Iva Toguri D'Aquino, 90; 'Tokyo Rose' in WWII

Mrs. D'Aquino's average time on each program was about 20 minutes, during which she introduced popular records of the day, sometimes with an aural wink: "So be on guard, and mind the children don't hear! All set? Okay! Here's the first blow to your morale -- the Boston Pops playing 'Strike Up the Band!' "

To Japanese ears, she was highly effective, and station officials rebuffed her several attempts to leave the job. Ecstatic at the war's conclusion in 1945, she again found herself desperate to survive in a miserable postwar economy. She applied for a U.S. passport, because she had not renounced her citizenship, but she made an error of judgment by trying to capitalize on her "Tokyo Rose" fame.

A writer with Cosmopolitan magazine offered to pay her $2,000 -- a fortune at the time -- if she would sign a contract as "the one and only 'Tokyo Rose.' " But the magazine's editors duped her into holding a large press conference that effectively scuttled the "exclusive" and freed Cosmopolitan from any financial obligation.

Mrs. D'Aquino was pleased by all of the attention, at first. She thought the gregarious reporters were admirers who understood her intentions to deliberately undermine the propaganda she was told to broadcast. She did not know that the Cosmopolitan reporter had taken his story to the Army and claimed that it was Mrs. D'Aquino's "confession."

Fallout of Fame

In October 1945, Army officials arrested her and held her for a year in a 6-by-9-foot cell at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo. She was permitted a 20-minute visit with her husband every month and to wash every three days.

During her imprisonment, she received word that her mother had died. She was abused by guards who kept lights on in her cell until she would sign an autograph. However, no charges were brought against her, and she was released.

She became pregnant in the late 1940s and sought to return to the United States to see her first child born there. In a weakened condition from her prison stay, she lost the baby soon after its birth.

Some of her Allied peers at the radio station were exonerated in their homelands, including Cousens, but the political atmosphere in the United States had turned ugly. Winchell's constant broadcasts magnifying her role during the war led to her re-arrest in 1948. Brought back to the United States on a troop ship, she faced trial in San Francisco the next year. She had been away for eight years.

Cousens and other Allied acquaintances testified on her behalf. The prosecution's case relied heavily on the eyewitness testimony of two of her co-workers at "Zero Hour." The charge that hurt Mrs. D'Aquino was having allegedly said in a 1944 broadcast: "Orphans of the Pacific, you are really orphans now. How will you get home now that your ships are sunk?"

The broadcast, which aired shortly after the Allied victory against Japan in the Leyte Gulf near the Philippines, was viewed with skepticism at the time but was used against Mrs. D'Aquino in her 1949 trial.

After the all-white jury deadlocked, the judge instructed them to continue deliberating because the trial had been "long and expensive." The 13-week trial cost $750,000.

Charged with eight counts of treason, she was convicted on one, for having spoken "into a microphone concerning the loss of ships." She was the seventh person in U.S. history to be convicted of treason, according to the FBI.