ESPIONAGE: Secret Agent

One of the neatest little spy stories ever uncovered broke into print last week in Los Angeles. Arrested by FBI men were two dapper little Japanese and Al Blake. U.S. citizen. Al turned out to be no spy but a hero: he had pulled off an amateur job of counter-espionage that would have made a professional spy turn green with envy.

A yeoman in the U.S. Navy during World War I, 50-year-old Al Blake had a job as “Keeno, King of the Robots” in a Los Angeles store window. Standing beside a male dummy, he defied spectators to make him laugh or to tell which figure was human. Some four months ago a Japanese named Toraichi Kono ran into Al Blake. Well-known in Hollywood. Kono was once Charlie Chaplin’s valet and private secretary, now has a small business.

Kono asked Al Blake if he would get in touch with yeomen aboard the U.S.S. Pennsylvania, try to worm some Navy secrets out of them. Blake agreed. Then he went to see Naval Intelligence officers, reported his conversation with Kono. They told him to go ahead, work with the Japanese, see what he could unearth.

Enter, at this point, a Japanese bigshot: Itaru Tatibana, 39, a lieutenant commander in the Imperial Japanese Navy. Registered on alien lists as a language student at the University of Southern California, Tatibana put up the money to pay for Al Blake’s snooping. Altogether, Al got several thousand dollars from the Japanese, turned it all over to U.S. officials. He made two trips to Hawaii. The Navy handed him some obsolete data, reports of firing practice on the U.S.S. Phoenix last February, several ancient code books. These Al passed on to his employers.

One afternoon last fortnight Navy Intelligence decided its case was complete. FBI men went out. picked up the suspects separately. In Tatibana’s rooms they found a truckload of assorted information about the U.S. Navy. Arrested on a charge of “conspiracy to obtain national defense information . . . for . . . a foreign power,” Commander Tatibana was promptly sprung when Japanese Consul Kenji Nakauchi posted $50,000 bail. Kono could not raise his $25,000 bail, stayed in jail.

Navy men said they had been watching the two Japanese almost a year, would hale them before a Federal grand jury this week on a charge of espionage (maximum peacetime penalty: 20 years). As for Al Blake. “King of the Robots,” he was congratulated by the Navy for successfully keeping a straight face.