CIC Investigates Communist Espionage Activity in Tokyo (15 NOV 1948)

Photo By Erin Thompson | Political rally in downtown Tokyo, c. 1945 (William B. Simpson Special Collection)  

UNITED STATES

11.13.2023

Story by Erin Thompson 

U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence

by Erin E. Thompson, USAICoE Staff Historian

15 NOVEMBER 1948
On 15 November 1948, the 441st Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) Detachment in Tokyo closed its investigation into the Japanese Urban People’s Department, an organization directed by the Japanese Communist Party (JCP). For eight months, the CIC surveilled the innocuous-sounding entity for evidence of communist espionage activities during the American occupation of Japan.

The JCP formed in the late nineteenth century during a tumultuous period in Japanese history that saw a power struggle between the old imperial and new industrial powers. As Japan became more industrialized, its economy boomed, and political activism began to grow. After World War I, the Soviet Union saw Japan as the best place for the next communist revolution—until the formation of the Chinese Communist Party under revolutionary Mao Zedong quickly shifted Soviet focus away from the island nation. This allowed the JCP to evolve largely without Soviet influence in the early twentieth century.

In the 1920s and 1930s, political repression intensified in Japan, with many JCP members rounded up and arrested—or executed. At the end of World War II, many of these members were released from prison by the American occupying forces and began rebuilding the communist platform in Japan that had fallen away over more than a decade of incarceration. Relations between the Americans and the JCP quickly soured over the next two years, and by late 1947, the party was staunchly anti-American.

In March 1948, the 441st CIC Detachment began investigating the JCP for a suspected espionage network in Tokyo, as several rosters of organizations, office locations, and national operations under the JCP’s so-called Liaison Bureaus were circulated. One of these organizations was the Japanese Urban People’s Department, which informants claimed was collecting information on the Allied occupation forces in Japan to pass on to high-level communist command offices, both nationally and worldwide. The Urban People’s Department quickly caught on to the CIC’s focus on the organization and began holding secret meetings with its JCP delegates. The organization also did “considerable shuffling of personnel…, designed to confuse [the] CIC.”

Despite the CIC’s belief this organization was conducting espionage activities, no proof ever surfaced. Investigations of the organization in other cities resulted in similar conclusions. A report from the CIC Nagasaki, Area 2, detachment noted:

"The Urban People’s Department is mainly charged with the responsibility of executing party propaganda and campaigns directed toward the ordinary citizens of Nagasaki…There is no indication presently that members of this department or any other department with the Nagasaki District Committee are engaged in any espionage activity against the Allied Occupation Forces installations or personnel in Nagasaki."

Reports from other CIC detachments supported these findings, though the CIC office in Yamagata remained suspicious of an emerging Special Urban People’s Department, which they believed was involved with foreign communist operations.

On 15 November 1948, the 441st CIC Detachment officially closed its case against the Urban People’s Department due to a lack of conclusive evidence of a communist espionage network. The next year, terrorist attacks across Japan caused the government to label the Korean League of the JCP as a terrorist organization, and by 1953, the JCP had lost all of its parliamentary seats. Attacks against the U.S. occupying force in the early 1950s further distanced the communist party from the political mainstream, and it began splintering internally. In 1955, new party leadership condemned these activities in the name of communism and for the next few years, the JCP remained out of the spotlight.

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• Date Taken: 11.13.2023
• Date Posted: 11.13.2023 09:33
• Story ID: 457702
• Location: US