Although nearly a dozen female broadcasters were given the moniker during World War II, D'Aquino became most tarred with the name, which came to personify Axis infamy in the Pacific. Her broadcasts were intended to demoralize soldiers fighting in the Pacific theater.

Taunting millions of servicemen with stories of infidelity on the homefront, false reports of battle outcomes meant to demoralize them and frequent spins of pop songs to keep them listening, the broadcasts of Radio Tokyo were notorious instruments in the propaganda war. Many American sailors and soldiers found them cartoonishly unbelievable, exactly what D'Aquino said she intended.

In 1949, she became the seventh person to be convicted of treason in American history and served six years in prison. But doubts about her possible role as Tokyo Rose later surfaced and she was pardoned by President Ford in 1977.

D'Aquino was born in Los Angeles to Japanese immigrant parents.

D'Aquino was visiting relatives in Japan to care for a sick aunt when she became trapped in the country at the beginning of World War II, according to a statement from a Toguri family spokeswoman, Barbara Trembley.

D'Aquino began working odd jobs to support herself while trying to find a way out of the country. That led to her work on a Japanese propaganda radio show called Zero Hour, the statement said.

She and other captive Allies decided to turn their ordeal on its head, deliberately making a hash of the propaganda. To that end, D'Aquino, who had a gravelly voice and a slight lisp, was exactly wrong for what the enemy wanted: a sultry-voiced villainess to tease the American listeners away from home.

The propaganda officials, largely incompetent, had little feel for their nuance and double entendres.

On April 19, 1945, D'Aquino married a Portuguese citizen of Japanese-Portuguese ancestry.

Ecstatic at the war's conclusion in 1945, she again found herself desperate to survive in a postwar economy. She made an error of judgment by trying to capitalize on her "Tokyo Rose" fame when a journalist with Cosmopolitan tried to find the mysterious broadcaster.

Offering to pay her $2,000, considered a fortune then, the reporter persuaded her to sign a contract singling her out as "the one and only 'Tokyo Rose.' " The reporter had not received permission from his boss, who was personally on the line for $2,000 if he could not null the contract. The magazine's editors duped her into holding a news conference that effectively scuttled the "exclusive" part of the contract and freed Cosmopolitan from any obligation.

Toguri was pleased at all 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 it was her "confession."

In October 1945, D'Aquino was arrested by Army officials held for a year in a 6- by-9-foot cell at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo. The FBI and the Army conducted an extensive investigation to determine whether D'Aquino had committed crimes against the U.S. Authorities decided that the evidence then known did not merit prosecution, and she was released.

But Walter Winchell, the powerful and vitriolic broadcast personality, and the American Legion lobbied hard for a trial. The Justice Department decided that the matter should be re-examined, and D'Aquino was rearrested in Yokohama in 1948 and tried.

D'Aquino was the only one of the Tokyo Roses arrested by U.S. authorities after the Japanese surrender. She was found guilty of treason by a judge who pressured a deadlocked jury to render a verdict.

"I supposed they found someone and got the job done, they were all satisfied," she later told the CBS News program 60 Minutes. "It was eeny, meeny, miney and I was 'moe.' "

D'Aquino spent the years following her release from prison living a quiet life in Chicago.

Released after six years for good behavior, D'Aquino worked to exonerate herself. By then, her personal life had crumbled. Her husband came to her defense during the trial only to be bullied into signing an agreement never again to enter the United States.