More accusingly than she should, she told him he had not.
Coppersmith looked puzzled. "All of this is in compartments. Nobody is supposed to know what's happening in the next box. Up to now Dugan has been working on Japanese problems, and he's been Landsiedel's man. Of course, I heard gossip. It was probably correct, considering who it was that told me."
"Who?"
He glared at her and then, without giving the source, told her the story.
Dugan was known as the odd American who looked enough like a Japanese to work in the Secretariat of the Board of Fleet Admirals and Field Marshals all through the war. He had planted himself there along about the summer of 1941. When Pearl Harbor broke, he risked his life to get a message out; but the message was stopped. No identifiable American couriers showed up, so Dugan had decided that a live Japanese captain — if boneheaded enough — was worth two dead spies any day. He had settled down to work in his assumed Japanese role, successfully mixing up papers, making other people imperil codes, and spreading misunderstanding around Imperial Headquarters. He had had a hand in sending Admiral Yamamoto to his death and, always in the guise of a doggedly loyal Japanese Army captain, he had slipped out bad news from one Japanese official to another until the Imperial Army refused to send air support to the Imperial Navy in the Philippines and the Imperial Navy had retaliated by withholding munitions needed by the Army on Okinawa.
Just before the Japanese surrender, Dugan had received a Japanese decoration. Right after the surrender, when he identified himself to some startled Americans at Atsugi airfield, he had been flown back to the United States. The President had him over to lunch at the White House and somebody in the Pentagon gave him a Legion of Merit, chiefly for having stayed alive.
"And the funniest part of the story was," Coppersmith concluded, "the way Finance refused to pay him when they found he had been drawing Japanese pay all those years. He offered to pay them back his Japanese in yen if they would give him his American pay in dollars. The last I heard of the story — and mind you, it may not be true — Dugan had gotten so mad at everybody that he put in for a Purple Heart because he got gashed during a B-29 raid on Tokyo. The people in Awards and Decorations said he couldn't get a gash counted if the Americans inflicted it on him, and Dugan stumped them on that by arguing that he had been hurt by a Japanese — by mistake. He didn't get the ribbon. Funny thing — I think he wanted it."
Colonel Landsiedel arrived promptly. He was a tall, slim young man who had been one of the Assistant Military Attaches in Tokyo just before the war. It had been his privilege to run one courier message to Dugan in 1941. He had expected to find a seedy half-caste in some unsavory barroom. Instead, he was ushered into the presence of an incredibly pompous Japanese captain who lectured him on Japanese military security, insisted on inspecting all of Landsiedel's papers while a dozen other Japanese officers hung over his shoulder, and ended up by slipping the reply message into Landsiedel's wallet as he returned it. Then he had Landsiedel marched out of a Japanese division HQ under MP guard, shouting rude things after him in bad English.
Landsiedel that very day became a Dugan hobbyist and found there were several other men in the Army who shared his interest in collecting stories about Dugan. When Landsiedel came in with the Occupation and found Dugan not only alive, but decorated by the Japanese, he almost wept with the sheer artistic pleasure the sight gave him, Landsiedel, as an intelligence officer.
Landsiedel spoke fair Japanese and found himself Dugan's immediate superior. He set Dugan to tasks worthy of Dugan's talents and, before Coppersmith called Dugan in, Landsiedel had had Dugan seeking spiritual peace in the quietude of a remote Buddhist monastery. It just happened that one of the co-priests was a Japanese Field Marshal whom the Japanese government — from either ignorance or charity — had listed as dead.