Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, a Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor

by Mark Harmon, Leon Carroll (With)

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"A fast-paced debut...Espionage buffs will savor this vibrant account." — Publishers Weekly

A U.S. naval counterintelligence officer working to safeguard Pearl Harbor; a Japanese spy ordered to Hawaii to gather information on the American fleet. On December 7, 1941, their hidden stories are exposed by a morning of bloodshed that would change the world forever. Scrutinizing long-buried historical documents, NCIS star Mark Harmon and co-author Leon Carroll, a former NCIS Special Agent, have brought forth a true-life NCIS story of deception, discovery, and danger.

Hawaii, 1941. War clouds with Japan are gathering and the islands of Hawaii have become battlegrounds of spies, intelligence agents, and military officials - with the island's residents caught between them. Toiling in the shadows are Douglas Wada, the only Japanese American agent in naval intelligence, and Takeo Yoshikawa, a Japanese spy sent to Pearl Harbor to gather information on the U.S. fleet.

Douglas Wada's experiences in his native Honolulu include posing undercover as a newspaper reporter, translating wiretaps on the Japanese Consulate, and interrogating America's first captured POW of World War II, a submarine officer found on the beach. Takeo Yoshikawa is a Japanese spy operating as a junior diplomat with the consulate who is collecting vital information that goes straight to Admiral Yamamoto. Their dueling stories anchor Ghosts of Honolulu's gripping depiction of the world-changing cat and mouse games played between Japanese and US military intelligence agents (and a mercenary Nazi) in Hawaii before the outbreak of the second world war.

Also caught in the upheaval are Honolulu's innocent residents - including Douglas Wada's father - who endure the war's anti-Japanese fervor and a cadre of intelligence professionals who must prevent Hawaii from adopting the same destructive mass internments as California.

Ghosts of Honolulu depicts the incredible high stakes game of naval intelligence and the need to define what is real and what only appears to be real.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400337019
Publisher:	Harper Select
Publication date:	11/14/2023
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	923
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Star of screen, television, and stage, Mark Harmon is now taking on the publishing world with Ghosts of Honolulu. Probably most recognized for his role as Leroy Jethro Gibbs on the hit drama NCIS, which he led for 18 seasons, Harmon is also an executive producer on the show. In his other TV work, Harmonreceived an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for the critically acclaimed The West Wing. Previously he earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Special for Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years. He received two consecutive Golden Globe nominations for his work on Reasonable Doubts, and received two additional Golden Globe nominations for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture Made for TV; one for After the Promise, and another for his role as notorious serial killer Ted Bundy in The Deliberate Stranger. Along with his costars on Chicago Hope, he received two Best Ensemble SAG Award nominations. Further credits include HBO's From Earth to the Moon, St. Elsewhere, Moonlighting, and Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth.

Harmon made his feature film debut in Alan Pakula's Comes a Horseman. Additional credits include Lawrence Kasdan's Wyatt Earp, Stealing Home with Jodie Foster, The Presidio, and Carl Reiner's smash hit, Summer School. On stage, Harmon has appeared in Kevin Wade's Key Exchange, Bill C. Davis's Wrestlers, and Mark Medoff's The Wager. In addition, he has done several successful productions of A. R. Gurney's hit play Love Letters with his wife, actress Pam Dawber.

Born and raised in Southern California, Harmon excelled in sports. He quarterbacked UCLA to multiple winning football seasons and was presented the National Collegiate Football Foundation Award for All Around Excellence. The National Football Foundation recently bestowed Harmon with their highest honor, the Gold Medal, making him the first recipient in their organization to receive both the Scholar Athlete Award and the Gold Medal. He is a cum laude graduate with a degree in communications.

Leon Carroll Jr. is the technical advisor on the hit drama NCIS. A native of Chicago, Illinois, he attended Lindblom Technical High School and went on to earn a BS degree in business economics from North Dakota State University. He was a member of two College Division national championship teams in the late 60s. Leon was a commissioned officer in the United States Marine Corps, serving on active duty for 6 years and 3 years in the Marine Corps Reserves, attaining the rank of Major. His duty assignments included serving in the Fleet Marine Forces and Sea Duty onboard the USS Ogden (LPD-5). Following his stint in the Marine Corps, Leon began a 20-year career as a Special Agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). He served in 7 different locations, including tours as a Special Agent Afloat on the USS Ranger (CV-61) and as the Special Agent in Charge of NCIS offices in the Republic of Panama and the Pacific Northwest. Upon retirement from NCIS, Leon was selected to be the technical advisor for the top-rated drama of the same name, holding that position for 20 seasons. His experience in Foreign Counterintelligence gives him unique insight into the world in which undercover agents operate.

Editorial Reviews

09/18/2023

NCIS star Harmon and Carroll, the show’s technical adviser, spotlight in their fast-paced debut how the historical precursor of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service dueled with Japanese spies in Hawaii during WWII. In 1939, FDR ordered the Office of Naval Intelligence to “investigate domestic threats of espionage and sabotage.” In Hawaii, Douglas Wada was recruited as the agency’s only Japanese American counterintelligence agent at a time when Japanese Americans accounted for more than a third of the population. Wada’s job was to “monitor the local population,” but he and his fellow counterintelligence officers correctly regarded Japan’s consular agents and their staff as the real spies in Hawaii, rather than members of the overwhelmingly loyal Japanese American community. After the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. counterintelligence chiefs in Hawaii, aware the attack had been guided by information that had “come from a spy working in the consulate in Honolulu,” advocated against the kind of mass internment of Japanese Americans that occurred in the western U.S. Wada continued his career through the Cold War decades, as the Office of Naval Intelligence evolved into the NCIS, and died in 2007. The authors strikingly paint WWII-era Hawaii as a spy-vs.-spy battleground, detailing Wada’s covert cat-and-mouse games with the Japanese consulate. Espionage buffs will savor this vibrant account of a dogged WWII investigator. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

2023-08-25
It’s no secret that Japanese spies worked in Hawaii in the years before Pearl Harbor, but there was also a Japanese American agent working to foil them.

Screen actor Harmon and NCIS technical adviser Carroll try their hand at history, and it’s mostly a success—at least for readers who can acclimate to present-tense narration and occasionally overheated prose. As relations with Japan deteriorated during the 1930s, intelligence services worried about the loyalty of Hawaii’s largest minority, Japanese Americans, although local officials found little disturbing evidence. The reality was that local Japanese officials were gathering information on island defenses, and in 1940, Japan sent an agent, Takeo Yoshikawa, to work at it full-time in the consulate. Counterespionage in Hawaii was the responsibility of local police and several government agencies, but the authors focus on the Office of Naval Intelligence and its first Japanese American agent, Douglas Wada, hired in 1937. Wada spent most of his time translating and interpreting, but he also kept an eye out for suspicious activities. In the first half of the book, Yoshikawa spies while Wada goes about his business. After the attack, Japanese diplomats, including Yoshikawa, were arrested and later exchanged. Hawaiian intelligence services were on the alert, although little of consequence turned up. In what is now agreed to be a disgraceful episode of national racism, all Japanese Americans were regarded as disloyal, and 120,000 people of Japanese descent were arrested and sent to internment camps. A few hundred people on Hawaii were detained, but there were no mass arrests. Some scholars credit American intelligence for assuring the White House that Hawaii’s Japanese Americans were loyal, but practical reasons predominated: Locking up more than one-third of the island’s population would wreck its economy. Neither Yoshikawa nor Wada was a significant historical figure, but they lived long enough to be interviewed and written about, providing material for this revealing account.

Though sometimes unnecessarily breathless, this is decent military history that will appeal to World War II buffs.

Kirkus Reviews