by Max Hastings
Sosnowski started working for the Russians, who sought to exploit his old sources in Berlin, most of them women. His old network had been broken up by the Nazis back in 1935, when he himself was imprisoned for espionage, then obliged to witness the guillotining of his agents at Plötzensee jail. He was eventually exchanged for the leader of the German minority community in Poland, but was sacked following a financial scandal. He was living in retirement when the Russians scooped him up during their 1939 invasion. He claimed just two surviving German sources, and reactivated these at the NKVD’s bidding. Sudoplatov asserted that he provided some value for his jailers until 1942, and thereafter was kept in the Lubyanka for the usual Soviet reason: ‘He was a man who knew too much.’
Prince Radziwiłł, a former conservative politician, sixty years old, was handled personally by Beria, because he was thought to have friends in Nazi high places, among them Göring. Once the NKVD was satisfied that he was under its control, Radziwiłł was permitted to return to Berlin. Beria told him, ‘People like you, Prince, will always be needed by us.’ But the Russians overestimated the nobleman’s intimacy with the Reichsmarschall, and indeed his intelligence value generally. He broke contact with Moscow in 1942, and paid the price three years later, when once more he fell into Russian hands, this time with his wife, who died in a Soviet prison. The family’s vast possessions were confiscated by the new Polish communist state.
Even more so than the plots of most intelligence services, those of the NKVD lurched between the imaginative and the ridiculous. In the winter of 1941, at Stalin’s personal behest a plan was devised for the killing of Hitler, involving both Prince Radziwiłł and Olga Chekhova, actress niece of the playwright, who was a Soviet agent, albeit an ineffectual one, living in Berlin. The principal assassin was to be an NKVD ‘illegal’ named Igor Miklashevsky, a former boxing champion. In December 1941 he succeeded in gaining access to Germany, posing as a defector. His authenticity in this role was attested by his uncle, a genuine exiled opponent of Stalin.
Miklashevsky’s subsequent career almost defies belief. He fought a bout with Germany’s hero Max Schmeling, which he contrived to win. He reported to Moscow that while it seemed impossible to reach Hitler, it would be easy to assassinate Göring. Centre rejected this proposal, for Göring’s removal seemed more likely to assist the Nazi war effort than the Soviet one. Miklashevsky remained in Germany until 1944, when he murdered his uncle and escaped to France. Stalin meanwhile withdrew his order for Hitler’s assassination, fearing his removal would prompt the Western Allies to seek a separate peace with a successor German leadership. After the liberation of France Miklashevsky spent two years in the West hunting down Ukrainian renegades of Hitler’s wartime ‘Vlasov army’, then returned to Moscow, where he boxed until his retirement.
As the Germans closed in on Moscow, the NKVD struggled to organise stay-behind espionage groups against the eventuality of the capital’s fall. They prepared key installations for demolition, including Politburo members’ dachas. So many NKVD staff had quit the Lubyanka that Sudoplatov’s Special Tasks group took over some offices for the saboteurs. Zoya Rybkina, who was one of them, described how safes were cleared of secret files and instead crammed with weapons, ammunition, compasses, explosives, fuses and even Molotov cocktails. During the hours of darkness, teams set forth to bury arms dumps in the city’s parks. ‘We did not go home for a hundred days,’ wrote Rybkina, ‘sleeping instead in air raid shelters with a gas mask case in place of a pillow.’ Each stay-behind group was organised as a ‘family’, with a ‘grandpa’ or ‘grandma’ as its head – usually an old Bolshevik chosen by the veteran Colonel Georgy Mordinov; some were veterans of the International Brigade in Spain, though most of these were former spies now too old for military service. Radio-operators and cipher clerks were appointed as their ‘grandsons’ and ‘granddaughters’. Rybkina once called at Mordinov’s apartment in Begovaya, and found the old revolutionary asleep on a bed composed of trotyl explosive blocks.
Senior officers despaired of amassing sufficient charges to mine the largest structures, for instance the Dynamo stadium and rail stations. Sudoplatov claimed in his memoirs that Special Tasks could call upon the services of a motorised brigade of 20,000 men and women, including two hundred foreigners of many nationalities – Germans, Austrians, Spaniards, Americans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Poles, Czechs, Bulgarians, Romanians. He also boasted of a paratroop unit on permanent standby to counterattack any German commando attack – for instance, against the Kremlin – with its own squadron of transport aircraft. Some of the USSR’s finest athletes had been drafted into service, and some of these were promptly designated for partisan operations, working in places and circumstances where supreme fitness and hardiness were needed.
Sudoplatov fails to acknowledge, however, that most of these elite units became available only later in the war: in the winter of 1941 the NKVD was reduced to pitiful improvisations. A Russian officer recorded the case of one of thousands of ‘line-crossers’ deployed at this time, a pretty young Ukrainian girl named Oksana. The Soviet Twelfth Army several times dispatched her through the enemy front in the Don basin. She was eventually denounced, however, as having gone over to the Axis. After interrogation she admitted that she had been caught, and chose to save her own life by ‘accepting the protection’ of an Italian officer. The Soviet tribunal which tried her allegedly waived the death penalty and instead gave her a long prison sentence, but almost all such people of both sexes were summarily executed. It is hard to credit that mercy was shown in this case, at this worst of all times for Soviet fortunes.
With the new importance of special forces, Sudoplatov rose in the Soviet hierarchy. In February 1942 he became a commissar of state security and lieutenant-general, and in August travelled with Beria and Merkulov at the head of an NKVD mission to the Caucasus, flying in American-supplied C-47s to arrange the blockage of mountain passes and stay-behind sabotage operations. The Special Tasks chief admitted later that having no military training, he felt out of his depth at a war front. So did his followers, who had been chosen for their skills as mountaineers rather than as soldiers: those who stayed to fight in the Caucasus suffered heavy losses. Beria suggested that Professor Konstantin Gamsakhurdia, a prominent local intellectual, should be designated to head the Caucasus groups. Sudoplatov thought this was a terrible idea: Gamsakhurdia was only on the NKVD’s books because he had been blackmailed into service as an informer years earlier, through a rash attachment to the Georgian nationalist movement. Now he met the professor at Tbilisi’s Intourist hotel, and was unimpressed: ‘He appeared to me unreliable, and besides his experience as an agent was not in inspiring people, only informing on them. He was too preoccupied with writing verses and what he believed to be great novels in the Georgian language such as Abduction of the Moon, a mediaeval saga.’
Sudoplatov preferred for the leadership role a local playwright named Georgi Machivariani, who was entrusted with a small fortune in gold and silver to finance partisan operations. In the event Tbilisi was never taken by the Germans. After the tide of war had turned, the NKVD chief described his amazement when Machivariani refunded his treasure undiminished, though he does not speculate about whether his conduct reflected honesty or terror. When Beria and his deputies returned to Moscow, Stalin reprimanded them for having ventured into a combat zone. He needed his spymasters closer to home.
2 THE END OF SORGE
Japan assumed a pivotal importance after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, a development which deeply distressed Richard Sorge, as all those around him observed. Moscow needed the answer to a critical strategic question: would the Japanese seize the opportunity to strike at Russia from the east, forcing the Red Army to fight on two fronts? Sorge’s informant Hotsumi Ozaki wielded significant influence through his membership of two government advisory groups, upon both of which he urged that Japan should move south, against the Europeans, rather than against the Russians. On 29 June Max Clausen wirelessed to Mosc
ow a Sorge message reporting that Japan was staging a test mobilisation for war with Russia, but that prime minister Konoye remained opposed to belligerence. The operator’s mental health cannot have been improved by a routine visit from the Kempeitai military police during this transmission.
On 10 July, Sorge told Moscow that while Japan would continue contingency preparations for war with the USSR, the main thrust of its policy would be to pursue negotiations with the United States and to plan for war with the European empires. Tokyo would attack the Soviet Union only if its collapse seemed imminent. Nonetheless, it is important to note that the wording of his dispatches remained equivocal and inconclusive. They reflected the fact that while Sorge and Wenneker, the German naval attaché, thought Japan would not fight Russia in 1941, Ott and his military attaché disagreed, believing that Tokyo would become a belligerent by autumn. Sorge several times asserted that Japan would probably be tipped into attacking the Soviet Union by the fall of Leningrad and Moscow, but at no time did he explicitly and uncompromisingly assure Moscow that Russia was safe from any Japanese threat. Contrarily, he reported the high command’s conviction that the Wehrmacht would enter Russia’s capital within weeks – which would almost certainly prompt the Japanese to attack the reeling Soviets from the east.
For years it was claimed that Sorge’s intelligence changed the course of history, by enabling Stalin to shift major formations from the East, to check the Nazi onslaught in the autumn and winter of 1941. In truth, such a redeployment began as early as May. A modern Russian source asserts that Moscow Centre received information from many foreign sources in the latter part of 1941 confirming that Japan had no intention of attacking Russia, allegedly on the basis of documents in the Moscow intelligence archive. On 17 July, the NKVD in London sent the text of a Bletchley decrypt of a telegram from the Japanese Foreign Ministry, announcing the decision of an imperial conference not to join Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union. The Tokyo spy’s dispatches may have increased the Stavka’s willingness to reduce the Red Army’s Asian forces, but as in all matters relating to intelligence, many sources and factors influenced Stalin’s decision, and the codebreaking operation described below may also have played a part. The reports of spies, however well placed and however romantic their stories, can never offer national leaders certainty, nor even probability. J.C. Masterman, orchestral conductor of the British Double Cross system, has written: ‘It is a mistake to suppose that the well-placed person, friendly, let us say, with a Cabinet minister or an official in the Foreign Office or a highly placed staff officer is necessarily in the highest grade of agents. The individual remarks of ministers or generals do not carry much conviction, and it is a truism of historical research that when dealing with diplomatic conversations and the rumours of embassies, we are in the very realm of lies.’
No more than any other agent could Sorge complete strategic jigsaw puzzles, nor even provide pieces in the same fashion as did signal decrypts or captured enemy documents. He could merely offer clues and pointers, for instance about the dispositions of the Japanese army, though Ozaki achieved an important coup by securing details of Japan’s petroleum reserves. In July, Ott dispatched Sorge to Shanghai to investigate the prospects of a mediated Japan–China peace. On his return, Hanako said that she had been questioned about him by the police. When an officer visited the house again shortly afterwards, Sorge was angry enough to hit the man. He escaped arrest for the assault, but it is plain that he was close to a nervous breakdown.
He reported to Moscow that the Japanese had been reinforcing their troops in Manchuria, but ever more of his material was failing to reach the GRU – for instance, a significant message about shrinking Japanese petrol stocks – because Clausen could not handle the stack of messages awaiting encryption and transmission. On 20 August, however, a signal did get to its destination, saying that Japan’s military leadership was still unwilling to enter the war, pending decisive German success in the West, but this ended – again, inconclusively – ‘Japan might not join the war this year, although the decision has not yet been taken.’ In August also, Ozaki visited Manchuria in his role as an important adviser to the railway management. On 14 September this yielded a report to the Russians that the Japanese were reducing their immediate military commitment in Manchuria, but were building a new strategic road to the frontier in preparation for a possible war with the Soviet Union in 1942. On Saturday, 4 October, a further message stated that an early Japanese attack on Russia was now highly unlikely. This proved to be the last transmission Max Clausen ever made.
On 10 October 1941 the Tokko security police arrested first Tomo Kitabayashi, then Yotoku Miyagi, both former members of the American Communist Party. In the latter’s room searchers found a report on Japan’s oil stocks, unlikely reading material for a professional artist. During his interrogation, Miyagi suddenly sprang to his feet and leapt out of a window, in a suicide bid. He fell two storeys, as did a police officer who jumped in pursuit. Both men survived. Under further questioning Miyagi told all he knew, revealing the names of Clausen, Voukelitch, Ozaki – and Sorge. At first the Tokko flatly declined to consider arresting the last of these, because of his status as a prominent member of the German embassy community. On 15 October, however, Ozaki was arrested at his home, and at Meguro police station began to talk almost immediately. He became outspoken to his inquisitors, declaring confidently on the 18th when the Tojo government succeeded that of Prince Konoye: ‘This cabinet is the one which is going to war against the United States.’ Clausen, Voukelitch and Sorge were all arrested in their homes on that same day. The wireless-operator made no attempt to destroy his codes, and had preserved copies of scores of messages he had transmitted. Instead of killing themselves, as their captors expected, most of the prisoners talked their heads off. It remains disputed whether this was a consequence of torture or – quite plausibly – because they were morally exhausted. All were questioned in English.
Sorge, alone, initially held out. He was visited by Eugen Ott, who was not merely furiously angry with the Japanese police, but also stubbornly disbelieving of his friend’s guilt – as he remained into old age. On 24 October, however, the spy suddenly broke. He wrote with a pencil: ‘I have been an international Communist since 1925,’ then burst into tears. His interrogators, overwhelmed by the compulsive flood of disclosures that followed, provided him with a typewriter. He set about composing a detailed narrative of his experiences, most of which was subsequently destroyed in the 1945 Tokyo fire-bombing. He asked his jailers to contact the Russians and attempt to arrange an exchange, a proposal which elicited a stony response from the Soviet embassy. The German mission succumbed to a sustained trauma, shock waves from which reached Berlin. The Gestapo’s Joseph Meisinger was disgraced for his egregious failure as security officer, and Walter Schellenberg was reprimanded by Himmler. Ott was summarily recalled, and Hitler informed. Yet in accordance with the erratic conduct of tyrannies, the Führer chose not to exact drastic penalties. The ambassador suffered dismissal, but escaped the executioners who would surely have awaited him in Moscow, had he been Stalin’s servant.
The spies meanwhile languished in Tokyo prisons. During the Second World War the Japanese behaved with institutionalised barbarity towards vast numbers of enemies in their power. It is bizarre, therefore, that the Tokko and the justice system appear to have treated Richard Sorge and most of the members of his ring relatively humanely, though they spent the ensuing three years in prison cells. While all were repeatedly and sometimes harshly interrogated, there is no evidence that they were tortured, as Tokyo’s prisoners were so often tortured; none of their family members or associates were persecuted or killed. Japanese restraint was probably prompted by a reluctance gratuitously to provoke Moscow, at a time when Tokyo was increasingly desperate to avoid war on a new front. Voukelitch died in prison on Hokkaido on 13 January 1945, but Clausen survived the war and was released on 8 October that year. He flew to Moscow, and thereafter lived in retiremen
t with his wife in East Germany.
The trials of Sorge and Ozaki dragged on until September 1943, when the two men became the only members of the ring to receive capital sentences. These were carried out on 7 November 1944, at Tokyo’s Sugamo prison. Its governor, Kikuyasa Ichijima, attended in dress uniform. Ozaki chose to don a black ceremonial kimono and black tabi before he was hooded and bound. Four executioners sprang the trap together, so that no one man bore the responsibility for killing another – this, in the midst of a war in which tens of millions were being slaughtered. Sorge was then summoned, wearing dark trousers, an open-necked shirt and loose jacket. The governor demanded formally: ‘Are you Richard Sorge?’ and the condemned man assented. Then he asked, ‘Is it today?’ and it was the governor’s turn to nod. Sorge stated that he wished his property to go to Anna Clausen, wife of his wireless-operator, and she duly received the yen equivalent of some US$4,000 – Hanako’s slavish loyalty to him was not reciprocated. He was offered the ritual tea and cakes, which he declined, asking instead for a cigarette. The governor said this was against the rules. The attending Tokko officer urged allowing this last request, but Ichijima was firm.
