The son of a spy, Ronald Drabkin tells the story of an LA-based British pilot who fed secrets to Japan ahead of Pearl Harbor.
Ronald Drabkin was researching his family history when he stumbled upon a tale of spies in Hollywood leading up to World War II.
The details were wild enough to prompt the Tokyo-based Drabkin, who works in tech, to write his first book, “Beverly Hills Spy.” Out now from HarperCollins, the book tells the true story of Frederick Rutland, a British pilot in the First World War-turned-spy who, while based in Los Angeles, gathered information for Japan that would ultimately lead to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
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“How many people look into their family history, or their roots, and end up writing about something completely different?” asks Drabkin on a recent video call while he was in Los Angeles.
Drabkin grew up in L.A., where his father was a Cold War-era counterspy. “He didn’t talk about it because they don’t talk about it,” Drabkin notes, while adding that his father’s mission was to pursue Soviet spies in U.S. industries like aerospace.
After the death of his father, Drabkin called the FBI to see if he could get information on his dad’s life as a spy. In the process of gathering information, he came into recently declassified information on Rutland.
“Anybody can contact the FBI and say, ‘Do you have a file on a certain person?’ And the FBI will answer you,” Drabkin explains. “They’ll either say, ‘Here’s a file’ or they’ll say, ‘We have nothing for you.’ They won’t say, ‘We just declassified something hot.’”
In this instance, the FBI had just declassified something extremely hot. And since this was early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Drabkin was stuck at home with time to dig into Rutland’s file. The more research he did, the more he realized that this was a story that was essentially buried in decades-old newspaper archives.
“A lot of the old newspapers tell the story really nicely,” he says. “I got a bunch of pictures of the spy, Rutland, and his kids and they’re all from papers like the Long Beach Press-Telegram from the time.”
Drabkin knew this was a good story. “The more I looked into it, the crazier the story got,” says Drabkin. “What’s this? Charlie Chaplin! What’s this? Pearl Harbor!”
And as it turns out, his family was adjacent to the action. At the time of Rutland’s dealings, Drabkin’s grandparents had a downtown Los Angeles lunch counter about a block away from the Japanese consulate where spies were based. “One block from the Japanese Consulate there was Grandma doing a lunch counter and you could get a burger, milkshake and shot of whisky,” says Rutland.
Drabkin knew that he was in a good position to write the book. “I have spies in my family. A good part of the story happens in Japan and I have access to Japanese records because I’m in Japan,” he explains. “It all came together. I wasn’t looking to write a book. I felt like I just had to tell people the story.”
The spy Rutland grew up with financial struggles and joined the Royal Navy at a young age. With time, he showed a talent for flying and a keen understanding of aircraft and carrier design. When his military career stalled, he looked towards the Imperial Japanese Navy for opportunities and, ultimately, fell into the spy game, a lucrative endeavor that brought him to Los Angeles.
Rutland’s story is unusual for a few reasons. For one, he was flamboyant in a way that real-life spies typically aren’t. He lived up in the Bird Streets of the Hollywood Hills, in a home Drabkin spotted on Zillow recently for around $14 million. His social circles included L.A.’s rich and famous.
As Drabkin explains, that’s not the typical spy life. “Most spies are not like James Bond. My dad was someone, you wouldn’t notice he was there. The more typical spy is someone like this. They can go into a crowd, you won’t see them there and they’ll notice everything,” says Drabkin. “The James Bond in plain sight is pretty unusual, but the story of Frederick Rutland and the spies in Los Angeles – it was absolutely in plain sight.”
The kind of information Rutland acquired, mainly related to aviation technology, isn’t always considered espionage, Drabkin notes, and these days the U.S. and Japan do share technological information. “It’s fine because the two countries are friends,” says Drabkin. “However, other countries, when they come and try to get California technology, it turns into espionage.”
