This essay examines the risks facing Japan as the only country without intelligence agencies such as the CIA or FBI.
Through historical cases of British intelligence operations, it exposes the structural vulnerability of postwar Japan.

2016-08-24
Perhaps that is why I have continued to write that Japan, the only country in the world without the CIA or the FBI, is no exaggeration to say a nation filled with danger.
Lately, I have been skimming newspapers diagonally, but just now my eye stopped on the book review column of today’s Nikkei.
I have written several times that Japan is the only country in the world without the CIA or the FBI, and that it is no exaggeration to say this makes it extremely dangerous.
For example, amid an era dominated by elegant isolationism and anti-Semitism, the United States—then even more the world’s champion than it is today—enjoyed the greatest wealth and prosperity on earth, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that it had absolutely no intention of fighting Nazi Germany.
I have written that in order to bring this United States into the war, British intelligence continued every conceivable intrigue and finally succeeded in imposing an oil embargo on Japan, Japan’s lifeline, and this book review convinced me that what I wrote was probably one hundred percent correct.
(The intelligence officer Somerset Maugham mentioned here without any annotation must surely be that writer, I thought, and when I searched Wikipedia, it was indeed him.)
No one would doubt that the facts written here represent the true nature of intelligence operations.
For the intelligence services of South Korea and China,
taking control of media such as Asahi Shimbun, which had dominated Japan until the year before last, must have been easier than twisting a baby’s arm.
Moreover, Japan has neither the CIA nor the FBI.
All emphasis in the text other than the title is mine.

Lenin vs. British Intelligence by Giles Milton

Depicting the Anglo-Soviet spy war after the revolution

At the end of the First World War, which claimed some nine million lives in Europe, the February Revolution broke out in Russia in 1917, and in August, Somerset Maugham of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, commonly known as MI6) infiltrated the capital Petrograd and informed Prime Minister Kerensky that Britain would provide funds to continue the war against Germany and prepare for the coming Bolshevik struggle.
However, due to the prime minister’s indecisiveness, Maugham’s top-secret mission came to nothing.
After the October Revolution, Lenin, who became head of the Soviet regime and won the civil war against counterrevolutionary forces, declared that the first target of attack against Western capitalist nations would be the British Indian Empire.

Incidentally, the SIS, founded in 1909, responded to this major event in a way that stunned the world.

This book deals with five years of Anglo-Soviet espionage from the Russian Revolution to the conclusion of the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement in 1921.

Immediately after the outbreak of World War I, in September 1914, the SIS established an eighteen-member station inside the Russian Army Ministry in Petrograd.

The station chief was a former Conservative Member of Parliament and baronet, and its members included writers, diplomats, army and navy officers, newspaper reporters, businessmen, and musicians.
They were masters of disguise and deception.

However, assassination attempts on Lenin and plots to overthrow the Soviet government triggered the brutal “Red Terror” by the Cheka, the Russian secret police, and all station members were expelled from the country.
Subsequently, as the Indian revolutionary operation linking the Red Army and anti-British Islamic forces intensified, three SIS agents re-infiltrated the Soviet Union.
They risked their lives to uncover Soviet strategy.
They boldly disguised themselves as Red Army vehicle drivers, Cheka officers ordered to arrest themselves under outstanding warrants, or guests attending the founding congress of the Comintern.

The information they gathered was put to use by Indian Empire intelligence.
While the Soviet Indian Empire operation was underway, the Soviet economy teetered on the brink of collapse due to industrial stagnation and crop failures.
It was a complete failure of the much-vaunted “War Communism” policy.
With millions of citizens on the verge of starvation, the Soviet government’s desperate remedy was to sign a trade agreement with Britain.
This came with a strong British condition: the permanent abandonment of all conspiracies against the Indian Empire.
By then, the SIS already had senior Soviet officials under its control and was accurately grasping the contents of top-secret meetings in Moscow just hours after they took place.

Thus, the lesson that intelligence operations “can strike the enemy more thoroughly than old-fashioned warfare” became a guiding principle of British foreign policy thereafter.

Review
Professor Emeritus Hiroshi Kawanari, Hosei University