An Impeccable Spy

by Owen Matthews

  Chiang Kai-shek’s German-trained army enjoyed superior weaponry and discipline. But for the moment they were distracted by infighting between provincial regimes that until recently had been part of the Nationalist coalition. Smedley reported that the bands of armed communist partisans fighting government forces were poorly equipped, with a single rifle to every five to ten men and their ammunition limited to what they could capture from the enemy. Sorge passed on Smedley’s reports of the weakness of these communist irregulars to Moscow Centre. He also reported that, according to his German officer contacts, Chiang Kai-shek was training a force of 20,000 model troops in Nanking, bribing opponents and preparing for a major offensive against the communists once he had crushed all Nationalist opposition closer to home.

  Nonetheless, in Shanghai the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo, Li Li-san, saw a chance to press their advantage while the Nationalists fought their private civil war. Moscow and the Comintern, insisting that China’s revolution would be hatched in the cities and not, as Mao believed, by holding the countryside, officially encouraged Li Li-san to try to seize a major urban centre. The target was to be Canton (modern Guangzhou), capital of Kwangtung (Guangdong) province, close to Mao’s power base and a large industrial city apparently ripe for a Bolshevik-style coup.

  On 9 May 1930, Sorge set off for Canton with Gorin’s radio man, Max Clausen. Smedley followed them a week later. Chen Han-seng, the young communist who worked as Smedley’s translator, wrote a memoir written half a century later in which he loyally repeated their cover story: the couple travelled south ‘to celebrate their honeymoon in Hong Kong’.37 In truth, of course, Sorge went to Canton on orders from Ulanovsky and in the company of Clausen in order to establish covert radio contact between this new cradle of revolution and Shanghai and Vladivostok.

  Clausen had been a member of Gorin’s Fourth Department team in Shanghai since the autumn of 1928. According to Berzin’s original instructions to the Ulanovsky-Sorge group – to break off all contact with the old, supposedly compromised bureau – Clausen should have been sent home. Instead, like so many of Centre’s sensible intentions, security was put aside in favour of operational convenience. Sepp Weingarten was, quite simply, proving an incompetent radio operator. Clausen was an excellent one.

  Max Christiansen-Clausen – codenamed ‘Hans’, following the Fourth Department’s quaint but insecure practice of giving all German agents German nicknames – was born in 1899 into the family of a poor bricklayer on the tiny Frisian island of Nordstrand. He joined the German Imperial Army in 1917 and trained as an electrical engineer, erecting radio masts across northern Germany. The following year he became a field radio operator and was deployed to the defence of Metz and Compiègne before succumbing to a botched German gas attack at Château-Thierry that left him coughing blood for a month. Like Sorge, Clausen’s lifelong socialism was born of his profound anger at the waste and horror of the war. Clausen attempted to desert but was arrested and spent time in a military brig. In the aftermath of the Armistice in November 1918, Clausen and a friend made their way to Hamburg, where he got a job in the Merchant Navy. By 1922 Clausen had become a prominent activist in the German Seaman’s Union, was briefly imprisoned for organising a seamen’s strike in Stettin, and on his release joined the German Communist Party’s Red Army organisation.

  Clausen first visited the USSR in 1924 aboard a German sailing ship that was being delivered to the Soviet government at the Arctic port of Murmansk. He spent a week at the International Seamen’s Club in Petrograd and liked what he saw of the workers’ paradise. On his return to Hamburg, Karl Lesse, officially head of the International Seamen’s Trade Union but in fact a Comintern operative, recruited Clausen to smuggle revolutionary literature on board merchant vessels.38 His skill at this clandestine work earned Max an invitation to Moscow in September 1928 – just as Sorge had been headhunted from the German party three years previously. But, unlike his future boss, Clausen was not destined for the intellectual salons of Moscow. The Fourth Department sent Clausen for training in constructing and operating short-wave radios at the Fourth Department’s Technical School in suburban Moscow, where he studied alongside Weingarten. In October 1928 he was sent to join Gorin’s apparat in Shanghai.39

  Under the cover name of ‘Willi Lehmann’, Clausen set up a household goods shop in the International Settlement using the Fourth Department’s money. Clausen may have been a dedicated communist, but he was to show a natural flair for business that would later become a fatal conflict of interest with his masters in Moscow. Demonstrating impressive technical skill, he constructed a portable radio set with a tiny 7.5-watt transmitter capable of making contact with Vladivostok – codename ‘Wiesbaden’ – which he carried around Shanghai in a leather suitcase.

  Gorin had been pleased with his new radio man’s talents, but less so with Clausen’s relationship with Anna Zhdankova, a White Russian émigré he had met in Shanghai. Anna was born in Novonikolaevsk (now Novosibirsk) in 1897 into the family of a tanner. At the age of eighteen she married Eduard Wallenius, a Finnish leather workshop owner, who later bought a flour mill in Seimapaltinsk in the Kazakh steppes. The Walleniuses lived a comfortable bourgeois life before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 forced them into exile. The couple emigrated to Shanghai along with tens of thousands of other refugees, fleeing the Bolsheviks with nothing more than they could carry in their suitcases. After her husband died in 1927, Anna found work as a nurse. By the time she met Clausen in 1929 – she had placed a classified advertisement to let out her attic, which Max answered – Anna Wallenius had developed a deep loathing of communists. She had no idea that her new lodger, and future husband, was a Soviet spy.

  Centre disapproved of the relationship on the entirely sensible grounds that no agent could be expected to maintain the secret of his double life in his own home. The fact that the Shanghai apparat’s main secret transmitter was concealed in her attic without Anna’s knowledge was also a major security risk. But Clausen stood firm. After his arrival in Shanghai, Sorge – in contrast to his later habit of putting his colleagues’ personal lives second to the needs of the apparat – also defied Centre by backing the talented radio operator. Sorge had met and liked Anna Wallenius and believed that she could be talked into sympathy for the cause. It would be six years before Moscow gave its blessing for Clausen officially to marry, and ten before Sorge would be proved disastrously wrong about where Anna’s true loyalties lay.

  So the Fourth Department apparat that assembled in Canton in May 1930 was a curious group. Sorge himself was posing as Richard Johnson, an American journalist. His lover Agnes Smedley was a conspirator posing as a neutral reporter. Clausen was under cover as a businessman, and Anna Wallenius was an innocent unaware of her lover’s role as a secret agent. Also accompanying the team was Konstantin Mishin, a White Russian who had been recruited as an additional radio operator by Gorin and whom Centre had declared politically unreliable – but was brought along anyway for want of any other qualified personnel.

  The group rented several properties around Canton. Clausen leased two houses from the British consulate in the city’s British Concession for himself and Sorge, while Smedley rented an apartment at her own expense in the Chinese area of Tungshan. Smedley’s flat was modest in size but had sufficient space for a darkroom. This was for Sorge, who would need such a space to photograph documents, prepare microfilms, and establish the wireless station that was the key mission of his trip.40

  Smedley clearly hoped that her little apartment would become a kind of home for her and her dashing lover. ‘You may think the two chairs express a hope or a reality,’ she wrote to her friend Karin Michaelis. ‘Oh well – far be it from me to contradict a woman who knows so much about women as you do.’41 She tried to hide her desire for a more exclusive attachment with brash statements like ‘no man will ever get his hooks in me again’. But her need for a deep and lasting love, as she confessed in her letters to Michaelis, remained
.42 (Clausen never thought much of her: ‘the only impression I have of [Smedley] is that she was a hysterical, conceited woman’, he recalled.)43

  By late summer Clausen had succeeded in establishing radio contact between Canton and Vladivostok – albeit with a much more powerful, and therefore less portable and therefore more vulnerable, 50-watt transmitter.44 Smedley undertook arduous reporting trips into the Chinese interior, visiting villages of impoverished silk workers whose worldly possessions consisted of just ‘a clay stove, narrow bench, table, and a few cooking utensils and cocoon frames’. She wrote movingly in the Modern Review on the usurious interest rates peasants paid to moneylenders that sometimes led to families selling their children into servitude. Meanwhile Sorge was making good use of Smedley’s contacts to recruit a network of Chinese helpers. Her secretary, Chen Han-seng, introduced him to a ‘Mrs Etui’, a Kwangtung native, and another Cantonese comrade, who both began providing Sorge with military and political reports on the situation in south China.

  Sorge, a trained spy with solid cover, was able to stay under the radar screen of the British police in Canton. The famous socialist Smedley, however, had a harder time maintaining a low profile. She discovered in July that the Chinese authorities in Shanghai had warned officials in Canton to keep an eye on her, on suspicion that she was engaging in communist propaganda. A censor was assigned to monitor her mail. ‘This is a warning for future letters,’ she instructed Florence Sanger on 19 July 1930. ‘George and Mary’ – Smedley’s nickname for the British police – ‘are again hot on the trail of my letters. Refer no more to lovers and revolutions, etc.’. She headed to the American consulate general in Canton to renew her American passport and seek the protection of the consul general, Douglas Jenkins. Smedley protested her surveillance by Chinese police, and warned a startled Jenkins (as he reported to Washington) that she was ‘afraid of being shot in the back’.45 As soon as Smedley had left his office, Jenkins cabled a request to the US Secretary of State to ascertain at once whether she was indeed a communist agent, as local authorities claimed.

  Three days later, as police in Canton cracked down in anticipation of a widespread communist uprising, Smedley once again appeared at Jenkins’s office to report that her apartment had been invaded and rifled by armed police who had seized various papers. She insisted that Jenkins return home with her. Finding two policemen still there, the diplomat ordered them to leave. The search had unearthed nothing more compromising than a parcel full of the current issue of the League of Left-Wing Writers’ Journal. Smedley was not an official member of the apparat and – fortunately for Sorge – no confidential material had been kept at her apartment. Nonetheless, quite apart from personal considerations, Sorge’s lover was too valuable an asset, and knew too much, for Sorge to allow her to be arrested and interrogated by the notoriously brutal Chinese police.

  Sorge’s solution was ingenious, a tribute both to the efficiency of Canton’s radio communications and the respect in which Agent Ramsay was then held in Moscow. On 7 August, by Sorge’s request, an article by no less a luminary than Karl Radek, head of the International Information Bureau of the Russian Communist Party’s Central Committee, appeared in the official party newspaper Izvestia. Radek denounced Smedley as ‘the bourgeois correspondent of an imperialist newspaper’ and attacked her for spreading erroneous stories about outrages that China’s Red armies were perpetrating upon the country’s poor in order to ‘create sympathy for its landowners, usurers, merchants, and officials’.46 The charge was quite false. But the deliberate libel helped Smedley distance herself from any links to Moscow.

  The day before the Izvestia article, Smedley had signed an affidavit at the American consulate to the effect that she was neither a communist (which was clearly not true), nor a member of the communist party nor any other political party (which was). She also swore that she was not in any way connected with the Communist International, and denied any involvement in communist agitation, Bolshevik propaganda, or any subversive activity directed against the Nanking government – which was all, again, a lie.47 We know from the correspondence of the Comintern’s Far Eastern Bureau that Smedley had declared to its chief, Ignatii Rylsky, as early as 20 March that her ‘journalistic accreditation was just a cover and she was in reality a representative of the anti-Imperialist league and has money to give to Chinese Communists for this work’.48 The only other part of her statement that was, surprisingly enough, perfectly correct was Smedley’s avowal that she had not been paid a dime either by the USSR or the Comintern for her efforts.49

  Despite this upset, Sorge’s Canton mission continued to produce impressive results. With the help of Smedley’s friends, Sorge reported to Moscow on troop movements, military manoeuvres, command structures, the creation of an eight-aircraft strong Nationalist air force in Canton, the whereabouts of German instructors, and the progress of the communist-led peasant insurgency. On 1 August 1930 the communist leader Li Li-sang finally seized a major city – Changsha in Hunan province – just as Moscow had encouraged him to do – and declared a Soviet government there. Just as Mao predicted, it proved a fatal mistake. Within a fortnight Nationalist gunboats, backed by the British and Americans, had destroyed the Red forces and summarily executed over two thousand communists. Sorge reported to Moscow; Smedley wrote for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Both were in their element. Smedley, at least, was blissfully happy.

  ‘Never have I known such good days, never have I known such a healthy life, mentally, physically, psychically,’ Smedley wrote to a friend. ‘I consider this completion, and when it is ended, I’ll be lonelier than all the love in the magazines could never make me.’50 But Sorgie and Smedley’s romantic Canton idyll would soon be shattered – precisely as she had predicted – just weeks after she wrote her heart-breaking letter. On 3 September, Sorge was urgently called back to Shanghai. Ulanovsky’s cover had been blown. The bureau chief was fleeing for his life.

  *It is unlikely that Sorge expected the American Smedley to genuinely believe that he was her fellow-countryman, further proof that Smedley had already been signed up by the OMS.

  5

  The Manchurian Incident

  ‘I was in ecstasy from this ride and shouted to him to ride faster’

  Ursula Kuczynski (alias Ruth Werner)

  Ulanovsky’s tenure as head of the Shanghai apparat had not begun well when the genial Brits to whom he had boasted of his arms-dealing mission on the boat from Marseilles turned out to be British policemen. But in truth his mission was doomed long before he ever boarded the ship.

  A time bomb was ticking under Ulanovsky’s career in China. It had been laid in 1927, when Ulanovsky had visited the northern Chinese port of Hankow as part of an official Soviet delegation of the Pacific Secretariat of Trade Unions. While in Hankow, Ulanovsky had not exactly hung back from the limelight. Using his own name, he had chatted with dozens of comrades, Soviet and Chinese, and had given a speech to a packed conference at U-Hang alongside Solomon Lozovsky, secretary of the Trades Unions International. It was only a matter of time, therefore, that an old acquaintance from Hankow days would run into the man posing as the Czech citizen ‘Kirschner’ on the streets of Shanghai and recognise him as a Soviet official.

  Precisely that happened with tragicomic immediacy on one of Ulanovsky’s first forays into Shanghai’s nightlife, a couple of weeks after his arrival. In the Arcadia nightclub the hapless rezident bumped into a German merchant who remembered him well.1 Ulanovsky could scarcely claim mistaken identity, as he and the German had shared a train compartment on the seven-day trip from Moscow to Vladivostok back in 1927. The businessman had even attended his Hankow speech. Ulanovsky reported sheepishly to Centre that this unfortunate meeting had rendered his Czech ‘boot’ – the Soviet spies’ jargon for a false identity – a liability. He suggested avoiding the German community as a precaution. Sadly for Ulanovsky’s career, this was his chief source of information. He was forced to fall back to scouring independent Chinese newsp
apers like the left-wing Gemin Jibao for information. But even this meagre resource was cut off when a new wave of censorship shut down most of the non-official press in early summer, 1930. Foreigners were also placed under close police watch, Ulanovsky reported to Centre; all post was examined and mass searches and arrests made spying extremely difficult. While Sorge was hobnobbing with German officers and senior Chinese communists, Ulanovsky had become a lame duck almost from the outset of his tour.

  Worse was to come. On another ill-advised sortie outside his front door, Ulanovsky was immediately spotted by another old acquaintance from Hankow, a man currently styling himself Captain Evgeny Pik. Also known by at least a dozen aliases, Pik – born Evgeny Kozhevnikov – had already distinguished himself in a city filled with unscrupulous adventurers as a one-man opéra bouffe of skulduggery.

  The son of an Astrakhan merchant, Kozhevnikov had been taken prisoner during the First World War and joined the Red Army on his return from German captivity to Russia in 1918. Thereafter he pursued an unusual combination of careers, studying at the GPU secret police academy while at same time putting in time at a Moscow theatre school under the pseudonym of Khovansky. As a newly commissioned GPU officer he spent time in Turkestan, and later policed the Ukraine–Polish–Romanian border, a notorious hotbed of smuggling and corruption. He served on a special Soviet mission to Turkey and Afghanistan, and in 1925 travelled to China with a top-level Soviet delegation to the government of Sun Yat-sen, led by General Vasiliy Blyukher and senior Comintern executive Mikhail Borodin.