‘My work became much more important during the Shanghai Incident,’ Sorge wrote. ‘I had to try to discover Japan’s true purpose and to study in detail the fighting methods of the Japanese Army … Of course at the time we did not definitively know whether the [fighting] was simply a skirmish or whether it represented a Japanese effort to conquer China following the acquisition of Manchuria. It was likewise impossible to tell whether Japan would push northwards towards Siberia or southwards into China.’40 Sorge would spend the rest of his career – and ultimately give his life – trying to answer precisely that question.
In February 1932, shortly after the Japanese forces finally withdrew from Shanghai, Ozaki was recalled to Osaka by his newspaper. Sorge tried to persuade him to quit his job and stay in China – but Ozaki insisted that the Asahi Shimbun was too prestigious a career to abandon.41 The next month the Fourth Department also finally sent Sorge some of the backup that he had been urgently requesting since the Noulens-related exodus. Karl Rimm, alias Klaas Zelman, codename ‘Paul’, an Estonian-born Fourth Department officer, arrived in Shanghai to act as Sorge’s deputy.42 Clausen was also recalled from a posting in Hankow to take charge of communications after the death of a stand-in radio man from tuberculosis. A Polish communist codenamed ‘John’ also joined the team, encrypting telegrams and letters and photographing documents in the back room of a photographic shop on the North Szechuan Road.
Sorge was finally free to travel. On a trip to Nanking in the summer of 1932, according to a story he told his Japanese interrogators, he seduced ‘a beautiful Chinese girl’ and persuaded her to give him blueprints of a Chinese military arsenal which he photographed and sent to Moscow.43 There is no mention of this dangerous liaison in Sorge’s telegrams to Moscow.
Sorge had promised Berzin to spend two years in Shanghai. He ended up staying three. Though Sorge did not know it, the danger to him was growing. Chief Detective Inspector Thomas ‘Pat’ Givens of the Shanghai Municipal Police was compiling a list of suspected Soviet agents, based on various confessions of arrested communists.44 By May 1933 the grimly efficient Ulsterman had come up with six names of key communist cadres in the city. One was Sorge’s (whom Givens mistakenly suspected of being a member of the Soviet-backed Pacific Trade Union Council). Another name on the police’s list was Smedley’s.45 Sorge was living on borrowed time.
By the late autumn of 1932, Sorge judged that Rimm was ready to handle the Shanghai apparat on his own. Clausen and his radio set were installed in Japanese-occupied Harbin, where he posed as a general trader. Smedley and Kawai were working well with Rimm. Only Sorge’s personal friendship with the German liaison officers could not be passed on to other operatives. In December 1931, Sorge handed over his rezidentura and boarded a ship to Vladivostok.
6
Have You Considered Tokyo?
‘The question of whether or not Japan was planning to attack the Soviet Union … was the sole object of my mission’1
Richard Sorge
General Berzin gave Sorge a ‘warm welcome’ – by Sorge’s own account – on his return to Moscow in January 1933. His Shanghai mission had been a success, certainly in comparison to his bumbling colleagues in the Comintern. He had managed not to blow his cover; none of his Chinese comrades had been arrested and shot. Sorge had left the Shanghai rezidentura with more agents, more radios and better informers than he had found when he arrived. Best of all, from Centre’s point of view, Sorge’s alias as a respected German journalist had emerged untainted by any hint of communist sympathy, despite his reluctant involvement in the mess of the Noulens affair.
Katya Maximova, too, had waited eagerly for her lover’s return. Sorge soon moved into her small basement apartment on Nizhny Kislovsky Lane, round the corner from the Fourth Department HQ. After a dangerous and debauched mission in Shanghai, Sorge now convinced himself that all he wanted was to settle into the quiet life of a scholar. He began work on a soporific book on Chinese agriculture, using the less-than-riveting reports he had filed for the soybean trader readership of the Deutsche Getreide Zeitung as his main source material.
Sorge’s ambition to be taken seriously as an academic often surfaces in his correspondence with Katya, and in his prison memoir. ‘Had I lived under peaceful social conditions and in a peaceful environment of political development, I should perhaps have been a scholar – certainly not an espionage agent,’ he wrote in his jailhouse autobiography. After his arrest he insisted that his captors see him as a scholar, not a mere spy. ‘I am sure that I had access to much more material than the average foreigner,’ Sorge boasted, listing the highlights of his collection of ‘between 800 and 1,000 books’ on Japan.2
Yet all of Sorge’s attempts to actually settle into the academic world – in Hamburg, Berlin and Aachen in the 1920s and in Moscow in 1933 – were inevitably interrupted by the call of party agitation and espionage work. Doubtless a part of Sorge sincerely yearned for a life with the dutiful Katya pouring tea at the earnest parties where strong drink was frowned upon and spending his days in Moscow libraries. But the more powerful part of his personality always, in the end, chose the world of action, women, restaurants, fast motorcycles and unrelenting risk.
Sorge could not have been very surprised – and was perhaps even a little relived – when Berzin summoned him to the Fourth Department headquarters on 19 Bolshoi Znamensky Lane in April 1933 and informed him that his book leave would have to be cut short. Soviet military intelligence clearly saw Agent Ramsay as a man of action rather than of letters. Berzin and his new deputy, General Semyon Petrovitch Uritsky, had a worldwide intelligence service to build: Agent Ramsay’s agricultural treatise would have to wait. Berzin asked Sorge where he would like to be posted next. ‘I jokingly suggested Tokyo as a possible destination,’ wrote Sorge. While in Shanghai he had visited Tokyo on a holiday and spent three days at the Imperial Hotel that left him ‘favourably impressed with Japan’.3
Perhaps Sorge exaggerated his own agency in Berzin’s decision to dispatch him to Tokyo. In any case neither man was under any illusions about how difficult and dangerous establishing a rezidentura in Japan would be. Unlike Shanghai, which teemed with so many spies that they had to make conscious efforts to avoid running into each other, no Soviet ‘illegals’ had ever succeeded in settling in Tokyo. The Japanese were known to be intensely suspicious of all outsiders, and the formal and informal surveillance of foreigners was constant.
Nonetheless, Sorge set about preparing for the challenge with his usual thoroughness. Berzin gave him permission to consult his old Comintern colleagues Pyatnitsky, Manuilsky, and Kuusinen, on his Japan mission. Their talks, ‘although they touched on political problems of a general nature, were purely personal and friendly’. They were, in Sorge’s words, ‘quite proud of their protégé’. He claimed that Pyatnitsky in particular ‘was extremely worried about the hardships I would face but delighted with my enterprising spirit’.4 He also met with Karl Radek (born Karol Sobelsohn), one of the original founders of the Comintern. Radek had been closely involved with the early Comintern’s attempts to turn the East Red, and had headed the Sun Yat-sen military university in Moscow that had been set up to train Communist cadres from all over Asia.5 Radek had been briefly disgraced for criticising Stalin and backing Stalin’s arch-rival Leon Trotsky, but by 1932 he had been reinstated as a Central Committee member and by 1933 headed its International Information Bureau. Sorge also met with Radek’s deputy, Colonel Alexander Borovich (real name Lev Rosenthal), another veteran of the Sun Yat-sen university.6 All shared the latest Soviet thinking on Asian politics with Sorge and advised him on his new mission. But they were all also marked men. As we will see, Stalin distrusted the Comintern as dangerously independent and fundamentally disloyal and was already carefully laying plans for its destruction. Sorge’s meeting with these future enemies of the people would leave a taint of treachery by association that would have fatal consequences for his future.
Japan’s intentions towards the US
SR were certainly of the most urgent concern to the Kremlin in the wake of the invasion of Manchuria. They would become more and more vital as the Second World War approached. Sorge’s main role, as he later told the Japanese, was ‘to observe most closely … the question of whether or not Japan was planning to attack the Soviet Union. It would not be far wrong to say that it was the sole object of my mission in Japan.’7
Fear of imminent encirclement and attack by Russia’s enemies had been a touchstone of the Kremlin’s strategic thinking from the very earliest days of Soviet power. The entire vector of Soviet foreign policy, long before the rise of Hitler and of Japanese militarism, was to confuse and undermine the USSR’s enemies and encourage them to fight among themselves wherever possible. Through the 1920s the senior Soviet leadership feared that Imperial Russia’s First World War allies Britain, France and America, would attempt to ‘strangle Bolshevism in its cradle’, as Winston Churchill had put it when arguing for an Allied expeditionary force to Murmansk in 1919.
That fear extended in particular to Japan, which had invaded Russian territory no fewer than three times in living memory. In 1905 the Japanese had seized the Russian Far Eastern stronghold of Port Arthur and sunk the Russian Baltic fleet at the Battle of the Tsushima Straits. Then in 1910, Japan annexed Korea, shaving more pieces off the Russian Empire. The most recent and most extensive Japanese incursion had come in 1918. In the aftermath of the tsar’s overthrow and the collapse of Russia’s war effort, Japanese troops occupied swathes of Russia’s Pacific coast, sent troops deep into Siberia as far as Lake Baikal, and seized the island of Sakhalin. After the Armistice, Japan was eventually persuaded by the Allies to relinquish most of the Russian territory they had taken – apart from the island of southern Sakhalin – but as a consolation prize received mandates over former German possessions in the North Pacific and generous oil concessions in North Sakhalin. In short, Japan was no phantom menace. Tokyo had repeatedly proved itself both greedy for Russian land and ruthlessly efficient at seizing it. With Japan again expanding on the Chinese mainland, getting secret Soviet eyes and ears into place in Tokyo was a matter of the highest urgency.
The Fourth Department decided that Sorge should once more hide in plain sight, working as the now-respected German journalist and Asia expert. They drilled him in the latest cipher codes, based on page and line numbers of the 1933 edition of the German Statistical Yearbook. They again warned Sorge against contact with local Japanese communists, who were hopelessly infiltrated with police informers. He was also to avoid officials of the Soviet embassy in Tokyo, who were kept under constant watch. All that remained was to establish Dr Sorge’s bona fides with a fresh set of German journalistic accreditations and letters of introduction to top German and Japanese officials in Tokyo.
What of Katya Maximova? We know much more about Sorge’s feelings towards Maximova after his departure for Tokyo because he regularly included personal letters, photographed on microfilm, among the secret dispatches that he couriered to Moscow. These were enlarged and printed for Katya, with copies duly filed in the archives. Of their life together in Moscow we know much less. Sorge told his Japanese interrogators little about her – except to claim that he was ‘not married’. Only a few clues survive to give us an idea of their relationship during the few months they spent together in 1933. Chief among these is a marriage certificate dated 8 August 1933, five months after Sorge left for Berlin, en route to his new posting.
We have already heard of Sorge’s contempt for the bourgeois institution of marriage in his letters to his cousin Correns, when he and Christiane were forced to tie the knot so as not to outrage the local authorities of Solingen. His second marriage, to Katya, may have had similarly practical motivations. In later correspondence he fretted about whether she was receiving the payments due to the wife of a Red Army officer serving in the field. In 1930s Moscow such things were important for the allocation of ration cards, holidays and, most vitally of all, accommodation. ‘The apartment question has spoiled us all,’ wrote Mikhail Bulgakov in his 1940 novel The Master and Margarita; it is quite possible that Sorge once again forced himself to go through the formalities of marriage for the prosaic, and indeed bourgeois, if understandable, reason that she wanted a better flat.
There remains the mystery of the long delay between Sorge’s departure and the finalisation of his marriage to Katya. One problem may be that he was still married to Christiane. The couple had not seen each other since their brief time together in London in 1929; the first time they could have met in person to sign the papers of their amicable divorce would have been when Sorge arrived in Berlin in May 1933. But since there is no trace of any request from Sorge for official help in his new marriage – nor of his divorce – it is more likely that he simply married (or in the jargon of the day, ‘signed with’) Katya bigamously before he left, with the formal paperwork coming through only later, in August. Sorge seems to have been sincere, however, in his intention to return to Moscow – and to Katya – as soon as reasonably possible. He agreed with Berzin, again by his own account, that his mission to Japan would last only two years. In the event, he stayed for eleven, the last three of which he spent in Tokyo’s Sugamo prison.
Sorge found the Berlin of 1933 much changed from the chaotic, communist-leaning city he had last seen in 1929. The Nazi Party had become the largest parliamentary faction of the Weimar Republic government in November 1932. Adolf Hitler had been appointed as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. The burning of the Reichstag (Germany’s parliament building) by a Dutch communist on 27 February had given Hitler a pretext for suppressing his political opponents. The following day he persuaded the Reich’s president Paul von Hindenburg to issue the ‘Reichstag Fire Decree’ suspending most civil liberties. On 23 March, parliament passed an Enabling Act that gave Hitler’s cabinet the right to pass laws without its own further consent, effectively giving the Chancellor dictatorial powers. By the time Sorge arrived at Berlin’s Ostbahnhof on 16 May,8 the Nazis had abolished labour unions and other political parties, and had started rounding up their political opponents – including hundreds of communists.
Sorge’s main Soviet contact in Berlin was Yakov Bronin (born Yankel Liechtenstein), whom Sorge knew as Comrade Oscar.9 After a distinguished espionage career, which included a spell as Fourth Department rezident in Shanghai from 1934–35 and six years in the Gulag, Bronin wrote a memoir entitled I Knew Sorge. Writing under the pseudonym ‘Ya. Gorev’, Bronin recalled that Sorge struck him as ‘confident, thorough and brave’ and was impressed by Sorge’s ‘sense of purpose of a Soviet military intelligence officer’.10
Bronin briefed the new arrival on the dangers he faced in Berlin as Sorge sought to renew his German passport and obtain a newspaper correspondent’s card. All Germans returning from abroad would be subjected to a background check by the newly formed state secret police, the Geheime Staatspolizei – commonly known as the Gestapo – before issuing a new passport. In Bronin’s opinion it was unlikely that Sorge’s communist past – his brawling on the streets of Kiel, his reputation as a dangerous socialist agitator in the pits of the Ruhr, or his role as a party courier and fixer in Frankfurt – would be unearthed by the Gestapo, formed less than a month before Sorge’s arrival. Nonetheless, Bronin admired the ‘calculated risk’ taken by Berzin, a ‘master of the dialectics of intelligence’ in sending Sorge into such danger.
Sorge was clearly aware of the risks he was running in returning to his old stamping grounds. On 9 June he telegraphed Berzin that ‘the situation is not very attractive for me here, and I will be glad when I can disappear from this place’. Three weeks later he wrote again to warn that ‘with things livening up in these parts interest in my person may become much more intensive’.11 Sorge was so concerned that he might give himself away during beer-fuelled sessions with his new Nazi acquaintances that he actually gave up drinking for the duration of his Berlin sojourn. ‘That was the bravest thing I ever did,’ he joked to Hede Massing whe
n they met in New York in 1935. ‘Never will I be able to drink enough to make up for this time.’12
Despite the danger of exposure, Sorge was working his impressive charm to lever his niche reputation as China correspondent of the Deutsche Getreide Zeitung into something far greater. He called at the offices of the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik (‘Journal of Geopolitics’), an influential magazine much read in Nazi circles. Its editor, Kurt Vowinckel, a well-known publisher and ardent Nazi had, by an improbable chance, read and been impressed by Sorge’s essays on China in the agricultural press. Vowinckel asked Sorge to contribute to his magazine and furnished him with an open letter of introduction to the German embassy in Tokyo, as well as personal introductions to embassy secretaries Josef Knoll and Hasso von Etzdorff.
With characteristic chutzpah, Sorge then travelled to Munich to pay his respects to Zeitschrift für Geopolitik’s legendary founder, General Dr Karl Haushofer.13 A professor at the University of Munich and director of the Institute for Geopolitics, Haushofer had a considerable reputation as Germany’s leading expert on Japan – as well as being the originator of the doctrine of German territorial expansion known as Lebensraum. Before the First World War, Haushofer had travelled to Japan as an officer of the German Army and had written extensively about the country. By the 1930s he came to believe that the Japanese were the Asian equivalent of the Aryan master race, destined to rule all Asia. Haushofer had connections with the highest levels of the Nazi Party (despite having a Jewish wife) and had been a friend of deputy führer Rudolf Hess, since the latter’s student days at Munich in 1918.14
An Impeccable Spy Page 12
