YAMAMOTO

Here is the untold story of Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku of Japan (1884-1943). I can compare it to the earlier discussed case of Rudolf Hess. Like Hess, Yamamoto was a nationalistic patriot of his country in his own right, but he was conspicuously empowered by Moscow, ever since his 1935 secret meeting with Stalin in Moscow, the reason for which was Stalin’s desire to facilitate the Japanese Navy’s getting the upper hand in its struggle for strategic supremacy over the Army, which was an urgent matter of national security for the USSR, as the Japanese Army’s military ambitions of a ground expansion in Asia, as opposed to the Navy’s naval expansionism, were putting Japan on a collision course with Russia.
(Once we are on this curious subject, my general observation about the recruitment of the best foreign agents of influence, disdainfully dismisses the intelligence services’ emphasis on the shaky pecuniary interests of a greedy turncoat. The greatest foreign agents are always encouraged to see themselves as benefactors of their own country, first and foremost. How many recruits of this rewarding, rather than rewarded, sort have been drafted by the United States anywhere in the world in the last few decades, I wonder? Indeed, this question is of huge practical political and intelligence value, but I am afraid that an honest answer to it will be most disappointing to America’s vanishing breed of patriotic intelligence veterans…)

In her preparation for a clash with Germany, the worst conceivable danger facing Soviet Russia would be a war on two fronts. Bearing this in mind, Stalin’s key task in the 1930’s was to pull Japan out of the negative column into the positive column, whatever the cost.
As I had a chance to mention before, Stalin’s strategy toward Japan was sitting on a rather unconventional two-pillar foundation: Prince Alexander Nevsky’s experience with the Tatar-Mongol invaders into Russia in the 13th century, and… Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly!
To be more precise, Saint Alexander Nevsky had taught Comrade Stalin to seek an alliance of convenience with the mighty Eastern power (in Stalin’s case it had to be Japan) while providing the war-hungry Japanese with an attractive “Western” target.
Stalin’s knowledge of Japan was extremely limited, but from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly he had learned enough about the love-hate relationship that must have existed between the two great powers, Japan and the United States of America, whom Stalin so much wanted to see up in arms against each other…
But first things first. For now he needed to address a worrisome problem at hand. The Japanese government had been taken over by the military, who all wanted one thing: an imperialist expansion. Comrade Stalin’s concern was not the expansion as such, but its direction. He didn’t like Japan’s 1931 move into Manchuria, which was too precariously close to the Soviet border. He needed to persuade the Japanese that any border silliness on their part would turn out unprofitable for them. Seeing Mongolia as the USSR’s back yard, and the probable next target for the Japanese land offensive, Stalin ordered some of the choicest Soviet troops to the area and gave them the task of responding to any possible provocation with excessive force. Such border clashes would indeed occur in 1938 and 1939, and they would be sweepingly repulsed by the most talented of the Soviet commanders who had survived the Purges General Georgi Zhukov, of whom I shall have a lot to say in a later entry. (By the way, it would be Zhukov’s Siberian Divisions, at the end of 1941, turning the tide against Germany in the Battle of Moscow at the price of completely baring the Soviet Eastern defenses: the daring gambit, which Japan passed on, considering Pearl Harbor a better option.)
Going back now to the question of Japan’s urge to expand, let her move South, East, and Southwest, but not to the North! Doing his best, to make his wish come true, Stalin believed that he had found himself a natural ally in the whole Japanese Navy, engaged in a domestic struggle for political supremacy with the Japanese Army commanders. In order to promote his strategic agenda, and to give some extra clout to the Japanese Navy clique in the process, Stalin improvised a secret and totally unanticipated meeting in 1935 in Moscow with a certain Yamamoto Isoroku, a mid-level Japanese official (promoted to vice admiral of the Navy just in the preceding year), who chanced to be traveling on some other business from Berlin to Tokyo through Moscow, by train. Yamamoto was an American-educated officer (Harvard 1919-1921), seriously suspected by his Japanese peers and also by superiors, of pro-Western sentiments, to the point of being put on a watch list for potential disloyalty. This was ostensibly not an encouraging credential, to win Stalin’s appreciation, but Stalin simply refused to believe it. Having attended yet another Bolshoi performance of Puccini’s anti-American tearjerker, for reassurance, Stalin purposely gambled on Yamamoto’s latent hatred for the United States, where he, a yellow man, must have been treated like an Untermensch by his white peers, and Stalin was not disappointed. In fact, having been seriously suspected in Japan of an excessive attachment to the West, Yamamoto needed some tangible proof to the contrary, and Stalin’s attention was a most propitious windfall for his fortunes.
As a result of their secret meeting, Yamamoto was quickly catapulted to prominence, since Stalin entrusted him with a personal letter to Emperor Hirohito, pledging Soviet friendship to Japan, in no uncertain terms. There appeared to be no hard feelings in Tokyo, with regard to Stalin’s choice of Yamamoto as more or less his “confidant” and his chief unofficial contact in Japan, over the official heads of Ambassador and Foreign Minister. What endeared Stalin the most to Japan’s top Navy and War Ministry brass, and what also made Yamamoto such an indispensable broker was Moscow’s promise to share Soviet military intelligence on the United States, Great Britain, and France, with Tokyo. Yamamoto’s role was not to be diminished in these transactions. On Stalin’s not-so-strange whim, Soviet agents were passing secret information to Yamamoto personally in the best of all places designed for such deals: geisha houses.
In the course of preparing the December 1941 attack on the American Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, the key part of the intelligence used by Yamamoto came from the Soviet Union…

In the long run, despite this wholly practical “friendship,” Stalin must have been most gratified to see Japan defeated in World War II. After all, throughout his life he was bearing an emotional grudge against Japan for having inflicted a humiliating defeat on Russia in the war of 1904-1905. It is truly mind-boggling how Stalin managed to use Japan against the United States in World War II, while getting his vengeance against Japan in the same war, at the end.