Kozhevnikov’s career as an international double agent and macher – wheeler-dealer – began in China when he stole Borodin’s diary and papers and sold them to the French consul in Hankow. With the help of the British police he escaped to Shanghai, where he published a series of sensational articles on communist penetration of China, under his Evgeny Pik pseudonym. He sent the Shanghai International Settlement police an anonymous letter – later traced back to him – exposing sixty-two supposed Comintern agents in the city. Simultaneously, the energetic Kozhevnikov found time to keep up his acting career, establishing himself as a popular character actor and theatre director and starring in Russian-language productions at local Shanghai music halls. A contemporary publicity photograph shows Kozhevnikov posing in a Tatar skullcap with a fake scar across his foxy face.
Finding that neither his parallel careers as a professional informer nor as a theatrical impresario could keep him in the style to which he aspired, Kozhevnikov/Pik turned his hand to extortion. In 1928 he teamed up with two other actors to extract bribes from a wealthy Chinese casino owner. Pik posed as the head of the Criminal Department of the Shanghai Municipal Police (no less) and his accomplices played members of the US consulate staff. This protection racket netted him £15,000, with which he fled to the northern Chinese city of Mukden. When the money ran out the following year he returned to Shanghai and was promptly arrested for extortion and forgery of US and British consular documents. After spending some months in jail, Pik quickly re-established himself in the graces of the British and French police, as well as the Chinese government, as a recruiter of agents and informers in the White Russian community. The agents Pik enlisted, as it turned out, were registered with all three agencies.
On the side he also re-formed his old gang of actors to attempt another confidence trick. This time Pik and his associates posed as German officers ‘Captain Kurt Kluge’ and ‘Major Levitz’ and began negotiations to buy contraband weapons for the Chinese government to the tune of $2 million – ironically, enough, exactly the game that Ulanovsky was supposed to be in had he not been rumbled at the outset by British police – but with the added twist of soliciting kickbacks from corrupt arms dealers to secure the non-existent contract. Pik succeeded in extracting some $70,000 from a Chinese merchant before being unveiled. He was once again briefly arrested.
In short, Pik was trouble. Yet on his release from custody in the wake of the Kluge caper, Pik turned up at Ulanovsky’s house in search of more money. With chutzpah bordering on the maniacal, he proposed a deal. Claiming to be an agent for Chinese and French counter-intelligence, Pik offered to save Ulanovsky’s star (and indeed only) agent, a shyster and petty criminal by the name of ‘Kurgan’, from jail.
In early spring a desperate Ulanovsky, under pressure from Moscow to provide some hard intelligence, had recruited a single agent. His name was Rafail ‘Folya’ Kurgan, an old comrade of Ulanovsky’s from their days fighting in the Bolshevik underground in White-held Crimea during the Russian civil war. Kurgan – later codenamed ‘Kur’, surely one of the least secure pseudonyms in the history of intelligence – was a penniless émigré when Ulanovsky ran into him on a Shanghai street. Kur began to recruit a series of extremely expensive and, it turned out, mostly unreliable agents into Ulanovsky’s new network. Among these was one Maravsky, a former member of the White government of Siberia who was providing Chiang Kai-shek’s German instructors with intelligence on how to invade the Soviet Union. Maravsky demanded a thousand silver dollars a month for his services but, as Centre discovered, he was also working for Japanese intelligence. Another of Kur’s less-than-stellar informants was the playboy son of a wealthy Chinese casino owner who demanded cash in exchange for ‘contacts’ in high society.2
Kur’s one real success was in recruiting a technical secretary to the Nanking government who agreed to hand over the monthly audits of all Chinese Army arsenals, as well as all contracts with foreign companies, for a one-off payment of 5,000 Mexican silver dollars. Ulanovsky gladly handed over the money and received photos of the documents – the one real intelligence coup of his Shanghai days.
Unfortunately, the prospect of pocketing a similar sum proved too much for Kur. Inventing details of a second cache of documents from this valuable agent, Kur instead took over a thousand dollars of Soviet silver from Ulanovsky and disappeared for three weeks. He made contact with Ulanovsky again on 12 June 1930, claiming that Maravsky had betrayed him and made off with the cash. Kur also asked for even more money – which Ulanovsky, improbably enough, handed over. This was perhaps not so much naivety as desperation. Kur knew the address and real names of Ulanovsky and his wife Sharlotta. He also knew the identity of every informer that he himself had recruited. It was easier for Ulanovsky to hand over money than risk his entire Shanghai network being blown. Ulanovsky at first claimed in his telegrams to Moscow that Kur had a gambling habit that had caused him to lose apparat money. But on 16 July he was eventually forced to admit to Centre that he was being blackmailed.
In early August, Kur showed up once more at Ulanovsky’s house demanding $1,200 to go to South America. When the station chief demurred, Kur hysterically threatened to shoot himself. At another meeting a few days later Sharlotta Ulanovskaya attempted to persuade Kur and his wife to take the train to Harbin and offered them 300 Mexican dollars for the tickets. Kur took the money and, to the rezident’s undoubted relief, disappeared once more.
It was at this point that the latest unwelcome guest materialised at the Ulanovsky residence in the person of the newly released Eugene Pik. The former secret policeman-turned-actor-turned-double-agent bore alarming news. Pik told Ulanovsky that Kur had not left for Harbin but remained in Shanghai. Worse, Kur was under arrest for the forgery of bonds. But Pik proposed a solution. He could use his contacts with the Chinese and French police to release the unfortunate agent before he could spill the beans. All Ulanovsky had to do was pay the (unrecorded) sum of Kur’s forged promissory note and all would be well. As an additional bonus, Pik also offered his own services as an agent to the Ulanovsky spy ring.3
It is highly likely that Pik’s offer was made in collaboration with the elusive Kur. At any rate, this latest démarche was too much even for Ulanovsky’s elastic credulity. Pik was ‘put outside the door’, Ulanovsky reported to Centre, and the two men never saw each other again – though Kozhevnikov/Pik went on to a spectacular career in crime and espionage for the Japanese and later the Americans.4 It was equally clear, however, that the game was up for the Ulanovskys. Too many of Shanghai’s shysters knew their identities, and they would have to leave in a hurry before one of them sold them out to the authorities. Ulanovsky urgently telegraphed Centre to warn them that he had been busted. He also recommended Sorge as his replacement.
Days later the Ulanovskys were on a boat to Hong Kong. From the relative safety of the British colony, on 23 August the departing chief shared with Sorge his wisdom for the future of the Shanghai rezidentura. In the opinion of Ulanovsky, agents should be taught dancing, golf, tennis and bridge – ‘as essential as a reliable passport’ in order to give ‘a good foundation for small talk’.5 More substantively, he warned Sorge of the heightened counter-intelligence measures now in place in Shanghai, including news that British police agents were conducting morning rounds of popular brothels in order to debrief the prostitutes on the previous evening’s conversations, and instruct them on what questions to ask their patrons. Understandably, given his experiences, Ulanovsky also warned that all White Russian groups were riddled with informers and crooks.Agnes Smedley followed Sorge back to Shanghai in early September. Through the League of Left-Wing Writers, she had met and befriended several young foreign communists. One was Irene Wiedemeyer, a handsome young German woman of Jewish heritage with freckled skin, milk-blue eyes and unmanageable red hair. While living in Berlin, Wiedemeyer had become involved with the propaganda apparatus of the formidable Comintern macher, Willi Muenzenberg, whose forte was persuading left-wing intellect
uals to support the Soviet cause via a series of supposedly non-communist front organisations such as the Anti-Fascist League. After a spell in Moscow studying Asian revolutionary movements, Wiedemeyer had turned up in Shanghai to run a branch of the Zeitgeist bookstore on the banks of Foochow Creek. The Zeitgeist stocked radical German, English and French literature, much of it produced by Muenzenberg’s publishing syndicate. It was also used by the Comintern as a rendezvous and recruiting station, where messages and information were conveyed to agents on sheets of paper slipped between the pages of designated books.6 It was during this time that Smedley was befriended by Ursula Maria Hamburger, née Kuczynski. A slim, twenty-three-year-old, dark-haired Berliner from a prominent leftist family, Ursula had previously worked as an agitation and propaganda leader for the German Communist Party. Ursula would, in the course of several marriages and a stellar career as a Soviet spy, accumulate several pseudonyms, including Ruth Werner and the codename ‘Sonja’. But when she sought out the great author of Daughter of Earth she went by her married name of Ursula Hamburger, the wife of Rudolf Hamburger, a successful young architect who had moved to Shanghai in July of 1930.7 The two women met on 7 November 1930, the anniversary of the Russian Revolution and a favoured time for leftist gatherings, at the cafe of Shanghai’s Cathay Hotel. Ursula confided to Smedley that she had come to China hoping to be put to work for the communist cause.
Smedley invited Ursula to meet with her Chinese comrades – among them the writer Lu Hsun and her assistant Chen Han-seng – and also gave her work writing for the League of Left-Wing Writers’ banned paper. Most fatefully, she introduced Kuczynski to Richard Sorge.
Ursula’s infatuation with the journalist she knew as Johnson was immediate. She found Sorge ‘charming and handsome’ with a ‘long face, thick curly hair and deep-set, bright blue eyes’.8 Soon Sorge had persuaded Ursula to offer her spacious house on the Avenue Joffre in the French Concession for meetings, unbeknown to her husband. The house was surrounded on three sides by a large garden and had a separate servants’ staircase allowing discreet access to the drawing rooms on the second floor. Chinese guests – in fact senior Chinese Communist Party members – were passed off to the Hamburgers’ seven servants as language teachers. Sorge would always arrive first and leave last. By spring the Hamburger house had become such an obvious hotbed of clandestine activity that the English landlords complained about ‘too many Chinese’ coming to their property.9
Ursula did not care. Despite being a young mother – or maybe because of it – she was profoundly excited by the risk and glamour of her secret life as a conspirator that took her out of the domestic world of the nursery and into a large new one of jeopardy and high ideals. Sorge personified both the danger and the romance. ‘In the first week of spring, when my boy was two months old, Richard asked me if I wished to ride with him on his motorcycle,’ recalled Ursula in her bestselling 1958 memoir, Sonja’s Rapport. ‘It was the first time in my life I had ever been on a motorcycle … I was in ecstasy from this ride and shouted to him to ride faster. He was racing the bike as fast as it could go. When we stopped I felt as though I had been born again. Maybe he used this ride to check my bravery and endurance.’10
Ursula may have begun her involvement with the communist underground as a naive and infatuated hero-worshipper of first Smedley, then Sorge. But she soon showed herself to be a talented and disciplined agent, whom Sorge formally recruited. Ursula and her husband cultivated some of the most influential expatriates in Shanghai, including the German consul general, the head of the chamber of commerce and the head of the Trans-Oceanic news service, as well as a scattering of professors and correspondents. The table talk reported by Ursula – or ‘Sonja’, as Sorge codenamed her – began appearing regularly in his cables to Centre. Rudolf Hamburger, though a leftist, remained in the dark about his wife’s secret activities.
Sorge would later pay a strange kind of tribute to the women in his network by insisting to his Japanese interrogators that ‘women are utterly unsuited to espionage work … They have no understanding of political and other affairs and I have never received satisfactory information from them.’11 He was covering up for them. In reality, women – including Smedley, Ursula, and at least two Chinese agents, recruited with Smedley’s help, as well as dozens of women during his Tokyo career – would play a central role in Sorge’s intelligence work.
Another potential recruit was a young British executive of British American Tobacco (BAT) named Roger Hollis.12 After a flirtation with communism at Oxford, Hollis had dropped out of university in 1927 and travelled to China to try his hand at freelance journalism before joining BAT. He spent time in Shanghai and Peking and moved in leftist circles – though he and Ursula Hambuger later denied having met. He certainly met Comintern recruiter Arthur Ewert and Smedley, though ‘Ramsay’ himself made no mention of any contact with Hollis in his detailed dispatches to Centre.13
Hollis went on to join MI5 and was appointed director general of Britain’s internal security service in 1956. In 1986 Hollis was accused by author Chapman Pincher of being ‘Elli’, an alleged Russian military intelligence mole in MI5 during the war mentioned by Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko. The case against Hollis rests largely on the fact that Hollis repeatedly, and inexplicably, quashed surveillance of Ursula Kuczynski after she moved to London in 1938. Divorced from Hamburger, Ursula had become a professionally trained Fourth Department spy. Her mission in England was to act as the controller of Klaus Fuchs, the nuclear physicist who acted as liaison between the Manhattan Project and Britain’s own atomic research network. Despite MI5 suspicions that a covert transmitter was operating in north Oxford – where Kuczynski moved after MI5 was relocated to nearby Blenheim Palace during the war – ‘Sonja’ was never caught or even questioned.
Had Hollis been recruited by the Soviets while in China? According to Hollis’s British flatmate in Peking, Smedley came to visit him there in 1931 in the company of Arthur Ewert, the head of the Comintern’s intelligence in China. Hollis also knew the Soviet spy Karl Rimm, who was to replace Sorge as Fourth Department Shanghai station chief in 1932. He also possibly had an affair with Rimm’s wife Luise. Hollis also visited Moscow in 1934 and again in 1936 on the way back to London, then obfuscated about these visits during his vetting process.14 But if the Soviets did recruit Hollis in China, it was not Sorge who bagged him. Neither Sorge nor Rimm made any mention of such a promising recruitment in their correspondence with Centre in the files of the Shanghai rezidentura at the Defence Ministry archive in Podolsk.15
In any case, in the late autumn of 1930 Smedley produced a far more immediately promising catch than the idealistic young tobacco executive Hollis. Hotsumi Ozaki was a special correspondent for Japan’s most respected newspaper, the Osaka Asahi Shimbun.16 Born in Shirakawa, Gifu Prefecture, in 1901, Ozaki was the descendant of a samurai family. He had become inspired by communism while studying law at Tokyo’s Imperial University, but never formally joined the party. In November 1928 Ozaki was posted to Shanghai by the Asahi Shimbun, and became a regular at meetings at the Zeitgeist bookshop. Like Ursula Kuczynski, he asked Wiedemeyer to introduce him to the ‘famous American authoress’.
Smedley’s first conversations with Ozaki were coy. They earnestly discussed what could be done to help the newly formed Chinese branch of International Red Aid – a Muenzenberg-style front organisation designed to rally leftist humanitarians – and how to mobilise a worldwide protest movement against the Chinese Nationalist government’s anti-communist terror. She also ‘suggested that they exchange information on contemporary social issues’, Ozaki told his Japanese interrogators a decade later. Soon they were discussing more politically sensitive subjects including the inner workings of the Nationalist government. Smedley was ‘so perceptive that her questions sometimes frightened me’, confessed Ozaki.17
Smedley introduced Sorge as an American newspaperman – though Ozaki, whose English was just as fluent as Sorge’s, said he never believed
the ‘Johnson’ alias. What Ozaki did believe was that Mr Johnson was affiliated with International Red Aid, the same Comintern front for which Smedley also worked. It was only some months after he agreed to share information with Johnson that Ozaki decided that his American friend was in fact a senior member of the Comintern’s OMS intelligence.18 It seems that Ozaki continued to believe that he was working for the Comintern, rather than for Soviet military intelligence, right up until his execution for espionage on Revolution Day 1944.
Sorge and Ozaki had plenty in common. Both were ‘good bottle-men’. And though Ozaki was married with a young daughter when he met ‘Johnson’, he was an incorrigible enpuka – a ladies’ man – and was described by a friend as a ‘hormone tank’.19 Ozaki’s entanglements with women had begun at university when he moved in with a married woman who was a family friend. In 1927 he wed Eiko, the divorced wife of his elder brother, which also shocked traditional-minded Japanese. Ozaki and Sorge’s cooperation was also based on a shared respect for each other’s intellect, and a deep and genuine ideological commitment to communism. In many ways, the relationship would become an exploitative one. Sorge would use Ozaki ruthlessly and even, at the end, recklessly put him in danger. But Ozaki saw the role of spy that Sorge invented for him as his fate. ‘If I reflect deeply, I can say that I was destined to meet Agnes Smedley and Richard Sorge,’ Ozaki told the Japanese police. ‘It was my encounter with these people that finally determined my narrow path from then on.’20
An Impeccable Spy Page 10
