The United States recruited former top Japanese army officers after World War II to form a spy ring against communists in Japan and other countries such as the Soviet Union and North Korea, according to recently declassified U.S. intelligence documents.
The documents are the first official confirmation that operations were conducted from the late 1940s to the early 1950s by the so-called Kawabe Organization, whose existence had been revealed earlier by statements of some those involved and other materials.
Headed by former Lt. Gen. Torashiro Kawabe, who served as deputy chief of the Imperial Japanese Army's General Staff, the intelligence organization resembled the Gehlen Org, an anticommunist spy group set up by former Nazi officer Maj. Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, who was also recruited by the U.S. military after the war.
As in the widely documented German case, key members of the Japanese group did not face charges of war crimes under the postwar U.S. policy of prioritizing anticommunist operations.