An Impeccable Spy

by Owen Matthews

  Miyagi went quietly, with no sign of inner turmoil or alarm.35 After a night in Roppongi police station it was decided to transfer Miyagi to Tsukiji station, where he would be unable to communicate with his accuser, Mrs Kitabayashi, between interrogations. The Tokko questioned Miyagi hard for hours, but though he admitted that the documents were his, he refused to speak when asked about his espionage activities. The detectives decided not to torture him, not because they were unwilling to do so but because they judged that it would not work. ‘Miyagi was not the type to break under torture,’ said Yoshikawa, who would become the leading prosecutor in the Sorge trials. He would not confess ‘unless he wanted to’.36 The tubercular young artist was turning out to be tougher than his captors had anticipated.

  The policemen conferred over lunch about their extraordinary suspect. Among the papers found in Miyagi’s room was a collection of love letters written to him by a thirty-year-old divorcee, Kimiko Suzuki, who worked as an interpreter in the American–European Division of the Tokko. Had Miyagi penetrated the political police itself? the interrogators wondered. (It turned out he had not; Suzuki was exonerated of any involvement in Miyagi’s spying.) As the interrogators opened the door of the interview room for a long afternoon of questioning, the two guards posted to watch Miyagi reflexively turned towards the new arrivals. At that moment Miyagi sprang up and dived, head first, out of the second-floor window and fell towards an approaching tram.37

  The first thought to flash through the mind of chief interrogator Tamotsu Sakai was, he told an interviewer twenty years later, ‘I must not let Miyagi get away. He is our star witness.’ Shouting a command to surround the building, Sakai himself jumped out of the window in hot pursuit. What he did not realise until he was already hurtling through the air was that Miyagi did not intend to escape. He intended to die – as the English reporter Jimmy Cox had died falling, or perhaps being thrown, from a Tokyo police station window the previous year.

  Both men landed in shrubbery. The tram rumbled by harmlessly a few feet in front of them. Struggling to rise, Sakai found that his body would not obey him. Miyagi was less badly injured. He was helped to his feet by police, shaken but lame in one leg.38 Chivalrously Miyagi insisted on seeing Sakai put safely into a police car before getting in himself. They were both taken to a nearby naval hospital for treatment.

  Sakai would be back at work within three weeks. His spine had been bruised, but not broken. Miyagi, though physically unhurt, had gone through a profound psychological transformation. He had attempted seppuku – ritual suicide – to avoid shame, in the traditional manner of an ancient samurai. But death had refused his sacrifice. ‘He had crossed the barrier of death and had come back to life,’ as Prosecutor Yoshikawa expressed it in 1965. ‘Miyagi had experienced no less than a resurrection, and what life remained to him he must live with clean hands. He must make a general confession and start over with an unmarked slate.’39

  Miyagi told his interrogators repeatedly how impressed he had been that one of their number had risked his life to bring him to justice. And so he talked, at great length and detail. He told the Tokko of his work for the Comintern – whom Miyagi still believed he was serving – and of his association with Hotsumi Ozaki and Richard Sorge.

  Miyagi’s revelations were so shocking that they verged on the unbelievable. The involvement of Sorge, prominent journalist and confidant of the German ambassador, was astonishing. But it was the information about Ozaki that caused the deepest shockwaves. Ozaki had, in fact, been under surveillance by the Tokko for over a year, as they scoured his writings for signs of leftist sympathies. Miyagi’s evidence that a member of Konoe’s Breakfast Group was a paid-up Soviet spy was ‘a terrific revelation’, Yoshikawa recalled. ‘The arrest of a group of underground communists was a routine business in Japan at the time, but the discovery of such a high-level spy ring was an altogether different matter.’40

  The case was clearly far above the pay grade of the Tokko officers who scribbled down Miyagi’s confession. Yoshikawa, as Senior Prosecutor of the Tokyo District Criminal Court, was hastily summoned to take over the case. Questioning Miyagi in person the day after his suicide attempt, he learned the names of Clausen, Vukelić, Kawai and other lesser collaborators in the ring. He also ordered the arrests of Akiyama, the ring’s translator, and of Miyagi’s informant, Mrs Kuzumi.

  Akiyama immediately talked. A quantity of documents on the South Manchuria Railway as well as military information was found in his home, all material from Ozaki and Miyagi awaiting translation into English.41 Kuzumi’s evidence also confirmed Miyagi’s confession. Yoshikawa was left in the uncomfortable position of having to believe his prisoner’s extraordinary allegations that two of the most powerfully connected men in Tokyo were Soviet spies.

  Ozaki had not been particularly worried when Miyagi failed to show up at his house to give his daughter Yoko her weekly painting lesson on Sunday, 12 October. He had also not been unduly perturbed when Sorge, too, failed to make their agreed rendezvous the following evening at the Asia Restaurant (Sorge, confused by a rising fever, mistook the date and arrived on Tuesday instead). But when he walked into the Asia for lunch on Tuesday, Ozaki found three senior policemen – including the chief of the Security Section of the Home Affairs Ministry and a division chief of the Tokko – apparently waiting for him. Ozaki, who knew the men slightly, greeted them courteously and walked on by. They made no attempt to arrest him. It was only the following morning, when Ozaki was in his library reading the morning papers, that a black car full of plain-clothes Tokko men pulled up outside his house, and politely presented business cards and a warrant for his arrest. He left the house quietly, with great dignity.

  In custody at Meguro police station, Ozaki still believed that he was under investigation for the liberal slant of his writings rather than for spying. Miyashita Hiroshi, one of the Tokko’s most experienced interrogators, quickly disabused him. ‘We’re not examining you as a Japanese but as a spy for the Comintern or the Soviet Union,’ Miyashita told his prisoner. ‘When Japan is at war, spies can’t expect any mercy.’42 For the first time ‘inner unrest clearly manifested itself on [Ozaki’s] face’.43

  Detaining a senior Japanese government insider and respected scholar – ‘one of the most brilliant advisers of Konoe’, as Yoshikawa put it – was already a bold move by the Tokko. Arresting a prominent foreigner like Sorge, one who enjoyed the confidence of the German ambassador, Japan’s closest ally, was a problem of even greater magni-tude. The diplomatic ramifications of a mistake could damage Japan’s delicate relationship with Berlin. But if Miyagi’s story was true, the political consequences could be, if anything, even worse.

  Formally, Japan was committed to a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. The discovery of a Soviet espionage ring at the heart of the Japanese government could disturb those already tense relations with Moscow at a time when Japan was about to commit the bulk of its troops to an invasion of Southeast Asia and was also heading towards war with the United States. And then there was a third possibility: that Sorge could in fact be a senior German agent, posing as a communist as a false flag to collect intelligence for the Reich. In short, the investigators believed Sorge to be doubly protected, by his position with the Germans if innocent and his relationship with Moscow if guilty. A mistake about such a man could leave Yoshikawa and his colleagues facing professional and personal ruin.44

  The Foreign Section of the Tokko balked at such a risk. They needed Ozaki’s confession to make a move on such prominent foreigners as Sorge and Clausen. Inspector Miyashita also knew that he was working against time; Ozaki’s powerful friends might arrange for him to be released at any moment. News of his arrest had reached the Breakfast Group while it was in session that very morning, thanks to frantic phone calls from Ozaki’s wife.45

  It took Miyashita the best part of a day of relentless questioning to break him. Ozaki finally capitulated at midnight. ‘I will tell all the facts,’ he said, as if released fr
om unbearable tension that was also shared by his questioners. ‘So let me take a rest today and let me think a little.’46

  Sorge, still unaware of the arrests of Miyagi or Ozaki, chose this moment finally to make the decisive move he had hinted at about to Eta and Hanako. On 15 October, while Ozaki was undergoing his first day of questioning, Sorge summoned Clausen to his house. He handed his radio man a sheaf of messages for Moscow requesting new instructions for the members of the rezidentura, and asking whether he was to return to Russia or start new activity in Germany.47 After seven years, and precisely a week too late, Sorge had decided to wind up the Tokyo spy ring whether Centre liked it or not. Clausen, after reading the messages, handed them back to his boss in his first ever act of open defiance. ‘It is a little too early to send these,’ Clausen said. ‘So I want you to keep them for a while.’48

  For Clausen, of course, a return to Moscow was out of the question. Quite apart from his private loss of communist faith and his thriving business, Clausen knew that his two years of quiet sabotage of the ring’s communications would be discovered as soon as Sorge returned to Centre. His open revolt at Sorge’s plan to wind down the ring was a matter of life or death for them both – in opposite directions. Sorge no longer frightened Clausen; the spell of his chief’s imperiousness was broken. The boss was clearly feverish and exhausted (Miyagi, on his last visit, had found Sorge so ill that he urged him to go to hospital). He was also increasingly uneasy about the unexpected disappearance of his Japanese agents. Sorge had attempted to find Ozaki’s telephone number, Clausen recalled, but failed to locate it in the chaos of his study.

  ‘Let’s wait for a couple of days anyway, and if [Ozaki] does not show up, I will call him on the telephone,’ Sorge said resignedly. As he left the house Clausen felt ‘that the time of arrest was approaching’.49 His departure was observed by the Tokko agent Saito, who had rented a second-floor apartment opposite Sorge’s front door and was now keeping a permanent watch on all comings and goings lest the suspect attempt escape.50 Vukelić, too, had been placed under close surveillance with a policeman outside his door and a hard-pressed team of Tokko men struggling to keep up with him as he made his way around town via a succession of trolleybuses and trams.51

  In Meguro police station, Prosecutor Yoshikawa decided that frankness would be the quickest route to getting a full confession out of Ozaki. He gave his prisoner a full account of Miyagi’s confession, not bothering to try to catch Ozaki out on possible contradictions in their testimony. Ozaki listened gravely without interrupting. When the prosecutor had finished, Ozaki bowed his head politely and said: ‘Wakarimashita – I understand.’ By that evening Ozaki had outlined his entire espionage career, from his beginnings with Agnes Smedley in Shanghai to his collaboration with ‘Mr Johnson’, his recruitment at Nara and his long relationship with Miyagi.

  His captors allowed him, for the first time since his arrest, to smoke. They gave Ozaki a box of matches decorated with spy warnings, which prompted him to share the wry recollection that he had always felt nervous using such matches at his meetings with Sorge.52 By the end of the third day of questioning – 17 October, the day after Konoe resigned for the last time as prime minister in favour of the war-mongering General Tojo – Ozaki was relaxed enough to crack another joke. ‘This cabinet is the one which is going to war against the United States,’ he told his captors. But ‘if they adopt my idea, the China Incident will be solved in three days. If the Chinese Communist Party takes over China and the Japanese Communist Party takes over Japan, then Japan, Russia, and China could cooperate with each other.’53

  Clausen returned to Sorge’s house the following day. The pair set out for the local garage, where Sorge’s much-battered Datsun had been undergoing repairs. The previous week Clausen had borrowed the car to fetch medicine for Sorge from a local chemist’s, lost control driving down a steep hill and turned the car on its roof. Uninjured, Clausen had crawled out of the window and righted the car with the help of a passing policeman. The damage had now been fixed, and Sorge and Clausen drove to the Minoru restaurant for lunch. They lingered over their meal until 4 p.m. Neither elaborated in their prison testimonies on what was said.

  It seems likely that Sorge, at least, was planning to make a run for it. After lunch Clausen walked into Ginza to do some shopping, watched a movie, then returned to the bar of the Minoru to drink some more. Sorge headed back home, then drove the Datsun back to the garage where it was usually parked. The police were waiting, but did not pounce. They searched the car and discovered a large sum of cash stuffed into envelopes and casually hidden inside the vehicle – presumably Sorge’s escape fund. The constable took the money to Torizawa police station, counted and photographed it. Then, with impeccable Japanese courtesy, he returned the cash-filled envelopes to the garage owner with instructions to hand them back to Sorge.54

  Vukelić was also nervous. He phoned Sorge in the early evening from a call box near Shimbashi station. His watchers overheard him say: ‘Boss, can I come and see you?’ and followed him onto a tram bound for Azabu-ku. Sorge summoned Clausen to the emergency meeting. Clausen arrived with a half-gallon bottle of sake. As the three spies drank, there was a knock on the door that doubtless made them freeze with fear. However, it was just the garage owner returning the money he claimed he had found in the car, for which he received polite thanks and a cash reward from Sorge. The man scuttled back to the police station to report that three foreigners were in the house.

  Settling back down to his sake, Sorge admitted to his colleagues that it was by now clear that ‘Joe’ and ‘Otto’ – or Ozaki, as he referred to him, the first time that Clausen had ever heard the star agent’s real name – had been arrested.55 It was likely from the garage owner’s mysterious visit that the police had Sorge’s Datsun under surveillance. Even driving off into the night was no longer an option. The arrests of their Japanese comrades made no difference, Sorge morosely told his guests, ‘our destiny would be the same’.56

  Clausen, filled with ‘an inexpressible uneasiness’, left the glum gathering and drove home.57 As Anna slept upstairs, he took stock of the incriminating evidence that filled his study: original and coded copies of telegrams already sent and those still awaiting transmission; his well-thumbed code book, and of course his trusty transmitter. He considered burning the papers, but flames in the garden at night would attract the attention of fire-wary Tokyo residents. He also thought of burying the transmitter, but again the darkness defeated him. A kind of terrified paralysis had settled over him. In the end, Clausen simply went to bed, where he spent a sleepless night.58

  Vukelić left the boss’s house not long after Clausen but did not immediately return home, as his watchers saw him stumbling home drunk at around midnight. Saito, monitoring Sorge’s front door from across the street, observed one more visitor that night: an official from the German embassy whom he logged as ‘Third Secretary Embritch’ (though it is not clear who this might be, as no one of that name is listed on the 1941 diplomatic register). Sorge’s visitor sat on the windowsill of his first-floor study rather than on the sofa. It is possible that Sorge wished to signal his links to the embassy to the police he suspected were outside. Saito, sitting by his darkened window, felt a twinge of sympathy for his quarry. ‘Those poor men, talking so loudly and not knowing that I am watching them,’ he told an interviewer in 1965.59 By 10 p.m. the diplomat left. Sorge’s light went out an hour later.

  With the confessions of Ozaki and Miyagi in hand, Prosecutor Yoshikawa and his colleague Tamazawa Mitsusaburo had spent the after-noon at the Ministry of Justice obtaining permission to issue warrants for the arrest of Sorge and Clausen. Their case, while extraordinary, was watertight. ‘If you have proof, I will take the responsibility,’ Minister of Justice Michiyo Imawura told them.60

  Before dawn on 19 October, three ten-man squads of Tokko agents met at the official residence of their Foreign Section chief, Shinichi Ogata, for a briefing. They were instructed not to harm t
he suspects, and to make a careful search of their homes. The first team headed to Vukelić’s house, knocking on the door shortly after six. A maid opened it and the policemen pushed past her, running up the stairs and burst into the bedroom where Branko Vukelić and his wife Yoshiko slept with their one-year-old son. Inspector Suzuki shook Vukelić awake, while Yoshiko huddled under the covers in horror. Suzuki would later recall that she seemed utterly shocked by the revelation of her husband’s espionage. The policeman was convinced – quite wrongly – that she knew nothing about it. Yoshiko Vukelić’s excellent acting would save her life.

  The police watched carefully as their prisoner dressed, wary that he might try to swallow a suicide pill. Three Tokko agents drove him to Sugamo prison, while the rest stayed to embark on a detailed search of the house. They found the darkroom filled with developed negatives of confidential documents and Japanese military installations.61

  Aoyama, the officer who had first suspected Clausen of possible espionage, led the raid on the Clausens’ home. The radio man had just fallen asleep after an anxious night. He woke to find Aoyama standing over his bed. ‘I would like to ask you something about an automobile accident that happened the other day,’ the policeman said with perfect politeness, by Clausen’s later account. ‘So I would like you to come over to the police station.’ Max had little doubt that ‘this was not just a problem of an automobile accident’.62 The police allowed him to dress and eat breakfast before driving him to Mita police station. Standing on a desk in the living room, in plain view, was the suitcase containing his home-made radio set.

  The team sent to arrest Sorge sat anxiously in their cars waiting for Aoyama to join them. It had been decided that the presence of a policeman that Sorge knew would reduce the risk of Sorge attempting suicide. In any case, the Tokko men found a German embassy car parked outside Sorge’s house when they arrived, so had to wait for the official visitor – who has been variously identified as journalist Wilhelm Schulz of the DNB, or possibly a second secretary of the embassy – to leave.63 One of the squad was Saito, the Tokko agent who had been watching Sorge from afar but had never met his target face to face. Saito’s biggest worry, he told an interviewer twenty years later, was that Sorge’s housekeeper would try to resist the police and cry out, giving him a chance to end his life. In the event, the woman emerged from the house soon after the embassy car departed, carrying a single large shoe and evidently bound for a cobbler’s shop.