The story of Chiune Sugihara, who saved thousands of Jewish lives during World War II, serves as a moral light in the darkness of the Holocaust. But upon closer inspection, author and scholar Hillel Levine learned that the saga of the former Japanese consul to Lithuania was also a tale of intrigue and espionage.

Levine, author of the recently published "In Search of Sugihara," first heard in 1989 how Sugihara saved thousands of Jews in 1940 by writing 300 exit visas each day. He was impressed, but hardly intrigued.

However, in 1993, while attending a dedication of the new Jewish studies center in Vilnius, Levine remembered the story and quickly found his way to the Japanese consulate.

"I suddenly felt like something had happened here," said Levine, professor of sociology and religion and director of the Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University. In Vilnius, "I was celebrating the re-establishment of Jewish studies, but without any Jews."

Levine saw a city devoid of Jews; and he thought of the risk Sugihara took to ensure the survival of so many as "a great mystery -- a watershed in history," he said, in a phone interview from his home outside Boston "And I put everything aside to find the answers."

Levine will speak Wednesday, Nov. 6 at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. The reading is sponsored by the Holocaust Oral History Project and Kinokuniya Bookstore. He will also speak Thursday, Nov. 7 at A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco.

As Levine began his work -- poring over tomes at the Japanese Foreign Ministry, Nazi archives, Yad Vashem and the U.S. National Archives -- he realized that aspects of the Sugihara legend "just didn't add up."

For instance, it is said that the Japanese government called Sugihara back to Japan and fired him, and that he lived in shame until his death in 1986. But Levine contends, "If he was really in trouble it wouldn't have taken seven years to fire him. He would have been executed immediately.

"The story is far more complex than we thought."

In his book, Levine posits that, in fact, there was high-level Japanese government collaboration with Sugihara's actions. His theory rests on the question: Why did the Japanese government send a diplomat to Lithuania and establish a consulate where there had never been one before?

"Sugihara was a spy, and an important one," Levine said. "He was doing the feasibility study for Pearl Harbor. He was in Europe to see which direction Japan should go.

"He was an important man on a major espionage assignment, vested with important matters of state. He got distracted by desperate Jews."

Unlike Oskar Schindler, who some argue saved Jewish lives for personal profit, Sugihara's motivation was pure, Levine said -- and thus, all the stranger.

First, "anything a young Japanese military officer knew about Jews was negative," Levine said. "This dimension makes the story all the more unlikely. He took the risks anyway."

Furthermore, Sugihara was part of the Japanese pro-Nazi faction in a divided Japanese government. As conflict erupted, some felt Japan should back the Nazis. The country ultimately joined the Axis powers.

"They weren't racist Jew-haters, but they thought Hitler would win the war," Levine said. "It was in the strategic interest of Japan" to support Germany. "And it just happened that Sugihara was a career officer."

Besides exploring the untold intrigue of the Sugihara story, Levine's book also examines the role of Righteous Gentiles -- a term he calls a misnomer -- and of Jews who enacted rescue operations during World War II.

Levine said most authors and filmmakers portray Jewish Holocaust victims as passive. But his book shows "they were very much active in their own rescue.

"They got the whole thing organized. It's not just getting a visa, but getting to the consulate, getting visas for others. It was a major collective rescue process in which Jews played a prominent role," he said. "This is different than our general perception of Anne Frank in the garret and some Righteous Gentile saving her."

In fact, Levine continued, "Righteous Gentile" is a flawed term. "They're just good people," he said. "And I'm more interested in what made them good."

In Sugihara's case, Levine said, it was "a love of life which made him good. At the critical moment when he saw Jews in jeopardy and saw wasted life, something cried out in him and he couldn't let it happen."

The lesson, Levine said, is that finding a Sugihara or a Schindler doesn't give "moral balance" to the Holocaust. "It only proves that the Holocaust could have been stopped.

"There is no good news about the Holocaust -- just some good people," he said. "Sugihara wasn't born to be a saint or to rescue Jews." But Sugihara's story proves that "if there was one, there could have been many."