Author: Ronald Drabkin, William Morrow, 2024

Reviewer: Former National Counterintelligence Officer for East Asia David A. Gutschmit

In "Beverly Hills Spy", Ronald Drabkin has authored a compelling narrative centering on the complex journey of a spy whose espionage in the years leading up to World War II should be more well known. Englishman Fredrick Rutland was a decorated hero of the First World War, a pioneer in the field of naval aviation, and an expert in warship design. He also betrayed Great Britain, helped build the Japanese Navy that enabled Japan's onslaught in the Pacific, and spied for Tokyo against the United States in the runup to Pearl Harbor.

 Drabkin successfully showcases the multiverse of vulnerabilities and motivations that made Rutland an ideal target if not an ideal agent. Japanese Naval Intelligence showered Rutland with cash and enabled an extravagant lifestyle in pre-war Los Angeles, capitalizing on his taste for the high life. One of his frequently exasperated handlers noted that Rutland was paid almost ten times as much as Japan's most senior naval officers. They also played to his large if not narcissistic ego, reinforcing his self-image as an irreplaceable authority on naval matters, and a high roller who could interact at the highest levels of U.S. society. Looming in the background is the resentment Rutland felt for his homeland's obsession with class, for which, being from a blue-collar background, he blamed his failure to rise in the Royal Air Force during the interwar period. Finally, as pressure mounted on Rutland from U.S. authorities, his overconfident efforts to protect himself by belatedly aligning with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and British intelligence as a double or even triple agent smack of magical thinking.

The author weaves several other interesting themes around the periphery of the Rutland drama. He documents the hostility and lack of cooperation between ONI and the FBI as war approached; a sad commentary on the pre-War state of the U.S. "intelligence community" that rings true. The ONI establishment on the West Coast was fixated on counterespionage and counter-sabotage threats, at the expense of trying to ferret out Tokyo's war plans and intentions. The FBI resented ONI's poaching on its domestic turf; but was focused an alleged Communist menace until late in the game.

Somewhat more surprising is Drabkin's description of Tokyo's wider espionage operations in the United States. Beyond Rutland, these were generally characterized by incompetence, relying on untrained and undisciplined line navy personnel rather than professional intelligence officers. The exception is Yoshikawa Takeo, the most gifted of Tokyo's naval intelligence operatives, who provided valuable intelligence on the disposition of U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor and surrounding facilities from his arrival in Honolulu in March 1941. For the most part, these are woven smoothly into the master narrative centering on Rutland himself. However, at some points the pace of the book is slowed by somewhat stilted dialogue which is not clearly documented, underlining an overall lack of footnotes/endnotes.

 It is not surprising that several major questions surrounding Rutland linger. The most poignant chapter in the book describes bewildered FBI agents following Rutland around Washington during a visit in the summer of 1941 as he shuttled between ONI Headquarters and the British and Japanese embassies looking for a way out as the Bureau, and the war, closed in. Drabkin affords Rutland considerable benefit of the doubt, maintaining that, in the course of looking for financial and physical self-preservation, he was sincerely trying to warn Washington and London that war was imminent - that his allegiances were clear in the end. While he did make it back to London courtesy of MI-5, he spent the first two years of the war in confinement and died an apparent suicide in January 1949 in a small apartment in Wales. Drabkin speculates that somehow Rutland was still enough of a potential embarrassment four years after the end of the war to have been eliminated by one or another of the allied services he tried to con. Rutland would have delighted in this fantasy.

David Gutschmit, former National Counterintelligence Officer for East Asia, is a retired CIA Operations Officer. In addition to numerous tours with the Directorate of Operations in the foreign field and at headquarters, he held assignments at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Counterintelligence Executive/Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the U.S. Naval War College. He currently teaches intelligence studies to graduate students at New York University, Columbia University, and Georgetown University, focusing on economic and industrial espionage and comparative intelligence systems.