One more reason to remember Pearl Harbor: The secret agents who made sure Japan attacked the United States instead of the USSR

The 80^th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack is an occasion to remember something else: How foreign agents operate within our government to manipulate decisionmaking with fatal effects.

Some of the most dangerous foreign agents aren’t spies who steal secrets. They are agents of influence.

At times we can tell who they are. Often we cannot. It wasn’t until declassification of the US Army Signal Corps’ decrypts of secret messages between Stalin’s secret services and their American agents in the 1940s that we gained a clear picture of the sheer scope of Soviet penetration of our institutions.

Pearl Harbor is a case in point. While the US government had anticipated an Imperial Japanese attack for years, the Venona decrypts show precisely how Stalin’s secret agents within the federal government worked with other agents worldwide to ensure that Japan attacked the United States and not the Soviet Union.

Japan had already invaded China, occupying Manchuria and other parts of the country. In the years leading up to World War II, American public opinion strongly supported China. The Chinese government, led by the great Chiang Kai-shek, led the resistance as Mao’s Communists hid in the mountains.

Stalin feared Japan. Manchuria lay on the Soviet Union’s far eastern border. Chiang’s forces kept the Japanese bogged down in China, so Stalin made a coalition of convenience with the nationalists to keep them all bogged down, with Mao playing no role.

After Hitler broke the Nazi-Soviet pact and invaded the Soviet Union with Operation Barbarossa in June, 1941, Stalin’s fear grew at the prospect of a two-front war against both Germany and Japan. That’s when the global Soviet agent network mobilized to ensure that Japan attacked the United States and not the USSR.

This mobilization, as the late M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein describe in their 2012 book Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government, led up to the Pearl Harbor attack.

Based on a combination of historical congressional and court testimony, defector accounts, and the declassified Venona decrypts, Evans and Romerstein demonstrate how Stalin’s worldwide secret network of agents worldwide made sure that Japan attacked the United States in the bloody Pacific war of 1941-45. Those agents saved Stalin from a two-front war until Japan lay on its back in 1945, and in the meantime bled out Chiang’s Chinese resisters until Mao was strong enough to take the war to them, too.

Central to this was Richard Sorge, a German Communist and Soviet GRU military intelligence agent who led an international clandestine network in Shanghai. The Russians revere Sorge as one of their greatest agents of all time.

After the Germans launched Barbarossa, Imperial Japan’s military leaders were divided. Much of the army supported an invasion of Soviet Siberia to the north. The navy favored attacks on American or European targets in the Pacific to capture energy resources.

Posing as a Nazi journalist, Sorge moved his operations to Japan and, ingratiating himself with Japanese decisionmakers, worked secretly with Japanese Communist comrades. “As he would divulge later in his memoir, Sorge and his colleagues – one of whom was Japanese Communist Party member Hotsumi Ozaki, with exceptional high-level Japanese contacts – sought to convince Japan’s officials that there was no percentage in attacking Russia, but that a move against British, Dutch, or American targets in the Pacific would be to their advantage,” Evans and Romerstein recall.

Meanwhile in the US, officials discussed tightening sanctions on Japan and cutting off oil, something that President Franklin Roosevelt himself cautioned might provoke war.

Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, US Far East Intelligence Chief, noted that Sorge’s “right-hand man” Ozaki “had exceptional facilities and an exceptional position within the highest quarters of the Japanese government” and exercised “his influence toward keeping Japan from attacking Russia and … to encourage them to move south toward a collision with England and the United States.”

The American Ambassador to Tokyo, Joseph Grew, sought a truce with Japan. But in Washington, others advocated confrontation. “When it seemed that the truce idea was gaining favor, other US officials with different notions would spring quickly into action,” Evans and Romerstein wrote. Those officials operated under the false cover of stopping an American betrayal of ally Chiang in China.

One of the most aggressive advocates of squeezing Imperial Japan with sanctions was Harry Dexter White of the Treasury Department. He said that a truce with Japan would “betray the cause of the Chinese people” and damage possibilities of a “world-wide democratic victory.” Not crushing Japan would “sell out China to her enemies.”

“White called for US officials and activist to stand fast for Chiang Kai-shek of China,” in November 1941 contacting the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), a private international think-tank, to prevent a “sellout of China.” A cable came in from China, signed by Owen Lattimore of Johns Hopkins University, who was the top US advisor to Chiang. That cable convinced Secretary of State Cordell Hull to abandon any hope of truce with Japan and to prepare for war. On November 26, 1941, with help from White at Treasury, Hull presented what amounted to an ultimatum to Japan.

Hull and Roosevelt didn’t realize that Harry Dexter White was a recruited Soviet agent. So was Currie, a White House whose portfolio included China, and who worked under Harry Hopkins, a fully recruited agent of Stalin. For years, Lattimore had been on the payroll of the IPR, a private international think tank with offices in England, Germany, China, Japan, and the USSR. IPR board members included Currie and one of the most notorious Soviet agents, Alger Hiss. Currie had installed Lattimore in China to advise Chiang.

The IPR, as a Senate report would later call it, “was like a specialized flypaper in its attractive power for Communists” from around the world, including Europe, China, Japan, and the United States. Evans and Romerstein wrote, “there were enrolled in the group a substantial number of Communists and Soviet agents from other nations who were thus able to liaise at IPR conventicles with American colleagues, many of whom had no idea they were dealing with Soviet agents (though there were others who in fact knew the connection.)” At least five members of the GRU’s Sorge ring were tied to IPR, plus White, Lattimore, and Currie.

The IPR’s global networks would be crucial in manipulating the United States and other countries to make decisions that favored Stalin during World War II.

“In all of this we can now also see the hidden hand of the KGB, which for reasons noted was concerned that there be no easing of Washington-Tokyo tensions. As disclosed later by KGB officer Vitaliy Pavlov, he had traveled to Washington some months before this to brief White on points to stress in preventing a US-Japanese rapprochement. White, who didn’t need much prompting, followed through by drafting and redrafting his tough-talking memo” to squeeze Japan. “The parallels between the Pavlov-White talking points and the document presented to Hull, indeed, are striking.”

“Thus did policies promoted in official US circles by White, Currie, and Lattimore dovetail with those advanced by the Sorge-Ozaki network in Japan – all converging toward the result that there would be no American-Japanese rapprochement and, even more to the point, no Japanese attack on Russia,” Evans and Romerstein noted.

Would the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor have happened anyway? “There is no way of telling,” the authors said. It had been presumed that Japan would, indeed, ultimately attack the United States. But that moment – autumn 1941 – was a vital time for Japan to choose between waging war on the USSR or on America.

Progressive support for the heroism of Chiang and his Chinese nationalists was only a ruse to help the Soviets against Japan. By 1943, with America and its allies bogged down in the Pacific, making China’s nationalists immaterial to Moscow’s interests, Stalin agreed for Chairman Mao to make war against Chiang. The same Soviet agent cabal in the Roosevelt administration – White, Currie, Lattimore, and others – turned against Chiang as soon as the Kremlin did.

In July and August of that year, the heroic Chiang Kai-shek would be treated as an enemy. Harry Dexter White would soon call him a “fascist.” Others would accuse him of Japanese collaborationism – a falsehood still spread today. The Soviet agent network in Washington, with White at Treasury, would choke off critical American war support for Chiang against both the Communists and Japanese, and would ultimately draw up a plan for his assassination.

But that’s another story.

Our remembrance today, along with our war dead at Pearl Harbor, is that foreign agents embedded throughout the American government colluded to protect the Soviet Union by ensuring that Japan attacked the United States.