Shanghai was ‘the Whore of the Orient’, a city of nightclubs that never closed and hotels that supplied heroin by room service, where gangsters and warlords mixed with bankers and journalists in the cabarets and at the racecourse.19 It was also, by the late 1920s, Asia’s espionage capital. In the 1920s Shanghai hosted many of the great Soviet illegals of the age – Arnold Deutsch (who went on to recruit Kim Philby), Theodore Maly (later controller of the Cambridge Five), Alexander Rado (one of the many agents who would later warn Stalin of Nazi plans to invade the Soviet Union), Otto Katz (one of the most effective recruiters of fellow-travellers to the Soviet cause from Paris to Hollywood), Leopold Trepper (founder of the Rote Kapelle spy ring inside Germany before the Second World War), as well as legendary Fourth Department illegals Ignace Poretsky and Walter Krivitsky, Ruth Werner and Wilhelm Pieck. It was also teeming with idealistic young Westerners sympathetic to the communist cause.20
Shanghai offered unrivalled opportunities for secret work. No residence permit was required for foreigners, and the only official requirement for most Europeans was the need to register at their respective consulates. Most foreign citizens enjoyed extraterritoriality from Chinese justice and could be tried only by the concessions’ own courts. An important exception was the German community – some 1,500 strong in 1929 – after the Weimar government had voluntarily waived extraterritoriality in a bid to sign a trade deal with China in 1921.
The city’s three police forces – International, French and Chinese – distrusted one another and rarely shared information. A large community of foreign speculators, swindlers, crooks and ‘persons of no declared profession’ offered a rich pool of informers and couriers. Ferries along the Yangtze linked Shanghai with cities 1,700 kilometres into the Chinese interior, as well as up and down the coast to Canton and Hong Kong to the south and Hangkow to the north. It boasted China’s most modern telephone and telegraph systems, a concentration of international news bureaus, and a cacophony of private short-wave radio transmitters that made interception all but impossible.
Most important of all for Moscow, Shanghai had also become the headquarters of Chinese communism. By 1929 an uneasy alliance between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the ruling Nation-alist government of the Kuomintang Party, led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and headquartered in the inland city of Nanking, had broken down. Members of the CCP were on the run. Communists from all over China hid from the Kuomintang police in the relative protection of the city’s concessions. Shanghai was also China’s most industrialised city, with the country’s largest urban proletariat. Therefore, by Marxist theory – if not, as it turned out, in practice – it should have been the ripest ground for revolution. By 1930 there were 250,000 factory workers in the city, as well as 700–800,000 coolies, rickshaw men and unskilled labourers.
By 1930, Shanghai’s economy was in deep crisis. Tea, cotton and wool prices had collapsed after the Wall Street Crash of the previous year. Several parallel civil wars in the Chinese hinterland had wrecked irrigation systems and hindered harvests, resulting in a 30–70 per cent shortfall in grain the previous year. A famine had killed hundreds of thousands in nearby Shanxi province and hunger riots were common across the countryside. Unemployment in Shanghai had tripled to 300,000, and inflation had made food unaffordable and driven thousands of peasants from the countryside into the cities to earn, beg or steal food.21 Behind the luxurious facades of the Bund’s palaces of capitalism, the backstreets of the city seethed in revolutionary anger.
Sorge and his party docked in the port of Shanghai on 10 January 1930 and checked into the Plaza Hotel. This was perhaps not the most discreet choice of accommodation as, of all the dozens of hotels in the city, the Plaza was known to be the favoured haunt of Comintern officials and senior Bolsheviks. Four days after their arrival the incumbent Fourth Department bureau chief, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Gurvich (alias Gorin, codename ‘Jim’), received an encrypted telegram from Moscow Centre informing him that his replacements were waiting for him to make contact. This came as news to Gorin, who had no plans to leave Shanghai before spring. Nonetheless, he presented himself at Room 420 of the Plaza the following morning.
‘Hello from August,’ said Gorin – the coded greeting provided by Centre by which he was to identify his surprise successor. ‘I know his wife,’ replied Ulanovsky.22
The meeting was not a happy one. Ulanovsky had instructions from Centre to take charge of the bureau’s cover businesses and funds, to avoid contact with any of its agents and staff, and to start a brand-new agent network essentially from scratch. Gorin had no such instructions.23 It seems that Berzin believed that Gorin’s cover had been blown and his networks compromised. Hence Centre’s haste to dispatch the new team with only the most peremptory preparation – and their instructions to Ulanovsky to stay clear of Gorin’s compromised networks. Berzin’s suspicions were founded on his debriefing of one of Gorin’s deputies, one Zussman (alias Decross, codename ‘Inostranets’), on his return to Moscow from Shanghai the previous October. For reasons that are not clear from the archives, Berzin seems to have concluded that Zussman was either a double agent or had been rumbled by the authorities. Gorin strongly disagreed, and his strenuous protestations to Centre occupied his correspondence for months. More, he refused to hand over any money and insisted on continuing to run his networks as before. For the first three months of Sorge’s mission to Shanghai, there were effectively two rival Fourth Department rezidenturas operating in the city.
Thus Ulanovsky’s main occupation in his first weeks in Shanghai was wrangling with his predecessor. Sorge, on the other hand, got on with what he did best – befriending men and charming women. His first targets were the German military advisers who had been drafted in by the Chinese Nationalist government to turn the Kuomintang Army into a modern military machine. The letters of introduction from Berlin established his bona fides with the German consul general, and with his help Sorge joined the Shanghai Rotary Club, the German Club and the International House. From Berlin, Sorge had also gleaned personal information on the key military advisers who might be best informed about Chinese affairs. Gorin’s old radio man, Max Clausen – who would play a key role in the Sorge story – was immediately impressed by the new arrival’s ruthless charm. Sorge quickly struck up ‘friendly conversation’ with the German officers, recalled Clausen, ‘filled his interlocutors with wine to loosen their tongues … and “gutted them like a fat Christmas goose”, as he told us several times’.24
Sorge was obviously a natural dissimulator of rare talent. The officers whom he befriended were men he naturally despised. The German instructors were ‘all Fascists, very anti-Soviet’, reported Sorge. ‘They all have dreams of attacking Siberia with the support of local warlords. They are mostly linked to industrial magnates in Germany and help them to get military orders.’25 Yet it was compatriots like these – Nazis, militarists and cynics ready to enrich themselves on the suffering of the proletariat – who would, for the rest of his career, become Sorge’s most valuable informers and closest supposed friends.
It was in the company of these well-paid swells that Sorge discovered, and quickly developed a taste for, the high life of Shanghai. In his previous career among rough and earnest communists, proletarians and intellectuals, Sorge had little opportunity to drink cocktails, dance with elegant women and eat in the finest restaurants. But his new job practically obliged him – at least in his own interpretation – to consume imported whisky and swap war stories with his new German friends in the salons of Shanghai’s swankiest clubs. To cover his true background as a communist, Sorge had to play the debauched bourgeois expatriate. He found the role entirely to his liking.
Clausen also soon fell under Sorge’s spell. ‘He was an extremely charming man, and an excellent bottle-companion,’ the radio man wrote in a post-war memoir. ‘It was not surprising that many were keen to spend time with a well-known journalist and no less well-known social lion. I cannot say that this st
yle of life was distasteful to Richard himself. He went to many restaurants, drank a lot, talked a lot. To be fair to him he was never indiscreet, though from time to time got into drunken fights and occasionally allowed himself some more desperate adventures.’26
On 26 January, after just a fortnight in Shanghai, Ulanovsky reported to Centre that ‘agent Ramsay’ – Sorge’s new codename – had achieved ‘excellent integration into the top circles of the German colony’. Citing ‘a friendly conversation between Ramsay and German Generals’, the rezident reported that Chiang Kai-shek was strongly opposed by commercial circles in Shanghai because they hated the nationalists’ requisitions and forced nationalisation of strategic businesses.27 Days later, he informed Centre that Ramsay had been told by the German consul that the nationalists were attempting a reconciliation with some of their warlord enemies in order to form a united front against the communists. Berzin marked the information ‘valuable’ and passed it directly to the Soviet People’s Commissar for War. Sorge, a newly minted agent in a strange country, was already turning up intelligence gold.
Chinese circles proved harder to crack. Ulanovsky and Sorge both joined the Shanghai Christian Youth Union in an attempt to meet influential young Chinese. They failed, possibly because earnest Christ-ian tea parties may not have been Sorge’s natural milieu. Sorge had more luck with Shanghai’s community of foreign communists and fellow-travellers. Already in Berlin he had been advised to contact one of the most fearless and outspoken foreign correspondents in Shanghai, an American socialist who worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung – Germany’s most prestigious daily newspaper – named Agnes Smedley.28
Smedley was thirty-eight when she met Sorge. Born into a poor family of coal miners in Osgood, Missouri, she had witnessed police violence against striking colliers as a child. After leaving school she worked for a spell as a rural teacher before supporting herself through Tempe Normal School in Arizona. Having suffering a nervous break-down, she was befriended by two neighbours, Thorberg and Ernest Brundin. Both were enthusiastic members of the Socialist Party of America and inspired Smedley with their devotion to the cause of justice for the oppressed. In 1917 Smedley moved to New York and became involved with Indian nationalists fighting British colonial rule in India, who recruited her to operate a front office for the group and publish anti-British propaganda. Most of these activities were covertly funded by Germany and Smedley changed addresses frequently to avoid surveillance by American and British military intelligence. Between May 1917 and March 1918 she moved ten times. Despite her precautions, in March 1918, Smedley was arrested by the US Naval Intelligence Bureau, indicted for violations of the Espionage Act and sentenced to two months in jail.
After her release, by now a committed communist, Smedley moved to Berlin where she became the lover of Indian revolutionary Virendranath Chattopadhyaya. She visited Moscow for the Comintern congress of 1921 and again in 1929.29 It was in Berlin that she met Yakov Mirov-Abramov, the Comintern’s top spy in Europe. Smedley’s relationship with the Comintern and the Soviet Communist Party would always be deliberately ambiguous. She consistently denied working as a spy and never formally joined the party. But it is clear that Mirov-Abramov enlisted her to his network as a helpful sympathiser, at the very least.
In 1928 Smedley published Daughter of Earth, an autobiographical novel that established her fame as a crusading socialist and humanist, passionately devoted to relieving exploitation and poverty. Sorge read the book in Moscow. The following year she left Chattopadhyaya and – perhaps with the encouragement of Mirov-Abramov – moved to Shanghai as a correspondent for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung.
Smedley was disgusted by Shanghai’s decadence. ‘In the big cities, and especially Shanghai, life follows its normal carefree pattern. There are opulent official receptions and balls, new banks opening, the establishment of great financial groupings and alliances, gambling on the stock exchange, opium smuggling and mutual insults by foreigners and Chinese under the aegis of extra-territoriality,’ she wrote in February 1930. ‘And there are the night clubs, the brothels, gambling clubs, and tennis courts and so on. And there are actually people who call this the beginning of a new era, the birth of a new nation. That may be true for a certain class of Chinese: for the merchants, bankers and racketeers. But for the Chinese peasantry, that is for 85 percent of the Chinese people, all this is like a life-destroying plague.’30
Soon after her arrival in Shanghai, Smedley made contact with the innocuously named Cultural Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This was in fact a key branch of the party’s central propaganda directorate whose task was to recruit Chinese intellectuals to the cause. Smedley, a well-connected foreigner with no formal ties to the party, was a godsend to the beleaguered left-wing Chinese whose lives, even in the concessions, were in constant danger. Radical literature was strictly banned, and communications and meetings were fraught with risk. Smedley’s foreign passport and status as a respected international journalist was the perfect cover for mail drops and liaison between party members. She also offered her home for meetings and set about winning over China’s pre-eminent short-story writer, Lu Hsun, to the cause. Smedley also set up a League of Left-Wing Writers, whose mail communications became a valuable covert conduit between the CCP and the rest of the world. In return, the party put Smedley in touch with Chinese and foreign communists, passed her the reports of the CCP’s Central Committee and even provided a secretary – a young leftist intellectual – who translated reports and newspapers for her. By early 1930 Smedley was the only Western journalist in China receiving information directly from CCP sources.
Shortly after moving from the Plaza to the more modest Foreign YMCA on Bubbling Well Road, probably sometime in late January 1930, Sorge called on Smedley at her home in the French Concession. Introducing himself as ‘Johnson’, a supposedly American journalist,* Sorge presented her with a letter from someone he referred to in his prison statement as ‘a mutual acquaintance in Berlin’. Most likely it came from Basov or one of his proxies. In any case, it seems that Sorge’s intention from the outset was to recruit Smedley into his new Fourth Department network. He told the Japanese that he had been ‘authorised to recruit personnel’ and had ‘heard of Smedley in Europe, and felt I could depend on her’. Soon after their first meeting, by Sorge’s account, he asked Smedley to help ‘in establishing an intelligence-gathering group in Shanghai’. She immediately agreed.31
Their relationship quickly progressed beyond the strictly comradely. Soon after they began working together, Smedley and Sorge became lovers. It is hard to imagine that Sorge’s motives were anything other than cynical: six years Sorge’s senior, short and muscular with cropped hair, Agnes was far from Sorge’s usual type. Ursula Kuczynski, a future love rival, described her as ‘an intelligent working woman in appearance, in no sense pretty, but a well-proportioned face. When she strokes her hair back, one sees the great dome of the forehead.’32 And Sorge himself would later uncharitably describe Agnes as ‘a mannish woman’. Her earnest disapproval of the decadent luxuries of Shanghai could not have sat well with Sorge’s penchant for restaurants, bars, fast motorcycles and women. Yet in one important sense this mismatched couple were kindred spirits. Both were passionately committed communists; both fiery characters who wanted to change the world.
By early spring, Smedley was frequently spotted riding behind Sorge – or ‘Sorgie’, as she took to calling him – on his powerful motorbike, speeding down the Nanking Road feeling ‘grand and glorious’. She was obviously smitten with her rugged younger lover. ‘I’m married, child, so to speak, just sort of married, you know,’ Smedley wrote to her friend Florence Sanger. ‘But it’s a he-man also and it’s 50–50 all along the line with he helping me and I him and we working together in every way. I do not know how long it will last; that does not depend on us. I fear not long. But these days will be the best in my life.’33
Sorge made clear that their relationship was a ‘friendship’ whic
h he insisted precluded such bourgeois sentiments as monogamy. Smedley, an early public advocate of birth control and women’s rights, also tried to convince herself that she too had transcended such conventional morality. ‘It is a rare husband that wears well,’ Smedley wrote to Sanger. ‘I never expect one to wear so well – that is perhaps because I myself do not.’ Monogamous relationships, as she had experienced them, were ‘senseless, dependent, and cruel’.34 But a few months into her affair with Sorge, Smedley confided to Sanger that she had at long last found that ‘rare, rare person’ who could give her ‘everything I wanted and more’.35
Smedley introduced Sorge to her circle of Chinese communist intellectuals. More, she was able to give him first-hand information about the rapidly developing CCP-orchestrated insurgency that was taking over the Chinese interior. In March 1930, Smedley went on the first of several investigative trips up the Yangtze valley to Shaanxi province, where Chiang Kai-shek had his power base, as well as other more remote cities. She travelled with Chinese comrades who took her to the homes of peasants who had been forced to sell their land because of usurious government taxes and greedy landowners.36 She reported in the Modern Review that a ‘social revolution has broken out in earnest’. Mao Tse-tung’s group of communist insurgents numbered over fifty thousand hungry, illiterate peasants and government soldiers who had defected into more than a dozen openly Red armies across central and southern China. In the communist-controlled ‘Soviet areas’, Mao’s fledgling Red Guards were confiscating property from landowners and redistributing it to peasants. Kuomintang officials were replaced with local ‘soviets’, or workers’ councils, that banned prostitution, gambling, and opium dens and closed temples and churches. Representatives of the ‘former classes’ such as missionaries, wealthy peasants, gentry, and officials, were executed after summary trials by people’s courts.
An Impeccable Spy Page 8
