Episode 1: Safecracker

Subscribe to MS Now Premium on Apple Podcasts. For early access, add free listening and bonus content to all of MS Now's original podcasts, including the chart-topping series, The Best People with Nicole Wallace. Why is this happening? Main Justice and more. Plus new episodes of all your favorite MS Now shows, Add Free, and Add Free Listening to all of Rachel Maddow's original series, including Rachel Maddow Presents, Burn Order. Subscribe to MS Now Premium on Apple Podcasts. The Summer of 1982. Good morning. This is today. It's Tuesday, August 17th. I'm Bryant Gumbel. Year two of the presidency of Ronald Reagan. That was President Reagan in a nationally televised speech last night from the White House, making a sober plea to Americans to support. The number one song in the country is I of the Tiger. The Summer's smash hit movie is E.T. E.T. Oh, no. And in Washington, Democrats and Republicans are at each other's throats over a big controversial bill to raise taxes. What we need now is an end to the bickering. In that Summer of 1982, there's a researcher posted up inside the National Archives, which is just a few blocks from the White House. This researcher has been coming to the archives for years and it's basically her second home. On a typical day, she's at the archives right up until closing time. She's maybe five feet tall. She's got big glasses. She's usually got a brown bag lunch with her and also her own personal copy machine that she lugs to and from the archives every day. But she's not a professor or an author who's there doing research for a book. She's not a 20-something student either. Quite the opposite, in fact. She's a retiree. She's a retired housewife, living in suburban Washington, D.C. And she started coming to the archives basically as a hobby. It started just out of her own interest to do research in the National Archives. This hobbyist researcher, this retiree, her name is Aiko. Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga. One of the great blessings in my life was meeting and getting to know Aiko. Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga hasn't had any formal research training at all. But in her own way, with her own methods, she's developed an almost uniquely encyclopedic understanding of what's in the parts of the archives where she has been spending all of this time. She knew the archives like the back of her hand. She would go there every single day, look at all of the government documents. Her husband would join her. When Aiko's husband, Jack, gets off work in Washington, he often heads straight to the National Archives himself. He finds Aiko in there. He rolls up his sleeves to get to work alongside her. It's a passion that they share, to the point that it's ended up kind of taking over their lives a little bit. Or at least it has taken over parts of their house. Her files that she'd accumulated over the years took up the whole inside of their condo, even in the bathroom, there were boxes. Aiko was the most dogged researcher that I have ever met. And I've been praised as a dogged researcher. And she was way, way ahead of me. Part of what makes Aiko so effective in her work in the archives is that she's developed her own very specific, very detailed filing system. She uses that portable copy machine to make her own copies of some important documents. But she also creates her own sorting system, her own index basically, of where every document is and how each of those documents connects to every other document. She took such meticulous notes. Every piece of paper that she saw was given a number so that she could keep track of them. And this was way before computers. This was all hand-done. I mean, she is like your dream researcher, God. You talk about somebody, you can find anything. And what was it? She found, she found a document. One afternoon in that summer of 1982, Aiko, her Zig Yoshinaga, is at her usual perch inside the National Archives. And she does spot this one document sitting on the corner of a desk. It's a document that is not supposed to exist. And because it's not supposed to exist, Aiko has not been looking for this thing. Nobody's been looking for it. But when she sees it, Aiko of all people, she knows exactly what it is. She was talking to someone and then noticed this document on the desk of somebody else and kind of looked at it and just kind of thought, wow. And she opens it up and she finds these handwritten notes in the margins and she realizes, oh boy. She talked about it with her eyes getting really large and just saying, wow, this is, do you know what this is? When Aiko picked it up and started leafing through, she immediately, I mean, her expression, oh my goodness, look what I found. The document that Aiko found that day, it's a government report, but it's also a ghost. There's a good reason she never would have looked for it. It's because there's no file, no record anywhere, no index card, no catalog that would have ever pointed her to it. The only record anyone has found, the only record Aiko has ever found about this document explicitly says that every single copy of this document has been destroyed. Every single copy of this government report was officially certified to have been incinerated, destroyed on purpose by fire. But here it is, not even singed, not even smoky, sitting right in front of her. As soon as I opened it, wow, I said, wow, this is it. And it was luck. It was luck. If I hadn't walked in that day, it might not have been there. It wasn't really luck. Aiko was there that day because she was there basically every day. And because of that, because of her dogged persistence, she's made this find. She has spotted this document that the US government never wanted anyone to see. This document, they insisted must be destroyed because of what it had the potential to reveal about one of the most disturbing chapters in American history. We all instantly understood that if this gets out, the government is gonna look really, really bad. This was something that nobody could have foreseen in their entire life. I still get a little choked up about that because it changed my life. Ultimately, it would change a lot of lives. This retiree, this self-described little old housewife, she was about to change the course of American history. I'm your host, Rachel Maddow. And this is Rachel Maddow Presents, Burn Order. I never believed that America would be doing this. When he told me about it, I was astounded. It was the classic smoking gun evidence that every lawyer wants to find. If I believe in a constitution, I've got to object to this. This is about all of us. It's about all Americans. Why did this happen? What can we do to make sure it doesn't happen again? Episode one, Safe Cracker. I think he won a Spanish prize in high school or something. He was very fluent in Spanish. He was very good with languages. That's Kenneth Ringel. He's talking about his dad, who was an intelligence officer in the United States Navy. He was on a destroyer that went to Spain. And my father loved the Navy. And he loved being at sea and he loved ships, but he didn't like shore duty. So he looked for a way to make shore duty less mature. And while he was in Madrid, he seized the naval attaché to the embassy there, going around seeing a lot of beautiful women and drinking whiskey. And this was during prohibition, right? This is during prohibition. It's the early 1920s. And Kent Ringel is a newly minted officer in the US Navy. My father, he wasn't a flake exactly, but he was 21, 22. And you know, you're thinking, booze and beautiful women, if I'm being paid to do that, that would be good. So he came back and applied for that job in Madrid. And the guys that said duty officer said, dream on, you know, many people senior, do you have that? However, we know you're good at languages. And if you want to position overseas during your shore duty, we have this program opening up in Japan. Imperial Japan had started a war with China in 1894. Japan beat China in that war. Then 10 years later, Imperial Japan had started a war with Russia and Japan beat Russia in that war. And then 10 years after that, Imperial Japan joined World War I and set out to take for itself every island north of the equator that Germany claimed as a colony. There were a whole bunch of them. It took Japan's Imperial Navy all of two weeks to seize every one of those islands for itself. In military terms, Imperial Japan was just a behemoth. It was the second largest empire in the world. And it had an escalating habit of invading its neighbors and waging wars to conquer new territory, wars which it generally won. A country like that, it makes sense that it would be important for the U.S. to have eyes and ears on what they might do next. At least that is what the U.S. Navy definitely thought at the time. They sent my father there and he learned, it was a very interesting program because they had very intensive training in Tokyo language training. And then for the next two years, they were assigned to go someplace where they would never see another Anglo or anybody who spoke English. They wanted totally immersion in Japanese. Ken Ringle didn't speak a word of Japanese before he went to that country. He was one of a handful of young officers who were placed by the U.S. Navy in that country technically as language students. But it wasn't hard to see that once they were there, they were expected to do a little more than just learn the language. I guess it was understood that he would be an intelligence there because that's why they were teaching him this stuff. He hadn't been interested in intelligence before that, I don't think. He really wanted a place where he could drink and see beautiful women. Ken Ringle was good with languages and he also really was interested in having a good time. But both of those things would end up serving him well and serving his country well while he spent these crucial years in Japan. My father was extremely good looking and I can show you a picture of him. And he'd go to the dishes houses. Well, the Japanese militarists were starting to take over there and new officers in the Japanese Navy would go in there and have a couple of hits of sake and start saying, we're going to take over the fucking world, man. We're going to conquer America and do all this stuff. And the Kishis just hated him. And so they would tell my father everything these guys said. And then he would tell his superiors, this is what the Japanese guys are saying. Lieutenant Commander Ken Ringle would quickly become one of the preeminent intelligence experts inside the US Navy on issues related to Japan. His years in Japan, his language skills, it was all just invaluable at a time when Imperial Japan was beginning to have global military ambitions, ambitions that of course would soon focus on America. All of this would ultimately culminate in the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. But in the years leading up to that attack, there was a concerted American effort to understand Japanese intentions and capabilities, both at home and abroad. In the United States, there was an effort to identify and locate anyone in this country who might be spying here, for them, against us. Today's threat to our national security is not a matter of military weapons alone. We know of other methods, new methods of attack, the Trojan horse, the fifth column, the Petrazen nation unprepared for treachery. At Japan's US Embassy in Washington, US Naval Intelligence suspected a military attaché at the Embassy of running a whole ring of spies for Japan inside the United States. One US Navy intelligence officer made friends with that attaché. He made sure to learn his favorite cocktails and the favorite drinks of everyone on the attaché's staff. He invited the attaché and his whole staff to his own house for a dinner party, whereupon he kept them happy for hours, having round after round after round of drinks. While that excessively long, excessively boozy dinner party was underway, Naval Intelligence, meanwhile, had a technical team doing an inch by inch search of every nook and cranny of that spy master's office. That's how Naval Intelligence busted that spy ring, which had infiltrated the Washington Navy yard and other US military installations on the East Coast. But it wasn't only the spies that Japan sent over to the country's embassy and consulates here. Inside the United States, Japan had a surprisingly large cast of Americans, notably native-born US citizens, not people of Japanese descent, who were either spying for Japan or secretly working for them as paid agents. Mr. Ralph Townsend, a career officer of our consular service, vice consulate Chang-Hai and Fu-Chao for two years, author of Asia Answers and Ways That Are Dark, whose recent testimony before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States Senate attracted wide attention. Ralph Townsend was an avowed American fascist. He said that Japan and Germany were the last great nation national cultures, which on a racial basis presented an effective defense against Jewish Bolshevism. Tokyo government is the only one among major powers never to default on a single dollar of debt to us. Ralph Townsend was an activist with the America First Movement. His books and pamphlets praised the Japanese military, defended Japanese and German fascism. He advocated that the US should either ally itself with Japan and Germany in the Axis, or stay out of the burgeoning world war altogether. All of us are aware of conditions which make war for the United States a possibility. Let us not, as a nation, commit suicide for a fiction. Federal agents ultimately came to suspect that the magazine that Ralph Townsend worked for was secretly funded by the Nazis. They also discovered that Townsend was being paid by Japan to spread propaganda on its behalf. Townsend was arrested for being a Japanese agent. He was prosecuted and put in prison. He was soon indicted for sedition. But Ralph Townsend wasn't alone, and he wasn't even the weirdest character who they recruited. There was also the owner of an antique doll shop in New York City. In what the FBI called a doll code, she would send letters out of the country that appeared on the surface to be about her doll business, but they were really coded messages to Japan about US Navy ships. When she wrote about dolls in hula skirts, that was code for US ships in Hawaii. When she wrote about dolls spending time in the doll hospital, that was code for ships in dry dock being repaired. The doll shop spy was ultimately caught red-handed. Serial numbers on cash and her possession were traced to the Japanese consulate. She too was convicted and sentenced to federal prison. She only narrowly avoided the death penalty for espionage. Spies, saboteurs, and traitors are the actors in this new strategy. With all of these, we must and will deal vigorously. While Japan ran this weird crew of spies and agents in the United States, the US government turned to naval intelligence, and its young Japan specialist officers like Kenneth Rinkle, to help root out spies working for Japan, and to help the US government assess whether Japanese Americans, people of Japanese descent living here, posed any threat, particularly on the Pacific coast. They say, we want you to be in California, and we want you to go around and assess the loyalty of the Japanese Americans, because nobody knows, FDR wants to know this. FDR wants to know. The American government, the American president, wants to know about Japanese Americans living on the US West Coast. Are they loyal? If war with Japan does come, will they be with the US or with Japan? There was a lot of suspicion of the Japanese Americans. So the head of the Fifth Naval District told my father, you go do this. You go do this. You, Ken Ringle, go immerse yourself in the Japanese community on the West Coast of the United States. Go assess their loyalty, and report back on what you find. And so in early 1941, months before the Pearl Harbor attack, Ken Ringle got to work on this highly sensitive mission. People think of intelligence, people that sneak around. My father would go to the Japanese American events, speak Japanese, and said, I'm an intelligence officer with the United States. Ken Ringle spent months gathering intelligence in Japanese American circles, but he wasn't undercover, he was introducing himself, building relationships, attending meetings. Almost everything he did was right out in the open. Almost everything. I knew that he did secret stuff. Most of what he did was not, you know, the break-in was really unusual. The break-in. That's next. Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Ringle came home from work early that day. Right around lunchtime. His wife, Margaret, knew that something was different, something was off. She said, your father always told me never to ask him about his work, because he couldn't tell me anything about it. But she said, when he came home and took a nap, and then got up at sunset and dressed in black and put on his sneakers and went out, because the evening I knew something was up. It was the spring of 1941, and Ken Ringle was heading out at dusk to conduct a burglary. Ringle's son did not learn about this episode in his father's life until decades later. I never asked him in detail anything that he did. One day I just asked him, what did you do? And he said, well, one thing we did was we broke into the Japanese consulate. And I said, oh, Christ. Naval Intelligence Officer Ken Ringle planned and carried out a break-in at the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles. When he told me about it, I was astounded. And I said, Jesus Christ, that was a big deal. I suppose you'd been caught. And he said, we couldn't have been caught. We had the Los Angeles police outside. We had the FBI with us. We had everything. We'd even checked our own safe cracker out of San Quentin. Ringle knew that the consulate had a locked safe. He was pretty certain that's where the most sensitive documents would be held. Who better to help with that than a real pro? I can just imagine how amused the safe cracker would have been. Hot damn, get back to work. With the safe cracker, they had sprung from San Quentin, with the LAPD keeping watch outside, with a small group of FBI agents. Ken Ringle broke into that consulate. He told me that they went in there, cracked the safe, and then took everything out and photographed it, and then put it back exactly as it was. And then went and nobody ever discovered it. They got in, cracked the safe, they took photos of every document and every piece of evidence that they found, and then they replaced it all exactly as it had been. I knew if he had done this, there was a good reason for it. And he found what he wanted. The big thing was the list of their spots. He pretty much knew that he would find those. Ken Ringle did find those. Detailed lists of all of the Japanese government's spies and intelligence assets operating up and down the West Coast. They were spying not just on military installations and US Navy ships, but also on things like oil infrastructure. There were lists of agents and codes and contact points for Japan's whole West Coast spy network. But Ken Ringle also found something else in those documents. Something equally important, maybe more important. He went there for two reasons, to find out the list of Japanese spies. And the second thing that he learned there that he found it even more was the fact that the Japanese did not trust Japanese Americans. Japan really had been recruiting and running spies all over the country, particularly on the West Coast, including a whole bunch of native-born Americans. But not Japanese Americans. And not immigrants from Japan. The records and the documents on Japan's spying operation that were stolen by US Naval Intelligence in that insane break-in involving a San Quentin safecracker furloughed just for that day. Those records showed that the Tokyo government was adamant they were even annoyed that Japanese Americans were of no help to them. They wrote to their agents, if you're coming in here and we're, you know, trying to get people loyal to the emperor, don't trust the American Japanese. For Ken Ringle, this was not only an enormously important intelligence hall for the US government. This was also something of a personal validation for what he himself had come to believe. My father believed that most of the Japanese Americans were loyal. And he wanted proof of that. But I don't think he quite realized that they would have in there as many statements about don't trust the Japanese Americans. Ken Ringle knew that war with Japan was very likely to come. And he knew from his own experiences in Japanese American circles that they were intensely loyal to this country. The break-in, that was his proof of this loyalty. Lots of people in this country were indicted as Japanese agents at the start of World War II. A bunch of guys who wrote for right-wing newspapers and publications like the then conservative New York Daily News, and the Washington Herald and the Chicago Tribune, and the American Mercury magazine. There was a big blustery Klansman, the Klegel of Camden, New Jersey, whose lectures on what he called 100% Americanism turned out to be secretly paid for by the government of Japan. Just before Pearl Harbor, naval intelligence described that Klansman flat out as a quote espionage agent working for Japan. There was that prolific American fascist Ralph Townsend, and the doll lady, her name was Velvalee Dickinson. There was a famous, very rich, very well-connected British pilot. There was a well-known silent film star. There was a guy who wrote soft-core porn novels about nudist colonies. There were a couple of hard-drinking ex-US sailors who'd been kicked out of the US Navy, including one guy everybody called Dodo. There were so many weirdos that Japan had on their payroll inside the United States. But what American officials never found during this entire time, what Ken Ringle never found during his work, was a single Japanese American living in this country who was involved with espionage for Japan. And more than that, what Ken Ringle did discover over his months of investigating and gathering intelligence in California was that Japanese Americans on America's West Coast not only posed no danger to America in the form of spying or sabotage. What he discovered was that they were so loyal. They were actually the best asset we had, the best defense we had, against those types of threats from Japan. He had so much evidence through all these months of the intense loyalty of these people. They were not just loyal to the US, but they were actively working against the militarists. And now Ringle had this new pretty incontrovertible proof, hard evidence from the Japanese government's own files, that they were totally unable to recruit Japanese Americans to work against the United States. Japan had done its best, but found them to be unerringly loyal to the US, totally uninterested in helping Japan. My father always said to me, the best Americans are those who haven't come here yet, who understand the promise of America. And that's what motivates him to come here and to be good citizens. And he felt that the Japanese Americans exemplify this 100%. Ken Ringle would take this information that he'd uncovered. He would eventually run it up the chain of command inside the US military all the way up to the president himself. If war does come with Japan, there is no problem with this immigrant population. They are loyal to this country, they're good American citizens, they can be helpful in this fight. At the time, there were reportedly only about a dozen people in the whole US military who spoke Japanese. Ken Ringle was fluent in multiple variants of Japanese. He had immersed himself in Japanese American communities on the West Coast. He was one of the, if not the, premier intelligence expert in the whole US government on this issue. But Ken Ringle would be pushed aside. Despite what he had learned, despite what he had begun reporting up the chain, as a country, we decided to go down a darker path. And to do that, a new story had to be created to replace the truth that Ken Ringle had uncovered and corroborated and documented. We would need a false story, jinned up by some of the highest ranking officials in the US government, who knowingly suppressed the real intelligence and replaced it with their own made up lie. The fight Ken Ringle was about to be in would result in a stain on this country that would last for decades. One minority group singled out for mass removal, mass detention, arrest and imprisonment based purely on race. The construction of huge camps in the middle of nowhere without access to legal help. The US military deployed on the streets. And all of it done at the stroke of a president's pen and with the Supreme Court's quiet acquiescence. There was tremendous anxiety as they saw neighbors and friends being taken. Farmers would be taken right out of the field. There was just a lot of fear. They told my father to get dressed and come with them. I didn't know what they were trying to do. Everything was done on the fly. America had never incarcerated, you know, a mass body of its citizens before. I couldn't, I never believed that America would be doing this. Reading it almost seems like, you know, reading a movie story. It's not reading the story of your family. That couldn't be. He was told that if you try to escape, this is the bullseye that we'll use to shoot you. This is the story of the American people. This is the story of one of the most shocking US government decisions in our nation's history. And the strange and very specific reason that decision was made. But it's also the story of what it took to stop it, what it took to stand up against it, to undo it, to break its back. And in a quiet moment, when persistence met providence, to find the evidence in that archive, to dig up the real story, and to finally expose it all. Our government has been down some terrible roads before. We have done some terrible things. But the Americans who stopped those things from happening, who put themselves on the line to try to fix it when we went wrong before, they have stories to tell too. Gee, if the American constitution means anything at all, this is wrong. And if I believe in a constitution, I've got to object to this. She said no to the government. No, I will do what's right for everyone. Those documents made it clear the decision of the Supreme Court were tainted. We're tainted with illegal and unethical conduct by our own government. It was the classic smoking gun evidence that every lawyer wants to find. In every era in American history, there have been people who takes a stand and says, this is what I'm going to do, regardless of the consequences. That's all ahead on Rachel Maddo Presents Burn Order. Rachel Maddo Presents Burn Order is a production of MS Now. This episode was written by myself and Mike Yarvitz. The series is executive produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz. It's produced by Kelsey Desiderio and Jen Mulroney-Donovan. Our associate producer is Vasilios Carcelakis, archival support from Holly Klopchin. Katie Lau is the senior manager of audio production for MS Now. Additional audio engineering and sound design by Bob Mallory. Bryson Barnes is the director of podcasts and live streaming for Versant Media. Our web producer is the great Will Femmea. Our senior executive producers are Corey Nazo and Laura Conaway. Aisha Turner is the executive producer for MS Now Audio. And Madeline Herringer is the senior vice president for audio, digital, and long form. Our theme music and additional composing is by New York-based Japanese composer, Miyu Sato. An enormous thanks to the organization, Densho, for providing archival material for the series and for everything that they do. You can find out much more about this series at our website, ms.now slash burn order. He was a very rational guy and he was a winning sort of a guy. I do have to show you this picture. Yeah, let me see. My father is, as a, you don't think of your parents as being good looking, they're just your parents. All right. But whenever I had girlfriends or anybody else came in and saw the Naval Academy yearbook and stopped picking my father, I went, good God. Home to the Rachel Maddow show. Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Psaki and more voices you know and trust. MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world. Learn more at MS.now.