Burn After Reading (26 page)

Military Intelligence was handled by the Third Section of the Imperial General Staff as a headquarters organization. Its importance was reflected in the fact that its chief was usually a lieutenant general or at least a major general. The service was decentralized and the various armies stationed abroad, like the Kwantung Army in Manchuria, maintained their own, autonomous intelligence organizations.

The fourth echelon, counter-intelligence, was a two-pronged organization: the
Kempetai,
which was the secret police of the army, and the
Tokkoka,
the Metropolitan Police of Tokyo, whose Special (Political) Branch was mainly responsible for counter-espionage. It was the
Tokkoka
that, in the fall of 1941, succeeded in demolishing the Sorge ring. Prior to that, it had smashed a British network allegedly headed by the Reuters correspondent in Tokyo, James M. Cox.

These two secret police organizations shared the guilt for Japan's unsavory reputation. Their methods of interrogation were ruthless and cruel. The torture to which they subjected
Cox drove him to suicide. They were equally brutal with others they pulled in on whimsical charges of espionage, like Otto Tolischus, Tokyo correspondent of
The New York Times
at the time of Pearl Harbor. He presented a shocking picture of the Japanese spy-busters in the book he wrote after his release and return to the United States.

Japanese espionage against the United States had begun spasmodically as early as 1920; the Naval Attaché in Washington directed the operations. He was followed by a motley cavalcade of lazy spies, some in uniform, others behind elaborate covers. It is possible that some of Japan's better spies operated in the United States during this leisurely era of peace, but there could not have been too many of them. Prior to the Pearl Harbor operation, Japanese espionage in the United States had its halcyon days during the regime of Captain Tamon Yamaguchi as Naval Attaché in Washington in the middle 1930's. This was the only period when the Japanese succeeded in enlisting native Americans (and ex-members of the U.S. Navy at that) to work for them. A Yamaguchi aide, Commander Toshio Miyazaki, persuaded a dismissed chief petty officer, William Thompson by name, to steal several classified manuals for him and to procure some tactical information. Yamaguchi went to work on a cashiered commander, a certain John S. Farnsworth, trying to obtain similar information from him. Both men were caught before they could do appreciable damage.

A third man Yamaguchi tried to enlist was a civilian, who worked in the Naval Gun Factory in Washington. He reported the contact to Naval Intelligence, was told to cultivate this relationship and was given the doctored blueprint of a new eight-inch projectile. Yamaguchi was delighted with the loot and gave the man five hundred dollars in brand new, crisp American banknotes. The operation compromised him and he had to leave Washington shortly afterwards, leaving a gap that Japan took some time to fill.

After Yamaguchi came a swarm of Japanese spies. There
was at Calle 10a in Colon, Panama, a little haberdashery shop owned by an attractive, sexy, elegantly dressed woman in her early thirties, Lola Osawa by name. That name was an alias and her shop was a blind. She was in reality Chiyo Morasawa, wife of a Japanese naval officer with whom she formed a husband and wife espionage team, specializing in the secrets of the Panama Canal. Her shop was local headquarters for one of several Japanese spy rings scattered throughout Panama, with fifty-five branch offices in as many barber shops.

The Caribbean was swarming with Japanese fishing craft, fishing for information under the eagle eyes of a certain Ketarino Kabayama, a gentle, soft-voiced, middle-aged businessman, actually Captain Kabayama of the Imperial Navy. The catch of Kabayama's fishing fleet was taken to Japan by a certain Shoichi Yokoi, an exporter, who was Commander Masakazu Yokoi. More such fishing craft crowded the waters all along the Pacific Coast from Alaska to Mexico, and every one carried a trained operative of the secret service. In Vancouver, British Columbia, residents of Japanese ancestry bought into filling stations and fuel firms. These people were Japanese agents gaining quasi-legitimate access to gasoline and fuel oil, which they siphoned off and stored surreptitiously in hidden tanks in secluded inlets of the rugged coast for a rainy day.

There were few spots along the sensitive perimeter of the United States without at least one representative of the Japanese secret service in attendance.

Within the country, the Japanese had hundreds of operatives at important and seemingly unimportant posts. The Japanese secret service controlled banks and purchasing agencies. It had so-called Army and Navy Inspectorates, a Silk Intelligence Bureau, tourist agencies, a cotton intelligence office, and several other quasi-commercial organizations. Most bizarre among its outposts was the mysterious “Tokyo Club,” a narcotic and gambling ring which had branches in many West Coast cities. The clubs not only collected information, but also supplied much
of the money needed for the operation and provided occasional trigger men for direct action.

The Domei News Agency was another front. Consular offices were the regional headquarters of the network. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Japan had consulates in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Philadelphia, Houston, Chicago, Honolulu and Manila. This formidable apparatus was directed by a single man, Nobutake Terasaki, who sat in an office in the handsome white Japanese Embassy building on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C. He hardly ever attracted attention because he appeared to be small fry, holding down the minor job of Second Secretary. He was a quiet, precise, uncommunicative man, the prototype of the studious intellectual, punctilious, modest, with an almost exaggerated passion for anonymity. He mixed little in the flamboyant society of Embassy Row. He had no friends. Yet this shy little man was the supreme chief of the whole Japanese network, not merely in the United States, but in the entire Western Hemisphere. The modest Second Secretary gave orders to the counselor in Buenos Aires, the Consul General in New York and even the Ambassador in Washington. He had at his disposal a small army of aides, including a brilliant communication technician named Kosaka, who operated his radio. Kosaka was sent to the United States in the late summer of 1941, when traffic became heavy, and he arrived with a new set of codes and ciphers.

Out in the field, the most important of all outlets was, of course, Hawaii, where an estimated four hundred secret agents were working for the Japanese secret service. The operation was directed by Consul General Nagao Kita, next to Terasaki the most important Japanese spy chief in the United States. His chief assistant was Consul Atojiro Okuda. Liaison with agents in the field was in the hands of Consulate Secretary Tadasi Morimura. He also took care of disbursements to spies and occasionally served as courier.

In actual fact, Morimura was Ensign Takeo Yoshikawa of
the Imperial Navy. He had been transferred from his desk at the Intelligence Division where he specialized in the U.S. Pacific Fleet and its main bases, to the biggest base earmarked for attack.

It was in the winter of 1940 that his preparation for this secret mission began in earnest. He was instructed to take the Foreign Ministry's English language examination and was then appointed vice-consul. As his cover, also, he was given his new name and his new identity. In August, the Director of Naval Intelligence told him: “Yoshikawa, you are going to Honolulu as vice-consul. Tension is building up in Hawaii, as you know, and short-wave transmitters can too easily be spotted by radio direction finders. So you will go as a diplomat and report on the daily readiness of the American fleet and bases by diplomatic code. This is the only secure channel of communication left and you will be our only agent. I do not have to tell you the importance of the mission.”

“Hai,”
Yoshikawa replied, the unquestioning “aye, aye, sir” of the Naval service.

“We have arranged,” the director continued, “for a new consul-general to be your chief for this operation. Nagao Kita, a diplomat now at Canton, has been dealing closely with the Imperial Navy on intelligence and other matters incident to our occupation of China. He can be trusted to cooperate with you fully. Kita goes to Honolulu first and you follow. Prepare yourself.”

Ensign Yoshikawa arrived in Honolulu in April 1941, and went to work at once to carry out his mission. The freedom with which he was permitted to move about amazed him. “For instance,” he later recalled, “I habitually rented aircraft at the John Rodgers airport in Honolulu for my surveillance of the military airfields, and walked nearly every day through Pearl City to the end of the peninsula where I could readily survey the air strip on Ford Island and battleship row in Pearl Harbor.”

He swam about in the harbor as he pleased, looking for
data about underwater obstructions, tides, beach gradients; and strolled through the hills overlooking Honolulu, “magnificent vantage points,” he said, “to observe the sorties of the fleet's units.” His favorite vantage point was a pleasant Japanese restaurant called
Shanchu-ro,
just below Aiea. Sitting on a straw mat and sipping sake, he was entertained by a geisha while he himself observed the fleet below through a high window with a breathtaking view of the harbor. “I gained,” he recalled, “much useful information on ships present and deployment patterns. From the geisha too, who would have entertained U.S. personnel earlier in the evening, I occasionally gleaned small bits of information.”

As X-day drew closer, the Japanese secret service sent to Hawaii another authentic genius of espionage. He had an enormously important job, yet little if anything is known beyond his name. He was Ichiro Fuji, if that, indeed, was his real name. He arrived in Honolulu in September, 1941, with specific instructions from Admiral Yamamoto in person, and promptly superseded Consul Kita at the head of the hierarchy, but only inside the organization. To outsiders, he remained non-existent. There is reason to believe that his identity and his presence in Honolulu was not known even to the American counter-intelligence agencies, despite the fact that, by then, they had a good coverage of the Consulate General.

The information gathered by these spies ended ultimately on the desk of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Combined Imperial Fleet. It was he who hatched the monumental plan to attack the United States Fleet at Pearl Harbor.

A Naval Attaché in Washington in 1926, Yamamoto knew the United States well, and that knowledge helped him shape the plan. In 1941, when he appeared before the Cabinet Council, he promised a quick and decisive victory because, he warned, a protracted war would end, inevitably, in the defeat of Japan. “If you tell me,” he said at the secret meeting, “that it is
necessary that we fight, then in the first six months to a year of war against the United States and England I will run wild, and I will show you an uninterrupted succession of victories. I must tell you that, should the war be prolonged for two or three years, I have no confidence in our ultimate victory.”

For his surprise attack on the U.S. Fleet, Yamamoto needed but limited intelligence, largely information of a tactical nature. Much of the material was already on file in Tokyo. It came mostly from published American sources, which described the composition and employment schedules of the U.S. Pacific Fleet with amazing candor. His intelligence service advised him that the American planes in Hawaii were distributed among the Hoiler Air Base, Hickam Field, and the naval air base on Ford Island. Every single anti-aircraft position was pinpointed for him from espionage reports. On the basis of this information, Yamamoto assigned one hundred and ninety-nine planes to deal with the airfields, and one hundred and fifty-four planes to take care of the fleet. From then on, all he needed from Intelligence was information about basic changes in the American organization and the movements of the ships.

The secret service was promptly mobilized to supply this data on a day-to-day basis. On January 6, 1941, the Consul General in Honolulu was told via Terasaki that he was to send continuous reports on the movement of U.S. vessels in Pearl Harbor; he was to report even when there were no such movements; and he was to tighten up his espionage clusters.

On February 15, Tokyo cabled a “Ministerial Instruction” to Terasaki in Washington for immediate distribution to his network. The agents were instructed to drop everything, discontinue their propaganda operations and concentrate exclusively on intelligence work. The dispatch included a voluminous “shopping list” of diverse items in twelve major categories.

On September 24, Tokyo asked Honolulu to divide the waters of Pearl Harbor into five separate sub-areas and to report the ships present in each of them separately, evidently to make
possible the assignment of individual targets to the attacking squadrons. The message specified, “With regard to warships and aircraft carriers, we would like to have you report on those at anchor (these are not so important), tied up at wharves, buoys, and in docks. (Designate types and classes briefly. If possible, we would like to have mention made of the fact, when there are two or more vessels alongside the same wharf.)”

On December 1, in Tokyo, the Cabinet Council formally approved the commencement of hostilities on the day proposed by Yamamoto—December 7. Tokyo also moved to wind up Terasaki's apparatus which, Yamamoto apparently thought, would not be needed after the deadly blow. On December 2, Terasaki and his four chief lieutenants were ordered to leave by plane at once. This was a blow to the Ambassador who depended on Terasaki's continuous intelligence to guide him in his negotiations with the White House and the State Department. He sent an urgent plea to Tokyo to let Terasaki stay, but back came the answer turning down his request. The modest Second Secretary was more important than the hapless Ambassador.