They Spied for Imperial Japan
Stuart Smith

In the wake of World War I, Britain’s foreign-policy planners and security agencies became obsessed with the menace, real and imagined, of Bolshevik revolution. With few exceptions, they ignored the threat posed by a second Eastern power: Imperial Japan.

 Japan’s ambitions were colonial and economic rather than ideological. It wanted “a place in the sun”, an empire of its own rivalling those of Britain and France. When the Versailles peace treaties, dictated by Western interests, proved unhelpful in advancing that cause, Japan’s naval and military elites began focusing on espionage as a key means of subverting the global status quo.

 Britain, the dominant imperial power in the Far East, was by the 1920s overstretched and over-reliant on a world-class navy for maintaining its hegemony. Accordingly, it was upon the Royal Navy and its technological superiority that Japanese espionage efforts fastened. Undermine that advantage by stealing Britain’s most prized naval secrets, then repurpose them, and the way was open to dissolving Western leadership in the Far East by substituting Japan’s own.

Japanese spymasters had a problem, though: their naval intelligence professionals were incapable of stealing these secrets unassisted. For that, they needed to recruit foreign nationals capable of deep-penetration operations. Typically, their target was middle- and high-ranking Royal Navy officers perceived to be greedy, morally compromised or simply disillusioned by the run-down post-war navy, and their own prospects within it.

Japan’s espionage efforts were rewarded across multiple sectors of naval innovation, including submarines, torpedo technology and air-warning systems. But the spymasters’ chief triumph – critical in the years ahead and eventually to the success of the Pearl Harbour Attack – was in naval aviation: in other words, aircraft-carriers and their warplane strike force, a sphere in which Britain’s lead was incontestable post WWI.

This triumph would have been impossible without the recruitment of two distinguished British naval air officers, Colonel William Francis Forbes-Sempill and Squadron Leader Frederick Joseph Rutland. They were as improbable as spies as they were dissimilar in personality and background. One was a swashbuckling young aristocrat who had led a successful naval aviation mission to Japan in 1921. The other, a gifted son of toil who had worked his way up the ranks to become the navy’s foremost aviator and a nationally acclaimed war hero.

The pendulum has swung awkwardly on the question of Sempill’s and Rutland’s “guilt” as traitors over the past 20 years. From being vilified as the man obliquely responsible for Pearl Harbour (as depicted in the BBC documentary, The Fall of Singapore: The Great Betrayal), Sempill is now more warmly regarded as a hapless “business consultant” snared by skirmishing intelligence agencies who were determined, on one side, to steal and, on the other, to protect at all costs, naval aviation secrets. Much the same has been said of Rutland. Was he simply a “rotter” who sold out to Imperial Japan, or more “fool than knave” – a dupe who thought he could play the espionage game to perfection; only to fall a victim to its Byzantine viciousness?

The truth navigates a treacherous path through the middle. Both Sempill and Rutland were clever, worldly-wise men conceited enough to believe they could game the system. In this, they were foolish.