MacArthur's Spies

by Peter Eisner

  The war in the Pacific was over before the end of the summer, with a series of events more shocking than the attack on Pearl Harbor less than four years earlier. The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, and the Japanese war machine was halted. Even before Japan’s formal surrender on September 2, 1945, before General MacArthur on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, American publishers and filmmakers craved stories of heroism during the war.

  Claire was already shopping her tale—the memoir of an American spy: how she fought for love and country against the Japanese occupation of Manila. She soon landed a book contract with a small publisher in Portland. All the while, FBI officials were monitoring Claire’s activities and continuing to reject anything Claire said and to accept Peggy’s version at face value.

  By the end of 1945, Claire was at work on her memoir, collaborating first with a woman named Cunningham, who helped mold the story and conduct background research. That version did not make the grade. The publishers in Portland, Binfords & Mort, wanted more flash. Myron B. Goldsmith, based in San Francisco, was hired as the new ghostwriter. He “dressed up” the story, promising to make it sellable. In other words, Claire admitted, he exaggerated some parts and twisted the truth for the sake of a good story. “He elaborated on some of the scenes [and] made it more dramatic,” she said. “I can say that it is actually true, the facts are, but he, as I say, dramatized on some of them.” Claire received a small advance and was looking forward to making more money from a movie. With few prospects in the working world, it was by far the best deal Claire could imagine.

  The publisher approved this second draft and the book, Manila Espionage, was distributed nationwide by William Morrow and Company in the first half of 1947. Peggy certainly would have noticed that she was hardly mentioned, and even then not by name—she was referred to as “auntie,” likely the name by which little Dian knew her during the war. As the central character, Claire was the ringleader, and Tsubaki Club was the site of clandestine meetings that might not have actually taken place. In the book version, Claire controlled Naomi’s shipments to Cabanatuan. Ramón and Lorenza Amusategui and all the others were bit players. None of the survivors was going to be very happy with her version of events. John Boone was an exception. He was on convalescent leave in California in 1945 after leaving Bataan and would soon revert from major in the U.S. Army guerrilla forces to sergeant in the regular U.S. Army. He provided a foreword to Manila Espionage in which he wrote: “I wish to state that all the facts in it of which I have any personal knowledge are, to the best of my belief, true and properly expressed.”

  Claire’s growing celebrity started to gnaw at the other surviving members of their underground operation in Manila. Lorenza, for one, was disgusted. She also was considering writing a book that would tell the story of the underground and would not be a memoir. She was talking about the possibility of collaboration with a cousin by marriage, Oliver La Farge, the prolific author whose book Laughing Boy had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1930. La Farge had also been a major in the Army Air Forces during the war and had worked with military intelligence. “Oh boy, what a bunch of lies,” she told La Farge. “So-called Claire Phillips has written a book through some ghostwriter of course (she can hardly write a letter, much less a book). . . . I would very much like to see the old woman’s [Peggy’s] face when she reads it.”

  Mention of Peggy’s face was more to the point than Lorenza realized. In Claire’s book, opposite page 27, the publisher had printed the photograph of Peggy standing in front of Tsubaki Club. However, in the print they used, Peggy’s face had been sliced off and replaced with an outsized photograph of Claire’s face pasted on top of Peggy’s body. “From the neck down, it is me,” Peggy said. “And from the neck up, it is Dorothy [Claire]. . . . You can tell by her height and by my height that if that were she, her head would be up to the top of the fence.” Not my fault, Claire said later, although she did not block publication of the fake photograph. She explained that when she was ill and in the hospital after her February 10, 1945, rescue from prison, she had asked the army photographer, Dale Risdon, to send her a picture of Peggy in Manila as a remembrance. “When I asked her and Dale to get the picture, I didn’t ask her to stand in front of the club.” Now that she had the photograph and the publisher was asking for one, it ended up being useful. “He wanted a picture of the club with me standing in front of it, and the only picture I had was of Mrs. Utinsky standing in front of it, and he said, ‘we can put your head over her head,’ and he said, ‘it will look as if it were you standing there.’” For years the altered picture, wrongly attributed to the National Archives, was republished in partly unsubstantiated accounts of Claire’s life.

  Claire’s book became the basis for most of what was known about her and her life before, during, and after the war. Her ghostwriter made his own voice and dramatic intentions immediately obvious in the text. Why was Claire involved in the resistance? “Bill Shakespeare said that ‘all the world’s a stage’ and maybe I was not fond of sitting in the wings, so for some unexplainable reason the States soon lost their lure for me.” It was unlikely that Claire herself was going to be quoting good ol’ Bill Shakespeare in that way.

  Some details in the book contradicted other accounts and facts and others were simply implausible. Claire claimed that she was able to observe part of the Bataan death march, which began on April 9, 1942. Her diary made no mention of that, and the march took place along the eastern coast of Bataan from Mariveles northward, many miles from the Sobreviñas family camp in the hills beyond Dinalupihan. Claire also claimed that she was in touch with Colonel Hugh Straughn and sent supplies to him. She said he wrote a note to her calling himself “just a tired old man.” It is possible, but not provable based on John Boone’s testimony at the Court of Claims and his letters to Claire during the war. Boone did say in his letter to her in June 1944 that he had put her in touch with other guerrilla commanders besides him. Claire also claimed that Colonel Akira Nagahama stopped in at the club the same day that Straughn was executed at the Chinese Cemetery in Manila and claimed to have fired the coup de grâce. There is no evidence that Nagahama ever went to Tsubaki Club or that he would admit the execution of Straughn by his own hand. In any case, Claire would not have been at the club to see him even if he had been there that night. In the book, Nagahama is quoted in stereotypic racially tinged language: “‘See dis hand,’ he boasted, ‘Dis is hand dat used gun on him in Chinese cemetery.’” This is unlikely on several counts. First, Straughn was executed alongside Colonel Thorp on or about October 5, while Claire was in the hospital in and out of consciousness after contracting tetanus following ulcer surgery. There are eyewitness accounts from the cemetery, none of which mentions the presence of Nagahama or an officer having fired a coup de grâce after the prisoners were executed by firing squad. Meanwhile, Nagahama was on trial for war crimes in Manila in 1946 as Goldsmith was ghostwriting Claire’s story. Reports of the trial were in the newspaper, and it would have been easy to pile more charges on the accusations against Nagahama. The Straughn case did not come up in the war crimes testimony against Nagahama, who was characterized as a reticent person who let others carry out his orders, though he was not always in control of their actions. It does not appear in character for him to have gotten drunk in public nor to have confessed to murder at Tsubaki Club.

  Safe at Home

  Los Angeles, 1947

  THE FBI TOOK more than a year to complete its investigation of Claire’s activities. While finding her statements questionable, the Bureau was convinced that she had not been a collaborator, as implied by Peggy’s statements. Claire was indeed a loyal American citizen and had worked for the underground, and there was no evidence she had provided information to the Japanese. The original charge was probably based on gossip: Peggy and the other women had seen Claire consorting with Japanese officers in Manila. While the women knew nothing themselves about Claire’s spying mi
ssion and the means to which they resorted to gather intelligence, her actions were endorsed by John Boone during and after the war. Boone trusted her, even though he criticized some of what she said. If she had been a double agent, the entire operation could have been swallowed up quite early and easily by the Kempeitai—Boone and his lieutenants included. J. Edgar Hoover did not pursue such unfounded charges, but he did send a letter to Claire telling her never again to claim to be working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  In the months after the war, both Claire and Peggy made formal requests to the government for restitution of funds they spent during the Japanese occupation of Manila. A private bill passed Congress in 1946 to award Peggy $9,280 ($87,000 in 2017 dollars) and she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on October 17, 1946. The awarding of restitution was based on an uncontested list Peggy provided of household items and goods she said she had sold in Manila to finance her supply operation to POWs from 1942 to 1944.

  Lorenza Amusategui and her husband, Ramón (posthumously), Naomi Flores, Maria Martinez, and many of their colleagues in the Manila underground also received the Medal of Freedom, an honor created by President Harry S Truman in 1945 to recognize civilian contributions to the war effort. Claire had not yet received the honor.

  Claire actually had more backup expense details than Peggy did. She applied on February 6, 1946, seeking $15,000 restitution from the War Department for providing support to Boone and the Bataan guerrillas, also providing a list of expenses. The department denied her claim on December 6, 1946, on a technicality—that Boone’s guerrillas were not officially recognized as part of the Philippine Army until 1945. That technicality was grossly unfair—Boone and tens of thousands of Americans and Filipinos were operating in the hills, sanctioned by MacArthur and supported by Chick Parsons as his surrogate.

  Problems like this increased as the government began to limit its liability after the war. President Truman had signed the so-called Rescission Act of 1946, which retroactively took away millions of dollars in payments due the estimated 250,000 Filipinos who fought on the U.S. side against the Japanese, both in the regular army throughout the Pacific and as guerrillas in their own country. As claims for war restitution poured into the Truman administration, members of Congress were concerned that not all claims were legitimate. Senate and House bills on Claire’s behalf to award her $6,000 in compensation for support to the guerrillas were introduced in Congress on May 15, 1947, and August 2, 1948, but both failed passage. Claire’s chance of receiving any payment worsened more on July 3, 1948, when President Truman created the War Claims Commission. While Truman said he hoped that the government would now sort out legitimate payments “at the earliest opportunity,” the measure froze all payments for a year as the new commission analyzed existing claims. The sheer number of requests for restitution was so great that the army and the War Claims Commission began to follow stringent guidelines for issuing payment and for doing anything that might establish a precedent for future claims. As a result, the atmosphere for approving claims and private congressional bills was much worse than it had been when Peggy’s private bill breezed through congressional passage. Claire by then had hired attorneys in Portland, and Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon filed a resolution on her behalf in the Senate, and Claire was now asking for additional reimbursement for money spent in supporting both the guerrillas and POWs. The purpose of the resolution was to ask the U.S. Court of Claims to conduct a hearing into the facts surrounding Claire’s claim. Claire appeared at a brief hearing in Washington on October 2, 1951. Her attorneys had now increased the restitution amount to $50,000. “I do not ask that I be paid for the work I did,” she told the Senate Judiciary Committee, “just for the money I spent, my own money.”

  Privately she knew she might not get the entire $50,000—equivalent in 2017 to almost $500,000—but she asked for backup from her old friends in the Philippines. “I might not get all I am asking for,” she wrote to Evangeline Neibert, “in fact they usually cut a bill like that in half or less. But whatever I get, I will share. We used to share, and I believe people should always share. Why should some be rich and some poor?”

  Morse promoted Claire’s claim and was likely confounded by Congress’s failure to pass the bill. He appealed to the patriotism of his fellow members of Congress but now only asked for a hearing resolution, rather than outright issuance of funding. “We are asking only for the right for Mrs. Clavier [Claire] to bring action in federal court and prove her loss,” Morse said. “She can tell her own story . . . there is no question but that the story of Mrs. Clavier’s life has great impact.” Morse’s request was approved, setting the stage for a hearing before the U.S. Court of Claims.

  About a year after publication of Claire’s own book, Peggy told her own story in Collier’s magazine in 1946. She followed that with a book, Miss U, published by the Naylor Company, a regional publishing house based in San Antonio, Texas. Her book did not take off; she did give occasional talks about the book and her experiences, but she had none of Claire’s notoriety—nor was a film produced. In the book she got back at Claire by hardly mentioning her, and when she did, awkwardly so. Claire appears a third of the way into the story—as one of the people who contributed to the relief organization that she ran for Cabanatuan, the last in a long list of collaborators and their code names. “Dorothy Claire Fuentes,” she wrote, “mother of little Dian—of whom a great deal more later—was called High Pockets.” Peggy wrote lovingly of Dian. However, it was the only time Peggy mentioned Claire by name in the book, referring to her once more as an unnamed hospital patient in the fall of 1943 and again as Dian’s unnamed mother, who reunited with her after the war. Peggy’s book also often ranged into fiction. She glorified her time in the hills in late 1944 and 1945 as if she were a pistol-packing fighter when actually, others said, she had quarreled with the guerrilla leaders around her, and Boone had tried to bust her back to civilian nursing duty. She also implied that she had been the leader of the supply line long after Ramón and Lorenza Amusategui had taken over, fearful that her drunkenness and threatening behavior were dangers to all of them. In addition, she claimed she had been tortured and severely injured. Lorenza said that was not true, that she and Ramón had ransomed Peggy out of jail quickly and that they had seen Peggy hours after her release, none the worse for wear. “She had lost 15 pounds in the 15 days of incarceration, but neither her arms nor her legs bore any marks of the Jap mistreatment,” Lorenza reported to U.S. intelligence. “I remember distinctly how on the day of her release, my father, Ramón, my sisters and I commented on her flawless white skin, how that skin would have bruised had the Japs maltreated her.” Peggy claimed further in the book that she went to the hospital because of the torture, but Lorenza had direct information that this was also not true. Lorenza’s father was the doctor who examined her. The medical treatment was a uterine operation for a preexisting condition unrelated to torture.

  • • •

  Claire’s book and popularity overcame FBI questions and criticisms, though several agents saw that a film deal was brewing in Hollywood and wrote complaints in the official investigative file. “She’s a prostitute. Got a lot of publicity and is a phony,” read one complaint. Nevertheless, on January 23, 1948, less than a year after the book appeared, Claire received word that General MacArthur had awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the same honor Peggy and her other allies had received in 1946. However, recognition of Claire carried special significance—it specifically mentioned that the commander in chief, Far East, that is, MacArthur, had authorized the award.

  Claire had become a media star, whether or not the coverage was flattering. An odd, questionable report about Claire appeared in the national media just before her memoir was turned into a film. She was famous enough that the story went out on the newswires. On January 19, 1949, Claire told the sheriff’s office in Vancouver, Washington, that Dian had been kidnapped after school. She said tha
t a man stopped by and told her he was holding Dian for ransom: He demanded Claire’s 1947 gray Frazer automobile. Claire, “sobbing and terror-stricken,” gave the keys to the man, who then told her, “Your little girl is waiting for you down at the corner.” Just as police took evidence and set up a manhunt across the Northwest, nine-year-old Dian ambled home and into the house and said she had come directly from school and “knew nothing of the tall stranger.”

  Claire’s fame crested on March 15, 1950, with the national broadcast of This Is Your Life, a popular radio program produced and hosted by Ralph Edwards. The show included a telephone hookup from New York with Carlos Romulo, the Philippine ambassador to the United States. Claire, he said, “at the risk of her life, gave valuable assistance to my countrymen, many of whom were fighting as guerrilla warriors, and to others who were made prisoners by the ruthless Japanese invaders.” Fely, who had come to the United States, re-created one of the Japanese folk songs she had sung at Tsubaki Club. Louise DeMartini was there as well. So was Colonel Charles Young, who had rescued Claire from prison. Major General Mark Clark participated via a telephone hookup and praised Claire for heroism, and a former POW rescued from Cabanatuan, Lawrence Courtney, confirmed that Claire had provided aid to the camp. Using Claire’s book as a guideline, Edwards went along with Claire’s unfounded claim about helping sink “a flotilla” of seventeen Japanese submarines. Anyone familiar with the Pacific campaign knew that Claire had not been able to provide immediate information on submarine movements because the guerrillas did not have direct radio communication from Luzon until late in the war. In any case, there was no record of the United States having destroyed seventeen Japanese submarines traveling in a single convoy.