Lockheed's Kuro Maku

Shed your blood for the state, shed tears for your friends, and sweat for your family.

--Yoshio Kodama

A powerful yet shadowy Japanese ultranationalist, Kodama also shed much sweat for Lockheed Aircraft Corp.

Last week it was disclosed that for many years he was Lockheed's secret agent in Japan, collecting more than $7 mil lion since 1960 to help the firm sell air planes. An enormously wealthy man (worth an estimated $1 billion), with no readily identifiable occupation, Ko dama helped to found Japan's ruling party, assisted in the naming of Prime Ministers, and presumably used his connections on Lockheed's behalf.

His unmasking as a paid Lockheed operative was the highlight of a week of corporate scandals; the others involved entertainment of Defense Department officials at hunting lodges by military contractors and a Christmas vacation for Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz paid by the Southern Railway.

Wide Pattern. Lockheed has admitted paying out $22 million abroad over the years to increase sales of its military aircraft, but has refused to name the recipients. The company did not itself name Kodama, but documents from Arthur Young & Co., Lockheed's auditors, fell into the hands of a Senate subcommittee investigating multinational corporations, and the subcommittee made them public. They revealed not only the Kodama connection but also a pervasive pattern of corporate influence buying: payments to Italian politicians, "gifts" to Turkish officials, and the pur chase of industrial secrets.

Among the extraordinary documents are signed receipts for Lockheed cash. One, from Hiroshi Itoh, an executive of Marubeni Corp., a trading company that acts as agent for Lockheed, reads, "I received one hundred peanuts"--meaning 100 million yen, or $333,000.

Carl Kotchian, Lockheed president, told the Senate subcommittee that that and other payments were passed on to Japanese government officials, with his "knowledge and concurrence," because Marubeni people told him it was the only way to sell planes.

Four other documents are English translations of receipts signed by Kodama (in Japanese fashion, with surname first) for payments totaling $2 million. They are dated November 1972--the same month that All Nippon Airways agreed to buy $130 million worth of Lockheed's TriStar jetliners, in a deal that was regarded as crucial to the company's survival.

Powerful Friend. That was not the first big deal that coincided with payments to Kodama. He began receiving Lockheed money in 1960 (some was eventually sent to him in yen-filled packing crates, some in checks made out to "bearer"). That year the government bought Lockheed's F-104 Starfighters--although it had seemed certain rival Grumman would get the order. No connection was ever established; however Kodama's longtime friend Nobusuke Kishi was Premier of Japan at the time.

Kodama, who turns 65 next week and whose origins in northern Japan are obscure, first burst upon the public consciousness as a prewar activist in right-wing causes. He has been jailed three times for a total of seven years. He was imprisoned by the Japanese for involvement in the 1936 assassination of former Premier Makoto Saito and again by the Americans as a Class-A war-crimes suspect (he was later released without trial). He became wealthy during World War II by supplying the Japanese navy and, by his account, "bringing home truckloads of diamonds and platinum" from territories occupied by Japan. After the war, he emerged from Sugamo prison as a kuro maku, or "black curtain," a term taken from the Kabuki theater that has come to mean many things rolled into one: kingmaker, underworld godfather and secretive political manipulator.

Kodama has financed adamantly conservative causes and postwar politicians. He is also reputed to have a grip on the yakuza, the Japanese equivalent of the Mafia; politicians have been known to wince at the mention of his name. Idaho Democrat Frank Church, chairman of the Senate subcommittee, charged last week that Kodama is "a prominent leader of the ultra-right-wing militarist political faction in Japan. We have had a foreign policy of the United States Government which has vigorously opposed this political line in Japan and a Lockheed foreign policy which has helped keep it alive."

In Japan, the disclosures aroused howls of "Kuroi kiri!" (black mist or political corruption). In the U.S., a kind of black mist has been swirling around corporate-Government connections too, and it got denser last week. Deputy Defense Secretary William P. Clements Jr. told a joint House-Senate committee that Northrop has paid back to the Air Force $564,013 for "improper costs" on contracts--apparently representing political contributions for which Northrop had quietly charged the Pentagon. But Clements was embarrassed by the subcommittee's disclosure of the names of 55 more Pentagon personnel who had been guests of military contractors on duck and geese hunts in Maryland.

Meanwhile, Southern Railway conceded that it had paid for a Christmas visit by Agriculture Secretary Butz to the railroad's private resort near Charleston, S.C.--even though the Agriculture Department has filed petitions with the Interstate Commerce Commission protesting rate increases by Southern on farm products. Butz told the Associated Press that he had done nothing wrong, said he would repay part of the cost himself and defiantly added that, if asked, he would visit the resort again next Christmas.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.