All spy stories are fundamentally tales of betrayal, but even in that amoral world, a particularly disreputable niche is reserved for the double agent. This is the operative who, as a British aristocrat once put it in a condemning speech to Parliament, is both “hunting with the hounds and running with the fox.” That is, his loyalties are all over the place, sheer anarchy.
Ronald Drabkin’s Beverly Hills Spy is a fascinating true tale of just such an intelligence agent who, while living amid the movie-star glitter and comforting sunshine of Hollywood during the years inexorably counting down to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, was dutifully working for the Japanese intelligence service as well as any other espionage agency that would have him—and pay him, often lavishly.
It’s a thrilling spy story centered around Frederick Rutland, a genuine British World War I hero (christened “Rutland of Jutland” by the British press for his daring exploits in that naval battle, for which he won the Distinguished Service Cross), who went on to become an inventive naval and aeronautical engineer, a man whose insights and talents were in demand in a world careening toward war, and yet who cavalierly sold his allegiances and his soul.
It’s also, even more compellingly, a psychological detective story told with authority and, often, drama (albeit in rather workman-like prose) of a covert operative who turns his back on all his previous loyalties to provide invaluable intelligence to the pre-war Japanese Navy, while also, remarkably, managing at the same time to convince himself that he was not culpable of any crimes. It’s as if he was holding a smoking gun and staring at a corpse at his feet with a bullet hole in its forehead while also adamantly denying he pulled the trigger.
This is the operative who, as a British aristocrat once put it, is both “hunting with the hounds and running with the fox.”
What set Rutland, a man with so many natural gifts and talents, down this twisted path? In the present-day realm of counter-intelligence, the customary explanation for treason is to trot out the acronym MICE: money, ideology, coercion, and ego. And Drabkin makes a persuasive case that two of these factors fueled the witches’ brew that Rutland eagerly chugalugged.
Money, indeed, played a role. Rutland liked—needed, perhaps—to live well, and espionage bankrolled the palatial mansion in the Hollywood Hills, the retinue of servants, the private schools for his children, and the globe-trotting holidays.
At the same time, Drabkin also makes clear how ego actively propelled Rutland to his traitor’s destiny. For despite all of his wartime heroics—gallantry that won him two audiences with King George V—he had no long-term future as an officer in either the toxically class-conscious Royal Navy or Royal Air Force. Rather, he was forever branded with the inescapable mark of his lower-class origins: he had entered the navy as a desperately poor and uneducated 14-year-old. Even after Rutland was promoted to flight commander, a huffy subordinate would still grouse that “the pilots didn’t like being bossed around by an ex lower deck.”
Espionage, however, offered a career that was not constricted by the iron bands of class and that also gave the dirt-poor lad from the dismal slums of Weymouth the opportunity to be a strutting player on the world stage. Viewed from this enticing perspective, it’s a bit easier to grasp the journey on which Rutland embarked. After all, how could he betray a society that wouldn’t let him in the front door?
A man whose insights and talents were in demand in a world careening toward war, and yet who cavalierly sold his allegiances and his soul.
As Drabkin’s narrative effectively documents, Rutland was in many ways the perfect double agent: he served all his masters productively while also simultaneously betraying them. In that bewildering way, Rutland delivered valuable intelligence to the Japanese that would enable their planes and aircraft carriers to prepare for the attack on Pearl Harbor, while at the same time warning the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence of a coming Japanese attack. He could plot with Japan to position a submarine close to the Malibu shoreline for espionage, while also disclosing this scheme to the Americans to prove his worth.
Then there’s Rutland’s desperate trip to a pre-war Washington in the summer of 1941, where over the course of 24 hours he headed off to meet with an officer in the U.S. Naval Intelligence service, then attempted to speak to the Japanese naval attaché, whom he hoped would encrypt and deliver a report to his superiors in Tokyo, and finally rushed to the British Embassy to offer his services to M.I.6.
Yet as Drabkin spins this turbulent day, for Rutland, a man for whom betrayal has become the only constant in his life, there seemingly is no awareness of the raging internal chaos propelling his adventures. Treason is simply business as usual.
Frederick Rutland was in many ways the perfect double agent: he served all his masters productively while also simultaneously betraying them.
There is also another subplot to this espionage story, one that resonates across the decades with a stern warning. At various points in Rutland’s clandestine career, firm suspicions about his spying became clarified in the minds of both British and American counter-intelligence services. The F.B.I., in fact, had been tailing Rutland even as he made his many stops around Washington offering his services and his purloined secrets.
But, deterred by both fatuous political logic as well as interagency rivalries, the information was not shared; one high-minded service didn’t know what the other, no less sincere, was thinking. One can only wonder with dismay (as well as the echoing knowledge of the missteps that led to 9/11) if ancient spymasters’ narrow, parochial mindsets are still continuing to breed future intelligence disasters.
As for Rutland, the complex juggling act that was his life ended in disarray. He wound up in a British prison, only to commit suicide when released. Or did he? In the penultimate paragraph of the book, Drabkin provocatively dangles another possibility: “It doesn’t seem totally impossible his death was not suicide but murder.”
And so the reader is left wondering, too. But then, in every true-life spy story, there is always one more secret file, one more mystery.
Howard Blum is the author of several books, including the Edgar Award–winning American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, and the Birth of Hollywood. His latest, When the Night Comes Falling: A Requiem for the Idaho Student Murders, will be published in June by HarperCollins
