Burn After Reading

by Ladislas Farago

  On March 19, Zacharias delivered into Forrestal’s hands his proposed plan for a psychological warfare offensive. The draft spelled out the mission as follows: “The United States will conduct an intensive psychological campaign against the Japanese high command through an official spokesman of high rank in order to accelerate and effect the unconditional surrender of Japan without the necessity of an opposed landing on the Japanese main islands.”

  Forrestal approved the plan out of hand. Admiral King also approved it. The War Department had no objections. The Joint Chiefs hesitated for a few days, but then gave it their blessing. There remained only one approval to be collected, the final and decisive one—that of President Roosevelt. But Roosevelt was out of town and could not be disturbed. He was resting at Hyde Park after the tiresome and burdensome trip to Yalta.

  Suddenly something happened whose tremendous significance was known only to us. On April 8, the cabinet of Koiso resigned and was replaced by one headed by Suzuki, exactly as had been predicted by Shark in December. This meant to us that the Emperor had definitely thrown in his lot with the peace party in Japan, and that Japanese efforts for an “honorable surrender” would henceforth be accelerated.

  We redoubled our efforts, prepared the draft of a first broadcast to be delivered by the “Official Spokesman” and also drew up a statement to be issued by the President. It was envisaged as the first in a series of such presidential statements to spell out to the Japanese what we in Op-16-W called the “conditions of unconditional surrender.”

  The statement was on Roosevelt’s desk in the White House, placed there by Elmer Davis, director of O.W.I., on the one day in April he spent in Washington on his way from Hyde Park to Warm Springs. He must have read and contemplated it because there were a few pale penciled changes in the draft when we got it back, but he left town without approving the project. A day later he was dead.

  We felt this sounded the death knell for our project as well, because we thought it would take some time before Truman could be familiarized with the project, before we could “sell” the idea to him and gain his approval and co-operation. The world was preoccupied with the majestic events in Europe where Hitler’s empire was collapsing like an overbaked soufflé.

  Then Zacharias hunted up a middle-man who had a friend in the White House. The middle-man was Samuel R. Davenport; the friend, Matthew J. Connelly, who was Truman’s appointment secretary. Davenport took the statement to Connelly, who placed it on top of the pile in the incoming basket on the President’s desk. For several days, the statement made its way from the top to the bottom of the basket, as Connelly dutifully replaced it each morning. Then on May 8, in conjunction with his proclamation of VE-Day, Truman suddenly released it.

  That same day, Zacharias went on the air, broadcasting in Japanese to the Tokyo high command, reading to them the President’s statement. His words went out over powerful shortwave transmitters in San Francisco and Honolulu. Saipan put it on the air on the medium wave used by Radio Tokyo, enabling the five million Japanese who had sets to hear it, if they dared or cared. It was not aimed at them, although their eavesdropping was eagerly sought. It was explicitly and directly aimed at the Emperor and his circle, at the members of the “peace party,” and the Japanese high command, a select audience of perhaps five hundred listeners.

  At this point a shadowy figure entered our plot, although he probably did not know we even existed. He was one Jiri Taguchi, a Japanese foreign correspondent who had been sent to Germany by Foreign Minister Togo to report to him privately and directly about the Third Reich’s final agony. Our intelligence agents succeeded in obtaining a copy of his confidential message to Togo. It was a melancholy report, urging the Foreign Minister to do something so that Japan might escape Germany’s fate. We put the correspondent’s private message on the air, special delivery to the attention of Foreign Minister Togo, and anybody else who happened to listen in.

  Agents’ reports started accumulating, reporting Japanese reaction to the President’s statement and the sudden appearance of an “official spokesman of the U.S. government” on the air. On May 20, we were informed by one agent that the statement and the Zacharias broadcasts had been discussed in a Cabinet meeting. On the nineteenth day of the campaign, we drew real blood. The first reply was given to Zacharias in a broadcast by an “official spokesman” of the Japanese government, Dr. Isamu Inouye.

  “Japan,” Inouye said, “would be ready to discuss peace terms provided there were certain changes in the unconditional surrender formula. We should like mutually to join hands in constructing an international machinery which strives toward world peace and the good of humanity.”

  Inouye indicated in so many words that he was not only answering the Zacharias appeal, but was expecting an answer from Zacharias.

  “I should like to know,” Inouye concluded his broadcast, “what Zacharias-kun thinks of these words from Japan.” These words were significant, not merely for their direct recognition of the captain, but for the word “kun” attached to his name. Unlike “taisa,” which means “captain,” and “san” which means “Mr.,” “kun” is a word used only between close friends, meaning something like “my good friend.”

  Agents reported that copies of Zacharias’ broadcasts had been requested by the Imperial Palace. In Berne, Taguchi sought a secret meeting with the American minister, Leland Harrison. Although Taguchi had credentials signed by Togo, he was regarded as a free-lancing busybody and was not taken seriously. Another great opportunity was missed in a chain that could have led, piece by piece, to the surrender of Japan.

  In April, the Emperor himself entered the picture. Using the Archbishop of Tokyo as his personal go-between, he secretly approached the Vatican to sound out the United States on what would be acceptable terms. The Pope assigned Pietro Cardinal Fumasoni-Biandi to handle the matter without committing the Vatican one way or another.

  The aged Cardinal called in Harold Tittmann, an American diplomatic agent stationed in the Vatican, to transmit the Emperor’s feelers to Washington. For some unexplained and inexplicable reason, this correspondence was not handled by the State Department, but by the Washington headquarters of the Office of Strategic Services. I remember distinctly that the reports were brought to us by the highest-ranking messenger ever to make the rounds in Washington, a brigadier general, one of Donovan’s top-ranking aides. The Emperor’s appearance in the plot filled us with great expectations, but we were instructed to forget it, on the ground that the feelers came to us via the Vatican. It was thought inadvisable to permit the Holy See to have anything to do with any short-cuts to Japanese surrender, for fear that public opinion in the United States might label and resent it as Papal intervention.

  Every single move along these lines was recorded inside Op-16-W and, in the Washington of those days, it was the only seismograph to record these tremors. The State Department at that particular juncture was virtually paralyzed. Edward Stettinius was Secretary of State. He was a diplomat of rather limited scope, and, just at this stage, he happened to be too busy with preparations for the inauguration of the United Nations, scheduled to be held at San Francisco in June. The Acting Secretary in Stettinius’ absence was Joseph Grew, long-time American Ambassador in Tokyo, ideally qualified to handle this intricate operation, but Grew had suffered a stroke and was not yet completely recovered. In addition, State was so confused by the several competing attitudes toward Japan and by the propaganda barrage of certain American factions arguing against the retention of the Emperor that it preferred to let sleeping dogs lie.

  In June, a third peace feeler was made under rather sinister circumstances. In a highly-encoded communication, Togo told his Ambassador in Moscow, an experienced and wise diplomat named Sato, about the Zacharias broadcasts and asked him what he thought of them. Sato answered that they were interesting as far as they went, but Zacharias ought to be far more specific in spelling out the surrender terms. Several cables were exchanged by Togo and Sato, and
then Togo suddenly instructed Sato in so many words to go to Stalin and ask him to mediate between Japan and the United States.

  American cryptoanalysts, monitoring every outgoing and incoming broadcast in Japan, picked up and translated the dispatches. The translations were distributed to the few recipients eligible for them. They were given to Truman, of course, and also to Grew, but they were withheld from us.

  The Japanese request for Stalin’s intervention was explicit. Nobody who had access to those telegrams of Togo and Sato could question their sincerity or the urgency with which they hoped to pursue the matter. Stalin bluntly rejected the mediation request, and he also withheld any information about this most explicit peace feeler from us, his allies. In June, his Foreign Minister, the enigmatic Molotov, was in Washington in person, but he kept mum about the Japanese approach.

  The situation was unique in diplomatic history. The United States Government knew that Japan was approaching the end and had asked Stalin to intervene, but it could not very well act upon this knowledge because the intelligence was obtained from the breaking of the Japanese diplomatic code.

  The Swiss government knew about Taguchi’s efforts on behalf of Togo but refused to recognize them as valid since they had been made by a non-official envoy.

  The Vatican knew virtually directly from the Emperor that Japan was seeking frantically to find a modus operandi for surrender, but refused to handle the matter officially because it had no formal diplomatic relations with the United States.

  Sweden knew that Japan was searching for a way out of the war because her own envoy in Tokyo had also been approached to use his good offices.

  Zacharias was talking directly to the Japanese about the urgency and the possibilities of peace, and was being answered by government spokesmen from Tokyo, virtually begging him to give Japan the terms on which its surrender would be acceptable.

  At this point I personally decided to take matters into my own hand and develop “terms” that Zacharias could then transmit to the Japanese in one of his broadcasts. The United States was so frozen to the unconditional surrender formula that it could not defrost itself without arousing public indignation, which Washington did not know how to guide or handle. The formula had been oversold to the American public. And the men in the State Department did not know how to get rid of it.

  I collected all the various wartime declarations of Roosevelt, Churchill and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek that had some bearing on the surrender of Japan. I found five of them: the Atlantic Charter, the Cairo Declaration, Chiang Kai-shek’s declaration of New Year’s Day in 1944, the statement I wrote for President Truman, and Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson’s statement on war criminals.

  I incorporated them in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post, firmly believing that it would quickly reach the Japanese. I decided to sign it merely “An Observer,” to create the impression that the letter was a U.S. Government-sponsored trial balloon. I not only expected that the Japanese would recognize them as the “terms” under our unconditional surrender formula, but also I hoped to commit my own government to them and thereby end this futile period of uncertainty.

  I wrote the letter in my office, on Uncle Sam’s time, on U.S. Government stationery, because this was not my property, my pride, my personal problem or my axe to grind. I did not even expect to get any credit for it. It was something I thought had to be said, shouted from the rooftops, so loud that it could be heard eleven thousand miles away in Tokyo.

  The editor of the Washington Post was Herbert Elliston. He was my friend. I used to go to his small inner sanctum from time to time to “inspire” editorials about Japan. Now I went to him again and told him that I was up to my neck in this one-man “conspiracy” and wanted him to become my partner. I showed him the letter and asked him to publish it and support it in an editorial of his own. I also told him that I intended to remain in the background and pass the ball for the touchdown to Zacharias because, after all, he was the official spokesman. I asked Elliston to tell anybody who might inquire about the author of the letter that it was written by Captain Zack and that his views reflected U.S. Government policy.

  Only then did I go back to the Navy Department and tell Zack about the letter, asking him to brace himself for fireworks, because I was determined to plug the letter in the National Press Club, and also to see to it that it would become a shot heard around the world.

  Next morning Herb Elliston, bless his soul, ran the letter, a whole column long in the Post, and it was the talk of the town. It was a lavishly baited hook. For example, one passage said, “The Atlantic Charter and the Cairo Declaration clearly state that we seek no territorial aggrandizement. The Atlantic Charter, moreover, assures certain definite benefits to victors and vanquished alike.”

  Another passage was designed to reassure the Emperor. “American military law,” it read, “based upon historical precedents, as well as a decision of the United States Supreme Court, clearly specifies that conquest or occupation does not affect the sovereignty of a defeated nation, even though that nation may be under complete military control.”

  Then came the direct invitation: “If the Japanese desire to clarify whether or not unconditional surrender goes beyond the conditions contained in the five documents cited above, they have at their disposal the regular diplomatic channels, the secrecy of which precludes any public admission of weakness. They are aware that we know that Japan has lost the war. Such an inquiry could not possibly be misinterpreted, or display any weakness beyond that which now actually exists in Japan.”

  I did not have to go to the National Press Club to alert its members. The whole club was coming to Captain Zack, demanding to know whether he was the author of the letter and whether he spoke for the White House.

  Typical of the press comments was a column our friend Duke Shoop of the Kansas City Star wrote: “A provocative open letter inviting the Japanese to open negotiations on unconditional surrender is being widely discussed here since it is believed that Captain E. M. Zacharias, the ‘official American spokesman’ of American radio broadcasts to the Japs, is the author. This provocative letter is like something out of a mystery thriller, but it is not at all out of the question that some such method might be taken to convey further to the Japanese what we mean by unconditional surrender.”

  Op-16-W was ablaze with excitement. We felt we were on the right path, moving steadily at a growing speed toward the climax of our effort. We somehow felt that the war in the Pacific was drawing to its close, despite the vicious nature of the fighting on Okinawa. We clearly distinguished between the stolid, automated Japanese combat soldier, clinging to caves and coves with obtuse bravado, with a sacrificial fighting spirit that was almost obscene because it had some mystic sexual undertones, and the suave and sophisticated, shrewdly-calculating statesmen in Tokyo who knew that the jig was up. Our targets were the statesmen, and our aim was to capture Tokyo with this verbal barrage.

  The follow-up was very important. We could not afford to allow a moment’s let-up in our dual campaign, aimed both at the Japanese and our own Government. What we were doing was clearly insubordination; still, we thought, if we were making policies, we were merely filling an abysmal vacuum.

  Back at Op-16-W, my colleagues, Dr. Reed and Dr. Possony, aided by Dr. Yoshioka, were working on a haymaker of a broadcast for Zack, to reinforce the multiple themes of the letter to the Post. Its basic, dynamic message was reduced to four key sentences: “The leaders of Japan have been entrusted with the salvation, and not the destruction, of Japan. As I have said before, the Japanese leaders face two alternatives. One is the virtual destruction of Japan, followed by a dictated peace. The other is unconditional surrender with its attendant benefits as laid down by the Atlantic Charter.”

  By now unconditional surrender must have looked to the Japanese like the Biblical apple on the tree of wisdom. It was sinful, to be sure, but it also held out the promise of some consolations.

  We released this
broadcast to the press, and it appeared from coast to coast in prominent positions on the front pages of the dailies of July 21. The New York Times reprinted the whole broadcast. The Washington Post headlined: “U.S. Warns Japan To Quit Now, Escape Virtual Destruction.”

  The Japanese answered it on July 24. While the voice was that of Dr. Kiyoshi Inouye, we knew that the hand which drafted his answer was that of the Imperial Government. Inouye stated point blank: “Should the United States show any sincerity of putting into practice what she preaches, as for instance in the Atlantic Charter excepting its punitive clause, the Japanese nation, in fact the Japanese military, would automatically, if not willingly follow in the stopping of the conflict. Then, and then only, will sabers cease to rattle both in the East and the West.”

  However, our decisive broadcast, as Zacharias came to call it, unleashed a storm of another nature, right here in the United States. The broadcast hit the State Department like a bombshell. Our diplomatists suddenly realized that somebody was making foreign policy and pushing it into action. In their annoyance, they decided to destroy us by undermining our influence in the eyes of the Japanese. They mobilized their own spokesmen, journalists and radio commentators close to the Department, and told them to discredit Zacharias. Typical of their campaign was a commentary by Raymond Gram Swing on July 21, in which he denied “on excellent authority” (actually one Thomas Blake, a minor official in the State Department) that the Atlantic Charter was applicable to Japan and said that Zacharias’ claim of being the “official spokesman of the U.S. Government” was “preposterous.”

  While this was going on in the United States, President Truman and James F. Byrnes, his new Secretary of State, were in Potsdam meeting Churchill and Stalin. ; Byrnes cabled the State Department for background about the broadcast, and the Department cabled back a reassuring despatch trying to show that “the Zacharias clique” was not making any headway.