Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Henry Miyatake Interview III
Narrator: Henry Miyatake
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: September 21, 1999
Densho ID: denshovh-mhenry-03-0017

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HM: Then I got -- I, I really got myself into a pickle. This, this, this army PX captain, that, he had a court, court martial thrown against him, general court martial. And he was cited for embezzling PX funds, expropriating U.S. Army material, and funds.

TI: This is the one that you helped by sorta bugging his...

HM: His place, yeah.

TI: His place to get information?

HM: But instead of being a Counterintelligence case, it was now a criminal investigation case.

TI: Right. Uh-huh.

HM: And it had proceeded to the point of a court martial. And then, this army regulation saying that you can't do this. If it's for one allegation, you have to prove it under that basis. You can't transfer data to another army organization. So I, I found out about this whole incident and, in fact a friend of mine that was stationed at Fort Meade said, "Hey they're court-martialing this army PX guy." So I went to the, the executive officer of that detachment that handled the case and we got into a shouting match. And I accused him of violating army regulations, and things got worse and he started calling me some nasty names, and I in turn returned the favor. And about a week later my commanding officer says, "Hey, we got a complaint here. You're gonna, they're gonna file court martial proceedings against you for insubordination." I says, "What's this all about?" He says, "Well, you went down to second army detachment and you cussed this guy out and a bunch of other things, and they're citing you for insubordination." So, I said, "Well, I knew what his rank was." And I guess in the army terms of military justice that was a legitimate allegation to make. So they froze me out of my job at that point because they said, "Hey, you're faced with this problem and you gotta resolve it." So this guy that got me into the CIC to begin with, he got wind of it and he says, "I want to talk to you. Maybe we can clear this thing up before it gets too, too bad." So he was willing to offer some help. He knew the guy that filed the complaint and he says normally he's a pretty good individual, but once you get him riled up he's, he acts insane. And the guy used to be under his organization's structure. And so he interceded. So, the thing got beat up through the organization function. Finally Gallagher, Gallagher who was at that time head of CIC, got attention of this court-martial that was suppose to take place -- I mean it was becoming very serious. It was not a, it was not just a cussing of another person out or something like that --

TI: Were you under house arrest or anything like that?

HM: No. There was, I couldn't, they wouldn't give me any traveling authorizations or anything. It wasn't under house arrest, but they wanted me around. So they didn't know what to do with me. So they sent me back to Fort Holabird. So I'm in this, this, these quarters and this adjutant that has a, is a friend, he says, "Well we're gonna put you underground and they're not gonna find you." So I said, "Where're they gonna send me?" He says, "Well, you know, the Central Records Facility is a classified organization and we don't want to identify anybody in there. We don't want to identify the work that they're doing."

TI: So they were just going to try to hide you until this thing blew over --

HM: The thing blew over, yeah, and it quieted down, see. And so they said, "Well, it's not a very good job, but at least it'll hide you. And you, as long as you stay hidden there, and it gets close to your separation time, well, we'll just sneak you out." That was the plan.

TI: Because you were within months of leaving --

HM: Yeah, I was at that time, let's see, this was toward Thanksgiving, I would have been released in February, but they could have held me over sixty days.

TI: At this point what was your rank in the army?

HM: Well, as a special agent, they don't put any rank on you. They only assess you on the pay level. So when we were doing the teaching at the school, because the, the classes that we were exposed to, some of these guys were like military attaches. So they were all field grade officers or better, and in fact they, they used to have some regular generals in there occasionally. So they didn't want us to be encumbered by rank so they would put unassigned brass on us, no rank, so we got officers, unassigned brass, but no rank. If they wanted us to show rank, then they used to give us warrant officer's ratings on the thing. So anyway, by the time I got this court martial thing they had auto -- automatically demoted me down to practically nothing. So I, I wasn't too concerned at that point, but the fact that they found me this place to hide for the next three months, I figured wow, that's a pretty good deal. At least I won't get involved in the court-martial case.

TI: At this point, as this court-martial was proceeding, did you feel like you had somehow screwed up somehow? Or what were you thinking?

HM: Well, I shouldn't have sworn at the guy. I, I told him to go to hell amongst other things. And he did the same thing to me, but nonetheless, I should have never gone and confronted him on this situation, because even though he, he faulted the army regulation, I had no authority to do that to him. I should've just kept my mouth shut and gone the other way, but it perturbed me so much that they were gonna send this guy off for ten to twenty years in Leavenworth that I felt compelled to do it. And I don't know, I felt they were kicking a guy down and kicking him again and I thought that was really a dirty stunt. And on top of that I didn't like that executive officer. When I served under him he was very arrogant. He called me a "Jap" a couple of times and I remember that, and it kinda rubbed me the wrong way. So this was a kind of a way to get back to him, in that, having this problem. So I was assigned to this Central Records Facility. And since I was the newest guy on the, on the job, they decided to put me on third shift which was midnight to eight o'clock in the morning. And all the guys that were there assigned to this department were very smart individuals. They were either history majors, or psychology majors, they had advanced degrees. And a bachelor's degrees was one of the minor areas, and here I wasn't even, I didn't even go to college. So anyway they stuck me in this place and the lead guy was a friend of the Kimmel family, I, I wasn't aware of that, at all. And on Sunday morning which is a, or Sunday midnight, that's Monday morning according to army time, so we show up for assignment on Sunday night. And because we don't have any instructions for any information requirements from assistant chief of staff, G-2 from Pentagon, because it comes during the day and it flows into the afternoon of the first shift, and then usually, second shift gets what's left over, and then we get either emergency type things, or on Sunday night, nothing because they didn't operate over the weekend usually, unless it's a emergency type situation. So his, his normal procedure was wow, let's start looking into some of these cases. And like typical ones that he looked into was the court-martial of Kimmel and General Short, Pearl Harbor thing, this, this superwoman spy that was operating in, in Germany during World War II, and all these kind of incidents, Richard Sorge's case, what they had of him.

TI: And these were all the classified sort of military documents?

HM: Yeah, yeah, and we had thirteen million plus files in that place. It was a huge repository of information. And it was all in dossier numbers. It's case numbers or study numbers. And so he had some feedback from the, the AC of SG2 the intelligence department in the Pentagon. So when we were tracking something like a, a case for an organization, he would have the all the dossier numbers of the people that were hitting the organization and then we would spread out from that, and it's like a big organization chart, once you get the key guys everything falls out from under it. And our job was to integrate the information to try to get it to some recognizable intelligent form.

TI: Would you actually write reports based on that, or you just collect the files?

HM: We'd collect the files and then --

TI: And put them into one --

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.