Morale Operations and Talking Their Way Into Japan

The Morale Operations section of the OSS recruited Asian Americans with the requisite skills in media communications. They hired individuals to help with propaganda materials aimed at two targets. One was to the Chinese public, to help stiffen their resolve to resist the Imperial Japanese forces. The other was aimed at the Japanese public and Imperial Japanese military personnel, to weaken their morale and willingness to continue with the war. The means of communication was in print or over the radio. For the former, some were graphic artists and employed to design cartoons and other pictorial representations for those not sufficiently literate in the Chinese language. Others were experienced typesetters and printers. Still others were writers who produced propaganda leaflets that Morale Operations distributed throughout the countryside in China.

Epilogue

Each of the three Asian American suspects were considered and then dismissed as the Trojan Horse within the OSS. The suspicion that the double agent was someone with a short family history in the United States was proven incorrect. Instead, the foreign agent inside the OSS was one whose family heritage traced back to the American Revolutionary War and whose ancestor signed the Declaration of Independence. Yet blame for the intelligence leakage to a foreign power ultimately rests on the FBI, the State Department, and the director of the OSS itself for their inadequacies in securing classified documents and ineptitude at counterintelligence.

Fighting Like a Man, Special Operations Style

Asian Americans also joined Special Operations. Their work for this section involved engaging in guerrilla warfare against the Imperial Japanese forces in Burma. Led by Carl Eifler, they were immensely successful against the enemy who outnumbered their units operating behind the battle lines. While they found their linguistic and cultural skills used far less than imagined, they nevertheless contributed to the defeat of the Imperial Japanese forces in the region. Other Asian Americans planned, trained for, and were about to penetrate Japanese-occupied Korea before the war ended. Two of these missions, known as Eagle and Napko, involved the former contacting the Korean underground movement and the latter planning to use YuHan Corporation pharmaceutical offices as their safe houses while operating covertly inside Korea. Both projects, however, were cancelled once the war ended.

Race, Loyalty, and Asian Americans

This chapter examines the intersection of race and loyalty. For all OSS members including Asian Americans, prosecuting alleged Asian American collaborators hinged on varying understandings of loyalty. For Frank Farrell, loyalty was fixed and emerged from the historical self, as George Fletcher asserted, as evident in the successful prosecution of the Tokyo Rose case. But for others, such as philosopher Simon Kellar, and Asian American investigators, loyalty was fluid, multilayered, and contingent, and violation of it by words alone was insufficient for prosecution for treason under Article III of the Constitution. As a result of their work, many alleged collaborators were exonerated.

Creating an Inclusive, Centralized Intelligence Agency

The intelligence agency the Asian Americans joined was established by William Donovan, lawyer and Medal of Honor recipient from World War I. Donovan turned to his trusted friends who organized the various sections of his agency and staffed them with personnel they knew and trusted through their old boy network. To gather strategic and tactical intelligence against Japan, however, Donovan required experts, field agents, and available military personnel with experience in East Asia. But he found there were fewer available through the old boy network. Out of necessity, therefore, he turned to the Asian American communities in the United States to recruit linguistically and culturally qualified personnel with the correct racial uniforms.

Knowing Your Enemies and Allies: Research & Analysis and Secret Intelligence

Asian Americans in Secret Intelligence had the right stuff. They were knowledgeable of the language, terrain, and local culture—skills necessary for the production of accurate intelligence assessments of the enemy, the local population, and the physical terrain. Some used open source materials; others gathered strategic and tactical intelligence behind enemy lines; a few in the Eastern Research Institute monitored radio traffic. Asian Americans also provided information on sites for aerial bombing or invasion during interviews, while others in Hawai’i were unaware that their correspondence with people in East Asia was recorded and given to the OSS to shed light on political factions surrounding the Chinese National government and the Korean independence movement. Penetration of Japan proper proved difficult; their network in Southeast Asia proved invaluable to the point that General Albert Wedemeyer made Secret Intelligence the pivotal agency for all intelligence in East Asia.

Countering Enemy Spies, Rescuing POWs, and Dealing with Collaborators

Asian Americans joined X-2 (the counterintelligence branch) and were involved in spy hunts. They were not always successful, as the Japanese Mata Hari’s spy ring eluded capture. Yet Asian American like John Kwock were nevertheless effective in securing OSS facilities from penetration by Japanese and Chinese Nationalist agents under Tai Li. Their greatest contribution, however, came with the Allied POWs rescue operations for missions code-named Cardinal and Pigeon. They also took up war crimes investigations immediately after the cessation of hostilities. They looked into alleged collaborationist activities of their ethnic cohorts such as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan’s radio propaganda broadcaster Herbert Moy, and others whose alleged activities were deemed treasonous by European American investigators such as Frank Farrell. With their expert knowledge of the local context in East Asia as well as the alleged traitors’ Asian American background, this provided them with a unique ability to assess these cases.

Recruiting Asian Americans with the Right Stuff

Asian Americans who joined the OSS were highly qualified individuals. They were nearly all proficient or native in the Asian languages and were highly educated, many with advanced degrees. They held qualifications necessary for their assigned tasks as creators for propaganda materials, for gathering and interpreting data for strategic and tactical intelligence reports, and for conducting raids behind enemy lines; they were not relegated to menial tasks performed by bottom-ranked soldiers. Many were commissioned and noncommissioned officers, which meant that European American enlisted men had to salute and obey their orders. They were recruited from Asian immigrant communities that were politically divided and regionally attached, making any assessment of their recruits’ loyalty difficult at best, even if three-quarters of them were American-born or naturalized US citizens.

Introduction

The OSS did not use race in their recruitment of Asian Americans. Instead, they used loyalty to determine which Asian American with the necessary linguistic and cultural skills could join the agency. But to understand why the OSS leaders took the risk in bringing in a potential Asian American Trojan Horse one must see race and loyalty as not fixed but fluid social constructions. Using a wide variety of sources scattered across the globe, this chapter shows that Asian Americans had broken through racial barriers as they were tasked with gathering, translating, and analyzing intelligence data, creating propaganda pamphlets and radio programs, conducting hit-and-run operations miles behind enemy lines, and hunting for enemy spies behind Allied lines. Their roles, salaries, and military rank all point to how rapidly loyalty and not race became the primary determinant of employment with and treatment in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.

Prologue

Did the OSS have a Trojan Horse in their midst? Joe Koide, a Japanese American recruit writing propaganda for Morale Operations of the agency, might have been a triple agent for the United States, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Kunsung Rie, a former employee at a Japanese consulate officer prior to the war, was now part of the Korean American team code-named Napko, in training to penetrate Japanese-occupied Korea in the summer of 1945. Lincoln Kan, a suave Chinese American, was a Secret Intelligence agent sent to Macao to gather intelligence prior to the Allied invasion of southern China. But he went missing for six months, only to fail to properly authenticate his identity to his superior officers at the headquarters. Had Kan been captured by the Japanese and turned?