An Impeccable Spy

by Owen Matthews

  Ozaki had excellent contacts with the Japanese consulate general in Shanghai, as well as with Japanese businessmen in the city, and with officials of the Chinese Nationalist government and the ruling Kuomintang Party. By December 1930, when Chiang Kai-shek unleashed 350,000 Nationalist troops into Red Army-held areas of Shaanxi province, Ozaki was already assisting Smedley with her extra-legal activities for International Red Aid and keeping Sorge informed of developments. Soon Ozaki would recruit two other young Japanese for Sorge’s network: Mizuno Shigeru, a student agitator, and Teikichi Kawai, a freelance journalist.

  The risks that Sorge, Smedley, Ursula Kuczynski and Ozaki were running became terrifying clear in the new year of 1931. In late January, twenty-four CCP members, including five young leaders of the League of Left-Wing Writers, were arrested in Shanghai and turned over to Kuomintang authorities. It later emerged that they had actually been betrayed by the incoming Chinese Communist Party leader, Wang Ming, a Moscow loyalist, who had informed the Shanghai Municipal Police that some of his dissenting comrades were conducting a secret meeting. Ruthless infighting of this kind made security among the Chinese comrades poor. Equally slim were the chances that arrested comrades would withstand brutal interrogation.

  In the wake of the arrests, Sorge urged Smedley to lie low in Nanking, where she met up with Ozaki. They travelled together to Manila, where they attended the founding congress of the Philippine Communist Party conference organised by Earl Browder, head of the Communist Party of America. While the Sorge group kept a low profile, Nationalist death squads roamed the Shaanxi countryside. Five of Smedley’s Chinese comrades from the Writers’ League were executed, reportedly by being buried alive.21

  With Smedley away in the Philippines, Sorge embarked on an affair with Ursula Kuczynski. Using his tried-and-tested seduction technique, he took her on thrilling motorcycle rides. ‘If he thought this would bring us closer together then he was right,’ she wrote in her memoir. ‘After this ride I was no longer scared and our chats became more frank.’22 When in March Smedley returned to Shanghai, she took the news of her best friend’s affair with her lover badly. Too proud to confront the younger woman directly, they bickered fiercely over ideological questions. ‘Agnes would storm off, enraged,’ according to Ursula. Then, a few hours later, she ‘would telephone as if nothing had happened’ and resume their friendship. Smedley, prone to night terrors and bouts of depression, would regularly call Ursula at three in the morning, asking her to come over and hold her hand.

  While his two mistresses vied for dominance, Sorge attempted to contain the damage caused by the Kuomintang’s relentless round-up of communist activists. His major problem was that Centre’s instructions to cut off all ties with the previous Fourth Department networks – and also to steer clear of the multifarious Comintern networks in Shanghai – were impossible to follow in practice. In Moscow, Comintern intelligence and Soviet military intelligence could operate as separate, and even rival, entities. In the chaotic Shanghai underground, the lives of the two sets of Soviet spies were hopelessly and inextricably tangled.

  In the late spring of 1931, Shanghai was host to a bewildering collection of Soviet organisations, all partly or wholly engaged in espionage. There was a secret Comintern OMS rezidentura; the clandestine representative office of the Comintern’s Far Eastern Bureau (Dalburo); representatives of the International Organisation of Unions (MOP); the Pacific Secretariat of Unions; the Communist Youth International (KIM); as well as the official Soviet consulate general and Soviet military commission. The Dalburo alone had a permanent staff of nine, kept fifteen apartments around the city for secret meetings and received a budget of $120–150,000 a year from the Comintern’s Western European bureau in Berlin in order to train and support communist cadres across Asia.23 All these Soviet comrades had legitimate covers; all of them met both overtly and covertly with Chinese trade unionists, members of the Chinese Communist Party, leftist writers, visiting foreign communists – and of course the fellow-travelling Europeans of the Zeitgeist bookshop circle. To complicate things still further, the OMS had failed to establish proper radio communications with Centre. That meant that much of the secret radio correspondence between the OMS and Dalburo actually went through Sorge, who had to personally encode it and pass it to his radio man for painstaking transmission in Morse code to Vladivostok.

  The whole edifice was staggeringly insecure, as was proved when Chinese police arrested Huan Dihun, a Moscow-trained Comintern agent known by the codename Kalugin, in Canton in March 1931. Under torture, Huan soon began naming other communists. More arrests quickly followed. By mid-April, five CCP couriers and eight Central Committee members had been arrested. One CCP Politburo candidate member, Gu Shun Jian, was arrested in Hankow where he had been posing as a street juggler (which had in fact been his genuine pre-party profession). Gu knew every clandestine meeting place in Shanghai and had met most of the Soviet cadres in the city, albeit under flimsy codenames. Within days, Gu had confessed all he knew. (Gu’s treachery not only did not save his own life, but condemned thirty members of Gu’s extended family to being murdered by communist partisans who spared only his twelve-year-old son from the massacre.24) The CCP organisation in Shanghai was utterly destroyed. By the end of June over three thousand Chinese party members had been arrested and many of them shot.

  The Comintern suffered another disastrous security breach when courier Joseph Ducroux Lefranc, alias Dupont, was arrested by British police in Singapore on 1 June 1931. Police found two sheets of paper on his person bearing a Shanghai post-office box number and a telegram address. The Shanghai Municipal Police quickly traced the addresses to one Hilaire Noulens, allegedly a professor of French and German. His real name was Yakov Rudnik, and he was in charge of the Dalburo’s communications, security and accommodation in Shanghai. After a week of surveillance, police arrested Rudnik and his wife Tatyana Moseyenko at a Comintern apartment at 235 Sichuan Road. In Rudnik’s pocket were the keys to apartment 30C at 49 Nanking Road, where police discovered a trove of secret documents relating to a variety of Comintern front organisations in the city. Many were coded. But unfortunately for the Profintern, the Dalburo and all the rest, a sheet listing the keys to the cipher had been left folded in copies of the Bible and the Three Principles (by the early Chinese socialist leader Sun Yat-sen) found in the same apartment.

  From Moscow, Berzin telegraphed that the ‘khozain’ – literally, the master, Centre’s codename for Stalin himself – had ordered that the Dalburo close all its extensive Shanghai operations and evacuate its staff immediately. A large gaggle of Comintern personnel fled for their lives. Sorge was left alone as the sole senior Soviet intelligence officer in the city.

  Centre’s strict instructions to Sorge to avoid contact with the CCP and the Comintern turned out to have been well founded. Unfortunately for the Fourth Department and for Sorge himself, Centre then proceeded to ignore its own good advice. On 23 June, OMS chief Yakov Mirov-Abramov appealed to Berzin to ask Sorge to do everything possible to free the Rudniks. Unwisely, but given little choice, Berzin agreed. For the next few months Sorge would handle what came to be known as the Noulens affair, hiring lawyers, coordinating publicity and investigating which Chinese officials could be bribed to secure their release.

  The Rudniks’ flimsy aliases had been concocted hurriedly by the OMS and quickly collapsed under police interrogation. At first the ‘Noulens’ couple claimed to be Belgian citizens in order to take advantage of Belgium’s extra-territorial rights in the International Settlement. When the Belgian Foreign Ministry refused to confirm their citizenship, the Rudniks were handed over to the Chinese court in Shanghai. On 4 August, Rudnik changed his story, claiming to be Xavier Alois Beuret, born on 30 April 1899 in St Leger, Switzerland. Again the Swiss consul general was not prepared to confirm Noulens’s new identity without specific directions from Berne – and indeed the real Xavier Beuret was soon found to be alive and well and living in Brussels.

  W
ith increasing desperation – and decreasing credibility – the Comintern persuaded another Swiss comrade living in Moscow to lend his identity to the unfortunate ‘patients’ languishing in Chinese jail. In late August, Rudnik became Paul Christian, a Swiss wallpaperer and agricultural labourer. Weeks later Centre changed its mind once more and Rudnik now claimed to be yet another Swiss national, a mechanic called Paul Ruegg. All the while the prisoner stretched the credulity of the Chinese court by continuing to maintain that he was not a secret communist agent – despite the fact that Chinese police had leaked large sections of the secret documents discovered at the Nanking Road apartment to the press.

  Meanwhile the Comintern had mobilised an international cam-paign to protest the ‘Noulenses’’ incarceration. From Berlin the master propagandist Willi Muenzenberg formed the International Noulens/Ruegg Defence Committee and roped in such luminaries as Albert Einstein, H. G. Wells, Madame Sun Yat-sen and Henri Barbusse to support the cause. The case was discussed in both the British House of Commons and the United States Senate.25

  Clearly, the glare of publicity surrounding the Noulens case was hardly the best place for a secret agent to hide. Nonetheless with blithe – or reckless – disregard for its bureau chief’s security, Centre continued to insist that Sorge negotiate with defence lawyers, handle large sums of cash bribes26 and deal with a number of Comintern operatives dispatched to Shanghai with various schemes to free the couple. The extraordinary effort made to free Rudnik – the money spent, the international resources mobilised, the risk taken by the USSR’s secret workers – would make a bitter contrast to the total lack of interest Moscow would later show in getting Sorge out of Japanese incarceration.

  Centre’s obsession with the imprisoned Noulens couple became even more absurd in the wake of Japan’s increasingly aggressive advances in the northern Chinese region of Manchuria, a far more pressing concern for Soviet national security. Japan’s influence in Manchuria – which bordered Japanese-ruled Korea, Chinese Mongolia and the Soviet Far East – had been growing for decades. Manchuria was a key source of raw materials, such as coal and iron ore, for the booming Japanese industrial economy. By 1931, 203,000 Japanese citizens lived in north-east China and Japan accounted for 73 per cent of foreign investments in the region. The South Manchuria Railway that linked the port of Dalian to the Manchurian interior – and ultimately the Russian Trans-Siberian line – was Japanese owned and staffed, and Japan had controlled a swathe of territory along the length of the railway since its victory in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05. Crucially, the Japanese-run Railway Zone was protected by a 15,000-strong force of troops from the Kwangtung Army, a semi-independent branch of the Imperial Japanese armed forces based on the Chinese mainland.27

  Nominally, Manchuria was part of the Republic of China. In practice the region had been ruled by the anti-Japanese warlord Zhang Zuolin since 1916. In 1928 the Japanese assassinated Zhang with a bomb, hoping that his opium-addicted, womanising son Zhang Xueliang would prove more amenable to Tokyo’s interests. They were wrong. By April 1931, Zhang Xueliang – nicknamed the ‘Young Marshal’ – pledged loyalty to the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, continued his father’s policies of harassing Japanese and Korean citizens, and began negotiating with American companies to open Manchuria to Western businesses.

  The plan to overthrow the troublesome Young Marshal and establish Japanese control over all of Manchuria was hatched by two officers of the Kwangtung Army behind the back of Japan’s civilian government. However, recent research has shown that the senior Japanese Army command in fact gave the scheme its covert blessing.28 On 1 August 1931, all seventeen divisional commanders of the regular Imperial Japanese Army were invited to a secret meeting at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, where it was agreed that their comrades in the Kwangtung Army would expand their zone of control to defend the interests of Japanese citizens all over Manchuria.

  The operation began on the night of 18 September 1931, when a small explosive charge placed by a Japanese platoon went off under the tracks of the South Manchuria Railway just north of Mukden.29 The railway was undamaged (a local train from Chen Chung to Shenyang passed by the site of the explosion ten minutes later). But the Kwangtung Army blamed Chinese extremists and immediately attacked a nearby Chinese military barracks, killing 450, followed by a full-scale assault on Zhang Xueliang’s forces across Manchuria.

  Zhang had previously been instructed by the Chinese government in Nanking to offer no resistance to possible Japanese provocations. Despite the outrageous provocation represented by the Manchurian incident, Chinese president Chiang Kai-shek continued to insist on appeasing the Japanese rather than fighting them. This was partly because Manchuria was not in any case under his direct control, and partly because Chiang Kai-shek feared that a major northern campaign against Japan would encourage new communist uprisings in Canton and across south-central China. ‘The Japanese are a disease of the skin,’ Chiang Kai-shek told his generals, ‘the communists are a disease of the heart.’30 As a result many units of Zhang’s quarter of a million-strong Northeastern Army had been ordered to store their weapons and remain in their barracks. And though numerous and well equipped, Zhang’s troops were under-trained, poorly led, and suffered from low morale. The Northeastern Army he commanded was also full of secret agents put in place by the Japanese military advisers who had created the force for Zhang’s father.31 Within six weeks of the ‘Mukden incident’, the 11,000-strong expeditionary force of Japan’s Kwangtung Army had overrun the whole of Manchuria. Zhang was ridiculed as ‘General Non-Resistance’.32

  Japan’s aggression was a matter of the most urgent concern for Sorge’s masters in Moscow. Would the Japanese, fresh from their easy victory in Manchuria, now turn north and invade the USSR’s sparsely populated and scantily defended Far Eastern provinces? The question would be central to Sorge’s mission for the next decade. And just as central would be the Japanese to whom Sorge turned for urgent information on his country’s intentions – the young journalist Hotsumi Ozaki.

  Ozaki was ‘my first and most important associate’, Sorge would tell his Japanese captors. Since his arrival in Shanghai in 1928, Ozaki had not only developed unrivalled contacts among the Japanese diplomatic and business community in Shanghai and the Kuomintang authorities but also, secretly, with the Chinese Communist Party. One of Ozaki’s major sources of contacts and gossip was the East Asia Common Script School, a university set up in Shanghai by the liberal-minded Japanese statesman Prince Konoe to promote Japan–China understanding. Ozaki would frequently lecture there on Asian politics. The school was a centre for left-leaning young Chinese, many of whom went on to senior positions in the government of Nationalist China. Ozaki also spoke often to Smedley’s circle of communist sympathisers who brought reports from beleaguered CCP-held areas of the Chinese interior. And Ozaki was also in frequent contact with pro-Japanese elements in the Nanking government.

  Sorge quickly recruited Ozaki – though as we have seen, under the false flag of the Comintern. Soon they were meeting frequently in restaurants and teahouses to exchange information and political gossip. Ozaki had also signed up an informant of his own, his colleague and friend the Japanese journalist Teikichi Kawai of the Shanghai Weekly. Kawai, like Ozaki, sympathised with communism but was not a party member. Soon Kawai was travelling to Manchuria at Sorge’s request to report on the progress of Japan’s puppet state, on the preparedness of the Kwangtung Army and the political news of the White Russian, Muslim and Mongolian minorities on China’s northern border. ‘Take your work step by step. Do not rush things,’ Sorge told Kawai at their first meeting in a restaurant on the Shanghai’s Nanking Road. The young Japanese was intensely impressed. ‘One meets one like him only once in a lifetime,’ Kawai recalled after the war. ‘Sorge’s words lived with me. I think I am alive today because I followed Sorge’s advice.’33

  Another important aspect of Sorge’s personality also crystallised in September 1931: his love of ph
ysical danger tipped into near-suicidal recklessness. Riding his motorcycle at full speed down the Nanking Road, Sorge lost control of the machine and crashed. His already damaged right leg was once again broken. In hospital, where he was visited by both the devoted Ursula and Smedley, he joked that his ‘body was already so battered’ by the wounds of war, ‘what difference did another scar make?’.34

  Laid up at home with his leg in plaster, Sorge reported to Centre on 21 September 1931 that according to the Japanese military attaché – information almost certainly provided by Ozaki – the invasion of Manchuria was ‘not of an active anti-Soviet character’.35 In Moscow, the Central Committee were relieved and agreed with Stalin that ‘it is good that the Imperialists are quarrelling’.36

  The autumn brought worse news for the Chinese government, however. Sorge’s German military advisers reported that the Japanese were pushing beyond Manchuria to the railhead and entrepôt of Harbin and preparing seaborne troops to attack Shanghai itself. Three Japanese cruisers appeared on the Yangtze river, in full view of the Bund. Sorge’s agents in Canton sent urgent word that the Japanese had offered the local warlords a $5 million bribe not to make peace with Chiang Kai-shek, keeping potential Chinese resistance weak and divided. Most alarming of all for Moscow, Kawai brought word from Mukden that the cossack Ataman Grigory Semyonov,37 a fiercely anti-Bolshevik White Russian general who was now living under Japanese protection in Manchuria, was negotiating an alliance with local warlords and the Kwangtung Army. Semyonov planned to gather a mixed force of Chinese, Japanese and White Russian troops to invade the USSR.38

  On 1 January 1932 Japanese marines attacked Chinese Army barracks just outside Shanghai’s International Zone. The fighting raged for thirty-four days. Sorge visited the front lines almost daily. ‘I saw the Chinese defensive positions and I saw Japanese aircraft and Marines in action,’ he wrote in his prison confession. ‘The Chinese soldiers were very young but their discipline was very good, although most of them were equipped only with grenades.’39 Within weeks the Chinese section of the city had been reduced to rubble. Japanese were unable to walk its streets in safety, so Sorge would meet Ozaki and Kawai in the dead of night at the boundary of the Japanese Concession and escort them by car to Smedley’s home in the French Concession where he would debrief them. In the absence of any backup from the now-dissolved Dalburo, Sorge had become the Soviet Union’s only eyes and ears in the heart of the unfolding crisis.