A Swedish international financial official, who later became the third managing director of the International Monetary Fund, engaged in secret maneuvers to help end World War II from neutral Switzerland at the request of his Japanese colleagues, declassified documents from Princeton University show.
In July 1945, Per Jacobsson, a senior official at the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements, secretly approached Allen Dulles, an official in the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, to act as a mediator between Japan and the United States.
Despite Dulles' reports on Japanese proposals to then U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, negotiation efforts failed partly because Kojiro Kitamura and Kan Yoshimura, Jacobsson's BIS colleagues who requested the discussions, were deemed noninfluential with the Japanese government.