As I had predicted, convincing my wife that she would enjoy Japan was a world-class effort in propaganda worthy of our efforts in Guatemala but hardly as effective. She wept silently as we gathered our two young daughters, infant son, and two squirmy dachshunds aboard the sleeper jet to Tokyo, where we arrived in the evening after a very tiring trip. But her attitude perked up on our ride from the airport when we entered the posh Ochanomizu (Tea Water) District of Tokyo close to the Imperial Palace. The neighborhood had once housed Japan’s most notable nobles and wealthiest businessmen and was so named because it was near the river where the Shogun’s tea water was extracted during the Edo period.
There was a lush park nearby, as well as a noted university. The home we were assigned was the nicest we had lived in yet, built by Frank Lloyd Wright while he was designing the nearby Imperial Hotel, still one of Tokyo’s finest. Drawing from local influences, Wright designed the place in a charming blend of European and Japanese styles, complete with a customary moon gate, a courtyard, a garden with shrines, and a lovely lily pond so big that we were able to convert it into a small pool for the children.
Befitting the prestige of my cover, Japan being exceedingly class conscious, we hired a staff of Japanese servants, including a nanny for our infant son, and enrolled our two girls in a school run by elderly French nuns. Most of our children’s classmates were Japanese, however, so they soon learned the language from their new companions.
My office at the Far East Command was located about ten minutes away from home in the CIA building at Pershing Heights. Our geographic area of responsibility was mind-boggling, encompassing all of mainland China, North and South Korea, Taiwan, Okinawa, Hong Kong, a forward base in the problematic Philippines, and, of course, Japan.
The Soviets were very active in the region, so there were hundreds of people working in and around Tokyo for the North Asia Command office. I soon found, however, that I was the only person in the entire group who had any field experience on the China mainland, as none of my former OSS comrades who had joined the CIA were stationed in the region. This was a major lapse in judgment by my superiors, as China was certainly our principal enemy in the Far East, and North Korea was simply a puppet regime of Red China.
This office was also quite a bit different from my previous assignments. In Mexico, being the boss of a small station, I could be almost as courageous and daring as I could imagine. We broke into an embassy, turned defectors, and came up with plots that would have done Graham Greene proud. Resourcefulness and imagination were prized during PB/Success. But in the decade since the war, the CIA had evolved into a government bureaucracy like any other, and the Far East Command embodied the worst of it. It was rife with paper pushers and analysts with no sense of action or initiative, completely lacking in vision—perhaps the same attributes that have hindered the agency during recent years.
When I joined the CIA, the spirit of OSS was still alive. We entertained a notion of group elitism, of daring spirit, of complete confidence that you could trust your comrades with your life. But in the Far East Command, I found the various units and personnel mired in a toxic work atmosphere of mistrust, backbiting, and competition.
This was due to the rapid expansion of the agency, which needed to absorb and train mass numbers of personnel. As a result, the CIA soon had to dispose of hordes of inadequate workers, who often found cozy niches where they could hide away from the light and draw a paycheck. Allen Dulles was a kindly man and did little to acknowledge and deal with the problem. When Richard Helms took over, however, one of his first major programs was to clear out the deadwood from the organization.
The CIA is popularly called “the company” these days, and that’s exactly what I found at my new office. An intelligence-gathering company, but a company all the same. Like that of a corporate officer, my job entailed many days of exhausting travel, visiting various stations similar to branch offices from Korea down to the Philippines. Despite the mind-numbing lack of enterprise, I still managed to start various print and radio campaigns with subtle anti-Communist, pro-West messages in Japan.
But that was a bright spot in a sea of mediocrity. In Japan, I found that my predecessor, with typical lack of imagination, had gone the subsidy route to gather information. There was an enticingly titled project called Samurai, in which a Japanese warlord and his son—who spoke very good English—collected an enormous paycheck from the CIA every month to conduct a broad political and psychological warfare project. They, by virtue of their position, had promised the CIA access to political intelligence, anti-Communist labor unions, and student groups. But I could find no concrete accomplishments.
I met with the two Japanese assets in question, who resisted the revelation of any pertinent information, saying they couldn’t discuss such sensitive matters.
“We’ve paid you hundreds of thousands of dollars,” I told them. “And I want some progress report showing where that money is going. Let me see some action on behalf of the United States against the Russians.”
“You should speak to your superiors about that,” was the measured response.
“Oh, that I will,” I responded.
Later when I met with my boss, things did not go as I had planned. “Admiral, I don’t see us getting anything for our money. Don’t you think we can do without this project?”
The admiral’s face reddened, the veins in his neck bulging. “No!” came the answer. “This is one of Allen Dulles’s favorite projects, and nobody can touch it!”
When I cabled Washington about the project, they promptly replaced the senior case officers with new ones. I thought that this was the last I would hear about Project Samurai, but the new case officers fell in love with the Japanese father and son, and lost all objectivity as well. My complaints and suspicions about the project finally reached Frank Wisner, and even he cautioned that this was a pet program of Allen Dulles’s. Wisner cabled me to “keep an open mind” about the project.
I had definitely struck a nerve here. The situation became ever more mysterious when Mr. Dulles visited the station a couple of months later. After a luncheon with various other people from the office, I got the DCI’s attention. “Mr. Dulles, you’ve heard from the case officer about the Samurai project, but I can’t get any solid information from them, and I don’t know where this river of cash is going. I think if there was ever a candidate for elimination, this project meets the criteria, but when I mentioned it to my superiors, they went crazy, saying it was a favorite project of yours.”
Dulles said that he was aware of the project, but he waved away its importance with a flick of the hand. “That’s ridiculous. It should meet the same standards as any other project that we endorse.”
With this ammunition, I was able to bring the project to a halt. During a final meeting with the father and son, the CIA case officer issued profuse apologies, begging them for their forgiveness. The father and son looked at me without the rancor that I expected. Instead, the father actually smiled and said, “We’ve been wondering how long it would take for you to catch on.”
Samurai’s abrupt termination did not make me a popular commodity around the office, as a remarkable number of officers and lower staff members seemed to have their entire careers entwined in this useless project, and many of them were no longer needed after its demise. But if the CIA was going to be run like a company, layoffs were to be expected.
Other projects that I felt had some benefit were run out of Taiwan, where we maintained a large station under navy cover from which we flew clandestine flights over the China mainland, took pictures, dropped leaflets, staged agent infiltrations (the agents usually met their doom), and broadcast anti-Communist radio propaganda over a powerful transmitter.
Hong Kong was always an interesting station to visit, as I could always count on a nice influx of high-powered defectors from the mainland. Since the island was British territory under the authority of Scotland Yard, the CIA ran no independent operations but conducted joint debriefings of the refugees.
One of the more important stations was South Korea, which I enjoyed visiting because I could take time off for the best pheasant hunting in my life. Apparently, the Koreans didn’t know these magnificent birds were edible, so they were generally not hunted here. The ones I shot were fat and tasty.
Taking a more aggressive stance than my predecessor, I initiated a propaganda campaign over North Korea. It was a difficult proposition, however, as leaflet flights over the border were strictly forbidden, so I had to come up with a more imaginative method of gaining access to the country. Since prevailing winds were in our favor, I tweaked an old method pioneered by the Radio Free Europe staff in Germany during the war and ended up launching balloons from a Corvette-size ship. Leaflets, set off by time release, offered a magnanimous $5,000 reward to any North Korean pilot who delivered a MIG-15 to the West.
I had great hopes for the project, but after several months without producing a single defector and with the winter weather setting in, I decided to terminate the project, just as I had Samurai. Just as all hope had died, I received an urgent cable from the South Korea station saying that our efforts had paid off—a North Korean pilot and copilot had landed a plane, emerging from inside clutching one of our leaflets. When I cabled back excitedly, I could almost hear the laughter in the station chief’s memo in return. Apparently, we had not secured our coveted MIG-15 but a rust-bucket with wings, some kind of Yak trainer.
The initial disappointment wore off a bit when it was discovered that the pilot had flown MIGs during the Korean War and had even operated advanced models of the fighter plane. He and his copilot were given asylum, debriefed extensively, and allowed to fly American jet fighters to compare them with Soviet aircraft.
That was the peak of the project, which was closed down thereafter. The personnel of the project were pink-slipped or reassigned. The captain of the balloon-launching ship, Colonel Luke, was sent back to the United States. I would meet him again in early 1961 on a secret airfield in Guatemala, where he was one of the soldiers training a parachute battalion of the Cuban invasion brigade.
It was during this time that I received a sad cable from Maxine North in Thailand, in which she informed Dorothy and me that Bob, my old OSS comrade and writing partner, had died after coming down with meningitis. I had a hard time reconciling myself to a world without my great friend and would often think about him in later years, considering what kind of advice he would have given me to get me through dark times to come. Maxine was, of course, heartbroken by the loss but eventually rose above it to become one of Thailand’s leading businesswomen.
Despite our initial resistance to the Japan assignment, Tokyo turned out to be one of the finest cities in which we ever lived. Our standard of living was exceptionally high, and we were able to entertain a good deal. While this was the first time we had ever had military cover, we still made friends with the local diplomatic corps, and my wife was able to get a job as a part-time speechwriter for the Argentine ambassador.
Juan Domingo Perón, with his charismatic wife, Eva, was the dictatorial power in Argentina, with consequent strained relations with the United States. Dorothy soon became so trusted that the ambassador started using her to code and decode his classified cables. She, in turn, repaid the trust in the manner that any dutiful wife of a CIA agent would do—one weekend, she brought me the embassy’s entire stock of codebooks, which we gratefully photographed and returned.
My children also learned to love Japan. I could give them the equivalent of twenty-five cents and see them return from the store with arms full of toys. They loved the famous tigers, pandas, and flamingos at Ueno Park Zoo, the swans in the moat at the Imperial Castle in downtown Tokyo, and taking various day trips to other islands such as Nikko, Nara, and Kyoto.
Any animosity that we still harbored for the wounds of World War II were healed one cathartic evening when we returned home to find our entire staff of servants watching a television program. We were about to reprimand them for the unauthorized use of the set, when our eyes adjusted to the darkened room, and we saw that the women were weeping uncontrollably. Even our most inscrutable older houseman had wet cheeks. The program they were watching was about the long-awaited wartime films taken by Japanese photographers, which had been sealed in the Imperial War Museum.
This was the first time the Japanese public had seen the atrocities perpetrated by their military, by their husbands, sons, and fathers under pressure from the ruling elite. Three of the four women had been widowed by the war, and the family of the fourth had been incinerated at Hiroshima. We knelt beside them and watched the jarring program to the end. Then my wife embraced each of the women, attempting to console them for their losses before sending them off to bed.
From then on, our compassion for the Japanese grew, and we both let go of our deep-seated cravings for vengeance. Dorothy even started studying Japanese culture and dressed our daughters in adorable little Japanese kimonos and zori. By this time, all three children spoke fluent Japanese, sang Japanese songs, and played with Japanese children in the neighborhood.
From the time I arrived, I had problems with the admiral who had lobbied so intensively to have me or someone like me assigned to the CIA station. In a typical scenario, I once dictated a detailed fifteen-hundred-word report to headquarters, which he refused to sign off on and send. When I asked him why, he nudged the papers on his desk and said, “Suppose you tell me what it’s all about.”
I didn’t know how anyone could get to be an admiral without reading thousands of reports, but I quickly summarized the cable for him, which he signed. He was also not careful about security, often talking about intelligence matters in front of personnel who were not qualified to hear them. Perhaps the admiral needed someone like me because he ran a fairly loose ship and mostly looked forward to lunch at the Officer’s Club.
He was replaced by his deputy, Lloyde George, who, thankfully, was not only a detail-oriented, seasoned intelligence veteran—formerly chief of OSO’s Far East Division—but also a charismatic, intelligent man with a broad range of interests. Morale improved, and the station’s communication with military hosts and subordinate stations flourished.
The Cold War was a constant chess match, with one of the most important strategies involving the turning of defectors and the catching of spies on both sides. At headquarters, one long-lived situation that hung on like a bad cold was a continuous review of the Fecteau-Downey case: two young agents who had been captured by the Chinese after their aircraft had crashed on the mainland and sentenced to long prison terms after a long series of vigorous interrogations.
The Chinese also captured a B-29 bomber and its pilot, a Far East air force colonel who often liaisoned with the CIA in Tokyo. The pilot was privy to sensitive information and high-level clearances that the enemy would have dearly loved to obtain. From an operational standpoint, when agents have been captured, assumptions must be made that all of their information has been compromised; that no matter how well trained, they have performed an aria worthy of the great Caruso. This certainly proved to be correct in the cases of Fecteau and Downey.
The situation did not improve when the Chinese returned the colonel and his crew through Hong Kong a few months later. A damage assessment proved the rule, and orders were immediately handed down to keep personnel with sensitive clearances from traveling in hazardous areas. These orders included even me. From here on, I was allowed to visit Kowloon but no longer permitted to drive within several miles of the New Territories or within sight of the armed border with mainland China, as I might be kidnapped by a roving gang of Chinese infiltrators.
Spies were indeed everywhere.
Befitting my status in Japan, I had joined the prestigious Tokyo Lawn Tennis Club as would have been expected of me if I was truly a civilian. I didn’t know it, but a Soviet KGB agent, Yuri Rastvorov, under cover as the second secretary of the Soviet Mission, had done the same thing in an attempt to recruit an American. His efforts had proved fruitless, however, and he was recalled to Moscow. Unproductive agents were dealt with severely in the Soviet Union, so he defected to the British embassy on a cold winter morning.
MI-6 was happy to take him in and planned to fly him to Hong Kong immediately. Unfortunately, the aircraft could not take off because of bad weather. Rastvorov requested and was issued identification by MI-6 personnel, who drove him to downtown Tokyo, where they allowed him to depart without a guard. The Soviet was unimpressed with his treatment and wondered whether to proceed with his resolution, so he decided to try his luck with the United States. He telephoned the only American he knew, his tennis teacher, who worked for the army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC). I have long forgotten her name but Washington Post reporter Serge F. Kovaleski identifies her as Maud Burris in his absorbing January 15, 2006, article, “The Most Dangerous Game.” As Yuri was a suspected agent, she had been assigned to befriend him and had very subtly encouraged him to defect. She called the CIA station, which immediately sent a car to pick up the Russian.
The agent proved a bit elusive, however, wandering away from the telephone booth to drown his anxieties in a nearby sake bar, where an agent finally found him and hustled him away in a car. To prove his worth, while still in the car, the Soviet immediately identified three Japanese assets who were under KGB control.
The defection, while welcome in principle, nevertheless had a cataclysmic impact on the station, which, despite its size, was unprepared for such a major event. We consulted the procedural notebook, which proved useless, as it was Europe-oriented. So, Chief of Station Lloyde George brought the senior staff together at a long conference table, where we came up with a new course of action.
As it was after dark, we had our liaison officer call on his Japanese counterpart and inform him that the U.S. government was planning an extra nighttime flight. It was only a formality, because the Japanese were well aware that we kept three airfields active and could use them as we chose. Fifth Air force HQ had to be notified and put a C-47 aircraft on standby at Tachikawa Airfield.
At this point, someone remembered Ms. Burris, but for whom the station would not be engaged in its unusual burst of activity. So Burris was woken up, filled in on the case, and brought into the holding room where the nervous Russian was waiting.
Rastvorov, overjoyed to see a familiar face, jumped up and hugged her, exclaiming, “What do I do now?”
Burris told him that everything would be all right and introduced him to the Russian-speaking case officer, Gil Hoonan, who was familiar with Rastvorov’s file. They were joined by another station officer, who was to act as conducting officer to Okinawa, where Yuri was to be debriefed.
The weather, however, was steadily deteriorating, forcing the pilots to call in and warn Lloyde George to get the party on board before the airfield shut down.
I accompanied the defector and the handler aboard the plane; the rain had turned to snow, coating the windows white and making ice form on the wings. The control tower advised the crew that takeoff was now extremely risky, so it was postponed.
Rastvorov decided that God was against him and tried to leave the plane. “I shouldn’t have tried to defect,” he said. “If I don’t get out of here, the Japanese will find out and hand me back to the KGB.”
I wasn’t about to let him leave and pushed him gently but firmly back into his seat, strapping the belt tight around his waist. “We won’t let that happen,” I told him.
Meanwhile, the crew was fending off sharp questioning from the tower. While weather forecasts were increasingly pessimistic, Lloyde George feared that Yuri’s fears would come true and Japanese officials would intervene to take charge of the defector. He conveyed his concerns to the flight crew, ordering them to take off as soon as it was safe.
Rastvorov was becoming unruly, so Burris was brought back in to calm him down. Cabin temperature plummeted, as the pilot declined to expend fuel for such niceties as heat because the distance over water to Okinawa was a thousand miles with no opportunity to refuel. Even with Burris there, the Russian soon started to complain how much he regretted his decision to defect. His demeanor made it quite clear that if he was allowed the favor of a warm Japanese hotel room, he would probably disappear. The only alternative was to keep him liquored up on the aircraft and wait out the blizzard. By 3 a.m., the Russians had noticed their missing “second secretary” and notified the Japanese to begin an investigation. Luckily, the weather had cleared sufficiently for takeoff, and after a rather harrowing flight to Okinawa, Rastvorov was turned over to the debriefing team.
The Russians made a big stink with the Japanese Foreign Ministry, claiming that they suspected foul play in the disappearance of their citizen. The U.S. embassy was also questioned and finally had to admit that the agent had defected. This provoked a strong reaction from powerful Japanese left-wingers who were angry that the United States had infringed on Japanese sovereignty. The same party also proved a vocal opponent when it was revealed that American U-2 planes had been spying on the Chinese and the Russians from bases in Japan.
Whatever minor embarrassment was occasioned by the Soviet agent’s exfiltration was made up for by the wealth of knowledge that he divulged during months of interrogation by a team of skilled Russian-speaking specialists who wrung out every last drop of intelligence the man possessed. Indeed, our Yuri proved to be one of the most important defectors the United States had during the Cold War, identifying three to four thousand KGB agents across the world, for which he was given a commendation by the CIA. Additionally, we were able to further extend his usefulness by having a writer pen three articles for Life magazine, ostensibly by Rastvorov, about the horrors of life in Soviet Russia. In the United States, he assumed the name Martin Simons, living a good life, even remarrying after a Mexican divorce from his Russian wife and enjoying many years of tennis, cigars, fancy suits, and sports cars until he expired at the age of eighty-two in 2004.
According to reporter Kovaleski, while Yuri was living the good life in the United States, his Russian wife was exiled to five years in Siberia for her failure to report a betrayal of the motherland.
By the summer of 1956, I was looking forward to a new set of initiatives, more creative problem solving, and greater latitude to conduct sophisticated operations under our new administration, but I received surprise orders appointing me the chief of station in Montevideo, Uruguay. I had to look it up on a map to figure out where it was! I was at first deeply concerned that I was being demoted for some reason to this tiny, innocuous country way down in South America—a little wedge between Brazil and Argentina.
Washington cabled me back that this was an important station because it was host to over a half-dozen embassies from Communist countries and was a tiny linchpin in the Communist strategy. Argentina and Brazil had evicted the Communist ambassadors, so they were all now concentrated in Montevideo.
By this time, my family had become very acclimated to Japan, and we were all more reluctant to leave than we had been to arrive. It was a good lesson for us, though, and we decided to think positively about our new assignment. We packed and made reservations on a big Pan American Stratocruiser that offered comfortable bunks for the long transpacific flight. Before we left, the airline informed us that there weren’t enough bunks on board to accommodate us, which necessitated a departure on another flight.
I had barely escaped death by airplane accident during World War II, and would now do so again. When we arrived in San Francisco on a later flight, we found our friends all grieving for us. The plane we had originally reserved bunks aboard had gone down in the Pacific, and news reports indicated that among the dead were a Foreign Service officer and his wife and children. I didn’t know then how airplane accidents would affect my life and those I loved so much in later years. At that point, we could only feel relief for ourselves and sorrow for the poor people who had not been so lucky.
We flew on from San Francisco to Sarasota, Florida, where I left Dorothy and the children in our seldom-used home there before reporting to Washington to be processed back into the Foreign Service reserve.
As if I had never done any of these things before, I was required to take various courses in station administration, wiretap management, mobile surveillance, and surreptitious entry, and a seminar on KGB operations in Latin America, some of which even proved worthwhile. I started looking forward to the new post, remembering how much freedom and creativity I was allowed in Mexico when I had been chief. I thought that Montevideo would allow me to continue the progress I had achieved in Mexico City.
After my courses and the necessary hobnobbing in Washington, I was utterly exhausted and was given a few weeks leave to spend with my family in Sarasota before dragging everyone down to the lower hemisphere. In the end, I would find Montevideo to be everything I expected and more. If Mexico City had been a never-ending carnival of spies, a Latin American Casablanca, Montevideo was even more intense and concentrated—a riotous circus of spies, complete with sideshows, high-wire acts, and trick ponies.