<Begin Segment 13>

HM: But everybody gets assigned and I'm sittin' there like a dead duck again, and not knowing what's gonna happen. And so I get called up by this Colonel Newton. He runs the Counterintelligence Corps School at Fort Holabird and he says, "Hey, we got a placement for you. And we know you got all this background. We know you got this FCC license, and we want to put you into this organization for training, and that's another six weeks." And that was for, they used to call it, the euphemism was, "defense against sound equipment." That was the euphemism.

TI: Defense against sound equipment?

HM: Yeah. That's a bunch of bologna that pertains to the other direction.

TI: Eavesdropping?

HM: Yeah.

TI: Right.

HM: Telephone taps, mike planting, all that kind of junk. So I got placed into that class, and they have morning lectures, and then the afternoons are, you have to work the problem and work with the equipment. And they have exams at every week interval. So by the third week I was getting so bored, sick of this stuff. It's elementary electronics. It's so elementary that I was just bored. And so the captain calls me into his office and says, "You look real bored in class. You seem completely disinterested, and we don't like to have students that way." So I says, "This stuff is so elementary that I just can't get enthused about it." So he says, "Okay, here take the finals." So he shoved me the finals, and I went, I went through the whole thing. And then the following Monday he says, "Well, I guess you know most of what we want to teach you so we want to assign you as the, the instructor for the afternoon classes." "I, I don't want it." He says, "Well, we're gonna cut your orders to that effect." And that's what they did. So I became an instructor in that area. The problem was that we have to make the lectures for the introductory functions of how to protect yourself from having this kind of equipment placed against you. Like for instance all the military attaches they used to ship out of the United States, they all used to come to the Counterintelligence Corps School for one week and we used to give them all these lectures on what to look out for. And so, we used to have groups of different countries, like Australians used to come there and they had their equivalent to CIC people trained in that kind of work. We had also people like the French Army and French Air Force people coming through there. All, all kinds of different countries. We used to have groups that were Puerto Ricans that were being assigned undercover in South America. All kinds of different people. Anyway, during the course of this teaching process, two of us had brand new cars. Lt. Parker who was another retread, recall, he happened to be Assistant District Attorney for the County of Los Angeles. And he was teaching investigation techniques at the school. And, and he had a brand new Buick and I had a, that Pontiac. And we got a notification on our windshield that we can't park our cars in the location we used to park. It was the con -- most convenient place for us to park to the school assignment area. And so I got to know Parker because of that. And I says, "Did you get the same note?" We were just getting ready to leave from the parking lot together. So he says, "Yeah." And I knew that he was my investigations instructor when I was taking the course. And he says, "Yeah, I wonder what this thing is all about." Anyway, Colonel Newton, the guy that was the Commandant of the school felt embarrassed because he didn't have a car as good as ours and he wanted us to park our cars way on the other side. [Laughs]

TI: Because he had these junior officers...

HM: Yeah.

TI: ...with brand new cars.

HM: Yeah, buncha young punks there. And so he says, "Yeah, you were in one of my classes weren't you?" And so I said, "Yeah." And he says, "How about helping me out one of these days?" So I says, "What do you want me to do?" And he says, "Well, I want you to dress up like one of these peasants and come into class, and we want to go through the interrogation process. And I want to demonstrate what happens when you use an interpreter." So I says, "You must be kidding." Because we had one of those sessions there and I did the interrogation for that, that class. Parker is one of these guys that says, "Who wants to volunteer for this interrogation?" And if nobody puts their hand up, he says, "You, right there." [Laughs] And I was the one that was in the front row. So we got into this -- in that class we got into this interrogation and where this guy was supposed to be a Nihonjin peasant and he witnessed a sabotage event. And the interpreter wasn't interpreting correctly. And I would ask a question, question and the interpreter would put it in Nihongo and then ask the question in Nihongo to the, this peasant. And the guy would iterate his answer in Nihongo, back to through the interpreter, back to me. And he was making some wrong statements and he was doing it incorrectly. So I was trying to get the interpreter to make it even more basic on the question that he was raising.

TI Outta curiosity, was the interpreter a Japanese, a Japanese American like a Nisei?

HM: No. He was hakujin guy. And he was trained in Monterey. Well, to come to the issue, we knew, I knew what the answer was supposed to be because we used to trade answers from the class ahead of us. We said, "What the heck kinda stunt is he gonna pull on this thing?" And then they would tell us. That they were one week in advance, so they were taking the class that we would take the following week. And the answer was known to me, so I was trying to get the answer outta this guy and the interpreter was screwing it up. [Laughs] I really got kinda ticked off. And the, and I guess Parker realized that I could understand the Nihongo part of it and this was why he wanted me to become the, the peasant, and this guy was being reassigned to a different assignment. So he talked me into it. So he gave me all these grubbies and zoris, and kind of dirty up my hair and go walking in there. And Parker really used to enjoy me because you know, I would, I would give flippant answers. And when the guy offers me a cigarette, the, the person that's doing the interview process, interrogation process, I would take the whole pack and slip 'em in my pocket. And I used to really destroy the balance of the equilibrium of the interrogator to the questioner.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.