Word: yoshikawa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...your story on Japanese Spy Takeo Yoshikawa's contribution to the attack on Pearl Harbor: Yoshikawa's eyes and ears were not as all-perceiving as TIME indicates...
Ignored by Yoshikawa, but moored between battleships California and Oklahoma on the night of Dec. 6, was the crack fleet tanker U.S.S. Neosho, as large, new and well manned as any tanker in the fleet. On the morning of the 7th, with 3,000,000 gallons of fuel oil aboard, she rated as a No. 1 priority target. It is not pleasant, even now, to contemplate Neosho and gasoline fueling facilities for the fleet on Ford Island had she been destroyed and Pearl Harbor flooded with millions of gallons of flaming...
Sunday Rainstorm. While Yoshikawa did not know the date of "X-Day," he did know that it was rapidly approaching. Near the end of November, a Lieut. Commander Suguru Suzuki arrived in Honolulu disguised as a ship's steward. He called on Consul General Nagao Kita, and, "in the course of their conversation, slipped a tiny ball of crumpled rice paper into Kita's hand." The list contained 97 questions. The key question, promptly referred to Yoshikawa: "On what day of the week would the most ships be in Pearl Harbor on normal occasions?" Yoshikawa's reply...
...thought it probably a maneuver, but rose and switched on the shortwave" to get the 8 o'clock news from Radio Tokyo. Twice during the weather forecast, the announcer reported "East wind, rain." That was the code signal indicating an attack against U.S. territory.* Yoshikawa immediately began burning his code books and other intelligence materials. When Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived that day to pick him up for eventual repatriation, the only incriminating sign of his activities that they found was a sketch of Pearl Harbor...
...Well," concludes Yoshikawa, "I am older now, and dwelling more in the past as the years go by. Some things certainly are ordained. And so it was that I, who was reared as a naval officer, never came to serve in action, but look back on my single top-secret assignment as the raison d'être of the long years of training in my youth and early manhood. In truth, if only for a moment in time, I held history in the palm of my hand...