By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

Please understand that security overrides the need to know in Operation Sweetheart. If the identities of Secret Agent True Love and her Target were revealed, Operation Sweetheart would be compromised.

You see, Secret Agent True Love's Target is her husband, who is in the National Guard. He'll soon be leaving for Iraq and she wants to show her total and undying support for him, if not for the war, by giving him something that relates to warfare but is nonviolent and has a local touch.

She decided on a sash of 1,000 stitches that Japanese women give their husbands and sons before the men go off to battle. A wife or mother asks relatives and friends to each make one stitch to imbue it with love and mana (spiritual power). People born in the Year of the Tiger get to take seven stitches, because Tigers come back from the war.

In this way, the husband or son goes to war under the protection of love and mana 1,000-strong. He can wear the sash around his waist or his head, or just tuck it into his duffel bag.

Cross-stitches are bad luck and the pattern should not be flowers because they die; otherwise there are no restrictions. Secret Agent True Love got her pattern idea from a book of Hawaiian sayings by Mary Kawena Pukui. The sash is white, the yarn is red.

Secret Agent True Love wants the sash to be a surprise and she has to give it to the Target before he leaves for Iraq. You understand now why Operation Sweetheart must be carried out under absolute, ironclad security. Every Advertiser reader can know about Operation Sweetheart except him, so don't tell.

You can imagine the pressure Secret Agent True Love is under. "I have been working at warp speed," she confessed. "I had to design the pattern and make the template while he was at work."

The sash has started a few traditions of its own. Secret Agent True Love said it's customary to sew in a 5-sen piece. She's going to sew in a buffalo nickel. Also, the sash had been collecting good-luck amulets. A friend took her to the Palolo Kwannon Temple to have the sash blessed and they walked out with an amulet. A local Chinese added some good-luck paper and a Laotian friend in Chinatown contributed a wisp of good-luck yarn to be worn around the wrist.

Secret Agent True Love is asking people who take a stitch to write in the Target's autograph book. So far, there are messages in English, Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian and pidgin.

"I may have learned about the sash when I was reading the history of the Russian-Japanese war," said Secret Agent True Love. "There will be more than 1,000 stitches in the sash. Nobody has turned me down."

She asked me to make a stitch, which I did, leaving only 159 stitches to go, every stitch a prayer for the well-being of Secret Agent True Love's sweetheart.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.