A Eulogy at the Church of San Miguel for the passing of Richard Pearse (1901-1947): British MI5 Agent 005

Richard Pearse was a friend and colleague of mine for many years. Although I mostly knew him and referred to him as British Secret Agent 005. Our work was professional and there was almost nothing I knew of his personal life. Since his death, details have been declassified as a result of the incident broadly known as ‘The Great Typhoon Rift.’ Foreign agents in Japan uncovered his identity as a double agent, and spy, and through numerous and sophisticated psychological interrogation techniques, Richard Pearse became compromised. As a result, British MI5 security procedures automatically required a ‘Burn Notice,’ simultaneously broadcasting compromising public information about Richard Pearse to disincentivize foreign agents from further attempts to gain leverage in public discourse on the matter at hand. 

I then learned Richard Pearse had a family living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, including his wife, Margarette, and three children: William, Arthur, and Synthia. His status as a Japanese American ensured he received preferential status in selection programs for espionage in the Pacific Theatre of Operations. Stationed in China during the early years of Japan’s invasion, Agent 005 witnessed numerous atrocities committed by Shiro Ishii’s Unit 731 before he was transferred to naval duties aboard the submarine I-58 and British manufactured battleship, Kongo. Agent 005 was considered an expert in numerous fields including: cryptography, radio communications, submarine warfare, navigation, cartography, astronomy, botany, geology, and medicine. When not at headquarters in Bletchley Park, Agent 005 worked closely with top scientists in New Mexico coordinating American advances in classified areas with MI5. Most of his work in New Mexico is still classified, and details are unlikely to be known for another 50 years. 

Agent 005’s experience was unparalleled. He was given access to top programs in MI5 including: OPERATION BREAD, OPERATION NICKEL, OPERATION MAPS, OPERATION NIGHTLIGHT, OPERATION SUBTERFUGE, and OPERATION SOUND. 

During his experience in Burma from 1923-1925, he gained access to private MI5 documents on medical research and performance reports on soldiers stationed in India. From numerous anecdotal reports within British archives spanning two-hundred years of trade in the East India Company it was theorized that water from Brahmaputra River Basin in the Himalayas gave the Tibetan Buddhist monks access to Nirvana. Soldiers given access to their rituals witnessed strange events, and experienced brief episodes of altered states of consciousness and levitation followed by severe episodes of dehydration from kidney blockages formed by crystalized minerals. Analysis frustrated our scientists for years, but under specific frequencies of light and phases of the moon, the crystals dissolved with a weak acid catalyst and heat. Dissections of rats living in the Karni Mata Temple, India, found that the proportionally large kidneys of rodents had evolved a separate line of kidney physiology. Initially suspect was the fermented grain liquor infrequently supplied, or saturated fats consumed from coconut milk offered by visitors which are unique to their diet. However, the mystery was solved by the proportional balance of their enlarged hearts and atypical blood pressure. Mastery of this research was used to gain trust and infiltrate the inner sanctum of the Zen Buddhist elite in the Japanese Imperial Navy which was conducting biological warfare on prisoners in China.

While Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity in 1916, Henry Cavendish performed a simple experiment published in the Royal Society in 1798 used to identify local variations of gravity which formed the foundational basis for OPERATION WINDFALL, still classified. OPERATION WINDFALL was supported by Agent 005 and American General Joseph Stilwell. In a declassified letter to Bletchley Park, General Joseph Stilwell reported:

“Coordinating planning of OPERATION WINDFALL with local militias, Agent 005, was lost in the jungle. Due to our commitment to radio silence, Agent 005’s rescue beacon was not heard for nine weeks and was assumed dead. When he was found he had lost a significant portion of his muscle mass but he appeared in good health and spirits. He survived on the provisions of a single ham sandwich packed before commencement of operations. When I asked how he had survived for so long on a single sandwich, he heartily stated, ‘Like the candle flame of the Maccabees, God’s will can sustain a man on his promises alone.’ But as a matter of fact, he used a razor blade to ration smaller and smaller portions so that a small caloric quantity was obtained daily like a consecrated wafer in a Catholic Mass. Comically, Agent 005 also said he was sustained more or less on the ‘idea’ of a sandwich than the actual ‘sandwich’ alone.”

In December, 1941, while onboard the Japanese Battleship Kongo, Agent 005 supported the Invasion of Malaysia. In 1909, Royal Dutch Shell opened an oil lease in Miri on the island of Borneo. These oil fields were a valuable strategic target after Roosevelt implemented an oil trade embargo with Japan in August, 1941. In order to prevent the fields from falling into enemy hands, the fields were sabotaged and set on fire. The Japanese anticipated these actions and had an emergency contingency plan in place. For the only time in the history of the Pacific War, the Japanese dropped an elite partrooper unit behind enemy lines. This exceptional mission succeeded and prevented the total destruction of their strategic oil reserves. Before retreating, the allies were able to inflict some pain attributable to heroic efforts performed by the USS Parrott resulting in the sinking of the Japanese ammunition cargo boat, Sumanoura Maro. Nine surviving witnesses described its sinking as a hellish and explosive firestorm. 

Recently it has become obvious how intertwined Japanese and American culture has become in the ninety years since Commodore Perry re-opened Japan to the West in July, 1853. After the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, over 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned by the War Relocation Authority (WRA). Despite being the masterminds of this inconceivable act, the Japanese caught a glimpse of their own schizophrenic mind and had to grapple with the same problem of ethnic paranoid mistrust. Recent declassified documents have uncovered numerous examples of enlisted soldiers who were educated in the West and subsequently repatriated to serve in the Imperial Army. During the Battle of Attu, a diary was recovered from a dead soldier who was later identified as Paul Nobu Tatsuguchi, a medical doctor formally educated at the University of Southern California. Attu, Alaska was 6,000 miles away from the 1942 Pacific Island campaign. Considering the limited strategic and resource value of Attu island, Allied leadership assumed this was the strategic military equivalent of a mission to Mars. However, it may have simply been considered by the Japanese as a conscript military prison enforced as an extreme flanking decoy. Their mission failed and it is with regret that Paul Nobu Tatsuguchi left numerous indications in his diary that he had sympathetic feelings for his time spent in the United States prior to the war.

Resource poor, Japan’s industrial rise as a recent global superpower has occurred completely on the backside of American trade relations. Thus they considered Roosevelt’s peacetime trade embargo as nothing less than an act of war. They may even go as far as to still perceive themselves as a victim. A young brother who was abandoned and left to starve. “It is no exaggeration to say that the Greater East Asian War was launched for the oil in Palembang,” claimed a Japanese historian. In a declassified private letter intercepted by Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagor, from the Japanese artist, Yonejiro Noguchi, Noguchi wrote presciently, “You are building your conception of an Asia which would be raised on a tower of skulls.” Yonejiro Noguchi, was westernized having associated with George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Roger Fry. 

Perhaps somewhere deep there is a cultural disconnect. Irreconcilably different perceptions of morals, ethics, values. That after a four hundred years of exploration and trade, we have finally determined a root incompatibility; an impassable river, the bridge burned long ago. Agent 005 observed and reported aboard Kongo numerous private conversations regarding the perceived racial superiority of the Japanese. Specifically, they viewed Christianity as a broadly irrational and hypocritical practice that was spreading over the globe like a disease. It’s hard to forget the Great Genna Martyrdom, and the list of two-hundred and five Dominican, Jesuit, and Franciscan prisoners who were publicly executed in the seventeenth century and beatified by Pope Pius IX in 1867.

Although some military historians have already noted the contrast between the Pacific Theatre and the war in Europe, some question remain why operations involving jungle warfare were likely to create so many challenges unique to the landscape and terrain on which it was fought. The answer I have proposed was that the war in Europe was fought on Hitlers terms created by multiple fronts he opened and refused to retreat from, while the war in the Pacific was fought on Allied terms, where naval supremacy established after the Battle of Midway in June 1942, made the use of naval aircraft carriers absolution and sequential battles along a highway of interconnected island chains the strategic outcome. Emblematically, war with Japan was won without a single soldier ever stepping foot on mainland soil. The war was won on, and from the ocean, extinguishing Japan’s colonial enterprise. The Royal Navy bequeathed its crown in the East to the Allies when it retreated to its safe harbors in the Indian Ocean, but our effort in the intelligence briefings and planning in the Pacific cannot, however, be underestimated. 

Agent 005 was a critical asset that helped unravel Purple, Japan’s equivalent of Enigma. Rear Admiral Karel Doorman and his intelligence assents onboard De Ruyter, used numerous deception techniques to communicate with Agent 005 so that from 1941-1942 several written correspondences were able to be received that diagramed the exact operation and design of Purple. These messages were left inside painted coconuts on beaches that were soon to be invaded by Allied forces. The messages were safe, because unlike Rommel’s German defenders in France, the Japanese had no strategic intention of defending the open, sandy beachheads. In January 1942, a back channel communication was received on Kongo by additional deceptions. One foggy morning, aerial reconnaissance observed a life raft that contained three dead and rotting corpses of Japanese sailors which were in fact bodies of naval aviators who were shot down and retrieved from aircraft on Midway island. On their persons were planted several decoy letters that when compared and read together, contained a cryptic message as to the exact position and movement of De Ruyter and the Dutch and Allied navy so that Agent 005 could lead the Japanese into a trap. Kongo unfortunately did not take the bait, but a message was communicated through a naval chain of command that ultimately led to the Battle of Badung Strait.

Agent 005 also engaged in numerous psychological experiments to try and cause internal conflict with the naval chain of command to sow discord in the leadership hierarchy. The collective actions in this area were known as OPERATION SQUID EYE. Intelligence of assets onboard submarine I-58 determined that most of the sailors were adherents to Zen Buddhism, a Mahayana sect, however Agent 005 was briefed on interrogation techniques to establish doubt with their ‘mind-only’ school. Westerners are specifically well adapted to this task given a twenty-seven-hundred year history of Greek philosophy with foundations established by Plato and Aristotle that professed a fundamental bedrock of nature reduced to the atom. In one letter retrieved from a coconut on Dragons Beach on the eastern side of the Island of Luzon, Philippines, Agent 005 wrote:

“Spent the day discussing the ‘mind-only’ school with a technician in the equipment and motor room. His name was Aoki Nagumo. He offered the specific example of Triops longicaudatus, a species of tadpole shrimp that have survived in an unevolved, primordial state since the beginning of time. He professed the belief that we simply have not come to understand our own powers of intellect and insight. We have been rendered stupid because of our invention of language. The tongue was born from and created by a demon serpent. He even tried to convince me that this is why the allies were doomed by their own hypocrisy. Why could they not see as Christians that their own savior spoke on a great mountain performing miracles firmly established by the ‘mind-only,’ school?” 

OPERATION SQUID EYE was unsuccessful. Myopia followed the Japanese all the way down to Hiroshima and Nagasaki where Western philosophy was revealed superior in all its blinding light; the power of the ‘atom’ had surpassed the power of the ‘mind.’

“Perhaps if there is salvation for Aoki Nagumo. He will re-incarnate as a tadpole shrimp and when I return to London, we can dine on him together, brothers.”

These were the last words left by Agent 005. Confident in our ultimate victory. There can be no doubt he died resolutely. However, his identity was finally uncovered for the simple fact that when defecating he did not squat in the traditional Japanese way. “The Thinker” position. It is a common and well known technique utilized by all Japanese men. However, Agent 005, was seen on the Dragon Beach, Luzon sitting on a piece of dead driftwood with coded coconuts strewn around. His identity as a western spy was summarily in no doubt. When he was found by Allies, his body lay in the same spot where it was executed, lying in his own pile of excrement.

Although the Allies discovered his body three years ago, due to challenges within bureaucratic military authority and conflict with Margarette and his family as to where his final resting place will be, we have finally repatriated the body of Agent 005. I pray that the soul of our brother Richard may finally find an eternal peace. And know that forever, he shines in the glory that his savior claimed for us all two-thousand years ago.  

Love Always,

Cpt. John ‘Roughneck’ Colt