by Max Hastings
Beria and Stalin nonetheless agreed that there was alternative evidence to show this to be mere sabre-rattling: Hitler was making a show of force on Russia’s border to advance his Balkan purposes. A 20 March 1941 GRU assessment by Gen. Filip Golikov stated what he knew his readership wished to hear: ‘The majority of the intelligence reports which indicate the likelihood of war with the Soviet Union in spring 1941 are derived from Anglo-American sources, whose immediate objective is undoubtedly to promote the worsening of relations between the USSR and Germany.’ The Swedish minister in Moscow, Vilhelm Assarasson, was consistently well informed about Nazi decision-making, and knew about the commitment to ‘Barbarossa’. But Assarasson’s tip was discounted, because it was forwarded to the Kremlin by Stafford Cripps, the British envoy. The NKVD intercepted the dispatches of Turkish ambassador Haydar Aktay, who also cited Assarasson’s information, along with reports of Hitler’s indiscretions to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, predicting war. Aktay’s view was also dismissed.
In March Soviet intelligence suffered a shock. Moscow considered it an important interest to keep Yugoslavia out of Hitler’s grasp. When it became aware that Prince Paul, the ruling regent, intended to throw in his lot with the Axis, Gen. Solomon Milshtein and a band of GRU ‘illegals’ were dispatched to Belgrade to organise a coup against him. They were confounded when Britain’s SOE pre-empted them, launching its own coup to install King Peter II. Moscow was even more appalled a few days later, when the Wehrmacht swept across Yugoslavia in the face of negligible resistance. Yet even though the Russians sympathised with its people, as fellow-Slavs, Stalin dismissed their pleas for military assistance. He remained stubbornly determined not to be provoked by the British – as he saw it – into an armed struggle against Germany over Yugoslavia. He merely signed a meaningless non-aggression agreement with Belgrade, shortly before German troops swept its new government aside. He had set a course – to buy time before confronting Hitler – and was determined nothing should deflect him from it, least of all the intelligence reports that swamped Moscow Centre between September 1940 and June 1941.
It is hard to assess the contribution of Soviet agents in Switzerland at this time, because modern knowledge is almost entirely dependent on the principals’ later memoirs. All were compulsive liars, bent upon inflating their own roles. Thus, what follows is even more speculative than most accounts of Russian activities. The onset of war had created financial and logistical difficulties for Alexander Radó. There was no Soviet legation in Bern through which cash could be channelled to him, and his cartographic business languished. He was left with little money to fund himself and his family, far less a spy network. Alexander Foote, trained by Ursula Hamburger to serve as Radó’s wireless-operator, was striving with equally meagre funds to sustain a masquerade as a British gentleman of leisure, hoping to sit out the war in the comfort of Lausanne. Wireless assumed a new importance for the network after the fall of France, because Radó could no longer use couriers to shift paper reports via Paris. To provide greater security for the Ring’s communications, he opened a second transmitter operated by a Geneva electrical engineer named Edmond Hamel, who was trained by Foote. Hamel inspired mockery because he was a very small man married to a very large wife, Olga, but he cherished an idealistic enthusiasm for the Soviet Union.
In March 1940, Moscow ordered Anatoli Gourevitch – ‘Monsieur Kent’ – to travel from Brussels to Geneva to hand over a new code to ‘Dora’ – Radó. This was a breach of every rule of espionage, barring contact and thus the risk of contamination between networks, but the GRU man was pleased to be given such an opportunity to spread his wings. As a supposed rich young ‘Uruguayan tourist’, Vincente Sierra commissioned Thomas Cook to make his arrangements, and took a fat book of travellers’ cheques to support his cover. On the train from Paris to Geneva, a man who looked familiar took the seat opposite him. Gourevitch was amazed when his companion introduced himself as Jean Gabin, greatest French film star of the age, on his way to Geneva to see his son make his debut as a circus performer. The two exchanged visiting cards. The enchanted young Russian decided that being a secret agent had many compensations.
Installed in Geneva’s Hôtel Russie, he divided his time between tourism, nightclub visits to support his cover, and a cautious reconnaissance of 113, Rue de Lausanne, the address Centre had given him for Radó. He called the Hungarian’s number from a telephone box, then went to a cinema and left in the middle of the film, to walk to Radó’s house. He was welcomed warmly, but with surprise, according to Gourevitch. The visitor later claimed that he had been bemused by Radó’s ‘careless air’, and by the agent’s claim that, despite the depredations inflicted by war, he still had some money because his map business was not doing badly. Radó introduced his wife Lena, then the two men closeted themselves in his study. Gourevitch handed over a French novel which provided the new key for coding messages. Over the course of the next few hours they practised the routine repeatedly, until both were satisfied that Radó had mastered it. Then they parted, agreeing to meet again in Lausanne, which was conveniently near Montreux, where the ‘Uruguayan tourist’ had booked a stay of several days. Following this second meeting they lunched together in a restaurant, then wandered the streets.
Most Russians abroad suffered severely from homesickness. When Soviet agents met and had leisure enough to gossip, the first question to a man or woman fresh from Moscow was almost always ‘What news from “the village”?’, as they called their own country. Though Radó was Hungarian, according to Gourevitch they talked indiscreetly about each other’s experiences of Centre. Radó allegedly begged his contact to emphasise to Moscow the lofty nature of his sources in Berlin. The Geneva agent also told him the Germans were planning to attack the Soviet Union. Yet it is implausible that in April 1940 Radó should have said Germany was preparing to invade Russia, because at that time Hitler had made no such decision, nor even come near to it. What seems certain, however, is that Centre was rash in sending Gourevitch to Geneva, and that its spies told each other things they should not have done, dangerous to both networks.
At the end of December 1940 Ursula Hamburger left Switzerland for England, where her German communist brother was already living in exile. She was soon followed by her husband Len Brewer. Her set – a ‘musical box’ in their jargon, just as a forger was a ‘cobbler’ and police ‘the doctor’ – was taken to Geneva. Alexander Foote moved back to Lausanne with his own transmitter. It was too dangerous to install an external aerial on his apartment building. Instead, he persuaded a nearby wireless shop to supply the deficiency, saying that he wanted to listen to the BBC. For months, however, he proved unable to raise Moscow. Despite passing countless hours hunched over a Morse key in the kitchen, his urgent pulses vanished into a void. Then on 12 March 1941 came an electrifying moment: into his earphones flickered a response ‘NDA, NDA, OK, QRK5.’ He was in touch with Centre.
Swiss intelligence must have been aware of the Radó group’s transmissions, but at that stage they made no attempt to interfere, even when the Gestapo protested fiercely to Bern about the flood of signals its operators monitored from across the border. The spies now boasted a third transmitter: Radó had met a young woman named Margrit Bolli, daughter of strongly socialistic parents, who said that she was eager to help the communist cause. The Ring trained the twenty-three-year-old girl in Morse technique. Initially she transmitted from the family home in Basle, but when her parents not unreasonably baulked, she moved to Geneva. The Gestapo, listening in frustration to the signals – still unintelligible to them – flooding across the ether from Bolli, Foote and the Hamels christened them ‘Die Rote Drei’ – ‘The Red Trio’.
Who was giving Radó the information from Germany which was forwarded to Moscow in an average of five messages a day? The activities of ‘Cissie’, Rachel Dübendorfer, had now been merged into those of his group. Colleagues described her as a charmless woman of Balkan origins. She lived with Paul Böttcher, a former German co
mmunist illegally resident in Switzerland: Dübendorfer more than once used her nominal Swiss husband’s identity documents to preserve Böttcher’s neck. It is alleged that one of her sources provided an explicit warning of ‘Barbarossa’. Meanwhile one of Radó’s messages, dated 21 February 1941, quoted a Swiss intelligence officer, Mayr von Baldegg or ‘Luise’, predicting a German invasion at the end of May, a forecast perhaps secured by the Swiss Viking intelligence network inside Germany, and endorsed by a prominent Japanese diplomat. The network also became a conduit through which some Czech intelligence was passed to Moscow, most of it ultimately derived from the Abwehr’s Paul Thummel. At the end of May Radó cited a French diplomat, Louis Suss, predicting an invasion on 22 June – this message provoked an icy response from Moscow. So did another report to the same effect from Rudolf Rössler, who would henceforward become the foremost source for the Radó network. His codename ‘Lucy’ has passed into history, since the GRU’s Swiss operation became familiarly known as the ‘Lucy’ Ring.
Rössler, a small, grey, bespectacled German émigré born in 1897, was an impregnably enigmatic figure, of a kind that populates many spy sagas. A socialist journalist, he fled from the Nazis in 1935 and set up a little publishing business in Lucerne – the city that prompted his codename. He began writing under the name of R.A. Hermes, describing the Nazi persecution of Jews and warning that the Nazis would reoccupy the Rhineland. Berlin identified ‘Hermes’, and in 1937 deprived Rössler of his German citizenship. He nonetheless retained many connections in his homeland, especially within the Wehrmacht. Short of both friends and cash in Switzerland, he began to provide information to a private intelligence agency called Buro Ha, based at the Villa Stutz south of Lucerne, and run by an ardent anti-Nazi named Captain Hans Hausamann. Buro Ha had informal links to Swiss intelligence, which for a season thereafter provided some protection for Rössler.
He secured a steady flow of information from Germany, and apportioned varying quotas to Swiss, British, Czech and Soviet purchasers. Though his anti-Nazi credentials were not in doubt, he was principally and of necessity a mercenary – all his customers had to pay cash. By 1942 he had become by far the GRU’s most important Swiss source, the key figure in the Radó network. Moscow Centre, mistrustful of this shadowy figure, insistently demanded that Radó should make Rössler identify his sources, and the journalist equally stubbornly refused to do so. For all his later importance, it remains unclear how much intelligence he provided in 1941. Rössler went to his post-war grave still silent about the identity of the Germans who had provided him with useful, even sensational material. Subsequent speculation has focused on Col. Hans Oster, deputy head of the Abwehr; Hans Gisevius; former Leipzig mayor Gördeler; and two unnamed Wehrmacht generals.
Uncertainty also persists about the timing and wording of some of the Swiss Ring’s messages and their supposed warnings to Moscow, both before and after ‘Barbarossa’. All that can confidently be said is that the GRU received a stream of messages from Switzerland in the spring of 1941, some of which strongly indicated that Hitler intended to attack Russia. Equally significant for the strategic debate in Moscow, Centre learned that Rudolf Rössler had been, and probably continued to be, an informant of MI6’s Bern station. It was only one step from this knowledge to a belief inside the Kremlin that the ‘Lucy’ Ring had become an instrument of Churchill, peddling false information to drag Russia into the war.
2 SORGE’S WARNINGS
Stalin’s Japanese sources told much the same story as his Swiss ones, though since the outbreak of war in Europe the strain of sustaining twin lives, occupying a much higher profile than the ‘Lucy’ spies, had exacted an ever worsening toll on its principal agent. Richard Sorge strove to use his influence to dissuade the Germans from war with Russia. He told the Tokyo embassy that Nomonhan – the summer 1939 Russo–Japanese border clashes – had been a disaster for the Japanese, and that Berlin should notice the effectiveness of the Red Army and of Zhukov, its local commander. Then came the huge shock of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, which stunned the Japanese government.
And Sorge. The spy reported on 12 August 1939 the movement of twelve Japanese divisions to Korea and Manchuria – the real total was twenty – in case the government decided on war, but he expressed his own conviction that Japan would hold back, and indeed on 4 September Tokyo formally announced a policy of non-intervention. Sorge told Moscow, on Hotsumi Ozaki’s authority, that the country would enter the war only when it was confident that it had identified the winner. He added that the German embassy expected the Japanese to remain neutral, and was even nervous they might join the Allied camp.
Sorge’s surreal relationship with Col. Ott’s mission took a new twist when he was offered a staff post as its press attaché. He declined, as usual because he was fearful of the security checks into his past that acceptance would have provoked, but he worked four hours a day in the embassy building, while assuming a new journalistic role as a stringer for Frankfurter Zeitung. It was scarcely surprising that in October the Japanese police foreign section, the Tokko, committed an agent – twenty-eight-year-old Harutsugu Saito – to shadow Sorge. They suspected that he was spying … for Germany. Saito noticed Max Clausen and began to take an interest in him, too.
During the months that followed, stresses on the network intensified. Branko de Voukelitch disclosed his work for the Soviets to his adored Japanese lover Yoshiko. In 1940 the couple were married, and she never betrayed him, but his indiscretion was appallingly risky. Max Clausen became grossly overweight, and his health deteriorated. Bedridden for some time, he had to get his wife Anna to assemble the transmitter before tapping out messages to Moscow from his sickroom. His employers were unsympathetic. Clausen was peremptorily informed by the Fourth Department that funding was tight: pay was being reduced. His little blueprint reproduction company employed fourteen people, had opened a branch in Mukden and was fulfilling assignments for the Japanese War and Navy Ministries. Moscow said that he must henceforth subsidise himself out of its profits. In a farcical twist, Clausen became increasingly admiring of Hitler – who was, after all, now supposedly Stalin’s friend.
But the radioman kept sending: in 1940 he transmitted sixty times, sending 29,179 words of Sorge’s wisdom. Prominent among the spy’s scoops was the draft of a proposed Japan–China peace treaty. It was deemed a vital Soviet interest to keep the China war going, because its termination would free the Japanese army to strike at Russia. When the treaty leaked and the draft was torn up, Sorge was also able to supply the substitute version – though this, too, remained unsigned. From the German embassy he secured data on the Mitsubishi and Nakajima aircraft factories. He provided accurate forecasts on Japan’s aggressive intentions towards French Indochina. He was not infallible, however, and gave Moscow some cause for scepticism. He predicted, for instance, that the British would reject Tokyo’s demand for closure of the Burma Road supply route to China shortly before they did so for three months. As is so often the case with intelligence, Sorge’s original report was not mistaken: Churchill simply changed his mind.
By the end of 1940, Sorge’s standing was higher in Berlin than in the Kremlin. Indeed, the excellence of his reports for the Nazis almost caused his undoing: Schellenberg of the RSHA ran a security check which revealed his communist past. The Gestapo’s Joseph Meisinger was posted to Tokyo as embassy security officer, with orders to look closely at Sorge, though as yet the Nazis had no suspicion of his supreme duplicity. Meisinger was ill-equipped for his task: a creature of Reinhard Heydrich, he was a thug whose reputation rested upon a few months of orchestrating brutality in Warsaw. Much more serious for the spy ring was the fact that some of its principal members were breaking down. Though Sorge sustained his journalistic career, penning fifty-one articles for Frankfurter Zeitung in the first six months of 1941, his nerves were shredded. His drinking worsened, and Hanako found him an increasingly violent lover. When she sobbed and begged him to explain himself, he responded sullenly, ‘I am
lonely.’ She said, ‘How can this be, when you have so many German friends here in Tokyo?’ He muttered, ‘They are not my true friends.’ In a September 1940 signal to Moscow, he said that he was forty-four years old and desperately tired. He yearned to be allowed to go ‘home’ to Russia, though he must have known that Centre would never countenance this until the war ended.
Max Clausen became too sick to keep pace with transmission of Sorge’s flood of material, and began secretly to destroy unsent a substantial proportion, arbitrarily selected. Thus, while it is known what information Sorge claimed to have passed on to the Fourth Department, it is unclear what actually reached them in 1941: Russian releases of some of his material in the 1990s must be treated with caution, because selective. From the end of 1940 onwards, Sorge was personally convinced that Germany and the Soviet Union would go to war. He was deeply troubled by the prospect, and by its implications for himself. During the early months of 1941 he reported an increasing Japanese focus on a ‘Strike south’ strategy against the European Asian empires. On 10 March he wrote of German pressure on Japan ‘to invigorate her role in the Tripartite Pact’ by attacking the Soviet Union. But Sorge added that this war would only start ‘once the present one is over’.
In May he asserted that Hitler was resolved ‘to crush the Soviet Union and keep the European parts … in his hands’, but suggested that there was still scope for diplomacy to prevent war. Later that month he said that his German contacts expected an invasion to be launched before June, but then added that some important visitors from Berlin believed that the prospect of such action taking place in 1941 had receded. Both these signals probably reflected Sorge’s conversations with Lt. Col. Schol, a Wehrmacht officer passing through Tokyo en route to taking up the post of military attaché in Bangkok. On 30 May he wirelessed: ‘Berlin has informed Ambassador Ott that the German offensive against the USSR will begin in the second half of June. Ott is 95 per cent sure that the war will begin. The indirect proofs that I see at the present are as follows: The Luftwaffe technical delegation in [Tokyo] has been ordered home. Ott has requested the military attaché to halt the transmission of important documents via the USSR. The shipment of rubber via the USSR has been reduced to a minimum.’