Ebook: Asian American Spies: How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory

Asian Americans were brought into the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, during World War II under the assumption of a secure loyalty. They served as research analysts, special operations members, morale operations propagandists, secret agents gathering covert intelligence, and, after the war, as war crimes investigators in East Asia where their cultural and linguistic skills, coupled with the correct racial uniforms, made them invaluable to America’s first centralized intelligence agency. These agents were drawn from New York City to Honolulu, where Asian immigrants and their American-born offspring had developed loyalties that were multiple and flexible, not singular and fixed. Despite this, European American OSS recruiters admitted them even as they believed their own loyalty was more certain and fixed, since they hailed from families with roots reaching far back into America’s past. In their joint struggle against the Imperial Japanese forces, these Asian Americans and their European American OSS colleagues generated propaganda to demoralize the enemy and encourage surrender, gathered overt intelligence from a wide variety of media sources, obtained covert intelligence inside enemy-occupied territory, and trained and executed guerrilla operations scores of miles behind the battle lines where, if captured, they faced torture and execution. Immediately after the war, they conducted war crimes investigations that included some Asian American collaborators, raising questions about the meaning of loyalty. The end result of their activities was not only the satisfaction of seeing Imperial Japan defeated, but a new understanding of loyalty, race, and Asian Americans.