MacArthur's Spies

by Peter Eisner

  Claire set out with Carling on Tuesday, June 2. The first five miles or so followed dark paths out of the mountains and beyond Dinalupihan, eventually south along more hidden trails. After several hours they came to a road and Claire piled onto a truck with Carling and twenty other people. The truck was loaded with sacks of charcoal and other supplies as it bounced along the rutted roads of Bataan carrying about twenty very uncomfortable people to Manila. The air felt heavy and hot after the long march from the mountains. The rainy season was starting; perhaps the rain would not come tonight.

  She may have drifted asleep and then nodded alert again. The recurrent malaria attack had left her shivering in the humidity and the heat with fever that wasted her energy and made it impossible to think clearly.

  Jostled by the other passengers and bumps that shifted the sacks of charcoal, she was covered by soot. To all appearances Claire was just a sick peasant among many, but if a suspicious Japanese soldier took a closer look—and Carling hoped one would not—there was something suspicious about this particular peasant. She was taller than most of those around her. That might lead to discovery of the fake travel pass. Male or female, despite the suntan, the rough clothing, the soot, and the scraggly hair, she did not have the features of a Filipina.

  Carling had planned it so Claire would arrive in Manila well before the midnight curfew. If the Japanese found out that one of the people on the truck was far from a peasant, she could be killed on the spot. Just transporting an enemy alien was punishable by death.

  Coming down from the hills represented a new beginning for Claire as much as a dangerous foray directly into the Pacific war. Claire would be more than a bit player, more than a person who shuffled from place to place, job to job, man to man. A high school dropout who worked as a circus performer, dancer, and nightclub singer half her life now had decided to join the guerrilla underground that was challenging the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. How could an American woman from Portland, Oregon, survive in war-torn Manila?

  She asked herself that question every day. The only answer was that she had survived so far. In six months she had grown hardened to suffering and war, angered by the death she had seen, and prepared to do what she could to challenge the Japanese. She had one advantage—she knew how to adapt and deceive. The way to spy on the Japanese was to carry on as she always had. No one really knew who she was. She kept it that way.

  • • •

  They rode to the outskirts of Manila by evening and to Dewey Boulevard along Manila Bay shortly after. Although she felt ill, Claire was ready to celebrate. They stopped at the Luneta Hotel café to collect the steak dinner promised by their friend Emilio Reyes, the deposed mayor of Dinalupihan, who had bet jokingly that they wouldn’t make it. “A clever ruse,” Sobreviñas bragged, “I smuggled her to Manila right under the very noses of the Japanese.” The celebration went beyond curfew and Claire slept that night at the hotel, by far the best accommodations she had experienced in six months. For some reason the curfew extended to noon the following day, June 3. Claire rested and bathed and was ready when the streets were open again. She made her way to Judge Roxas’s house on Batanga Street in the midafternoon. Despite misgivings about the danger of hiding a fugitive American, the judge and his family welcomed Claire warmly; they could see that she was exhausted from her months in the mountains. She took heart, though her reunion with little Dian did not go well. The two-year-old did not recognize Claire after two months of separation. Claire collapsed in utter exhaustion and stayed in bed for some time.

  “It was necessary for my family doctor to take care of her for a certain period,” Roxas recalled. The doctor said that the malaria had left her anemic and that she had a case of scurvy; he prescribed vitamins and iron to restore her blood counts. There were other problems, including a persistent eye infection that blurred her vision and frightened her. He referred her to an eye specialist; her eyes were covered with sores and abscesses that had to be cleaned; she said her vision was never good after that. Meanwhile, the possibility of chronic relapses of malaria was always lurking, and she was susceptible to colds and spent days in bed.

  Claire did not intend to lie still for long. She wrote in her diary that she was feeling like “the girl in Rebecca,” the 1940 Hitchcock film about a young woman who suddenly finds herself having the run of an opulent mansion. The only difference, Claire said, was that “this is a rich relation’s home, not mine.” Twenty-five people and eight servants were living at the Roxas home. She was well taken care of and could complain only that she was “eating like a pig” because “everything tastes so good.”

  The rich relations she was referring to, of course, were the cousins of Manuel Fuentes, her husband, who had been caught out of the Philippines on an American ship when the war started. If alive, he was probably doing something for the war effort. No one knew and it did not seem to trouble Claire. She had already told Boone that she was married to John Phillips, and Boone had taken to calling her Claire Phillips. By the time she arrived in Manila, she had taken Phillips’s name as her own. Even after the war, Phillips’s name would be a lasting memorial to him and his comrades, prisoners or those who had died in the Japanese invasion. But few if any in Manila would hear her use that name.

  PART TWO

  ■ ■ ■

  Occupation

  A Brave New World

  Manila, June 1942

  AS CLAIRE LOOKED out on Manila, nothing was immediately different. Few buildings had been bombed in the city proper during the Japanese takeover. Streetcars ambled along the main avenues, fashionably dressed people walked the streets, commerce was brisk. People, cars, trucks, and carts crushed together in the open markets and on the streets; shoppers jostled and elbowed looking for sugar and rice, meat and fish, and buckets and soap powder. It was the city it had always been. But a closer look showed stark changes. Japanese soldiers wearing white pith helmets and bearing rifles patrolled the streets. Japanese plainclothesmen, recognizable as cops, eyed people with suspicion as they passed by. Japanese officers expected civilians to make way, bow deeply, or risk the consequences. People with European features could expect a sneer and extra scrutiny, including random ID checks. Protest was futile and dangerous. Manila would now follow the rules of the Empire of Japan.

  The military occupiers had moved quickly to declare a new regime with new rules. They urged compliance and understanding, arguing that Japan had freed the country “from the oppressive domination of the U.S.A., letting you establish the Philippines for the Filipinos as a member of the Co-prosperity Sphere in the Greater East Asia.” This was “Asia for the Asians.”

  In the early days of the occupation, residents of Manila remained off the street, disbelieving those words of friendship. Most people never bought into the rhetoric. They were shoved and slapped and pushed and cajoled from the outset. So they hid their cars when rumors proved true that Japanese soldiers were commandeering vehicles at will and prayed that their houses would not be confiscated as well. Despite every token effort and every claim the Japanese made in favor of the great friendship their two countries enjoyed, the Filipinos quickly learned to hate the Japanese and the life imposed upon them.

  The occupation authorities were well prepared to challenge and punish misguided pro-American holdouts. They created a neighborhood watch system that divided Manila into a grid in which designated district and neighborhood leaders were responsible for the good behavior of those in their territory. It was a system ripe for snitching and false accusations. Regulations for the neighborhood watch went in both directions; residents were expected to “be on guard against activities of bandit or bandits or suspicious character or characters and to report the same immediately to the constabulary officers, the leader of a neighborhood association or other competent authorities.” Meanwhile, a neighborhood leader was expected to “prevail upon residents within the area or areas under his jurisdiction not to commit illegal
or unlawful acts . . . and to hold himself or herself responsible with regard thereto.” Within the regulations was a warning: Residents were expected to inform on others; if they did not, the consequences could be dire. The call for questioning at Fort Santiago was tantamount to an invitation to a torture session and possible death.

  Rumors of torture replaced actual testimony, although many people lucky enough to survive Fort Santiago feared even admitting to having been there in the first place. “The last thing we are told before leaving that bastille is that we must keep our mouths shut about what we have seen, heard or experienced during our incarceration,” said one survivor. “And if we violate those orders it means re-arrest. . . . Do not ask me to tell you about the beatings and the torturers for my blood turns cold whenever I think of them.”

  Japanese officials combined organization and rhetoric with enforcement. Resistance was to be expected: The Americans had been running the islands as their most important Asian outpost since the Spanish-American War. The Japanese commandeered radio and the newspapers and hammered at the notion that their arrival amounted to liberation from the Americans, that benevolent plan to return Asia to the Asians. Those who did not accept that, they warned, would suffer the consequences as traitors. Foreign radio broadcasts were banned and foreign newspapers could not be imported; for that matter all broadcasts in English were prohibited by decree—this was to be temporarily suspended while Filipinos got used to speaking Japanese, the language of their Asian brothers and benefactors. People took to lowering their voices and listening to the news in the dark at very low volume—in the Manila heat, the windows were always open and radios might be overheard on the street.

  When declarations of friendship and voluntary compliance weren’t enough, they stepped up the repression. Intelligence agents discovered a clandestine printing operation run by two well-known men, José and Eduardo Fajardo, brothers who responded to the Japanese call to celebrate Emperor Hirohito’s birthday on April 29 by distributing leaflets that urged a boycott. The Kempeitai announced on June 25 that the Fajardos and six other men had been executed. It was the start of a comprehensive intelligence campaign in Manila to search for anti-Japanese activities. The military police fanned out to compare the typeface of the leaflets with the characteristics of every printing press throughout the city. After halting the Fajardo operation, they went progressively further. Soon they were requiring every typewriter in the country to be brought in for registration. The goal was to create a detailed file for each, including owner, make, model, and serial number, along with a sample printed page using every key on the machine. They intended to do the same thing with mimeographs and printing presses. While it was a meticulous, ultimately impossible task, the attempt would make potential perpetrators think twice about taking the risk. The message: You will be caught.

  Next officials extended the ban on Western radio broadcasts. Soon they were requiring everyone in the country to bring their radios to police headquarters, where they were to be altered so that only authorized stations could be received. In practice many people did comply, but some brought in one radio and then hid spares that still could receive open broadcasts. Shortwave radios hidden under floorboards continued to haul in stations broadcasting war news to U.S. forces at sea and to anyone else who could listen. Despite the dangers, people defied Japanese authorities and risked imprisonment and death to distribute newsletters that compiled information from the illegal shortwave receivers. Thus, despite Japanese propaganda, Filipinos had a good idea about the progress of the war at home and on both the Pacific and European fronts. Japan was losing the war of information.

  • • •

  It was lucky that Claire had a few days to recover at Judge Roxas’s house so she could begin to understand the basic guidelines of occupation. The judge was an important person to know, but he was in a precarious position. He was the older brother of General Manuel Roxas, the Philippine government liaison to General MacArthur before the war. The general, a former speaker of the Philippine House of Representatives and finance secretary under President Manuel L. Quezon, had traveled south to Mindanao after December 8, planning to start a guerrilla insurgency there. Japanese forces had captured and imprisoned him; rumors circulated that he had been executed. The Roxases were influential and had friends who were major power players in Manila’s business community. Among them was Juan Elizalde, the wealthy owner of a major brewery and distillery who secretly sought ways to oppose the Japanese occupation. He was also friends with Chick Parsons, who had sailed out of Manila Bay four days after Claire had managed to sneak back into the city. Parsons had already touched base with Elizalde and others about organizing underground operations.

  Judge Roxas played the role of supporting the occupation and the puppet government. He was friends with many who had signed on with the Japanese; collaboration was controversial and dangerous, but some of the collaborators were secretly pro-American and waiting for an opportunity to subvert Japanese rule. Pragmatically Filipinos, whether under the Japanese or under the Americans before them, needed rational governance. They needed leaders dedicated to public welfare and responsible for maintaining services, utilities, and food supplies and keeping transportation operating as well as possible.

  In the tightly knit, family-oriented life of Manila, everyone in the neighborhood would likely know that Claire was the wife of Manuel Fuentes and thereby the judge’s cousin by marriage. Her presence would not raise suspicion that the judge was harboring a fugitive. Yet since she did not appear to be Asian, it still made sense for the judge to establish some rules to avoid attracting the attention of Japanese authorities.

  The judge laid down a series of “suggestions,” including one that she was “not to leave the house except when absolutely necessary in view of the danger to herself and to us.” Should Claire go outside, she was to limit the time on the street and she had to remain close to home. Non-Asians would be noticeable and an attractive woman would stick out even more. Look no Japanese soldier in the eye and bow carefully and deeply to every soldier she saw, Roxas warned. Japanese guards slapped people in the face or beat them when they failed to bow. And once that happened, who knew what might follow? People had been left lying in the street; some had died.

  However, Judge Roxas knew well enough that Claire rarely followed the rules, and he was not surprised to see her start causing trouble almost as soon as she got out of bed. Claire apparently decided that the best way to start her career as a spy was to find out if she could make friends with the enemy. One day the judge was distressed to see that Claire had gone out and was not listening to him. “I saw her in a refreshment parlor with two Japanese officers.”

  The judge had no idea what to make of this and told his wife, Mercedes, with some alarm as soon as he got home. Mercedes was neither concerned nor surprised. Claire had told Roxas’s wife forthrightly that she was preparing to work with the underground and that she wanted to spy on the Japanese. “It must have been because of this that I saw her in the company of Japanese officers.”

  Friendly or not with the Japanese, Roxas needed a plan that would keep Claire and the family safe. As Filipinos the Roxases were subject to unannounced visits by Japanese authorities, especially if Claire was seen coming and going. She could not remain at the house without regularizing her status; she was a danger to herself but a greater danger to the judge and his family, especially since the name “Roxas” sent up warning flags. The judge figured that the best alternative sometimes was the most straightforward option. He explained his plan to Claire, who was not accustomed to doing anything the simple way. Roxas said that the idea was just to acknowledge who she was—an American woman in Manila—but that as the wife of Manuel Fuentes, she was also a citizen of the Philippines, presented no danger, and should not be detained. “We agreed that I was to write a letter to the chief of the military police telling him that although [she] was an American, having been born in America, legally she was
a Filipino being legitimately married to a Filipino and that her parents were Italians.”

  Japanese military police headquarters responded quickly, perhaps because of Judge Roxas’s prominence. Send her in, said Lieutenant Colonel Seichi Ohta, the chief of the Kempeitai, the elite Japanese military police force. She was to appear at Ohta’s office at Fort Santiago headquarters on the morning of Wednesday, June 10. Roxas sent along one of his assistants and gave Claire another piece of advice: Do not speak unless spoken to. Let the Japanese officers do most of the talking.

  A trip to Fort Santiago was fear producing, yet the relaxed atmosphere surprised Claire that morning. Far from menacing, a uniformed guard stationed at the front gate looked up from a first-grade reading book when they arrived, ready to practice his English. He ushered Claire and the assistant quickly through the gate to Ohta’s office. Ohta asked Claire to confirm what the judge had written:

  Her husband Manuel Fuentes was casually in the United States having gone there to fetch her a little before the outbreak of the war, without knowing that she had already taken a ship bound for the Philippines . . . that she had come to my house from a province in Northern Luzon where she evacuated when war was declared, and that being an American, I thought it proper to inform the Military Police of the fact of her stay in my house and that I was asking for instruction as to what to be done.