The declassification of United States (US) government records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has unintentionally illuminated a broad spectrum of Cold War-era communist activities. These, as recent scholarship has noted, extended far beyond Europe and the US, encompassing the Far East, notably Japan. As this piece will illuminate, the Kennedy assassination files reveal the importance of domestic non-state actors in Asia. Japan experienced significant sociopolitical upheaval in the 1960s, and the extent of foreign interference, particularly on the part of Moscow, has been largely underexamined. In this context, the release of the Kennedy assassination files throws new light on the scope and scale of Soviet meddling in domestic Japanese politics.
In 1967, four American sailors, later known as the ‘Intrepid Four’, were assisted in their attempts to defect by the Japanese peace movement Beheiren (Peace for Vietnam Citizens’ Alliance) working alongside Soviet intermediaries. The incident both alarmed and frustrated the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Tokyo Station, and exemplified the nuance of Soviet Cold War activities in Japan, utilising local proxies in a country that lay firmly in the US sphere of influence.
Who were the Beheiren?
The Beheiren operated from 1965 to 1974 during a social uprising among Japanese students opposing the Vietnam War. It was established by Tsurumi Shunsuke, who espoused replacing Marxism and German idealism with pragmatism, and the group consisted of intellectuals who opposed both old liberals and communism. Indeed, it is said to have had no political ideology (or, indeed, paid staff) embracing action instead. Operationally, Beheiren’s Chairman Makoto Oda was essential in mobilising public demonstrations and propagating an anti-war message against the US bases in Japan.
Who were the Intrepid Four?
The Intrepid Four were American sailors Craig W. Anderson, Richard R. Bailey, John A. Barilla, and Michael J. Lindner. They deserted from the U.S.S. Intrepid, an aircraft carrier docked in Japan, on 23rd October 1967. Following their desertion, the group was reportedly sheltered by members of Beheiren. The sailors were subsequently smuggled through a covert network of sympathisers, changing safe houses frequently to evade US military police. Eventually, they were escorted out of Japan, transiting through the Soviet Union and reaching Sweden, where they made a public announcement about their defection on 30th December 1967. Their appearance in Stockholm drew global attention and provided symbolic ammunition for anti-war and anti-American narratives worldwide. The Beheiren went on to establish a covert operations team named Japan Technical Committee to Aid Anti-war US Deserters (JATEC) to encourage more American deserters. Eventually they facilitated 16 more deserters from Japan to Sweden between 1967 and 1971.
Analysis of the CIA station in Tokyo
The declassified Kennedy assassination documents indicate that the CIA Tokyo Station closely monitored the Intrepid Four defections. At least two reports speculate on their whereabouts, alongside analysis of activities undertaken by the Beheiren.
After the four sailors went missing, the CIA Tokyo station suspected that they had deserted because of misgivings held about US policy in Vietnam, misgivings that had prompted them to embark on a rash “mis-adventure”. During their stopover in Japan, the sailors were exposed to local anti-war sentiment. This led them to make contact with representatives of Beheiren. The sailors passed from house to house and between different sympathisers to avoid being detected by the Armed Forces police. According to the CIA, the Beheiren treated the defectors well until they left Japan. for example, some senior Beheiren members made a villa available to the US servicemen hidden away in Chigasaki, a southwestern coastal area near Tokyo.
Intriguingly, the CIA reports revealed that the Beheiren arranged for the defection of the four US sailors by liaising with Soviet Embassy officials in Tokyo. The Beheiren’s Chairman, Oda, was known to have links with members of the Soviet Peace Committee, which was affiliated with the Soviet Communist Party. He had, moreover, cultivated ties not only with Eastern-bloc countries but also recruited “many reputable Westerners” by hosting events to promote various kinds of “peace loving policies”.
Furthermore, the CIA Tokyo Station knew of the collusion with the group and the Soviets. Indeed, Yoshikawa Yuichi, responsible for the group's operations, made a telephone call with Sergey D. Anishimov, First Secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo, to request a meeting to discuss “an extremely important, extremely delicate matter”. Indications are that the defectors were provided with additional safe houses through a fellow American sympathiser, Brian Victoria, a Buddhist monk from Nebraska, who, it seems, liaised with the Soviet Embassy to arrange boarding passes for the four sailors on a regular Russian passenger ship from Yokohama to Nakhodka. These revelations complicate previous assessments of the Beheiren, and suggest that it played a more extensive and consequential role as a proxy for Soviet covert operations in Cold War Japan.
After the Intrepid Four surfaced in Sweden in December 1967, the country eventually became home to American soldiers disaffected with the Vietnam War. Indeed, between 1967 and 1973 some 800 Americans officially found a place there, some of whom - we now know - did so with the support of a Soviet-sponsored network run by local Japanese communists.
The consequences of defection
International aspect
The revelation of the Intrepid Four caused significant embarrassment for the US. It exposed ideological dissent within the ranks of the US military, and the sailors' anti-Vietnam War narrative was replayed and amplified in Japan, the Soviet Union, and Sweden. This emphasised American deserters' moral opposition to the Vietnam War and painted the US as internally fragmented. The acceptance of asylum seekers concerned Swedish policymakers who were anxious about a potential political backlash from the US government, and the Swedish Foreign Ministry stressed that the decision to grant asylum to the deserters should not be “interpreted as a hostile act against the US”.
Domestic aspect
Within Japan, the Intrepid Four incident underscored the influence and organisational capabilities of domestic anti-war movements. It also illustrated how civil society organisations, like the Beheiren, could act as intermediaries in broader geopolitical contests, intentionally or not. The Beheiren’s establishment of the JATEC offered US military deserters crucial logistical assistance. In doing so, Japan became a ‘hub’ for deserting members of US armed forces and operated sophisticated escape networks that drew on a combination of local and external (e.g. Soviet) resources, which led to criticism domestically. Indeed, when the revelation was discussed in a Japanese National Diet (Japanese national legislature) session it resulted in criticism from lawmakers due to the failure to detect deserting members.
The repercussions of the incidents have been consistent over many decades. For example, one of the members of the Intrepid Four, Craig Anderson, gave a lecture at a Japanese university in 2017 in which he presented himself as a “patriotic deserter”. Indeed, Anderson’s anti-Vietnam War feelings and reasons for seeking asylum in Sweden stemmed from patriotic convictions. However, we now know that the American’s passage to Scandinavia, and the propaganda windfall it provided to Moscow at the height of the Cold War, was facilitated by the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo, working in close partnership with the Beheiren.
Conclusion
Whilst the JFK assassination files might not have revealed any exciting new evidence relating to the JFK assassination itself, they have given historians new insights into CIA operations around the world and Cold War activities in third party states. As Dr Paul McGarr highlighted in an Insights post in May this year, the releases are particularly interesting for historians of intelligence outside the Anglosphere. As shown in this piece, insights into the CIA’s activities and Cold War-related activity in Japan are included in this trove.
Satoshi Yoda is a PhD candidate in the War Studies Department at King's College London with expertise in hybrid warfare and influence operations. He holds a Master’s degree in Intelligence and International Security from King's College London and is currently conducting research focused on security in the Asia-Pacific.
Picture taken from declassified JFK assassination files.
