CIA hired Japanese World War II criminals as 'useless' spies

TOKYO: Colonel Masanobu Tsuji was a fanatical Japanese militarist and brutal warrior, hunted after World War II for massacres of Chinese civilians and complicity in the Bataan Death March. And then he became a US spy.

Newly declassified CIA records, released by the US National Archives and examined by the Associated Press (AP), document more fully than ever how Tsuji and other suspected Japanese war criminals were recruited by US intelligence in the early days of the Cold War. The documents also show how ineffective the effort was, in the CIA's view.

The records, declassified in 2005 and 2006 under an act of US Congress in tandem with Nazi war crime-related files, fill in many of the blanks in the previously spotty documentation of the occupation authority's intelligence arm and its involvement with Japanese ultra-nationalists and war criminals, historians say.