Asian American Spies: How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory, by Brian Masaru Hayashi

Abstract

Brian Hayashi has written a consistently informative and often frustrating study of Asian Americans and their wartime service with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). While Hayashi’s deft writing makes his monograph read like an espionage thriller, it is no mere adventure tale as it offers a detailed examination of the OSS, Asian American communities, and the fluid nature of loyalty, especially in wartime. Here, in examining how loyalty is developed and understood by multiple communities, Hayashi excels, and his work eclipses even that of Masayo Umezawa Duus’s Unlikely Liberators (2006). These strengths notwithstanding, the book does not, as the subtitle promises, tell the story of how Asian Americans helped win the war; instead, it often leads readers down a winding path to a disappointing historical dead end. Hayashi begins with a thorough review of the historiography of the OSS and uses Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean language sources to bring to life the work of heretofore historically marginalised Asian American agents serving both stateside and overseas. Chapters One and Two examine the creation of the Office of Strategic Services, its basic structure and the functions of its various sections, as well as how the OSS became, by the standards of wartime America, ‘an ethnically and racially inclusive organization’ (p. 17). Here, Hayashi does an outstanding job of guiding readers through the labyrinthine process that William Donovan, head of the OSS, and others followed to identify and recruit agents from Chinese, Japanese, and Korean communities. These chapters offer a solid look at figures such as Donovan and Cornelius Vander Starr, whose wartime business, C.V. Starr and Company, grew into today’s multinational finance and insurance corporation, American International Group. These chapters also produce some highly useful and unexpected nuggets of information as, for example, when Hayashi concludes that Japan’s rapid conquest of British Burma and Malaya resulted in part from the Secret Intelligence Service’s preoccupation with ‘suppressing nationalist movements within their empire’ (p. 20). Equally impressive is his coverage of COMINTERN recruitment within the Asian American community and the contribution of Japanese leftists to the Allied victory.