Death and Honor

If the scholars who had prepared the analysis could be believed—and Donovan decided they could be—Japan had been courting the Muslim countries since the 1880s. After the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, Japan intensified its efforts, and as early as 1906 had begun to plant rumors that the emperor was preparing to make Islam Japan’s state religion.

In 1909, according to the analysis, the notion was given semiofficial approval when a number of influential Japanese signed “The Muslim Pact,” which promised to promote Islam to the Japanese people. Among the Japanese who signed it was Tsuyoshi Inukai, who had later become prime minister. Others who signed it were Ryohei Uchida, who was known to be close to the emperor, and Mitsuru Toyama, who was very active in an odd facet of Japanese politics, the secret societies. On the Muslim side was a well-known and powerful writer, Abdurrashid Ibrahim, whose writings pushed the idea that the time had come for a worldwide expansion of Islam.

After World War I, the analysis went on, the Japanese began to spread the word in the Muslim world that thousands of Japanese had converted to Islam and that Japan as a whole was ready to convert en masse, because the Mikado himself was coming to see himself as the head of a religion embracing the tenets of Muhammad.

In 1923, the analysis reported, a Japanese named Sakuma, who was reliably reported to have close contacts with the Japanese military, the foreign ministry, and the emperor’s closest advisers, went to Shanghai and established “The Society of Light,” a Muslim evangelical center with the announced purpose of promoting Islam in China.

More recently, the analysis went on, in the 1930s forward, Japan had been excusing its expansion into Southeastern Asia as “necessary to liberate those countries from Anglo-American tyranny.” To Muslims, that might mean from “Christian tyranny,” especially when the Japanese were portraying themselves as seriously considering conversion to Islam.

It pointed out that the “cultivate the Muslims” policy was being run by General Sadao Artaki, a former war minister and one of Premier Tojo’s closest allies.

The analysis concluded that Japan considered its program a success and very likely would try something similar elsewhere—for example, with a “Catholic Policy” in Latin America. If Muslims could be convinced that the Mikado was about to become a Muslim, why couldn’t Latin American Roman Catholics be convinced that the emperor was about to embrace the Pope, and all Japan was trying to do was protect them from the evils of Anglo-American Protestantism?

Phrased in academic jargon, the analysis said that while to Western eyes the Japanese emperor’s conversion to Islam was about as likely to happen as the Pope embracing Shintoism, it wasn’t how things looked to Western eyes that mattered, but what the people in Asia and South America thought.

The analysis summarized: “Japan has expended on Muslim policy many years of patient labor and has assigned to it some of her ablest political and military leaders. Her cunning and opportunism, her flexible approach and unscrupulous manipulation of the facts have borne fruit in many lands,” and then went on to recommend that the OSS immediately begin its own propaganda campaign in Muslim countries exposing “Japan’s barefaced duplicity” by documenting what the Japanese were in fact doing, forcing emperor worship on the Muslim populations of territories they had “liberated.”

Donovan exhaled audibly. This was the first he’d heard of anything like this—and that was more than a little embarrassing, as he took pride in his knowledge of things like this—and obviously it had to be looked into.

He reached for his pen and the pad of interoffice memoranda forms again, and wrote two. One was to the authors of the analysis: “Thank you. Good job. I’ll get back to you. WJD.” The second was to the assistant deputy director for Asia, as he knew the deputy director himself was in Asia, trying to reason with General Douglas MacArthur about the potential value of the OSS: “Read this carefully. Look into it. Get back to me soonest. WJD.”

Then he turned to the problem that he really shouldn’t have to deal with but knew he had to.

It was in the form of an interoffice memorandum: “Bill, I need to talk to you about Frade. I’ll be here all morning. AFG.”

Donovan recognized the initials as those of the deputy director of the OSS for Western Hemisphere Operations, Colonel Alejandro Federico Graham, USMCR.

And Donovan knew that Frade was Major Cletus Howell Frade, USMCR, an OSS agent presently in Argentina.