by Max Hastings
Sorge remained calm as he was bound, then cried out in halting Japanese, ‘Sakigun!’ – the Red Army; ‘Kokusai Kyosanto!’ – the International Communist Party; ‘Soviet Kyosanto!’ – the Soviet Communist Party. The Tokko witness said later that he spoke like a man uttering a prayer. Other versions of Sorge’s last words have been suggested, but this one seems the most credible: he sought to dignify the labours of his life at its ending, and spoke in the language which would ensure that he was understood. At 10.20 a.m. the trap was sprung, and after nineteen minutes he was pronounced dead. Neither the German nor the Soviet embassy wanted anything to do with his body, and thus it was committed to the prison graveyard.
Like most secret agents, Richard Sorge was an abnormal human being, who gained an emotional charge from his complex existence and multiple deceits. He had more than a little in common with Kim Philby – charm and a streak of recklessness which rendered astonishing the longevity of both men in their roles. Sorge retains celebrity because he was a remarkable personality, and also because very few spies, and certainly no wartime British, American or German agent, gained such access to high places. It is much more doubtful, however, that he alone changed any history: ‘All things are always on the move simultaneously.’
3 THE SECOND SOURCE
The arrest of Richard Sorge and the break-up of his network is often supposed to have marked the end of Soviet penetration of wartime Japan. Yet this was not the case. Centre had another important source on Tokyo’s affairs – and possibly also access to some of its codes. Captain Sergei Tolstoy, the Japanese specialist in the NKVD’s Fifth (Cipher) Directorate, became the most decorated Soviet cryptanalyst of the war, closely followed by Boris Aronsky. Some modern Russian writers suggest that Tolstoy’s team thus provided the Kremlin with information about Tokyo’s intentions based on better authorities than Sorge offered. In October and November 1941 eight Soviet rifle divisions, a thousand tanks and a thousand aircraft were moved to the Western Front. The Russians claim to have read a 27 November instruction from Tokyo to Baron Ōshima in Berlin: ‘see Hitler and Ribbentrop, and explain to them in secret our relations with the United States … Explain to Hitler that the main Japanese efforts will be concentrated in the south and that we propose to refrain from deliberate operations in north [against the Soviet Union].’ This signal was allegedly forwarded to Moscow by Kim Philby, via the NKVD’s London station. All that seems certain is that in the months following the onset of ‘Barbarossa’ the Russians had plenty of informants other than Sorge telling them that their eastern flank was safe.
They never remotely matched the achievements of Bletchley, Arlington Hall and Op-20-G, because they were incapable of building bombes, and would never have licensed the sort of young iconoclasts who led the British operation. Western cryptographic experts also argue that, to have read Purple consistently, they would need to have matched the American achievement in building a replica of the machine, for which Soviet technological skills were almost certainly inadequate, and for which the Russians have never produced evidence – the Germans’ OKW/Chi failed to break Purple. It is not unlikely that Tokyo’s cable to Ōshima was passed to Moscow from Washington or London by an American or British traitor, rather than broken by the Fifth Directorate.
Yet the Russians had more success in reading at least lower enemy wireless traffic than is sometimes recognised. There is now no doubt that valuable coding material was provided to Centre by a Japanese informant, Izumi Kozo, whose story deserves to be better known. He was an unusually gifted linguist who spoke both Russian and English. At the age of thirty-three in 1925, he was posted to his country’s newly opened Moscow embassy. He rented a room from a general’s widow named Elizaveta Perskaya, whose daughter Elena was a literature graduate who worked in the library of the Internal Affairs Ministry. Kozo fell in love with Elena, and they were married two years later. The whole family was, inevitably, on the books of the OGPU, not least because Elizaveta’s son had been executed for anti-Bolshevik activities.
It seems almost certain that Elena was ordered by a case officer to start a relationship with Kozo. When he was reposted to the Japanese consulate in Harbin, his wife, mother-in-law and a baby boy accompanied him. Thereafter, however, Elena broke off contact with the NKVD and was deprived of her Soviet citizenship. When her mother Elizaveta was rash enough to return to Moscow, she was promptly arrested and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for espionage. A second daughter, Vera, was shot along with her husband, though the family was told that she was confined in a psychiatric hospital. It is hard to believe that the Kozo family discovered many causes for mirth in their lives.
In 1935 Izumi became third secretary at the Japanese embassy in Prague. Two years later, Elena presented herself at the local Soviet embassy to deliver a formal request for her citizenship to be restored so she could return home and bring up her son in Moscow. The boy was not, she said, the son of Kozo, though the diplomat had adopted him as such. Moscow Centre considered this proposal. The troubled woman was asked if her husband worked in intelligence; she said she only knew that he had been learning French and German, and spent a lot of time reading the Russian émigré press. The NKVD’s verdict was that its handlers should reopen contact with Elena, in hopes of securing access to Japan’s diplomatic codes. They had two levers: whatever Elena felt about her husband, he was passionately committed to both her and the boy; moreover, he deplored Japan’s aggressive foreign policy.
Cash provided a further motive to Mrs Izumi, if not to her husband: at a meeting in Prague on 3 May 1938, Elena offered seven Japanese codebooks for £10,000, and when this deal was rejected she took the material back to the embassy. In September she renewed the negotiation, this time asking for £5,000 and £100 a month. It remains uncertain how much she finally received, but the NKVD’s Prague resident duly received seven codebooks and assorted secret telegrams which were welcomed in Moscow, and appear to have enabled the Soviets to read some Tokyo diplomatic traffic. Amid the post-Munich crisis, Japanese embassy families were evacuated to Finland, but Kozo remained in Prague until late October. Though not a professional intelligence officer, he was performing some intelligence tasks, and was soon able to divert to his NKVD case officer telegrams and details of Tokyo’s local agents. On 4 October he delivered a batch of twenty-five messages from Berlin, twenty-nine from London, thirteen from Rome and fifteen from Moscow. A week later he provided a memorandum on the organisation of Japanese intelligence abroad. The NKVD remained cautious about Kozo, however, and decided to work chiefly through his wife, whom they were confident they could control. The veteran intelligence officer Zoya Rybkina was posted to Helsinki to handle her.
At their first meeting, Elena besought Rybkina to be allowed to return home, but Moscow decided this was unacceptable, because her departure would be bound to rouse Tokyo’s suspicion of Kozo. Through much of 1939 the Japanese diplomat – codenamed ‘Nero’ – channelled a stream of reports to the NKVD via Elena, about Japan’s intentions to seek a military alliance with Germany, including details of a conference in Berlin about a joint intelligence assault on Russia. Kozo had just been asked for details of the Japanese War Ministry’s new code when the Russo–Finnish war erupted, and contact was lost until the spring of 1940. The diplomat was then posted to Sofia, where one fine morning Elena arrived unannounced at the Soviet embassy, and demanded to see the NKVD resident. She told him her husband was happy to resume his activities on behalf of Moscow, but that she herself wanted to divorce him and to come home. Once again, Centre prevaricated, while welcoming the material from Kozo. In November 1940 he handed over the latest Japanese diplomatic codes – by now, of course, Purple was in force – followed by other material, climaxing in April 1941 with another batch of cipher telegrams – 302 pages in all – which appears to have enabled Moscow through the summer to read some traffic between Tokyo’s embassies.
In May 1941, after domestic scenes which can be imagined between the lovelorn Japanese and his bitter
ly alienated Russian wife, Elena was at last granted her wish to return to Moscow with her son. After her departure Kozo continued to forward information, but never again sought cash; he asked that payments should go to Elena, though it is unknown whether this was done. His subsequent offerings included a 21 May report describing German–Japanese discussions in Berlin about an attack on the Soviet Union intended to start within two months. On 22 June, following the onset of ‘Barbarossa’, Tokyo changed all its diplomatic codes, but Kozo was quickly able to provide the new ones for Europe, the more easily because he himself was promoted to acting chargé d’affaires in Sofia. He went on passing Moscow important coding information until 1944, when amid the general turmoil of Europe contact with him was broken.
After the war he resumed his work for the NKVD, which continued until 1952. Nothing is known of the later fortunes of Elena or her mother. As long as the intelligence files of the NKVD and GRU remain closed to researchers, it is impossible to know how much Japanese diplomatic traffic was read in Moscow. As Bletchley’s experience showed, it was not enough to secure details of the enemy’s ciphering technology and codebooks: immense intellectual input and electro-mechanical aids were also required in order to read enemy signals quickly enough to be of operational use to the Red Army. But, given Kozo’s undoubted role as an informant, it seems plausible that his material enabled the Russians to access at least some of the same information as Sorge sent from Tokyo about Japan’s decision not to attack Stalin until the Soviet Union’s doom was assured. And unlike the spy, he continued to pass coding secrets until the last stage of the war.
4 GOUREVITCH TAKES A TRAIN
A wireless message from Centre to Moscow’s foreign stations confirmed the news of 22 June 1941: ‘Fascist beasts have invaded the motherland of the working classes. You are called upon to carry out your tasks in Germany to the best of your ability (signed) Director.’ The agents of the vast Soviet spy networks in Europe were profoundly shaken, as well they might be, by early German successes, and discussed them feverishly whenever they met. In Switzerland, the ‘Lucy’ Ring intensified its efforts and its reporting. On 2 July, Alexander Radó reported that Moscow was Hitler’s main objective, and that his armies’ other thrusts were diversionary. Germany’s generals certainly wished that this was true, which may help to explain the information passed to Radó from Berlin. In reality, however, to the general staff’s fury Hitler had insisted on striking south with equal vigour, towards the oil of the Caucasus. On 7 August Radó cited an assurance by the Japanese ambassador in Bern that there was no question of his country attacking the Soviet Union until Germany was victorious. Before ‘Barbarossa’, Alexander Foote transmitted to Moscow only twice a week, at 1 a.m. Now he was dispatching messages almost daily, some of them containing detailed German order-of-battle material.
Funding became a problem for the spies once Russia became a belligerent, since cash could no longer be channelled through its diplomatic missions. Money was the lifeblood of the Ring, not least because ‘Lutzi’ – Rudolf Rössler, the mercenary – would not sing without it. Once, absurdly, Centre instructed Alexander Foote to travel to Vichy to receive a payment, as if an Englishman could stroll at will into alien territory. Eventually Moscow devised a system whereby money was paid into a US bank, which was then credited to its Geneva branch. This suited the Americans, who made a 100 per cent profit on every transaction by employing the official dollar–franc exchange rate, rather than the real black-market one. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were eventually transferred in this way, though Centre never entrusted an agent with more than $10,000 at a time, lest the temptation to ‘go private’ became irresistible.
Rössler was repeatedly pressed by Moscow, through Radó, to reveal his sources, and equally insistently he declined to do so. Dr Christian Schneider, a German émigré codenamed ‘Taylor’, joined Rössler’s business. As a test of his worth he was invited to identify German formations deployed on the Southern Front in Russia, together with the number of Wehrmacht PoWs in Soviet hands. When he responded correctly to both questions, Moscow was suitably impressed. Wehrmacht chief of staff Gen. Franz Halder later raged about the leakiness of OKW and OKH: ‘Almost every offensive operation of ours was betrayed to the enemy even before it appeared on my desk.’ Speculation has persisted into the twenty-first century about the source of Rössler’s extraordinary information stream. He himself indicated that he had a range of contacts in the German high command. Eastern Front intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen later claimed, absurdly, that Martin Bormann was in Rössler’s pay.
Radó revealed after the war that the sources he and Rössler had guarded so zealously for so long were … strips of punched paper. Each day of the war, more than 3,000 teleprinter messages were dispatched from OKW’s communications centre to the Führerquartier, unencrypted since the link was a secure landline. One of Rössler’s agents persuaded two female teleprinter operators to pass to him ‘spent’ ribbons, intended for destruction. By this means the spy received copies of some 4,500 top secret messages and eight hundred special reports, which were subsequently carried by courier to Switzerland. If this version of events is accurate, then Rössler’s notional sub-agents – codenamed ‘Olga’, ‘Werther’, ‘Teddi’, ‘Anna’, ‘Ferdinand’ – were in reality mere paper creations.
The truth will never be known. All that is certain is that Rössler supplied to Radó for onward transmission to Moscow an astonishing volume of highly classified information, of which fragments intercepted by the Abwehr have been published. He warned in March 1943 of the German intention to attack at Kursk. On 15 April he passed on Hitler’s operational order for the offensive, then on 20 and 29 April flagged successive delays, finally reporting that Operation ‘Citadel’ was scheduled for 12 June. On 17 April he catalogued new tank and infantry formations being created, with their locations and identifications; a 28 June signal detailed the Luftwaffe’s order of battle, while another summarised Panther tank production. On 25 September he provided minutes of an economic conference held at Hitler’s headquarters. If Radó’s story of the stolen teleprinter tapes seems implausible, only that or another equally astonishing narrative can explain the quality of his material. Though the Swiss ring’s intelligence did not match the volume and precision of that which the British garnered through Bletchley Park, it provided the Russians with incomparably better material than the Germans secured about Allied military operations.
The evidence suggests, however, that Moscow appreciated the ‘Lucy’ Ring’s output below its true worth. In particular, instead of recognising inconsistencies and inaccuracies as reflections of changes of plan in Berlin, the familiar, corrosive Soviet paranoia prompted a rising conviction in the minds of the NKVD – which persisted to the war’s end – that Rössler and Radó of the GRU were consciously or unconsciously involved in a Nazi deception. The most fantastic twist here was that Soviet suspicions soared when they found that some German material being passed to them by British traitors matched that emerging from Switzerland. Could ‘Lutzi’ and her friends be part of an elaborate British plot? Nobody in Moscow, as far as can be discovered, hit upon the real and simple explanation – that the GRU’s Swiss agents were forwarding some of the same German signals being intercepted by GC&CS at Bletchley Park.
Communication between the Red Orchestra and Moscow was lost from June to November 1941, when the Wehrmacht swept eastwards into Russia, driving the NKVD’s wireless receivers beyond range of their Berlin agents’ weak transmitters. It became a matter of urgency for the Russians to regain contact with Harnack, Schulze-Boysen and ‘Breitenbach’, and if possible to discover the fate of their network in Prague, which had also gone silent. In consequence Centre broke every rule of espionage by ordering the GRU’s Leopold Trepper to find means to contact the NKVD networks in Hitler’s capital. Though the spies’ wirelesses were out of reach of Moscow, if provided with the necessary codes and schedules they could transmit messages to Belgium, for forwarding to Centre. In Sep
tember, Trepper returned to Brussels from Paris to discuss this assignment with Anatoli Gourevitch, ‘Monsieur Kent’.
Gourevitch’s most notable achievement since 1940 had been to create in Belgium, with Moscow’s money and loans from friends, an entirely new trading company, christened ‘Simexco’ and based in elegant rented offices on the Rue Royale, to provide cover for the network – and, eventually, amazingly substantial profits. He bought a company car and hired a chauffeur. He worked energetically at creating relationships with the new German masters of Brussels, most of whom proved eminently corruptible, especially Major Kranzbühler, a prominent figure in the Nazi administration who cheerfully provided passes, curfew laissez-passers and letters of introduction for the company’s director-general, who was so pleasingly eager to collaborate. Gourevitch cemented Kranzbühler’s goodwill by procuring an abortion for the German’s local mistress. With his own lover Margaret Barcza acting as hostess, the GRU agent began to provide lavish entertainments for Germans and fellow-collaborators, who basked in Centre’s largesse. He acquired on the black market petrol coupons which enabled him to drive with Margaret into the countryside to buy hams, chickens, butter and suchlike delicacies now denied to ordinary Belgians.
