The Soviet Union had secretly helped the Weimar Republic re-arm and train between 1923 and 1933. Now, reasoned Hitler, Stalin could be persuaded to help once more – this time to provide the raw materials for the German economy that would be cut off in the event of war with Britain by the Royal Navy’s command of the seas. Hitler had often decried the ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ rulers of the Soviet Union and spoken of an inescapable battle against Pan-Slavism, the victory in which would lead to ‘permanent mastery of the world’. But Hitler had also said as early as 1934 that he was ready to ‘walk part of the road with the Russians, if that will help us’.4
Stalin, for his part, was anxious to direct Nazi aggression away from the USSR at almost any cost – and frankly distrusted the old imperialist powers’ promises to help Russia in case of a German attack. Molotov, who negotiated with Hitler in Berlin in August 1939, later explained the pact in terms of simply buying time before an inevitable German invasion. ‘We knew the war was coming soon, that we were weaker than Germany, that we would have to retreat,’ he told a biographer in 1982. ‘We did everything to postpone the war. And we succeeded – for a year and ten months. We wished it could have been longer, of course.’5
Molotov was ordered by Stalin to buy not only time but space. ‘The question was, retreat to where – to Smolensk or to Moscow, that’s what we discussed before the war,’ remembered Molotov. ‘We knew we would have to retreat, and we needed as much territory as possible.’ Over a series of top-secret meetings in Berlin and Moscow in late July and August, a protocol to the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact was agreed, effectively dividing Poland in half between Germany and the Soviet Union and establishing ‘spheres of influence’ for both powers from the Baltics to Romania. The logic, for Stalin, was clear: to establish a buffer zone around the Soviet Union that would allow defence in depth. In return, over the first year of the pact, the USSR would supply Germany with one million tons of cereals, half a million tons of wheat, 900,000 tons of oil, 100,000 tons of cotton, 500,000 tons of phosphates and considerable amounts of other vital raw materials, along with the transit of one million tons of soybeans from Manchuria.6
Molotov would later scoff at the idea that Hitler had lulled Stalin into a false sense of security. ‘Such a naive Stalin? No. Stalin saw through it all. Stalin trusted Hitler? He didn’t trust all his own people!’ Molotov recalled. ‘We had to delay Germany’s aggression, that’s why we tried to deal with them on an economic level – export-import. No one trusted Hitler. Stalin wanted to delay the war for at least another half a year, or longer.’7
On 19 August the Soviets abruptly broke off alliance negotiations with British and French officials in Moscow and signed their economic agreement with Germany. Three days later Ribbentrop was invited to the Kremlin where he drank vodka with Molotov and Stalin and signed the political part of the non-aggression pact in front of photographers. The final brake on war had been removed. On 1 September 1939, German troops crossed the Polish border in overwhelming force, unleashing the blitzkrieg they had perfected on the plains of Belarus during the days of German-Soviet cooperation. Britain had signed its defensive pact with Poland six days before: by 3 September Britain therefore found itself at war with Germany.8
Stalin did not make any move in Eastern Europe until the final peace had been signed with the Japanese at Nomonhan on 15 September 1939. With the Far East secured, Stalin ordered Soviet troops to invade Poland on the thin pretext of ‘protecting’ their ethnic Ukrainian and Belorussian brethren from Nazi aggression.9 Molotov later admitted to German officials that this feeble excuse was necessary because the Kremlin could find no more convincing justification for the Soviet invasion.10 Within less than a fortnight, German and Russian forces had met in a line that stretched from Königsberg in the north to Uzhgorod on the Hungarian border. In the city of Brest-Litovsk on 22 September 1939, Major General Heinz Guderian of the Wehrmacht and Brigadier General Semyon Krivoshein of the Red Army held a joint victory parade, featuring crossed swastikas and hammers and sickles.11 Poland had been wiped from the map.
The Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact served Hitler’s tactical needs in Europe. But it left his relations with the Japanese in tatters. The Japanese government was furious at having been kept in the dark over Hitler’s brazen violation of the Anti-Comintern Pact. More intriguingly, the collapse of confidence in Hitler opened the way for an entirely different alliance for Japan.
Many senior Japanese military officers advocated a rapprochement with Britain, France, and the United States. Most prominent among them was Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, who was appointed Japan’s foreign minister on 25 September. Nomura argued that an alliance with the Pacific’s greatest naval powers had much to offer Japan: ready access to the raw materials so vital to its economy, for one, as well as powerful allies who shared an interest in keeping Asia free of both German and Soviet influence. A new government led by General Nobuyuki Abe, a moderate who distrusted the ultra-nationalists, came to power. Abe named emperor’s former chief aide-de-camp, General Shunroku Hata, as war minister – another safe pair of hands who distrusted military adventures. Unwittingly, Hitler’s deal with Stalin seemed to have stalled, for the moment at least, the progress of militant nationalism in Japan. ‘This cabinet will be much weaker than the previous one,’ Ozaki reported to Sorge. ‘And will be cooperative with the United States and Britain.’12
During this brief – and in retrospect bizarrely counterfactual – period it seemed as if the Soviet Union would remain at peace with Germany, and that Japan would sit out the Second World War either in isolation or even possibly as a partner of Britain and America. Some firebrands in the Japanese Army may have admired Hitler’s aggressive policies. But Hitler’s perfidious pact with Stalin had discredited the pro-German faction. For the most part, Sorge noted, ‘pro-British and US groups successfully turned the feeling against Germany, and the German embassy was possessed by anxiety that the Japanese Government might directly join the British and US side’.13
The Fourth Department, for its part, did not feel any need to explain or justify the Soviet leadership’s abrupt volte-face to its agents. Instead, the tone of the cables coming from Moscow became increasingly peevish and permanently displeased. Between the dismissal of Jan Berzin in August 1937 and the signing of the pact there had been four directors, every one of whom had been (or soon would be) shot. Gendin had been dismissed in October 1938 and was executed four months later. Like his predecessor the latest director, General Ivan Proskurov,14 valued the Ramsay rezidentura’s information – but completely misunderstood the motivations of his star agent in Tokyo. When he had to refuse yet another one of Sorge’s requests to return to Moscow in June 1939, Proskurov sent an internal memo to his subordinates in Centre’s Japanese department. ‘Think carefully about how we could compensate for Ramsay’s [Sorge’s] recall,’ instructed Proskurov. ‘Prepare a telegram and letter to Ramsay with excuses for the delay in replacing him and listing the reasons it is necessary for him to remain in Tokyo. Give Ramsay and the other members of his organisation a one-time monetary bonus.’15 Proskurov, insultingly, assumed that money was all that was needed to maintain Sorge’s obedience.
On 1 September, Proskurov wrote to scold Sorge. ‘Your activity seems to be getting slack,’ the chief snapped. ‘Japan must have commenced important movements (military and political) in preparation for war against Russia, but you have not provided us with any appreciable information … You should utilise all the capacities of Joe, Miki and Otto to the fullest extent.’16
There was no evidence, either from Ozaki’s regular meetings with top policymakers, nor from Miyagi’s network in Japan’s military industrial complex, nor from the German embassy, that Proskurov’s fears of Japan-ese aggression at that moment were in any way justified. Nonetheless the tone was set for the final, ultimately tragic, period of Sorge’s career with the Fourth Department. ‘From then on,’ recalled Clausen, Sorge ‘regularly got telegrams with scoldings and admonitions.’17 Stalin
was convinced he knew the truth about Germany and Japan’s intentions. No information that Sorge could provide, however solidly sourced, was capable of swaying the paranoid khozain – boss of the Kremlin – from his belief that Germany had been successfully contained but that Japan remained a fatal threat. The truth was precisely the contrary.
Proskurov’s criticism was especially unfair in light of the increasing danger in which the Sorge spy ring was working. Even back in 1934 when Sorge first arrived in Tokyo, the atmosphere of suspicion and surveillance was suffocating. But with the escalation of the war in China and the humiliations of Changkufeng and Nomonhan, Japan was overtaken by fully fledged spy mania that quickly evolved into a national psychosis.18 The government flooded Japan’s cities with anti-spy posters, slogans, shop-window displays and even anti-spy matchbooks. In all the propaganda images, the evil spy was invariably depicted as a tall, blond Westerner – a caricature portrait, in fact, of Sorge himself. Local authorities organised anti-spy days and weeks where citizens were harangued to report any suspicious behaviour on the part of their neighbours and passers-by. The Tokko political police and the military’s own Kempeitai counter-espionage force routinely questioned any Japanese seen to be talking to a foreigner, and the government even sent agents to Berlin, Rome and San Francisco to monitor Japanese radicals and cut off any Comintern literature that might reach Japan.19
The indefatigable Miyagi continued with his recruitment efforts despite the escalating dangers. With anti-Japanese feeling rising in the United States, a steady stream of Japanese expatriates were returning home, among them several of Miyagi’s old communist acquaintances. In April 1938 Miyagi travelled to the small town of Kokawa on the island of Honshu for an emotional reunion with the wife of his old landlord from San Francisco, Tomo Kitabayashi. She had found work as a sewing instructress, joined the local Seventh-Day Adventist Church and was saving money for her husband to join her in her native town. With her modest station in life and remote provincial existence it is not clear how Tomo Kitabayashi could be of use to the Sorge spy ring. Nonetheless, Miyagi signed her up as an informant apparently more on the strength of their old friendship than because of any lingering communist sympathies or practical usefulness.
In Tokyo, Sorge, Clausen and Vukelić had done well to establish cast-iron bona fides before the full onslaught of spy mania. Nonetheless, all of them were coming under ever-closer scrutiny. Sorge and Vukelić, as journalists, came under particular suspicion. ‘With Japanese nationalism mounting to the point of fanaticism, almost anything in the possession of a foreign correspondent could be construed as evidence of his guilt as a spy,’ recalled Joseph Newman of the New York Herald Tribune, who often saw Sorge on the seventh floor of the Domei news agency building, where most foreign reporters had offices. ‘They suspected German and Italian newsmen much more than Americans. They understood that the Axis correspondents had been sent to Japan not only to report to their newspapers and agencies but to gather whatever secret information they could for the German embassy.’20
By 1939 Sorge was also under regular, though sporadic, police surveillance. The officer assigned to keep tabs on him was twenty-eight-year-old Harutsugu Saito, a proud and intelligent young German-speaker from the five-man-strong department of the Tokko’s Foreign Section that was charged with monitoring the 700 Germans in Tokyo.21
Sorge was an easy man to follow. His small Datsun, which he had switched to driving after his motorcycle crash, was as distinctive as the tall German himself. Saito was well aware how well connected with the German ambassador his subject was and took extreme pains not to be observed as he trailed Sorge around town. He made regular attempts to question Sorge’s new housekeeper, Fukuda Tori, who had taken over from the elderly Honmoku, but was firmly rebutted. ‘I won’t answer your questions or those of the Kempeitai,’ Fukuda snapped. ‘My master is a fine man. Leave him alone!’22 Eventually Fukuda relented to the extent of allowing the personable young officer to accompany her to the temple to pray to her favourite deity, Oinari-san, the fox god revered by many Japanese peasants. As the old lady lit incense sticks in the small shrine she may have offered a prayer to that most appropriate of deities for the safety of her employer.
Over a period of two years Saito got to know Sorge’s routes to and from work, his favoured drinking haunts and restaurants. But Sorge’s predictability and high profile were of course just the public face of a (usually) meticulous tradecraft. Saito and his four Tokko colleagues had 140 Germans each to keep tabs on, which meant that his surveillance of Sorge was necessarily patchy. He never succeeded in trailing the careful Sorge to his monthly rendezvous with Miyagi, and less frequently Ozaki, in Tokyo teahouses, restaurants and occasionally in the city’s numerous ‘love hotels’. The Tokko never linked the fictitious ‘Mr Otake’ who made the restaurant bookings with the government adviser Ozaki. Neither Ozaki nor Miyagi’s name ever appeared in the Tokko’s surveillance files in connection with Sorge.23
Another pair of eyes observed Sorge on a daily basis from the vantage point of the Toriizaka police station, 300 metres from his home. In the wake of Sorge’s motorcycle accident Aoyama Shigeru, a young police officer from Toriizaka was assigned to watch over Sorge’s house during his convalescence. With his usual talent for befriending those who could be most dangerous to him, Sorge charmed the young policeman. But from the beginning Aoyama ‘had the impression that something fishy was going on’ in the modest wooden house on Nagasaki Street. Sorge and Clausen spoke frequently on the telephone and Clausen visited Sorge’s house even when he was out – but when they happened to meet in the Das Rheingold or other German hostelries they never drank together. ‘They acted almost like strangers, only nodding to one another,’ Hanako recalled.24 Saito also sensed something strange in Sorge and Clausen’s relationship.
Aoyama, too, attempted to question the housekeeper Fukuda. She told him nothing – except to say that her employer often burned documents after typing them.25 Soon afterwards a ‘gentle-looking’ young man visited Hanako and questioned her politely but persistently on her relationship with Sorge. Delicately insisting that he would ask nothing of Hanako that he would not ask of his own sister, the agent requested that she steal Sorge’s papers. ‘I could not steal without telling him!’26 Hanako protested. When Hanako told Sorge of the visit he appeared unconcerned. ‘Would you like to have my papers?’ he offered with a laugh. Hanako declined – though she admitted that the visit had made her nervous. If the police ever came back, she was to refer them directly to him, Sorge told her.
Clausen’s constitution was not so steely. His duties as radio man involved him taking his life in his hands every few days to transport his radio gear around town to his various transmission stations. The close calls began to mount up, taking a toll on his nerves. In early 1939 Clausen was in a taxi clutching his black leather suitcase when the driver mistakenly raised his turning signal. A vigilant traffic officer flagged them down and peered curiously at the foreigner in the back with his mysterious luggage. But instead of questioning Clausen the policeman summoned the driver to the nearest police box, where he interrogated him, leaving Clausen sweating in the back of the cab for a ‘very painful’ thirty minutes. When the driver returned and they resumed their journey Clausen felt, he later told his Japanese captors, ‘as though I had just emerged from a tiger’s lair’.27
What neither Sorge nor Clausen knew was that from 1938 onwards, their every coded signal was being intercepted and transcribed by the Japanese Ministry of Telecommunications. Thanks to their own radio monitoring, and after a tip-off from the military government in Korea, the Japanese authorities knew that a powerful illegal transmitter was regularly operating from various sites in the Tokyo area. An all-points bulletin was sent out to all municipal police stations, including Toriizaka, to try to spot the source of the signals. But the Japanese were never able to successfully triangulate Clausen’s radio. And happily for Sorge, the Russian military code he used proved unbreakable – though t
he messages were faithfully monitored and transcribed by the Japanese into an ever-thickening file of unintelligible strings of number groups.28
Sorge’s spy group had come to resemble a numerous and unruly family, united less by common loyalty to the communist cause than by the fatal secret they all shared. And it was to Sorge, as the charismatic and apparently unwavering head of the family, that all its members turned for money, advice and moral support.
Clausen’s complaints were primarily financial, and connected with the extraordinary stress of his job. Branko Vukelić’s were personal. Vukelić had always been a kind of general dogsbody to the spy ring, gathering small titbits of information from his journalistic contacts and performing the relatively menial task of developing Sorge’s microfilms for dispatch to Moscow. His wife Edith was wife to a dogsbody. She received no salary from Moscow, and supplemented the family’s meagre income with her callisthenics lessons. Their little son Paul helped keep the family together – ‘Voukelitch bought his son an electric train and played with it himself,’ recalled a friend.29 But Vukelić’s marriage was in trouble within a year of his arrival in Tokyo. On 14 April 1935 he went alone to a Sunday afternoon performance of a Japanese Noh play at the Nogakudo theatre in Tokyo’s Suidabashi. Sitting next to him was a charming young Japanese woman, chaperoned by her father. Vukelić approached her in the lobby afterwards and introduced himself. Yoshiko Yamasaki turned out to be a daughter of a good family, a graduate of the Tsuda English College in Tokyo who spoke good English. In an interview in 1976 she recalled her excitement and nervousness at being approached by a foreigner. Vukelić was immediately smitten. The next day he sent her the first of ninety-one love letters that would eventually lead to their marriage.30
An Impeccable Spy Page 27
