Evidence suggests the Soviet Union, fearing its fate at the hands of a growing Pacific power, used agents in Washington and Tokyo to manipulate the U.S. and Japan into open warfare:
New revelations from the former Soviet Union show that Soviet intelligence tried to reduce the threat to the U.S.S.R. from Japan by manipulating the United States and Japan into war. “What the Soviets wanted was to make sure that they would not be attacked by Japan, that the Japanese would be turned on us and not on them,” veteran Soviet intelligence expert Herbert Romerstein tells Insight.
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It long has been known that New Deal economist Harry Dexter White was a Soviet spy. It even is old news that as assistant secretary of the Treasury he was one of the first to urge Roosevelt to take a hard line against Japan. But it now has been revealed that the policy advice White gave on Japan probably was instigated on direct instruction from his bosses in the Soviet Union.
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This included a U.S. demand for Japan’s total and immediate withdrawal from China, a view many foreign-policy experts knew Japan would consider unrealistic. White wrote a memo shortly after the meeting was said to have taken place that contained many of the same points and urged a hard line against Japan. He sent it to his boss, Henry Morgenthau Jr., then secretary of the Treasury. After getting a second memorandum from White, Morgenthau eventually sent a letter with the same themes to Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull. On Nov. 26, 1941, Hull gave the Japanese government what historians call an “ultimatum” that included White’s demand that Japan totally withdraw from China. Japan responded two weeks later by bombing Pearl Harbor.
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“Stalin was much more frightened of the Japanese than he was of the Germans,” says Stephen Schwartz, a journalist who has written extensively on Soviet intelligence operations. “Stalin was frightened of the Japanese because he remembered the devastating defeat inflicted so quickly on Czarist Russia [in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905.] … Stalin, who was a great Russian nationalist, was deeply, deeply traumatized by this and was frightened that it could happen again.”
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The record shows the Soviets were delighted when Sorge reported in September 1941 that Japan was planning to attack the United States and not the U.S.S.R., enabling Moscow to commit Eastern forces to help beat back Germany. “Sorge told the Russians, ‘Don’t worry about the Japanese; they’re going to attack the Americans,’”
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Had the Japanese-American talks succeeded, there would have arisen the danger that after their rapprochement, Japan and the U.S.A. [would] pursue a coordinated anti-Soviet policy.”
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Thomas Fleming, author of the just-published book, The New Dealers’ War. “Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to get in the war so badly that he was the real origin of the provocation of Japan,” Fleming says. He notes that in August 1941, Roosevelt slapped an embargo on all oil shipments to Japan.
But Ralph de Toledano, a former Newsweek reporter, columnist and editor who after the war covered the congressional hearings on both Pearl Harbor and domestic communism, re-members it differently. “Roosevelt swung back and forth,” de Toledano tells Insight. But White and other Soviet agents in the administration, such as White House aide Lauchlin Currie, constantly were “working to kill the modus vivendi.”
Fleming writes that the Venona documents show there were at least 329 Soviet agents working in the U.S. government during World War II. Although he doubts they had much influence on policy toward Japan, Fleming argues they made U.S. policy tilt toward the Soviets in several instances during World War II and tipped off the Soviets to what Roosevelt and top officials were thinking.
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