An Impeccable Spy

by Owen Matthews

  The poem was written as a tribute to Theodor Nette, a Soviet diplomatic courier killed in Latvia in 1926 while defending a package of diplomatic post, who had a ship of the Black Sea fleet named after him. (Sorge would, after his own martyrdom for the revolution, also have a ship named after him – as well as streets, schools and planes.)

  Sorge’s image of himself as a hero-poet from Schiller, formed in his schoolboy days, had only been strengthened by war and revolution. ‘He was always a little romantic,’ recalled Dorothea von During, a friend from Berlin. ‘Richard was a strong-willed, open, determined young man. We all loved Ika … I have somewhere a poem he wrote: “Forever a wanderer, condemning himself forever never to know peace”.’53 Nonetheless, this wanderer parked his cross-country skis and books in the corner of Katya’s room and, by the end of 1928, he had moved in with her.

  The young couple’s revolutionary idyll was short-lived. Katya may have dreamed of the stage, but her teacher at the Leningrad Institute of Theatrical Arts thought her no more than a ‘competent actress’.54 At the beginning of 1929, Katya shelved her life’s ambition and instead went to work in the newly opened Bolshevichka* men’s clothing factory in northern Moscow as a machine operator. She would claim in later letters to Sorge to be very happy among real proletarian workers – but one cannot help thinking that Katya protested too much in denying her regret over the compromises she had made.55

  More seriously for Sorge, the political winds in the Comintern were turning against the very idea of world revolution. Over the last decade, multiple communist risings all over Europe had failed. Treacherous socialists all over the Continent were making common cause with moderate social democrats, the Comintern’s arch-enemy. At the same time the equally fickle working classes were becoming worryingly enamoured with fascism. Mussolini was already in power in Rome. Hitler’s political fortunes were on the rise in Berlin.

  To Moscow – and particularly to Stalin – the message was clear. At the Comintern’s annual congress in 1928, Stalin finally pushed through his long-held belief in a ‘new course of socialism in one country’.56 Hopes of ‘imminent world revolution were put aside’, Sorge would later explain to the Japanese. ‘There occurred in fact a shift in the centre of gravity … Pyatnitsky believed that imminent world revolution was an illusion and that we must concentrate on the Defence of the Soviet Union.’57

  All the same, in the spring of 1929, Sorge returned to Norway for what was to be the last time. Moscow’s hand was tightening over foreign communist parties – and over the Comintern’s agent network. If previously Sorge had sent many of his day-to-day reports via a local party, by 1929 he was forced to travel personally to the OMS headquarters in Berlin for transmission. ‘In other words, I had absolutely no independent means of communication.’58 Worse, when he returned to Moscow in April 1929 he found that his reports had not even been read. ‘The Comintern had no interest in my political information.’59

  Foreign communists were also being systematically squeezed out of the Comintern’s central apparat. Swiss socialist and leading Comintern hierarch Jules Humbert-Droz complained to Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti that almost no non-Soviets were left at headquarters, with most of the remainder preparing to be reassigned abroad. Otto Kuusinen, one of the last remaining foreigners at the top of the organisation, was withdrawing into ‘regional and editorial work’. The Comintern’s head, Bukharin, was officially ‘busy with Russian affairs’.60 In fact Bukharin was fighting for his political life. In addition to purging the Comintern of unreliable foreigners, Stalin was also purging the Soviet party itself, systematically removing every top Bolshevik who could challenge him for supreme leadership. Having used Bukharin to oust Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, Stalin was now preparing to destroy Bukharin himself.

  Sorge found himself bounced from one job to another. Though he would be later accused of being a ‘Bukharinite-rightist’, the beginning of Sorge’s fall from grace pre-dated Bukharin’s removal from the leadership of the Comintern and from the editorship of Pravda in late April 1929. In the new political climate Sorge’s foreignness certainly counted against him. But perhaps more important was his independent-mindedness, even cussedness, with relation to his Comintern colleagues that is evident from their streams of bickering telegrams carping at his expenses and refusal to follow instructions.61

  In May, Sorge was moved into the Comintern’s economic commission, then briefly became personal secretary to his old patron Manuilsky.62 He attempted to reverse his downward mobility, appealing to Pyatnitsky to be allowed to engage in pure intelligence-gathering, without the impediment of involvement in local party politics: ‘I believed that espionage work, which I liked, and for which I think I am well fitted, would be impossible with the narrow framework of party activities … my character, tastes and strong preferences all lead me towards political, economic and military intelligence and away from the field of party controversies’.63

  On 18 June, a day before the start of the Tenth Plenum of the Comintern Executive Committee, Sorge left Russia on his most ambitious foreign assignment yet – to England and Ireland. It is not clear from the archives how he overcame his superiors’ objections to the mission. But the timing of his departure is significant. It is possible that Sorge’s remaining friends in the Comintern wanted to get him out of Moscow before the congress in order to save his skin from a coming purge. More likely, his enemies wanted him out of the way as they moved to destroy him.

  True to his own advice to Pyatnitsky – but also perhaps because of the unseemly party squabbles in Oslo the previous year – Sorge was under ‘instructions to remain strictly aloof from internal party disputes’.64 He was also, tellingly, warned to live in seclusion and avoid ‘slim, long-legged English girls’, or so he later told the Japanese.65 His OMS bosses were already well aware of Sorge’s weakness for wine and women.

  Britain in 1929 was a far more challenging environment for a Soviet spy to work in than Scandinavia had ever been. For years the popular press – in particular the Daily Mail – had been sounding alarmist warnings to their working-class readers of the dangers of foreign subversives in their midst. In 1924 the paper published the sensational Zinoviev letter, a document purporting to be a directive from the Comintern to the Communist Party of Great Britain ordering them to hasten the radicalisation of British workers. The letter was in fact a forgery, but it sowed anti-communist hysteria and helped to instil a deep aversion in the Parliamentary Labour Party to compromising contacts with Moscow that would last until the end of the Cold War.66 In May 1927 police raids on the Soviet Trade Mission operating out of a building at 49 Moorgate, London, had revealed an extensive espionage network that caused Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to break off diplomatic relations with the USSR. The records of British police’s Special Branch and the Security Service, MI5, list hundreds of suspected Soviet sympathisers and agents who were being kept under rigorous surveillance.67

  So by the time Sorge arrived by ship in July 1929, Britain was thoroughly hostile territory for a Soviet spy. He remained for ten weeks. By his own account his ‘purpose was to study British politics and economics – but since the Depression had thrown so many people out of work … I also undertook investigations to see whether a general strike might develop’.68

  Stalin had made clear in the previous year’s Comintern plenum that he had his hopes of an English revolution, and that the British Labour Party could be drawn into Moscow’s orbit. Neither aspiration had much ground in reality, as Sorge soon discovered. The British Communist Party numbered only 3,500 members, compared to some 300,000 in Germany.69 The party was also, as Special Branch records show, riddled with informers – a fact of which Moscow Centre seems to have been aware, instructing Sorge to strictly avoid contact with known British communists.

  So if he was not organising party work – his Scandinavian speciality – what exactly was Sorge up to? He told the Japanese that he travelled to ‘mining areas’ and saw for himself ‘how
deep the crisis was’. But he was lying. The Wall Street Crash would not come until October of that year, long after Sorge had left Britain, so the Great Depression that he referred to in his confession to the Japanese in fact still lay in the future. It seems that Sorge’s true mission in England was – at least in part – to collect sensitive information from a top Soviet spy. Christiane, still on good terms with her husband despite their separation, joined him in London. She later reported that the purpose of their trip was to meet a ‘very important agent’. The couple went together to the rendezvous on a London street comer. While the two men talked, Christiane kept her distance and a watch for signs of danger.70

  Who Sorge’s contact may have been was a mystery that worried British spycatchers for decades to come – notably Peter Wright, the Australian-born head of MI5 counter-intelligence. Wright’s theory was that Sorge’s agent was Charles ‘Dickie’ Ellis, another Australian who began his career in military intelligence in Constantinople in 1922 and was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS, the following year while serving as British vice-consul in Berlin. Dickie Ellis went on to work in Vienna, Geneva, Australia and New Zealand under the cover of a foreign correspondent for the Morning Post. Ellis would later work alongside Kim Philby in SIS and come under suspicion after maintaining contact with Philby after the latter’s departure from British intelligence under a cloud of suspicion following the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1957.71 Wright came to believe that Ellis, like Philby, was a Soviet spy, and that he had also passed secrets to the Germans.72 In 1964, Christiane – by then living in retirement, improbably enough, in a convent in New York – was questioned by a colleague of Wright’s and shown photographs of possible suspects. Christiane tentatively identified Ellis as the man she had seen in London – ‘this man looks familiar’ she told her MI5 interviewer – but could not say with certainty.73

  Given Sorge’s perilous position in the Comintern and his relative inexperience of running secret agents – as opposed to his extensive expertise in corralling fractious communist cadres – it seems odd that he would be given such a sensitive task as contacting a top Soviet spy inside the British establishment. Handling such agents would normally have been the province of David Petrovsky, alias A. J. Bennett, who served as Soviet consul in London and was the official liaison between the British Communist Party and Moscow. Moreover, by 1929 the USSR’s foreign intelligence was being increasingly run not by the Comintern but by the GPU – the Soviet secret police later known as the NKVD and still later as the KGB – and by the Red Army’s fledging military intelligence unit, the Fourth Directorate of the General Staff. In any case, whether the contact was indeed Ellis or someone else, Sorge warned Christiane that the mission was extremely risky – and later told the Japanese that he had faced twelve years’ imprisonment if he had been caught.

  In fact, Sorge was caught, though it was not for the clandestine meetings with any Soviet agents.74 Sometime towards the end of his visit Sorge was arrested by the British police, though it is not clear exactly when and why. Almost certainly this was not by the Bolshevik-hunters of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, since there is no mention in their meticulous records of Sorge, unless it is under a hitherto unknown alias. He was not charged. Perhaps he had been drinking with the same rough docker types that he had fraternised with in Copenhagen and got into a spot of bother with the law. Nonetheless, Sorge had, in the parlance of Soviet espionage, provalilsya – literally ‘fallen through’ – in the sense of being rumbled by the authorities.75

  In the event, it did not matter. Sorge’s career in the Comintern had, unbeknown to him, already come to an abrupt end. On 16 August 1929, Pyatnitsky and the Comintern’s Executive Committee (IKKI) resolved to ‘exclude comrades Sorge and [head of the Comintern’s Anglo-American Secretariat Ivan] Mingulin from the lists of the workers of the IKKI’.76 Sorge and three other Germans were to be ‘transferred to the direction of the Central Committee of the [Soviet] Party and to the Central Committee of the German Communist Party’.77 Eight days later the German four were mentioned as having been ‘purged’ as a group of ‘active Bukharinites’.78 In November Bukharin himself, having already been removed from the leadership of the Comintern earlier that year, would also lose his seat on the Politburo.79

  Sorge was understandably furious when he learned what his fate would be, probably on his return to Berlin after his London mission. ‘Those swine, how I hate them,’ he railed to a friend. ‘This disregard for human suffering and feeling … And they have not paid me for months.’80 The Soviet betrayal ran deep. For one, it was clear that his old protector, Pyatnitsky, had turned against him. Worse, he was not even allowed to return to Moscow. Sorge was now, in the words of a German party comrade, kaltgestellt – jargon for a party member who had been put ‘on ice’.81

  On 9 September 1929, Sorge had been, according to a secret tele-gram dispatched from the head of Soviet military intelligence in Berlin, waiting for nearly a month ‘without any instructions about his future. He is also without money.’82 A week later, according to the same source, Sorge received a telegram from the Comintern ‘allowing’ him to return to Moscow for talks – ‘however he must pay for his return ticket himself’.83

  The Berlin spymaster who was sending reports on Sorge’s fate was Konstantin Mikhailovich Basov. Born Jan Abeltiijs in Latvia,84 Basov had joined Lenin’s first secret police, the Cheka, in 1919, but soon moved on to the Registration Directorate of the Red Army – the Soviet Union’s first military intelligence organ. From 1927, Basov had been the chief Soviet spy in Berlin, eclipsing and annexing both the existing Comintern apparatus and the local German Communist Party’s spy network.85 Basov had been introduced to Sorge by Christiane in London a couple of months before.86 During Sorge’s miserable kaltgestellt Berlin days, the two men had met and spoken about the newly unemployed spy’s future. Basov evidently saw a man he could work with. Sorge most likely saw a potential saviour.

  Sorge was ‘a rather well-known colleague who needs no intro-duction’, Basov telegraphed his superiors at military intelligence head-quarters in Moscow on 9 September. ‘Speaks Germ., Engl., Fr., Russ. Education: doctor of econom.’ The Berlin bureau chief had even formed a precise idea of Sorge’s possible place in the Soviet military intelligence apparat that he was building. ‘He will be best suited for China. He can obtain commissions from publications over here to write scientific articles.’ Sorge – perhaps understandably for a man with a very specific skill set and no current employer – was ‘very seriously set on coming to work for us’.87

  By the time Sorge got permission to return to Moscow, Basov’s background check of Sorge was complete. ‘His bosses evidently want to fire him,’ Basov wrote to his chief in Moscow Centre, the headquarters of the Red Army’s military intelligence network. ‘I have made enquiries as to why the Comintern made such a decision. I received some hints that he was involved in the Rightist opposition. But in any case, all the comrades who know him speak highly of him … he will come and see you and discuss the question of moving over to us.’88

  Back in Moscow by mid-October, Sorge addressed his old comrades, friends and enemies on the Comintern Executive Committee for the last time. The minutes make moving reading. Contrite, for once, Sorge admitted to occasional ‘wavering’ but insisted that he ‘actively fought against Trotskyites in the German Club’.89 He listed all the fallen factions of which he was not a member – the heretics of the Ruth Fischer circle, the deviationist Samuelsohn, the wrong-headed Everta. It was Sorge’s futile attempt at self-justification – but more poignantly, a sad list of all the once-idealistic men and women who had been jettisoned as the Comintern devoured itself.

  In public, Sorge’s fall looked like a disgrace. On 31 October the IKKI, headed by Pyatnitsky, formally and unanimously voted to exclude Comrade Sorge from the Comintern, the organisation to which he had devoted half his adult life.

  The real story was different. Eleven days before Sorge’s expul
sion, a secret meeting of the IKKI confirmed that he had successfully passed through the ‘purging’ process (proshel chistku) – and could count himself ‘positively vetted’ (proveren).90 Sorge had ‘conversations with Pyatnitsky and Kuusinen in personal terms about the project’ of his future career. Pyatnitsky, for his part, had also spoken about Sorge to his friend, General Jan Karlovich Berzin, head of the secretive Fourth Directorate of the Red Army’s General Staff.91 To the world, Sorge had suffered an ignominious downfall. In reality, he had been recruited by Berzin, the man who would set Sorge onto his new, brilliant and ultimately fatal career path, penetrating the secrets of the USSR’s enemies in the Far East.

  *‘Woman-Bolshevik’ – an odd name for a menswear factory.

  4

  Shanghai Days

  ‘His work was impeccable’

  Kim Philby on Sorge

  The headquarters of the Fourth Directorate of the General Staff of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army – more familiarly known as the Fourth Department – were housed on a quiet side street behind the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in a handsome two-storey Italianate pre-revolutionary mansion. From the outside the only concession to the Bolshevik order was a new pair of heavy wooden front doors – decorated with carved revolutionary stars and, oddly, the Saint George-slaying-the-dragon coat of arms of the city of Moscow – which remain in place to this day. Today the building has been expensively renovated and the windows facing the street are all fitted with mirrored glass. Unlike other government offices there is no sign announcing to which department the building belongs, though the steel garage gates bear the double-headed eagle insignia of the modern Russian Ministry of Defence.

  When Sorge pulled on the long, ornate brass door handle for the first time in late October 1929, Jan Berzin was well on the way to becoming the chief architect of all the Soviet Union’s foreign intelligence operations. True, Berzin’s newly formed Fourth Department was just one of six Soviet spy agencies operating abroad. Berzin’s chief rivals were the Comintern’s OMS spy network and the overseas agents of the GPU secret police. The OMS was mired in amateurishness and squabbling; the GPU was, at this early stage, more concerned with hunting down enemies at home and abroad than in systematically gathering serious political information. Both would soon be outclassed in gathering foreign intelligence by Berzin’s ruthlessness and professionalism.