My Enemy’s Enemy: The German-Japanese Intelligence Alliance
The years leading up to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour saw a strengthening of diplomatic relations between Japan and Germany, and growing cooperation between their intelligence services. This is where I found inspiration for my new novel novel, Rising Tide.
Hitler’s long-term foreign policy goal had been to create living space in Eastern Europe. The Abwehr, German Intelligence, had therefore largely focused on the Soviet Union. They had not planned to fight Britain in 1939 and had not developed networks in Britain. This is demonstrated by the poor quality of the agents they sent to Britain, who were all caught.
Dusko Popov
By 1941 Japan and Germany knew they would have to fight America and hoped to split its resources between the Pacific and Europe, in a two front war. The Third Bureau of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s General Staff had been gathering detailed intelligence on the British and American navies, which posed the major threat to Japan’s expansion in the Far East. In return for radio and microdot technology, they traded this information with Germany.
This relationship developed when the Germans began to run their own spy rings in America. As Westerners, their operatives could enter places which the Japanese could not, without drawing attention. One of these spy rings the ‘Joe K’ gathered information on Hawaii’s defences for their Japanese allies. However their reports were intercepted by British censors as they were sent from New York to Europe via Bermuda and the spy ring was broken up.
To help rebuild their American networks the Abwehr sent one of their best agent, Dusko Popov to the States. He was given a list of questions about America to answer. A third of the questionnaire concerned Pearl Harbour and Hawaii. It included questions about the layout of its airfields, naval defences, ammunition dumps and anti-torpedo nets. Popov’s German handler instructed him to travel to Hawaii and some writers have suggested that he was to replace a sleeper agent called Kuehn. Kuehn was the manager of a sugar plantation and his wife owned a beauty parlour which she used to befriend army and navy wives, who the couple grandly entertained at their home to pick up gossip.
Yoshikawa, a Third Bureau agent on Hawaii paid Kuehn to be Japan’s eyes and ears in Hawaii after the attack on Pearl Harbour. They even worked out an elaborate system for the German to signal information to Japanese submarines off the coast of Hawaii. Yoshikawa gives a less than flattering account of his meeting with Kuehn in his book Japan’s Spy at Pearl Harbour: Memoir of an Imperial Navy Secret Agent and held reservations about Kuehn’s ability to do the job.
Suspicions that rang true since Kuehn’s extravagant lifestyle attracted the attention of the FBI and he was arrested after the Pearl Harbour attack and executed in 1942, leaving the Japanese blind to American activities in Hawaii.
Dusko Popov was also unable to carry on Kuehn’s role. Popov was actually a British double agent, who tried to warn the FBI about Japan’s interest in Hawaii. However J. Edger Hoover the FBI Director did not believe Popov’s warning and prevented him from travelling onto Hawaii to link up with the German agent and gather more evidence. This is where my novel Rising Tide picks up the story. The central character, Daniel Nichols, travels to Hawaii and becomes caught up in a conspiracy that would keep America embroiled in a Far Eastern stalemate and split between the Pacific and Europe.
Alan Bardos is a novelist and the author of Rising Tide.
My Enemy’s Enemy: The German-Japanese Intelligence Alliance
My Enemy’s Enemy: The German-Japanese Intelligence Alliance
