Miracles and Massacres (27 page)

Lee pictured the large-type, front-page headline and then shook Brundidge's meaty palm. “I'm in.”

Tokyo

August 31, 1945

Iva was ecstatic.

Leslie Nakashima, a Japanese newsman, had just called and asked if she'd be willing to tell two American reporters about her experience as Tokyo Rose in exchange for two thousand dollars. Iva replied she'd never heard of “Tokyo Rose,” but Nakashima explained that it was simply the name Allied soldiers had given to English-language radio hosts in the Pacific and Iva certainly qualified.

Between needing the money and wanting Americans to know how her and Cousens had foiled Japanese propaganda efforts with
Zero Hour
, her answer came fast.

“Tell me where and when to meet them.”

Tokyo

Morning, September 1, 1945

Iva Toguri walked into room 312 of the Imperial Hotel with Leslie Nakashima and her husband, Phil d'Aquino, without a care in the world. The war was over, the Allies had won, and now she was about to make seven times more money in a single morning than she'd made during her entire time in Tokyo.

Casting her eyes on a short man pouring a glass of bourbon, and then on his taller, fitter colleague, Iva was happy to finally have a
chance to talk about her small role in helping the American war effort. She knew these men would help bring that part of the story back to the United States.

“Good morning,” said the taller man. “I'm Clark Lee from the
International News Service
and this is Harry Brundidge from
Cosmopolitan
magazine.”

Iva shook hands with the men and they all sat down. Brundidge got right to the point. “So, you are Tokyo Rose?”

Iva detected a little hostility in his voice. “Mr. Brundidge,” she replied politely, “there are five or six girls to whom that name should apply. I am just one of them.”

“You worked at Radio Tokyo,” Brundidge replied. “You announced introductions to records. You were a sort of disc jockey, weren't you?”

“Yes,” said Iva.

Lee turned to Nakashima. “You told us that you went to Radio Tokyo and someone there gave you her name?”

Nakashima nodded. Iva had no idea Nakashima had been paid $250 by Lee and Brundidge for identifying “Tokyo Rose.”

“Then she will do!” said Lee, grinning. “Now, let's get to her story.”

With that, Clark Lee unpacked his typewriter, and Harry Brundidge, for reasons that Iva did not yet fully understand, locked the hotel room's door.

Tokyo

Afternoon, September 1, 1945

After everyone had left his hotel room, Clark Lee fed a blank piece of paper into his typewriter and stared at it. The interview that had just concluded had not gone according to plan. For starters, he'd expected someone who looked, or at least
sounded
, like a femme fatale. This Iva woman didn't fit the bill. More important, Iva had denied broadcasting any propaganda: Nothing about unfaithful wives, the horrors of warfare, or the fictitious sinking of American ships.

Nevertheless, and despite her protests that she was just one of many hosts, Iva had eventually agreed to sign a paper saying she was “the one and original Tokyo Rose.” That should have been good enough, but
now, as Lee stared at the blank white paper in his typewriter, he was starting to have second thoughts.

Part of Lee's hesitation was that he had personally heard a broadcast by a woman whom the troops had called “Tokyo Rose” in 1942—a year
before
Iva said she'd began working at Radio Tokyo. That got his mind running.
How many Tokyo Roses were out there? And which of them had actually broadcast propaganda?

Clark Lee stared for a while longer. He knew that if Iva hadn't committed treason against her country, then he had no scoop. On the other hand, she had signed the statement.

Finally, he made up his mind and his fingers began pecking away at the keys.

TRAITOR'S PAY: TOKYO ROSE GOT 100 YEN A MONTH . . . $6.60.

In an exclusive interview with this correspondent . . .

Tokyo

October 17, 1945

As Iva finished washing her hair, she heard a knock on the door.
Another reporter
, she thought to herself.

After the publication of Clark Lee's article—which, to Iva's shock and horror, had portrayed her as a traitor to her country—the media had gone into a feeding frenzy. Interviews had been followed by a press conference, which was followed by intensive questioning by investigators from the Eighth Army's Counter Intelligence Corps. Through it all, Iva had answered every question asked of her. She knew that she had nothing to hide and was convinced that no one would believe her to be a traitor once they'd heard the full story about her time on the radio.

Iva opened the door, her dark hair still wet. Three officers and a master sergeant from the Army Counter Intelligence Corps stood on her front porch.

Iva Toguri was under arrest.

Tokyo

July 4, 1946

It was her birthday, but after spending the last eight months in prison, Iva Toguri was not in a celebratory mood. Showering at Tokyo's Sugamo prison, where many Japanese war criminals were also being held, Iva felt sad and alone. She missed her husband, whom she was only allowed to see for twenty minutes a month. She missed Charles Cousens, who had been sent back to Australia, where he told military authorities that Iva was innocent of any wrongdoing. She missed her father and siblings, whom she'd not seen in five years. And, most of all, she grieved for her mother, who, unbeknownst to Iva until now, had died three years earlier in a Japanese-American internment camp.

As Iva emerged from the shower stall, she stopped suddenly and screamed. She had been through a lot of surreal experiences in recent years, but this was the most bizarre of all. Peering through a window and into the foggy bathroom like they were viewing a circus act were sixteen well-dressed men.

She did not know it, but they were all United States congressmen.

Tokyo

October 25, 1946

Amid the popping of reporters' flashbulbs and the shouting of questions, Iva Toguri ran through the lobby of Sugamo prison and into the arms of her smiling husband. After a year behind bars, Iva was being unconditionally released by the United States military due to lack of evidence.

She took the bouquet of flowers that Phil had brought for her and smiled. It was a new beginning, a chance to put this nightmare behind her and return to her life in California.

Or so she thought.

Tokyo

January 5, 1948

Iva had cried for so long that her eyes had run dry. It was hard not to think of everything that had brought her to this point and wonder if it all would have been different had she not been so naïve.

It had now been over a year since the U.S. State Department told her that she was in a line of ten thousand second-generation Americans stranded in Japan waiting for approval to return to America. Now she wondered if that was just another lie.

Cynicism did not suit Iva well, but she'd come a long way since she'd accepted that interview with Clark Lee and Harry Brundidge three years earlier. She knew that if she'd been less naïve back then, she would probably be back at home in Los Angeles right now nursing her and Phil's first child.

Instead, she lay in her bed in Tokyo, her husband holding her tight as her body shook and heaved uncontrollably.

Their baby had died that morning.

Washington, D.C.

May 25, 1948

Thomas DeWolfe sat at his small desk, dictating a memo to the unluckiest secretary at the Department of Justice. She was the only assistant in the building still working this late at night and DeWolfe was, as usual, the only attorney.

DeWolfe knew his bosses, especially Attorney General Tom Clark, did not want to hear what this memo had to say: Iva Toguri was innocent.

That same conclusion had been reached almost two years earlier by lots of others, including the Counter Intelligence Corps's legal section, its intelligence division, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, and the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, Theron L. Caudle.

After Toguri was released, the American press had gone crazy. Walter Winchell, the most powerful gossip columnist in America, waged
a personal crusade against her. Furious that Iva was trying to return to the United States, Winchell labeled her a traitor in his syndicated columns, which were read by seven million Americans, as well as on his Sunday night radio broadcasts, heard by twenty million listeners. He wanted the government to re-arrest Iva and prosecute her for treason. At the very least, he wanted to make sure that Iva never set foot on American soil—unless, of course, it was in handcuffs.

“Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea!” he began every radio show. It was great entertainment, delivered with the panache of the vaudevillian he once was. The information that followed it, however, like the “news” in his columns, was usually wrong.

According to Winchell, the lawyers at the Justice Department who were blocking Iva Toguri's re-arrest and prosecution were “emperor-lovers and friends of the Zaibatsu.” He also told his audience that Clark Lee had turned the original typewritten copy of Toguri's eighteen-page confession over to FBI agents. In it, according to Winchell, she had named two witnesses against her, both of whom were available to testify if she was brought to trial.

Thomas DeWolfe knew that almost everything in Winchell's reporting on Iva was wrong: there were no “emperor-lovers” in the Justice Department; Iva's “confession” was nothing more than Clark Lee's notes from his interview—where she had unequivocally denied any wrongdoing; and the “two witnesses against her” were Charles Cousens and Ted Ince. DeWolfe knew these two men would actually
confirm
Iva's innocence if they were called to testify. Cousens, in fact, had written to the Justice Department saying as much.

The career federal prosecutor understood Washington well enough to know that a memo from him concluding that Iva Toguri should not be re-arrested would win him few friends in the Truman administration. But DeWolfe also knew that it was his job to tell his bosses the facts. It was
their
job to decide whether to listen to them.

“There is insufficient evidence to make out a
prima facie
case,” he dictated to his tired secretary. “Don't forget that
facie
is f-a-c-i-e, and that last sentence should be in all capital letters.”

“Thank you, Mr. DeWolfe.” Debbie had worked with him for a dozen years and not once had she ever called him “Tom.”

“The government witnesses, almost to a man, will testify to facts which show that the subject was pro-American, wished to return to the United States and tried to do so prior to Pearl Harbor, attempted, again, unsuccessfully to return to the United States in 1942, and beamed to American troops only the introduction to innocuous musical recordings.”

DeWolfe had no doubt that other female disc jockeys, other “Tokyo Roses,” had broadcast propaganda that was far from innocuous. Nor did he doubt why the American government was not interested in prosecuting any of them: The press had not appointed itself as judge, jury, and executioner of
those
women; Clark Lee and Harry Brundidge had not labeled
those
women as “Tokyo Rose”; and Walter Winchell had not publicly directed his wrath and vitriol toward
those
women.

DeWolfe continued dictating: “The government's evidence likewise will show that subject was a trusted and selected agent of the Allied prisoners of war, who selected her as the one they could trust not to sabotage their efforts against the success of the Japanese propaganda machine.”

When it was complete, DeWolfe's memo totaled approximately 2,500 words. Not one of them indicated that he had any doubt about Iva Toguri's innocence.

Washington, D.C.

August 16, 1948

The presidential election was only months away. President Truman, feeling pressure from the public over Tokyo Rose—pressure that was fueled almost daily by Walter Winchell—and sick of being labeled by the media as “soft on communism” and “soft on spies,” ordered Attorney General Tom Clark to make a case against Iva Toguri.

Clark ordered that Toguri be arrested in Japan and brought to California to stand trial for treason. He appointed Thomas DeWolfe, the government's best trial attorney, especially when it came to cases involving treason, as her prosecutor.

San Francisco

One year later: August 12, 1949

Thomas DeWolfe was having trouble sleeping. In fact, he hadn't slept well from the moment he gave his opening statement in
United States v. Iva Toguri
to the day he questioned the last of his forty-six witnesses—a period of five weeks.

He tried to pass the insomnia off as simple nervousness about the trial, but deep down he suspected it was something else: an uneasy conscience. DeWolfe knew he was a compartmentalizer, and he comforted himself in the belief that the decision to prosecute an innocent woman was not his to make. His only job was to follow orders and to give the Department of Justice his absolute best effort.

In the past five weeks, that best effort had included ensuring an all-white jury through peremptory strikes of African and Asian Americans during jury selection. It had also included calling to the witness stand American GIs who remembered hearing a female disc jockey broadcasting Japanese propaganda, even though these witnesses had trouble remembering key details—like the dates of broadcasts, times of day, and the sounds of the voices they heard—that would help distinguish Iva from other announcers.

Despite those weaknesses in his case, DeWolfe's direct examination of two men from Radio Tokyo had gone exceedingly well. George Mitsushio, the American who'd renounced his citizenship, and his sidekick Kenkichi Oki had perjured themselves after being solicited by none other than Harry Brundidge, whom the Department of Justice had sent to Japan as an agent of the government to find and interview witnesses for the prosecution.