Burn After Reading

by Ladislas Farago

  The veil has now been lifted. “The Sorge spy ring in Tokyo,” wrote Brigadier Dixon and Dr. Heilbrunn, “could inform Russia in 1941 that Japan would not attack her, and this intelligence enabled the Russians to transfer their reserves from the Far East to the European theatre where they arrived in time for the battle of Moscow. Russia was then assured of a one-front war, while Germany had to keep a considerable part of her forces in the West in defense of a second front. Germany fought from then on with one arm tied behind her back, while Russia could use both fists.”

  Sorge was not allowed to enjoy the fruits of his triumph. On October 18, 1941, he was arrested at his home by officers of the Tokkoka. His downfall must have struck him as an ironic anticlimax. Three days before his arrest, he gave Klausen a dispatch for Moscow, telling the “Center” that he saw no further reason to continue operations in Japan. He suggested that he be transferred with new instructions.

  Klausen thought the message was premature. He told Sorge nothing about his opposition to the suggestion, but never put that message on the air.

  Sorge was kept in a cell at the headquarters of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Board, more or less unmolested, left to stew in his own juice while damning evidence was being extracted by the most cruel means from his fellow conspirators. He and Ozaki were finally hanged on November 7, 1944. Klausen was sentenced to life imprisonment, but was released by the American Occupation authorities in 1945.

  Sorge remained a wayward intellectual to the bitter end, a fanatic and an idealist with a poetic turn of mind. Whenever in his double life he was seized by doubts and scruples, he escaped into poetry, a pastime he bashfully concealed even from his few friends. Only a handful of his poems survive, but they afford an insight into the soul of this very strange man. One of them began :

  “… eternally a stranger who condemns himself—never to know real peace …”

  16

  Target: United States

  During the decade before Pearl Harbor, the world of espionage acquired a new figure who could not help being conspicuous. He was the secret agent of Japan who attained a comic prestige with an oddly sinister overtone. The “spy of the Rising Sun” became a favorite cartoon character, a familiar little man bowing deeply and hissing, “So solly, please,” with a toothy smile, his hands fumbling busily in someone’s pocket.

  The Japanese themselves saw nothing funny in their spies. They regarded espionage as a deadly serious business, an important instrument of national policy. Fundamentally oriental in character, Japanese espionage was distinctly schizophrenic. In Asia, it operated with unbridled savagery, but in the United States, for instance, it could be civil and courteous. In Asia the Japanese manipulated narcotic drugs, prostitution, pornography, gambling. Its basic aim was to gain its ends by corruption. Rape, murder, kidnaping, arson, and counterfeiting were primary weapons in the arsenal of Japanese secret agents. Their victims were handled with medieval cruelty and even their own agents, if they happened to be Chinese or Caucasians, were treated with contempt.

  This system triumphed in Manchuria, whose conquest was largely the handiwork of the secret service, but it failed in China. The lords of Tokyo had to bring in their armies after all; no amount of Japanese-inspired corruption could bring about China’s collapse.

  Their espionage effort against the Western world was more subtle. It was a large-scale and smooth maneuver in which spies were used along conventional lines with an organization patterned after Western intelligence services.

  In the lore of espionage, the Japanese who attained the greatest fame was General Kenji Doihara, sometimes called the Lawrence of Manchuria. The epithet thus gave him major credit for the cheap conquest of Manchuria, which he captured, according to legend, with a pocketful of espionage tricks and a handful of spies.

  In actual fact, Doihara was no master spy. His prominence was due chiefly to the fact that, being the brother of the concubine of an Imperial prince, he was given credit for other people’s achievements. There was, indeed, a major espionage coup behind the lightning conquest of Manchuria, and there were fantastic secret maneuvers in China and elsewhere in Asia, but they were thought up and managed by faceless, nameless specialists who loathed Doihara for hugging the limelight.

  The Japanese spy system was not spectacular at all, nothing like Canaris’ “Fox Lair” in Berlin or the Fourth Bureau on Znamensky Street in Moscow. It was bureaucratic and pseudo-Prussian in its stolidity and humdrum efficiency.

  The structure of the Japanese secret service is difficult to blueprint because it was vague and widely dispersed. It consisted of four major agencies operating as equals, although the semblance of a central intelligence agency existed within the Foreign Office.

  This secret service arm operated under the nominal direction of the Foreign Ministers. The instructions issued to agents in the field were frequently signed by the ministers themselves. The Foreign Office supplied resident directors for networks abroad. It provided quarters in its various embassies and legations. It took care of the technical services, supplied the documents of authentication (including the customary forgeries), made necessary disbursements and handled the lines of communications.

  The anchoring of the secret service in Japan’s diplomatic machinery proved cumbersome even in peacetime, and disastrous in war. Rupture of diplomatic relations inevitably disrupted the espionage system of Japan when and where it was most urgently needed. This happened in the United States on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese Embassy had to close down. With its departure, the entire apparatus of Japanese espionage in the United States had to be dismantled. The espionage effort was shifted to the Embassy in Rio de Janeiro, then to Argentina and Chile, where it was too far removed from the United States to be effective.

  The Department of Naval Intelligence was another senior branch of the service and it naturally played a very great part in the preparations for Pearl Harbor. It was a somewhat bizarre coincidence that Kichisaburo Nomura, who was the Japanese Ambassador in Washington at the time of Pearl Harbor, was once director of Naval Intelligence. It operated along more or less traditional lines, under a captain of the Imperial Navy.

  Military Intelligence was handled by the Third Section of the Imperial General Staff as a headquarters organization. Its importance was reflected in the fact that its chief was usually a lieutenant general or at least a major general. The service was decentralized and the various armies stationed abroad, like the Kwantung Army in Manchuria, maintained their own, autonomous intelligence organizations.

  The fourth echelon, counter-intelligence, was a two-pronged organization: the Kempetai, which was the secret police of the army, and the Tokkoka, the Metropolitan Police of Tokyo, whose Special (Political) Branch was mainly responsible for counter-espionage. It was the Tokkoka that, in the fall of 1941, succeeded in demolishing the Sorge ring. Prior to that, it had smashed a British network allegedly headed by the Reuters correspondent in Tokyo, James M. Cox.

  These two secret police organizations shared the guilt for Japan’s unsavory reputation. Their methods of interrogation were ruthless and cruel. The torture to which they subjected Cox drove him to suicide. They were equally brutal with others they pulled in on whimsical charges of espionage, like Otto Tolischus, Tokyo correspondent of The New York Times at the time of Pearl Harbor. He presented a shocking picture of the Japanese spy-busters in the book he wrote after his release and return to the United States.

  Japanese espionage against the United States had begun spasmodically as early as 1920; the Naval Attaché in Washington directed the operations. He was followed by a motley cavalcade of lazy spies, some in uniform, others behind elaborate covers. It is possible that some of Japan’s better spies operated in the United States during this leisurely era of peace, but there could not have been too many of them. Prior to the Pearl Harbor operation, Japanese espionage in the United States had its halcyon days during the regime of Captain Tamon Yamaguchi as Naval Attaché in Washington in the middle 1930’s. Th
is was the only period when the Japanese succeeded in enlisting native Americans (and ex-members of the U.S. Navy at that) to work for them. A Yamaguchi aide, Commander Toshio Miyazaki, persuaded a dismissed chief petty officer, William Thompson by name, to steal several classified manuals for him and to procure some tactical information. Yamaguchi went to work on a cashiered commander, a certain John S. Farnsworth, trying to obtain similar information from him. Both men were caught before they could do appreciable damage.

  A third man Yamaguchi tried to enlist was a civilian, who worked in the Naval Gun Factory in Washington. He reported the contact to Naval Intelligence, was told to cultivate this relationship and was given the doctored blueprint of a new eight-inch projectile. Yamaguchi was delighted with the loot and gave the man five hundred dollars in brand new, crisp American banknotes. The operation compromised him and he had to leave Washington shortly afterwards, leaving a gap that Japan took some time to fill.

  After Yamaguchi came a swarm of Japanese spies. There was at Calle 10a in Colon, Panama, a little haberdashery shop owned by an attractive, sexy, elegantly dressed woman in her early thirties, Lola Osawa by name. That name was an alias and her shop was a blind. She was in reality Chiyo Morasawa, wife of a Japanese naval officer with whom she formed a husband and wife espionage team, specializing in the secrets of the Panama Canal. Her shop was local headquarters for one of several Japanese spy rings scattered throughout Panama, with fifty-five branch offices in as many barber shops.

  The Caribbean was swarming with Japanese fishing craft, fishing for information under the eagle eyes of a certain Ketarino Kabayama, a gentle, soft-voiced, middle-aged businessman, actually Captain Kabayama of the Imperial Navy. The catch of Kabayama’s fishing fleet was taken to Japan by a certain Shoichi Yokoi, an exporter, who was Commander Masakazu Yokoi. More such fishing craft crowded the waters all along the Pacific Coast from Alaska to Mexico, and every one carried a trained operative of the secret service. In Vancouver, British Columbia, residents of Japanese ancestry bought into filling stations and fuel firms. These people were Japanese agents gaining quasi-legitimate access to gasoline and fuel oil, which they siphoned off and stored surreptitiously in hidden tanks in secluded inlets of the rugged coast for a rainy day.

  There were few spots along the sensitive perimeter of the United States without at least one representative of the Japanese secret service in attendance.

  Within the country, the Japanese had hundreds of operatives at important and seemingly unimportant posts. The Japanese secret service controlled banks and purchasing agencies. It had so-called Army and Navy Inspectorates, a Silk Intelligence Bureau, tourist agencies, a cotton intelligence office, and several other quasi-commercial organizations. Most bizarre among its outposts was the mysterious “Tokyo Club,” a narcotic and gambling ring which had branches in many West Coast cities. The clubs not only collected information, but also supplied much of the money needed for the operation and provided occasional trigger men for direct action.

  The Domei News Agency was another front. Consular offices were the regional headquarters of the network. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Japan had consulates in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Philadelphia, Houston, Chicago, Honolulu and Manila. This formidable apparatus was directed by a single man, Nobutake Terasaki, who sat in an office in the handsome white Japanese Embassy building on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C. He hardly ever attracted attention because he appeared to be small fry, holding down the minor job of Second Secretary. He was a quiet, precise, uncommunicative man, the prototype of the studious intellectual, punctilious, modest, with an almost exaggerated passion for anonymity. He mixed little in the flamboyant society of Embassy Row. He had no friends. Yet this shy little man was the supreme chief of the whole Japanese network, not merely in the United States, but in the entire Western Hemisphere. The modest Second Secretary gave orders to the counselor in Buenos Aires, the Consul General in New York and even the Ambassador in Washington. He had at his disposal a small army of aides, including a brilliant communication technician named Kosaka, who operated his radio. Kosaka was sent to the United States in the late summer of 1941, when traffic became heavy, and he arrived with a new set of codes and ciphers.

  Out in the field, the most important of all outlets was, of course, Hawaii, where an estimated four hundred secret agents were working for the Japanese secret service. The operation was directed by Consul General Nagao Kita, next to Terasaki the most important Japanese spy chief in the United States. His chief assistant was Consul Atojiro Okuda. Liaison with agents in the field was in the hands of Consulate Secretary Tadasi Morimura. He also took care of disbursements to spies and occasionally served as courier.

  In actual fact, Morimura was Ensign Takeo Yoshikawa of the Imperial Navy. He had been transferred from his desk at the Intelligence Division where he specialized in the U.S. Pacific Fleet and its main bases, to the biggest base earmarked for attack.

  It was in the winter of 1940 that his preparation for this secret mission began in earnest. He was instructed to take the Foreign Ministry’s English language examination and was then appointed vice-consul. As his cover, also, he was given his new name and his new identity. In August, the Director of Naval Intelligence told him: “Yoshikawa, you are going to Honolulu as vice-consul. Tension is building up in Hawaii, as you know, and short-wave transmitters can too easily be spotted by radio direction finders. So you will go as a diplomat and report on the daily readiness of the American fleet and bases by diplomatic code. This is the only secure channel of communication left and you will be our only agent. I do not have to tell you the importance of the mission.”

  “Hai,” Yoshikawa replied, the unquestioning “aye, aye, sir” of the Naval service.

  “We have arranged,” the director continued, “for a new consul-general to be your chief for this operation. Nagao Kita, a diplomat now at Canton, has been dealing closely with the Imperial Navy on intelligence and other matters incident to our occupation of China. He can be trusted to cooperate with you fully. Kita goes to Honolulu first and you follow. Prepare yourself.”

  Ensign Yoshikawa arrived in Honolulu in April 1941, and went to work at once to carry out his mission. The freedom with which he was permitted to move about amazed him. “For instance,” he later recalled, “I habitually rented aircraft at the John Rodgers airport in Honolulu for my surveillance of the military airfields, and walked nearly every day through Pearl City to the end of the peninsula where I could readily survey the air strip on Ford Island and battleship row in Pearl Harbor.”

  He swam about in the harbor as he pleased, looking for data about underwater obstructions, tides, beach gradients; and strolled through the hills overlooking Honolulu, “magnificent vantage points,” he said, “to observe the sorties of the fleet’s units.” His favorite vantage point was a pleasant Japanese restaurant called Shanchu-ro, just below Aiea. Sitting on a straw mat and sipping sake, he was entertained by a geisha while he himself observed the fleet below through a high window with a breathtaking view of the harbor. “I gained,” he recalled, “much useful information on ships present and deployment patterns. From the geisha too, who would have entertained U.S. personnel earlier in the evening, I occasionally gleaned small bits of information.”

  As X-day drew closer, the Japanese secret service sent to Hawaii another authentic genius of espionage. He had an enormously important job, yet little if anything is known beyond his name. He was Ichiro Fuji, if that, indeed, was his real name. He arrived in Honolulu in September, 1941, with specific instructions from Admiral Yamamoto in person, and promptly superseded Consul Kita at the head of the hierarchy, but only inside the organization. To outsiders, he remained non-existent. There is reason to believe that his identity and his presence in Honolulu was not known even to the American counter-intelligence agencies, despite the fact that, by then, they had a good coverage of the Consulate General.

  The information gathered by these spies ended ultimately on the de
sk of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Combined Imperial Fleet. It was he who hatched the monumental plan to attack the United States Fleet at Pearl Harbor.

  A Naval Attaché in Washington in 1926, Yamamoto knew the United States well, and that knowledge helped him shape the plan. In 1941, when he appeared before the Cabinet Council, he promised a quick and decisive victory because, he warned, a protracted war would end, inevitably, in the defeat of Japan. “If you tell me,” he said at the secret meeting, “that it is necessary that we fight, then in the first six months to a year of war against the United States and England I will run wild, and I will show you an uninterrupted succession of victories. I must tell you that, should the war be prolonged for two or three years, I have no confidence in our ultimate victory.”

  For his surprise attack on the U.S. Fleet, Yamamoto needed but limited intelligence, largely information of a tactical nature. Much of the material was already on file in Tokyo. It came mostly from published American sources, which described the composition and employment schedules of the U.S. Pacific Fleet with amazing candor. His intelligence service advised him that the American planes in Hawaii were distributed among the Hoiler Air Base, Hickam Field, and the naval air base on Ford Island. Every single anti-aircraft position was pinpointed for him from espionage reports. On the basis of this information, Yamamoto assigned one hundred and ninety-nine planes to deal with the airfields, and one hundred and fifty-four planes to take care of the fleet. From then on, all he needed from Intelligence was information about basic changes in the American organization and the movements of the ships.

  The secret service was promptly mobilized to supply this data on a day-to-day basis. On January 6, 1941, the Consul General in Honolulu was told via Terasaki that he was to send continuous reports on the movement of U.S. vessels in Pearl Harbor; he was to report even when there were no such movements; and he was to tighten up his espionage clusters.