For good measure, Miyagi also recruited rightists by hinting – as the still-imprisoned Kawai had done after his arrest – that he was linked to shadowy ultra-nationalist secret societies. In this way Miyagi roped in two right-wing journalists, Masahiko Sano and Hachiro Kikuchi, as informants with whom he also socialised for cover. But the most important of Miyagi’s new contacts was was Yabe Shu, a secret leftist who worked as confidential secretary to General Ugaki Kazushige, a former Minister of Defence who briefly served as prime minister in early 1937.38
Less than two years after arriving in Tokyo, Miyagi, the dishevelled artist with the winning smile and disarmingly frank manner, had proved himself a recruiter and agent-runner of exceptional talent – if not always with perfect judgement. By the middle of 1937 Miyagi controlled a network of friends, paid agents, collaborators and unwitting dupes that stretched from his native Okinawa in the south to Hokkaido in the north. Unlike the overpowering Sorge, whose booze-fuelled charm steamrollered people into either loving or hating him, Miyagi managed to fit quietly into any company, from high-society hostesses whom he met on the Ginza art gallery circuit to semi-educated fishermen from Hokkaido. He could hang out at low bars and engage strangers in easy conversation. Indeed Miyagi complained to his boss about the amount of time he had to spend drinking with casual acquaintances – not a part of the job that bothered Sorge himself.39 Sorge described Miyagi as ‘a very simple, good-natured man’ who looked ‘very naive and kind’.40
Miyagi’s naïveté may have been the secret to his charm. But it was also extraordinarily dangerous to associate with former communists, let alone recruit so profligately from their ranks. There is no evidence that Sorge ever objected to Miyagi’s working with known communists – but Gudz, in Moscow, certainly did. By his own account, Gudz considered that sending Miyagi to work with Sorge was General Berzin’s ‘major mistake … How could one work with communists? They were everywhere under surveillance abroad,’ Gudz told Russian television in 1999. ‘It was Berzin’s idea to take a Japanese artist from a normal environment in the United States and send him to liaise with Sorge. But Sorge did not realise that he must not associate so often and so openly with a communist.’41 But again there is no evidence that Gudz, or anyone else in the Fourth Department, warned Sorge and Miyagi to fish for informers in less risky waters.
While Miyagi was busy gathering agents for his ring, a new crisis in China would bring Ozaki even closer to the top councils of power in Japan. On 12 December 1936, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Kuomintang Party and leader of Nationalist China, was arrested by his ally and subordinate Marshal Zhang Xueliang. ‘Young Marshal’ Xueliang – the former warlord of Manchuria and now commander of China’s North Eastern Army – was frustrated by Chiang’s refusal to fight the Japanese. Instead of resisting the Japanese expansion into Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, Chiang Kai-shek had continued to spend men and resources fighting the Chinese communists, on the principle that the Japanese were ‘a disease of the skin, the communists a disease of the heart’. Xueliang, who had attempted to resist the Japanese, had been ordered to retreat.42
Now it was time for Xueliang’s revenge. He kept Chiang Kai-shek and his staff prisoner for two weeks at the regional military command headquarters at Xi’an. By 25 December, the generalissimo had been persuaded to change his mind and sign a truce with the communists, allowing a united front against the Japanese. The reversal of Chiang Kai-shek’s policy of appeasement of the Japanese invaders set the stage for full-scale war between China and Japan.43
The Soviet Union’s role in the Xi’an incident was deeply controversial (and would later serve as a major bone of contention between the ultimately victorious Chinese communists and Moscow). Essentially, as Japan and Germany rearmed and became more aggressive, Stalin sought to improve relations with all nations who were also potentially threatened by their rise. Top of the list of potential Soviet allies, by this logic, were the United States and Nationalist China. In 1933 Moscow normalised its relations with Washington, and in the same year Stalin’s foreign affairs commissar Maxim Litvinov encouraged America to sponsor a treaty of non-aggression between the US, the USSR, Japan and China.
Stalin was also acutely aware – in part thanks to the efforts of Sorge and the Shanghai rezidentura – that Nazi Germany was making strong overtures to Chiang Kai-shek in the form of vast sales of military hardware and military advisers. A pro-Nazi China would leave the Japanese a free hand to attack the USSR. Therefore, from the mid-1930s Stalin had supported a united front with Chiang Kai-shek against the Japanese.
An open alliance with the Chinese nationalists would have left the USSR’s ideological allies, the Chinese communists, out in the cold. Stalin solved the problem in characteristic fashion by playing a double game. The USSR promised Communist Party leader Mao Zedong weapons and encouraged him to set up his own Soviet state in Shaanxi province that might also be a buffer against Japanese aggression. But at the same time Stalin was also making overtures to Chiang Kai-shek, attempting to nudge him towards war against Japan – but without involving the USSR. Simultaneously, the Comintern was working on persuading Marshal Xueliang to drop his own hostility towards Mao, sending a senior Moscow-trained Chinese comrade44 to negotiate with the marshal and encourage him to make a move against the arch-appeaser of the Japanese, Chiang Kai-shek.
The Xi’an incident was in many ways a triumph of Stalin’s diplomacy. Indeed Chiang Kai-shek’s advisers at the time clearly blamed the Comintern for Xueliang’s mutiny and the generalissimo’s temporary imprisonment.45 Stalin had successfully forced China’s nationalists and communists to bury their differences and unite against their common enemy – Japan. In order to concentrate on fighting the Japanese, though, Chiang Kai-shek needed an assurance from his Soviet friends that Mao’s communists would not stab them in the back – a trade that Stalin was more than happy to offer on Mao’s behalf. The USSR quickly abandoned its two-track policy and abruptly ordered Mao to abandon his dream of a separate communist state and work with the nationalists. Mao’s fury over this betrayal was witnessed by American journalist Edgar Snow, who spent much time with ‘the Chairman’ during this period.46 But for Stalin, Mao’s ambitions and even the triumph of communism in the Far East were secondary to the importance of uniting China against the Japanese.
In Tokyo, Ozaki penned another influential article on the incident, ‘The Significance of Chang Hsueh-liang’s [Xueliang’s] Coup d’Etat’, correctly predicting a truce between the communists and Nationalists against the Japanese. His editor was so impressed that he recommended Ozaki for membership of a rising new think tank – the Showa Kenkyu Kai (Showa Research Association) – that would soon become a kind of shadow cabinet for a would-be premier, Prince Fumimaro Konoe.47 Konoe was an impeccably educated aristocrat who enjoyed the respect of both civilian moderates and the military – thanks in large part to his refusal to condemn the army’s unsanctioned adventures in Manchuria. The British ambassador to Japan, Sir Robert Craigie, found him exasperatingly hard to pin down on any topic – a slipperiness that would be Konoe’s strongest political asset. Craigie called him ‘the dilettante Konoe, who, surrounded by the young men of his “brains trust”, delighted to toy with dangerous political experiments’ such as appeasing Japan’s radical nationalists.48 Ozaki’s companions in the brains trust were such luminaries as the editor-in-chief of the Domei News Agency, Japan’s leading labour lawyers, political philosophers and economists.
In June 1937, Prince Konoe became prime minister. From his ringside seat at the Showa Association, Ozaki was able to report to Sorge that Konoe’s appointment was ‘the last trump card of the upper class in Japan’ who hoped that their man would check the ‘political pressure of the army’. But Ozaki was under no illusions. The military welcomed Konoe as a useful puppet who would allow them to ‘bring about the aggressive national policy they had always wanted’.49
Ozaki was right. In July 1937, Japanese forces clashed with Chinese troops near
Beijing at the Marco Polo Bridge. The pretext was tiny. After some unannounced night-time manoeuvres by the Japanese Army, one soldier – Private Kikujiro Shimura – failed to return to his post. His commanders demanded permission to enter the town of Wanping to search for the missing man. When the local Chinese commander refused, the Japanese began shelling.
In Tokyo, Konoe felt he had little choice but to dispatch three divisions of troops to defend Japanese honour. Japan coveted no Chinese territory, he told the diet (parliament) on 27 July, only ‘cooperation and mutual assistance – a contribution from China to Far Eastern culture and prosperity’. Konoe also admonished the military to be sure not to escalate the conflict. He was roundly ignored. By mid-August Japan’s Imperial General Staff – now without any civilian oversight – launched a general assault that would by December 1937 bring them to the gates of the Chinese Nationalist capital of Nanking.50 Though none of the principals yet realised it, the skirmish at the Marco Polo Bridge would mark the beginning of the Second World War in Asia.
12
Lyushkov
‘The mechanism at work seems to have been much the same for both [Kim Philby and Richard Sorge]: beginning by finding that alcohol is instant friendship, and a bar the ideal place to elicit information – and discovering, as many a drunkard has, that booze offers a respite from nagging fear – the two spies went on to court attention by their conduct, thinking no one would guess that ostentation is a kind of camouflage’1
Murray Sayle
At two o’clock in the morning of Saturday, 14 May 1938, Papa Keitel closed up the Das Rheingold bar and turned Sorge and his friend Prince Urach out into the Ginza night. Urach was staying at the Imperial Hotel. He was drunk enough to accept Sorge’s terrifying offer of a lift home. Soviet spy and German prince mounted Sorge’s powerful black motorcycle and zoomed across town. The Imperial’s bar was already closed, but Sorge knew an Austrian businessman who had invited him to help himself to the private bar in his room, whether he was in or not. Urach resisted his friend’s pleas to join him and went to bed, leaving Sorge to raid the Austrian’s room on his own. Alone, Sorge polished off a bottle of whisky, then returned to Urach’s room to attempt to persuade him to come home to Nagasaki Street for yet more drinking. Again, Urach wisely declined.
Sorge always drove at terrific speed, even when sober – as a thrilled Smedley and a petrified Clausen testified. The motorcycle he drove was one of the heaviest and most powerful models available, a 1934 Zündapp flat-twin K500 that he had bought from Clausen two years before. The 498cc monster weighed 180 kilos and had a top speed of 120 kilometres per hour. Sorge, now drunk and alone, accelerated his roaring machine toward Toranomon and turned left down a narrow dirt road that skirted the US embassy. Just past the embassy grounds he lost control and ran the motorcycle full tilt into a stone wall.2 A policeman on duty at the gate heard the crash and hurried to help. ‘Here, here!’ Sorge called out. Through a shattered jaw he managed to ask the policeman to telephone Urach at the Imperial.3
Urach was soon on the scene. The first thing Sorge asked him was to ‘tell Clausen to come at once!’.4 Doubtless Urach found it strange that Sorge would call on an apparent acquaintance rather than his girlfriend or someone from the German embassy, but he complied. By the time Clausen – and wife Anna – arrived at St Luke’s American hospital they found Sorge barely conscious. His left arm had been sprained, and one of the handlebars had smashed into his teeth and jaw, fracturing his skull. Sorge whispered to Clausen to send out all the doctors and nurses, and once they were alone he managed one final sentence before passing out: ‘Empty my pockets!’
In Sorge’s bloodstained jacket Clausen found documents that could have cost them both their lives. There were several intelligence reports, written en clair in English ready for encoding, plus a large quantity of American dollars. Grabbing the compromising material, and Sorge’s house keys, Clausen rushed to Nagasaki Street and frantically cleared Sorge’s study of all suspicious-looking papers, including his chief’s diary. Minutes after Clausen left, Weise of the DNB news agency arrived – probably after a call from Urach – to put Sorge’s effects under seal in case the Japanese police were tempted to search the place and discover classified embassy information. Clausen spent the rest of the night terrified that the police would come knocking on the door of his house – which contained an antenna built into the wall and all his radio equipment – demanding to know why Sorge had summoned him to the hospital so urgently.5
Sorge’s behaviour had been insanely irresponsible. The documents he carried in his pocket while driving drunk around Tokyo in the small hours of the morning would have cost him not only his own espionage career and his neck but also triggered a major manhunt that would have snared all his known associates – including his star agent Ozaki. More, the exposure of a communist espionage ring operating from inside the German embassy and so close to the centre of the Japanese government would certainly have strengthened the hand of the militarists in the army who were lobbying to attack the USSR. Sorge’s alcoholism and his addiction to danger had nearly destroyed the security of the Soviet Union that he claimed to be dedicated to preserving.
The risk was especially reckless given that Sorge had risen to a position of unprecedented trust in the German embassy. In the wake of the Marco Polo Bridge incident, Ambassador Dirksen had formed a ‘study group’ composed of Ott, Sorge and deputy military attaché Major Erwin Scholl to analyse the escalating war in China. Their focus was on gathering information on Japan’s armed forces and their deployments. Sorge’s official inclusion into the embassy’s innermost circle – one that handled the most urgent and sensitive secrets – took his relationship with the German state to a new level. Ott could share all the private information he liked over breakfast or drinks with his personal friend, the journalist Sorge. But including Sorge in formal, classified meetings made him something very close to an official member of Germany’s intelligence establishment.
Obviously Ott trusted Sorge and relied on the unusually well-sourced political information on Japan he provided. But to persuade Dirksen to approve Sorge’s participation in the study group Ott would have had to cite more than personal trust. It seems that Dirksen accepted that Sorge was already some kind of German special agent (which had also been Third Secretary Meissner’s assumption). The confidential reports Sorge was now regularly writing for General Thomas in Berlin would have given him such status.
Soon Sorge would be pulled even more deeply into the official orbit of German intelligence. Evidence of the high esteem in which Berlin held him emerged in 2015, when an employee at the Tamura Shoten antique book dealers in Tokyo’s Jinbocho district discovered a personal letter from the newly appointed Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to Sorge. The letter, dated May 1938, congratulated Sorge on his forty-second birthday (somewhat belatedly) and praised his ‘outstanding contribution’ to the work of the embassy in Tokyo. The letter came with a signed photograph of Ribbentrop. While there has never been any question that Sorge remained a devoted Soviet agent, the fact remains that from 1937 the Germans considered him almost as valuable an intelligence officer as the Russians did.
The German embassy study group received regular reports from naval attaché Captain Wenneker and air force attaché Lieutenant Colonel Nehmiz on everything they discovered from their Japanese counterparts. As a result, Sorge had access to detailed material on Japanese mobilisation plans, equipment and facilities, allocation of troops in Manchuria and China, battle techniques in China, logistics, aircraft, mechanisation, officer training, army casualties and the wartime economy of the nation. ‘In addition, when a particularly important battle was fought in China, a detailed investigation and study were made of it and a report was sent to Germany’ – and, by Sorge, to Moscow.6
The injuries Sorge sustained after his motorcycle accident left his already ravaged face looking, as he wrote to Katya, ‘like a battered robber-knight’. As during his wartime hospitalisation
in Königsberg, Sorge charmed the female staff at the American hospital. During a minor earthquake during a visit by Meissner, three nurses rushed to protect Sorge from falling plaster.7 An infection set in that caused most of his teeth to fall out, and his new false ones fitted uncomfortably. The doctors at St Luke’s also attempted some plastic surgery. But Sorge’s face had become ‘somewhat like a mask, demoniacal’, remarked his friend Sieburg.8 The accident also left psychological scars. Sorge ‘has been subject to nervous disorders, the after-effects of a skull fracture in a motorcycle accident’, Ott would report in 1941.9
The Otts generously took Sorge in after he was discharged from hospital. Helma Ott, the doubly rejected wife and mistress, nursed him at the ambassador’s residence. She also seems to have attempted to rekindle her romance with Sorge, while her husband was away in Berlin having an audience with the Führer himself. ‘Lavishing unwanted intimacy – she is good at that!’ Sorge ungraciously told Hanako.10 Sorge, the difficult patient, was laying incapacitated in the Otts’ guest bed when the greatest challenge yet of his espionage career materialised from a wholly unexpected direction.
At around 5.30 on the morning of 13 June 1938, a two-man Manchukuo police patrol made out a suspicious figure lurking in the dawn fog along the frontier zone that divided the USSR from Manchuria near the Changlingtzu Heights, about 120 kilometres south-west of Vladivostok. The man wore a civilian mackintosh and tweed cap and was armed with two pistols. When the Japanese policemen challenged him the intruder threw down his weapons, put his hands up and began to speak rapidly in Russian. The man was ‘stout, black haired, [and] black-eyed with a Charlie Chaplin moustache and a strongly Jewish cast of countenance’.11 He seemed only too happy to be taken into custody at the Japanese border patrol headquarters, where he was jovial and talkative. Under his mac the man wore the full uniform and medals of a Soviet general officer, with boots and red-seamed cavalry breeches. But the defector was not a soldier. His identity card – signed by secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov himself – identified him as Genrikh Samuilovich Lyushkov, Commissar of State Security 3rd Class,* NKVD chief for the entire Soviet Far Eastern region.12
An Impeccable Spy Page 23
