An Impeccable Spy

by Owen Matthews

  Hess and Haushofer had co-authored a book entitled Japan and Espionage where they advocated a programme of total espionage modelled on that of the Japanese, who counted on every citizen living and travelling overseas to provide a full account of all they had seen and heard to the state as a matter of course. Following this principle, Hess even established a special card index in the Foreign Department of the Nazi Party which held details of every Nazi Party member based abroad. Every man, and a very few women, were expected to act as spies for the Third Reich.15 As Albrecht Haushofer, Karl’s son, noted in his own study of Japan: ‘every Japanese abroad considers himself a spy, and when at home takes upon himself the role of spy catcher’.16

  Sorge was able to convince Haushofer that he was an ardent national socialist, an able young recruit to the cause. He wrote Sorge a personal letter of introduction to the German ambassador to Japan and another to the Japanese ambassador to the United States.17 He also assured Sorge that he looked forward to reading his contributions to his influential journal.

  Not content with making friends with senior Nazis like Haushofer and Vowinckel, Sorge returned to Berlin to collect yet more accreditations. The Tägliche Rundschau was a moderately anti-Nazi daily that was already under pressure from the authorities (and was destined to close soon after Sorge’s arrival in Japan). Nonetheless, its editor-in-chief, Dr Eduard Zeller, also knew Sorge’s work and was happy to accept articles from Tokyo. Zeller made out a contract on the spot and gave Sorge a ‘To Whom It May Concern’ letter of introduction to the German embassy. More fatefully for all concerned, Zeller also wrote a letter to a personal friend from wartime days, one Lieutenant Colonel Ott, who was serving as an officer with a Japanese artillery regiment at Nagoya as part of a German–Japanese military exchange. Zeller, succumbing to Sorge’s charm, asked Ott to trust his new friend ‘in everything that is, politically, personally and otherwise’. Neither man realised at the time quite how valuable this introduction was to prove. Later Sorge was to tell the Japanese that this letter would provide him with ‘my first opportunity … to get closely acquainted with Colonel Ott and to win his confidence’.18

  Membership of the Nazi Party was not yet a necessity in order to work for a major German newspaper. However it was clear that Sorge would have to make a convincing pretence of being a part of the new order. Sorge had read Mein Kampf in Moscow, in addition to studying Nazi phraseology and ideology. Bronin, after quizzing Sorge, passed him as ‘ideologically qualified’ for his new role as a keen national socialist. In late summer 1933, Sorge decided to take another calculated risk and submitted an application for membership of the Nazi Party – despite the more thorough Gestapo checks into his background that this would entail. His two Nazi seconders were the editor-in-chiefs of the Berlin newspaper Pozendai Zeitung and of the monthly magazine Heidelberg Geopolitik, to whom Sorge had contributed articles during his Shanghai days.

  Did Sorge decide on this bold step because he knew that a Soviet agent would ‘clean’ his police files before they were checked by party officials? When Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg, deputy head of the SS intelligence service, examined Sorge’s files in 1940 he found that the police record, ‘if it did not exactly prove him to be a member of the German Communist Party, one could not help coming to the conclusion that he was at least a sympathiser. He had been in close contact with a large number of people who were known to our intelligence service as Comintern agents – but he had close ties with people in influential circles and had always been protected against rumours of this sort.’19

  Hede Massing – not always a reliable source – also later claimed that Sorge had a German guardian angel, ‘another Soviet agent who had been planted in the Gestapo. Sorge never knew his name, although he knew of his existence. At the crucial moment [of Sorge’s Nazi Party application], this agent had been able, temporarily, to remove all the incriminating evidence from the file on Sorge.’20 But if Schellenberg was able to easily find the compromising material in the files in 1940 it is also possible that it was there in 1933 – but that the Gestapo simply failed to look. The story of Sorge’s secret protector remains unsubstantiated, particularly since neither the Fourth Department archives nor later Soviet histories make any mention of a Soviet agent in the Gestapo. In any case Sorge’s application was accepted, though his Nazi Party membership card did not catch up with him until October 1934 in Tokyo.21

  Sorge’s last task in Berlin was to rendezvous with his new radio operator, Bruno Wendt, alias Bernhardt, a former member of the German Communist Party and, like Sorge’s Shanghai radio men Clausen and Weingarten, a graduate of the Fourth Department’s Moscow Technical School. The two men agreed to meet at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.

  ‘I cannot claim to have achieved one hundred percent but it was simply impossible to do more – and it would be pointless to stay on here in order to obtain representation agreements with other newspapers,’ Sorge reported to Moscow Centre on 30 July 1933. ‘I am sick of being idle. At present I can only say that the prerequisites for my return to work have been more or less created.’22 He took a train to Cherbourg, France, in order to avoid the stringent customs controls at German ports and boarded a liner to New York.

  Sorge, no ascetic, spent eight days at the Lincoln Hotel on 8th Avenue, which was then the tallest and most modern hotel in Manhattan. That year aspiring jazzmen Count Basie and Fats Waller played at the Lincoln’s Blue Room nightclub. But since Prohibition was still in place (it would not be repealed until December), Sorge would have had to seek more discreet speakeasies to make up for his lost months of drinking in Berlin. In New York, he made contact with a Soviet agent who worked at the Washington Post – whose identity has never been revealed – who would help him establish contact with Sorge’s new Japanese assistant.23 They agreed to meet at the Chicago World’s Fair for the handover of recognition codes.

  Sorge then proceeded to Washington, where he presented his letter from Haushofer to Katsuji Debuchi, Japanese ambassador to the United States. Debuchi duly furnished Sorge with another valuable letter of introduction, this time to Amaha Temba, head of the Information Department of the Japanese Foreign Ministry. After three days in the capital Sorge headed back north to Chicago to meet his Washington Post contact, who passed on instructions from Centre. On arrival in Tokyo, Sorge was to place an advertisement in the Japan Advertiser, a Tokyo English-language newspaper, indicating a desire to purchase ukiyo-e – a style of Japanese woodcuts and paintings – and provide a post-office box for a reply.24 His Japanese assistant, who was en route to Tokyo from California, would check the paper and reply as soon as he saw the advertisement.

  His arrangements finalised, Sorge caught the Empire Builder trans-continental express train to Seattle, changing for Vancouver. There he took the Canadian steamer Empress of Russia for the ten-day voyage to Yokohama.25

  7

  The Spy Ring Forms

  ‘The 20th Century has been the century of espionage, and Richard Sorge was probably its most fascinating exemplar – a spy of unparalleled charm, nonchalance, courage, impudence, and brilliance’1

  Arthur M. Schlesinger

  September is the season of typhoons in Japan. The heat of late summer turns damp and clammy, the choppy waters of Yokohama harbour become grey and monsoon clouds gather low and black over Tokyo Bay. The Empress of Russia docked at Yokohama on 13 September 1933. The name of ‘R. Sorge’ duly appeared on the passenger lists published regularly in the Japan Advertiser and eagerly read by Tokyo’s small European community.

  Tokyo was a world away from the cosmopolitan, thoroughly West-ernised world of Shanghai that Sorge had left nine months before. Until 1853, when US Commodore Matthew Perry had sailed his warship into the same port demanding trading privileges at gunpoint, Japan had spent over three centuries closed off from the outside world. In 1933 the entire foreign community in Japan numbered just 8,000. Of them, 1,118 were German. Japan’s profound suspicion of outsiders and spies had its roots in centuries of i
solation. One of the first news items Sorge would have read in the Advertiser was a report of a police raid on an antique shop in Tokyo where eighteenth-century prints of Nagasaki harbour had been confiscated as a potential source of information for saboteurs.

  Sorge checked into the Sanno Hotel, a grim box-like building offering European-style amenities. During his first walks around the city, Sorge was impressed by seeing crowds of Japanese travellers bowing deeply in reverence to the Imperial Palace as they emerged from Tokyo train station in Marunouchi. Three days later Sorge paid his first call to the German embassy, a two-storey brick-built confection of Wilhelmine neoclassical facades and Japanese windows standing on a rise near the Imperial Palace.* Sorge respectfully presented his credentials to Counsellor Otto Bernard von Erdmannsdorff, since the new ambassador was not due to arrive until December. He also presented his personal letters from Zeitschrift für Geopolitik’s editor, Kurt Vowinckel, to First Secretary Hasso von Etzdorff and Commercial Secretary Josef Knoll.2 Both men had, like Sorge, served as privates in the First World War. Sorge’s months of preparation in Berlin stood him in good stead with his new acquaintances. ‘The German embassy asked me if I knew anyone in the Foreign Ministry and I was told I could be given an introduction to officials there,’ recalled Sorge in his prison memoir. ‘I said rather proudly that with my letter to Temba Amaha [head of the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry] their introduction … was unnecessary.’3

  The following day Sorge presented his letter from Ambassador Debuchi to Temba, who greeted him ‘cordially’, introduced him ‘to many Japanese and foreign journalists’ – including the influential government spokesman – and gave him a number of valuable tips concerning travel in Japan.4 One of these new acquaintances was Aritomi Mitsukado, a correspondent for the Jiji Shimpo newspaper, who recommended the cheaper Meguro Hotel and later helped Sorge find his own house in Azabu district. Aritomi also introduced him to a socialist friend who spoke to Sorge in Russian, which he affected not to understand. Sorge was convinced that Aritomi was working for the Metropolitan Police Board. The new arrival was being quietly, but thoroughly, vetted.5

  Not all was unfamiliar. There were several modern buildings in central Tokyo, including the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Imperial Hotel, which was built in the style of a Mayan altar inspired by the pyramids of Yucatán. The Imperial boasted an underground bar and shopping arcade and a bookshop that stocked foreign newspapers. There was a German Club five minutes’ walk from the embassy that shared a modest building with a Japanese curving roof, a pond and bamboo garden with the German East Asia Society. The library and reading room held volumes of English and German works on Japan, as well as anthropological studies illustrated with photographs of naked Japanese women.6 Across the courtyard was a bar and restaurant which was the venue for Nazi Party meetings. In the nightlife district of Ginza was Lohmeyer’s, a German restaurant known for its roast pigs’ trotters and wurst, as well as the Das Rheingold and Die Fledermaus German beer halls. There was a German bakery in Yurakucho that sold strudel and Black Forest gateau.

  Sorge quickly found that, despite the outward appearance of an intensely stable and regulated society, the Japan of 1933 was in reality as stormy as the September weather. Just as in Germany, a brief experiment with liberal democracy had recently floundered. In 1932 the prime minister and finance minister, as well as several leading industrialists, had been assassinated by fanatical young army officers (the killers also, eccentrically, planned to murder the visiting Charlie Chaplin in the hope of sparking a war with America). Japan’s post-First World War political order was being convulsed by economic forces beyond the government’s control. The Great Depression caused American and European silk demand to collapse, bringing much of the Japanese countryside to the edge of destitution. In the winter of 1932–33 many small farmers had been forced into prostituting their daughters – sold to travelling representatives of teahouses and brothels so their families might eke out an existence. The economic crisis was compounded by a disastrous crop failure in 1932 across northern Japan. Many young officers and soldiers came from peasant backgrounds and had seen the suffering of their communities at first hand. A large former rural population had also recently moved to the cities to work in shipyards, mines and factories, as well as a vast network of small workshops who relied for their work on orders for the zaibatsu, Japan’s great financial-industrial concerns. These workers, too, had suffered in the Depression – and like the people in Germany’s industrial heartlands, were turning to extreme nationalist rather than socialist politicians to rescue them from destitution.

  The leader of the militarist party was General Araki Sadao, Minister of War, who was a radical advocate of kodo-ha – ‘the Imperial Way’ – a mystical belief in the direct rule of the emperor and Japan’s heaven-sent mission to extend her empire. Again, like national socialism in Germany, kodo-ha had a strong anti-capitalist streak. Ultra-nationalists such as Araki believed that major enterprises and agricultural land should be ‘restored’ to the emperor. The Kodo doctrine had a powerful appeal to young army officers who, as a result of the recent economic crisis, had come to despise the great capitalist conglomerates of Japan and the democratic politicians who often spoke for them. It also attracted many former socialists and communists, who supported Kodo because it reconciled revolutionary action with loyalty to the Imperial house and Shinto piety which enshrined loyalty to the emperor as a national religion. Uncomfortably for a Soviet agent hoping to set up an espionage network, almost all Japanese politicians were united in a vivid fear of Marxism and communism, represented by the Comintern and the USSR, as an existential threat to the hierarchical Japanese way of life.

  That fear also represented a direct threat to the USSR’s security. In a speech shortly after Sorge’s arrival, Araki contended that war with Russia was ‘inevitable’. The US ambassador Joseph Grew noted in his diary on 7 September 1933 that ‘the [Japanese] Army has complete confidence in its ability to take Vladivostok and [Russia’s] maritime provinces and probably all territory to Lake Baikal’.7 Grew also predicted that a new Russo-Japanese war was ‘absolutely inevitable’ by the spring of 1936.

  On a practical level, the Communist Party of Japan had been outlawed in 1925 under a Peace Preservation Law that was intended to control subversion against kokutai – Japan’s ‘emperor system’. By 1933 all potential subversives – including liberals, socialists, Christians, pacifists, feminists, birth-control advocates and Esperanto enthusiasts – were deemed to have committed thought crime or shisohan. All were subject to summary arrest and detention. Communists were threatened with the confiscation of their family’s property unless they sincerely recanted and offered proof of their apostasy, a throwback to the days of the first shogunate of the seventeenth century when recanting Christians were forced to trample a crucifix.8

  In 1933, the hothead advocates of kodo-ha were still a political insurgency rather than a military one – alarming, but containable, in the opinion of the old courtiers who still retained ultimate control of the empire. The Emperor Hirohito himself – thirty-two years old when Sorge arrived in Japan – was a scholar devoted to his personal hobby of marine biology. On his rare public appearances at the annual review of the Imperial guards’ battalions at Yoyogi parade ground, Hirohito was magnificent on his white charger. In reality the 124th Emperor of Japan was short-sighted, shy and bookish and easily dominated by the forceful advisers who surrounded him.9

  The emperor’s closest courtiers, Count Makino and Prince Saionji Kinmochi – a fifty-year veteran of the Imperial governing council and one of the last surviving Gen-ro, or ‘original leaders’ of Meiji-dynasty Japan10 – believed that the excesses of the Nationalists could be contained. ‘Everything will be all right as long as we old men are here to put on the brakes,’ another member of the old guard, Prime Minister Admiral Makoto Saito, told the editor of the Japan Advertiser in 1933. By law, criticism of the emperor was blasphemy. But in practice the invasion of Ma
nchuria in 1931, unauthorised by the emperor, had clearly demonstrated to all clear-eyed observers of Japanese politics that the army was no longer under the old courtiers’ control. Another sign that real power had slipped decisively away from the palace was another officers’ plot to assassinate the entire cabinet, including Premier Saito and other conservative courtiers, uncovered in spring 1933. Yet for the time being a majority of senior officials and army officers – known as the tosei-ha, or Control Faction – considered the expansive adventures in Manchuria tacitly condoned by Araki were impulsive and dangerous. They also believed it unwise to pick a fight with Russia.

  Sorge’s central question – whether Japan would attack the Soviet Union – was, therefore, closely bound up with the question of who was really in charge in Tokyo. The riddle consisted of how to parse a state ruled by a god-emperor who could barely exercise authority, governed in practice by a centralised bureaucracy which was obliged to follow the course settled upon by the army, and of a society famous for its self-discipline but which was regularly prone to unrest and murderous political violence.11

  In early October Sorge set off to the industrial city of Nagoya, four hours’ south-west of Tokyo, to meet the last and (as it would turn out) most important of his German contacts.

  Nagoya was, and remains, a grim place full of porcelain and textile factories. Lieutenant Colonel Eugen Ott had recently been posted there as a liaison officer to the Japanese Third Artillery Regiment. Ott and his family lived in spartan quarters in the regimental barracks with no other Germans for company. If Sorge had come into Ott’s life at any other point their relationship might have been different. As it was, the lonely officer was delighted to welcome the charming, self-confident journalist as a friend – especially since the new arrival bore a letter from Ott’s old friend Zeller in Berlin assuring him of Sorge’s political and personal trustworthiness.