MacArthur's Spies

by Peter Eisner

  It was the most violent storm to hit Manila in forty years. Water several feet deep inundated the streets and threatened to wash people away. Electricity was out, the telephones were not working, and transportation was a mess. Fortunately, Lichauco had carried as much furniture as he could to his second-floor bedroom. Four days later it was still raining “and when a friendly neighbor came to visit us in his banca [dugout canoe] to see how we were getting along he paddled straight into our living room.”

  Claire, still recovering, was in no danger in her second-floor room at Tsubaki Club. The club was only a mile or so from Lichauco’s house and probably suffered the same conditions. She had not yet resumed writing in her little date-book diary to say anything different. There was a gap in entries from the day of her collapse—September 29—until the end of November.

  Conditions at Santo Tomas already were precarious when the typhoon hit. Food rationing had made it more difficult and expensive to provide enough to eat. The housing situation was miserable, the smells pungent, but the rain made everything worse. Winds toppled the open-walled shanties under which many people lived. “Three days of bucketing rain poured masses of bedraggled shanty people into the corridors and hallways of the buildings, where they camped as best they could. The air there became thick from the crowds of people, damp clothing, and the smoke of kerosene lamps; electricity went off for . . . three days. Out in the shanties, some overnight sleepers were marooned for a day until reached by rescuers on bamboo rafts. The water came in over some of the buildings’ ground floors too.” Only the children of the camp had fun—everything was an adventure, even though the water destroyed some stores of food. While the rain continued, the children were even able to swim for a while before the water turned to brown slime. Claire found out only afterward that Louise was still at Santo Tomas during the typhoon. Louise was moved several weeks later to the new Los Baños camp, where her fiancé, Bob Humphries, had been sent to build housing.

  The situation was at least as bad for the POWs at Cabanatuan. The storm knocked down many of the flimsy barracks. “At one time it looked as if the rain was not falling but going parallel to the ground. Everyone and everything gets wet and stays that way, bedding, blankets, shoes, clothes, all develop green mold.”

  The guerrillas also hunkered down in miserable, drenched jungle hideouts, but at least Japanese patrols had to curtail their search-and-destroy missions during the week of rain and floods.

  • • •

  After a month Claire was back at work. She contacted Boone to report she was now ready to resume operations. She had almost died, but her message was almost an apology for being out of operation. In the interim Fely had been running the food and supply operations, and Claire would once again focus on intelligence gathering.

  Claire threw a Christmas party for her employees and friends at the club on December 22, 1943. The staff gave speeches belatedly commemorating her thirty-sixth birthday but also to mark her return and remarkable recovery. She resumed singing her torch songs as she gained a bit of strength and weight. Fely’s allure brought new Japanese officer friends, and the hostesses resumed gathering information with their cooing questions. Meanwhile Claire said Ichikawa, the composer still enamored of Fely, had invited Fely to sing at a party that he was throwing at the ballroom of the Bay View Hotel, a few blocks away. Fely asked Claire to come along with her, probably as a chaperone so she would not be alone. She argued that it would be a good chance to meet Japanese officers. Claire agreed to go. “Nip big-wigs would be present and we might pick up some important news.” At the party Ichikawa introduced her to a captain named Kobayashi, who asked her some pointed questions—he understood she was Italian, but had she ever been to the United States?

  Claire stuck to her cover story that her parents were Italian but added that she had been born in the Philippines and had visited neither Italy nor the United States. Kobayashi teased her that once Japan took over, he would be in charge of the Pacific Northwest and could give her whatever province she wanted.

  “I have seen pictures of Portland, in Oregon,” she replied. “I have heard it is called the City of Roses, and they are my favorite.”

  “Portland shall be yours,” Kobayashi said.

  In her next report to Boone on Japanese contacts, she told him that a Japanese captain had bragged and joked with her about the future occupation of the United States. She had one other piece of more serious business. Her old friend at the Park Avenue School, William Bruce, had sent through information about troop movements. Along with a request for money, Bruce had sent a message through a trusted Filipino with a list of every man in the camp. Meanwhile, he reported: “We are loading ships for the Japs and whenever anything looks fishy I will tell you. One thing right now is that these Red (double) Cross ships of theirs are bringing in troops, not wounded soldiers. We are now loading one of these ships and I would swear the cargo is guns and ammo. Send this info on if you can.”

  Mellie, Boone’s wife, was now pregnant and pulled back from making the supply and message runs. Claire came up with a new runner, whom they called Zigzag. He shared duties with Pacio. Zigzag’s reputation preceded him and he was easy to identify. He had six fingers on one hand—two thumbs. One of the most recent shipments was sizable, more than either Zigzag or Pacio could handle alone, so they worked with additional trusted helpers, men and women. The prices were high, but food and supplies were far easier to find in Manila than in Dinalupihan. Claire sent food and cooking oil, gin and cigarettes, spices and shoelaces, books and newspapers, and the latest radio transcriptions from the San Francisco radio broadcasts. Boone was more than grateful: “Thanks a million for the food supply,” he wrote, thanking Claire more than once. “You have no idea how those things help the situation.”

  On the political side, Claire happily had missed the main event of the season while in the hospital. José Laurel, recovered after the June assassination attempt, had been inaugurated on October 14 as president of the new, supposedly independent Second Philippine Republic. Neighborhood block captains had warned attendance was mandatory, with the obvious possibility that the Kempeitai might otherwise pay a visit to inquire about the loyalties of those not attending. Most Filipinos seemed to scoff at or to be disinterested in the declaration of Philippine independence. Laurel gave a lengthy inaugural address that, if not written by the Japanese, fit fully with their pan-Asian ideal. Laurel repeated the call for an end to guerrilla operations: Stop fighting, he said, or “I shall have no other alternative than to consider them public enemies of our government and deal with them accordingly.”

  General Shigenori Kuroda, now the top Japanese commander in the Philippines, also delivered an address, greeted almost entirely without cheers or applause—a protest of silence that showed the depth of opposition to the occupation. After the speeches Japanese planes flew overhead and a parade accompanied newly named President Laurel to the official residence, Malacañang Palace. German and Japanese residents were prominent in the ceremony. The Germans raised their arms in the Nazi salute and the Japanese wore white caps and short uniforms, marching in unison.

  Despite restrictions, most Manila residents still had access to news from the outside world via shortwave radio and illegal newsletters. They soon heard President Roosevelt’s reaction to the inauguration. He called Laurel “the latest puppet whom the Japanese have set up in Manila to head the government which they have established there. . . . The only accredited Filipino officials are temporarily here in Washington.”

  Parsons’s Second Return

  Aboard the USS Narwhal, Mindanao Sea, Philippines, November 11, 1943

  “GIVE A GANDER, Chick, isn’t that a pretty sight?”

  Frank Latta, the commander of one of the submarines assigned to Philippines operations, the USS Narwhal, invited Chick Parsons to the bridge after spotting his prey—a fully laden Japanese oil tanker lumbering through the Mindanao Sea. The Japanese vessel lay
within sight of land, near an inlet between Negros and Siquijor islands.

  Latta and Parsons were two weeks out from Brisbane, one of a series of dozens of supply runs planned between Australia and the Philippines to provide food, personnel, radio and spotting equipment, and other supplies, as well as to withdraw important refugees and provide transport in both directions for intelligence operatives. However, a radio message two days earlier from Brisbane had reminded Latta and the crew that enemy operations took precedence. He had detoured from his assigned route to the island of Mindoro and was lying in wait. The Narwhal was appropriately named because it was a whale of a submarine, double the size of more nimble attack submarines in the U.S. fleet. It had been stripped of unnecessary gear to fit a full load of supplies, though of course it was still fitted for war.

  Latta had seen no sign of a destroyer escort—the tanker appeared to be an open target.

  “When are you going to make an approach?” Parsons asked.

  “Right now!” Latta said, and gave the order to clear the bridge and dive. Seconds after he fired off four torpedoes, he took a look at periscope depth. The torpedoes had skipped past the target but trouble was closing in. The ship’s full accompaniment had been hidden by land. “A hornet’s nest of destroyers, destroyer escorts, and heavily escorted transports and tankers” had been waiting.

  Within minutes the crew felt a concussion, a telltale bump from an exploding depth charge still far off. Then another glanced by closer, and several more. Latta decided to make a break for it in the dark—the Narwhal could run at only 9 knots underwater but double that on the surface.

  Thankfully, Chick knew the lay of the land. “We surfaced to get away and were chased into what looked like a blind alley,” recalled Robert Griffiths, an officer on the Narwhal. “When we asked Chick Parsons if he recognized the surrounding mountain peaks, he said, ‘Yes, keep going straight ahead.’”

  Latta ordered all-ahead emergency speed to outrun artillery from the ships and smaller fire from the patrol boats pursuing in the narrow passage. The Narwhal hit 17 knots and more. Plummer, the engineering officer, started sweating out the readings of the engine RPMs. He was not sure how much pressure the diesels could take above the red line. “Is it necessary to keep the engines going at this pace?” Plummer asked.

  “Keep it there or you won’t need engines,” Latta said.

  They escaped with a bit of help: Chick’s knowledge of the channel saved them. Clouds, rain, and fog from the approaching typhoon also helped make it a lucky escape. If the sky had been clear, the submarine would have been visible in the light of a full moon just after midnight.

  The Narwhal was one of a fleet of submarine transports designated for a special mission: to run supplies, gear, insurgents, and spies into the Philippines for the duration, part of MacArthur’s plan to support the guerrillas and pave the way for retaking the archipelago whatever the cost.

  While on duty with Parsons’s guerrilla mission, the Narwhal was quite ready and able to pursue Japanese ships and undertake other missions that came its way. In this case, operating solo in the Pacific, escape was the best possible course. By the time they had evaded their Japanese pursuers, Parsons was minimizing the encounter. The first stop was on the northwest coast of Mindoro, about ninety miles south of Manila. It was completed “without difficulty,” he said, “delayed one day due to unexpected enemy interference.” Parsons and a contingent of commandos landed at Paluan Bay on November 13, 1943, carrying forty-five tons of supplies. Along with supplies, the delivery also included counterfeit Japanese occupation currency, which would buy supplies for the guerrilla operations, counteract inflated prices for food and supplies, and undermine attempts to regulate the economy.

  Nine commandos also came ashore with the assignment of setting up close-in radio communications with Manila and the rest of Luzon. For the first time communications from Claire and the others would be carried by boat overnight across the Verde Island passage between Mindoro and Luzon. Parsons made arrangements for transit to and from Manila for supplies and agents. The fulfillment of the hope of providing real-time intelligence to General MacArthur’s headquarters was at hand, though still probably months away. Parsons reminded the guerrilla leaders that MacArthur was adamant that they avoid direct offensive action against the Japanese. They were to continue their focus on intelligence gathering in preparation for a U.S. invasion.

  Parsons then organized a smuggling operation with a fleet of commercial ferries in Mindoro that were licensed by the Japanese to carry lumber but whose crews were deeply loyal to the United States and had been secretly prepared all along to fight the war in whatever way possible. He found that the logistics at Paluan Bay were ideal. Soon the ferries were carrying “shipments of propaganda, bundles of money, vitamin tablets for the POWs and internees, radio sets and spares and any other article desired to be gotten into Manila. This is a situation hard to believe, and could not be better had it not been planned ahead of time.” Parsons also set up a forgery unit that produced fake IDs for him and other insurgents. He said that the infrastructure for operations was so good that he was concerned that he himself might have been the victim of a sophisticated counterintelligence ruse by the Japanese. He decided to double-check on the people he was now working with; his knowledge of the country and his network of friends paid off as usual. “I found the family of an old trusted employee of my company—as well as a number of people known to me in Manila—all of whom I consider to be reliable.” Meetings with them “convince me that all in the town were okay.”

  Before leaving Mindoro, Parsons sent word to his friends in Manila about the streamlined route. Intelligence documents that Claire had been forwarding to Boone and to Ed Ramsey could follow the same route. Maintaining operational security, Claire had expanded her guerrilla contacts to include Ramsey, Colonels Loyd and Wright, among others. Boone had told his colleagues about Claire and they were getting in touch. Within less than a year of opening the club and beginning her operations, Claire’s supply and intelligence line had proven valuable to most of the top guerrilla leaders in central Luzon.

  Parsons continued on his mission from Mindoro to Mindanao, where he delivered another forty-five tons of supplies to guerrillas led by Colonel Wendell Fertig. He held meetings with Fertig and other guerrilla commanders and gathered information about the mood of the Filipinos. He told MacArthur that support for the Allies was as dominant as ever and Filipinos mocked the country’s independence under Japanese control; they were ready to fight. The Narwhal picked up Parsons and evacuees at Mindanao and Negros before turning back for Australia on December 5. That same day Captain Latta had a second chance. At around dawn he spotted a Japanese cargo ship, the Hinteno Maru, and blasted it to an ocean grave in a hail of gunfire.

  A Spy Breaks Through

  Manila, January 1944

  FRANCO VERA REYES, a flamboyant Filipino novelist and sometime convict before the war, showed up at the door of Blanche Jurika, saying he had just been with Chick Parsons, her son-in-law. Blanche had stayed behind in Manila when the rest of the family fled in June 1942. Like many people in Manila, she was collecting food and clothing for POWs. No one in the underground could figure out with certainty what Vera Reyes had said that day or what message he carried; all that was known was that he had convinced Blanche that he had real information and that he was working with the guerrillas.

  Vera Reyes apparently told Blanche Jurika that he had just come from guerrilla territory and delivered on behalf of Chick a letter from Katsy, Chick’s wife, along with photographs of their children—Blanche’s grandchildren. Vera Reyes said that he had returned to the Philippines with Chick on the Narwhal and carried along a recent copy of Life magazine. Chick probably had visited his mother-in-law during his secret visit to Manila in June 1943. The family was intensely concerned for her well-being, knowing that she would be in danger if either her activities or Chick’s activities were discov
ered. It was likely she would be under surveillance, and Chick’s friends in Manila questioned whether he would have risked sending incriminating material to her. Vera Reyes might have gotten the letter from a courier captured by the Japanese. It also was possible that the message Vera Reyes brought along was a forgery, but Blanche told friends and associates that the letter delivered by Vera Reyes was genuine.

  Whichever was the case, one thing eventually became certain: Vera Reyes was a spy working for Colonel Akira Nagahama, the chief of the Kempeitai.

  Vera Reyes was an unusual fellow. Before the war, in the thirties, he had written two novels—Bagong Kristo (New Christ) and Makata at Paraluman (Poet and Parallels). Yet he was also a businessman, and some of his dealings had landed him in jail for larceny and embezzlement. When war broke out, it was said, he had earned parole from Bilibid Prison by convincing military authorities that he could help them identify American operatives and guerrillas. Vera Reyes was already suspect among guerrillas in Bataan as possibly having helped in the capture of Hugh Straughn months earlier. However, no one in Manila had received that information. So he was relatively safe to be making the rounds in Manila, describing himself as a liaison officer for the guerrillas.

  Nevertheless, some of Blanche Jurika’s allies were suspicious. Boone’s guerrilla commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ed Ramsey, got word through underground-message channels that Vera Reyes wanted to meet him. Ramsey was on a dangerous temporary assignment inside Manila, under deep cover, accompanied by his comrade-in-arms and lover, Ramona Snyder. Ramsey wavered on how to proceed. “I was routinely suspicious of unannounced contacts, but this one seemed genuine enough,” Ramsey said. As a test, though, he decided to plant some information with Vera Reyes to see what happened. He sent along a friendly response to Vera Reyes that he had to leave town for a few days: He said that Huk Maoist guerrillas had just murdered a number of rival guerrillas during a clandestine meeting in the town of Malabon, outside Manila. As a result, Ramsey said, he had to investigate the killings and would meet with Vera Reyes when he returned.