Cheering and expectant crowds greeted the General Hodges, a United States Army transport vessel, when it docked at San Francisco on September 25, 1948. The ship was filled with servicemen returning home from Japan and South Korea, and they eagerly gathered at the high deck railings, waving and whistling to sweethearts and families on the sunlit quayside below.

Yet before those GIs were allowed to disembark, a small, thin, Japanese-American woman, flanked by a pair of burly FBI agents, slowly descended the gangplank. As a band struck up the bouncy ‘California, Here I Come,’ the woman–her head bowed, her pale face reflecting days of suffering from dysentery–stepped toward a waiting car. Although many of the people in the crowd knew who she was supposed to be, few found it easy to reconcile the plain and meek-looking prisoner with popular images of the World War II radio propagandist ‘Tokyo Rose,’ the sultry-voiced siren who had allegedly done her damnedest to demoralize American troops fighting in the Pacific. The United States government, however, seemed not to harbor any such reservations. Before another year ended, it would put Iva Toguri d’Aquino on trial for treason, even though American intelligence agents had already concluded that she was not Tokyo Rose–that Tokyo Rose was, in fact, merely a creature ‘of rumor and legend’–and that d’Aquino’s broadcasting activities in Japan during the war had been ‘innocuous.’

Iva (pronounced Aiva) Toguri hardly fit the mold of an American traitor. Born in 1916–ironically on July 4– she was the second of four children of Jun and Fumi Toguri, Japanese immigrants who had settled in LosAngeles and operated a small import business. Like many immigrants, Jun Toguri wanted his family to be as Americanized as possible, so he discouraged his offspring from learning to speak or write Japanese, rarely took them to Japanese-American events, and fed them a diet that combined Western and Asian dishes.

When Iva was old enough, her parents encouraged her to try out for school sports, despite her small stature. She discovered an aptitude for tennis. She also joined the Girl Scouts, took piano lessons, and developed a crush on film star Jimmy Stewart. Dreaming of a career in medicine, Iva attended the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and graduated in 1940 with a bachelor’s degree in zoology.

If not for a relative’s illness, Iva might never have seen the land of her parents’ birth. Instead, in the summer of 1941 the Toguris sent their daughter to Tokyo to care for her aunt, Shizuko Hattori, who was bedridden with diabetes and high blood pressure. It was an inopportune time for travel to Japan. Thanks to the island empire’s expansionist policies, its relations with the United States were decaying precipitously. Requests by Japanese Americans to visit Japan sparked more than a little suspicion, and Iva’s application for a U.S. passport still hadn’t been filled by her departure date. When she boarded the Arabia Maru on July 5, 1941, carrying 28 pieces of luggage (filled with gifts for her relations, as well as Western foods to help Iva endure up to a year away from home), she had no visa to enter Japan and only a certificate of identification from the Immigration and Naturalization Service to prove that she was an American citizen.

None of this immediately mattered. Iva’s first concern was to fit into Japanese society. Although she looked native-born, she didn’t know the language, found the people ‘discourteous,’ and had difficulty handling chopsticks (her father had forbidden their use). ‘I have finally gotten around to eating rice three times a day,’ she explained in a letter home. ‘It’s killing me, but what can I do?’ Unable to read local newspapers, she remained in the dark as tensions between the U.S. and Japan mounted. It wasn’t until late November 1941 that Iva, frightened by increasing signs of an international crisis, decided to return to Los Angeles. She planned to board the California-bound Tatsutu Maru on December 2. However, a last-minute paperwork snafu caused her to miss the boat. Less than a week later, Japan attacked Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, and Iva was stranded in Tokyo.

Japanese government agents soon approached her and suggested she renounce her U.S. citizenship and become a Japanese national. Iva refused, asking instead to be interned with other ‘enemy aliens.’ Due to her ancestry and gender, officials denied her request. Instead, Iva remained at her aunt’s home until neighbors–fearful of an ‘American spy’ in their midst–persuaded her to move. Iva then found a room in a boardinghouse and part-time work at the Domei Tsushin Sha, the national news agency, where she transcribed English-language radio broadcasts from around the Pacific. It was at Domei that Iva learned her family back in California had been sent to Arizona’s Gila River Relocation Center, like tens of thousands of other Japanese Americans who were incarcerated far away from West Coast defense areas after the Pearl Harbor attack.

While she worked at Domei Iva met Felippe d’Aquino, a Portuguese-Japanese pacifist and fellow radio monitor. Five years Iva’s junior, he shared her pro-American sentiments, gave her moral support when police harassed her for remaining a U.S. citizen, and loaned her money when she was hospitalized in the summer of 1943 for scurvy, beriberi, and malnutrition.

Iva didn’t like owing money, even to friends, so, following her release, she set off to find additional employment and square her accounts. She answered a newspaper advertisement for English-language typists at Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK), better known as Radio Tokyo. As biographer Masayo Duus puts it, this was Iva’s ‘first step into the legend of Tokyo Rose.’

Helping her to take the next step was British-born Major Charles Hughes Cousens, a tall, dignified, and mustachioed army officer in his late 30s who had been a broadcasting celebrity in Sydney, Australia, before the war. The Japanese captured him in Singapore and sent him to Tokyo, where officials intimidated him into managing English-language broadcasts for NHK. What the Japanese wanted most from him was a professional-style short-wave propaganda program that would help lower the morale of Allied troops in the Pacific, yet still have enough credibility to attract and hold an audience. But what the Australian army officer gave them when he launched Zero Hour in March 1943 was an entertainment-heavy show designed specifically to undermine the propaganda campaign, without his Japanese overseers realizing.

Two fellow prisoners of war joined Cousens in this effort. U.S. Army Captain Wallace Ince and Filipino Lieutenant Norman Reyes had worked together on an Allied propaganda program before being captured in the Philippines. They helped introduce Zero Hour as a 15-minute broadcast featuring jazz recordings interspersed with news segments, largely about disasters back in the States. Although this trio started out at Radio Tokyo reading scripts prepared by Japanese staff members, when they complained about botched English grammar and syntax their supervisors eventually let them pen their own material–which they craftily larded with double-entendres, on-air flubs, and sarcasm.

Iva Toguri joined this sabotage in November 1943 when Cousens recruited her as an announcer. She’d grown friendly with the Australian major and other POWs at Radio Tokyo and had even smuggled food and medicine to them. But inviting her into broadcasting hardly seemed like a favor in return. ‘I don’t know the first thing about radio or radio announcing or anything about scripts or records,’ she told Cousens. Other women announcers already working at Radio Tokyo protested that Iva’s voice was raspy and that she sometimes lisped. But Cousens didn’t trust those women and didn’t want them on his show. He believed that Iva would help keep his private radio war a secret. And he considered her lack of broadcast savvy a plus. ‘This,’ Cousens testified in a deposition years later, ‘combined with her masculine style and deep, aggressive voice, we felt would definitely preclude any possibility of her creating the homesick feeling which the Japanese Army were forever trying to foster.’ Although Iva started out as an anonymous presence behind the microphone, the Japanese insisted that all on-air talent have names, so she adopted ‘Ann,’ from the abbreviation ‘ANN’–for ‘announcer’–on her scripts. Cousens soon expanded that alias into ‘Orphan Ann,’ alluding both to the comic-strip character Little Orphan Annie and to a term used by Australians to describe forces cut off from their allies: ‘orphans of the Pacific.’ He took a still-greater role as Iva’s voice coach, slowing down her delivery, making her sound more ‘jolly,’ and instructing her to mispronounce words. When she referred to her listeners in mock contempt as ‘honorable boneheads,’ the adjective came out ‘onable.’ Other times she broadly lampooned Japanese misapprehensions of English, asking her audience, ‘You are liking, please?’ And far from being a clandestine disseminator of newspeak, Iva openly warned her listeners that Zero Hour contained ‘dangerous and wicked propaganda, so beware!’

The results were more amusing than disheartening:

Ann: Hello there, Enemies! How’s tricks? This is Ann of Radio Tokyo, and we’re just going to begin our regular program of music, news and the Zero Hour for our friends–I mean, our enemies!–in Australia and the South Pacific. So be on your guard, and mind the children don’t hear! All set? OK. Here’s the first blow at your morale–the Boston Pops playing ‘Strike Up the Band!’ (Music)

Iva commanded the microphone for only about 20 minutes out of each 75-minute broadcast (Zero Hour had been expanded shortly after she joined). During most of that time, she played records–dance tunes and light classics, many of them British selections, which Cousens reasoned would not make American GIs homesick. The balance of each program was given over to POW messages home, a jazz sequence, and more news briefs about stateside disasters. The choice of ‘Strike Up the Band’ as the theme song was Iva’s–it was the fight song of her old alma mater, UCLA.

Cousens pulled off his subversion by exploiting cultural differences between the captives and captors in Tokyo, convincing his overseers that humor made it difficult for the target audience to dismiss Zero Hour as propaganda. It also helped that the show was popular among U.S. servicemen. GIs were particularly fond of a Sunday program hosted by a Japanese woman disc jockey they knew as ‘Tokyo Rose.’ It wasn’t clear which broadcast this was, however. Although Zero Hour aired daily at 6:00 p.m., Iva didn’t come into the studio on Sundays, and she was usually replaced by her more experienced colleague, Ruth Hayakawa. But Hayakawa didn’t have the low-pitched, seductive voice attributed to Tokyo Rose, nor did she spread information about impending air attacks or warn her male listeners that their wives and girlfriends back home were being unfaithful, both of which Tokyo Rose was said to do with relish. Cousens reasoned that if there really was a Tokyo Rose, she must have been broadcasting from somewhere other than Japan.

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