An Impeccable Spy

by Owen Matthews

  After the start of the war Sorge became closer than ever to the Otts, not just professionally but personally. Sorge spent much of the summer and autumn of 1940 at the Otts’ summer residence at Akiya, thirty kilometres south of Tokyo. He and Eugen would spend days walking around the countryside, Sorge snapping photographs of peasant life (on one occasion Ott saved Sorge from arrest by spy-crazy police by producing his diplomatic pass). Sorge was also frequently ill – despite his enthusiasm for chest-expanding and physical fitness, he was not a healthy man – and Helma Ott reprised her role as nursemaid and mother, bringing him nourishing soups at home.36 But the real pain – of separation from Katya, and of being trapped in his secret life – remained, private and implacable.

  In early autumn 1940 Colonel Matzky headed back to Berlin – via Vladivostok and the Trans-Siberian railway through friendly Russia – carrying Sorge’s latest essay for General Thomas among his papers. As the colonel drove through central Moscow en route from the Kazan station to the Belorussian station he would have passed close to the Fourth Department headquarters, where the report’s contents had been filed some weeks before. Matzky’s replacement was Colonel Alfred Kretschmer who, like his predecessors, had been briefed by army top brass that Sorge was a man who could be trusted.

  Hitler’s planned invasion date for Britain had been set for 15 Septem-ber 1940. A crew of film-makers from Berlin was sent to the Belgian port of Antwerp to film tanks and troops pretending to land in Britain from barges and storming dunes under a volley of blanks. Since the actual landings were due to happen under cover of night, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wished the people of the Reich to have a newsreel-ready version of the invasion.37 But the RAF’s unexpected resilience, and the superiority of the Royal Navy, made the planned operation a near-suicidal prospect. On 17 September 1940, Hitler held a meeting with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt during which the Führer became convinced the operation was not viable as long as control of the skies was still lacking. Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz admitted that ‘we possessed neither control of the air or the sea, nor were we in any position to gain it’.38 Later that day, Hitler ordered the postponement of the operation and ordered the dispersal of the invasion fleet in order to avert further damage by British air and naval attacks.39

  Officially, in order to maintain pressure on Britain, Operation Sealion was merely postponed until the following spring.40 In private, Hitler was already moving towards the most fateful decision of his life. At noon on 29 July 1940, after a routine situation report from his senior commanders, Hitler asked his chief of operational staff, Generaloberst Alfred Jodl, to stay behind. The Führer was worried: the Russians might ignore the non-aggression pact and attack while Germany’s forces were tied up in the West. Hitler was concerned that there were too many Russian troops on the other side of the German–Russian border: ‘In the East we have nothing.’ If the Soviets seized Romania they would cut the Reich off from the only source of petroleum in mainland Europe, the oilfields of Ploesti, strangling Hitler’s war effort. ‘Then the war would be lost for us,’ Hitler told Jodl.* Hitler then asked Jodl whether there was any chance of redeploying the Sealion forces to the East and, if necessary, attacking and defeating the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1940. Jodl replied that such an offensive would take four months at least to prepare.41

  On Hitler’s orders, a secret group in the German high command began working on plans to invade the Soviet Union under the codename ‘Operation Otto’.42 The Führer received the preliminary military plans for an attack on the USSR on 5 December 1940. Two weeks later Hitler issued his top-secret Directive No 21 instructing the Wehrmacht to be ready for an imminent attack along the Reich’s 1,600-kilometre long Eastern front with the USSR. The operation was renamed after the medieval Holy Roman Emperor who had led the Third Crusade, Frederick Barbarossa. The launch date of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was set for 15 May 1941.

  Despite the enormous movement of men and materiel that it entailed, Operation Barbarossa remained a closely kept secret. In Japan, the first inklings of a major shift of German policy came in the form of urgent instructions to the new military attaché Kretschmer to redouble efforts to persuade the Japanese to join the war by attacking Singapore. Ott, too, was mobilised by a personal cable from Ribbentrop.

  The ambassador, ever practical, knew the respect in which German military planning was held by the Japanese. He therefore formed a working group at the embassy to come up with a detailed military plan to take Singapore, based on the information they possessed about Japan’s military and economic capabilities. The group – composed of Ott’s three senior service attachés, plus the chief of the Economic Section, Alois Tichy – even constructed a special sand table representing the geography of the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. By the end of January, Ott, Kretschmer and naval attaché Wenneker (Sorge’s old bottle-mate, back in Tokyo for a second tour of duty with the rank of rear admiral and a pretty young bride) came to a crucial conclusion. ‘It would be possible to conquer Singapore if Japan would attack from the direction of the Malay Peninsula,’ Sorge reported to Moscow. Furthermore, the attack should be ‘sudden’ and supported by Germany, who would ‘assist Japan indirectly by taking the offensive in the Atlantic during the period and by thus drawing British forces there’.43

  The Germans’ simple realisation that Singapore was impregnable from the sea but almost undefended from the land was a brilliant piece of creative tactical thinking. However, despite the cleverness of the plan, Ott’s campaign to persuade the Japanese to attack Singapore ran into a snag almost from the outset – a complication of the Germans’ own making and the fruit of a fateful naval engagement in the South China Sea.

  At around 7 a.m. on 11 November 1940, the British Blue Funnel cargo liner SS Automedon was spotted by a German surface raider about 340 kilometres miles north-west of Sumatra. The Automedon was carrying crated aircraft, motor cars, spare parts, liquor, cigarettes, and food and was bound for Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Her German pursuer was the Atlantis, a heavily armed converted freighter. Within an hour the faster Atlantis had closed to within gunnery range. She ran up her Kreigsmarine ensign and uncovered her guns. Automedon did not have enough time to finish sending a distress signal before German shellfire destroyed her bridge, killing all the senior British officers at a stroke.

  The boarding party from the Atlantis took the surviving crew members prisoner. Among the cargo they discovered fifteen bags of top-secret mail intended for the British Far East Command in Singapore. Among the haul of documents were the new Royal Navy fleet codes valid from 1 January 1941, the newest fleet orders and gunnery instructions, $6 million in new Malayan dollars – as well as some sixty sealed packages containing mail from Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service to their stations in Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo, including summaries of the latest intelligence reports of Japanese military and political activities.

  The most significant find, however, was a small green bag discovered in the chart room below the wreckage of the bridge. The bag, marked ‘Safe Hand – British Master Only’ was weighted with lead and equipped with holes to allow it to sink if it had to be thrown overboard. It contained documents prepared by the British War Cabinet’s Planning Division and addressed to Air Chief Marshal Robert Brooke-Popham, British commander-in-chief in the Far East.44 The report was a summary of the Cabinet’s military strategy in the Far East. It was an explosive document, frankly admitting that Britain did not have the ships or men to go to war against Japan. The papers also made it quite clear that no reinforcements could be spared from the European theatre of war, and that Hong Kong, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and even Singapore itself were all indefensible in the face of a Japanese attack. In effect, the document confirmed that Britain could not send a fleet to defend Singapore and that in the eyes of Downing Street, the fortress had already been abandoned.*,45

  The Atlantis’s captain, Bernhard Rog
ge, recognised the significance of the captured dispatches and sent them to Wenneker in Tokyo, who immediately composed a message to Berlin on his Enigma encoding machine.46 Wenneker’s telegram was immediately shown to Hitler who scrawled in the margin: ‘This is of the utmost importance.’ On 12 December the Führer authorised a copy to be given to the Japanese. Wenneker hurried to show the document to Admiral Nobutake Kondo, deputy Chief of the General Staff.

  Wenneker believed that the report, showing as it did British weakness in the Pacific, would strengthen his argument for an attack on Singapore. Instead the Japanese reached a very different conclusion – one that did not suit Germany’s interests at all. The commanders of the Japanese Imperial Navy took the British War Cabinet report as an assurance that Britain would not – and could not – interfere with their Asian expansion. Even more significantly, navy commander Marshal Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto concluded that their only remaining serious enemy in the Pacific was the Americans.

  From the beginning of Japan’s naval rearmament in 1922, Japanese Navy planners had had to contend with the likelihood of a two-power threat in the Pacific. Thanks to the revelations in the Automedon papers, it became evident that the Japanese naval staff could concentrate with single-minded equanimity on the US Pacific Fleet.47 In January 1941 Yamamoto ordered his staff to plan a surprise attack that would destroy American naval power at a single stroke.48 The plan, developed in absolute secrecy even from the civilian government and the army, centred on a strike by naval aircraft on Pearl Harbor.49

  Neither Sorge nor Ozaki, nor even Prime Minister Konoe himself, had any inkling of Yamamoto’s Pearl Harbor plan. However, evidence of Germany’s preparations for war against the Soviet Union continued to accumulate. An economic mission from Berlin arrived in Tokyo. It was headed by Helmut Wohltat, a Finance Ministry official who specialised in the Reich’s strategic oil supplies and its task was to negotiate a grand economic bargain between Germany and Japan.50 From economic attaché Tichy, Sorge learned that Japanese wanted parts for machines, tanks, submarines, and anti-aircraft guns, assistance in mass production of war materiel, and patent releases on such items as artificial petroleum and aeroplanes.51 Wohltat asked, in return, for 60,000 tons of rubber a year, soybeans, whale oil, various minerals, and a guarantee of German rights in China.

  Why would Germany be seeking to find alternative sources of the raw materials it was currently receiving from the Soviet Union? Why the sudden urgency to cripple the Royal Navy? Piece by piece, an observer as intelligent and well informed as Sorge must have been fitting together the truth about Hitler’s plan to attack Russia within weeks of Directive No 21. ‘Germany at that time was already determined to have a war against Russia,’ Sorge would explain to his captors. ‘And since she could not give any time to Britain, she was eager for the Japanese to join the war against Britain.’52

  Later Sorge would claim that he never doubted that Hitler would eventually attack Stalin. ‘Even though Germany had come to terms with Russia, anti-Soviet feeling in the Nazi Party ran high,’ Sorge told the Japanese. He became convinced that ‘despite the existence of the [non-aggression] Pact, sooner or later a break with the Soviet Union would inevitably occur’.53 Hanako, in her memoir, confirmed that ‘by the end of 1940 Sorge had the conviction that someday Germany and Russia would fight. Sorge was deeply troubled by this prospect. It gave him many anxious moments.’ Sorge certainly despised Hitler. Hanako recalled him explaining to her, in his babyish Japanese, that Hitler was ‘not a very big man’ whereas Stalin was ‘a great man’. But, in Hanako’s judgement, her lover ‘had a deep inner conflict. He spied for the Russians, but he both liked and respected the Germans and he did not want to see Germany and Russia fight.’54

  Even as Barbarossa was still in its earliest stages, Sorge picked up more snippets of information from visiting German officers. The first inkling was Berlin’s growing preoccupation with keeping Romanian oil out of Soviet hands. Another was speculation by visiting German officers about the battle-readiness of the Soviet Army. On 28 December, Sorge reported to Moscow that a new reserve army of forty divisions had been created in the Leipzig area of eastern Germany.55 He also warned that several new arrivals from Berlin had mentioned a force of eighty German divisions deployed on the Soviet border with Romania.56 The purpose of the new army, in Sorge’s understanding, was to protect the oilfields of Ploesti, the Reich’s single source of petroleum in Europe. If the USSR ‘begins to develop activities against German interests, as happened in the Baltic, the Germans could occupy territory on a line from Kharkov through Moscow to Leningrad,’ Sorge explained. ‘The Germans know that the USSR would not risk this, as the Soviet leadership is aware, particularly after the Finnish campaign, that it will take twenty years for the Red Army to become a modern army like that of Germany.’57

  Like Clausen, Sorge still felt himself to be German, even after all his years among foreigners. And Centre was doing little to encourage Sorge’s loyalties for his adopted Motherland. With its constant carping and demands for confirmation, Centre was making it abundantly clear that it frankly distrusted his information. Nonetheless, whatever qualms he may have felt about the coming war between the Motherland and Fatherland, Sorge’s first loyalty remained to his network and to the Soviet Union. The year of the snake – 1941 – promised to bring terrible danger for Russia, and for Katya.

  *Hitler was right – Romania was Hitler’s only source of oil and the destruction of Ploesti would have stopped the German war machine at any time of the war. Hitler’s much touted synthetic oil represented only a very small part of Germany’s consumption. It remains one of the great mysteries of the Second World War why the Allies did so little to attack it, other than a single major USAF raid in August 1943.

  *Even as Churchill was privately giving up on Singapore, he was nonetheless also attempting to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt to station units of the US Pacific Fleet there. Churchill sent Roosevelt a report called ‘Notes on the Action at Taranto’, a study on how a 11–12 November 1940 Royal Navy surprise attack had, for the first time, used torpedo bombers to destroy a significant part of the Italian Regia Marina fleet at anchor. Churchill had hoped that the Taranto operation would warn the Americans that the same thing could be done to their own fleet at Pearl Harbor. But Roosevelt did not send any ships to Singapore, nor did he prepare for the kind of surprise aerial torpedo attack that Churchill had so cannily predicted.

  16

  The Butcher of Warsaw

  ‘So utterly bestial and corrupt as to be practically inhuman’1

  SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg on Gestapo colonel Joseph Meisinger

  It is not precisely clear just how Nazi intelligence first got wind of the fact that their contributor, informant and trusted source on all things Japanese, Dr Richard Sorge, might, in fact, be a communist. What we do know is that by the end of 1940, SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg, head of foreign intelligence at the Reich Main Security Office (or RSHA), was fully aware that Sorge had deep, long-standing connections with the German Communist Party.

  The first tremors of doubt about Sorge’s bona fides had begun to circulate in Berlin in the middle of 1940, when the Foreign Department of the Nazi Party received expressions of concern about Sorge’s ‘political past’. Such a denunciation could only have come from members of Sorge’s Tokyo Nazi Party group – probably triggered by Sorge’s increasingly frequent and outspoken diatribes against Hitler in the bars and restaurants of Ginza. Rather than raising the matter with the embassy, where Sorge’s personal connections with Ott would doubtless have quashed any investigation, the complaint went direct to Berlin, where party headquarters referred the matter to one of Sorge’s official employers, Wilhelm von Ritgen, the head of the German News Agency (or DNB). Von Ritgen, who had been the grateful recipient of detailed news reports and personal letters from Sorge for some years, in turn took the allegations to Schellenberg at the RHSA.

  Schellenberg had the makings of a most dangero
us enemy for Sorge. He had joined the SS, Hitler’s elite stormtroopers, in 1933 immediately after graduating from law school. A fanatical Nazi, Schellenberg subscribed to the Führer-Prinzip – the idea that Hitler’s directives were beyond the framework of the legal system and should be carried out unquestioningly, regardless of legal niceties. In 1935 he was handpicked by RHSA chief Reinhard Heydrich for counter-intelligence work. Schellenberg’s SS personnel file described him as ‘open, irreproachable, and reliable … firm, tough, possesses energy [and] very sharp-thinking’. His national socialist worldview was judged ‘thoroughly fortified’. Heydrich entrusted him with the less official aspects of the SS’s empire-building. One of Schellenberg’s tasks was to amass a real-estate portfolio from confiscated properties – including a handsome villa on Berlin’s Wannsee where the SS’s leaders would soon gather to plan the Final Solution to the Jewish problem.

  The allegations against Sorge presented Schellenberg with a tricky problem. By 1940 Sorge’s judgement on all things Japanese was trusted by a swathe of the Reich’s top brass – not only Ambassador Ott, but also General Thomas of the Wehrmacht’s Economic Department and by the DNB, which had by this time become an arm of the Reich’s intelligence network. Von Ritgen told Schellenberg that Sorge had never given him any reason to doubt his integrity. Indeed, his recent report on Japan’s war economy had been circulated to some of the most senior officials in Berlin. Sorge was, in von Ritgen’s estimation, ‘indispensable’.