Wanted for Hire: Japanese War Criminal

[GuyJean]

AP: CIA Recruited Japanese War Criminals
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070224/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/japan_spies_and_war_crimes

Col. 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 U.S. spy. Newly declassified CIA records, released by the U.S. National Archives and examined by The Associated Press, document more fully than ever how Tsuji and other suspected Japanese war criminals were recruited by U.S. 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 U.S.-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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 Reports:
http://www.archives.gov/iwg/japanese-war-crimes/introductory-essays.pdf

http://www.archives.gov/iwg/reports/japanese-interim-report-march-2002-1.html

GJ

[dimwit]

Not implausible. After the war he went to China to aid Chiang Kai Shek and later North Vietnam to do 'something' from whence he disappeared.

[Greji]

Not implausible. After the war he went to China to aid Chiang Kai Shek and later North Vietnam to do 'something' from whence he disappeared.

I think I recall reading where he had surfaced in Thailand a couple of times, but nothing definative. He was definately an interesting character and since he was a extremely active member of the tokumugikan of the kempeitai and was involved in some high profile incidents, it was obvious that he hads to have been recruited by somebody after the war, otherwise he would have surfaced up front in the trials.

[Mulboyne]