CIA Keeping Historians in the Dark About Its Cold War Role in Japan

With the end of the Cold War, the world has begun to glean from the former Soviet and East German archives all sorts of new information about the history of the past 40 years.

The opening of the Soviet records in Moscow, for example, has demonstrated Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-tung’s complicity in the North Korean invasion that started the Korean War. We have learned, too, that the tiny Communist Party in the United States was subsidized by Moscow.

But in Washington, some of our own Cold War history still seems to be off limits, thanks to the CIA.

For the past few months, the CIA has been quietly doing its utmost to prevent some of the most important information about America’s role in the Cold War from coming to light. It has been blocking the release of documents about American policy toward Japan that even the State Department believes could be released without harm to national security.

In short, the CIA doesn’t want us to know too much about our own past, and particularly our activities in the Cold War.

Did you ever want to know why the Japanese government behaves the way it does today--why its politics seem so corrupt, why its political parties are so hopelessly weak? Why Japan never developed a workable two-party system?

There are some U.S. government files that could help shed light on those questions. They are the records of American policy toward Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, as Japan was setting out on the course that today makes it the world’s most economically muscle-bound, politically scrawny superpower.

These files, which are still classified, would fill in the details of what is known about the period--that the CIA supported and subsidized top leaders of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party while doing what it could to weaken and undermine its opposition, the Japanese Socialist Party.

The LDP, which was formed in 1955 and governed without interruption until 1993, supported continuation of Japan’s security treaty with the United States, while the Socialist Party opposed the treaty.

By meddling in Japan’s politics, the CIA was supporting overall U.S. foreign policy.

A few materials describing American operations in Japan already have been made public. In one 1958 document that has been declassified, then-Ambassador to Japan Douglas MacArthur II complained that the brother of then-Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi “has tried to put the bite on us for financial help in fighting communism.” LDP officials generally have denied that their party received money from the CIA.

The State Department now wants to include a much fuller record of the CIA’s efforts in Japan as part of its series of official histories of U.S. foreign policy.

These works--generally published about 30 years after the events in question--are meant to be the full and definitive record of American foreign policy decisions and actions. The official histories are meant not only for us but also for future generations.

Right now, the State Department historians are preparing to publish the volume that will cover American policy toward Japan, Korea and China during the John F. Kennedy Administration. They have found plenty of information about the CIA’s operations in Japan and want to include it in the official history.

But the CIA has refused to declassify or allow publication of the files that show what it was doing in Japan in the late 1950s and the 1960s.

The State Department historians don’t want to publish a sanitized history, one that includes the more benign elements of U.S. policy toward Japan but leaves out the subsidies to Japanese politicians or the ruling party.

“Our position is that if you publish documents that are incomplete, that would mislead the public,” says Rutgers University Prof. Warren E. Kimball, who is the leader of the group of academic historians advising the State Department.

And so, in frustration, Kimball and the other historians now are threatening to publish the history, which is an official U.S. government document, with a large section of blank white pages.

In other words, the book would include material covering China and Korea but have only white space where the section should be on U.S. policy toward Japan. Nothing like this has been done since the official histories were first published in the 1920s.

This is not merely some arcane dispute about what happened long ago. It is about the bargains and dilemmas of American policy in the Cold War, and their consequences today.

The United States, in the aftermath of Soviet subversion of domestic governments in Eastern Europe, helped build up ruling parties in places like Japan and Italy that would be staunchly anti-Communist. The CIA was willing to hand around a lot of money in the process. And sometimes, the agency also helped tilt the balance by undercutting the political opposition to these ruling parties.

The process worked. Indeed, the CIA, which often feels sorry for itself these days and likes to mourn that the world learns only of its failures, not its successes, could proclaim its Cold War work in Japan a great triumph. Japan’s alliance with the United States remains intact.

But one of the side effects was that the United States at best looked the other way at corruption in the ruling anti-Communist parties--and indeed, with subsidies for politicians, may have contributed to the problem. Another result was that countries like Japan and Italy failed to develop strong two-party democracies. We can see the aftereffects in Tokyo and Rome today.

Over the past two years, in an attempt to show that it is opening itself up a bit, the CIA has announced that it will eventually make public the details of a few selected Cold War operations, such as those in North Korea and Tibet. But the CIA will do this in a way in which no one else--not the State Department, not outside historians--will decide what can be released.

CIA officials don’t want to talk about their flap with the historians over Japan. Their reluctance to declassify information is based on their usual opposition to the release of anything that would compromise what they always call their “sources and methods.”

It’s not clear what that means in this case. What the State Department historians want to publish is the record of U.S. support, three decades ago, for the leaders of Japan’s ruling party.

Many of those involved are no longer alive. If anyone still active in Japanese politics is involved, maybe his name could be kept out of the history. But the CIA is trying to go beyond that and censor any mention of the entire program, which seems to have been an essential component of American policy toward Japan.

In fact, the CIA still seems to be operating on the same assumptions that governed U.S. policy during the Cold War--that America’s relations with Japan are just too delicate and too sensitive to permit the release of information about the past. Maybe Japan is more resilient and mature these days than the CIA wants to imagine.

During the Cold War, it was commonplace for Communist propagandists to alter pictures, giving greater prominence to leaders in favor, airbrushing out the ones in disgrace. Now, as the record of American relations with Japan is being written, the CIA is engaged in its own effort to doctor history.

This time, it is not some fallen Communist leader who is being airbrushed out of the picture. It is ourselves.