A former White House official who helped Japan and the United States negotiate the return of Okinawa Prefecture has shared how he got involved in a secret accord between the two countries back then in his memoir, which is expected to published about a year from now.
Morton Halperin, 81, said he arranged a secret accord allowing the United States to bring nuclear weapons back to Okinawa in times of emergencies -- a crucial agenda item in the negotiation for Okinawa's reversion.
It has already become known that then Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato and then U.S. President Richard Nixon signed in November 1969 a secret "agreed minute," in which Tokyo allowed Washington the right to bring nuclear weapons back to Okinawa in grave emergencies even after the United States was to have removed all nuclear weapons from Okinawa at the time of the return.
According to a draft of his memoir obtained by The Yomiuri Shimbun, in response to public sentiment in Japan back then, Halperin had insisted -- since 1967, when he was a senior Pentagon official -- on the early return of Okinawa and the removal of all nuclear weapons there. The U.S. military, however, opposed the nuclear-free reversion of Okinawa to Japan.
In an effort to persuade the military, Halperin deemed it necessary to have a "secret note" to guarantee the return of weapons to Okinawa in a grave emergency. When he joined the National Security Council in 1969, Halperin, together with fellow U.S. official Richard Sneider -- who was later sent to Japan and held the diplomatic rank of minister-counselor -- created a memo stipulating the Japanese government would agree to the return of nuclear weapons in a grave emergency only if the two sides' leaders had reached a "secret understanding."
The memo was submitted to the president by then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in the spring of the same year and was adopted.
After July of the same year, Halperin met with Kei Wakaizumi, a scholar of international politics who became Sato's "secret agent," to explain the need for a secret accord. At the same time, Halperin recommended Wakaizumi to Kissinger to back the secret negotiations.
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