REPORT ON RELOCATION OF JAPANESE SCORED AS INACCURATE BY FORMER U.S. OPERATIVE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000303420039-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 26, 2010
• Sequence Number: 39
• Publication Date: July 4, 1983
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
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Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/26: CIA-RDP90-00552R000303420039-9
THE WASHINGTON TILES
r , r'l 7 L E ni ARE0. A 4 July 1983
Report on relocation of Ja
scored as inaccurate by former
U.S. operative
By Gene Goltz
WASHINGTON TIMES STAFF
A report recommending reparations to
ethnic Japanese who were relocated from the
West Coast during World War II is "blatantly
inaccurate and shockingly incomplete;' a
retired U.S. intelligence agent told The Wash-
ington Times.
The agent, David D. Lowman, 61, now lives
in Honolulu. He is retired from the National
Security Agency, the super-secret intelli-
gence arm of the Department of Defense.
After his retirement, Lowman served as a
consultant to the agency on declassifying
secret World War II documents.
Lowman said in a telephone interview
from Honolulu that it is not his place to decide
whether payments of $20,000 each should be
made to the surviving Japanese-Americans,
as recommended by the Commission on War-
time Relocation and Internment of Civilians
in its recent report. But Lowman said there
was no doubt that a great deal of spying was
going on among ethnic Japanese on the West
Coast during World War II. He said the com-
mission was wrong when it said President
Roosevelt and high-level advisers based their
decision on "war hysteria, racial hatred and
a failure of political leadership."
Lowman has been invited to testify before
the Senate Judiciary Committee when it
opens hearings July 27 on the reparations
question.
"I'm going to blow that commission out of
the water,"" Lowman said. He said it is incon-
ceivable that the commission could have
ignored "The 'Magic' Background of Pearl
Harbor," an eight-volume Department of
Defense publication, which contains hun-
dreds of Japanese diplomatic cables refer-
ring to espionage activities before and during
World War II on a global scale.
"Before the U. S. Congress accepts the
commission's report:' Lowman wrote in a
statement of which The Washington Times
was provided a copy, " . .. thereby labeling
Roosevelt a racist and political opportunist
acting contrary to the advice of the intel-
ligence community, it had better re-examine
the advice Roosevelt was receiving and from.
whom.
"Even more important, it ought to look at
the actual intelligence itself which was
available to the president, including all those
'Magic' messages establishing Japanese
espionage networks up and down-the entire
Pacific Coast from Canada to Chile:"
Commission members said they had not
been informed of the "Magic" volumes dur-
ing their three-year study. After the commis-
sion recommended monetary reparations,
however, it issued an addendum saying the
commission staff had now studied, the
"Magic" reports and concluded they would
have no effect on the final recommendation
of $20,000 to each survivor of the relocation.
The commission implied in a summary of
its report that J. Edgar Hoover, then head of
the FBI, had told Roosevelt and his advisers
that relocation of the ethnic Japanese was not
necessary and that only "careful watching of
suspicious individuals or individual reviews
of loyalty" were called for.
Lowman said, however, that Hoover was
not on the list of the few persons who reg-
ularly received the decoded Japanese diplo-
matic cables. Furthermore, as the commis-
sion itself states in the body of its report,
Hoover stated that the views of his field
agents on the West Coast should be taken into
account.
The FBI office in San Francisco appar-
ently agreed that mass evacuation was not
necessary, Los Angeles was noncommital,
but the FBI people in San Diego and Seattle
were "vehemently favorable" to the idea.
In a statement widely quoted, the commis-
sion said: "Not a single documented act of
espionage, sabotage or fifth column activity
was committed by an American citizen of
Japanese ancestry or by a resident Japanese
alien on the West Coast." In its addendum,
issued after the "Magic" reports had been
reviewed, the commission said, "That
statement still stands:"
Yet other experts disagree. For instance,
the late Gordon Prange, who had been a mili-
tary intelligence officer in the Far East and
was a history professor at the University of
Maryland until his death in 1980, stated in his
book on the attack on Pearl Harbor, "At Dawn
We Slept":
"As early as Dec. 16, 1940, the cooperation
of Japanese bank officials in America was
sought by Tbkyo, and American authorities
knew that a widespread Japanese espionage
organization was operating in the United
States for at least a year before the war."
Prange, who had been a naval officer and
served as chief of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's
C'ONTD TTED
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/26: CIA-RDP90-00552R000303420039-9