Eta Harich-Schneider was also at the dinner. Sorge, in his usual manner, lectured and flirted in equal measure. He learned that since her arrival Eta had seen almost nothing of Tokyo except the embassy compound. Sorge proposed taking her on an excursion the following day, which she eagerly accepted. Helma Ott and her friend Anita Mohr – both former mistresses of Sorge’s – were less enthusiastic. ‘Are you sure you want to put your life in Sorge’s hands?’ asked Mohr over a ladies’ lunch at the embassy the next day. The sexual currents of the tiny community had become deeply intertwined. Eugen Ott was hopelessly in love with Mohr, Helma had confided to Eta, who had become an unwilling confidante to her older, frustrated hostess. Sorge’s cavalier bedding of not only Ott’s wife but also his ‘love object’ was scandalous enough. But to Helma, still possessive of her former lover, Sorge’s evident plan to also seduce their pretty new house guest was taking things too far.
Speeding through the crowded streets of Tokyo, even in Sorge’s little Datsun, felt like a liberation. ‘It’s heavenly to be out of the compound and actually get close to people,’ Eta told her dashing new friend. ‘You feel so remote from the real world when you are being driven around in the Ambassador’s car.’27
Sorge was all too willing to chime in with his own gripes about the Otts, the couple he had been forced to befriend for his own secret reasons but whom he had come to heartily detest. The Otts had shown Eta nothing of Tokyo ‘because they know nothing about the place themselves. What an unimaginative bunch!’ Eta countered that the Otts had been nothing but charming towards her. ‘Charming?’ reposted Sorge. ‘Charming, unimaginative, unprincipled people.’28 Despite his irritation with the Otts – compounded no doubt by the ambassador’s clumsy attempt to have him removed to Berlin – Sorge was nonetheless in one of his buoyant moods. Driving an attractive blonde through the streets of his adopted city had made him playful. As they ascended the steep steps at Agato Park he put a steadying arm around Eta’s shoulders and made fun of his own limp. ‘The Kaiser took two centimetres from my leg and gave me an Iron Cross in exchange,’29 he joked.
They counted the steps in chorus as they ascended to the top, with its sweeping view of a low-rise, smoke-veiled city which was soon to be obliterated by Allied bombing. Eta thought it ‘ugly … a mess. Uglier than Naples, even.’30 They drank green tea at the teahouse and drove on, across the city, to the Aoyama cemetery in the port district of Minato. By the end of May, the cherry trees that still line the main avenue would have lost their blossom, but the cemetery, with its European-style grave monuments in ponderous Victorian style, remained an island of quiet in the busy city. Sorge walked with Eta to the section of the graveyard where the Europeans were buried, segregated from the Japanese in death as they had been in life. For Sorge, it was not a romantic place.
‘The first Europeans butchered by the Japs are buried here,’ Sorge explained, with typical hyperbole (the first Europeans killed by the Japanese were in fact Jesuit priests buried in unmarked graves in Nagasaki in the seventeenth century). ‘Now they don’t kill us with their swords – but in their hearts they hate us just as much. They smile and behave politely but don’t be fooled … They wear a mask of courtesy, but even that is wearing thin. When I first came to Japan eight years ago, they were much more tolerant of foreigners. But now – the malevolence towards whites! We Germans are meant to be on the same side, but the fact is that most Japanese make no distinction.’ Sorge, oblivious to the horrific picture that he was painting for the new arrival, told Eta that a German woman had recently been slapped by a stranger on a train, ‘not because she was German but because she was white’.31
Sorge had always liked and respected the Chinese. But the Japanese, he had come to believe, were worse than the Nazis. ‘They are breast-fed on chauvinism and conditioned to think of themselves as a divine race,’ he told Eta. ‘From which it follows that Japan has a holy duty to rule Asia – and the rest of the world as well if we let them get their hands on it. In place of the Nazis’ ideology, the Japanese rulers have “the way of the Gods” to bolster their ineffable superiority … Not even the Nazis have this kind of holy authority for their master-race super-state.’32
Eta offered some confidences in return – about her successful musical career in Berlin, and her unhappy marriage. She claimed that her recent divorce was the reason for her self-imposed exile in Tokyo. She did not trust Sorge sufficiently to vouchsafe the real reason for her leaving Germany, which was the disapproval of the Nazi Party when Eta tried to prevent a Jewish student from being expelled from the conservatoire two years previously. But Eta did share with her intriguing companion her frustration and fear at the atmosphere of distrust, intrigue and family quarrels at the German embassy.
It was growing dark. Sorge suggested dinner. It was indecently late by the time Eta finally returned to the residency, where she was greeted coldly by her hosts. Clearly both Helma Ott and her husband felt jealous – for different reasons – of her friendship with the irresistible Dr Sorge.
Sorge finally met his old friend Scholl at the Imperial Hotel, most probably on Saturday, 31 May. The previous day Ott had already communicated the gist of Scholl’s message from Berlin, which Sorge summarised to Centre in a brief, urgent cable.
‘Berlin informed Ott that the German attack [on Russia] will commence in the latter part of June,’ Sorge wrote in a message dated 30 May and promptly – for a change – transmitted by Clausen. ‘Ott 95% certain that war will commence … Because of the existence of a powerful Red Army, Germany has no possibility to widen the sphere of war in Africa and has to maintain a large army in eastern Europe. In order to eliminate all the dangers from the USSR side, Germany has to drive off the Red Army as soon as possible. This is what Ott said.’33
Scholl and Sorge met in the lobby of the lumbering neo-Aztec ziggurat of the Imperial Hotel. By Sorge’s account, they spoke ‘in a corner of the lobby’. In contemporary photographs one can see that the hotel’s wide lobby opens onto a large terrace decorated with potted palm trees, with a view of a Japanese garden composed of ponds, bamboo and stone lanterns. It was probably here that Scholl recounted, in detail, what was at that moment the greatest secret in the world. Scholl confided that he had ‘orally transmitted to Ambassador Ott special, highly secret instructions concerning the coming German-Russian war’. So secret was the message that Ott had told Sorge only the barest outline during their conversation the previous day. ‘Ott hid as much as possible the secret instructions he received from Scholl,’ Sorge later told the Japanese. ‘And he did not even give any warning to those Germans who were going home via the Siberian Railroad.’34
Scholl himself had no such inhibitions. He bluntly informed Sorge that Operation Barbarossa would begin in the middle of June; and though the start date might be postponed for a few days all the preparations were already in place. The Wehrmacht had massed some 170–180 divisions along the Soviet border, all of them mechanised or with tanks. The German attack was to be made simultaneously along the entire front, with the main strike forces heading for Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev. The German General Staff confidently expected the Red Army to collapse quickly under this overwhelming blitzkrieg, and anticipated that the war would be over in two months. By the winter, Hitler planned to take the Trans-Siberian railway and establish contact with Japanese forces in Manchuria.35
Despite the urgency of the information, Sorge had to go through with his promise to take Scholl for a night on the town, just like in the old days. They dined at the Imperial, probably at the fashionable New Grill. Sorge was particularly fond of the Beef Steak à la Chaliapine, a dish created at the hotel and named, for obscure reasons, in honour of a great early twentieth-century Russian opera singer.36 They then headed into the fleshpots of Ginza.
By the end of the evening Sorge was reeling, not only with drink but with the detail and importance of the news he had to impart. In the morning he composed a long message to Moscow, the single most important cable of his intelligence
career. He summoned Clausen and handed it to the radio man for urgent transmission, an order that Clausen could find no excuse to refuse.
This time Sorge made sure to spell out that his source was Scholl – ‘who left Berlin on May 3rd’ – rather than unnamed couriers at unspecified times, as per his previous cable. ‘The beginning of the German-Russian war is expected around June 15th,’ Sorge wrote in his telegram of 1 June 1941. ‘In my conversation with Scholl I established that the German advance against the Red Army is founded on a major tactical mistake by the USSR. From the German point of view, the Soviet disposition of forces against German positions does not have any significant depth, which is a grave error. It will help them smash the Red Army in the first major battle. Scholl informed me that the strongest strike will be undertaken by the left flank of the German Army.’37 He went on to describe in detail Scholl’s descriptions of the plan of attack. Surely now, with such concrete and well-sourced information, Golikov would finally take heed and signal the alarm that would allow the Soviet Union to prepare for the coming storm.
*Almost named the Adolf Hitler, but changed to the Bismarck when the Führer presciently worried about the symbolic consequences if the ship were sunk.
18
‘They Did Not Believe Us’
‘You can send your “source” … to his fucking mother’
Stalin, on being warned of Operation Barbarossa
His latest and most important-ever dispatch completed, an exhausted Sorge telephoned the Otts to excuse himself from attending a Whitsun weekend party at their summer house in Akiya. Eta was also in no mood for the wholesome pleasures of a German family gathering, but felt obliged to go. She spent much of the weekend walking alone on the wide, sandy beaches and in the pine woods above the house. She also thought of Sorge. Her first impression of him, she told an interviewer in 1982, was of an arrogant and rather boorish man with low-brow cultural tastes. He was an atheist, a drinker, a glutton and a nihilist for whom nothing was sacred. Eta’s Catholic beliefs and middle-class prejudices made her ‘a pious petty bourgeois’, as Sorge had bluntly told her. She found his habitual mocking tone and incessant sarcasm grating.
But after their day together in Tokyo, Eta had begun to believe that under the outward act, Sorge was a fundamentally decent and humanistic man. She was particularly impressed by his fearless contempt for their fellow Germans in Tokyo – including the Otts – whom she also found hypocritical, smug and stilted. Among this community of time-servers, careerists and Geldmenschen (men interested only in money), Sorge stood out ‘like a true aristocrat, pure and uncorrupted, natural and spontaneous’.1 She would not be the first woman, but was the last, to fall for the romanticism of the robber-baron persona Sorge had adopted ever since his schooldays.
Helma Ott was keen to show off Eta, her celebrity house guest. She hosted a lavish reception and concert at the embassy on 10 June, to which the entire Tokyo diplomatic corps and many Japanese notables were invited. Eta played Bach’s ‘Concerto for Harpsichord and Two Flutes’, conducting from her harpsichord as an amateur orchestra drawn from the German community struggled through the piece. After the recital the guests went through to a lavish buffet, both a miracle and an act of calculated German arrogance in a city struggling with shortages of everything from fresh meat to kimono silk. As Soviet ambassador Konstantin Smetanin, in full dress uniform, congratulated Eta on her performance, Sorge cut in. ‘You need a brandy,’ he said, holding out a drink for her. Famously Helma Ott was the only hostess in the city able to force Sorge into evening dress. For Eta’s concert he wore a white dinner jacket and black bow tie.2
‘Let’s get away from here,’ Sorge whispered, taking Eta by the arm. It was the night of Tokyo’s annual flower festival; he proposed they escape there at once. ‘You have to relax sometimes, you know.’3 Eta knew the Otts would disapprove of the star of the gala disappearing from the reception, but accepted anyway. She slipped upstairs to change out of her ball gown. As she left she caught a wintry glance from Helma. Eta ran across the wide, gravelled drive to Sorge’s car and they speeded away, laughing. They drove as far as the crowds would permit, then parked the Datsun and walked arm-in-arm through narrow streets lined with paper lanterns. The physical intimacy with a striking young woman was nothing new to Sorge, but Eta evidently triggered deeper feelings in him.
‘I am a lonely fellow,’ Sorge confessed – a theme which he had hitherto shared only, as far as we know, with Hanako and Katya. ‘I have no friends, no one.’ He told her that the ‘political situation’ was depressing him. ‘But your music tonight – that really lifted me up.’4
They moved through the throng towards the sound of a booming temple bell, and threw coins in a large chest to take their turn swinging the heavy wooden clapper. Eta noticed Sorge’s lips moving in an unspoken prayer. ‘Come on,’ Sorge said. ‘Everyone comes here to pray they’ll get rich. Now it’s your turn.’ He presented her to some of the monks he knew from earlier visits, bowing deeply and introducing his blonde companion as ‘a famous musician from Germany who has come to Japan to give concerts’.5
They walked down streets lined with stalls selling potted plants and flowers. Sorge was particularly interested in the stands selling miniature bonsai trees. ‘They fascinate me, these dwarf trees. They are like a metaphor for the Japanese themselves, rigidly trained to suppress their own nature and turned into artificial, disciplined creatures. Look, I’m going to buy you a wicked little pine.’6 They continued, cradling Eta’s midget tree. Dropping her guard, she told Sorge of how she missed her daughters, of her hopes to travel on to South America, of how the Nazis had hounded her out of Germany.
‘The whole German volk is diseased,’ she told Sorge, happy to finally find a fellow countryman to whom she could speak frankly. She also confessed that her hosts, the Otts, had no idea of her real reason for fleeing Germany. She had claimed to the ambassador that she was in Tokyo at the invitation of the Musashino Music Academy. Ott had graciously invited her to stay on the unspoken assumption that she would play for her supper by entertaining his guests. Eta had also told Ott that she would be heading back to Germany on 11 July, which was a lie. ‘Quite frankly, I am in a mess,’ she confided.
Sorge listened to her gravely and told her – without elaborating on how he knew – that return via the Trans-Siberian railway would soon be impossible, Eta recalled in her memoir: ‘There is no way you can go back to Germany, even if you wanted to,’ he told her. ‘You will have to stay here. By July we will be in the middle of a war with Russia.’
‘But I feel such an impostor.’
‘There are other kinds of impostors here, believe me. Imposture can sometimes be a merit.’7
Sorge told Eta firmly not to divulge anything of her true history to the Otts. He warned her that Ott was a frightened man who thought someone was watching him all the time. ‘He will be finished as Ambassador if he puts a foot wrong. He will not help you.’ Sorge admitted that once, Ott was ‘alright. He was against the Nazis. When he heard he was being appointed ambassador he asked me whether he should accept. I warned him … you’ll lose your integrity … And that’s what’s happened. Whatever principles he started out with have gone out of the window long ago. Now he is trying to drag Japan into the war, into Germany’s war, to improve Hitler’s chances against Britain. It’s not like he likes Nazis or wants to rule the world. No! He is only doing it for the money. For filthy, despicable money, and to advance his career.’8
Sorge was in no mood for an early night. He took Eta to a party at the home of Kurt Ludde-Neurath, a secretary in the embassy’s political department. They drank red wine and ate sandwiches, then they all repaired to Sorge’s more modest digs at Nagasaki Street. It was the first time Eta had visited the little house. Considerably more booze was consumed – with Sorge swilling whisky – before the party broke up in the early hours. The rowdy group piled into Neurath’s car to accompany Eta back to the Otts’ residence. As they passed the Soviet embassy, Ludde-
Neurath turned to his passenger, who had been loudly proclaiming his admiration for Stalin and extolling the Soviet Union as the best partner Germany could ever have. ‘Well, Sorge?’ quipped Ludde-Neurath mischievously. ‘Shall I drive in so we can see your friends?’
When they pulled up outside the German embassy, Sorge drunkenly staggered out of the car and began shouting up at the Otts’ darkened bedroom windows. ‘Frau Ambassador!’ he called. ‘Frau Ambassador!’ A sleepy houseboy came to open the door and a mortified Eta hurried inside.
The following morning Eta apologised for Sorge’s rudeness: ‘He was completely drunk.’ Helma offered some tart advice. ‘There is something you must know about Sorge. No love affair with Sorge lasts very long. It always ends in tears.’9 She did not reveal that she was speaking from personal experience.
Sorge waited for a response from Centre to his bombshell telegram of 1 June. He could not know that Stalin had personally scrawled across the message: ‘Suspicious. To be listed with telegrams intended as provocations.’10 When Golikov finally responded, his answer was out-of-date, irrelevant and, as usual, carping. Had Ramsay meant corps or armies in his 20 May cable, asked Centre? ‘I repeat,’ Sorge replied in desperation on 13 June, ‘nine armies with the strength of 150 divisions will most likely begin an offensive by the end of June.’11
An Impeccable Spy Page 34
