Jan Karlovich Berzin was born Pēteris Ķuzis, the son of a poor Latvian farmer. He began his revolutionary career at the age of sixteen, when he led a guerrilla detachment during the 1905 revolution. The young Berzin was wounded, captured and sentenced to death, but was spared execution because of his youth. After two years in a tsarist prison he was deported to Siberia, whence he escaped twice. During the First World War he served as a private with the Imperial Russian Army before deserting in 1916 to join the Bolsheviks.1 By the spring of 1919 civil war had broken out all over Russia. Berzin was appointed commander of a division of Bolshevik Latvian riflemen against the counter-revolutionary White forces near Petrograd.2 Berzin devised a system of taking and shooting hostages to recover deserters and to put down peasant rebellions in areas seized by the Red Army from the retreating Whites. In September of that year, two months before his thirtieth birthday, Berzin’s ruthlessness earned him the post of Minister of Internal Affairs of the newly formed Soviet Socialist Republic of Latvia. The following November he was transferred to Moscow to found the Soviet state’s first military intelligence bureau. When Russian sailors at the Kronstadt naval base revolted against Bolshevik authority in March 1921, it was Berzin who pursued, arrested and liquidated the survivors.3
Clearly, Berzin was a very different kind of man from the well-meaning, idealistic comrades who led the Comintern. Official photographs show a fit man with piercing eyes and crew-cut hair. He has the air of one born to wear a uniform with commander’s stars on the collar. Berzin’s instincts were those of a partisan commander and a merciless revolutionary, ready to execute civilians and prisoners of war if expediency demanded. The first generation of Soviet spies had been a motley cast of gentlemen amateurs, demi-mondain chancers, opportunists and naive conspirators. Berzin’s outfit, by contrast, was to be an intelligence service for a new world – disciplined, ruthless, systematic and professional.
In this ambition Berzin was a true disciple of Count Felix Dzerzhinsky, architect of the Red Terror that followed the Bolshevik coup of 1917, and founder of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, or Cheka, the first Soviet secret police and predecessor to the GPU. Dzerzhinsky said that ‘only a saint or a scoundrel’ could serve in his ruthless new force. The Cheka’s agents were the revolution’s avenging angels invested with the prestige of a righteous elect. If the Comintern was a community of bickering dreamers, Berzin sought to create a cadre formed of a steely new clerisy, ‘a puritan high-priesthood, devout in its atheism. Here were the avengers of all the ancient evils; here were the enforcers of new heaven, new earth.’4
Sorge, even before his recruitment by Berzin, certainly had no doubt about the need to apply violence and guile in the service of the revolution. ‘The proletariat does not like to turn the other cheek,’ Sorge told friends, quoting Pravda.5 Like his contemporaries, Whittaker Chambers – a young American socialist who also became a spy – and the poet Isaac Babel, Sorge was mesmerised by the secret world’s mixture of bloody ruthlessness and high ideals. ‘Once a person … had fully identified with the apparatus, he would justify anything, even criminal acts, according to the law which he no longer recognised,’ wrote Hede Massing, who also saw herself as a ‘trusted soldier of the revolution’ and became a Soviet spy at around this time. She described ‘the elation, the self-denial, and often the self-abasement involved’ in secret work. ‘Once he is incorporated and a functionary of the quasi-religious brotherhood, he lives in what seemed to be an elevated world. The rules are strict.’6 Lenin called the Soviet Union’s secret services ‘the decisive weapon against the countless plots and countless attempts to destroy Soviet power from the side of people who were infinitely stronger than us’. Massing, and Sorge, saw themselves as front-line soldiers in that secret army.
In Sorge, Berzin saw a promising recruit. Sorge was no pigeon-chested, bespectacled Comintern bookworm. He was a former soldier, a strong, tough man who had shovelled coal and brawled with reactionary thugs in Aachen. Sorge would later call Berzin ‘a friend, like-minded comrade in arms’.7 General Berzin’s secretary, N. V. Zvonareva, recalled that ‘they had good, warm relations – they understood each other’.8 The two men – both tall, strong and stern-faced – even resembled each other physically.
On the practical side, Sorge had established academic and journalistic credentials that would serve as a perfect ready-made cover for foreign assignments. He was not Russian, and therefore free of the most obvious taint of association with Soviet espionage. Sorge had proved too independent-minded for the Comintern’s taste. But Berzin was on the lookout precisely for men able to work on their own. The Red Army needed good agents, and fast. From the collapsing hen house of the Comintern’s intelligence network, Berzin and his agents hoped to pluck out a few tough, experienced operatives who might suit their purposes.
Berzin and Sorge seem to have struck an immediate deal at their first meeting. ‘Our talk centred on the question of how far the Fourth Bureau as a military organisation was concerned with political espionage, for Berzin had heard from Pyatnitsky that I was interested in this kind of work,’ Sorge told his Japanese interrogators, who were naturally intensely interested in learning the inner workings of Soviet military intelligence.9
The Red Army needed detailed political information on China, Berzin bluntly informed his latest recruit. As the prospect of revolution in Europe faded, the Far East was becoming more of a priority for the Kremlin, both as an opportunity and a danger. A successful communist revolution in China could spread though Asia and destroy the supremacy of the Western capitalist powers by overthrowing their colonial empires. A nudge from the Soviet Union might, therefore, turn the whole Orient Red and shift the balance of power in the entire world in Moscow’s favour.10 Or Asia could go the other way and become a mortal threat to the Soviet Union. China could fall under the control of nationalists backed by US capital, avowed enemies of Soviet power. Japan was industrialising and arming at an alarming rate – and its fragile democratic government was becoming increasingly dominated by aggressive military factions.
What Berzin perhaps did not admit was that the Far East was a blind spot for the Soviet military. Up until 1928 most intelligence on China had been gathered by the Comintern using a highly insecure network of Soviet officials, diplomats, Chinese communists and paid informers. This mixture of professionals and amateurs, officials and illegal spies, proved a security nightmare. The memory of the single police raid on the Soviet Trade Mission in Moorgate, London, in 1927 that had smashed almost the entire Soviet espionage apparatus in England at a single stroke must have been still fresh in Berzin’s mind. And unfortunately – for the Soviets – it was the British who ran the most effective counter-intelligence and anti-communist operations in its colonial outposts in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore. Moscow had sensibly decided that its diplomatic quarters abroad were no longer safe centres from which to control agents. More, doubts were also accumulating about the basic competence of the Comintern as a spy agency.11
Berzin’s task, therefore, was to create an entirely new network of illegal agents run by a variety of undercover espionage officers posing as journalists, brokers, merchants and academics. The main principle was that the Fourth Department’s men and women should not be connected in any obvious way to the Soviet Union, that they should operate their communications and finances independently of the Soviet embassy and of local communist parties, and that they would have watertight cover. That, at least, was the theory. The practice, as Sorge was to find out to his cost, would prove rather different.
Berzin’s energy and ambition is witnessed by the gigantic volume of correspondence that issued from his desk on a daily basis, now carefully filed in the basement of the Ministry of Defence archive in Podolsk, near Moscow. At the time he met Sorge, the archives show that Berzin was also busy preparing fully fledged rezidenturas – illegal spy centres – in New York, Paris, Marseilles, Le Havre, Rouen, Prague, Warsaw, Danzig, Vilnius, Brailovo, Kishinev and Helsinki as wel
l as in the Chinese cities of Harbin, Shanghai, Mukden and Canton. Sixteen commercial companies – including general stores in Romanian Bessarabia, nut and raisin merchants in Samsun and Constantinople, and a corned beef dealership in Mongolia – were bought or set up in a dozen countries at Berzin’s command in order to give funding and cover to his new agent network.12 The Fourth Department’s new Shanghai team, as assembled by Berzin, would consist of four men: bureau chief Alexander Ulanovsky, radio operator Sepp Weingarten, an officer with the alias of ‘Vetlin’ (code-named ‘Koreets’, or the Korean) whose real identity remains unknown – and the newest addition, Richard Sorge.
Berzin’s reasons for choosing Ulanovsky as rezident remain something of a mystery, given that his career before Shanghai was a litany of failure – and continued in the same disastrous fashion during and after his spell in China. In 1921, Ulanovsky had been sent by Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka to spy in Germany. But his orders were so vague that Ulanovsky had to call in at the Soviet embassy in Berlin to ask for more precise instructions. Berlin telegraphed Moscow for guidance, only to be told by the Cheka that they had never heard of Ulanovsky and advised the embassy to chase him away as a provocateur. Ulanovsky’s only experience of China had been a visit in 1927 as a member of an official Soviet delegation of trade union representatives, where he addressed large audiences of Chinese communists and met scores of Soviet and local officials using his own name. It was scarcely a promising prelude to a career as an underground operative under cover of a new identity.
Perhaps the secret of Ulanovsky’s remarkable, Teflon-coated career was his combination of charm and ruthless fervour.13 ‘There was something monkey-like in the droop of his arms, the roll of his walk and the look in his brown eyes, alternatively mischievous and wistful,’ recalled Whittaker Chambers, who worked with Ulanovsky in the USA in 1931–34. ‘He was deeply kind-hearted and very ironic. He was a modest man … but had huge life experience and a wonderful understanding of people, with that rare capacity of seeing things through the eyes of another person. His favourite phrase was “I would strike you”. I never doubted that if necessary he would do so – that he would shoot me to protect the case in hand, or if he had been ordered to.’14
Just days after his recruitment by Berzin in late October 1929, Sorge and his new boss Ulanovsky were sent to Berlin. Their contact was to be Konstantin Basov – codename ‘Richard’ – the man who had talent-spotted Sorge and one of the most experienced agent trainers of his generation. Basov’s job was to orchestrate the building of the two men’s cover stories, stitching their fake new identities into the fabric of reality like an expert tailor, invisibly patching over their Soviet past. He had already procured a Czech passport under the name of ‘Kirschner’ for Ulanovsky. His plan was to set the fictional Herr Kirschner up as a businessman representing a legitimate German or European company in China. To that end he had Ulanovsky place classified advertisements in the Berliner Tageblatt and Berliner Zeitung newspapers advertising himself as an independent metals salesman en route to China and offering his services as a trade representative.15
The scheme worked a little too well. To Basov’s surprise the Schelder-Consortium, a company specialising in the export of German arms based in the Netherlands port of Rotterdam, responded within days to offer Kirschner the position of their official agent in China, on generous terms. There was just one hitch: arms exports from Germany to China were currently banned by both the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. The Schelder-Consortium breezily suggested that the ban could be easily circumvented thanks to the company’s excellent contacts with both the Belgian and French members of the Allied Commission of the Rhine, who were meant to monitor Germany’s rearmament. These corrupt officials could be prevailed upon to provide false export certificates for shipments of German arms to non-existent customers in India and Indo-China, though the weapons would ultimately be diverted to China.
The Schelder-Consortium’s proposal was clearly grossly illegal, and as such – one might have thought – not the most obviously discreet cover for an active Soviet spy. Nonetheless, Basov judged that a position as an international arms smuggler would help Ulanovsky make contacts in Chinese military circles. The Fourth Department quickly gave its blessing.
Sorge’s cover, by contrast, was to be hardly covert at all. In Germany and Moscow he was already known as an academic and journalist, albeit one with socialist leanings. In China, Basov judged, Sorge should simply seek work as a foreign correspondent and freelance commentator, hiding in plain sight under his real name. In order to do so Sorge would have to establish himself as a China expert, ingratiate himself with journalistic, academic and business circles in Berlin, and procure the necessary letters of introduction. He had approximately four weeks to get the job done.
Undaunted by the tight deadline, Sorge took an apartment on Reichskanzlerplatz in the bourgeois Berlin district of Charlottenburg and began seeking out old friends and comrades. A university chum, Karl August Wittfogel, put Sorge in touch with Richard Wilhelm, scholar and founder of the influential China Institute. Wilhelm, despite Sorge’s complete lack of any previous experience or expertise on China, agreed to furnish him with an official letter commissioning him to collect ‘scientific materials’ on ‘social and political’ subjects in China.
Armed with this letter, Sorge headed to the Getreide-Kreditbank – the Grain Credit Bank – Germany’s largest agricultural financier. Crucially, the bank also published an important trade paper, the Deutsche Getreide Zeitung (German Grain News), that carried reports on harvests around the world. Would they accept articles from Dr Sorge on China’s soy, rice and bean harvests – on a strictly freelance basis, no retainer required? Of course they would. The editor quickly drew up an official letter of recommendation for the attention of the German consul generals in Shanghai and other Chinese cities, dispatched via the German Foreign Ministry’s official channels, asking for the Deutsche Getreide Zeitung’s new correspondent to be afforded all possible assistance in his studies of the Chinese agrarian sector.
Sorge’s chutzpah did not end with the agricultural press. A well-known Berlin publisher accepted his offer to write a monograph on China, supplying him with several more letters of introduction to prominent foreigners and intellectuals in Shanghai. Sorge also got himself hired to write a report on the development of the Chinese banking system for an influential consortium of German businesses with interests in China, who again furnished him with an impressive contract, written in both Chinese and German. The final fillip of this networking tour de force was to procure press accreditation from two German photo agencies for his boss Ulanovsky.16
On 29 November, Basov cabled Moscow Centre that his team was ready for departure – despite the fact that Weingarten the radio operator had arrived too late in Berlin for any kind of cover to be prepared.17 On 7 December the three Soviet spies departed on the same ship from Marseilles, bound for Shanghai. It was a risk to send them all together, explained Basov to Centre, but such was the urgency of their assignment that he did not want to risk waiting two or three weeks for the next transport.
The Fourth Department team had an agreeable voyage. Rather too much so, as it turned out. At a boozy New Year’s Eve party somewhere in the South China Sea, Ulanovsky had got drunk with a group of friendly Britishers. ‘Kirschner’ had introduced himself as a representative of the Schelder-Consortium – and later, as the bonhomie flowed, confided to his new friends his plans to sell arms to the lucrative Chinese market. Unfortunately for Ulanovsky – and unbeknown to him, as they were better at holding their tongues when drunk than he – his Hogmanay companions were British officers from the Criminal Investigation Department of the Shanghai Municipal Police, returning to China after leave. Ulanovsky had jeopardised his own cover even before arriving in his new post.
The port of Shanghai, the great commercial entrepôt of China, was neither exactly a colony nor a sovereign Chinese city. In the wake of the the Opium Wars of 1842 the totteri
ng Imperial government in Peking had ceded large pieces of territory along the banks of the Yangtze river to various foreigners – first to the British, then the French and the Americans. Known as ‘concessions’, these were self-ruling enclaves beyond the authority of the Chinese government. The largest was the International Settlement, covering nine square miles of prime waterfront and in 1929 home to 1.2 million people – nearly half the city’s population. Some 3 per cent of the Settlement’s residents were foreigners, mostly British and Americans, and it was run by a municipal council elected by the enclave’s mostly foreign property owners. It also had its own 50,000-strong police force, commanded by British officers and staffed by Chinese, Indian and Russian constables, as well as law courts, newspapers and an efficient postal service.
The Settlement was the commercial heartland of Shanghai, where the largest banks of the world had branches and where commodities such as rice, tea, oils, grain, cotton and tobacco were traded from a row of modern skyscrapers that lined a broad waterfront boulevard known as the Bund. Behind lay a dense warren of factories and workshops – including glass foundries, soap works, silk-spinning sweatshops and over sixty textile mills – as well as workers’ tenements.
To the south was the smaller French Concession, centred around the smart offices and banks of the Avenue Joffre. A largely residential area favoured by wealthy foreigners and Chinese, it had a separate police force under the authority of the French consul general. The French Concession was also – naturally – known for its restaurants, pleasure gardens and whorehouses. Shanghai boasted some three thousand bordellos, most of them operating around the clock and segregated for Chinese and foreigners, as well as around two hundred dance halls and thousands of legal and illegal casinos catering to every social caste. Du-Yuesheng’s three-storey gambling house on the Avenue Foch, for example, was famous for providing high rollers with limousines, the best wines, girls, cigars, and opium, as well as a special ‘service’ shop next door where less fortunate clients could pawn everything from fur coats to underwear.18
An Impeccable Spy Page 7
