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Book

Asian American spies : how Asian Americans helped win the Allied victory

Call Number

  • 940.5486 H4135 (CEN)

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Publication Information

New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021]

Physical Description

xvi, 281 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm

Summary

"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 battlelines where, if captured, they faced torture and execution. Immediately after the war, they conducted war crimes investigations which 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"--

Contents

  • Creating an Inclusive, Centralized Intelligence Agency
  • Recruiting Asian Americans with the Right Stuff
  • Morale Operations and Talking Their Way into Japan
  • Fighting Like a Man, Special Operations Style
  • The Long and Short of Spying for Research Analysis and Secret Intelligence
  • Rescuing POWs, Countering Enemy Spies, and Encountering Collaborators
  • Loyalty, Treason, and Asian Americans
  • Epilogue: Unveiling the Trojan Horse.

Subjects