Excerpt from Beverly Hills Spy by Ronald Drabkin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In 1982, John Toland asserted in his book Infamy that much of the blame for the surprise at Pearl Harbor lay with unnamed higher-ups in Washington. There wasn't much public evidence at that time that would have pointed any blame at the FBI.

However, a recently released FBI file shows that an agent wrote a memo about a Japanese spy known as "Agent Shinkawa." In the file, the FBI agent says that this mysterious Japanese agent had flipped and become a spy for the United States Navy. A message came directly from Hoover, saying to not talk about Shinkawa to anyone outside the agency, because it was highly embarrassing to the FBI.

Only now can the full story of Agent Shinkawa be told. The FBI has recently released about two-thirds of Shinkawa's files—in Britain, MI5 has transparently released over one thousand pages of files on the man. In 1945, Japanese Navy Intelligence officers burned their files on Shinkawa and others, with clouds of smoke billowing for days over their headquarters in Hiyoshi, but stories of his accomplishments still exist in the unpublished (and still untranslated) memoirs of several Japanese admirals.

It turned out that Japanese spy Agent Shinkawa had indeed turned double agent and was attempting to help US Navy Intelligence anticipate the Japanese attack. The FBI didn't trust him and had him removed from the scene.

Shinkawa was not Japanese—he wasn't American either. In fact, he was British, and a VIP. And despite his late attempts to help the US stop the attack on Pearl Harbor, he had personally helped redesign the Japanese aircraft carriers that led the attack. He had helped the Japanese Navy update the famous Mitsubishi A6M Zero. He was even the lead investor in Kayaba, the company that made the signal pistol that kicked off the attack. For many years, this charismatic British war hero had been living in a house now worth $14 million in Beverly Hills. Newspapers of the period, which have only just gone online in 2023, show he often hosted parties and other events with the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Boris Karloff, Nigel Bruce, Amelia Earhart, Douglas Fairbanks, and the father of Yoko Ono.

This is the story of Frederick Rutland, also known as Agent Shinkawa of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and Rutland of Jutland, and who has certainly been called many other names over the years. It's a story of high ambition, daring greatness, and world-changing events—but mostly, it's a story of missed chances.

Excerpted from Beverly Hills Spy by Ronald Drabkin. Copyright © 2024 by Ronald Drabkin. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.