fisher capital management strategies >> Cold War Vet Spied On Communists- Launched into history

Casa Grande man was Navy intelligence agent and first to fire a Polaris missile

By LARRY LOCKHART
News Editor

Published: Friday, April 1, 2011 9:23 AM MST

Steven King/Dispatch, Ward Roy, a World War II and Korean War veteran, talks about his military experiences Wednesday afternoon at his home in Casa Grande.

Ward Roy lived an exciting life during his 21-1/2 years enlisted in the Navy. Some might say it was a charmed life.
“Hitler saved my life,” Roy said recently in the living room of his Casa Grande home.
That’s because Roy, now 90, was serving in the Navy at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu in 1940 and part of 1941. But because the Germans were disrupting shipping in the Atlantic Ocean, the unit with which Roy served was moved to the Atlantic to chase German submarines. Not long after, on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The surprise attack sank eight U.S. ships and killed 2,402 men, wounding 1,282 more.
“We were based in Bermuda, patrolling in the Azores,” Roy explained. “We came in off patrol on a Saturday night. The attack on Pearl Harbor was Sunday afternoon [Bermuda time].”
Though he was in relative safety in the Atlantic, Roy’s discharge from the service was postponed.
“I had 42 days to do when they bombed Pearl Harbor,” he said. So instead of shipping off to New York the night of the attack to prepare to be discharged, it was more duty for the young electronic technician. He already had served nearly four years after enlisting Feb. 2, 1938.
The excitement was just beginning for Roy. He later served on the USS George Washington, one of the nation’s ballistic missile submarines. He was an inadvertent intelligence agent during the occupation of Japan after World War II when activists were trying to gain information to block formation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, or SEATO. He also gave the order to fire the first two Polaris test missiles in 1960.
“We went from submarine to submarine checking their missiles before they test fired,” Roy said. He added that his unit had about 500 pounds of “mobile” equipment, broken down into sizes that would fit through a submarine’s hatch, along with “several miles of cable.”
He served in the occupation force in Japan from December 1945 to February 1947 and became an unofficial intelligence agent by accident. He and a couple of buddies had stopped in a bar for a while one evening, and the locals seemed suspiciously intent on separating him from his friends. He reported the incident to superiors after returning to his ship and was taken to see intelligence officers not long after that.
It turns out the bar he had visited was a known hangout for communists trying to disrupt SEATO, but the activists knew all of the U.S. intelligence agents so they weren’t able to infiltrate the bar. He was asked if he was willing to work for them and immediately agreed. It helped that he had a Japanese girlfriend and knew the Japanese language, though he didn’t let that be known in his subsequent visits to the bar. Whenever the communists would begin speaking Japanese, he’d ask his girlfriend “What are they saying?” when in fact he understood most of their conversations and reported back on what he heard. He said he spent five months as an agent.
After losing a civilian job after the war and being single, Roy enlisted again when the Korean War started. His final tour was spent riding trains out of Los Angeles in a mixed-branch military police operation. Some of those trains plied Southern Pacific rails through Casa Grande, though he didn’t move here until April 2003. A native of Massachusetts, he lived south of Denver before coming to Casa Grande eight years ago.
Arizona’s heat doesn’t bother him, he said. “I worked in the boiler room,” he explained.