MacArthur's Spies

by Peter Eisner

  He kept searching for Blanche. The last word about her had come months earlier: She had been detained at Fort Santiago. He then got a tip that she might have been taken to Mandaluyong. One report said that she had been taken from the prison just before the invasion of Manila. It would be months before Chick found out that was not true. For now, however, he feared the worst. “I am afraid she has paid heavily for being my mother-in-law.” He found out much later that he was right: She had been executed and decapitated in late August 1944 by the Kempeitai at the Chinese Cemetery in Manila.

  The Wounds of War

  Manila, March 3, 1945

  CLAIRE WAS ADMITTED to a hospital soon after she arrived at Santo Tomas. She said doctors treated her for anemia, scurvy, and skin infections. She said she weighed ninety-five pounds, less than she had after her ulcer surgery and bout with tetanus a year and a half earlier. An Associated Press report on the liberation of the women’s prison had singled her out as an underground operative freed by U.S. Army cavalrymen. She was identifying herself as Claire Mabel Phillips, the widowed wife of John V. Phillips of the 31st Infantry. She was no longer Dorothy or Dot Fuentes or Claire De La Taste, nor was she Madame Tsubaki or any of her previous aliases. The army offered to airlift her to Tacloban and from there directly to the United States by plane. She declined because she had not yet heard from Peggy and Dian. She did, however, ask help from the Red Cross to send letters to her mother and to John Phillips’s mother, Vada Phillips. The army also delivered a surprise—a letter from Manuel Fuentes. He was very much alive, having been with the navy throughout the war, and was now hoping to reunite.

  Once the fighting in Manila was over, the army gave Peggy and Dian a ride down to Manila from Bataan. Peggy sought out Claire with mixed emotions—she loved Dian, now five years old, but the foster child deserved to be with her mother. Peggy found Claire in the hospital at Santo Tomas, waiting with the other Americans there for word about when they could return to the States. The reunion of the three of them was difficult—they had not been together since Claire had been arrested ten months earlier. Claire was upset that Dian once again did not recognize her. It took a day before the little girl tentatively held Claire’s hand and said, “Are you my Mummy?” The reunion, Peggy said, “proved to be harder for all of us than I had anticipated. You cannot take care of a child for so long a time without coming to love it, and I hated to let Dian go.”

  Sometime days after that, Claire asked Peggy to drive with Fely up to Quezon City to retrieve papers and valuables they had hidden with Fely’s father, Vicente Corcuera. The papers included receipts both from the club and from Claire’s guerrilla activities, money, letters from prisoners, and—almost definitely—Claire’s diary. The documents were in several narrow-necked jars buried in Vicente Corcuera’s yard. Fely said there were dozens of receipts from Boone and lists of men who had received supplies at Cabanatuan, Park Avenue School, and Bilibid Prison. Peggy looked over the paperwork; she delivered papers and documents to Claire back at Santo Tomas, along with several thousand dollars in old pesos still negotiable at the bank.

  It was now safer to travel around Manila, but Peggy said she carried a sidearm and wore a drab blouse and skirt given to her by the Red Cross, just in case. One day Claire asked her to check out Tsubaki Club to see what she could find. Peggy went to the site with Dale Risdon, an Army Signal Corps photographer, who took a picture. The two-story building was blown to rubble. Some of the fence was still intact and the Tsubaki Club sign was still there. Peggy stood on the crumbled sidewalk just in front of the double wooden fence. Above the gated entrance was a semicircular iron framework with the remains of a lantern. Fastened between the top of the wooden portion of the gate and the metal frame was a five-foot sign with white lettering on a dark background, reading TSUBAKI CLUB. Peggy turned her head to the left over her shoulder, looking directly at the camera. She wore sturdy shoes and a calf-length skirt. She carried a bag in her left hand that might have covered her sidearm. Her hair was straight and long; wire-rimmed sunglasses obscured her eyes. It was the last picture ever taken of Tsubaki Club—a bittersweet memory for them all. Claire had been too weak to go there herself.

  PART FOUR

  ■ ■ ■

  Fame

  Claire’s Recovery

  University of Santo Tomas, Manila, March 1945

  EVEN IN THE HOSPITAL, suffering from malnutrition, injuries from torture, and most likely the disease that would one day become known as post-traumatic stress disorder, Claire began to tell the story that would make her famous. Frederick C. Painton, a veteran freelance war correspondent, came to visit her. Painton had covered the North African campaign, the Allied landing at Anzio, and the invasion of France. He arrived in the Pacific for MacArthur’s landing and followed U.S. forces into Manila, where he hoped to develop a first-person story about prisoners and internees of the Japanese. Claire was a perfect subject for an account of surviving the occupation.

  Claire described how Judge Roxas had warned her against guerrilla activities but she opened Tsubaki Club anyway and began spying on Japanese officers. She related the story of the Sally Rand dance and how she, Fely, and the other hostesses fought sexual abuse by their Japanese customers. She played down the idea that she or the others were sleeping with Japanese soldiers. The Japanese “first wanted to make me and the hostesses their concubines or mistresses. I would insist this was not that [italics in original] kind of a place. Some girls were beaten and I was slapped for our refusal. Gradually, however, as I built up a clientele of high-ranking Japanese, this trouble ceased.” She proclaimed that John Phillips was her husband, described the supply operation to Cabanatuan, and told about torture at the hands of Japanese interrogators after her arrest on May 24, 1944. “I was stretched out, bound hand and foot, head tied rigidly. Suddenly a garden hose was held to my mouth and nostrils. This was the water treatment and it is just like drowning, only more horrifying.”

  Painton wrote up his piece and sent it off to his editors. Claire, meanwhile, had to realize that her story was about to be published nationwide, declaring to the world for the first time that she was the widow of John Phillips. She wrote a second letter on March 10, 1945, to Phillips’s mother, telling her this time that she had left something out. “I didn’t tell you in my first letter that I was his wife. I thought it best to let you get over the first shock; first . . . we were married in Bataan at the outbreak of the war here.”

  Painton’s story was published in the May 1945 issue of American Mercury, a magazine founded by H. L. Mencken and now owned and edited by Lawrence Spivak, later well known in his own right as the founding producer and moderator of the television program Meet the Press. Neither Spivak, one of the great journalists of his time, nor Painton, respected among his peers as a fearless, diligent correspondent, had the ability to fact-check or any reason to doubt this portrait of an American war heroine. The first-person account, “I Was an American Spy,” was one of Painton’s last dispatches. Six weeks after he sent in the story, Painton collapsed and died of a heart attack at an airstrip in Guam as he covered the predawn departure of a B-29 bombing mission bound for Japan.

  Aboard the SS John Lykes

  Manila Harbor, April 2, 1945

  IT WAS SEVERAL weeks before the U.S. command could declare that the Port of Manila and Manila Bay were safe enough for ships to come in and collect passengers to carry them back home. Claire, Dian, and Peggy were among five hundred civilians—most of them survivors of Santo Tomas—and five hundred soldiers who left port on Monday, April 2, aboard the SS John Lykes, a medium-sized merchant cargo ship that had been leased during the war as a troop transport. Roy C. Bennett’s wife and two daughters were also on the ship. Bennett remained in a hospital in Manila for several months more. The destination was Honolulu and onward to Los Angeles, but the route home was complicated. Allied forces had just invaded Okinawa, about 925 miles to the north, the start of what would be a two-and-a-
half-month siege. So the Lykes was escorted far south to New Guinea, then cut a wide circle before heading north beyond the range of any possible remaining Japanese warships or submarines. The month-long journey was not always peaceful—drills and alarm bells sounded from time to time and reminded passengers that the war was still on.

  Simmering hostility between Claire and Peggy boiled over during the voyage, though the exact source was never clear. There were elements of old jealousy—it might have been about the quick notoriety Claire had received within days of rescue; or the fact that Claire had always been favored by men and Peggy, forty-four and only seven years older than Claire, was nicknamed “the old lady”; or that Peggy was angry that she had to give up Dian, whom she dearly loved. Claire, on the other hand, could have been angry that Peggy had been recognized as a guerrilla officer, was allowed to parade around in a uniform, and was entitled to salary and benefits.

  Many people on the ship noticed that the women were bickering and arguing. Then the sniping went public. Claire marched up to the captain of the John Lykes one day and told him someone had entered her cabin, rifled through papers in her room, and stolen some receipts and paperwork, while not taking money or other valuables.

  The captain was dubious but reported the charge to two FBI agents who were on board checking out the passengers as part of wartime surveillance operations. The FBI agents, Royal L. Stauffer and S. Charles Straus, learned that the U.S. immigration agent also on the ship already had questions for Claire. While many of the passengers did not have ready proof of citizenship, Claire did have a passport. However, the document was mutilated and the photograph had been defaced. Claire explained that the passport had been buried for a year and that her daughter, Dian, had torn up the passport photo while she was playing with it. Whatever name had originally been on the passport, it could not have been Phillips, which was Claire’s current stage name. She had not adopted the name until she met John Phillips, and no one was issuing U.S. passports in Manila during the war.

  The FBI agents saw Claire not as a heroine but as a stumbling, devious subject and had suspicions about the confusing versions of her life. Others on the ship, meanwhile, told them she had been going around bragging about her wartime exploits and implied that she herself was working with the FBI. The agents wondered why someone would rob papers and receipts without stealing money that was also right there.

  “The subject related a fantastic story which had many discrepancies,” the agents said in a report for their investigation. “She also had considerable money in her possession which she could not satisfactorily explain as to how she came into possession of it.”

  On repeated questioning, Claire acknowledged that she had never formally married John Phillips but claimed she had planned to do so after the war. She may also have implicated Peggy in the theft. They also interviewed Peggy, who apparently came across as serious and believable. Peggy dismissed Claire as a minor participant in the POW smuggling operation. She said Claire had told her that she had never intended to marry Phillips but was now thinking about claiming widow’s compensation from the army. She also charged that Claire had been arrested not because of her underground activities but on civil morals charges. Everyone in town knew, Peggy said, that Claire had been sleeping with a married bar owner down the street from Tsubaki Club, Ramón Infante, and that Ramón’s wife had informed on her to the Japanese.

  That charge was dubious—Claire had been held originally as a military prisoner and had been sentenced to hard labor for crimes against the state. Claire acknowledged that she was friends with Ramón Infante, but only because he was contributing to the guerrilla supply operations. But Infante’s wife, Emma, Claire said, was sleeping with a Japanese colonel. When Emma intercepted a message from Claire to Infante, she interpreted it as a secret love letter. Claire said it was a coded underground message. Emma handed information to her Japanese officer lover about Claire, which added to the case against her. Claire’s claims could later be proved, at least in part. Emma Infante was arrested by U.S. Army counterintelligence agents on April 10, 1945, on a charge of “active collaboration with the Japanese.” The agents spoke to Yay Panlilio, who had been a guerrilla in the Luzon hills alongside Hugh Straughn and Ed Ramsey. Panlilio, en route to Washington on assignment for the newly restored Philippine government, also said Claire had been boasting about her exploits, but she had tried to avoid speaking with her.

  Claire told agents Stauffer and Straus she had returned home in 1941 to obtain a Nevada divorce from Manuel Fuentes and had managed to do so. She waffled, though, on whether she was really married to John Phillips. The agents noted, meanwhile, that Claire was carrying a life insurance policy in the name of Mabel C. Enette, which gave an indication that she possibly had never divorced Joe Enette back in Seattle.

  The final report by the FBI agents itself had mistakes, spelling errors of proper names, and wrong dates. It was understandable that the agents chose to believe what Peggy said, rather than Claire’s version, although they had no factual basis while on the ship to know whether either woman had ever worked for the Manila underground. The two Los Angeles–based FBI agents concluded in their report that Claire was weaving “a fantastic story of her activities while in the Philippines which had many discrepancies.” However, they disposed of the matter upon arriving in port. “No further investigation is being conducted in this office,” they wrote, “and this matter is being referred to the Office of Origin [Portland].” Based on their report, though, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover authorized an investigation of whether Claire had collaborated with Japanese occupation officials in the Philippines and whether she had committed fraud and lied during interviews with immigration officials.

  Public Affairs

  Wilmington Harbor, Los Angeles, May 2, 1945

  CLAIRE, PEGGY, and the other passengers of the SS John Lykes returned to the United States on May 2, 1945, in an atmosphere of war-weary triumph. Adolf Hitler had committed suicide on April 30, Nazi Germany was in its death throes, and Americans were looking for heroes. The latest edition of the American Mercury was on the street and an Army Public Affairs officer was on hand looking for Claire when the ship docked at Wilmington south of Los Angeles. Peggy was already irritated with Claire when they arrived, but the star treatment Claire received must have rankled. The army officer said news outlets were clamoring to speak with her about her experiences. Her story appeared on network radio and in national gossip columns. After playing bit parts in road shows around the Pacific Northwest before the war, Claire had never made it in show business. FBI doubts notwithstanding, she was now returning to the United States as a celebrity.

  Red Cross relief personnel met the civilian passengers. The refugees each received vouchers for hotel rooms, money to buy food and clothing, and free phone calls to contact home. “I believe it was seventy-five dollars we could buy in clothing for an adult, like myself, for instance, and a fifty dollars’ requisition for a child,” Claire recalled. “That was so we would have decent clothing to go home in and meet our families.”

  A day or two after arrival, Claire visited a downtown Los Angeles airline office to see if she could book a flight to Portland. “Just as I was getting into the limousine in front of the airplane office, I saw him”—it was Manuel Fuentes, who had gotten word that she was on the ship’s manifest and had come to persuade her to take another shot at their marriage. Somewhat surprisingly, Claire said yes. “I tried to make a go of it, I thought maybe I could.” After the Portland visit, the Fuentes family—Claire, Manuel, and Dian—moved into a house they bought at 448 Madrid Street in San Francisco’s Excelsior District. The other passengers, meanwhile, dispersed to their hometowns or built new lives. Peggy was bound for Washington, DC. She and Claire did not remain in contact.

  Claire was soon meeting with film executives and potential ghostwriters to tell the fuller version of her story. On June 17, 1945, she appeared on the popular CBS radio program I Was
There, which dramatized and retold her first-person account. At the end of the dramatization, Claire was interviewed by Chet Huntley, live in a studio in San Francisco.

  Huntley: Mrs. Phillips, what happened after you were sentenced to be shot as a spy?

  Mrs. P: I was taken to Bilibid Prison and thrown on the floor. There I lay for day after day, waiting to be shot, but still the Japs didn’t come after me. Then, to my amazement, I was taken out for a new trial. The charge this time was not espionage but “acts harmful to the Imperial Japanese Government.”

  Huntley: How do you account for the new trial?

  Mrs. P: I don’t know for certain—except that the Japs apparently had no idea I was sending information to the guerrillas. They just thought I was smuggling food and medicine into the Cabanatuan prison. Anyway, I was sentenced to twenty years’ hard labor.

  Huntley: And you were put back in prison?

  Mrs. P: Yes. Then came the blessed day, February 10, 1945. The helmeted American boys came in. I went forth barefooted and ragged but happy in my liberation and in the hope of seeing my Dian and my native land again. That’s my story, Mr. Huntley—I was there.