August 27, 1999
Web posted at: 1:36 p.m. EDT (1736 GMT)

By Jamie Allen
CNN Interactive Senior Writer

In this story: 'The real wars' 'I was drawn into it' 'Barbaric treatment' British controversy RELATED STORIES, SITES

(CNN) -- In World War II, Shanghai was a prize possession for the major powers.

"Shanghai was the richest city in China, it was the largest port in China, it was China's major industrial center," says author Bernard Wasserstein.

Therefore, Shanghai was also something else: "It was the espionage intelligence center of the Far East," Wasserstein adds. "It's a very colorful and exotic arena. Shanghai in that period was in some ways an attractive and sinister place."

Wasserstein knows. His book "Secret War in Shanghai" (Houghton Mifflin), which took him seven years of research and writing to complete, delves into the murky underground of double agents, collaboration and murderous political maneuvering.

'The real wars'

Billed as the first book-length account on the subject, "Secret War" reveals much more than the rivalry between the Allies and their enemies. Wasserstein says the intrigue in Shanghai centered on the lack of trust between those who were supposed to be working for the same cause.

"The real wars were between the Japanese and the Germans, the British and the Americans, and the different factions of Chinese," says Wasserstein. "The British and Americans were deep rivals. The Germans and Japanese, although they were supposed to be allies, were at loggerheads and deeply suspicious of each other.

"Shanghai was well-known as a paradise of adventurers where you simply followed the highest bidder," he says.

'I was drawn into it'

Wasserstein is president of the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He has written five previous books, including the biography "The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln," which detailed one agent's experience in Shanghai.

While researching that book, Wasserstein "came across the files of Shanghai municipal police," he says. "They had large files on the entire Shanghai underworld, and those files carried on until World War II. It was continued under Japanese occupation during the war.

"I was drawn into it," says Wasserstein. "I felt I had a ringside seat at this mixture of the theater of the absurd and theater of cruelty."

'Barbaric treatment'

Wasserstein focuses on specific figures on the scene to paint a picture seemingly traced from the pages of a John LeCarre novel. There's fashion model "Princess" Sumaire, whose sexual fidelities changed as often as her political loyalties. There's also the character of Lawrence Klindt Kentwell, a British-Chinese journalist and disbarred lawyer who sided with the pro-Japanese regime during the war.

His segment is particularly compelling, because the Japanese left a legacy of "horrific" war crimes, according to Wasserstein's research.

"Japanese treatment of Chinese and Allied citizens whom they captured, particularly if they suspected them of espionage, was horrific," Wasserstein says. "I describe some of the barbaric treatment of British and American political prisoners in the book."

But the book doesn't take sides -- in Wasserstein's research, everyone was working for and suspecting everyone else.

One of Wasserstein's favorite characters, and one who perhaps symbolizes the symbiotic and eccentric existence of spies in Shanghai, was "Captain" Eugene Pick.

"(He) was a Russian, born in Latvia, who was an actor, singer, gangster and ran a whole network of agents in Shanghai for the Japanese during the war," Wasserstein says. "He ended up, though, working for the Americans after the war. Before the war, he worked for the British, fell out with the British, and then turned for the Japanese."

British controversy

Wasserstein says his book has met some controversy since its release earlier this year in Great Britain.

"Many British who are still alive who served in Far East were shocked by some of the facts that I disclosed in the book," says Wasserstein. "For instance ... the fact that large numbers of British, American and Australian newspaper men and broadcasters continued working in Shanghai under the Japanese occupation.

"(Also), the fact that businessmen carried on not just working under Japanese occupation, but producing critically needed war material for the Japanese war effort," Wasserstein says. "This hadn't been revealed before, and it was the single aspect of the book that provoked the most controversy in Britain when it came out."

Ultimately, Wasserstein says, the spying in Shanghai did little for the war effort on either side.

"The results were actually rather meager," says Wasserstein, "and yet all the powers put enormous resources into intelligence in the Far East."