Stephen C. Mercado

Mercado is a former CIA analyst and Asia expert who appears to know his way around Japanese sources, and he has found a lot of interesting stuff on the Nakano School. This was organized in 1938 -- really rather late in the game -- to train Japanese officers in intelligence and covert operations. The emphasis was apparently on covert operations; Nakano was more closely analogous to OSS than to more conventional American military intelligence programs, such as JICPOA. This was unfortunate for Japan, because conventional Japanese military intelligence suffered badly while the Nakano graduates were out playing Lawrence-san of Burma (or any other Asian country you wish to name.)

The book is interesting enough to recommend, but with some caveats. It really is all about covert operations; there is little about intelligence gathering and utilization. Mercado strikes me as having gone slightly native, and this shows in his uncritical acceptance of some of the claims for the Nakano graduates. For example, Mercado depicts Nakano units as waging a campaign of terror against Australian rear area units in New Guinea, but accepts claims of casualties inflicted and materiel destroyed much too uncritically. LIkewise, Mercado claims the Nakano men were very effective on Morotai, but the official Allied histories of the Morotai campaign depict it as pretty much a pushover.

Mercado is also just a bit too inclined to side with the Japanese for my tastes. He repeats the Japanese view that the B-29 campaign was pure murder of civilians (a case can admittedly be made, though not necessarily an airtight one) and that killing civilians on the ground was no different (a serious non sequitur.) He describes the brutal murder of a group of B-29 crew by Nakano graduates a bit too sympathetically. He is also rather sympathetic with the view that Japan was working to free all Asia; this would have come as something of a surprise to the Chinese, as Mercado grudgingly admits.

Things I learned that I didn't know? Nakano ran the balloon bomb program through its Noborito Research Institute, which Mercado mentions only once and in passing, a puzzling omission. Noborito also was tied to the biological warfare program, supplying Nakano agents with "fountain pens" full of biological warfare cultures, presumably cholera, with which to infect wells in Allied-occupied territory. Nakano men were planning to covertly support an insurrection in Burma until their plans were foiled, ironically, by Japan deciding to go to war openly with Britain.

There is next to nothing on how intelligence was gathered, transmitted, analyzed, and used. Actually, there was little on intelligence, period, which is odd for a book on an intelligence school. There is little discussion of Nakano failures. No explanation is offered, for example, of how the Japanese contrived to be surprised by the Russian invasion in August 1945.

Not that some of the covert operations weren't interesting. Nakano men used the powerful Saigon radio station to broadcast fake versions of Dutch broadcasts from Java during the Japanese invasion, being careful to duplicate the voices and mannerisms of Dutch announcers. These succeeded in deceiving the Allies (though to little effect since the defense was doomed anyway) but also succeeded in deceiving Japanese radio monitors in Tokyo. (I would like to have been a fly on the wall during the subsequent debriefings.) Nakano men also jumped with the first paratroops into Palembang, and played some role in ensuring that the oil refinery was captured intact. (Probably not as big a role as Mercado depicts, however.)

Nakano men ended up working as coast watchers and guerrillas in areas liberated by the Allies. Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese officer who took to the hills in the Philippines and did not surrender until 1974, was a graduate of the Futamata Bramch of the Nakano School. (Mercado does not think to mention that Hiroo murdered a number of Philippine police during his decades on the run.)

Okay, yeah. The book irritates me now and then. Probably still of interest to readers here, if you can enjoy it while reading with a grain of salt. You kind of have to to that with almost anything written about spies and covert operations anyway.… (más)