An Impeccable Spy

by Owen Matthews

  Among Lyushkov’s personal effects were a Longines watch, Russian cigarettes, a pair of sunglasses; 4,153 yen in small bills issued by the banks of Japan, Korea and Manchukuo; 160 Soviet rubles; the Order of Lenin and two Orders of the Red Banner; and a photograph of his wife Ina. More importantly, he carried an empty typewriter case filled with a trove of classified military documents, including details of Soviet armed forces units, air bases, border posts, and military factories all over the Far East. Under the tightest possible security, the high-profile defector was spirited to the Manchukuo Security Bureau in Hsinking, then to Seoul and finally, after some wrangling between the Kwangtung Army and the Imperial General Staff, to Tokyo.13

  Sorge heard of the defection of a senior NKVD general from the German embassy officials who visited his bedside in the ambassador’s residence. The news must have chilled Sorge’s blood. With the NKVD crawling all over the Fourth Department in Moscow, questioning its top leaders and probing its files, could Lyushkov have known about the Red Army’s top spy network in Tokyo? Flight was not an option in his battered state. Sorge had no choice but to lie and wait, questioning his colleagues to glean any details he could.

  Lyushkov was the most senior NKVD officer ever to flee Stalin’s Russia. Until the moment of his defection, his career as a secret police-man had been meteoric. Born in Odessa in 1900 into the family of a Jewish tailor, Lyushkov had made a bloody name for himself fighting for the Bolshevik underground in Crimea during the civil war. He was promoted to brigade political commissar at the age of twenty. He joined Dzerzhinsky’s fledgling secret police in 1920, and worked for a while undercover in Germany. By 1934 Lyushkov was deputy head of the Secret Political Department of the NKVD in Leningrad, where he personally led the investigation into the assassination of Sergei Kirov – the senior Bolshevik those murder at the Smolny Institute in Leningrad had served as the pretext for Stalin to launch his terror. He confirmed to his Japanese interrogators that the charges implicating Kamenev, Zinoviev and dozens of others in the Kirov murder were fabricated – largely by Lyushkov himself.14

  Yezhov had personally selected Lyushkov as one of his most trusted hatchet men. Another NKVD officer recounted a visit Lyushkov made to a colleague at the NKVD headquarters in Rostov-on-Don in 1937.15 ‘Armed with all the arrogance of his Moscow authority, [Lyushkov] marched into my friend’s office, accused him of inefficiency and slackness and shouted, “Get marching, you son-of-a-bitch, and do something or I’ll have you arrested!”’ After berating the entire staff, Lyushkov pointed out a handful of ‘traitors’ who were immediately arrested and later shot.16

  Lyushkov told his Japanese hosts that he had been experiencing doubts about the Soviet Union’s ‘deviations’ from ‘true Leninism’ during his investigations into the Kirov murder. But the real reason for Lyushkov’s flight in 1938 was clearly that he had caught wind that he would soon himself be consumed by the Great Purge. This was highly ironic, because Lyushkov had, by his own account, been personally sent by Stalin to Vladivostok with the express intention of directing a purge against the top party and military cadres of the Far Eastern Military District. He had personally orchestrated the execution of over five thousand supposed enemies of the people before realising that he would soon be next.

  One of the most fascinating passages in Lyushkov’s confessions to the Japanese is his account of a one-on-one interview with Stalin in the Kremlin in spring 1938 that gives a penetrating insight into the dictator’s state of mind in that pre-war period. According to Lyushkov, Stalin accepted that war with Japan was inevitable and that the Far East would undoubtedly become a theatre of war. Lyushkov’s mission was to purge the Far Eastern Army of all spies and pro-Japanese elements, particularly those linked to the recently executed Marshal Tukhachevsky. Stalin believed that a subversive group led by Far Eastern NKVD commander Terenty Deribas and his deputies was planning to provoke a collision with Japan and, in agreement with Tokyo, to turn the troops against Stalin. ‘The [Russian] Far East is not Soviet,’ Stalin told Lyushkov. ‘There, the Japanese rule.’17

  Stalin also ordered Lyushkov to keep supreme commander in the Far East, Marshal Vasiliy Blyukher18 – a civil war hero and one of the generals who had helped Stalin frame his colleague Marshal Tukhachevsky – under close observation. No objective evidence of the kind of pro-Japanese sympathy described by Stalin, let alone any plot, has ever surfaced. Rather, the picture of Stalin that emerges from Lyushkov’s testimony is of a ruler with little grasp of the realities of international politics – but with a mob-boss-like predilection for eliminating underlings whom he despised or feared. When the Japanese asked Lyushkov whether he ever had any pangs of conscience over his assignment, he replied that ‘emotion or human feelings were impossible in dealings with Stalin. The dictator possessed an abnormal suspicion.’19

  On arrival in Vladivostok in early 1938, Lyushkov had quickly got to work, ordering dozens of arrests and assembling a 200-strong staff of ‘field-tested experts’ to concoct a complex web of conspiracy from the arrested men’s confessions, extracted under torture. He also ordered the mass deportation of 165,000 ethnic Koreans and 8,000 Chinese from border areas on the pretext that they harboured pro-Japanese sympathies. He arrested 11,000 Chinese on the same grounds, as well as 4,200 officers and political workers as ‘anti-Soviet elements’ – including dozens of generals, admirals and senior commanders.

  But the one scalp that Lyushkov was not able to provide was that of Marshal Blyukher. Nicknamed ‘the emperor of Siberia’, Blyukher proved too able, too well-connected in Moscow and too wary to be ensnared in Lyushkov’s nets. Both men were manoeuvring for their lives, and Lyushkov lost. In May 1938, Lyushkov received a telegram requiring him to return to Moscow for a ‘new assignment’ – a euphemism, as he knew better than most, for liquidation. He began making preparations for his flight by sending his wife and daughter to the capital, with instructions to flee to Poland as soon as they could. The signal that Lyushkov’s family were safely out of the USSR would be a telegram to Papa in Vladivostok conveying ‘affectionate regards’.20 With his family en route to Moscow, Lyushkov arranged for an urgent tour of inspection of a thinly policed border region, donned his civilian disguise and left his escort and driver behind saying that he was proceeding on foot to liaise with a confidential Japanese agent. As a rainstorm raged about him, Lyushkov walked out into the Manchurian night, clutching his typewriter case full of stolen secrets.

  Lyushkov would later claim that by absconding with his trove of secret papers he was acting only against Stalin personally and not against his Motherland. The defector wanted to ‘rescue his beloved homeland from the hands of a frenzied Stalin, to release 180 million people from bloody fear and falsified politics’, according to an August 1938 article in Tokyo’s Nichi Nichi Shimbun newspaper, based on an interview with the interpreter assigned to live with Lyushkov. ‘He wanted to bring happiness to the populace.’21

  This, like all of Lyushkov’s attempts at self-justification, was nonsense. The secrets in his typewriter case and in his head were the general’s life-insurance policy. From the moment he met his first Japanese interrogator until the Japanese finally murdered him in 1945, Lyushkov sang like a canary to save his own skin.

  The Kremlin was as appalled by Lyushkov’s defection as the Japanese and Germans were delighted. In Berlin, military intelligence chief Admiral Canaris judged the information so vital that he sent a personal agent to debrief the Soviet general in Tokyo. The bedridden Sorge, effectively imprisoned in the home of the German ambassador, was in no position to instruct Clausen to cable the Fourth Department and ask whether Lyushkov constituted a deadly danger. Nor could Clausen do it on his own, as Sorge was the only member of the ring who knew the secret Soviet cipher codes needed to communicate with Wiesbaden.

  The best Sorge could do for the time being was to play down the importance of Lyushkov’s revelations about the USSR’s alleged weakness to his German visitors. ‘Lyushkov is not a big figure, and an un
reliable person,’ Sorge stressed to Ott and Scholl. ‘It is very dangerous to judge the internal condition of Russia by trusting such a person’s words. When the Nazis took over the government of Germany many Germans escaped abroad and by reading their books many people got the impression that the Nazis would be collapsing any day. But it wasn’t so, and Lyushkov’s case is exactly the same.’22

  By 20 June 1938, Lyushkov had been installed in the heavily guarded but luxurious Kaikosha military compound in Kudan, just outside Tokyo. He was treated like an honoured guest (the Japanese interrogators noted dryly that although Lyushkov was a general, he had terrible table manners – and though he was Russian he did not like to drink, though he became jolly when he did imbibe). Ten days later the Japanese authorities made the defection public. Japanese newspapers printed special editions on the sensations that Lyushkov revealed – primarily his bitter criticism of Stalin and the bloodthirsty Purge; the supposed growing discontent inside the USSR and the failure of communism; and the danger of foreign war fomented as a distraction by Stalin. Soviet newspapers, by contrast, remained grimly silent.

  Soon afterwards Lyushkov appeared in person at a carefully orches-trated press conference at the Sanno Hotel.23 He wore a newly tailored polar-weave summer suit and smoked Cherry brand cigarettes in a long ivory holder. To his previous revelations he added that Stalin was testing out Russian ordnance in China and had sent many Soviet officers to help the Kuomintang in order to provide Soviet commanders with battlefield training for the coming war with Japan.

  More importantly for the Japanese – and for Sorge and his Centre – were the military secrets that Lyushkov had revealed. The Japanese and international press reported that the Soviet Far Eastern Army, combined with the Trans-Baikal Military District and Lyushkov’s own NKVD forces, numbered some twenty-five rifle divisions, or 400,000 troops, as well as 2,000 military aircraft, and ninety large and small submarines based at Vladivostok and Nakhodka. Nationwide, according to Lyushkov, the Red Army numbered over a hundred divisions, or some two million men.

  These numbers came as a serious shock to the Japanese – and to the Germans, who had seriously underestimated the speed of the Soviet military build-up. Hitler may have found some comfort in Lyushkov’s claim, made in an exclusive interview with Ivar Lissner of the the Nazi paper Der Angriff, that revolution was ‘inevitable’ inside the USSR and the people had lost confidence in Stalin. Lyushkov added, with more accuracy, that the Soviet military had also been seriously weakened by the purges. ‘The endless arrests of commanders and political agents of the Red Army have brought discredit upon the remaining officers in the eyes of the men … a feeling of mistrust pervades all and is poisoning the minds of the people.’ Lyushkov also predicted that ‘if the Japanese Army struck, the Red Army would collapse in one morning’.24 The defector’s words would soon lead directly to war.

  Sorge’s challenge, following insistent orders from Centre in July and August 1938, was to find out in exact detail what operational details Lyushkov was telling the Japanese Army – and the names of allegedly rebellious Soviet officers that Lyushkov had identified. The task was beyond Sorge’s Japanese network. Though brilliantly connected inside the civilian government, Ozaki only had oblique access to the inner workings of the Imperial Army’s intelligence wing. Miyagi was able to report only that Lyushkov was being ‘treated well’. This was certainly true. To distract Lyushkov from his worry about his family, his handlers took him clothes shopping at the upmarket Matsuya department store, treated him to meals at the Tenkin restaurant in Ginza and even accompanied him – with a generous budget of 300 yen – to a brothel in Maruko Shinchi, where the honoured guest unfortunately contracted gonorrhoea.25

  Sorge’s breakthrough came with the appearance of Admiral Canaris’s personal envoy, a military intelligence colonel and a Russia specialist who arrived in Tokyo in October and spent several weeks personally debriefing Lyushkov. Sorge met the colonel several times at the embassy (though could not later recall his name), and got few details out of him. He did not need to. Major Scholl showed Sorge the envoy’s full report, running to several hundred pages, as soon as it was complete. Sorge, now back on his feet, secretly photographed about half the document – omitting Lyushkov’s tirades about Stalin and his analysis of the political situation in Moscow – and sent it by courier to Moscow.

  The information that Lyushkov had given was highly detailed and specific – from the deployment sites, organisation, and equipment of each Red Army division in the East to lists of names of pro-Japanese elements in the army. Sorge was able to inform Moscow that Lyushkov had revealed the Soviet military codes, which were immediately changed. The defector had also told the Japanese that Moscow was aware of a secret bacteriological warfare institute which the Japanese had established near Harbin. Most crucially of all – from Sorge’s own point of view – he was able to confirm that Lyushkov knew nothing of the Sorge ring operating in Tokyo. The NKVD man had told the Japanese that the centres of Russian espionage activity in Manchukuo and Japan were, respectively, the Soviet consulate general in Harbin and the Soviet embassy in Tokyo.

  Lyushkov also revealed specific details of the Soviet military weaknesses about which he had spoken in general terms to the press. The Russians’ 1,000 air observation and signal points were in wretched condition, causing delays of up to three hours between the alert and the actual take-off of planes, Lyushkov told the Japanese. Soviet planes were shoddily manufactured and the pilots badly trained, and sometimes up to half the aircraft of the Soviet Air Force were out of action at any given moment. Many Red Army artillery units had been supplied with the wrong calibre of ammunition; supply chains were dysfunctional; gasoline was in desperately short supply; officers and men were demoralised by non-existent housing and lousy food. It was a similar story in the Soviet Navy – not enough transports, poorly equipped repair facilities, malfunctioning submarines. The Russian railways were in chaos because of disintegrating track beds, bad coal, a lack of locomotives – and because so many experienced administrators had been arrested. All forces suffered from a desperate shortage of men, in large part because Yezhov had sent nearly 470,000 political prisoners from all over the USSR to hastily built Gulags in the Far East which also needed to be supplied and guarded.

  Finally, the anti-Soviet feeling that Lyushkov had so ruthlessly persecuted during his days as Yezhov’s executioner was not entirely fabricated. Thousands of peasant soldiers had seen their families dispossessed and starved in the recent collectivisation and purge of wealthier peasantry. Many officers feared becoming victims – especially commanders of Polish, German, ‘Lettish’ (Latvian) and similar minority backgrounds. In short, Lyushkov told his captors that the Soviet forces in the Far East were not ready for active operations because they lacked senior command personnel (thanks in large part to Lyushkov’s own purge), had insufficient training and logistical structure and relied on unserviceable artillery and aviation. Most fatefully of all, Lyushkov claimed that the top command of the Soviet Far East – including Blyukher himself – believed that with Japan so heavily involved in China, the time had come to stop the constant purges and weaken Stalin by launching a pre-emptive attack on Japan.

  The picture Lyushkov painted was a dangerously tempting one for the Japanese – a mixture of temporary Soviet weakness combined with the apparent certainly of a military build-up, or even an imminent Soviet attack, in the future. Everything that the defecting general had told the Japanese pointed to the wisdom of an immediate strike against the Soviet Far East while it was in a weakened state.

  The Japanese had, therefore, every incentive to start a war against the USSR. But the Soviet military archives in Moscow reveal that it was in fact the Russians, not the Japanese, who actually provoked the first military clash between the Red Army and the Japanese in Manchuria.26 On 6 July 1938 the Kwangtung Army decoded a message sent by the Russian commander in the Posyet region to his headquarters in Khabarovsk recommending that some strategic heigh
ts in an ill-demarcated section of the Soviet–Manchurian border be occupied and fortified. Several thousand Soviet troops moved up to the Changkufeng Heights and began digging trenches and installing barbed wire entanglements.27 The Japanese military attaché in Moscow demanded a Soviet withdrawal. When the Russians refused, some 1,500 Japanese troops launched a night sortie to retake the heights, killing forty-five Soviet soldiers and knocking out several tanks. The second Russo-Japanese war in half a century was under way.

  The People’s Commissar for Defence, Kliment Voroshilov, ordered the Soviet First Coastal Army and the Pacific Fleet to combat readiness. Marshal Blyukher had initially been reluctant to get into a fight with the Japanese but a bracing phone call from Stalin soon brought him to heel. ‘Comrade Blyukher, tell us honestly,’ Stalin shouted down the phone on 1 August. ‘Do you have the wish to fight the Japanese properly?’28 Blyukher duly took personal command of a massive counter-attack.29 The Soviets fired more shells in a day than the small Japanese force was able to fire in a week, though Blyukher lost at least two thousand men in the attack.30 It was soon clear that without a massive redeployment of troops from the Chinese front the Japanese could not hold the heights – even with the ever-obliging Lyushkov personally advising the Japanese high command during the campaign. On 11 August the Japanese, losing the nerve to escalate the incident into a full-scale war, abandoned the Changkufeng Heights to the victorious Soviets.31