Dan Snow's History Hit - Hollywood Spy: The British WW1 Hero Who Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbour

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Frederick Rutland was one of Britain's finest naval pilots and a celebrated hero of the First World War. And yet in the interwar period, he would become a turncoat, feeding information to Japanese intelligence whilst living undercover in the glitz and glamour of 1930s Hollywood.Joining Dan to discuss Rutland's life is Ronald Drabkin, author of 'Beverly Hills Spy: The Double-Agent War Hero Who Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor'. Ron explains how his information helped the Japanese to build a cutting-edge navy, and how he managed to evade capture by American and British intelligence.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Frederick Rutland seemed to have it all. He was living in a Hollywood mansion. He had staff, he had drivers, he had an apparently successful business career. He had a great CV. He was friends with Charlie Chaplin and the fast crew of 1930s Hollywood. He rubbed shoulders and drank martinis with the elite of California society. He'd risen to international prominence, really, as the most celebrated naval aviator of

the First World War, a decorated hero. He'd performed such heroics at the Battle of Jutland in the summer of 1916 that he became known as Rutland of Jutland. He was described as having a square jaw, well-poised, highly intelligent, good personality, modest, gives appearance of affluence and breeding. But that appearance was well-crafted. Frederick Rutland had another identity. Agent Shinkawa, working for the Imperial Japanese Navy. He was such an important asset, he was paid more, far more, even than Admiral Yamamoto himself. Whilst he was in California, partying, drinking, visiting factories and docks,

he was sending a stream of information back to Tokyo about the American Pacific Fleet and the aircraft that flew off their carriers. He made an enormous contribution to the Japanese strike force that would hit Pearl Harbor in late 1941. How did this British war hero end up spying for the Japanese just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Well, here to tell us on the podcast is Ron Drabkin. He's an expert in espionage history. He was checking out files that have been declassified recently by the FBI, and he realised that this treasure trove had just entered the public domain. He's written Beverly Hills Spy, trove had just entered the public domain. He's written Beverly Hills Spy, all about the life and career of Frederick Rutland. It's a hell of a story. Enjoy.

T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again and the shuttle has cleared the tower ron thanks very much coming on the podcast thank you dan great to be here this is something we brits don't like talking about too much you know uh war heroes who end up going over to the other side and becoming intelligence assets was there anything in in Frederick Rutland's upbringing that suggested he might turn traitor? Well, yeah, I think so. Yeah. He was a very poor, low-born fellow with a chip on his shoulder, very brave, very talented. He had class problems in the Royal Navy to start with,

being a low-born fellow. And in World War I, he was the, you know, well, not only was he the lowborn fellow in the units, but he was also by far the oldest. You know, he had joined the Royal Navy as a boy, lying about his age at age 14. When World War I started, he was late 20s, and all the other officers were typically, well, they're right out of school or even in school, higher-born fellows. Just didn't quite get along with them all. But it didn't stop him. I mean, he had a stellar career in the First World War.

Tell me about his First World War service. Yeah, it was a well-known story in the Battle of Jutland. Battle of Jutland had 150 British ships on one side, 99 German ships on the other, and one airplane, which was his. It was probably the most important mission in the Royal Naval Flying Corps to date, and they chose him because he was just that good. If you recall in the old days, it wasn't a very nice aircraft carrier like we have today. It was a seaplane with a crane winched into the ocean, and they chose him because he was just that good. He could fix anything on the plane. He was a great pilot. He had actually designed the radios on the planes themselves. So he was

the guy to make that mission. And it's battle famous for being a kind of Titanic, the apogee of battleship warfare, these two huge fleets of battleships blasting each other, big guns. And the British forget to take an aircraft carrier, don't they? But there is this moment where aircraft do play an important part. Yeah, absolutely. There was bad weather, a lot of fog, a lot of smoke, guns with smoke everywhere. And they decided to launch this one plane over the German fleet, which was his. It was him and his observer, about 80 miles an hour plane, not very capable, strings and

sticks. But it showed exactly what happened. He flew over the German fleet. He saw exactly where it was. The German fleet changed direction. He went after them. They couldn't hit him. I guess they weren't really used to shooting at planes much. And his observer radioed back the position back to the British fleet. And that's how it worked. It showed the future of aviation. And as you were saying, Dan, that was the last really big battleship battle in naval history. So this was the first time any heavier than air aircraft had carried out,

had seen an enemy fleet. The first carry-launched combat mission. Yeah. It's incredible. And so he lands on the water, but sadly though, his very, very useful reconnaissance doesn't get through to Admiral Jellicoe, the British commander on that day. No, it didn't. They just hadn't figured this all out yet. It was really obvious that this was the future and planes would be dominating the naval warfare. It wasn't quite there yet, but it was big enough that everyone knew it was happening. Yeah.

So he does extraordinary work there. Rutland of Jutland. He then does some heroic stuff. He jumps overboard and various things. So tell me about that. Yeah. You know, he only made one mission at Jutland. He was very frustrated that he couldn't do more.

The sea was getting bad and such. And he was sitting there impotently complaining that the other seaplane carrier, the companion, hadn't showed up. And one of the other British warships was hit and was being towed by his ship back towards England. And it was sinking. And what they decided is they tried to pass the sailors on the other ship over to his ship. And at one point, some fellow fell off a stretcher into the water in the North Sea. And what Mr. Ellen, what he did is he grabbed a rope and went over the side between these two ships that were tossing in the water, grabbed the sailor and pulled him back

aboard, which the people on the ship just couldn't believe his bravery. This is the same mission after he's done the first combat aircraft carrier mission, right? He's having quite a couple of days here. He's having a big couple of days and he becomes a celebrated war hero in the UK. Very celebrated worldwide. Partly because his name Rutland rhymed with Jutland, so it became kind of buzzworthy in the media. And then a year later, he does an extraordinary thing. He takes off from a kind of platform. If people think about these very, very long guns, these big gun battleships have had,

well, imagine if you create a platform between those big long guns, you can take a light aircraft off from that platform. And he does that, doesn't he, In 1917, almost exactly a year later. A platform is sort of a charitable, I would call it a very large board. You know, and what basically it was like, like we're saying, really smart and driven fellow. And what he figured out is that one of these planes like us hop with could take off in 20 feet. He was just benchmarking how long it took people to take off. And he realized he could, with this board, you can kind of, as you go over the board, you can drop a little bit because you're high up, right?

And just take off. He demonstrated that that could be done. And that was very exciting for the British Navy because, you know, in the old days, you know, with a seaplane carrier, the ships had to actually stop to winch the plane into the water, right? And here, by taking off on top of a board on the ship, the ship was still moving. Yeah. And actually, the moving is the key part, right? Because you can create more lift. If you're doing 25 miles an hour, you get some wind across the flight deck, as it were, and the plane's going to take off even quicker. Yeah, exactly. And then the ship doesn't have to go out of line to do that, right? So the ships are all together. Ironically, one of the ships that

he demonstrated this taking off on top of a board, on top of a turret, was the Repulse, which was very, very, very ironically later sunk by his Japanese patrons. Oh yeah, well, we'll come to that dark day for the Royal Navy in a second. What goes on after the war? Because you mentioned the class thing, but he's appointed to command a unit on board HMS Eagle. He's doing well, right? He's doing well. He's extremely talented.

He's making technology move forward. The admirals love him. He's not so good with his peers or his men. His men didn't like him when he was squadron leader. Some of that was at class. Was it just his dominating personality? A couple of his folks, they complained that when a reporter came onto the ship, he didn't let anyone else talk.

So he was not getting along with his men, was fair to say. And I should just quickly say, HMS Eagle, one of the earliest aircraft carriers in the Royal Navy and in the world. So he's at the heart of the action. But yeah, by 1922, I learned from you, MI5 have taken interest in him. What's going on? Yeah. So he's losing out after the war ends. There's the wartime hero and the peacetime doesn't work out for them. This is certainly a case of this. He's in the new Royal Air Force and they basically tell him, look, sir, you're not going to get promoted in the post-war Royal Air Force. They didn't say, we don't like you or you're low born. They say, look, how many Germans did you shoot down? How many planes did you shoot down? He's like, well, none.

And so one day he's frustrated, he's annoyed. And the Japanese Navy had an office in Westminster and he walked in one day and he said, I'd like to talk to you. My name is Rutland. And these two Japanese officers were there and they said, we know exactly who you are. We'd like to talk to you as well. They make them an offer to become an advisor, take them over to Japan to advise them on the new air strike force of the Japanese Navy. What do the Brits think of the Japanese point? They've been allies in World War I. They'd had a naval agreement for earliest years of the 20th century. Were they allies or was there now a creeping concern about Japanese

competition in the Pacific? I think it's both. So they're definitely allies and there was definitely creeping competition. But a statement was made by one of his defenders in some later speeches was the British Navy and the Japanese Navy were very, very tight. The Japanese Naval Academy was modeled after the British one. And someone said, we forget that back then, a lot of the British admirals had dogs named Togo, which they named after the Japanese admiral. And they said that, I think, genuinely complimenting them. Maybe it sounds funny to name your dog after an admiral, but anyway, there was both. Yeah. And of course, Western journalists and Western people like to call Togo, that admiral who defeated the Russians so famously in 1905. They like to call him the Nelson of the East. So they were popular. And yet, slightly weird that one of their finest

has gone and signed up to work with them. What does he do in Japan? Is it all above board at this stage? Is he just out there accepting the job and it's legal? MI5 is certainly not happy about this. They put his passport on hold for a few months. They're trying to figure out what he's doing. He's not officially sponsored. There were more than a couple of Brits out there in Japan at the time. Notably, the head designer at Sotwith was working at Mitsubishi. But the Japanese do a very basic bit of subterfuge to get him out there.

The plan is to get him out there and work directly with the Japanese Navy, directly to redesign their new carriers and such. But they just say, look, he's going to be working for Mitsubishi, a private company. And the British didn't know that. He's got a thousand page file over at Q. And the British never found out

that he was working directly for the Japanese Navy. That only shows up in the Japanese accounts. You're listening to Dan Snow's history hit. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research

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Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So he's working allegedly for a private company, but effectively for the Navy as well. He's just helping to found the soon to be legendary Japanese naval air arm, is he? Yeah, that's exactly right. The Japanese did have a naval air arm, and they were redesigning their first attempts at carriers, which were called the Akagi and the Kaga, which went on to lead the strike on Pearl Harbor. And early on, they had the same problems the British did. It was really hard to land onto one of these planes without killing yourself. That was one thing.

It was very hard to get the planes to fly in formation and go out and bomb something and come back. It was very challenging to get that all done. And he helped with that. There was a few things going on. He was very big into the hydraulic landing gear, which, stay with me for a moment, this is actually an interesting thing,

is that these light, early planes would hit the deck of a carrier and actually bounce off. So today our planes are very heavy. But back then they were so light, they would hit the deck, a wind gust would hit up and then the plane would go right overboard. Fixing this, there was the netting of course, but there was the hydraulic shocks on the wheels, which helped a lot. Wow. Okay. And so he's really getting into the weeds. He's talking about aircraft, he's talking about landing gear, everything needed for the whole strike package. The whole thing, the earlier ships, where do you put the smokestack of the plane so that the wind doesn't impact the landing? There's all these little things to get done.

Yeah. Amazing. He obviously enjoys his time in Japan because he then does go from semi-legit to full-on intelligence agent. Yeah, absolutely. So in his work with the Japanese Navy, he gets to know a lot of the top admirals, including Admiral Yamamoto, Admiral Shimada, who ran the Japanese Navy. And eventually, the Japanese Navy, they realized that A, there's going to be a war with the U.S. at some point over the Pacific. It'll be dominated by carrier aviation. And they need to crank up their data gathering in the U.S., specifically in California. Los Angeles had about 65% of airplane production. So, Lockheed and Douglas, as well as the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

Lockheed and Douglas, as well as the US Pacific fleet. And they need someone to go out there who's not Japanese because a Japanese person would get suspicious, right? And they think of, well, this fellow Rutland was wonderful last time. Let's see if he wants to work for us again. We can send him to Hollywood. You're going to Hollywood, kid. When I've talked to people in the intelligence world, they often say, despite what you see in the movies around honey traps and blackmail and sexuality, the surest way to recruit an agent is to look for people who feel they've been overlooked. And I guess Rutland was furious. I guess he felt he should have climbed higher than he had. He absolutely felt he was the best and you could argue he was. What was his cover? What was he doing out in California? He decided to become a trading company executive, start his own trading company. When he was in Yokohama earlier on, he really liked the lifestyle of the British trading company execs. They were

in Shanghai and Yokohama, Beijing, right? And so this was the cover. But what he found is in Hollywood, the early silent film stars were very heavily British. Charlie Chaplin and Boris Karloff show up quite a bit, but Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone, and they have a little British social club called the British United Services Club in Hollywood. And this was a block from Charlie Chaplin's studio on Sycamore Drive. The British actors could go there

and they eat their bangers and mash or whatever they do. And they have some whiskey and they party heavily and then they can let in whichever women want to come in. No women are allowed other than the ones they want in there. No spouses are allowed, right? They're all in either the dress, tuxedo, British Army, Navy outfit, or kilt if you're Scots was fine. They'd have some fairly legendary parties in here. And he fell in with them. He's a famous war hero. He could tell a good story. A lot of these folks were sort of lowborn. It's funny, you read the American accounts and we Americans, we can't tell British class stuff, right? They could leave a great impression. The FBI says, yes, he gives

the appearance of breeding and so on. And so they're having a wonderful time in Hollywood together. He can afford the kind of fast life because he's getting money from the Japanese, is he? That's exactly right. One of my Japanese naval friends today went back and did the math, and his salary worked out to be 10x the highest Japanese admiral at the time. Yeah, he really worked them over for pay. The house he lived is up in the Hollywood Hills. There's a neighborhood called the Bird Streets. All the streets are named after birds.

And the house there, if you look on one of the websites today, it's worth $14 million. It's on a double lot with a great view. Just absolutely beautiful place, which he bought for cash with Japanese Navy money. So if there's any question that if the Japanese valued his contribution, certainly they weren't paying everyone like this. So he's a Japanese agent. He's living in Hollywood. He's splashing cash around.

Is he providing any useful information? How is he getting it back to the Japanese? Yeah, there's a couple of ways to do it. The simplest was the Japanese shipping companies were sailing into the Los Angeles Harbor all the time. And he could just write down his report and give it to a ship captain. It would never be interrupted, right? They'd take it back. But he was also visiting Japan about once a year on holiday or business. And we just go there, go to the Japanese admiralty and give his report. It's crazy. And is he running agents himself? How is he gathering intelligence?

Yeah. So Dan, there's a couple of ways to gather intelligence and his favorite way, which was most valuable, was really just getting drunk with the right people. So if you look at the newspapers of the day, he's running the party at this club. Chaplin and his friends are there and the head of the American Pacific Fleet's there along with a lot of his men, right? So you can just imagine the most famous British pilot from World War I is out there drinking with these American aviators and admirals, right? And he says, wow, when I was at Jutland, my plane flew like this. How's your new plane? And they would tell him, right? So that's like the easiest thing to do for him. Another agent couldn't do that. So the Japanese

also recruited some drunk ex-sailor down the docks who would never be able to get any kind of information like this. So that's the first way. The second way was, as you were saying, was just hiring someone to go in. So there's in the FBI docs, he hires unusually an IRA member, an Irish nationalist to become the night janitor at Lockheed and sends him in. This fellow used to work for Boris Karloff and that's how Rutland met him. And so they recommended him to the folks at Lockheed who hired this guy. And if you think about it, night janitor is really your ideal job if you want to go and steal secrets from a plant, right? You're walking all the way

through the plant at night. You can go anywhere and steal information out. And that's what he did. It's wild. The Japanese are getting good intelligence off him. He's doing his job. He's doing his job. You could argue how well, but he's spending a lot of money and he's doing this job. The P-38 Lightning was the new plane that Lockheed was making. He got their plans out to Japan, for example. When does he start to attract the gaze of counterintelligence experts? Or does he get away with it? He gets away with it for a very long time, very much, as they say, hiding in plain sight. It starts getting a little suspicious at some point. The thing that really hit it was the start of World War II in Europe. So what happens is he gets called for his annual trip over to Japan.

This is in August 1939. And he's got one of his daughters from the UK staying with him. He left a first wife and a couple of kids in England. He was trying to repair some relationships with his daughter in England, who was feeling a little neglected and brings her out to Los Angeles and lets her party with the stars and then takes her over to Japan with him while he's on business. And while he's out there, World War II breaks out in Europe. So he's there September 1st, he's looking around Japan and it's just become a very militant society.

You know, there's war erupting, there's soldiers marching everywhere. And on the way back from their trip to Japan, you know, of course, they stop in Pearl Harbor for a week. Well, she can go to the beach and he can go check out, you know, the naval base. And back then, you know, all the other Brits are starting to do, you know, British rescue, British war relief, raising money. And he's not interested in any of this. And they think it's very, very strange that he's not. The money he's been throwing around, and it didn't seem possible, but it became possible, if that makes any sense. And that's when the actors go to the FBI. The actors? Like his buddies, all his new drinking buddies? the actors, like his buddies or his new drinking buddies. Yeah, his acting drinking buddies that he's been partying with, they do go to the FBI. They say, look, we didn't think this was possible that this British warrior was a Japanese spy, but it's the only possible explanation. And the FBI dig deep and they're like, well,

what's going on? What is he doing? And that's what starts the ball rolling in a bad direction for him. Does he get arrested? It gets kind of crazier and crazier. So the last thing that the British wanted was for this fellow to be arrested. So at the time, Britain's trying to get US to come into the war against the Nazis. And the last thing they would want was the newspaper headlines showing that their British war hero was helping the Japanese spies, right? That's the last thing the US wanted as well.

And so instead of getting arrested, they arranged for him to go back to England, kind of exile him back home. They tell the British, look, this is your guy. This is your problem. I mean, no wonder the Americans do not trust the British. Whether it's in Los Alamos, whether it's here here whether it's MI6 later like the British intelligence services are leaky they're leaky that's all I want to say and I apologize to all my American listeners for this okay so he he's kind of too big to fail in a way like he gets away with it in some ways he gets away with it for a very very long time absolutely yep so

he's sent home to the UK yes and uh it appears that some folks at MI6 gave him a little bit of a bill of goods. They said, you know, if you go back, maybe you can get a job back in intelligence back in Britain, right? Which is a lie. They're not going to trust him, right? There's no chance, but this is how they get him to go back home. The plane lands in Ireland to refuel and they take his passport and he says, hey, what's going on here? Supposed to be a hero here. Okay. And then do the Brits lock him up? So the Brits are busy trying to see what they can lock him up for and they've got nothing.

They certainly got evidence he's spying against the US, which is not a crime in Britain at the time. They ask the FBI what's happening and the FBI says, we've got enough evidence on this guy to shoot him. The MI6 memo at the time is, I find it hilarious. They say, we think they're being rhetorical about being able to shoot him, but we're not quite sure. And so they don't have evidence. But finally, what happens is after Pearl Harbor and Britain joins the war against Japan, they're able to lock him up without trial under the wartime regulations, which allow you to arrest people for being enemies of the state without any evidence, really, or any trial.

And is he disgraced publicly at that point? They keep it as quiet as they can until it hits the House of Commons when some of his friends from the Royal Navy decide that he's been given a raw deal. And it really would have gotten very big in the press had there not been a war on, I would say. He ends up taking his own life not long after the end of the war. Yeah. His son said he was a bitterly angry man. And no doubt that's correct. Yeah. And he left a very touching suicide note to his kids. Did he maintain his innocence? Yeah, he maintains innocence. One of his daughters, the one from the US, came to visit him and was pleading with him to try to clear his name. And he's like, you can't clear your name

if you've never been accused of a crime. So he was interned for the length of the war and then just released with no charge. Yeah. And they kept him in jail longer than like Oswald Mosley or the British fascists. They kept him in jail for a very long time, right to the end of the war when they had to let him go. What a wild story. In terms of Japanese sources, is there anything that you can put your finger on that they, I guess he was all over the carrier strike group, but was there anything in particular they were able to tweak and change in their plans to take on the Pacific fleet because of his intelligence? there anything particular they were able to tweak and change in their plans to take on the Pacific fleet because of his intelligence? There was a few things. One was the intelligence from the American aircraft manufacturers. The Pacific is very large, and the Japanese developed right after the Americans, very long-range planes. So the Mitsubishi Zero was famously able to go 10, 12 hours, right? This was key in making Pearl

Harbor strike happen. We believe this came from him, for example. Wow. He played a material role in events leading up to Pearl Harbor and Japanese naval doctrine. That's an amazing, amazing story. Thank you very much for bringing Frederick Rutland of Jutland to our attention. What is the book called? The book is called Beverly Hills Spy, and it was just published recently by HarperCollins, and I encourage your listeners to check it out. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Appreciate it, Dan. you