Burn After Reading (41 page)

Coggins had left to serve as a guerrilla surgeon with Chinese partisans behind the Japanese lines in China. His place was taken by Commander William H. Cullinan, a radio news commentator from Boston, whose diplomatic tact was badly needed for our very survival.

Yet the most important member of the Branch was conspicuous by his absence. He was Zacharias. Nine months after
the establishment of the Branch, he was removed from O.N.I. and sent to sea in command of the battleship
New Mexico
. This was a heavy blow to us, as it was to the entire Naval Intelligence establishment, for Zack was the most dynamic executive in O.N.I. While he was still in O.N.I., Naval Intelligence virtually steamed with activities. It was during his tenure that O.N.I. participated in a secret mission that spirited an anti-Fascist admiral out of Italy. He also co-operated closely with O.S.S. on several top secret espionage projects and with the various branches of the British Secret Service on ventures far beyond the narrow competence of Naval Intelligence. He left behind him an excellent organization in every one of its branches, but especially in its Japanese branch, headed by a Marine colonel named Boon and a Navy captain named Egbert Watts.

The day before his departure, “Captain Zack” invited me to his house and gave me a parting assignment. “Look,” he told me, “I am going to sea and will do what I can to contribute to the military defeat of the Japs, but I am absolutely convinced that we could better defeat them, and sooner at that, by non-military means.

“I want you to make a comprehensive study of every Japanese defeat situation in history and draw your conclusions. Then think of arguments we could provide for those Japanese in high places who dream of peace and need such ammunition.” This was in the late summer of 1943 !

He was gone for two years, covering himself with glory. During his absence, I partially retired to a cubbyhole in the Library of Congress and, with the help of the Eastlakes and Professor Yoshioka, carried out Zack's assignment.

My researches produced a fantastic conclusion. Although in all their history the Japanese had engaged only in a few foreign wars, they fought among themselves, clan versus clan, all the time. We examined hundreds of such fratricidal battles and found that rarely, if ever, was such a battle fought to the bitter end. Contrary to popular legend, surrender was quite common
among the Samurai. The Japanese of the past rarely, if ever, committed suicide when defeated.

The findings of this research—an important part of the intelligence activity—answered the question, “Can it be hoped or expected that the Japanese will ever surrender?” in the affirmative. We had our data ready pending Zack's return, but he was transferred from his command at sea to shore duty as chief of staff of a Naval District on the West Coast. It was there, early in 1945, that Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal found him, nurturing a historic plan.

Zacharias was obsessed with the idea that he could persuade the Japanese high command to surrender, even unconditionally, provided certain assurances could be given, such as the assurance that the Emperor, symbol of the “Japanese spirit,” would be permitted to remain on his throne. Zacharias outlined his idea to Forrestal and the Secretary decided to bring him back to Washington to carry it out. But even the civilian chief of the Navy proved powerless to overcome certain objections to Zack's second coming.

Forrestal was determined to give Zack his big chance, so he hit upon a compromise. He had Zacharias assigned to the Office of War Information, over which Zack's Naval enemies had no control, and then gave him a desk in his, Forrestal's, own office, reporting directly to the Secretary.

Zacharias arrived in Washington in February, 1944, and walked into 16-W out of the blue. He spent his first week in Washington going over all the intelligence reports, and his second week composing an estimate of the situation for the Secretary's eyes only.

I received him with a special “gift” that made him almost jump for joy. It was a single intelligence report, but of such monumental importance that he regarded it as the conclusive confirmation of his theory. This was how it came into our possession.

President Roosevelt had rewarded a good friend of his,
George Earle, former Governor of Pennsylvania, with an exciting appointment as assistant Naval Attaché to Sofia in Bulgaria, an excellent listening post. Earle had a lot of qualifications for the job, but discretion was not one of them. He was ingenious, imaginative, daring and intelligent, but he was also flamboyant and his temperamental boiling point was rather low. Earle performed so well that the Germans demanded the Bulgarian Government declare him
persona non grata
. Roosevelt had the Governor transferred to Turkey, where he made the friendship of a high official of the Foreign Ministry in Ankara and obtained through him copies of the reports of Turkish ambassadors in enemy capitals.

There was little of any importance we could cull from reports sent to Ankara from Germany or Hungary, but the reports of the Turkish ambassador in Tokyo proved of enormous value. We gave him the code name “Shark.” Late on the afternoon before Christmas in 1944, I was alone in the office when an officer-messenger delivered a single five-page report. It was from Shark. It contained information of overwhelming importance.

Shark outlined in explicit detail the future course of Japan. He reported without equivocation that Koiso would soon resign as Premier, to be replaced by the venerable Admiral Suzuki, a confidant of the Emperor. More important, he told us that there existed a “peace party” on high echelons in Tokyo and that the Emperor himself had recently joined it. The major objective of the “peace party” was to obtain a clarification of our unconditional surrender formula and to explore the most favorable peace terms they could get. According to Shark, the Emperor was still on the periphery of the “peace party,” chiefly because he was not sure whether he himself would be permitted to remain on the throne. If such an assurance could be given by the Allies, he would throw in his fate with the “peace party” and do everything he could to make it prevail.

Shark even outlined the course of events which would lead up to Japan's surrender. At the psychological moment, Suzuki,
too, would resign to give way to an Imperial prince who reflected directly the Emperor's will and authority, and who would then arrange Japan's surrender, guaranteeing the “execution and observance of the surrender terms.” As early as December, 1944, Shark even identified this Imperial prince as Prince Higashi Kuni, a cousin of the Emperor.

I was thrilled by this report and peddled it up and down in O.N.I., but found no takers. Even the experts of the Japanese Desk regarded it as a lot of moonshine. In O.N.I., within the Joint Chiefs and everywhere else in Washington, the possibility of Japan's surrender was viewed with an overdose of skepticism. Remembering my findings in the Library of Congress, I refused to share this pessimism.

Another one of my researches revealed that the much-vaunted Kwantung Army stationed in Manchuria was but a shell of its former self. Most of its elite regiments had been transferred to the fighting fronts in the Pacific and had been annihilated on Saipan and Palau. This was another report I peddled assiduously and for which I also found no takers.

When Zacharias walked into my office, I showed him the reports, and he took them to Forrestal, and then used them in his campaign to recruit supporters for his scheme in the White House and on Capitol Hill. Soon we had two enormously important sponsors, Admiral William L. Leahy, the President's chief of staff, and Senator Elbert Thomas of Utah, a former missionary in Japan who had the expert's appreciation of Zack's plan.

We did not know it then, and were not to find out until after it was too late, but a race was on between ourselves and scientists at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge who were working on the atomic bomb. It may seem lacking in a sense of proportion to mention these two projects in the same breath, and yet it is amply justified, because today we know that Op-16-W's scheme had an excellent chance to succeed. Its success would have obviated not only the invasion of Japan, but also the use of the A-bomb. Both projects had the same aim, to accelerate Japan's surrender without a bloody landing. Otherwise the two efforts
were incomparably different. For one thing, Op-16-W had cost a grand total of ninety-seven thousand five hundred dollars to operate from the day of its inception to VJ-Day, while the Manhattan Project swallowed up two billion dollars to the time of the detonation of the first bomb. For another, the purpose of our project was to save lives, whereas the A-bomb was to claim thousands.

If there was a reasonably promising alternative, as I believe there was, to the use of the bomb on Japan, then it was folly to use that bomb before that alternative was given all its chances for success.

On March 19, Zacharias delivered into Forrestal's hands his proposed plan for a psychological warfare offensive. The draft spelled out the mission as follows: “The United States will conduct an intensive psychological campaign against the Japanese high command through an official spokesman of high rank in order to accelerate and effect the unconditional surrender of Japan without the necessity of an opposed landing on the Japanese main islands.”

Forrestal approved the plan out of hand. Admiral King also approved it. The War Department had no objections. The Joint Chiefs hesitated for a few days, but then gave it their blessing. There remained only one approval to be collected, the final and decisive one—that of President Roosevelt. But Roosevelt was out of town and could not be disturbed. He was resting at Hyde Park after the tiresome and burdensome trip to Yalta.

Suddenly something happened whose tremendous significance was known only to us. On April 8, the cabinet of Koiso resigned and was replaced by one headed by Suzuki, exactly as had been predicted by Shark in December. This meant to us that the Emperor had definitely thrown in his lot with the peace party in Japan, and that Japanese efforts for an “honorable surrender” would henceforth be accelerated.

We redoubled our efforts, prepared the draft of a first broadcast to be delivered by the “Official Spokesman” and also
drew up a statement to be issued by the President. It was envisaged as the first in a series of such presidential statements to spell out to the Japanese what we in Op-16-W called the “conditions of unconditional surrender.”

The statement was on Roosevelt's desk in the White House, placed there by Elmer Davis, director of O.W.I., on the one day in April he spent in Washington on his way from Hyde Park to Warm Springs. He must have read and contemplated it because there were a few pale penciled changes in the draft when we got it back, but he left town without approving the project. A day later he was dead.

We felt this sounded the death knell for our project as well, because we thought it would take some time before Truman could be familiarized with the project, before we could “sell” the idea to him and gain his approval and co-operation. The world was preoccupied with the majestic events in Europe where Hitler's empire was collapsing like an overbaked soufflé.

Then Zacharias hunted up a middle-man who had a friend in the White House. The middle-man was Samuel R. Davenport; the friend, Matthew J. Connelly, who was Truman's appointment secretary. Davenport took the statement to Connelly, who placed it on top of the pile in the incoming basket on the President's desk. For several days, the statement made its way from the top to the bottom of the basket, as Connelly dutifully replaced it each morning. Then on May 8, in conjunction with his proclamation of VE-Day, Truman suddenly released it.

That same day, Zacharias went on the air, broadcasting in Japanese to the Tokyo high command, reading to them the President's statement. His words went out over powerful shortwave transmitters in San Francisco and Honolulu. Saipan put it on the air on the medium wave used by Radio Tokyo, enabling the five million Japanese who had sets to hear it, if they dared or cared. It was not aimed at them, although their eavesdropping was eagerly sought. It was explicitly and directly aimed at the
Emperor and his circle, at the members of the “peace party,” and the Japanese high command, a select audience of perhaps five hundred listeners.

At this point a shadowy figure entered our plot, although he probably did not know we even existed. He was one Jiri Taguchi, a Japanese foreign correspondent who had been sent to Germany by Foreign Minister Togo to report to him privately and directly about the Third Reich's final agony. Our intelligence agents succeeded in obtaining a copy of his confidential message to Togo. It was a melancholy report, urging the Foreign Minister to do something so that Japan might escape Germany's fate. We put the correspondent's private message on the air, special delivery to the attention of Foreign Minister Togo, and anybody else who happened to listen in.

Agents' reports started accumulating, reporting Japanese reaction to the President's statement and the sudden appearance of an “official spokesman of the U.S. government” on the air. On May 20, we were informed by one agent that the statement and the Zacharias broadcasts had been discussed in a Cabinet meeting. On the nineteenth day of the campaign, we drew real blood. The first reply was given to Zacharias in a broadcast by an “official spokesman” of the Japanese government, Dr. Isamu Inouye.

“Japan,” Inouye said, “would be ready to discuss peace terms provided there were certain changes in the unconditional surrender formula. We should like mutually to join hands in constructing an international machinery which strives toward world peace and the good of humanity.”