The Double-Agent War Hero Who Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor

Francis P Sempa in the Asian Review of Books:

Frederick Rutland

Tokyo-based American author Ronald Drabkin has written a riveting, fast-paced account of a Beverly Hills-based spy who engaged in intelligence collection for Japan and provided the Japanese Navy with naval aviation technical expertise before Japan’s attack on American ships, planes and forces at Pearl Harbor. Frederick Rutland was a British naval hero in the First World War, worked for the Japanese Navy in the years between the wars, and had connections to American intelligence agencies in the lead-up to Pearl Harbor. Months before the attack at Pearl Harbor, Rutland offered his services to the United States and Britain when he sensed that a surprise Japanese attack was in the offing. After Pearl Harbor was attacked, Rutland was interned in a British prison and later on the remote Isle of Man as an enemy spy. A few years after the war, then living in Wales, Rutland either committed suicide or was murdered; Drabkin isn’t sure which.

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