In June 1944, Major Cousens–long dogged by illness and stress–suffered a heart attack and left Zero Hour. By this point, Iva had departed the Domei news agency, due to criticism of her pro-American views, in order to take a full-time typist job at the Danish legation, and she tried to resign from Zero Hour as well. But the NHK brass refused to let her go. Worse, with Cousens gone, there was talk of having somebody more political write the Orphan Ann scripts. Iva headed this off by re-using or rewriting her mentor’s old scripts. Once she and Felippe d’Aquino were married in April 1945, Iva started to play hooky from NHK, not showing her face at the studio for weeks at a time. Other women broadcasters filled in, though they lacked her burlesque flair. Iva eventually returned to Zero Hour in May 1945, after Denmark broke relations with Tokyo and left her without her legation job. In early August, American B-29s dropped atom bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and within days, Japanese Emperor Hirohito surrendered to Allied forces. Almost four years after arriving in Japan, Iva Toguri d’Aquino could look forward to going home.

Not long before the Japanese surrender, the U.S. Office of War Information had concluded, ‘There is no Tokyo Rose; the name is strictly a GI invention . . . . Government monitors listening in twenty-four hours a day have never heard the words Tokyo Rose over a Japanese-controlled Far Eastern radio.’ The sobriquet might have applied to a dozen or more women broadcasters, but to no single one. Nonetheless, the victorious Americans began the search for this propagandist in late August, when reporters stormed Japan’s capital. Their editors were eager for interviews with Hirohito, Prime Minister Hideji Tojo, and U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, but Tokyo Rose would do.

Two journalists from the Hearst empire, Clark Lee of International News Service and Harry Brundidge of Cosmopolitan magazine, were the first to fit 29-year-old Iva d’Aquino into the Tokyo Rose frame. The reporters offered a reward to anyone able to put them in touch with the mythical Dragon Lady of the Airwaves, and Kenkiichi Oki–who’d worked at NHK and who had married one of the other English-speaking announcers–pointed them to Iva. Although Iva protested that she wasn’t Tokyo Rose, Lee and Brundidge promised her $2,000 for an exclusive interview. Felippe d’Aquino eventually tipped the scales, telling his new wife that by agreeing to this single parlay, she could keep other reporters away. So, on September 1, both d’Aquinos sat down with the Hearst men. Lee asked the questions, but Brundidge told Iva that, in order to receive her money, she must sign a document identifying herself as ‘the one and original `Tokyo Rose.’ ‘

Although she agreed, d’Aquino never received her $2,000, because three days later–in violation of her ‘exclusive’ arrangement with Hearst–she gave a press conference in Yokohama. More than 100 Allied reporters came to hear d’Aquino say, ‘I didn’t think I was doing anything disloyal to America’ and that she had ‘never, never broadcast propaganda . . . [or] mentioned wayward wives or sweethearts.’ A representative of the Eighth Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) subsequently questioned her, but Iva didn’t recognize that as ominous. ‘[It] all seemed to be a big joke,’ she said later, especially since officers and enlisted men wanting her autograph frequently interrupted her CIC interview. She didn’t know that the press back in the States was already portraying her as a traitor.

On October 17, 1945, three CIC officers arrested d’Aquino at her Tokyo apartment. They didn’t inform her she was being charged with treason, nor did they allow her to consult with an attorney. They took her to a Yokohama brig, where interrogators asked if she had advised the Japanese government on propaganda warfare. A month later, d’Aquino was transferred to Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison, which was primarily used to hold alleged Japanese war criminals. She remained there for the next 1112 months in a 6-by-9-foot cell, often gawked at by civilian visitors, including a cadre of U.S. congressmen who were on hand one day to observe the ‘evil’ Tokyo Rose emerge naked from her shower.

Six months after Iva’s arrest, the Eighth Army’s legal section reported, ‘There is no evidence that [Iva Toguri d'Aquino] ever broadcast greetings to units by names or location, or predicted military movements or attacks indicating access to secret military information and plans, etc., as the Tokyo Rose of rumor and legend is reported to have done.’ This should have won her freedom. However, the military feared ‘the reaction in the press and in Californian political circles if she was released, after all the hullabaloo in the media about the `capture’ of Tokyo Rose,’ recalls Russell Warren Howe in The Hunt for `Tokyo Rose.’ Not until the U.S. Attorney General’s office reiterated ‘the identification of Toguri as `Tokyo Rose’ is erroneous’ was she finally discharged from military custody, on October 25, 1946.

During d’Aquino’s imprisonment, her mother had died, and the rest of her family had moved from their internment camp to Chicago. She now hoped to return to the United States and see them, but the same lack of documentation that had trapped her in Japan half a decade before again prevented her from easily acquiring a U.S. passport. As Felippe’s wife, she was eligible for a Portuguese passport, but Iva had put up with too much in order to remain an American–she had no wish to become Portuguese. Instead, she waited more than a year for the state department to rule that it had ‘no objection at all’ to her receiving a U.S. passport.

Rumors of d’Aquino’s homecoming sparked protests. The American Legion pushed for her confinement in Japan, and even the Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution opposing her return to the United States. Conversely, powerful newspaper columnist and radio commentator Walter Winchell beat the drum for her prosecution in America, while FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called for help in proving, once and for all, that Iva d’Aquino was the voice of Tokyo Rose. Even Iva’s old nemesis, reporter Harry Brundidge, now working for the Nashville Tennessean, got into the act. In March 1948, with justice department backing, he flew to Tokyo to secure Iva’s signature on the notes that Clark Lee had taken during their interview almost three years before–a signature that would certify the notes’ accuracy, including her ‘confession’ that she was World War II’s most nefarious propagandist.

Brundidge found Iva emotionally exhausted. Two months earlier, she had given birth to a boy who had died the next morning. She just wanted to rejoin her family, and the reporter assured her that she’d help her cause by certifying that Lee’s notes were correct. Though she protested, ‘Most of this is made up,’ the still-too-trusting Iva signed. It was the ‘proof’ her enemies needed. In August, the justice department–giving in to press and political pressure–had Iva arrested for ‘treasonable conduct’ and shipped to San Francisco for trial.

Judicial proceedings against Iva Toguri d’Aquino began on July 5, 1949, the day after her 33rd birthday, and lasted for nearly three months. Because the government had to import a variety of witnesses from Japan, the trial reportedly cost more than $750,000, making it the most expensive in U.S. history up to that time. The defense was more restricted in building its witness pool, as Iva’s father had to cover all the costs with borrowed money. Nevertheless, some important allies came to California on Iva’s behalf, including Charles Cousens, the Australian major who’d made her his protg.

Government lawyers intended to show that Iva had maliciously betrayed the United States, had urged GIs to lay down their arms, and had voluntarily remained in Japan after the outbreak of war to make radio broadcasts. In addition, the government hoped to prove that Tokyo Rose was not a myth–no matter what its own justice department believed–but was, in fact, Iva’s radio moniker. This last effort was buttressed by Iva’s own nave willingness over the years to sign autographs as ‘Tokyo Rose’ but was undermined in court by several GIs who found it hard to separate the legend of Tokyo Rose from what they actually remembered being said on the broadcasts.

Although the trial began on July 5, Iva wasn’t called to testify until September 7. Newspaper reports noted she looked ‘pale’ and ‘haggard.’ Her all-white jury was surprised at how unlike the storied temptress she appeared or sounded. Years later, Iva would be quoted in Masayo Duus’ Tokyo Rose: Orphan of the Pacific as saying she ‘wasn’t all that worried [about being found guilty of treason]. I did not feel the least bit as though I had betrayed America.’ Reporters covering the trial agreed–nine out of 10 of them predicted her acquittal. Yet, after 80 hours of deliberations, the jury surprised everyone. On September 29, it returned a verdict of ‘guilty’ on one out of eight charges, that of’speak[ing] into a microphone concerning the loss of ships’–a reference to allegations that, shortly after the 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, she had broadcast the ‘news’ of American ship sinkings. (In fact, a Japanese fleet had been destroyed during that confrontation.) On October 6, Judge Michael Roche sentenced d’Aquino to 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Only much later did he admit that he’d been prejudiced against her from the trial’s inception.

Iva spent six years at the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, West Virginia, visited periodically by her family, but not by her husband, who had been forbidden to re-enter the United States after he had testified at her trial. They corresponded about once a month until shortly after Iva was released from prison. ‘I wanted to keep up her morale,’ Felippe later said in a newspaper interview. ‘But then we stopped. It all seemed so hopeless.’ The pair divorced in 1980.

When authorities released Iva on January 28, 1956, she told reporters, ‘All I ask for is a fifty-fifty chance to get back on my feet.’ Instead, she learned that the U.S. government now planned to deport her. It took two years for her lawyers to defeat that effort, but much longer for the country of her birth to offer anything approaching an apology for the turmoil it had put her through. Lawyer Theodore Tamba, who had worked on d’Aquino’s defense during her trial, petitioned President Dwight D. Eisenhower for clemency in 1954 but received no reply from the White House. When Wayne Collins, d’Aquino’s trial lawyer, wrote to President Lyndon B. Johnson 14 years later with a similar request, again the White House did not respond.

A series of newspaper articles sympathetic to d’Aquino were published in the mid-1970s. Two came from the Chicago Tribune in which two prosecution witnesses from her trial recanted their testimonies, claiming they had been given under duress. In 1976 d’Aquino appeared on television’s 60 Minutes in a report sympathetic to her case. During the segment, George Guysi, a former CIC officer who had interviewed d’Aquino, declared that the state department had abandoned her, and John Mann, foreman of the jury from her trial, now said he believed she was innocent and he should have stuck to his guns at the time.

Wayne Merritt Collins, the son of d’Aquino’s trial lawyer, filed a petition for a presidential pardon in November 1976, and on January 19 of the following year, President Gerald Ford pardoned Iva Toguri d’Aquino as one of his last acts in office. By then, she was living in Chicago, where she remains today, declining any further press attention at age 86.

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This article was written by J. Kingston Pierce and originally published in the October 2002 issue of American History Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to American History magazine today!

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