Colonel Masanobu Tsuji was a fanatical Japanese militarist and brutal warrior, hunted after World War II for massacres of Chinese civilians and complicity in the Bataan Death March.
And then he became a US spy.
Newly declassified CIA records, released by the US National Archives document more fully than ever how Tsuji and other suspected Japanese war criminals were recruited by US intelligence in the early days of the Cold War.
The documents also show how ineffective the effort was, in the CIA's view.
The records, declassified in 2005 and 2006 under an act of Congress in tandem with Nazi war crime-related files, fill in many of the blanks in the previously spotty documentation of the occupation authority's intelligence arm and its involvement with Japanese ultra-nationalists and war criminals, historians say.
In addition to Tsuji, who escaped Allied prosecution and was elected to parliament in the 1950s, conspicuous figures in US-funded operations included mob boss and war profiteer Yoshio Kodama, and Takushiro Hattori, former private secretary to Hideki Tojo, the wartime prime minister hanged as a war criminal in 1948.
The CIA also cast a harsh eye on its counterparts — and institutional rivals — at G-2, the occupation's intelligence arm, providing evidence for the first time that the Japanese operatives often bilked gullible American patrons, passing on useless intelligence and using their US ties to boost smuggling operations and further their efforts to resurrect a militarist Japan.
The assessments in the files are far from uniform. They show evidence that other US agencies, such as the Air Force, were also looking into using some of the same people as spies, and that the CIA itself had contacts with former Japanese war criminals. Some CIA reports gave passing grades to the G-2 contacts' intelligence potential.
But on balance, the reports were negative, and historians say there is scant documentary evidence from occupation authorities to contradict the CIA assessment.
The files, hundreds of pages of which were obtained last month by the Associated Press, depict operations that were deeply flawed by agents' lack of expertise, rivalries and shifting alliances between competing groups, and Japanese operatives' overriding interest in right-wing activities and money rather than US security aims.
“Frequently they resorted to padding or outright fabrication of information for the purposes of prestige or profit,” a 1951 CIA assessment said of the agents. “The postwar era in Japan ... produced a phenomenal increase in the number of these worthless information brokers, intelligence informants and agents.”
The contacts in Japan mirror similar efforts in postwar Germany by the Americans to glean intelligence on the Soviet Union from ex-Nazis. But historians say a major contrast is the ineffectiveness of the Japanese operations.
The main aims were to spy on Communists inside Japan, place agents in Soviet and North Korean territory, and use Japanese mercenaries to bolster Taiwanese defenses against the triumphant Communist forces in mainland China.
Some of the missions detailed by the CIA papers, however, bordered on the comical.
The Americans, for instance, provided money for a boat to infiltrate Japanese agents into the Soviet island of Sakhalin — but the money, boat and agents apparently disappeared, one report said.
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