Office of the Historian

740.00119 PW/5–745: Telegram

The Ambassador in Portugal (Baruch) to the Secretary of State 97

Lisbon, May 7, 1945—noon.
[Received 9 p.m.]

990. …97a of OSS reports that the Counselor of the Japanese Legation here, Masutaro Inouye, yesterday approached … the DNB representative in Portugal (formerly DNB Washington).… who has been a trusted undercover agent of OSS for past year informed … that Inouye made following statements to him:

“I do not want this to be construed as a ‘peace feeler’ but please try to get into touch with the American Embassy and find out what exactly they plan to do in the Far East. There can be no ‘unconditional surrender’ as the Emperor would never do that. But we realize that Japan will be hopelessly smashed by United States bombers. We regard the Tripartite Pact98 as torn by Germany as Doenitz99 has surrendered to the western powers though the pact said that there would be no separate peace. So we now feel able to conclude a peace with the western powers too. The only drawback is that we do not know how far the western powers intend to go. We are prepared to give up all the conquests in this war but would like to keep what we had before. We think that we have a rather good point for argument: China and Russia. The Americans no doubt know that Russia will try to drive [Page 479] them out of the Far East and that the United States may lose the great Chinese market. The way Molotov1 acts at San Francisco2 shows plainly that Stalin has reverted to Imperialism or to Isolationism. There can be no other solution for the western powers than to get up a united front against Stalin. The Japanese are very strong in China. If need be the Government can go to China and fight on from there. We hold the richest parts of the Chinese sub-continent and we have an important Chinese following. We have the argument of ‘Asia for the Asiatics’. So instead of waging a very long war against Japan in China and finally losing the Far East markets to Russia the western powers should come to some sort of an arrangement, however bad it might be for us. We do not think that after the Polish experience the USA will grant a six billion dollar credit to Stalin and we think that the Russians will drift even farther apart from the western powers. We hope that the United States will see this in the same light.”

Baruch
  1. The substance of this telegram was given the British Embassy on May 14.↩
  2. The names of certain officials have been deleted from this document.↩
  3. Signed by Japan, Germany, and Italy at Berlin, September 27, 1940, Foreign Relations, Japan, 1931–1941, vol. ii, p. 165.↩
  4. Grand Adm, Karl Doenitz, successor to Adolf Hitler as head of German Government, May 1.↩
  5. Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union.↩
  6. At United Nations Conference on International Organization which met at San Francisco, April 25–June 26, 1945.↩