MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about the wartime intelligence exploits of the Allies against Japan. Such exploits range from the United States’ success in breaking the Japanese JN-25 naval code, to the extensive operations of the Soviet Union’s military intelligence networks in Tokyo. In contrast, very little is known about Japan’s intelligence performance against the Allies in the interwar years, as well as after 1941. Now a new paper by an international team or researchers sheds light on this little-studied aspect of intelligence history.
The authors acknowledge that the history
of the intelligence efforts of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) has
received very little attention by scholars. Consequently, it remains
unexplored even in Japan, let along in the international scholarship on
intelligence. There are two main reasons for that. To begin with, the
IJN systematically destroyed its intelligence files in the months
leading to Japan’s official surrender in 1945. Then, following the war,
fearing being implicated in war crimes trials, few of its undercover
operatives voluntarily revealed their prior involvement in intelligence
work.
Luckily, however, the past decade has
seen the declassification of a number of Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) counterintelligence files relating to Japanese intelligence
operations targeting the United States. Most of these files date from
the 1930s and early 1940s. Additionally, a number of related documents
have been declassified by the government of Mexico, which is important,
given that Mexico was a major base for Japanese intelligence operations
targeting the United States.
What do these files show? According to
Drabkin, Kusunoki and Hart, the IJN’s spies were able to obtain secrets
relating to the military capabilities of the United States during the
interwar years. These included “significant amounts of information” on
American weapons systems and military tactics. However, such successes
were rare. On balance, the authors state that IJN intelligence
activities in the United States were “fraught with problems”. These were
partly rooted in the deep skepticism about the value of espionage among
the leadership of the IJN. The latter generally regarded human
intelligence (HUMINT) as ungentlemanly and “nearly heretical”. Put
simply, the upper echelons of the IJN “had little interest in
intelligence”.
Yet the IJN did launch a number of
espionage operations on American soil, though these were usually
individual initiatives launched by intelligence-oriented mid-ranking
officials, including naval attachés. Most IJN case officers and spies
tasked with collecting intelligence on the United States were located in
Hawaii, the West Coast and Mexico. They were able to
recruit “a small number of American and British agents”, most of whom
were used as so-called ‘sleeper agents’, and were thus kept mostly
dormant in anticipation of a possible war between Japan and the United
States. Few of them, however, were able to become fully operational
prior to being arrested by American or Mexican counterintelligence.
Mexico City was undoubtedly the primary
hub of Japanese naval intelligence operations in the Americas. The
Japanese embassy there hosted an IJN intelligence radio team, as well as
a sizeable group of case officers who had systematically recruited
Mexican agents with the purpose of infiltrating the United States.
However, Tokyo had completely miscalculated the intentions of the
Mexican government. The Japanese saw Mexico as a sworn enemy of the
United States. That turned out not to be the case. Instead, the day
after the Pearl Harbor attack, Mexico broke off diplomatic relations
with Japan, shut down the Japanese embassy and promptly rounded up the
IJN spy network.
The IJN spy network inside the United
States did not fare much better. Its case officers were severely
under-trained in intelligence tradecraft. One of them had apparently
“instructed his American agent to simply drop off confidential documents
with his apartment doorman instead of using a dead drop or any other
method of transmission”. Even the Hawaii-based Takeo Yoshikawa, the IJN
intelligence officer who gave Tokyo invaluable information in
preparation for the attack on Pearl Harbor, owed most of his HUMINT
tradecraft knowledge to the writings of T.E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of
Arabia’), rather than to his IJN instructors.
The agents that the IJN case officers had
managed to recruit inside the United States were fueled by substantial
cash payments, rather than ideological sympathy for Japan. They
apparently included “several alleged alcoholics who were caught bragging
about their exploits”. Most of them were arrested by the FBI and the
Office of Naval Intelligence in the months after the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor. Consequently, the IJN was left with almost no HUMINT
presence inside the United States once Washington entered the war.
The failure of the IJN to establish a
durable espionage network on American soil was highly consequential,
according to the authors. Not only did the absence of such a network
leave Tokyo blind after 1941, but it also became one of a number of
contributing factors to Japan’s defeat in the war.
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