Ex-Imperial Army officers’ plot to kill PM Yoshida in 1952: stopped by a CIA agent in their midst?
An interesting new discovery has been made through the investigation of recently released CIA documents:
A group of former high-ranking Imperial Japanese Army officers framed a plot in July 1952 to assassinate then Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, according to recently declassified U.S. documents.
Takushiro Hattori, the late former planning chief of the army staff office, and five others came up with the plan in defiance of what they saw as Yoshida’s pro-U.S. policy, said the Central Intelligence Agency documents dated Oct. 31, 1952.
The group planned to install Yoshida’s rival, Ichiro Hatoyama, as Japan’s new prime minister after killing Yoshida, who it thought was hostile to those removed from public office after World War II and nationalists, the documents said.
The documents were released by the National Archives in the United States, where records of the General Headquarters of the Allied Forces and the Central Intelligence Agency are kept.
The group eventually refrained from carrying out the assassination following opposition by Hattori’s friend, former Col. Masanobu Tsuji, who insisted the real enemy be the Socialists, not conservatives like Yoshida, the documents said.
What the Kyodo News article doesn’t mention is that Col. Masanobu Tsuji was one of the suspected Japanese war criminals whom the CIA had hired to act as spies in the immediate postwar years. Here’s what an Associated Press article written earlier this week said about Tsuji:
The Army considered him a potentially valuable source, but the CIA was not impressed with Tsuji’s skills as an agent. The files show he was far more concerned with furthering various right-wing causes and basking in publicity generated by controversial political statements.
“In either politics or intelligence work, he is hopelessly lost both by reason of personality and lack of experience,” said a CIA assessment from 1954. Another 1954 file says: “Tsuji is the type of man who, given the chance, would start World War III without any misgivings.”
Was this just a case of Tsuji’s furthering of various right-wing causes overlapping with America’s desire not to have Yoshida assassinated, or of a paid agent carrying out the wishes of the CIA?
