A GLITTERING PARADE of Japanese elite crowded into the Tsubaki Club on its opening night: film stars, famous musicians, military officers, and civilian officials. None of them wanted to miss the first night of Manila’s new, most exclusive nightclub.
The guests were treated to one dazzling dance production after another. For the finale, the elegant owner appeared alone on the dance floor. Dressed in a long, glittering white evening gown, Dorothy Fuentes sang beautifully for her guests. When she was finished, the crowd jumped to their feet in a thunderous standing ovation.
When the last guests had left, Dorothy checked the overflowing cash box. She knew that the Tsubaki Club was now the most popular spot for the Japanese in Manila. Her plan would work.
She wrote the following note: “Our new show was a sell out. You can count on regular backing. Standing by for orders and assignments.”
Claire Phillips, 1940s. Manila Espionage by Claire Phillips and Myron B. Goldsmith (Binfords & Mort, 1947)
She was about to sign it, then stopped. She couldn’t use her name; it was too risky. But what could she use as an alias? She thought for a moment about how she always stashed money in her bra. She signed the note, “High Pockets.”
The woman’s real name was Claire Phillips. She had been born Mabel Clara Dela Taste in 1907 in Michigan but went by Claire. She left home at the age of 16 and traveled throughout the United States for more than a decade, working various jobs as a vaudeville actress and chorus girl. When Claire was in her early 30s, she landed in Manila, where she eventually got work singing in Manila nightclubs.
One night in September 1941, an American serviceman named Private John V. Phillips, whom everyone called Phil, saw her perform. As rumors of war swirled throughout the Philippines, Claire and Phil began a whirlwind courtship. On December 24, 1941, a few weeks after the war rumors had become reality, they held a formal ceremony in which they pledged to marry as soon as they could. Although they were not yet married, Claire took Phil’s last name.
As the US and Filipino troops evacuated Manila for the Bataan Peninsula, Phil found a place for Claire to stay outside of the city. Manila would no longer be safe for American or European civilians: the Japanese were coming. As one living situation after another became unsafe for Claire, Phil always found a way to get away and move her to safety. In the meantime, Claire began to tan herself in the sun; with darker skin and her already dark hair, she could pretend to be someone else, someone who wasn’t an American, an enemy of Imperial Japan.
Then she lost contact with Phil. One day, as she searched for news of him, she was told that three American soldiers, separated from their regiment, were being sheltered nearby.
Claire rushed to meet them. She asked if they knew the whereabouts of a John Phillips who had been with their regiment, the 31st Infantry. They didn’t: the 31st Infantry was large.
But one of them, a man named John Boone, had an idea: creating a guerrilla band of Filipino soldiers.
“So why don’t you set it up?” Claire asked him.
“Only one reason,” Boone answered. “Supplies. We need a contact in Manila. And that could be you!”
It was an excellent idea. Claire could see Boone was a natural leader, and she knew there were many Filipino civilians willing to fight the Japanese if given the opportunity. As soon as word got out to them, an effective unit could be formed.
“We won’t stand and give battle,” Boone continued, “but kill the Japs one by one.”
Claire left, her mind spinning with ideas. But her focus was still on Phil. Where was he? One day she learned that he had been imprisoned in Manila. Now she had two reasons to return there: John Boone’s plan and her husband. Dressed in men’s clothing, Claire made the difficult journey to Manila.
But when she arrived, she discovered Phil had been taken elsewhere. She decided to stop searching for him. By this time, the Americans and the Filipinos on Bataan and Corregidor had surrendered to the Japanese. Now was the time for a different sort of war, a secret one in which Claire could actively participate. She could fight this battle most effectively in Manila. She would fight for the oppressed Filipino people. She would fight for John Boone and his guerrilla band. And she would fight for Phil, wherever he was.
Her first step was crucial: a new identity. Claire was now so tanned, she could easily pass for an Italian or Spaniard. She chose Italian as she didn’t think most Japanese were familiar with the language or culture. She obtained some official-looking papers declaring her to be Dorothy Clara Fuentes, an Italian native who had become a Filipino citizen.
On October 17, 1942, Claire opened a nightclub located near Manila’s busy harbor. She named it the Tsubaki Club after a rare Japanese flower. Her opening night was a huge success, and she looked forward to earning more Japanese money to fund resistance efforts. But her mind was always on Phil.
The following day, Claire felt the time was right to get an update on him. She called on Father Theodore Buttenbruch, a fellow resister and German priest who the Japanese were allowing to visit Cabanatuan under careful supervision. She asked Father Buttenbruch if he would carry a message to Phil.
Two weeks later, the priest called Claire to his office. He had lists of POWs who had died at Cabanatuan. Phil had died, he said, on July 26, 1942.
A few days later, she received a sympathy note from Chaplain Frank Tiffany, who lived at Cabanatuan. Although Phil’s death certificate stated that he had died of malaria, Chaplain Tiffany told Claire the underlying reason for Phil’s death was malnutrition.
“But I beg of you,” he continued, “not to forget the ones that are left. They are dying by the hundreds.”
Claire was heartbroken. It took her several days to recover enough to return to work. But when she did, the circumstances of Phil’s death gave her an additional motivation to keep the Tsubaki Club successful. She also became more motivated to engage in her own form of espionage.
The Tsubaki Club regularly entertained powerful Japanese civilians and military men who passed through Manila. Claire focused most of her attention on the military men: she or one of the other women would flirt with them while encouraging them to drink. The alcohol would often get them talking freely about where they had been and where they were going.
One night, a Japanese officer who commanded an entire flotilla of submarines visited the Tsubaki Club. A club employee told Claire the man was a great admirer of her singing. Claire, flirting and smiling, joined him at his table. He didn’t drink much and talked even less. This wasn’t going to be easy.
Suddenly, he told Claire that he liked her and hoped the feeling was mutual. He was sad that he would soon be leaving Manila. Then he asked her if she could dance as well as she could sing.
“You should have to be the judge of that, Commander,” Claire answered. “I am so disappointed you must leave. Not immediately, I hope.”
“Tomorrow afternoon, I finish repairs on our submarines,” he replied. He said he would be willing to delay just a little, however, if Claire would perform a fan dance (for which the dancer wore a costume that made her appear naked).
After obliging the commander with her dance, Claire had someone “photograph” the two of them with an empty camera. Where should she send the photos once developed, she asked.
That would be impossible, he said. He and his flotilla were on their way to the Solomon Islands.
Claire calmly excused herself long enough to write a note with the information she had just been given. A courier took the note and immediately set out for John Boone’s camp.
When she returned to the officer’s table, Claire and her female employees drank, flirted, and danced with him and his men all night. The officer, having a good time with Claire, often glanced at his wristwatch, asking her to please keep track of the time; he had to leave by 2:00 am.
Claire did nothing of the sort. She and her staff delayed them till after 6:00 am, long enough for the note to reach John Boone and for him to radio it to USAFFE headquarters in Australia.
A few months later, the same Japanese commander returned to the Tsubaki Club. He told Claire, sadly, that his flotilla had been attacked and most of it destroyed. He survived only because he was picked up by a fishing boat.
Claire’s earnings were already funding Margaret Utinsky’s Miss U Network (chapter 6) . But after December 1942, when Margaret, distraught from news of her husband’s death, became less involved in her network, Claire, with the help of Spanish businessman Ramon Amusategui, gradually took some control of the network. Under their leadership and funding, the organization grew larger and became even more successful at funneling medicine and food into Cabanatuan and other prison camps outside and within Manila.
One of their plans fed the starving Cabanatuan prisoners right under the noses of the Japanese: on the days when the prisoners were allowed to visit the nearby market, members of the network posing as vendors would “sell” the Americans parcels of food that had money and medicine hidden inside.
Claire was so determined to help the Americans, she decided to take an even more direct role. Clara Yuma, known as Claring, the aunt of one of Claire’s waiters, told her nephew about an American crew of slave laborers being forced to work at the Nichols Airfield. Every day the prisoners walked on a certain road from their prison camp. When Claire learned of this, she and Claring watched them one day from an abandoned shack on the route.
Describing the scene later, Claire wrote that on seeing the gaunt prisoners, her “heart sank.” She found it difficult to believe that “these ragged [men] with shaven heads and red-ringed eyes were once proud American fighting men.” As they “stumbled along the uneven gravel road,” Claire was further horrified by their “cut and bleeding bare feet” and the “big festering sores on their legs,” most likely the result of malnutrition and untreated illnesses.
Claire’s compassion propelled her into action. She rented a house in Claring’s name along the route, and they both set up a shed across the street. Claring became friendly with the Japanese guards who escorted the prisoners. Claire was too well known in Manila, so she watched from inside the house. Claring bribed the Japanese guards with gifts so they would allow her to give the prisoners food packets, which Claire had funded and both women had prepared.
As the weeks passed, the prisoners not only began to look healthier, but the despair on their faces was gone, replaced with a glimmer of hope.
After four months, however, the Japanese guards suddenly became dissatisfied with their gifts. One of them slapped Claring repeatedly in front of the prisoners, who were helpless to intervene. The guards then forced her to shut down the food stand. But others in the network continued to help the same men in other, secretive ways, always funded by Claire’s earnings from the Tsubaki Club.
Claire invited the Manila resistance to use her club as a secret headquarters. Agents walked in and out in a variety of disguises: repairmen, milkmen, meter readers, and peddlers. No one outside the network seemed to be aware of their real identities. That was about to change.
During the summer of 1943, a guerrilla courier code-named CIO-12 was caught. After long, agonizing days of horrific torture at the hands of the Kempeitai, he finally broke down and disclosed information. The Japanese immediately executed him, then convinced a Filipino con man to take on his identity. The imposter gained the trust of enough people, who, of course, hadn’t known the original agent. Soon the resistance network headquartered at the Tsubaki Club was infiltrated. One by one, its members began falling into the hands of the Kempeitai.
One morning, a young Filipino man who claimed to be a courier handed Claire a letter from an American named Captain Bagley. The letter was a request to fund a group of Filipino guerrillas.
Claire immediately knew the message was fake. It was written in a formal style not used by any Americans she knew. And the young man had not given any proper identification.
She responded angrily, claiming to be an Italian who didn’t care about the Americans or the guerrillas.
As the young man left, Claire signaled one of the waiters to follow him. The waiter returned with a chilling report: the “courier” had been met by four Japanese men in civilian clothing. Claire was obviously under suspicion.
Her friends urged her to flee to the guerrillas in the mountains. She refused. She didn’t believe the Japanese seriously suspected her of espionage. If so, why hadn’t they arrested her already? Plus—and this was crucial—how could she provide information and money to the resistance if she was in hiding? But as a precaution, she cleared her office of any incriminating documents that might cast doubt on her false identity.
During the following months, as Claire worked tirelessly against the Japanese, the Kempeitai continued to close in on the network. On May 23, 1944, Kempeitai agents stormed into the Tsubaki Club. “Jitto shita cri!” [“Don’t move!”] one of them shouted.
They searched Claire to see if she was carrying a weapon.
“You are Madame Tsubaki?” they asked.
“Yes,” Claire replied.
“Take us to your office, High-Pockets!”
Claire was terrified: they knew who she was. As they searched her office, she tried not to tremble as she recalled all she’d heard about the horrific tortures the Kempeitai used to extract information.
Although they didn’t find anything incriminating, the Kempeitai agents shoved Claire into a car and drove her to the Japanese administration building a few blocks away. They put her in a tiny room, blindfolded her, then interrogated her about others in the network. She answered “I don’t know” to almost every question. Each time she said those words, she received a vicious slap across the face or a hard kick to her shins.
After two weeks, she was moved to Fort Santiago, where she was imprisoned in a filthy cell, measuring 7 by 12 feet, with six other women.
During her imprisonment, Claire endured grueling torture that, on multiple occasions, threatened her very sanity. But on her return from every interrogation, the other women did their best to help her recover some strength.
On February 10, 1945, nearly nine months after her initial arrest, Claire was liberated by American troops. The already slim woman had lost 55 pounds while in captivity. She hadn’t betrayed anyone.
Claire wrote her memoir in 1947, and the following year she was awarded with the US Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1951, her memoir was made into a highly fictionalized film called I Was an American Spy.
Suffering severely from untreated posttraumatic stress, Claire died of alcoholism-related meningitis in 1960 at the age of 52.
Angels of the Underground: The American Women who Resisted the Japanese in the Philippines in World War II by Theresa Kaminski (New York: Oxford, 2016).
Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II’s Greatest Rescue Mission by Hampton Sides (Random House, 2001). Contains a section on Claire Phillips.
Manila Espionage by Claire Phillips and Myron B. Goldsmith (Binfords & Mort, 1947); republished as Agent High Pockets: A Woman’s Fight Against the Japanese in the Philippines (Uncommon Valor, 2014), Kindle e-book.
“Manila Mata Hari” by Brian Libby, Portland Monthly, January 14, 2011, www.pdxmonthly.com/articles/2011/1/14/ana-fey-january-2011.
