MacArthur's Spies

by Peter Eisner

  Boone said that his memory was dim about details and that he had not kept financial records. However, unpublished and unseen in the court record was evidence that showed that Boone’s estimate could have been closer to an accurate figure than he thought after all. In fact, Boone had compiled a list of supplies and money obtained from all sources from September 1943 to September 1944, including fifteen thousand pesos in cash, clothing, food, and medicine from Claire. That did not include the support Claire provided in the eleven months between when she opened Tsubaki Club in October 1942 and September 1943. Nor did that include Claire’s costs to supply the POWs.

  The second witness against Claire that day was Lorenza Amusategui, who had remarried and was living in Maryland at the time. She wept more than once during testimony when she recalled the events surrounding her husband Ramón’s capture and death. She also said that Claire had overstated her position in the supply operation they had run to Cabanatuan and other prisons. She said Ramón, not Claire, had assumed leadership of the group when Peggy was pushed aside.

  Another four months went by. The final hearings in the case opened at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco on January 9, 1956. The first witness was Naomi Flores. Perhaps more damaging than Naomi’s testimony were exhibits presented by the government: copies of letters that Claire had written to Evangeline Neibert, Lorenza, and Naomi, asking them to confirm that the government owed her money. The government attorneys said that Claire’s letters implied that she would even pay a kickback to the women once the case was settled. Claire, even without a high school degree, should have known the implication. If she didn’t, her lawyers should have warned her.

  • • •

  The government attorneys held their star witness for last, more than two years after the case opened. Peggy had been quietly working on behalf of the U.S. government defense team all along. She now stepped forward to offer her testimony, telling the court she had not traveled too far. She was living in Long Beach, California, for the winter. Claire and Peggy were in the same room together for the first time since their passage on the SS Lykes in 1945, and it was probably the last time they would meet; it is impossible to know whether Peggy and Claire looked directly at each other or spoke on the sidelines. Matronly Peggy—“auntie,” as Claire had called her, or “the old lady,” as Lorenza had called her—said that Claire was just a minor player in an operation that she claimed to have run.

  In the course of several hours of testimony, Peggy told the court that she had gone with Fely after liberation in February 1945 to pick up Claire’s papers and documents in Quezon City at the home of Fely’s parents. She said that she had gone over the documents before giving them to Claire and that there were no receipts for payments to the guerrillas there.

  Claire’s lawyer, Frederic Young, seemed unprepared; he did not ask one obvious question: Did Peggy know anything about the mysterious reappearance of Claire’s diary? Peggy was the only antagonist with the ability to have produced it. Peggy was the one who had traveled to Fely’s parents’ house after liberation and had private access to everything that had been hidden away. Young never pursued in open court where the diary had come from.

  Peggy went to the extreme in unfairly and wrongly denying that Claire had ever been a “real” member of her supply operation. She said that Claire had hardly ever helped support the organization. She said that she herself had never gone to Tsubaki Club, though both Claire and Fely said she had come and that she had always been welcome to free beer and other alcohol, which was hard to come by elsewhere. Peggy was playing the role of the respectable old lady and was successful in sabotaging Claire’s reputation. All the while, government lawyers and the FBI knew that Peggy was a questionable source of information. They received word from Lorenza Amusategui that Peggy had been displaced as leader of the group and had threatened to turn all of them over to Japanese authorities.

  She even went to the point of challenging the origin of Claire’s nickname, “High Pockets.” Peggy said it wasn’t because she stuffed secret messages down the front of her dress. “I gave her the name,” she said. She and Claire were walking along together on the street one day when Peggy turned to her friend. Peggy was five feet tall and Claire was at least half a foot taller, even taller with heels on. When Peggy turned, she found herself looking straight at Claire’s breasts. “She had on a little jacket with some pockets on it, and I am so short when I have no high heels on, and I was looking directly into her pocket, and I said, ‘How high your pockets are.’ I said, ‘That’s a good name for you,’ and that was it.” It seemed a bit of a payback for Claire having pasted her face onto Peggy’s body.

  The case was closed by Commissioner Foster, at 4:30 p.m. on January 11, 1957. Foster, who had been based in the Philippines during the war, was familiar with Manila nightlife, at least by observation at a distance. He implied that he understood Tsubaki Club to have been a disreputable nightspot. By his conduct of the hearings, Foster left the impression that he thought that Claire’s uneducated, unsophisticated demeanor was as disreputable as the club.

  Claire’s credibility had been shattered. Even she admitted finally that her book blended fact and fiction. “The basic facts are true . . . but my co-author did dress the book up,” she finally said. “The way I had written it was like a diary, and he said, ‘That is no good.’ . . . He insisted it made better reading.” The only saving grace for her reputation was that the proceedings were little followed in the press, and the transcripts remained unseen and lost in a dusty file box for more than half a century.

  The government had done so well in challenging Claire that it asked that the Court of Claims drop all claims by Claire and that she be cited for perjury. A four-member panel of the U.S. Court of Claims received the court record and findings by Commissioner Foster. It recommended on July 12, 1957, that Claire be paid exactly the amount that the testimony indicated could be verified, the dollar equivalent of about 8,500 Japanese-era pesos, calculated not at the rate of two pesos to the dollar, as Peggy had been paid, but on a sliding scale in which the peso became decreasingly valuable during the war. The amount authorized for Claire, $1,349.21, was equivalent to about $11,000 in 2017. If the amount was a slap at a woman who had indeed served and had indeed provided intelligence information, the judges of the U.S. Court of Claims said essentially they were grateful at least that she had been on the Allied side. “Much of her story was greatly exaggerated, and at times almost fanciful,” the court said. But she deserved payment, because “when the rubbish is cleared away it is rather well established by outside testimony that she furnished [money and supplies] to prisoners of war and to organized guerrillas.”

  Her Own Life

  Portland, Oregon, 1957

  AFTER THE 1957 COURT DECISION, Claire disappeared from sight. She took odd jobs and sometimes spoke to veterans’ groups. At one time she worked in a department store. Her mother listed her last job as a waitress in Portland. The U.S. government decision to pay her a pittance for her wartime service may have pushed her toward bitterness and a new bout with alcoholism.

  Claire and Manuel Fuentes had lived together from July 1945 until the beginning of January 1946. Fuentes returned to the Philippines to work for the U.S. Army on an interisland ship. He paid Claire $1,200 in support payments in 1946. Claire took Dian with her back to Portland, where she filed for divorce from Fuentes in 1947. In a court hearing she said Fuentes was not violent but had been cruel and humiliated her. “He drank quite a bit and of course his temper was worse then,” she said in court. “He would bawl me out and accuse me of picking on him. He would humiliate me in public and call me vile names.” The uncontested divorce was granted in Multnomah County Court in Portland on April 25, 1947. She returned to the court on August 7 and won legal custody of Dian. In the filing, Claire was named Maybelle C. De La Taste and Dian was listed as Dian C. Fuentes.

  After John Boone’s visit in 1945, she tried to keep up a c
orrespondence with him and with Mellie. Something seemed amiss in that relationship. “He went back to Manila . . . and wrote to me for a few months. But I have been writing and writing him and he don’t [sic] answer me.” Mellie “wrote me once and I answered but she never wrote again. I don’t know why.”

  Claire met with veterans and paid a Christmas 1947 visit to the veterans’ hospital, where she met Robert Clavier, an army private who had been among the POWs at Cabanatuan and was later moved to the Old Bilibid Prison hospital, where he was liberated in 1945. Although Clavier was still being treated in Portland for tuberculosis and other ailments, he left the hospital and married Claire three weeks later, on January 18, 1948. “I, at last, found the right man,” she said in a letter to Evangeline Neibert and Naomi Flores. “He is six feet three inches tall (just the way I love ’em). Weighs about 170 . . . has bluish-green eyes, medium brown hair and a nice nose. In fact he reminds me a lot of my Phil. . . . I loved Phil so very much and lost him and I thought I’d never love again.” They divorced in 1953 in the course of Claire’s attempt to obtain restitution from the government. She apparently did not marry again after that. Claire’s talks to veterans’ and women’s groups tailed off in the late 1950s. Dian, meanwhile, was born in 1940 and could still be among us. She would have turned eighteen in 1958. She did not take advantage of the full scholarship pledged by Lewis & Clark College as a result of Claire’s This Is Your Life appearance. She could not be located for this book.

  There is no indication that Claire had any further contact with her former underground colleagues after the Court of Claims case was settled. Her days in the limelight had come to an end.

  Claire Phillips died on May 22, 1960, almost exactly sixteen years after she was dragged to a dungeon by the Kempeitai. An obituary the following day recalled her glory days for a moment. “Private funeral services have been arranged . . . for Claire Phillips, Portlander who was a wartime spy in the Philippines,” the story said. “She opened a night club for Japanese officers, using the profits to aid Americans in prisoner of war camps. She was imprisoned, tortured and sentenced to die by Japanese military police, but her term was finally reduced to 12 years at hard labor. She was later rescued by American troops.”

  A separate death notice listed survivors: Dian, identified as Mrs. Dianne Claire Selness; her mother, Mrs. Mable Snyder; and her sisters, Mrs. Eva Jose and Mrs. Jeanne Childwood. Claire’s remains were cremated.

  The death certificate filed by her mother declared that she had contracted pneumococcal meningitis two days before her death at the Portland Sanitarium. The disease is caused by the streptococcus bacteria and is more virulent and fatal than the more common viral meningitis. Little more is known about her final years and final days, and neither Dian nor Claire’s mother nor her two sisters came forward to discuss the life and death of Claire Phillips.

  • • •

  Good spies and heroes are not necessarily Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts. Claire Phillips was deceptive and foolish at times, but she also fought on behalf of the United States to defeat Japan in occupied Manila. For the eighteen months she was running her nightclub, Claire and the women who worked for her risked their lives nightly to gather intelligence faster than it could be assimilated and used by MacArthur’s intelligence headquarters in Australia. If John Boone had managed to have a functioning radio transmitter early on, Claire would actually have done what she dreamed. First she sweet-talked men who, hopelessly drunk with love, provided the names of their crews, their travel dates, and their itineraries. And then, after a final kiss, they would have been blown out of the water by U.S. ships and airplanes.

  Claire did not fit the easy mold of a noble hero, a patriot who marches off to war, triumphs, and is acclaimed. She was not alone among the heroes who fell into their roles by accident and circumstance. In the end she was a hero and a survivor. Her diary made the difference for me to be able to tell her story right; for the first time in the seventy years since Claire began telling and adjusting her story, we hear her unadorned daily efforts to live, love, and survive; to avoid disease, vermin, informers, and Japanese officers crowding her door. Her diary shows her toughness of spirit, her fears, heart, and humanity.

  Claire’s story is a significant, if still slightly mysterious, part of the larger story of the saga of American and Filipino guerrillas in the hills who refused to surrender to the Japanese after the invasion of the Philippines. These fighters successfully harassed and evaded the Japanese occupiers of the Philippines throughout the war, forced Japan to maintain a large force in the islands, and laid the groundwork for the U.S. return. There were thousands of Filipinos who resisted and fought the occupation of their country. They all stood up, people of all types, wealthy and poor, beggars, thieves, and chiefs. To this moment most of the Filipino guerrillas who fought for freedom in their own country have not received the recognition nor the compensation they deserved as soldiers in the U.S. Army. That failure should be and can still be corrected while the dwindling corps of survivors of the war are still alive. With their help and with assistance from Claire and her comrades, Japan’s war machine failed in the Philippines. That part of the story is no mystery at all.

  After the War

  Peggy Utinsky

  After living for a while in Washington, DC, Peggy Utinsky moved to Texas and later to California after her book, Miss U, was published. Like Claire, she gave occasional speeches about her wartime experiences. During the Court of Claims hearing, she gave indications she often was not well and was on government disability, but she lived ten years longer than Claire. Peggy, seventy, died in Los Angeles on August 30, 1970. A gravestone at Roosevelt Memorial Park in Los Angeles County reads: “Margaret Utinsky ‘Miss U’ Valiantly served her country by working with the Filipino resistance movement to provide medicine, food, aid and hope to Allied POWs in the Philippines during WWII.”

  John P. Boone

  After the war, John Boone returned to the United States and stayed in the military. He received the Distinguished Service Cross for his wartime service in the Philippines. He retired from the army but reenlisted during the Korean War and served as an intelligence officer with the X Corps in Korea. He was stationed at Fort Ord in northern California for a time and rose to the rank of major. As a civilian in retirement, he was a news photographer and pursued photography enthusiastically on his own. Boone was at Fort Gordon, Georgia, when he died in 1980 at the age of sixty-seven. He and Mellie had six children, three boys and three girls. They had always planned to write a book about their wartime experiences and had made an audio recording to start the process when Mellie died in 1965, forty-two years old. “We couldn’t find the tape and my father just couldn’t write the book without my mother,” said their daughter Jeanne. “He needed her to do it.” Mellie and John are buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

  Chick Parsons

  Navy commander Chick Parsons and his family remained in the Philippines after the war. Parsons resumed his business career. He had received multiple awards for his service during the war, including the Distinguished Service Cross, two Navy Crosses, and the Bronze Star from the United States and the Medal for Valor from the Philippines. Parsons came closest to telling his own story in the 1946 book Rendezvous by Submarine, written by Travis Ingham with Chick’s assistance. He took an aw-shucks attitude toward his service, telling Ingham, “I am not a colorful figure and I wish to be kept out of the story of the guerrilla movement as much as possible.” After the war, he reconstituted his import business and traveled frequently to Japan, where he made friends and business contacts, leaving the war far behind him. He died in March 1988 at the age of eighty-eight. Chick Parsons’s son, Peter—the five-year-old who helped his father smuggle intelligence documents by sitting on them on a pier in Manila—returned to the Philippines and has produced half a dozen films about the war in Manila, the guerrillas, and his father’s exploits. Prior to moving to the Philippines, Peter Parsons lived and w
orked for forty years in California.

  Fely Corcuera

  Fely Corcuera spent time with Claire in Portland after the war and gave occasional talks about her wartime experiences. She married a physician, Manuel Santos, and settled in Hawaii outside Honolulu. She died in 1984 at the age of sixty-four. Her children live in Hawaii.

  Lorenza Amusategui

  Lorenza Amusategui married Edward P. O’Malley and moved with him to Maryland after the war. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1949. She and her late husband, Ramón, were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1946. On August 11, 1955, Congress passed a private bill that awarded $20,000 to Lorenza and $5,000 each to her sons, Ramón and José Maria, “in full settlement of all claims against the United States for money and supplies furnished and distributed by Mrs. O’Malley and her former husband, Ramón de Amusategui (now deceased), to American prisoners of war in the Philippines during World War II.” U.S. Court of Claims commissioner George H. Foster, who heard testimony in Claire’s case, used a different standard for Lorenza’s claim of restitution. He noted that no documentation was available to back up Lorenza’s claim, because the material had been burned to avoid detection by the Japanese. Lorenza died in Monterey, California, on May 25, 1967, at the age of fifty-one. She was buried at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California, where she was listed as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army.