As with his other publications, Richard Samuels has written an ambitiously large book that mates prodigious description with incisive analysis. The title of the book comes from tokumu kikan, the name of special duty units established by the Japanese imperial military in the 1930s for covert action (xvi). The book has chapters introducing the theory and practice of intelligence, and five historical case studies: its birth and growth from 1895 until 1945; accommodating defeat during the Cold War; what Samuels calls tinkering with failure from 1991 to 2001; reimagining possibilities, from 2001 and 2013; and “reengineering,” from 2013 until 2018, thereby setting up the Abe administration as an agent of change.
Chapter 1 reviews the theoretical literature on intelligence, illustrated with many concrete examples. One might quibble with the fact that most examples are drawn from the US, with far fewer examples (excepting Japan itself) from the UK, France, or Germany, and even fewer examples from non-Western countries. This is disappointing, given that Samuels quotes the first director of Japan’s Defense Intelligence Headquarters, the country’s largest image and signals collection organization, as claiming that the UK “model is closer in size, scope, and historical relevance” (13). An important message from this chapter is that Japan perennially suffers from three intelligence deficiencies that plague intelligence agencies elsewhere, but afflict Japan even more: group think, siloism (or stove-piping), and weak political control of intelligence agencies as part of a wider pattern of weak political control over bureaucracies.
Samuels identifies three drivers of change in intelligence: external environment, or strategic, change, technological development, and failure. He further distinguishes six elements of intelligence: collection, analysis, communication, protection, covert action, and oversight. However, one can question whether covert action belongs. This seems to be an artifact of institutional design in many countries, if not the conventional use of the term “spy,” rather than a concept intrinsically linked to other elements of intelligence (25–27).
At least once Samuels appears to equate intelligence success with success itself, almost equating knowledge with power. As social scientists know from painful experience, possessors of knowledge are often simultaneously bereft of the power to act on that knowledge. Samuels calls the capabilities of Commodore Perry’s “black ships” an intelligence failure for the Tokugawa (xvii). However, it is not clear that even if the shogunate had possessed perfect intelligence, the bakufu could have been better prepared. In fact, one could even call the shogunate’s response an intelligence success since they did not underestimate Western military capabilities as China had during the Opium War, and thus did not suffer the same disastrous consequences (of which Edo was well aware). Arguably, the Tokugawa made the right mix of concessions that staved off attack while not conceding too much. If there was an intelligence failure, it was domestic: the failure to see how concessions to Perry could destabilize the bakufu, leading to its collapse 15 years later.
The Cold War chapter argues that Japan’s intelligence community laboured under the twin burdens of delegitimization as an extension of Japan’s anti-militarist delegitimization of armed forces, and subordination to its US ally. Dependence produced intelligence tensions under the surface, as the US reportedly blocked Japan from acquiring surveillance satellites, and the GSDF kept the code names of its intelligence units secret from their US interlocutors, illustrating “a long undercurrent of resentment of Japan’s subordination to its US partner” (xv, 234). According to Samuels, the Japanese intelligence community “only recently has begun the delicate process of freeing itself” from US dependence “by enhancing indigenous capabilities without denying itself the benefits of U.S. intelligence support”(xv). Others have identified this process as Japan’s decentering from exclusive dependence upon the US as its sole security partner (Paul Midford, Wilhelm Vosse, eds., New Directions in Japan’s Security: Non-US Centric Evolution, Abingdon, 2020).
Chapter 6 deals with Abe’s “reengineering of the intelligence community” since 2013, starting with the Designated State Secrets Law (DSSL). It is worth noting that preparations for this law began during two previous DPJ cabinets. Samuels insightfully observes “Japan’s discourse on state secrets migrated from its past preoccupation with the experience of wartime authoritarianism to a more universal concern for the preservation and health of democratic norms” (207). Yet he does not confront the reason for this, namely that Abe’s version of this law included illiberal criminal penalties for journalists who publish state secrets. In other words, this was arguably the first postwar security-related law that directly challenged liberal democratic norms.
The second major change Samuels analyzes is the reform of the National Security Council and the creation of the National Security Secretariat under it, also in 2013, for the purpose of overcoming siloism and producing all-government actionable intelligence that would respond to policy makers´ needs. Samuels credits this “reengineering” to Abe as a “relentlessly focused prime minister who was distinguished by his willingness to expend political capital for intelligence reform” (216). Given that others have found Abe to be more focused on ideology than on traditional security (Bryce Wakefield, “Centered on the fight within: the inward-looking nature of the Japanese debate on constitutional reinterpretation with a diluted US focus,” in Midford and Vosse, eds., New Directions in Japan’s Security, 27–43), one wonders whether some of this “relentless focus” should be credited to former Foreign Minister Machimura Nobutaka, who was a driving force for intelligence reform. Samuels credits Abe’s reforms as the first serious reengineering of postwar intelligence institutions, but reform that has nonetheless been modest (the NSS has less than 90 employees, 212) and of mixed success.
Samuels argues that Abe’s reforms were intended as “a security hedge,” a “prudent course in the face of declining US capabilities relative to China.” The Abe administration essentially was “positioning the alliance to transcend the alliance should it be become necessary” (253). Summing up the limitations of Abe’s reengineering, Samuels observes that “stovepipes never went away, and a robust HUMINT (human intelligence) capability has yet to arrive” (255). It is also striking that most of this reengineering took place in 2013 and then appeared to stall, with the Abe administration by 2015 rejecting a “Nihonban CIA” HUMINT organization “as moving too far and too fast” (254).
Overall, Samuels plots the trajectory of Japan’s intelligence community as “like a sine curve-one in which Japan’s intelligence infrastructure expanded, receded, and now is poised to expand again” (255). However, his own account raises questions over whether that expansion stalled by 2015. The first significant academic book in English, Samuel’s magisterial work on Japan’s postwar intelligence community will be the standard work on the subject for years to come.
Paul Midford
Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo