Livin' In Reseda

LIVIN’ IN RESEDA

Reseda, California, the neighborhood best known to history as the site of one of the first Sav-On

Drug stores in the San Fernando Valley, a place so utterly unrenowned, as having a freeway

through a yard, according to the Tom Petty song, Free Fallin’, would hardly come to mind as the

site of an important listening post during World War II.

Recent declassified government records, however, show Reseda as the site of a clandestine

station operated by the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II precursor of the CIA,

which served up a singular slice of intelligence during the war, namely commercial radio

messages from Japan and Japanese held territories. A small band of radio engineers,

translators and transcribers located at the secluded Reseda station under cover of the FCC was

the only Allied intelligence unit which monitored commercial radio traffic from Saigon in Indo-

China to Manchuria in northern China.

At the helm of the Reseda Station and its sister Los Angeles Translating Unit was Alghan Riordan

Lusey, a derring-do figure who formerly served as the Shanghai correspondent for Press

Wireless, which beamed uncensored news across the Far East in the years leading up to Pearl

Harbor.

Prior to assuming his post in Reseda, Lusey performed “special activities” for the fledgling

American intelligence services across the globe, including Afghanistan, where he reported on

enemy radio stations near the Iranian border, which picked up “lend lease movements to

Russia,” to India, where he proposed an overland supply link to China using mules, yaks and

possibly camels. Lusey’s dispatches read like pulp spy stories, such as an April 1942 report he’d

been rendered unconscious through a blow to the head and robbed of a coded cable at a Cairo

hotel by German or Italian agents.

Ironically, Lusey himself came under scrutiny as a possible agent for Japan in a March 1942 FBI

probe, which found no evidence of any suspicious ties to Japan, but concluded Lusey “to have

had financial difficulties; is described as possessing a weak character, unethical and an

opportunist who would have dealt with the Japanese if the price was right and not contrary to

the interest of United States.”

Notwithstanding the conclusions of the FBI report, which J. Edgar Hoover sent to OSS Chief

William Donovan, Donovan dispatched Lusey to China in March 1942, where Lusey embarked

on a 7,000 kilometer trek across China, was one of the first westerners to meet General Tai Lee,

the head of General Chang Kai Shek’s Information and Intelligence Service and where he

managed to obtain a copy of the battle plans of a Japanese invasion of the Soviet Far East.

Lusey’s globetrotting ended in August 1943, when he was tasked by Donovan to survey the use

of the Reseda station for radio intercepts, a unit activated in February 1944.

Lusey was initially stymied in his efforts to interest the military and intelligence brass of the

usefulness of seemingly “open” and “non-restricted” messages of cargo shipments plying the

waters from Saigon to the Philippines, the price of melon seeds in Canton and the production of

silk in Shanghai.

Occasionally, Lusey’s team stumbled upon non-commercial radio traffic, including a Morse code

broadcast from Chinese Communist headquarters at Yenan and a series of “inexplicable”

messages beamed from Tokyo to Berlin of American prisoners-of-war addressed to their

families in the U.S., which included the names of states carefully spelled out in Morse code.

These POW messages baffled the experts, who surmised that the messages may be some sort

of “open code” conveying the movements of battle ships corresponding to names of the states

spelled out in the messages.

In time, military brass came around to value the quality and quantity of the Reseda intercepts,

particularly messages dealing with the dire finances, supplies and personnel of the Japanese

puppet government in the Philippines during the lead up to the advance on the Philippines

while the various OSS Branches turned to the Reseda intercepts as the “only authentic

communications within the inner zone” of Japan, Korean and Manchuria of critical factual

information concerning Japanese industry as well as much needed data on chemical warfare.

The Reseda station wrapped up operations shortly after Japan’s surrender and briefly remerged

as a CIA listening post in early 1948, a post which finally closed down in late 1952 due to

encroaching housing developments.

No longer just a place “with a freeway running through a yard,” Reseda can now lay claim to

where a small band of intelligence agents helped defeat Japan.