Protecting the women in his life – particularly Hanako – was part of Sorge’s motivation in cooperating so freely. He struck a deal with Yoshikawa that Hanako would not be harmed, and never mentioned her in his official testimony. He also, with considerable chivalry, refused to speak about any of his other Tokyo affairs, which the Japanese police estimated at around thirty women.12
The prosecutor kept his word. On the day of Sorge’s arrest, Hanako’s old tormentor from Toriizaka police station paid her a call at her mother’s house. The police inspector, whom she knew only as ‘Mr M’, was polite. He told Hanako that her lover was under arrest for ‘currency speculation’. He also speculated that the charges might be ‘justified’ as ‘they say that he is a Jew’. Certainly, Mr M told a bewildered Hanako, the prisoner Sorge was not a Christian as he had been observed praying to the rising sun (perhaps a watcher’s misinterpretation of Sorge’s early morning callisthenics). ‘No, he never prays to the sun,’ Hanako assured the policeman, quite accurately. ‘He doesn’t pray to anything.’13
A week later the inspector returned and broke the news that Sorge was a Russian spy. ‘He will be shot,’ Mr M said bluntly. ‘There is no hope for him to survive.’ Only wives could visit suspects in jail, so there was no way for Hanako to see him. Christmas 1941 passed with no present or letter, only another brief visit from Mr M to assure Hanako that ‘Sorge-san is worried about you’.14
Sorge could clearly expect no help from the Germans. But he certainly believed he could count on the Russians, still officially bound in a friendship pact to Japan, to come to his rescue. A few days after his arrest he waited for a moment when he was alone with Ohashi and asked him to inform ‘Zaitsev of the Soviet embassy’ of his arrest. Viktor Sergeyevich Zaitsev was the embassy’s second secretary – and the NKVD courier whom Clausen and Sorge had known as ‘Serge’. But Ohashi never made contact with the Soviet embassy.15
Sorge would doubtless have remembered the extraordinary efforts to which Moscow had gone to rescue even such lowly agents as the Noulens from Chinese captivity – the money freely spent, the international press campaigns, the reckless mobilisation of all the USSR’s intelligence assets, including himself – and taken heart. Surely Moscow would be frantically working to rescue its greatest (in his own opinion at least) and longest-serving spy? Sorge told his interrogators that he was sure that his old Comintern patron, Solomon Lozovsky, one of the delegates to the conference in Frankfurt where Sorge was first headhunted by the Soviets and now deputy foreign minister, would intervene in his case.
He was mistaken. Unfortunately, Sorge no longer worked for the Comintern in peacetime but for the Red Army in the midst of a world war. The Fourth Department may have come to warily trust Sorge’s information. But the idea of making an effort to rescue an agent with a chequered ideological past, a man associated with so many recently purged Comintern bigwigs and self-confessed traitors, a rezident who might be working for the Nazis and a German national to boot, did not rank high on their list of priorities. In August, General Kolganov had essentially labelled Sorge a double agent in his report into Agent Ramsay’s background. Though Kolganov was himself ousted from the Fourth Department in October 1941, just before Sorge’s arrest, the doubts had stuck. The truth was that Sorge could expect no rescue from Moscow.
In the wake of Sorge’s arrest, Centre sent a pair of diplomats from the Soviet embassy to speak to Anna Clausen, who confirmed that something disastrous had happened. But Sorge and his agents had been the USSR’s eyes and ears in Japan for so long that without him Moscow was blind. Without Sorge’s excellent contacts neither Centre nor the NKGB’s separate rezidentura in the Tokyo embassy had any way of knowing the true facts of the case. ‘We have information that five days ago INSON [Sorge] and GIGOLO [Vukelić] were arrested for espionage – for whom we do not know,’ someone from the Soviet embassy in Tokyo cabled the Fourth Department in an unsigned message on 30 October (Clausen was not even mentioned).16 In other words the NKVD* was not sure which side the Japanese thought Sorge and Vukelić were spying for – the Germans or the Soviets. Nor, of course, was Soviet military intelligence sure itself.
By January the NKVD got wind that Sorge had confessed. The NKVD’s Zaitsev and his sidekick Butkevich – the Soviet ‘legals’ under diplomatic cover who had been ordered to act as couriers to the ring in the final dangerous months – had managed to glean some information from their few Japanese sources. It is not clear whether it was they or their NKVD bosses who garbled the message, but by the time the intelligence had worked its way to the top levels of the party even Sorge’s name had become mangled. ‘It has come to our attention that one of the arrested Germans in Tokyo, one ZORGE or KHORGE, confessed that he has been a member of the Communist Party since 1919, joined the Party in Hamburg … and worked in the information department of IKKI (Comintern),’ wrote NKVD deputy chief Pavel Fitin to Comintern chief Dmitrov on 7 January 1942. ‘In Tokyo he was in touch with our workers … I ask you to inform me how accurate this information is.’17
In other words, the NKVD in Moscow was completely unaware of Sorge’s importance as a spy – and apparently had forgotten the connection between him and the military intelligence Agent Ramsay/Inson reported by their own rezidentura in Tokyo in October. Moreover, it is clear that the NKVD’s main interest in the Sorge case was to protect their agents Zaitsev and Butkevich from exposure.
Sorge’s old handler Boris Gudz, who had by now left the Fourth Department and was working as a bus driver in Moscow, speculated that Stalin had been angered by Sorge’s confession and therefore did not wish to exchange him.18 More likely, as Sorge froze in his cell, tapping out his account of his intelligence triumphs on his trusty typewriter, Moscow simply ignored him. The NKVD’s own file on Sorge erroneously listed him as having been shot in 1942. The Fourth Department simply appeared to forget about his existence.
Centre did not even bother to immediately inform Katya of her husband’s arrest. She continued writing him letters well into the autumn of 1941 and sending them to the headquarters at Bolshoi Znamensky Lane. ‘Dear Ika, I have had no news for such time that I don’t know what to think,’ she wrote in an undated letter included in a 1965 Soviet collection of documents on Sorge which is described as having been sent after his arrest. ‘I have lost hope that you exist. All this time was very hard and difficult. Very hard because I repeat I do not know what is happening with you and how you are. I am coming to the thought that it is unlikely that we will meet again in this life. I do not believe it any more and I am tired of solitude. What can I say about myself? I am getting older slowly. I work a lot and lose hope of seeing you ever. I hug you tightly. Your K.’19 Fourth Department clerks simply inserted her letter into Sorge’s file, never to be transmitted.
Prosecutor Yoshikawa conducted some fifty interrogations of Sorge over a period of four months. Some of the sessions lasted until ten at night. The prisoner was not mistreated. The Sugamo authorities allowed Sorge to spend the money that had been found in his house – 1,000 yen, plus a black leather wallet containing $1,782 in American currency. Ohashi observed that his prisoner regularly bought copies of the Economist which, curiously, were available in the prison shop, and bought five-yen lunches, which the policeman himself could not afford. Sorge also sought two audiences with the prison governor, both times to ask about the progress of the war. He lived in a three-tatami-mat cell with a toilet-cum-chair and washbasin with a wooden cover that became a small table where he typed.20
Ozaki, less ascetic and psychologically tough than Sorge, had a harder time of it. The prison governor found him a man of quick intelligence and much charm, but Ozaki was clearly profoundly shaken by his enforced separation from his family. From Sugamo Ozaki wrote a series of exquisite love letters to his wife Eiko, a selection of which were published after his death under the title Love Was Like a Falling Star, which became a bestseller after the war and are now considered a classic of Japanese love poetry.21 He also penned two volumes of lyr
ic poems, The White Cloud Report, which Ozaki entrusted to the governor for safekeeping but which were lost in the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945.
The Tokko were also busy rounding up all those mentioned in the confessions of the members of the spy ring. They eventually arrested eleven people in connection with the case. Among them were Anna Clausen and Kawai; two of Sorge’s collaborators from his Shanghai days; a number of Miyagi’s humble helpers and the grandees Prince Saionji and Takeru Inukai (also known by his pen name Ken Inukai), a Breakfast Group colleague of Ozaki’s.22
The Sorge spy trials began in a closed session of the Tokyo District Court in May 1942. Sorge himself was defended by a prominent lawyer known for representing communists. His defence was that he had done nothing illegal and never forced anyone to divulge information. But now that the Tokko had the keys to the ring’s code they were able to finally decrypt the reams of radio intercepts that they had been gathering for years. Soon, after a titanic amount of legwork, the Japanese had a near-complete record of every message Clausen had ever sent to Centre.
The evidence of the scale of Sorge’s espionage was so overwhelming that the verdict was never in doubt. Curiously, one of the things the Japanese found especially damning was the contents of a case of personal papers that Sorge had left with his friend Paul Wenneker for safekeeping. After Sorge’s arrest Wenneker had turned the papers over to the Japanese authorities (it is not clear whether he did this on his own initiative or because ordered to do so by Ott). It contained old love letters from both Sorge’s former German wife Christiane and his current wife Katya. Sorge was not only proven to be a spy, but also the secret husband of a Soviet citizen.23
The Japanese authorities also chose the start of the trials to finally make Sorge’s arrest public knowledge. If Schellenberg’s memoirs are to be believed, it was only now, eight months after Sorge’s arrest, that his Gestapo agent Meisinger sheepishly reported the outline of the case to his superiors. Unsurprisingly, Meisinger chose to pile as much blame as possible on Ott’s indiscretion and bad judgement.24
The repercussions in Berlin were profound. ‘In a long and uncomfortable session with Himmler, I had to justify our collaboration with Sorge,’ Schellenberg wrote. ‘As far as Ambassador Ott was concerned, Meisinger did his best to ruin him. After a careful examination of the evidence, however, it became quite clear that, while Ott had been thoroughly exploited by Sorge, he had never been guilty of knowing complicity in espionage activities.’25
Himmler, who had always had doubts about Sorge, informed the Führer that their valued informant in Tokyo was in fact a Soviet spy. ‘In a confidential discussion between Hitler and Himmler, Hitler agreed that no blame could be placed on the German Secret Service in this affair.’26 Hitler however took a dim view of Ott’s weakness. ‘Hitler held to the opinion that a man in Ott’s position should never allow trust and friendship to carry him so far as to reveal confidential political information. It was lucky for Ott that Hitler took such an objective view of the matter. He was recalled from his post as ambassador, and, although Meisinger received secret instructions to look out for additional evidence, nothing was ever found and no further measures were taken against him.’27 The unfortunate Ott attempted to redeem himself by requesting a transfer to the front line. This was refused, and he was instead ordered to a remote posting in the German consulate in Peiping, China. It was there, in late 1942, that he learned that his only son Podwick had keen killed at Stalingrad.
It was not until 15 December 1942 that both Ozaki and Sorge were convicted of violations of the Peace Preservation Law and the National Defence Security Law. The case, as a capital crime, was automatically referred to the Supreme Court for sentencing. The official Soviet news agency TASS announced that ‘no member of the Soviet Government or the Soviet embassy is directly connected with the case’.28 Unofficially, one Soviet embassy official called the trial ‘a plot engineered by the fifth column of Hitler’s Elite Guards and Special Police. Moscow knows nothing about it.’29
It is not clear whether Moscow ever knew about the courtroom revelations of Sorge’s relationship with Katya. Sorge’s Russian wife was not mentioned in any of the press reports. But in any case it is likely that the ruthless logic of the secret police simply demanded that loose ends of the Sorge case be cleaned up. Katya’s personal file notes that she was placed under surveillance from October 1941. In November 1942, Katya was fired from her job at the factory and arrested. Her official workbook for June of that year noted ‘criticism with a formal warning for irresponsibility and unpunctuality’. The official cause of her dismissal was listed as Item 47(D) of the Labour Code – ‘criminal activity’ – though of what kind is not recorded.
Katya Maximova was sentenced to five years of internal exile in the village of Bolshaya Murta, 120 kilometres from Krasnoyarsk in central Siberia. In spring 1943 she wrote two letters to her sister in Moscow complaining that she was freezing, hungry and very weak. That summer Katya fell seriously ill and was admitted to the local hospital. She was nursed by Lyubov Ivanovna Kozhymakina, who recalled in 2011 that her patient’s ‘eyes were large and grey … Who she was I didn’t know, but she caught something in my soul, lying in bed all pale and tortured. “Do you want some water?” I asked, but she didn’t answer, just looked at me with her big and grey eyes and a tear on her cheek.’30 The only two doctors in the village had left for the front two years before. There was nobody to treat her properly. The following day Kozhymakina returned for her shift and found Katya’s cot bed empty. The patient had died and been taken to the local cemetery. The graveyard where Katya was buried was destroyed after the war. Sorge would never learn of his wife’s fate, nor of the vicious ingratitude of the Soviet state towards the woman who had waited for him for so long.
Japanese justice, surprisingly for an authoritarian state, turned out to be both thorough and scrupulous. The three volumes of investigative documents prepared by the Tokko are exhaustive, far more professional than the cursory evidence which the NKVD assembled to convict hundreds of thousands of suspected spies in the 1930s. Ozaki spent weeks preparing a moving personal statement to the court explaining that he was motivated by a species of patriotism and had not, in fact, offended against the sacrosanct principle of kokutai – the natural bond that every Japanese owes to his homeland and emperor, soil and ancestral spirits. Ozaki did not deny his communist convictions, but argued that he had acted in the interests of his country.
Sorge, for his part, told the court that he ‘had absolutely no thought or plan to start a communist revolution in Japan or spread communism in Japan whatsoever … I take full responsibility, however, so please treat my Japanese colleagues as lightly as possible’.31 It did not help. On 29 September 1943, both Ozaki and Sorge were sentenced to death by hanging. The verdict took Ozaki, at least, completely by surprise.
Sorge was calmer. A German embassy translator sent to take down his last will and testament found him looking well. The lines in his face had smoothed out after two years of enforced sobriety. He gave the impression of ‘a man who is proud to have accomplished a great work and is now ready to leave the scene of his accomplishments’. Sorge asked for his eighty-year-old mother, still living in Berlin, to be spared repercussions, and asked for more history books to read.32 Kawai, also imprisoned at Sugamo, caught a glimpse of Sorge dancing with joy and banging a guard jovially on the back when word went around the prison of the German defeat at Stalingrad.33
Perhaps Sorge was so calm because he still, up to the very last, expected the USSR to save him. Early in his interrogation Sorge said that the Soviet government would exchange him for Japanese prisoners – though since the two countries were not at war it is not clear what prisoners he had in mind. It is possible that the Japanese approached Moscow with such an offer. Sorge’s old comrade Leopold Trepper, the famous Soviet spy who served time in the Gulag alongside a Japanese general after the war, reported that his fellow prisoner confided that the Japanese government had made three atte
mpts to arrange an exchange for Sorge and had been told every time that Moscow had no knowledge of him. Trepper, an unreliable narrator, is the only source for this story.34 There is no trace of such an offer in the Japanese archives.
Later, largely fictionalised Soviet accounts have Japanese foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu unexpectedly showing up to the Soviet embassy for a reception on the eve of Revolution Day, 6 November 1943, to offer Soviet ambassador Yakov Malik a last chance to save its agent. But Mikhail Ivanov, then a military attaché at the Soviet embassy in Tokyo, gives the lie to that story. Ivanov confirmed that Shigemitsu did indeed speak to Malik that night – but it was to urge continued friendly relations between Japan and the USSR as the tide of the war turned against Germany. Sorge was not mentioned.35
The day after Malik and Shigumitsu’s talk at the Soviet embassy was the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Great October Revolution, a day of celebration for communists all over the world. The Japanese authorities deemed it an appropriate moment for Sorge and Ozaki’s executions. Ichijima Seiichi, the governor of Sugamo prison, wore his full dress uniform with epaulettes, brass buttons, white gloves and police sword. Other officials were in formal morning dress, and the prison chaplain wore Buddhist robes. Ozaki was woken as usual as six, breakfasted on rice, bean soup, and pickles, and wrote a last postcard to his wife Eiko.
‘It is gradually getting colder,’ he wrote. ‘I am going to fight the cold bravely.’36
Ozaki refused the ceremonial tea and cakes, but did kneel to pray in front of an image of the Buddha while the priest intoned the mantra ‘The Three Promises of the Great Sutra of Constant Life’.37 He was led to the large execution chamber where the charges were read and he was hooded and placed on a trapdoor. Five prison officers operated the release mechanism so that no one of them would feel the guilt of having killed a man.
An Impeccable Spy Page 42
