by Max Hastings
Arrived in Brussels early in 1939, fresh from the GRU training school, Gourevitch took rooms in a lodging house, enrolled himself in a language school in his guise as a Uruguayan visitor, and reflected that his own absolute ignorance of commerce seemed likely to prove an impediment to his intended cover life, helping to run a locally based business. This concern receded, however, in the face of a more serious one: disillusionment on first meeting his boss, Leopold Trepper. Gourevitch had forged a heroic mental image of this secret agent so much esteemed by Moscow Centre, yet now he was confronted by what he afterwards claimed was a drab, unimposing reality. He had been briefed to suppose that a solid business cover had been established for ‘Otto’s’ network in Belgium, whereas on the spot he found only a little suburban export business employing just three people and peddling ‘the Foreign Excellent Trench-Coat’. Its secretary was a young Russian émigré, married to a former tsarist army officer, who was apparently completely ignorant of the real nature of the firm’s operations. All the managers were Jews, which must make them instantly vulnerable in the event of a German takeover of Belgium.
Gourevitch felt more confidence in his fellow-agent ‘Andre’, a thirty-five-year-old Alsatian named Leon Grossvogel, who had deserted from the French army in 1925, then drifted around Germany before travelling to Palestine, where he became a communist, and forged a friendship with Trepper. After three years there he returned to Belgium, where his parents lived and ran a small trading house named ‘Au Roi’. It was the presence of the Grossvogels that persuaded Trepper to come to Belgium, and to exploit their commercial contacts as a cover, when in 1938 Moscow charged him with the formation of a West European espionage organisation. His new deputy nonetheless decided that Trepper’s supposed network of important intelligence contacts was nothing of the sort. While large allowance must be made for the fact that Gourevitch published his version long after he himself was denounced as a traitor, the thrust of his remarks makes sense. Whatever Trepper’s tradecraft skills, together with his plausibility in composing reports which found favour in Moscow, it is hard to imagine what useful intelligence he could have acquired in low-grade Belgian and French business circles, the only society that he had access to. Centre seemed content to accept Trepper’s claim to have created a system through which material could be gathered and passed to Moscow from its Berlin sources in the event of war with Germany. But Gourevitch dismissed as ‘completely false’ the claims of post-war Soviet historians that Trepper ran a large network of important agents extending into Scandinavia.
On the eve of war, Moscow Centre could boast that the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack groups in Germany provided excellent information from the Nazis’ inner circle. The ‘Lucy’ Ring in Switzerland had established itself soundly, but only began to provide important intelligence from 1941 onwards. The Trepper–Gourevitch networks trod water until 1940. The extensive Soviet secret machine in the US, which will be described elsewhere, produced a steady stream of technological intelligence, which would have been more useful to the Russians in advancing their own defence base if their industries had been capable of exploiting it.
We have left to last the best of all Moscow’s men – or rather, the most spectacular. Richard Sorge grips the imagination of posterity, more because of what he was than through his influence on history, which was marginal. He dispatched to Moscow a flow of privileged political and strategic information, acquired through an access to high places achieved through sheer force of personality. Much of his material was ignored, however, or merely duplicated similar reports from more authoritative Berlin sources. Some historians who selectively quote Sorge’s occasional brilliant insights have ignored his misjudgements and false prophecies – ‘noise’. His character and career as an agent were nonetheless extraordinary.
‘Ika’, as Sorge was nicknamed, was born in Baku in 1895, one of nine children of a German petroleum engineer and a Russian mother. After completing school in Germany he found himself thrust into the Kaiser’s war as a young soldier. While convalescing in Königsberg after suffering a bad wound, he was indoctrinated into communist ideology, allegedly by the father of one of his nurses, though there was already a family precedent: Sorge’s grandfather had been an associate of Marx and Engels. When the war ended he became a Marxist instructor, and acquired a PhD in political science. In 1921 he married Christiane Gerlach, having persuaded her to abandon a previous husband. His communist and revolutionary links attracted the unfavourable attention of the police, and he found Germany becoming too hot to hold him. In 1924 the couple moved to Moscow, where Sorge was recruited and trained as a Soviet agent. Uncertainty persists about his movements in the next five years, though it is known that he visited Britain. Christiane left him, without the formality of a divorce – his immense appeal to women made him careless about whether they stayed or went. The combination of rough-hewn good looks and a hypnotic, driven personality enabled him to attract, and often to maintain in tandem, an impressive range of lovers of all shapes and sizes. Though sceptics later condemned Sorge as a charlatan as well as a betrayer – a fundamentally shallow figure despite his intellectual pretensions – he was a strikingly successful one.
In 1929 the Red Army’s Fourth Department – later the GRU – offered him an overseas assignment. He requested China, and arrived in Shanghai that November under cover as a freelance journalist, with a wireless-operator in tow. He achieved rapid social success in the European concessions, and made well-informed friends. Also agents. He himself was masquerading as an American, but dropped the pose with Agnes Smedley, the American China traveller, whom he enlisted in Moscow’s service. In 1930 he met twenty-nine-year-old Hotsumi Ozaki, a struggling magazine writer with communist sympathies, whom he also recruited and who played a notable part in his subsequent career. Like almost all those who worked with him, Ozaki fell under the foreigner’s spell. Long afterwards, another of his Japanese network said wonderingly of the superspy that Sorge became, ‘You meet a man like him only once in a lifetime.’ The GRU agent threw himself into researching every aspect of Chinese life, and his reports earned warm approval from his chiefs.
In January 1933 he returned to Moscow, where he ‘married’ again: a young Russian girl named Yekaterina Maximova – ‘Katcha’ – to whom he wrote emotional letters through the years that followed. He himself wanted to stay in Russia, but what use was a foreign spy in his employers’ own country? The GRU decided to post him to Tokyo. In preparation for this assignment, Sorge travelled to Germany, now Nazi-ruled, to secure appropriate credentials, and achieved another brilliant social and professional success, while somehow evading exposure of his communist past. He met the publisher of Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik, an ardent National Socialist, and secured from him both a contract as a ‘stringer’ and a letter of introduction to the German embassy in Tokyo.
He also gained the goodwill of the magazine’s founder, Karl Haushofer, a second ‘stringing’ arrangement with Täglische Rundschau, and a letter addressed to Lt. Col. Eugen Ott, a German officer serving an exchange term with a Japanese artillery regiment. The editor-in-chief urged Ott to ‘trust Sorge in everything; that is, politically, personally and otherwise’. Through these sponsors the spy pulled off a further coup: he became a member of the National Socialist Party. Thus armoured, this avowed Nazi set off for Tokyo via the United States with a wireless-operator, Bruno Wendt of the Red Army, carrying in his luggage a copy of the 1933 German Statistical Yearbook to provide the key for his coding. Sorge was thirty-eight, and on the threshold of one of the greatest espionage careers in history.
Arrived in Japan, with remarkable speed he established a relationship with the German ambassador Herbert von Dirksen, a Prussian aristocrat; and a much closer one with Colonel Ott, who embraced another former Frontsoldaten as kin. Sorge, with characteristic recklessness, promptly began an affair with Ott’s wife Helma, an Amazonian six-footer who was herself a former communist. This appears to have done no harm to the spy’s relationship with her husband
, who seemed, as he remained, mesmerised by his new friend. The colonel was an austere and unbending figure who perhaps saw qualities in Sorge which he envied, not least exuberance. The newcomer also ingratiated himself with the convivial and charming Captain Paul Wenneker, who joined the German mission in 1934 as naval attaché.
Sorge’s intimacy with the embassy won him some respect and attention from the Japanese, though at this stage the Tokyo government had by no means committed itself to an alliance with Hitler – German residents were subject to police surveillance as intrusive as that imposed on other foreigners. Sorge threw himself into acquiring information of all kinds about the country, its people, history and culture, forming a library of over a thousand books, though he never learned to read Japanese, nor even to speak it well. His sexual indiscretions would have earned censure in any spy school, but his management of the relationship with the German diplomatic community at the colonnaded and handsomely gardened embassy offered a masterclass in penetration. Despite his avowed National Socialist allegiance, he was gaily critical of German government policies.
At meetings with Dirksen and Ott – who was now transferred to become military attaché – Sorge appeared to provide as much information as he received. Indeed, they recognised that the journalist knew more about Japan than they did. He started to assist in the compilation of diplomatic reports for Berlin, and forged a long-distance relationship with the editor of the Nazi Party newspaper, contributing to its columns and attending local Tokyo branch meetings. Meanwhile, patiently and skilfully, Sorge built up his network of informants for Moscow. Hotsumi Ozaki, his old friend and source from Shanghai, was now a respected journalist in Osaka, whence he was able to transfer to Tokyo. In that pre-social-media universe, for the next two years Sorge was able to prevent Ozaki from discovering his real name: the German was known to him only as ‘Mr Johnson’, the American cover identity he had worn in his China days.
Another recruit, Yotoku Miyaki, was a painter born in 1903, whose family had moved to California when he was a child. The American Communist Party talent-spotted Miyaki for the Comintern, and the slightly-built young man was persuaded to move back to Japan, where he proved a superb agent. In keeping with Moscow’s stringent finance policies, though Miyaki received a salary from Sorge, he supplemented this through giving language lessons and selling his pictures, which commanded respectable prices. Another key Sorge subordinate was a Yugoslav-born journalist, Branko de Voukelitch. The Fourth Department peremptorily instructed Voukelitch to strengthen his cover by divorcing his wife Edith and marrying a Japanese woman. This the compliant agent duly did, confusing himself as well as his associates by falling sincerely in love with a well-born local girl, Yoshiko Yamasaki, who eventually married him.
It was a reflection of Colonel Ott’s intimacy with Sorge that when he toured Manchuria in 1934, he took along the Russian spy as his courier in the Nazi interest. Sorge subsequently ghosted Ott’s report to the army economic department, which won plaudits in Berlin. The following year, the Japanese police broke up another Soviet spy ring in Tokyo run by an American, John Sherman, a development which increased Moscow’s dependency on Sorge. He once said, ‘Spying work must be done bravely,’ and indeed he became a famous figure in Tokyo’s social, journalistic and diplomatic circles, careering about the city on a motorbike, drinking heroic quantities of alcohol, bedding every woman within his reach. He rented a two-storey Japanese-style house at 30 Nagasaki Machi, and Moscow kept him supplied with sufficient funds to sustain the rackety life he loved. He had a housekeeper who became devoted to him, together with a maid and a laundryman who were routinely quizzed by the police. But even the pathologically suspicious Japanese had no clue that Sorge might be a spy; they regarded him merely as an influential acolyte of the Nazis.
He performed a daily tour of newspaper offices and the German Club before making his way to the embassy, where he now spent so much time that he was provided with his own office in which to conduct research and prepare material for transmission to Berlin; privacy was also useful for photographing documents for Moscow. A German diplomat spoke later of Sorge as ‘a gay, dissolute adventurer with a brilliant mind and an unassailable conceit’. The spy wrote a memorably ironic letter to his Moscow ‘wife’ Katcha in 1937: ‘it is very hard, above all this solitude’.
It was indeed a ceaseless challenge for the Soviet agent to sustain a masquerade as a Nazi stooge while he partied and womanised. In the evenings he frequented a string of bars and clubs – Lohmeyer’s restaurant in the Ginza, which had a loyal German clientèle; the seedy little Fledermaus; and the Rheingold, whose proprietor Helmut Ketel was an ardent admirer of Hitler. It was there that Sorge met ‘Agnes’, one of many bar girls who fell for him. Agnes proved to have staying power. She was twenty-three, and her real name was Hanako Ishii. She became increasingly a fixture in his house, and he paid for her to take lessons to fulfil a cherished ambition to become a singer. But Sorge was no more faithful to Hanako than to any other woman: he conducted a long parallel relationship with Anita Mohr, wife of a locally based German businessman, who was described as a ‘blonde bombshell’. Hanako appears to have provided a convenience rather than an object of real affection.
Sorge’s priority was always service to Moscow. As the weight of GRU material increased, so did the difficulties of transmitting it. Wendt, his radioman, was incompetent, and Sorge insisted that a better man must be found. In 1935 the spy left Tokyo, supposedly on holiday, bound for the United States. From there he travelled covertly to the Soviet Union, to confer with his chiefs and sort out the communications issues. In Moscow he was rebriefed about priorities, foremost among which was to explore Japan’s intentions towards the Soviet Union. Thereafter, in descending order he was ordered to study the Japanese army and industry; policies in China; positioning towards Britain and the US.
Soon after Sorge’s return to Tokyo, a new wireless-operator and courier joined him from Moscow. Max Clausen held officer’s rank in the Red Army. To provide cover he established a blueprint-copying business in Tokyo, which became a notably profitable pet project. Clausen’s first intelligence task was to build his own wireless set, common practice among agents in countries to which it was deemed too difficult or dangerous to dispatch a professionally constructed one. He used a domestic radio receiver, attached the transmitter to a Bakelite panel mounted on a wooden box, and wound tuning coils from copper tubing intended for motor manufacture. In the absence of instruments to measure wavelengths, Clausen transmitted on a 37–39 metre band, and received on 45–48.
Sorge persuaded a friend and fellow-journalist, Gunther Stein, to allow the Soviet operator to message Moscow from his flat. Stein initially recoiled from accepting this appalling risk, but eventually assented. Since Clausen dared not set up an external aerial, he stretched two copper-stranded wires, seven metres in length, around the room from which he transmitted. Stein also became a useful informant for the Sorge ring, exploiting friendships he had formed at the British embassy. So too did Torao Shinotsuka, owner of a small military-equipment factory in Kansai, who provided extensive material on military aircraft and naval armaments. Anna Clausen, Max’s adored wife, arrived in Tokyo from Moscow to share the wireless-operator’s hazardous existence.
The Soviet network’s membership thus expanded at a period when Japan was entering a period of paranoia about foreign espionage, and reinforcing its domestic security agencies. In 1936 there was a bad moment when Tokyo police arrested Taikichi Kawai at the request of their Manchurian counterparts. Kawai had been an informant of ‘Mr Johnson’ in Shanghai. In captivity he was brutally interrogated. Unlike most agents under torture, however, he gave away nothing significant. Sorge’s luck held. His work was giving the highest satisfaction to both of its beneficiaries, Moscow Centre and the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. The latter was especially delighted by a report which he compiled on the 1936 Japanese army revolt, but which he insisted should circulate among the Nazi hierarchy only under the coy initials
‘RS’, because he remained fearful of a Gestapo investigation of his political past.
He helped Ott and Dirksen draft a cable to Berlin, asking for information about a rumoured German–Japanese negotiation. Sorge sought to promote Moscow’s agenda by urging on the German embassy team the view that such an alliance would be mistaken, and rooted in absurd rumours that Stalin’s fall was imminent. He published an article on the Japanese army in Die Wehrmacht magazine. His reputation with the Tokyo embassy and with Berlin soared after the fulfilment of his prediction that Japan’s war in China would prove protracted. More important, however, was the mass of information about Japanese deployments on the Soviet border which Ott provided to Sorge, who swiftly forwarded it to the GRU. Moscow also professed appreciation of industrial data delivered by Hotsumi Ozaki at monthly restaurant meetings. The journalist had become influential in government circles, and correspondingly well-informed: for a time he even served in the Japanese prime minister’s office as an expert on China. Even though he lost that role when the government changed in 1939, he secured a new job as a Tokyo-based researcher for Japan’s Kwantung army in Manchuria.
In 1938 Herbert von Dirksen was invalided home. His successor as ambassador was none other than Colonel Ott. Sorge thenceforward found himself drafting the German embassy’s dispatches for Berlin, while transmitting his own to Moscow. On his forty-third birthday he was presented with a signed photograph of Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop as a token of Berlin’s appreciation for his services. No foreign penetration of a British diplomatic mission could be compared in significance with that achieved by Sorge of Hitler’s Tokyo embassy. When a Russian general defected to Tokyo in 1938, the spy was immediately able to warn Moscow that its codes were compromised. In May 1939, when tensions on the Russo–Japanese border erupted into local clashes, thanks to Ozaki Sorge could tell Moscow authoritatively that the Japanese had no intention of escalating the ‘Nomohan Incident’ into a wider war. On this issue as on many others, however, doubts persist about the use made of his material. Sorge supposedly gave the Soviets detailed Japanese order-of-battle information, but Georgi Zhukov as the Red Army’s local commander complained bitterly about the absence of such data. It seems likely either that Sorge later exaggerated his own contribution, or that the GRU failed to pass on his material.