This is the best summary I could come up with:

In a major covert operation of the cold war, the Central Intelligence Agency spent millions of dollars to support the conservative party that dominated Japan’s politics for a generation.

has dropped its covert financial aid and focused instead on gathering inside information on Japan’s party politics and positions in trade and treaty talks, retired intelligence officers said.

's financial role in Japanese politics has long been suspected by historians and journalists, the Liberal Democrats have always denied it existed, and the breadth and depth of the support has never been detailed publicly.

It was pieced together through interviews with surviving participants, many well past 80 years old, and Government officials who described still-classified State Department documents explicitly confirming the Kennedy Administration’s secret aid to the Liberal Democrats in the early 1960’s.

By the early 1960’s, the payments to the party and its politicians were “so established and so routine” that they were a fundamental, if highly secret, part of American foreign policy toward Japan, said Roger Hilsman, head of the State Department’s intelligence bureau in the Kennedy Administration.

A United States Senate subcommittee discovered that Lockheed Corp., seeking lucrative aircraft contracts, had paid $12 million in bribes to Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka and the Liberal Democrats.

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