The Changkufeng incident taught both sides important lessons – all of them, as it turned out, mistaken. The Russians falsely concluded that the Japanese lacked the will and skill to take on Soviet troops in Manchuria. And the Japanese concluded that the Russians were pathologically aggressive and bent on destruction of Japan’s fledgling Asian empire. More, Tokyo’s military strategists came to believe that only a pre-emptive attack, in massive force and at a time and place of Japan’s choosing, was necessary to curb Soviet expansion.32
Sorge’s information would be vital in helping the Red Army plug the strategic gaps that Lyushkov had revealed (and that the Japanese would be attempting to exploit). But first Stalin did what he knew best – purge the traitors in the Far Eastern high command that Lyushkov had identified. Blyukher’s head rolled first. Despite his effectiveness at Changkufeng, the old civil war hero was summoned to Moscow in September 1938, berated by Stalin for ineffective leadership, dismissed from his post, arrested and severely tortured.*33 He refused to confess, and died as a result of injuries sustained during interrogation in the Lubyanka in November 1938.34
Lyushkov’s defection also helped bring down his old boss, NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov. On 23 November 1938, Yezhov wrote to Stalin asking to be relieved of his duties – an attempt to pre-empt arrest and execution, which was the fate he had meted out to his own predecessor. Yezhov had failed to cope, he admitted, with the job of operating a ‘huge and responsible commissariat’ and, among his mistakes, had recommended personnel for promotion who proved to be spies. Yezhov’s attempt to save his skin, predictably enough, failed. He was arrested, confessed to a range of anti-Soviet activities (which he later claimed were extracted under torture) and eventually followed his hundreds of thousands of victims in the NKVD’s execution pits.
*The equivalent of a major general.
*Just before his recall, Blyukher honourably warned his senior staff of the danger. One of his aides-de-camp was Air Force Major Yakov Lvovich Bibikov, whose wife was heavily pregnant at the time. Blyukher ordered the whole family to take the seven-day train journey to Moscow immediately, ignoring Bibikov’s protests that labour was imminent. Bibikov’s wife gave birth on the train. But when the slightly enlarged family party arrived in Moscow they were spared the arrests that wiped out many of Blyukher’s staff. Bibikov rose to the rank of lieutenant general and oversaw the Soviet Union’s ballistic rocketry programme after the Second World War. Bibikov was brother of the author’s grandfather, Boris Lvovich Bibikov, a party official executed in the Purge of 1937 in Kiev.
13
Nomonhan
‘If it were not for loneliness, all would be well with me’1
Richard Sorge, letter to Katya
In Moscow the madness of the Purge seemed to have burned itself out – at least enough for Sorge to feel sufficiently safe to apply for permission to return home. In February 1938 he wrote to Katya apologising for not being able to visit the previous autumn and promising to be in Moscow by summer. In April, Sorge sent a formal request to his latest boss, General Semyon Gendin, to bring his Japanese mission to an end. Katya’s sister Marina – ‘Musya’ – remembered that Katya even sent away her room-mate Marfa before the May Day 1938 celebrations, convinced that Richard would arrive in time for the holiday.2 But Gendin refused Sorge’s petition. Agent Ramsay would never come home again.
Sorge had become a victim of his own extraordinary success. In the febrile atmosphere of the purges, Gendin had voiced public misgivings about Agent Ramsay’s political reliability as a ‘non-returner’. But at the same time Gendin had resisted his predecessor’s call to dissolve Sorge’s Tokyo rezidentura. It is likely that the director realised that many of the fantastical charges that had sent so many of his colleagues to their deaths were, as Gudz put it, ‘lipochki’ – little fictions. Gendin was forced to pay lip service to the pervasive atmosphere of suspicion in order to survive – but as a professional intelligence operative he recognised the extraordinary quality of Agent Ramsay’s access. And so the Fourth Department’s paradoxical attitude to Sorge as simultaneously a vital source and a potential traitor was born. If Sorge was, in fact, still loyal, his rise in the German embassy was fast making him the most highly placed Soviet agent in the world. No new officer sent by Moscow could ever hope to replicate his extraordinary access. In short, Sorge had become irreplaceable. And if he could be relied on, Sorge’s information was of the utmost importance to the security of the Soviet Union. That ‘if’ would become a question of life and death, not only for Sorge but for Russia itself.
In February 1938, Ambassador Dirksen resigned his post, plagued by asthma that had been exacerbated by Tokyo’s damp. Ott was offered the job in his place. Even before telling his wife, Ott consulted his friend Sorge on whether to accept. Sorge strongly advised him not to. The probable reasons why Sorge should not wish his closest friend and best source to become Germany’s senior diplomat in Japan are significant. It is possible that Sorge was concerned Ott would become more careful with his new role and stop sharing secret military documents with Sorge. Much more likely, however, is that Sorge feared – rightly – that Ott’s promotion would reduce his own chances of ever being allowed to return to the Soviet Union. For once Ott disregarded his friend’s advice. On the bright spring morning of 28 April 1938, Ott, in full court dress and wearing the Order of the Sacred Treasure, 2nd class, that he had previously received, drove in an open carriage past the famous sakura cherry trees in full blossom in the Imperial Palace gardens to present his credentials to Emperor Hirohito.
Rather than losing his access, Sorge became an even more trusted confidant of the new ambassador. And as the representative of Japan’s closest foreign ally, as well as by his own diligence, Ott would soon become the best-connected and best-informed member of the diplomatic corps in Tokyo. ‘Of all his foreign colleagues, only Ott had real access to Japanese politics and the holders of power,’ US Ambassador Joseph Grew confided to Jan Sieburg. ‘And that was due more to Ott’s human qualities than to German policies.’3
In April, Sorge sailed for Hong Kong on a courier-run for the German embassy – and also, of course, for Moscow Centre. Ambassador Ott entrusted him with confidential official German dispatches and issued him with a diplomatic pass to ease his passage. On his way back, Sorge also stopped off at Manila to deliver further papers – almost certainly including the latest diplomatic code books – to the German embassy in the Philippines. The courier activities of the spy ring were not only being financed by the Third Reich but were conducted under German diplomatic protection.
Sorge put a brave face on Gendin’s refusal to allow him to come home. ‘Dear Comrade: Do not worry about us,’ he wrote to the director in October 1938, just days before Gendin’s arrest on charges of espionage that were becoming the traditional end to all Fourth Department chiefs’ careers. ‘Although we are exhausted and tense we remain disciplined, obedient and resolute, prepared to carry out the tasks of our great cause. Our warmest greetings to you and your friends. Be so good as to pass on the enclosed letter to my wife and add my regards. Please look after her from time to time.’4
To Katya he wrote, ‘do not forget me … I am sad enough without that’. He complained about the Tokyo monsoon heat – ‘so difficult to bear, above all when the work demands a perpetual tension’ – and feared that his wife might become tired of ‘this eternal waiting’. He hoped that there was still ‘a little chance of realising our old dream of five years of living together’.5
Sorge made another attempt to come home in early 1939. His old friends and bottle-mates, the military and naval attachés Major Scholl and Captain Wenneker, had been rotated out of Tokyo, meaning that his access to the day-to-day military intelligence they once provided so freely was no longer as good as it was. Sorge also claimed to Moscow – quite falsely – that Ott no longer had much time for him now that he was ambassador. Perhaps it was time for a new Fourth Department man to come in and make new contacts? Sorge suggested.
‘Please pass on my best wishes to Katya,’ he concluded his cable. ‘It is unbearable for her to have to wait so long for my homecoming.’6
But by this time Sorge almost certainly knew that his request would once again be refused. Japan’s military had signalled its continued aggressive intentions in China by overrunning the Nationalist capital of Nanking, massacring upwards of 250,000 civilians. In Europe, Hitler had annexed Austria, the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia and, shortly after, the rest of the country too. A major European war was coming, and the Kremlin’s urgent priorities were twofold: to ensure that Hitler attacked anyone but the Soviet Union, and to prevent Germany and Japan concluding an alliance that would threaten Russia from both east and west. Sorge had made himself indispensable to the USSR’s national security. He knew that he would be trapped in Tokyo until the end of the war.
Over the summer of 1938 the reach of Sorge’s spy ring reached its apogee. Ozaki was formally appointed a shokutaku, or ‘unofficial assistant’, to the office of Prime Minister Prince Konoe. Ozaki and the other members of Konoe’s bright young brains trust now had the ear of Japan’s rulers – at least in affairs that the civilian government of Japan still ran. Ozaki gave up his job at the Asahi and moved into a basement office inside the prime minister’s official residence, where he had access to all government papers that crossed the desks of his colleagues in the cabinet office. Konoe’s confidential secretaries, Ushiba and Kishi, began convening an unofficial kitchen cabinet of ministers, experts and advisers over the traditional Japanese breakfast of miso soup – earning the council the nickname of Asameshi kai, or Breakfast Group.7 Barring a seat at the inner councils of the Imperial General Staff, Ozaki was as close to the heart of the decision-making of the Japanese state as a spy could get.8
When the hostilities broke out at Changkufeng Heights, for instance, Ozaki was able to consult the cabinet’s information department, dispatches from the Governor General of Korea and the official reports of the army. The incident was not a deliberate provocation by the Japanese high command, Ozaki reported to Sorge, and the government and General Staff in Tokyo had no intention of escalating the conflict. Sorge’s information was tactically important to the Soviet commanders at Changkufeng, who were able to pile on the military pressure knowing that they did not risk kicking off a full-scale war. But there was one ominous note for the future in Ozaki’s scoop. Soon after fighting had broken out with the Soviets in Manchuria, ‘contact between the cabinet and military was cut completely’.9 In other words the Japanese General Staff was becoming a state within a state, so far beyond civilian control that it was not even bothering to report to its nominal masters in the cabinet.
Ozaki was also becoming something of a celebrity pundit on China. In 1937 he wrote two well-received books: China Facing the Storm: The Foreign Relations, Politics and Economics of China at a Turning Point and China Seen from the Point of View of International Relations, as well as fourteen major articles. He also found time to translate another Agnes Smedley book, Macao: Pearl of the East, once more using his pen name Jiro Shirakawa.10 Most importantly, Ozaki was one of the authors – alongside Breakfast Group colleagues Royama Masamichi and Miki Kiyoshi – of a bold economic plan for the development of the whole of Asia, led of course by Japan. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere11 sketched out ‘a “new order” … on the basis of an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist liberation of the colonised peoples in Asia and the creation of a pan-Asiatic culture’.12 Conceived by Ozaki and his associates along socialist lines the Co-Prosperity Sphere would, ironically enough, soon be co-opted by ultra-nationalists and became the blueprint and ideological fig leaf for the Japanese conquest of all of Southeast Asia.
Ozaki’s fame as a China expert led directly to another appointment – one that put him at the heart of the Kwangtung Army’s logistical operations. On 1 June 1939 he was hired by the Investigation Department of the South Manchuria Railroad, or Mantetsu. The railway had been the economic powerhouse of Manchuria since its construction by the Russians in 1898–1903. The Kwangtung Army had indeed originally been formed as an adjunct to the all-powerful railway administration. And since the Japanese takeover of Manchuria in 1931, the railway had also become the central military artery of Japan’s expansion. From his office on the fourth floor of the Mantetsu Building in Tokyo’s Toranomon district, Ozaki had an unrivalled insight into Japan’s war effort in China. The railway’s innocuous-sounding Investigation Department included a Chinese Resistance Capacity Measurement Council that reported on Chinese troop movements, an International Situation Research Council that gathered intelligence on Chinese politics, and a Current Materials Section which monitored the Chinese economy.13 ‘I was able to obtain a large amount of information and materials on politics, economy, foreign policy, etc.,’ Ozaki would later confess to his Japanese interrogators. ‘Moreover, I was able to find out some part of the movement of the Kwangtung Army and, furthermore, the movement of the Japanese military.’14 In short, there was no better vantage point than Ozaki’s from which to watch for a Japanese offensive against the USSR.
Miyagi’s enthusiastic, if reckless, recruitment efforts also turned up an unlikely gem. The Fourth Department had demanded that Sorge find some serving Japanese officers to work for the ring – a ‘very difficult problem’, as Sorge remarked when Clausen handed him this message.15 The army was the ideological home of ultra-nationalism and rampant anti-communism. Moreover, the military had recently set up their own political police force, the Kempeitai, which was fast emerging as Japan’s most ruthless counter-espionage outfit. Any attempts to recruit collaborators from among the officer corps was therefore risky in the extreme.
Miyagi cracked the problem by enlisting not an officer but a reserve corporal who quickly proved his worth as one of the ring’s best informants. Koshiro Yoshinobu – also known by his nickname of Kodai – was an old acquaintance of Miyagi’s via a fellow Okinawan and socialist who had studied with Kodai at Meiji University. Kodai had flirted with communism as a student but was drafted into the Japanese Army in 1936, spending two years on active duty in Manchuria and Korea. By the time Miyagi looked him up in March 1939, Kodai was back home in Tokyo, a corporal with the army reserves, working in a paper shop.16 ‘If a war should break out between Russia and Japan it would mean a great sacrifice not only on the part of the farmers and labourers of both countries but also on the part of the whole Japanese people,’ Miyagi told Kodai at their first meeting. ‘To avoid such a tragedy … I am sending various data on the situation in Japan to the Comintern.’17 Revealing himself as a communist agent was a risky strategy – but it paid off when Kodai agreed to obtain military information from his friends.The idealistic corporal also refused payment.
Sorge was sufficiently intrigued by this new recruit to meet with him in person at least twice in Tokyo restaurants. He even telegraphed a biography of Kodai to Moscow, who approved the recruitment and allocated him the codename of Miki.18 Miyagi urged Agent Miki to rejoin the army’s active list and get a job in the War Ministry’s mobilisation bureau. Soon Kodai would become a key source on the organisation and equipment of the Japanese Army – and provide detailed information on the shipment of tanks, planes and troops.
Anna Clausen had also taken her place on the team – albeit reluctantly. After her months of exile in the Volga steppes and in Moscow under the unfriendly eye of Fourth Department minders, Anna was not greatly enamoured of the Centre and its diktats. Nonetheless, as her husband, Sorge and Vukelić were increasingly busy with their spying work and could not spare the time to act as couriers themselves, Centre suggested that Anna become the ring’s mule to smuggle urgent microfilmed material out of Japan. When Clausen broke the news to his wife, Anna resisted bitterly. Shanghai had fallen to the Japanese after a three-month battle in 1937, so Centre suggested Anna make a courier-run to the British colony of Hong Kong instead. But Anna spoke no English and felt much safer in the familiar surroundings of Shanghai. And then there was the importan
t issue of shopping. ‘I don’t like Hong Kong because I have no friends and there is nothing to buy there,’ Anna told her husband.19
Anna was eventually persuaded to set sail on the first of her eighteen courier-runs to Shanghai in November 1938. She carried $3,000 in cash in her luggage (a favour to a business partner of Clausen’s who needed the money wired to Switzerland, which was easier to do from Shanghai than Tokyo), and a small package of personal gifts from Sorge to Katya. In a rolled piece of cloth concealed under her breasts, Anna carried between twenty and thirty tiny cans of microfilm containing the secrets of Lyushkov’s interrogation. She landed in Shanghai, the contents of her brassiere unmolested, around 10 December. She waited for her rendezvous at the cafe of the Palace Hotel in the lobby of the Cathay Hotel. Centre’s instructions were for her to carry a yellow handbag and wear white gloves – an idiotic plan that only a man could have thought up, in Anna’s view, since nobody wore white gloves in mid-winter.20
Nonetheless she complied, and in due course a Fourth Department courier made contact to accept the microfilm and hand over a package containing some $6,000 in mixed Chinese and American money, ostensibly for the rezidentura’s needs. In fact Anna immediately rewarded herself by spending $700 on a fur coat, sent $500 to a private account in Hamburg belonging to her husband and deposited another $1,000 in her personal account at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.21 After making some more purchases for her husband’s business, the money was almost gone – perfectly fair, in the Clausens’ view, because Sorge had been freely dipping into the profits of Max’s business in order to fund the ring’s expenses for years. Anna had been drawn into acting as a Soviet secret courier by her own avowedly capitalist interests. Most of the Fourth Department cash had gone into the Clausen family’s pockets, raising the inevitable question of who had the right to the profits of the business set up with Moscow’s money – Clausen, or Centre? The question was further complicated by the fact that in early 1939 Sorge delegated the accounting duties of the ring to Clausen, meaning that he had to pay his own salary and expenses as well as also those of Branko and Edith Vukelić. Since the only source of funds from Moscow was irregular courier-runs to Dutch and American banks in Hong Kong and Shanghai, the actual cash flow for the whole operation was increasingly coming from Clausen Shokai, Inc. In essence, Max Clausen was personally bankrolling the Soviet Union’s most successful – and expensive – spy ring. As the dangers grew over the coming years, so Anna would increasingly question whether not only the risks but the costs to herself and her beloved Max would be worth it.22
An Impeccable Spy Page 25
