History that reads like a novel is all the rage right now. Authors, many of them not historians, focus on a previously unheralded individual or small group who were involved in feats of daring and thrilling activities such as spying. World War II is a particularly ripe field for these micro-focused histories. In “Beverly Hills Spy: The Double-Agent War Hero Who Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor,” Ronald Drabkin (not a historian) has taken this format to the extreme, with his unsourced text and complete dialogues often feeling more novelistic in the fictional sense rather than a presentation of history.
Drabkin engagingly tells the story of Frederick Rutland, a World War I hero known as “Rutland of Jutland,” because he was not only the pilot of the sea plane that found the German fleet, but he also saved the life of a drowning sailor as his ship was taking on survivors. Rutland’s heroics made him a press darling, attention which he enjoyed and sought the rest of his life. After the war, Rutland assisted in designing concepts for British aircraft carriers, though the Royal Navy implemented a series of half measures on existing ships rather than the purpose-built flattop carrier advocated by Rutland. With the merger of the Royal Navy air forces and the Army’s Royal Flying Corps to form the Royal Air Force, Rutland’s progress up the ranks stalled, due in no small part to his lower class origins.
Although Great Britain provided technical support to Japan’s Navy in the early 1920s, that support ended as Japan grew to be the third largest Navy in the world. As a result of the official technical exchanges and sales of British aircraft to the Japanese, a substantial number of British citizens were employed in Japan’s aviation industry. It was only natural, then, that Rutland’s thoughts of post-RAF employment turned toward Japan. Rather than hire on direct with industry, though, Rutland offered his services directly to the Japanese Navy before his retirement was final. This served to put him on MI5’s radar, not only because of his war hero status, but because their codebreaking efforts caught the Japanese glee at having recruited “Rutland of Jutland.”
Upon his retirement, Rutland moved to Japan, employed by various companies, while at the same time receiving money from the Japanese Navy. Drabkin credits Rutland with helping the Japanese design their flattop carrier fleet, with two of the carriers he helped build participating in the later attack on Pearl Harbor. As the political climate changed in the 1930s, Rutland eventually moved to Los Angeles, where the U.S. Pacific Fleet was based. He settled in Hollywood and ran a technology-based import-export business focused on Japan; his residency in the United States and military background in Great Britain proved to be an excellent cover for espionage. Rutland obtained information from his U.S. contacts in the aviation and defense industry, trading on his notoriety from World War I, and sent it along to the Japanese.
With the transfer of the Pacific Fleet to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the Japanese relied less on Rutland and more on their own personnel in Hawaii and on the West Coast. With war rapidly approaching, Rutland became a double agent, recruited by the Office of Naval Intelligence’s (ONI) senior officer on the West Coast. Unfortunately, Rutland’s ONI contact neglected to inform his superiors at ONI or the FBI. When the FBI finally did take an interest in Rutland, they were warned off because he was working with ONI, ostensibly to help pinpoint when the Japanese attack would occur. The lack of cooperation between ONI and FBI prevented a true assessment of the risks presented by the recruitment of Rutland by ONI. It did not help that MI5 did not share what it knew about Rutland with the Americans. Drabkin attributes this failure to share information about Rutland and other spies to the British being too embarrassed to admit one of their war heroes was spying for the Japanese against America. It is hard to evaluate the accuracy of this claim due to lack of source notes in the text. At this point the British-U.S. intelligence relationship was in its nascent stages, and it is not clear either side was yet willing to engage in the exchange of sensitive source intelligence. The “special relationship” was forged during the war and did not exist at this point in time.
The failure to use source notes is particularly disappointing since the author gained access to a collection of documents on pre-World War II Japanese Naval Intelligence, including some that no historian, Japanese or American, has ever seen. Drabkin clearly relies heavily on these sources in certain sections of the story, but it is not possible to know how accurately it has been presented without the ability to replicate the underlying research.
Sourcing shortcomings aside, the story of “Rutland of Jutland” is a timely reminder of the importance of cooperation and collaboration between allies and organizations to defend U.S. national security. As the information sharing pendulum starts to swing away from its post-9/11 apex, we must ensure “need to know” does not become a proxy for “I’ve got a secret and you don’t,” allowing personalities to overwhelm process to the detriment of security.
Throughout the book, Rutland comes across as a glory-seeking opportunist. In the epilogue, Drabkin presents some strong conclusions about Rutland’s efforts to warn the U.S. about a Japanese attack and the FBI’s “cover-up” of those efforts so the FBI could “avoid taking blame for the Pearl Harbor attack.” Integrating those conclusions more thoroughly in the text and properly sourcing them would have presented a more nuanced portrait of Rutland and a stronger case against the FBI. But, as one might expect from a story about spies in Hollywood, sources are not allowed to get in the way of a good story, well told.
Mr. Paul Walker is a former Naval Aviator and a former Navy intelligence officer. He is currently attorney-adviser to the Deputy Under Secretary of the Navy for Intelligence and Security.