In public, despite his private anguish, Sorge kept up his facade of cheerful cynicism. At an embassy reception in September 1936 the newly arrived Third Secretary Dr Hans-Otto Meissner found Sorge in apparently buoyant mood. “So you are Meissner. I heard you had just arrived,” Sorge said, tipping a glass in a half-mocking, half-gracious salute. “Welcome to our Oriental paradise!” Sorge had not bothered to introduce himself, assuming that the young diplomat already knew who he was. Meissner judged Sorge ‘a gay, dissolute adventurer with a brilliant mind and an unassailable conceit’.61 (Another new member of the rapidly expanding staff, Press Secretary Count Ladislaus von Mirbach-Geldern, sniffily dismissed Sorge as ‘the most uncultured fellow in the world’.62) But Meissner noted that Sorge was ‘accepted by everyone, everywhere’, and clearly enjoyed the confidence of his superiors. Indeed, Ott hinted to Meissner that Sorge was some kind of German special agent. The young diplomat found it ‘hard to resist’ Sorge’s ‘obvious high zest for living and careless disregard for pomp and ceremony’.63
At least Max Clausen was able to enjoy a happy family life. Once Clausen had established radio contact to their satisfaction, the Fourth Department decided to allow Anna to join her common-law husband in Tokyo. Over the winter she had been living alone in Moscow, under Centre’s close eye, and thoroughly disliked it. ‘There is no life, no freedom, and no peace’ under communism, she bluntly concluded.64 But early one morning in March 1936 a German woman who had been closely monitoring Anna unexpectedly handed her a train ticket to Vladivostok and told her to be ready for departure by ten o’clock on the same day. Anna was shunted off to China with an accompaniment of a string of Fourth Department blunders. The contact who was meant to give her money and a false passport in Vladivostok was late, so she missed her boat to China and had to wait a month. When she finally reached Shanghai, the post office could not find Clausen’s letter with his contact details.
Eventually Clausen tracked Anna down through the poste restante service of the Thomas Cook office. He had travelled to Shanghai with twenty to thirty rolls of microfilm that he kept in his pocket at all times, ready to fling them into the sea at the first sign of trouble.65 Finally, he and Anna had been able to have their marriage legally sanctioned by the German consul general, which entitled her to a German passport in her own name. By late summer they were installed in Tokyo as man and wife in Clausen’s new house in Azabu-ku.66
‘Are you busy with the secret work as usual?’ Anna asked her husband shortly after they had settled in. ‘Of course,’ Clausen replied. ‘But just a little bit.’ Clausen assured his wife that he was going into commerce. What he did not tell her was that the seed capital of $20,000 was Fourth Bureau money sent at Sorge’s request in order to set Clausen up with a cover business. At first Clausen experimented with importing forestry equipment, then powerful Zündapp motorcycles (one of which he sold to the speed-loving Sorge, which would soon have fateful consequences). But the project which eventually prospered was the manufacture and sale of blueprint copying machines. In early 1937 the Fourth Department’s latest covert commercial venture was duly registered as ‘M. Clausen, Shokai’.
Meanwhile Ozaki was busy penetrating ever deeper into the heart of the Japanese establishment. In August he sailed with a top-level Japanese delegation to California for the sixth annual conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations. Founded in 1925 by American philanthropists, the institute was a regional discussion forum in the spirit of the League of Nations that attracted some of the most senior figures in Japanese and American diplomacy. The theme for the 1936 meeting, naturally enough for the turbulent times, was Japan–China relations. Ozaki had been invited as a leading China expert.
On board the liner Taiyo Maru were two old acquaintances. One was Prince Kinkazu Saionji, the Oxford-educated adopted grandson of the liberal constitutionalist Prince Kimmochi Saionji, one of Japan’s most distinguished elder statesmen.67 The younger Saionji would later become a passionate socialist. But in 1936 he was a rising statesman who enjoyed the patronage of his grandfather’s friends, Prince Fumimaro Konoe, the future prime minister, and Yosuke Matsuoka, soon to become foreign minister. Ozaki knew Saionji slightly through the East Asia Problems Investigation Association. On board the ship they shared a state room and became firm friends.68
Ozaki’s other friend was a school and university mate, Tomohiko Ushiba, who was now a secretary of the Japanese council of the Institute of Pacific Relations. The conference itself, held in a lodge in Yosemite National Park, turned out to be ‘very aristocratic and also pedantic, and did not fit a heretic like me’, Ozaki remarked. Ozaki observed at first hand how ‘fastened to nationalistic consciousness’ and ‘narrow-minded’ the Japanese were; he also noted that the ‘British and Americans did not try to cover their arrogance as the rulers of the world’.69 The main ‘crop’ of the conference, as Ozaki put it bluntly, was ‘to promote my personal friendship with Japanese delegates’.70 After the trip Saionji would become a daily visitor to Ozaki’s offices and they would regularly dine at each other’s homes. ‘Saionji trusted me well, treated me as a bosom friend, and disclosed secret matters to me without any caution. Thus, as his political position rose, I was able to obtain important information from him,’ confessed Ozaki.71
Ozaki penned a widely read report on the conference entitled ‘Recent Developments in Sino-Japanese Relations’. It was an apologia for Japan’s imperialistic adventures in China, emphasising Japan’s status as a great power and calling for China to recognise Manchukuo. The report was also statement of Ozaki’s outward political orthodoxy. Its spirit was not entirely cynical, however; nor was it that far from Moscow’s own party line. The USSR had no desire to see a resurgent Nationalist China on its borders. And while Japan was busy cannibalising its neighbour it would have no time to attack the Soviet Union. By cheering on Japanese expansion southwards into China, Ozaki (and later, Sorge) were distracting Tokyo’s militarists from the temptation to strike northwards into the USSR.
In September 1936, just as Ozaki was returning from California, Aino Kuusinen reappeared in Tokyo. She had been urgently recalled to Moscow the previous November – doubtless to the relief of Sorge, who saw this Comintern princess with no obvious job or usefulness as a security risk for his hard-working spy ring. On arrival in Moscow, Aino had made an appointment to see General Uritsky only to be told that her recall had been a mistake, and that she should return to Tokyo forthwith. She refused. Aino could afford such caprices, at least as long as her ex-husband still ruled the Comintern. Instead of returning she set to writing a book entitled Smiling Japan, a vapid account of the country’s history and culture, penned with the sole purpose of ingratiating herself with her new friends in Tokyo.
Amid the general confusion she found at the Fourth Department, Aino heard some disturbing criticism of Sorge’s new rezidentura. Uritsky warned Aino to stay away from Sorge and expressed irritation that he had requested so much money to set Clausen up in business. ‘Those rascals – all they do is drink and spend money,’ Uritsky had told Aino – which she reported to Sorge when she eventually deigned to return to Japan. ‘They won’t get one kopek.’72
Sorge mentioned nothing of Centre’s odd – and frankly inexplicable – ingratitude in his confessions or prison memoir. But he could only have been deeply hurt. In Tokyo and Berlin, Ott and General Thomas appreciated him as an exceptionally perceptive observer of Japanese affairs. However Moscow, which had learned the deepest secrets of the unfolding alliance between Germany and Japan and had an ear, via Ozaki, to the topmost echelons of Japanese politics, scorned him. Worse, Aino brought news of various old Comintern comrades who had been imprisoned in a gathering purge of foreign cadres, including her own brother.
At least Aino – known to the Fourth Department as Agent ‘Ingrid’ – was well launched on her quixotic mission to penetrate Japanese high society. The Foreign Ministry arranged for Smiling Japan to be translated into Japanese (from the original Swedish) and the Swedis
h ambassador took her to a garden party at the Imperial Palace, where she met Emperor Hirohito. Aino also struck up a cordial relationship with Prince Chichibu, the emperor’s brother, and found him surprisingly liberal in his views.
Aino’s report from Moscow was not the only ominous news to reach Sorge that monsoon season, his third in Tokyo. In Nuremberg in September 1936, Hitler treated a rally of the Party Congress of the Workers’ Front to what Dirksen described as a ‘terrific diatribe against Bolshevism’, an ominous sign of his implacable hatred for Soviet Russia.73
Worse was to come. On 25 November 1936, Japan and Germany officially announced the culmination of the talks that Sorge had caught early wind of back in March – an official Anti-Comintern Pact.74 Superficially the five-year pact was relatively innocuous, committing the signatories to exchange information on Comintern activities and to ‘take drastic steps within the bounds of existing law, in dealing with persons who, at home or abroad, directly or indirectly, are serving with the Communist International or foster its destructive activity’.75
The sting was in the pact’s secret annexes, which Dirksen (now back from Berlin) sent to Ott, who shared them with Sorge. In the event of an ‘unprovoked attack or unprovoked threat of attack’ by the Soviet Union, each party would act ‘to preserve their common interests’. It was not a full military alliance, and Dirksen in his official report to Berlin – which Sorge photographed – believed that the Japanese government was too divided ever to take decisive action against the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, any kind of deal between the USSR’s most powerful and volatile enemies to the west and east was the sum of all Moscow’s fears.
Sorge’s information rang around the Kremlin and down the chains of command – even coming back to Tokyo, where the Soviet ambassador to Japan, Konstantin Yurenev, told his US counterpart Ambassador Grew that ‘his Government possessed definite evidence that a secret military pact existed’.76 The effort to avoid a two-front war with Germany and Japan became the basic motive of every Russian diplomatic action from the last months of 1936 almost until the end of the Second World War.
Sorge had good reason to feel pleased with his work. ‘I hope that soon you will have the opportunity to rejoice for me and even to be proud and convinced that “yours” is quite a useful fellow,’77 he wrote to Katya. But if Sorge thought that his outstanding work in Tokyo was being gratefully received in Moscow, he was quite wrong. In late November he summoned Aino to come and see him urgently. She found him at home, alone and dead drunk with a nearly empty bottle of whisky. ‘We have all been ordered back to Moscow, including me,’ he informed Aino. ‘Immediately, via Vladivostok.’ Sorge had already made his decision to refuse Uritsky’s order. ‘Pass a message to our chiefs about the excellent contacts we have made. I will not return before next April at the earliest.’
Aino, despite her forebodings of why Centre should have suddenly recalled all its agents, had no such excuse and agreed to return. She tried to persuade Sorge to do the same, to avoid the wrath of the Fourth Department. Again he refused. ‘My judgement’, he said, ‘is better than yours.’78
11
Bloodbath in Moscow
‘In the atheists’ paradise, their souls, like Sorge’s, may survive in peace’1
John le Carré
Sorge was right: his decision to defy Centre probably saved his life. Aino returned, and within a year found herself in the Gulag, along with thousands of other loyal Comintern comrades. Stalin had finally set in motion the machinery of terror that he had spent years putting in place. By the end of 1938 the Soviet secret police (by 1937 known as the NKVD, or People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) painstakingly recorded the arrest of 1,548,366 citizens – many of them party members – on charges of counter-revolutionary activity and sabotage. Of those, 681,692 were shot.2 Stalin’s Great Purge would decimate the party and consume almost the entire Fourth Department apparat. Of the Comintern’s 492 staff, 133 were imprisoned or executed. Three of five Soviet marshals, 90 per cent of all Red Army generals, 80 per cent of Red Army colonels and 30,000 officers of lesser rank were arrested.3
Was it the good judgement that Sorge blithely ascribed to himself that saved his skin – or was it intuition, or even his usual fiendish good luck? By the time he and Aino spoke in Tokyo in November 1936, there were clear signs that a major bloodbath was under way – the purge that Virtanen had warned Sorge about during their drunken dinner at the National Hotel in Moscow the previous year. In August 1936, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, two of the most prominent former party leaders to have opposed Stalin’s rise, were publicly tried alongside sixteen other old Bolsheviks. After confessing to plotting to murder Sergei Kirov and Stalin himself, all the defendants were immediately executed.4 By 11 October, when the Politburo voted to replace NKVD commissar Genrikh Yagoda with Stalin’s loyal lackey Nikolai Yezhov, the Purge was ready to move down the social scale to the rank-and-file of the party.
Yezhov had made his name by personally orchestrating the show trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev – ‘working all the time, not taking any leave, and, it seems, not even getting ill’, as his then-boss Yagoda recalled. With these scalps in the bag, the ambitious Yezhov turned his attention to ‘restructuring of the work of the NKVD itself’ where he divined ‘in the leadership moods of complacency, calmness, and bragging … they now only dream about decorations’.5 Once Yezhov was finally rewarded for his zeal with the NKVD’s top job he set to his great work of cleansing the party, the army, and the foreign intelligence apparat of spies and traitors.
Yezhov came to power with a detailed plan in place to eliminate ‘agents of foreign intelligence services, disguised as political emigres and members of sister parties’ who had allegedly penetrated the Russian Communist Party. Yezhov’s report ‘On Measures to Protect the USSR Against the Penetration of Spy, Terrorist, and Sabotage Elements’ was accepted by the Central Committee in February 1936. He appointed a commission headed by the new head of the Comintern’s OMS, Mikhail Moskvin, to draw up detailed lists of suspect foreigners associated with the Comintern, International Red Aid, or the Red Trade Union International. Moskvin was not who he seemed. In reality he was named Mikhail Trilisser, and his true job was chief of the Foreign Department of the NKVD. He had been installed in the Comintern under his new alias in August 1935 specifically to root out traitors.
Trilisser found plenty. By 23 August he presented the NKVD with a list of 3,000 comrades who were ‘under suspicion of being saboteurs, spies, agents provocateur, etc.’. Several hundred German communists who had fled from Nazi Germany or been actively invited – as Sorge had been – to work in Moscow were liquidated. More than a thousand more were handed over to the Nazi authorities in Germany.6 The leaders of the Indian, Korean, Mexican, Iranian, Mongolian and Turkish com-munist parties were executed – including Agnes Smedley’s former lover, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya.7
Sorge’s old Comintern comrade Leopold Trepper recalled terrifying nights waiting for arrest. ‘In the house where the party activists of all the countries were living no one slept until 3 o’clock in the morning … At exactly 3 o’clock the car headlights began to appear … we stayed near the window and waited [to find out] where the car would stop.’8
The Red Army, to Stalin and Yezhov’s paranoid minds, had been thoroughly contaminated by its decade-long secret cooperation pact with Germany. Between 1924 and 1933 many senior Red Army officers had had close contact with their German counterparts – including with Eugen Ott in his former role as liaison to the Sondergruppe R. Hundreds had participated in military exchanges. Many had even been admitted as senior students into the German Military Academy in Berlin, where the German and Soviet officers had jointly developed sophisticated operational thinking about how to storm the defences of their common enemy, Poland. Indeed the very concept of blitzkrieg, or lightning war, had been hatched during secret German Army manoeuvres on the plains of Belorussia, with Soviet advice.9
Almost every Soviet officer who had eve
r visited Germany or worked with the Reichswehr was murdered in the purges. Among them was the Red Army’s most senior officer, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who was arrested in May 1937 and charged with creating a ‘right-wing Trotskyist’ military conspiracy and espionage for Nazi Germany. The Germans were all too happy to participate in the destruction of their former colleagues. The NKVD, tasked with concocting information on a plot by Tukhachevsky and the other Soviet generals against Stalin, contacted Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of German intelligence (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD), with a request for more information.10 Heydrich, seeing an excellent opportunity to dupe Stalin into executing his best generals, forged documents implicating Tukhachevsky and other Red Army commanders that he passed back to the Soviets via the Czech leader Edvard Beneš. In his quest to destroy all his potential enemies and rivals in the Soviet General Staff, Stalin was ready to enlist the help of the Nazis – who were only too happy to help him destroy the best of the USSR’s officer corps.
Stalin was similarly convinced that Soviet intelligence was thoroughly riddled with ‘wreckers, saboteurs, Trotskyist-fascist spies and murderers who infiltrated all our echelons of power’. On a personal visit to the headquarters of the Fourth Department in May 1937, Stalin claimed that ‘the whole Directorate has fallen into German hands’.11
Richard Sorge, whether he knew it or not, was now in every possible kind of danger. He was a German in the Soviet secret service. He had been a Comintern member and was close to many top leaders who were now under arrest or under deep suspicion. He was a Red Army officer, many of whose superiors were tainted with ties to Germany. He was an intelligence agent who had spent many unsupervised years overseas.
An Impeccable Spy Page 21
