In a major covert operation of the Cold War, the CIA spent millions of dollars to support the conservative party that dominated Japan's politics for a generation.
The CIA gave money to the Liberal Democratic Party and its members in the 1950s and the 1960s, to gather intelligence on Japan, make the country a bulwark against Communism in Asia and undermine the Japanese left, said retired intelligence officials and former diplomats. Since then, the CIA has dropped its covert financial aid and focused instead on gathering inside information on Japan's party politics and positions in trade and treaty talks, retired intelligence officers said.The Liberal Democrats' 38 years of one-party governance ended last year when they fell from power after a series of corruption cases - many involving secret cash contributions. Still the largest party in Japan's Parliament, they formed an awkward coalition in June with their old Cold War enemies, the Socialists - the party that the CIA's aid aimed in part to undermine.
Though the CIA's financial role in Japanese politics has long been suspected by historians and journalists, the Liberal Democrats have always denied it existed, and the breadth and depth of the support has never been detailed publicly. Disclosure of the covert aid could open old wounds and harm the Liberal Democrats' credibility as an independent voice for Japanese interests. The subject of spying between allies has always been sensitive.
The CIA did not respond to an inquiry. In Tokyo, Katsuya Muraguchi, director of the Liberal Democratic Party's management bureau, said he had never heard of any payments.
"This story reveals the intimate role that Americans at official and private levels played in promoting structured corruption and one-party conservative democracy in post-war Japan, and that's new," said John Dower, a leading Japan scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "We look at the LDP and say it's corrupt and it's unfortunate to have a one-party democracy. But we have played a role in creating that misshapen structure."
Bits and pieces of the story are revealed in U.S. government records slowly being declassified. A State Department document in the National Archives describes a secret meeting in a Tokyo hotel at which Eisaku Sato, a former prime minister of Japan, sought under-the-table contributions from the United States for the 1958 parliamentary election. A newly declassified CIA history also discusses covert support sent that year.
But the full story remains hidden. It was pieced together through interviews with surviving participants, many well past 80 years old, and descriptions of still-classified State Department documents explicitly confirming the Kennedy administration's secret aid to the Liberal Democrats in the early 1960s.
The law requires the government to publish, after 30 years, "all records needed to provide a comprehensive documentation of major foreign policy decisions and actions." Some State Department and CIA officials say the Kennedy-era documents should stay secret forever, for fear they might disrupt the coalition government in Tokyo or embarrass the United States. Other State Department officials argue that the law demands that the documents be unsealed.
The CIA's help for Japanese conservatives resembled other cold war operations, like secret support for Italy's Christian Democrats. But it remained secret - in part, because it succeeded. The Liberal Democrats thwarted their Socialist opponents, maintained their one-party rule, forged close ties with Washington and fought off public opposition to the United States' maintaining military bases throughout Japan.
One retired CIA official involved in the payments said, "That is the heart of darkness and I'm not comfortable talking about it, because it worked." Others confirmed the covert support.
"We financed them," said Alfred C. Ulmer Jr., who ran the CIA's Far East operations from 1955 to 1958. "We depended on the LDP for information." He said the CIA had used the payments both to support the party and to recruit informers within it from its earliest days.
By the early 1960s, the payments to the party and its politicians were "so established and so routine" that they were a fundamental, if highly secret, part of American foreign policy toward Japan, said Roger Hilsman, head of the State Department's intelligence bureau in the Kennedy administration.
"The principle was certainly acceptable to me," said U. Alexis Johnson, United States Ambassador to Japan from 1966 to 1969. "We were financing a party on our side." He said the payments continued after he left Japan in 1969 to become a senior State Department official.
The CIA supported the party and established relations with many promising young men in the Japanese government in the 1950s and 1960s. Some are today among the elder statesmen of Japanese politics.
One is Masaru Gotoda, a respected Liberal Democratic Party leader who entered Parliament in the 1970s, recently served as justice minister and is a frequently mentioned candidate for prime minister.
"I had a deep relationship with the CIA," he said in an interview, referring to his years as a top police and intelligence official in the 1950s and 1960s. "I went to their headquarters. But there was nobody in an authentic government organization who received financial aid." He would not be more explicit.
"Those CIA people who were stationed in the embassy with legitimate status were fine," he said. "But there were also covert people. We did not really know all the activities they were conducting. Because they were from a friendly nation, we did not investigate deeply."