Mark Harmon to Tell the ‘Real Story’ About NCIS Predecessor in Upcoming Book

Matt Webb Mitovich
·2 min read
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NCIS vet Mark Harmon and tech advisor/former Special Agent Leon Carroll Jr. have teamed on a non-fiction book that chronicles a World War II operation led by the ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence), aka the Naval Criminal Investigative Service’s predecessor.

Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor will be released on Nov. 14 (shop Amazon or Walmart).

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“I feel compelled to take part in opening up the history and real story of what became NCIS,” Harmon said in a statement. “When I first started this show, there was not much information to be found by research.

“NCIS agents are public servants at the highest level and many have come and gone through this life with no one knowing anything about who they are or what they do,” Harmon added. “And now that story gets told. All because of a TV show.”

Having studied “long-buried historical documents,” Harmon and Carroll Jr.’s narrative non-fiction tells the story of Douglas Wada, the only Japanese American agent in naval intelligence, and Takeo Yoshikawa, a Japanese spy sent to Pearl Harbor to gather information on the U.S. fleet.

In his native Honolulu, Wada’s poses undercover as a newspaper reporter, translates wiretaps on the Japanese Consulate, and interrogates America’s first captured POW of World War II. In contrast, Yoshikawa works with the consulate as a junior diplomat and collects vital information, sending it straight to the Japanese Navy’s Admiral Yamamoto.

The dueling stories “anchor Ghosts of Honolulu‘s gripping depiction of the world-changing cat-and-mouse games played between Japanese and U.S. military intelligence agents (and a mercenary Nazi) in Hawaii before the outbreak of the Second World War,” read the synopsis from publisher Harper Select.

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“I hope this book will give readers a different look at NCIS as an agency and that we are much more than the homicide-of-the-week,” says Carroll Jr. “The name NCIS was chartered in 1992, 90 years after the establishment of ONI to emphasize the criminal mission of the agency…. This book is intended to be the first in a series that will give an inside look into the inner workings of accomplishing that mission.”

Harmon remains an executive producer on CBS’ NCIS, which will enter Season 21 this fall (WGA strike allowing), but he has not appeared on-camera as Leroy Jethro Gibbs since early Season 19.

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