Episode 1: Safecracker

Summary

Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order

Episode 1: "Safecracker"

Release Date: December 1, 2025
Host: Rachel Maddow (MS NOW)

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Main Theme

The first episode of "Burn Order" introduces listeners to one of the darkest decisions in American history: the government’s executive order to forcibly round up and incarcerate Japanese Americans during World War II. The episode weaves together suspenseful historical narrative and investigative journalism, focusing on the unsung heroes who stood against this injustice—most notably amateur researcher Eiko Herzig Yoshinaga and naval intelligence officer Kenneth Ringle. Their stories reveal the brazen lies, suppressed truths, and government cover-ups that led to and sustained this policy, as well as the bombshell evidence that helped bring it into the light.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Accidental Historian: Eiko Herzig Yoshinaga

• Eiko’s Archival Obsession

  • Eiko, a retired housewife in suburban DC, began researching at the National Archives as a hobby (01:22–02:46).
  • She was meticulous, developing a unique system for cataloguing and cross-referencing documents—years before digital databases.
  • Quote (about her method):

    "She took such meticulous notes. Every piece of paper that she saw was given a number so that she could keep track of them. And this was way before computers. This was all hand done."
    —Eiko Herzig Yoshinaga (04:38)

• The Chance Discovery

  • One day in 1982, Eiko spotted a document that, according to all records, should not have existed—it was supposed to have been destroyed by fire (05:07–07:10).
  • The document contained marginalia and notes that revealed the government’s efforts to suppress the truth about the Japanese American incarceration.
  • Quote:

    "We all instantly understood that if this gets out, the government is going to look really, really bad. This was something that nobody could have foreseen in their entire life... it changed my life."
    —Eiko Herzig Yoshinaga (07:55)

Wartime Paranoia and Intelligence: Kenneth Ringle

• Early Espionage and Japan Experts

  • Kenneth Ringle, naval intelligence officer and fluent Japanese speaker, was trained in Japan as part of a program to "totally immerse" US officers (11:00–14:22).
  • Ringle leveraged social immersion and intelligence gathering, attending Japanese American community events and building trust (21:22–22:44).

• The Safecracker Episode

  • With the help of a safecracker from San Quentin prison and the support of the LAPD and FBI, Ringle orchestrated a break-in at the Japanese Consulate in Los Angeles (25:00–26:32).
  • Their target: Documents naming Japanese government spies and, critically, evidence about the perceived loyalty of Japanese Americans.
  • Quote:

    "We couldn't have been caught. We had the Los Angeles police outside, we had the FBI with us, we had everything. We'd even checked our own SafeCracker out of San Quentin."
    —Kent Ringle’s son (25:35)

• What the Documents Revealed

  • Ringle discovered not just the agents' names, but that the Japanese government actively considered Japanese Americans untrustworthy and did not recruit them for espionage (27:32–28:32).
  • Quote:

    "My father believed that most of the Japanese Americans were loyal and he wanted proof of that... I don't think he quite realized that they would have in There as many statements about don't trust the Japanese Americans."
    —Kent Ringle’s son (28:44)

The Suppression and the Rewriting of History

• Ignored Evidence

  • Despite Ringle's findings and his direct reports up the military and political chain—including to the President—he was sidelined (32:22–33:32).
  • The government, eager for a scapegoat, ignored his intelligence, instead constructing a false narrative to justify Executive Order 9066.

• The Cost and Consequence

  • Japanese Americans, who posed no threat, became the objects of mass suspicion, removal, and internment (34:31–36:23).
  • Quote:

    "Everything was done on the fly. America had never incarcerated, you know, a mass body of its citizens before."
    —Kent Ringle’s son (34:48)

  • The episode grapples with the legacy of those decisions, the trauma inflicted on families, and the rare courage of those who tried to stop it.

The Role of Hidden Heroes

• Exposing the Lie
  • Eiko’s tenacious discovery decades later provided the "smoking gun" proving the government had lied to justify its policy and had destroyed evidence to conceal the truth (36:28–36:48).
  • Quote:

    "Those documents made it clear the decision of the Supreme Court were tainted, were tainted with illegal and unethical conduct by our own government."
    —Eiko Herzig Yoshinaga (36:28)

  • The narrative closes by reflecting on the necessity of individual action—and the significance of standing up to unconstitutional government conduct, regardless of the era.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments with Timestamps

• On Discovery and Fate:

  "It was luck. If I hadn't walked in that day, it might not have been there."
  —Documentary Narrator (07:09)

• On American Values:

  "If I believe in a constitution, I've got to object to this."
  —Ralph Townsend (08:49, 36:15)

• On Japanese American Loyalty:

  "They were not just loyal to the US, but they were actively working against the militarists."
  —Kent Ringle’s son (31:26) "The best Americans are those who haven't come here yet, who understand the promise of America... the Japanese Americans exactly exemplify this 100%."
  —Kent Ringle’s son (32:02)

• On Government Malfeasance:

  "A new story had to be created to replace the truth that Ken Ringle had uncovered and corroborated and documented. We would need a false story ginned up by some of the highest-ranking officials..."
  —Bryant Gumbel (32:38) "This is the story of one of the most shocking US government decisions in our nation's history and the strange and very specific reason that decision was made."
  —Bryant Gumbel (35:17)

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Segment Timestamps

• Eiko’s Background and the Discovery: 01:22–08:38
• Introduction of Kenneth Ringle: 10:49–14:22
• American/Japanese Espionage and Community Engagement: 14:22–22:44
• The Japanese Consulate Break-in: 24:30–26:44
• Revelations from the Documents: 26:44–29:18
• Ignored Intelligence and Policy Move Toward Incarceration: 32:22–34:31
• Aftermath, Trauma, and Resistance: 34:31–37:02

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Tone & Style

Rachel Maddow and the show's contributors use a suspenseful, investigative tone, blending empathy with incredulity as they uncover this history. The episode maintains a sense of urgency and reverence for its subjects, highlighting both the systemic failure and individual heroism that defined this chapter in American history.

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For Listeners New to the Series

This episode sets the stage for understanding not just what happened to Japanese Americans during WWII, but why—and how flawed intelligence, racism, and deliberate deception at the highest government levels led to tragedy. It also reveals how ordinary citizens’ tenacity can change the course of history.

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Further Listening

The episode ends by promising deeper dives into the people who perpetrated and resisted the policy, how the truth was hidden, and, ultimately, how it was exposed.

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For more information and resources, visit the show's website: MS NOW Burn Order.

Transcript

[Jen Psaki]

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[Bryant Gumbel]

El Programa Nacional de Vecas a ser de McDonald's a beneficiado mas de vieiciente. The Summer of 1982 Good morning.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

This is Today.

[Bryant Gumbel]

It's Tuesday, August 17th. I'm Bryant Gumbel, year two of the presidency of Ronald Reagan. That was President Reagan in a nationally.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

Televised speech last night from the White.

[Bryant Gumbel]

House making a sober plea to Americans to support. The number one song in the country is Eye of the Tiger. The summer's smash hit movie is E.T. and in Washington, Democrats and Republicans are at each other's throats over a big controversial bill to raise taxes. What we need now is an end to the bickering. In that summer of 1982, there's a researcher posted up inside the National Archives, which is just a few blocks from the White House. This researcher has been coming to the archives for years. It's basically her second home. On a typical day, she's at the archives right up until close closing time. She's maybe five feet tall, she's got big glasses, she's usually got a brown bag lunch with her and also her own personal copy machine that she lugs to and from the archives every day. But she's not a professor or an author who's there doing research for a book. She's not a 20 something student either. Quite the opposite, in fact. She's a retiree. She's a retired housewife living in suburban Washington D.C. and she started coming to the archives basically as a hobby.

[Documentary Narrator]

It started just out of her own interest to do research in the National Archives.

[Bryant Gumbel]

This hobbyist researcher, this retiree, her name is Eiko. Eiko Herzig Yoshinaga.

[Eiko Herzig Yoshinaga]

One of the great blessings in my life was meeting and getting to know Eiko.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Eiko Herzig Yoshinaga hasn't had any formal research training at all. But in her own way, with her own methods, she's developed an almost uniquely encyclopedic understanding of what's in the parts of the archives where she has been spending all of this time.

[Documentary Narrator]

She knew the archives like the back of her hand. She would go there every single day, look at all of the government documents her husband would join her.

[Bryant Gumbel]

When Aiko's husband Jack gets off work in Washington, he often heads straight to the National Archives himself. He finds Aiko in there. He rolls up his sleeves to get to work alongside her. It's a passion that they share to the point that it's ended up kind of taking over their lives a little bit. Or at least it has taken over parts of their house.

[Eiko Herzig Yoshinaga]

Her files that she'd accumulated over the years took up the whole inside of their condo. Even in the bathroom, there were boxes. Eiko was the most dogged researcher that I have ever met. And I've been praised as a dogged researcher. And she was way, way ahead of me.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Part of what makes Eiko so effective in her work in the archives is that she's developed her own very specific, very detailed filing system. She uses that portable copy machine to make her own copies of some important documents.

[Eiko Herzig Yoshinaga]

But.

[Bryant Gumbel]

But she also creates her own sorting system, her own index basically of where every document is and how each of those documents connects to every other document.

[Eiko Herzig Yoshinaga]

She took such meticulous notes. Every piece of paper that she saw was given a number so that she could keep track of them. And this was way before computers. This was all hand done.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

I mean, she is like your dream researcher. God, you talk about somebody who can find anything. And what was it she found? She found a document.

[Bryant Gumbel]

One afternoon in that summer of 1982, Eiko Herzig Yoshinaga is at her usual perch inside the National Archives and she does spot this one document sitting on the corner of a desk. It's a document that is not supposed to exist. And because it's not supposed to exist, Eiko has not been looking for this thing. Nobody's been looking for it. But when she sees it, Eiko, of all people, she knows exactly what it is.

[Documentary Narrator]

She was talking to someone and then noticed this document on the desk of somebody else and kind of looked at it and just kind of thought, wow.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

And she opens it up and she finds these handwritten notes in the margins. And she realizes, oh boy, she talked.

[Documentary Narrator]

About it with her eyes getting really large and just saying, wow, this is. Do you know what this is?

[Eiko Herzig Yoshinaga]

When Iko picked it up and started leafing through, she immediately, I mean, her expression, oh my goodness, look what I found.

[Bryant Gumbel]

The document that Eiko found that day, it's a government report, but it's also a ghost. There's a good reason she never would have looked for it. It's because there's no file, no record anywhere, no index card, no catalog. That would have ever pointed her to it. The only record anyone has found, the only record Eiko has ever found about this document explicitly says that every single copy of this document has been destroyed. Every single copy of this government report was officially certified to have been incinerated, destroyed on purpose by fire. But here it is, not even singed, not even smoky sitting right in front of her.

[Documentary Narrator]

As soon as I opened it, wow.

[Bryant Gumbel]

I said, pow.

[Documentary Narrator]

This is it, you know? And it was luck. It was luck. If I hadn't walked in that day, it might not have been there.

[Bryant Gumbel]

It wasn't really luck. Aiko was there that day because she was there basically every day. And because of that, because of her dogged persistence, she's made this find. She has spotted this document that the US government never wanted anyone to see. This document, they insisted must be destroyed because of what it had the potential to reveal about one of the most disturbing chapters in American history.

[Eiko Herzig Yoshinaga]

We all instantly understood that if this gets out, the government is going to look really, really bad. This was something that nobody could have foreseen in their entire life. I still get a little choked up about that because it changed my life.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Ultimately, it would change a lot of lives. This retiree, this self described little old housewife, she was about to change the course of American history. I'm your host, Rachel Maddow. And this is Rachel Maddow presents Burn Order.

[Documentary Narrator]

I never believed that America would be doing this.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

When he told me about it, I was astounded.

[Documentary Narrator]

It was the classic smoking gun evidence that every lawyer wants to find.

[Ralph Townsend]

If I believe in a constitution, I've got to object to this.

[Eiko Herzig Yoshinaga]

This is about all of us. It's about all Americans. Why did this happen? What can we do to make sure it doesn't happen again?

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[Jen Psaki]

Mississippi now presents season two of the Blueprint, hosted by Chen Psaki. In each episode, she talks to leading Democrats about how they plan to win again, including Texas Congressman Greg Cassar, who chairs the Progressive caucus, Congresswoman Sarah McBride of Delaware, the first openly trans person elected to Congress, and more, who are helping to shape the future of the party. The Blueprint with Jen Psaki Season 2 All episodes available now.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Episode 1 Safecracker I think he won.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

A Spanish prize in high school or something. He was very fluent in Spanish. He was very good with languages.

[Bryant Gumbel]

That's Kenneth Ringle. He's talking about his dad, who was an intelligence officer in the United States Navy.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

He was on a destroyer that went to Spain, and my father loved the Navy and he loved being at sea and he loved ships. But he didn't like shore duty, so he looked for a way to make shore duty less immature. And while he was in Madrid, he sees the naval attache to the embassy there going around, seeing a lot of beautiful women and drinking whiskey. And this was during Prohibition, right?

[Bryant Gumbel]

This is during Prohibition. It's the early 1920s, and Kent Ringle is a newly minted officer in the U.S. navy.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

My father, he wasn't a flake exactly, but he was 21, 22. And, you know, you're thinking boozing beautiful women would. If I'm being paid to do that, that would be good. So he came back and applied for that job in Madrid. And the guys that said duty officer said, dream on. You know, many people, senior, do you have that? However, we know you're good at languages, and if you want a position overseas during your shore duty, we have this program opening up in Japan.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Imperial Japan had started a war with China in 1894. Japan beat China in that war. Then 10 years later, Imperial Japan had started a war with Russia, and Japan beat Russia in that war. And then 10 years after that, Imperial Japan joined World War I and set out to take for itself every island north of the equator that Germany claimed as a colony. There were a whole bunch of them. It took Japan's Imperial Navy all of two weeks to seize every one of those islands for itself. In military terms, Imperial Japan was just a behemoth. It was the second largest empire in the world, and it had an escalating habit of invading its neighbors and waging wars to conquer new territory wars, which it generally won. A country like that, it makes sense that it would be important for the US to have eyes and ears on what they might do next. At least that is what the US Navy definitely thought at the time.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

They sent my father there and he learned it was a very interesting program because they had very intensive training in Tokyo, language training. And then for the next two years, they were assigned to go someplace where they would never see another Anglo or anybody who spoke English. They wanted total immersion in Japanese.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Ken Ringel didn't speak a word of Japanese before he went to that country. He was one of a handful of young officers who were placed by the US Navy in that country, technically as language students. But it wasn't hard to see that once they were there, they were expected to do a little more than just learn the language.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

I guess it was understood that he would be an intelligence there because that's why they were teaching him this stuff. He hadn't been interested in intelligence before that. I don't think he really wanted a place where he could drink and see beautiful women.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Kent Ringle was good with languages, and he also really was interested in having a good time. But both of those things would end up serving him well and serving his country well while he spent these crucial years in Japan.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

My father was extremely good looking, and I can show you a picture of him. And he'd go to the geisha's houses. Well, the Japanese militarists were starting to take over there, and new officers in the Japanese Navy would go in there and have a couple of hits of sake and start saying, well, we're going to take over the fucking world, man. We're going to conquer America and do all this stuff. And the geishas just hated him. And so they would tell my father everything these guys said. And then he would tell his superiors, this is what the Japanese guys are saying.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Lieutenant Commander Kent Ringle would quickly become one of the preeminent intelligence experts inside the US Navy on issues related to Japan. His years in Japan, his language skills, it was all just invaluable at a time when Imperial Japan was beginning to have global military ambitions, ambitions that, of course, would soon focus on America. All of this would ultimately culminate in the attack on Pearl harbor in December 1941. But in the years leading up to that attack, there was a concerted American effort to understand Japanese intentions and capabilities both at home and abroad. In the United States, there was an effort to identify and locate anyone in this country who might be spying Here for them against us.

[Ralph Townsend]

Today's threat to our national security is not a matter of military weapons alone. We know of other methods, new methods of attack. The Trojan horse. The fifth column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery.

[Bryant Gumbel]

At Japan's US Embassy in Washington, US Naval Intelligence suspected a military attache at the embassy of running a whole ring of spies for Japan. Japan Inside the United States. One U.S. navy intelligence officer made friends with that attache. He made sure to learn his favorite cocktails and the favorite drinks of everyone on the attache's staff. He invited the attache and his whole staff to his own house for a dinner party. Whereupon he kept them happy for hours having round after round after round of drinks while that excessively long, excessively boozy dinner party was underway. Naval Intelligence, meanwhile, had a technical team doing an inch by inch search of every nook and cranny of that spymaster's office. That's how Naval Intelligence busted that spy ring which had infiltrated the Washington Navy Yard and other US Military installations on the East Coast. But it wasn't only the spies that Japan sent over to the country's embassy and consulates here inside the United States, Japan had a surprisingly large cast of Americans. Notably native born US citizens, not people of Japanese descent who were either spying for Japan or secretly working for them as paid agents.

[Ralph Townsend]

Mr. Ralph Townsend, a career officer of our consular service, Vice Consulate, Shanghai. And Fu Chow for two years, author of Asia Answers and Ways that Are Dark whose recent testimony before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States Senate attracted wide attention.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Ralph Townsend was an avowed American fascist. He said that Japan and Germany were the last great nation national cultures which on a racial basis presented an effective defense against Jewish Bolshevism.

[Ralph Townsend]

Tokyo government is the only one among major powers ever to default on a single dollar of debt to us.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Ralph Townshend was an activist with the America first movement. His books and pamphlets praised the Japanese military, defended Japanese and German fascism. He advocated that the US should either ally itself with Japan and Germany in the Axis or stay out of the burgeoning World war altogether.

[Ralph Townsend]

All of us are aware of conditions which make war for the United States a possibility. Let us not, as a nation, commit suicide for eviction.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Federal agents ultimately came to suspect that the magazine that Ralph Townshend worked for was secretly funded by the Nazis. They also discovered that Townshend was being paid by Japan to spread propaganda on its behalf. Townshend was arrested for being a Japanese agent. He was prosecuted and put in prison. He was soon indicted for sedition. But Ralph Townshend wasn't alone, and he wasn't even the weirdest character who they recruited. There was also the owner of an antique doll shop in New York City. In what the FBI called a doll code, she would send letters out of the country that appeared on the surface to be about her doll business, but they were really coded messages to Japan about U.S. navy. When she wrote about dolls in hula skirts, that was code for US Ships in Hawaii. When she wrote about dolls spending time in the doll hospital, that was code for ships in dry dock being repaired. The doll shop spy was ultimately caught red handed. Serial numbers on cash in her possession were traced to the Japanese consulate. She too was convicted and sentenced to federal prison. She only narrowly avoided the death penalty for espionage.

[Ralph Townsend]

Spies, saboteurs and traitors are the actors in this new strategy. With all of these, we must and will deal vigorously.

[Bryant Gumbel]

While Japan ran this weird crew of spies and agents in the United States, the US Government turned to Naval intelligence and its young Japan specialist officers like Kenneth Wrinkle to help root out spies working for Japan and to help the US Government assess whether Japanese Americans, people of Japanese descent living here, posed any threat, particularly on the Pacific coast.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

They say, we want you to be in California and we want you to go around and assess the loyalty of the Japanese Americans. Because nobody knows. FDR wants to know this, FDR wants.

[Bryant Gumbel]

To know the American government, the American President wants to know about Japanese Americans living on the US West Coast. Are they loyal? If war with Japan does come, will they be with the US or with Japan?

[Kent Ringle's Son]

There was a lot of suspicion of the Japanese Americans. So the head of the 5th Naval District told my father, you go do this.

[Bryant Gumbel]

You go do this. You, Kent Ringle, go immerse yourself in the Japanese community on the west coast of the United States. Go assess their loyalty and report back on what you find. And so in early 1941, months before the Pearl harbor attack, Ken Ringleader got to work on this highly sensitive mission.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

People think of intelligence people as sneaking around. My father would go to the Japanese American events, speak Japanese and said, I'm an intelligence officer with the United States.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Ken Ringle spent months gathering intelligence in Japanese American circles. But he wasn't undercover. He was introducing himself, building relationships, attending meetings. Almost everything he did was right out in the open. Almost everything.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

I knew that he did secret stuff. Most of what he did was not, you know, the break in was really unusual.

[Bryant Gumbel]

The break in, that's next.

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[Jen Psaki]

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[Bryant Gumbel]

The American people are basically telling the President that they are not okay with any of this.

[Jen Psaki]

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[Bryant Gumbel]

Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Ringle came home from work early that day, right around lunchtime. His wife, Margaret knew that something was different. Something was off.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

She said, your father always told me never to ask him about his work cuz he couldn't tell me anything about it. But she said when he came home and took a nap and then got up at sunset and dressed in black and put on his sneakers and went out for the evening, I knew something was up.

[Bryant Gumbel]

It was the spring of 1941 and Kent Ringle was heading out at dusk to conduct a burglary. Ringle's son did not learn about this episode in his father's life until decades later.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

I never asked him in detail anything that he did. One day I just asked him, said, what did you do? And he said, well one thing we did was we broke into the Japanese Consulate. And I said, oh Christ.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Naval Intelligence Officer Ken Ringle planned and carried out a break in at the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

When he told me about it, I was astounded and I said, Jesus Christ, that was a big deal. Suppose you'd been caught? And he said, we couldn't have been caught. We had the Los Angeles police outside, we had the FBI with us, we had everything. We'd even checked our own SafeCracker out of San Quentin.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Ringle knew that the consulate had a locked safe. He was pretty certain that's where the most sensitive documents would be held. Who better to help with that than a real pro?

[Kent Ringle's Son]

I can just imagine how amused the safecracker would have been. Hot day.

[Bryant Gumbel]

I get back to work with the safecracker. They had sprung from San Quentin with the LAPD keeping watch outside with a small group of FBI agents. Ken Ringle broke into that consulate.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

He told me that they went in there, cracked the safe, and then took everything out and photographed it and then put it back. Exactly it was. And then went. And nobody ever discovered it.

[Bryant Gumbel]

They got in, cracked the safe, they took photos of every document and every piece of evidence that they found, and then they replaced it all exactly as it had been.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

I knew if he had done this, there was a good reason for it. And he found what he wanted. The big thing was the list of their spies. He pretty much knew that he would find those.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Ken Ringle did find those Detailed lists of all of the Japanese government's spies and intelligence assets operating up and down the West Coast. They were spying not just on military installations and US Navy ships, but but also on things like oil infrastructure. There were lists of agents and codes and contact points for Japan's whole West coast spy network. But Ken Ringel also found something else in those documents. Something equally important, maybe more important.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

He went there for two reasons. To find out the list of Japanese spies. And the second thing that he learned there that he valued even more was the fact that the Japanese did not trust Japanese Americans.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Japan really had been recruiting and running spies all over the country, particularly on the west coast, including a whole bunch of native born Americans, but not Japanese Americans and not immigrants from Japan. The records and the documents on Japan's spying operation that were stolen by US Naval intelligence in that insane break in involving a San Quentin safecracker furloughed just for that day. Those records showed that the Tokyo government was adamant. They were even annoyed that Japanese Americans were of no help to them.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

They wrote to their agents, if you're coming in here and we're, you know, trying to get people loyal to the Emperor, don't trust the American Japanese.

[Bryant Gumbel]

For Ken Ringle, this was not only an enormously important intelligence hall for the U.S. government, this was also something of a personal validation for what he himself had come to believe.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

My father believed that most of the Japanese Americans were loyal and he wanted proof of that. But he. I don't think he quite realized that they would have in There as many statements about don't trust the Japanese Americans.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Ken Ringle knew that war with Japan was very likely to come. And he knew from his own experiences in Japanese American circles that they were intensely loyal to this country.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

The break in that was his proof of this loyalty.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Lots of people in this country were indicted as Japanese agents at the start of World War II. A bunch of guys who wrote for right wing newspapers and publications like the then conservative New York Daily News and the Washington Herald and the Chicago Tribune and the American Mercury Magazine. There was a big blustery Klansman, the Kleagle of Camden, New Jersey, whose lectures on what he called 100% Americanism turned out to be secretly paid for by the government of Japan. Just before Pearl Harbor, Naval Intelligence described that Klansman flat out as a, quote, espionage agent working for Japan. There was that prolific American fascist, Ralph Townsend, and the Doll lady, her name was Velve Dickinson. There was a famous, very rich, very well connected British pilot. There was a well known silent film star. There was a guy who wrote softcore porn novels about nudist colonies. There were a couple of hard drinking ex US Sailors who'd been kicked out of the US Navy, including one guy everybody called dod. There were so many weirdos that Japan had on their payroll inside the United States. But what American officials never found during this entire time, what Ken Ringel never found during his work, was a single Japanese American living in this country who was involved with espionage for Japan. And more than that, what Kent Ringgold did discover over his months of investigating and gathering intelligence in California was that Japanese Americans on America's west coast not only posed no danger to America in the form of spying or sabotage, what he discovered was that they were so loyal, they were actually the best asset we had, the best defense we had against those types of threats from Japan.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

He had so much evidence through all these months of the intense loyalty of these people. They were not just loyal to the US but they were actively working against the militarists.

[Bryant Gumbel]

And now Ringel had this new, pretty incontrovertible proof, hard evidence from the Japanese government's own files, that they were totally unable to recruit Japanese Americans to work against the United States. Japan had done its best, but found them to be unerringly loyal to the US totally uninterested in helping Japan.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

My father always said to me, the best Americans are those who haven't come here yet, who understand the promise of America, and that's what motivates them to come here and to be good citizens. And he felt that the Japanese Americans exactly simplify this 100%.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Ken Ringel would take this information that he'd uncovered. He would eventually run it up the chain of command inside the US military, all the way up to the President himself. If war does come with Japan, there is no problem with this immigrant population. They are loyal to this country. They're good American citizens. They can be helpful in this fight. At the time there were reportedly only about a day dozen people in the whole US Military who spoke Japanese. Ken Ringel was fluent in multiple variants of Japanese. He had immersed himself in Japanese American communities on the West Coast. He was one of the, if not the premier intelligence expert in the whole US Government on this issue. But Ken Ringel would be pushed aside despite what he had learned, despite what he had begun reporting up the chain as a country. We decided to go down a darker path. And to do that, a new story had to be created to replace the truth that Ken Ringle had uncovered and corroborated and documented. We would need a false story ginned up by some of the highest ranking officials in the US Government who knowingly suppressed the real intelligence and replaced it with their own made up lie. The fight Ken Ringel was about to be in would result in a stain on this country that would last for decades. One minority group singled out for mass removal, mass detention, arrest and imprisonment based purely on race. The construction of huge camps in the middle of nowhere without access to legal help. The US military deployed on the streets. And all of it done at the stroke of a president's pen and with the Supreme Court's quiet acquiescence.

[Documentary Narrator]

There was tremendous anxiety as they saw neighbors and friends being taken. Farmers would be taken right out of the field. There was just a lot of fear. They told my father to get dressed and come with them. I didn't know what they were trying to do.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

Everything was done on the fly. America had never incarcerated, you know, a mass body of its citizens before.

[Documentary Narrator]

I couldn't. I never believed that America would be doing this.

[Bryant Gumbel]

Reading.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

It almost seems like, you know, reading a movie story. It's not reading the story of your family. That couldn't be.

[Documentary Narrator]

He was told that if you try to escape, this is the bullseye that we'll use to shoot you.

[Bryant Gumbel]

This is the story of one of the most shocking US government decisions in our nation's history and the strange and very specific reason that decision was made. But it's also the story of what it took to stop it, what it took to stand up against it, to undo it, to break its back. And in a quiet moment when persistence met providence to find the evidence in that archive, to dig up the real story and to finally expose it all, our government has been down some terrible roads before. We have done some terrible things. But the Americans who stopped those things from happening, who put themselves on the line to try to fix it when we went wrong before, they have stories to tell, gee, if the American Constitution.

[Ralph Townsend]

Means anything at all, this is wrong. And if I believe in the Constitution, I've got to object to this.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

She said no to the government. No, I will do what's right for everyone.

[Eiko Herzig Yoshinaga]

Those documents made it clear the decision of the Supreme Court were tainted, were tainted with illegal and unethical conduct by our own government.

[Documentary Narrator]

It was the classic smoking gun evidence that every lawyer wants to find.

[Eiko Herzig Yoshinaga]

In every era in American history, there have been people who takes a stand and says, this is what I'm going to do, regardless of the consequences.

[Bryant Gumbel]

That's all ahead on Rachel Maddow presents Burn Order. Rachel Maddow presents Burn Order is a production of Ms. Now. This episode was written by myself and Mike Yarvitz. The series is executive produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz. It's produced by Kelsey Desiderio and Jen Mulraney Donovan. Our associate producer is Vasilios Karsilakis. Archival support from Holly Klopchin. Katie La Lau is the senior manager of audio production for msnow. Additional audio engineering and sound design by Bob Mallory. Bryson Barnes is the director of podcasts and live streaming for Versant Media. Our web producer is the great Will Femia. Our senior executive producers are Corey Nazzo and Laura Conaway. Aisha Turner is the executive producer for MSNow Audio and Madeline Herringer is the senior vice president for audio, digital and long form. Our theme music and additional composing is by New York based Japanese composer Miyu Sato. An enormous thanks to the organization Densho for providing archival material for the series and for everything that they do. You can find out much more about this series at our website, Ms. Now burnorder.

[Kent Ringle's Son]

He was a. He's a very rational guy and he was a winning sort of a guy. I do have to show you this picture. Yeah, Let me see it. My father is as a. You don't think of your parents as being good looking. They're just your parents. All right. But whenever I had girlfriends or anybody else came in and saw the Naval Academy yearbook and saw a picture of my father and went, good God.

[Bryant Gumbel]

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[Kent Ringle's Son]

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[Bryant Gumbel]

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