The two men had much in common. They quickly established that they had served in the same division on the Eastern front – another example of the kampfkameraderie, or battle-comradeship, that would bond Sorge with so many Germans of his generation. Sorge was thirty-nine when they met, Ott forty-four. Both enjoyed chess and shared a fascination with Japan.12 Though Sorge was ruthlessly to exploit his relationship with Ott, their friendship had a genuine core. ‘Ott was a man of fine character … shrewd, able, politically realistic,’ Sorge wrote in his prison memoir. Both shared a scepticism of the Nazis – though Ott would soon overcome his qualms and become a loyal servant of the Reich, to Sorge’s disgust. Ott, in Sorge’s estimation, ‘thought me to be a man of rare progressive views, neither a Nazi nor a Communist, a somewhat eccentric person with no partisan commitments’.13
Ott had served a stint on the front lines of the First World War as an artillery officer, where career officers of the old school had snubbed him. ‘Ott is a little Swabian who wanted to play Grand Prussian,’ said General Walter von Reisenau, Ott’s one-time immediate superior. ‘But after all he was only a pale copy of a Prussian sergeant, not an officer.’14 Ott’s true talent was indeed in the underhand and decidedly ungentlemanly skills of espionage and black operations. After his spell at the front Ott was talent-spotted by Colonel Walter Nicolai, chief of the German high command’s intelligence service, who put him to work gathering military intelligence.
It was in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat in 1918 that Ott’s career had taken a decisive turn into the clandestine world. General Kurt von Schleicher, a ruthless anti-communist who had been one of the founders of the Freikorps in 1919, recruited the intelligent young officer for his own covert purposes. Schleicher was forming a secret group within the army, Sondergruppe R (for ‘Russland’), which was devoted to rebuilding covertly the German Army in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. This secret rearmament meant dealing with Bolshevik Russia, under a confidential deal negotiated between Schleicher and Soviet Central Committee member Leonid Krasin in 1921.15 The funds for Germany’s covert military build-up were supplied by a network of dummy corporations created by Schleicher – notably the GEFU, or Company for the Promotion of Industrial Enterprise, that funnelled 75 million Reichsmarks into the Soviet arms industry. Between 1921 and 1933, when the deal was terminated by a Soviet leadership nervous of the rise of Hitler, these clandestine arms contracts provided the USSR with much-needed foreign currency and ensured that Germany did not fall behind in military technology in the 1920s, despite being officially disarmed by the victorious Allies.
Eugen Ott served as the head of Schleicher’s Political Department. He also acted as liaison with the so-called ‘Black Reichswehr’. Headed by Major Bruno Ernst Buchrucker, this was an army of arbeits-kommandos – ‘work commandos’ – which claimed to be a civilian labour corps but was, in reality, a paramilitary force. This fiction allowed Germany to exceed the limits on troop strength set by Versailles. Buchrucker’s Black Reichswehr, just like the old Freikorps from which many of its members were drawn, was also infamous for murdering Germans it suspected of working as informers for the Allied Control Commission, the organisation charged with policing the terms of the peace treaty. Victims were assassinated after being convicted of treason by secret military courts known as femegerichte. The femegerichte murders were a clear challenge to the authority of the Weimar government – and proof that the German Army had effectively become a state within a state, contemptuous of the weak civilian government and pursuing a policy of rearmament behind the back of the democratically elected authorities.
Ott would have understood very well the dynamics of the Japanese Army’s rise to power in the 1930s. He had been part of the same process in his own homeland. Ott, as this story unfolds, may appear as a naive dupe thoroughly taken in by his wily friend Sorge. But it is worth remembering that in the formative years of his career, Ott was a professional dissembler himself, active not only in Germany’s secret rearmament deal with communist Russia but also in a clandestine organisation responsible for a spate of political murders.
In December 1932, after a stint as Minister of Defence, Schleicher became briefly Chancellor of Germany. He sent Ott as his emissary to Adolf Hitler to offer the rising Nazi star a cabinet post. Hitler refused, holding out for the supreme power that he quickly achieved on 30 January 1933. After Hitler took over as chancellor, Ott’s superiors in the high command arranged to have Ott, the trusted lieutenant of the fallen Schleicher regime, removed out of sight and mind to distant Japan. The move probably saved Ott’s life. Schleicher himself was murdered on 30 June 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler’s bloody purge of his enemies inside the Nazi Party and possible rivals outside it.16
Ott’s lonely posting to Nagoya was, then, a species of political exile. His career abruptly stalled, he faced an uncertain future. Sorge’s dynamism and intellect must have come as a welcome distraction not only to Ott but also to his family. A few days after their first meeting, the Otts were on a weekend motoring trip through the countryside outside Nagoya when they came across Sorge hiking through the rice paddies. Sorge greeted Ott’s wife Helma courteously and chatted to the couple’s two children, Podwick and Ulli, then aged eleven and seven. Before long the children would be addressing him as ‘Uncle Richard’.
Sorge returned to Tokyo delighted with his new contact. His social career at the German community launched, it was time to move on to assembling his underground network. En route to Japan, Sorge had learned at a brief meeting with an unnamed operative at the Hotel Noailles in Paris that one other member of his prospective team – ‘a certain Vukelić’ – was already in Tokyo and waiting for contact. Proceeding with extreme caution, Sorge waited for Bruno Wendt, the Moscow-trained radio man and the one member of the new rezidentura that he had actually met, before making any attempt to contact the mysterious Vukelić.
Wendt and his wife arrived by ship in mid-October. They met up with Sorge in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel, as agreed. For security reasons the new radio man had arrived without any actual radio parts. Wendt’s first task would therefore be to buy the necessary components and assemble from scratch a set powerful enough to reach Vladivostok. He would also have to create a plausible cover that would allow him to travel and buy the transformers, radio valves and so on. Using Fourth Department money, Wendt duly set up a small company supplying samples of Japanese products to foreign firms. But for reasons lost to his-tory he established it in Yokohama instead of Tokyo, meaning an hour-long train ride whenever Sorge wanted to make a transmission. Perhaps Wendt believed that Yokohama, with its heavy traffic of commercial shipping radio, would be a less conspicuous location for a covert radio transmitter. Or he may have thought that police surveillance would be less comprehensive outside the heart of the capital. Soon Sorge would be complaining to Centre that Wendt was ‘extremely timid and does not send half the messages I give him’.17 He would not be the last uncooperative radio man to let down the Tokyo spy ring by failing to transmit his comrades’ hard-won information.
Either because of Wendt’s ‘timidity’ or Sorge’s caution, it was not until November 1933 that Wendt finally got round to telephoning Vukelić at the Bunka Apartments, a once-grand nineteenth-century residential block facing the Ochanomizu River.18 ‘Do you known Johnson?’ Wendt asked, quoting the pre-arranged recognition code supplied by Centre. ‘I know him,’ answered Vukelić, beside himself with relief that the call had finally come. ‘I myself am not Schmidt, but I was sent by him,’ Wendt concluded.19 A meeting was set for the following day.
Branko Vukelić was a tall, heavyset Yugoslav with a receding hairline and a military bearing. Sorge – or Schmidt, as he introduced himself – found his new agent in ‘a pitiful state … ill, homesick and broke’.20 It emerged that Vukelić and his family had been waiting in Tokyo for Sorge to make contact since February, without money, instructions or any way to contact Centre.
Exactly why Centre chose Vuk
elić as a member of Sorge’s Tokyo spy ring remains something of a mystery. He had not been trained as a spy, had no knowledge of military affairs or of Japan. He was not even a particularly enthusiastic communist. Born in Osijek, in modern-day Croatia, in 1904, Vukelić was the son of an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army. He spent his childhood in garrison towns and discovered socialism while a high-school student in Zagreb. His mother, Vilma, recalled Branko being much moved when in 1922 the young communist assassin who shot Yugoslavia’s interior minister was executed. Vukelić laid carnations at the Red martyr’s grave.21 He enrolled in the Fine Arts Academy in Zagreb, joined the Marxist student club and was arrested by police after street brawls with nationalists. After two terms, Vukelić left the academy and transferred to the architecture faculty of the University of Brno in Moravia. In 1926 his mother, now widowed, took her son to Paris where he enrolled in the law faculty of the Sorbonne.22
Vukelić’s communist past followed him to France in the concrete form of his Yugoslav police dossier, which was requested by Paris police after he was twice arrested for participating in socialist-fomented unrest. In 1929 Vukelic’s mother recorded in her diary that her son had taken her to see Sergei Eisenstein’s propaganda classic about the 1905 Russian revolution, Battleship Potemkin. ‘My son held my arm as we walked silently. Suddenly he said, “See, mother, this wonderful, truthful film! Do you like all that the Soviet Union has achieved in the name of the future of humanity?” “Yes, son, because it is your world,” I answered. “But the Soviet Union is surrounded on all sides by enemies,” continued Branko. “The whole world is in arms against the young proletarian state. To defend the USSR today is to defend yourself and your own country.”’23
Despite his romantic notions of defending the revolution, on graduating in 1929, Vukelić joined the petit-bourgeois ranks of clerks at Paris’ Compagnie Générale d’Electricité. He had a baby with his Danish girlfriend, Edith Olsen, a maid in the household of a Danish family living in Paris, and then married Edith despite his mother’s objections. The necessity of putting food on the table had temporarily trumped his Marxist enthusiasm.24
Vukelić only came to the attention of the Communist Party’s underground in 1932. He had just returned to France from a four-month spell in his native Yugoslavia, where he had belatedly been doing his national service in the army. He was by now unemployed, supporting his young family by freelance journalism and photography. On a Paris street he ran into two old friends from a Marxist student group in Zagreb, Hugo Klein and Milo Budak.25 Vukelić had lost all contact with the party. His two comrades certainly had not. Before long they had persuaded Vukelić to write a personal report on the political and social state of the Yugoslav Army, based on his recent experiences, to be published in the Comintern magazine Inprecorr (to which Sorge had also been a contributor). ‘A man who can write such a report is always in demand, so you needn’t worry about getting a job,’ Klein told Vukelić flatteringly. ‘This report is useful to the Movement.’26
And so the recruitment began. Vukelić was reluctant at first, claiming (by his own detailed account to Japanese interrogators in 1942) that he was no longer a convinced communist.27 Klein talked him round. ‘Let us give a chance to Soviet Russia to establish socialism by maintaining peace for another several years,’ he urged. In March 1932 another, more senior, Soviet operative took over the seduction. She was a tall, beautiful woman with a heavy Baltic accent (or so it sounded to Vukelić) and a passion for skiing, who called herself ‘Olga’. (It is possible that Olga was Lydia Chekalova, also known as Baroness Stahl, a courier and photographer for Soviet intelligence working for the Paris headquarters of the Fourth Department.28 Or she may have been the sister of Alfred Tilden, a senior OMS operative stationed in Paris at the time.29)
‘Our task is to protect Soviet Russia,’ Olga explained to the young recruit. ‘This is the duty of all good communists, but our special duty is to collect information.’30 Vukelić protested that he had no experience of secret work, nor any knowledge of military matters. ‘We won’t expect you to crack safes, but we will expect you to use your experience as a journalist,’ she assured him. ‘You will have to utilise your observational and analytical ability as a Marxist. No matter what country you go to, there will be experienced comrades who will guide you and sympathisers who will cooperate with us in our work.’31 Like many other agents recruited by the Fourth Department in this period, Olga allowed Vukelić to believe that he was signing up for covert Comintern work – the ‘cause of international peace’, in Willi Muenzenberg’s formulation – rather than Soviet military intelligence. Her final question of the interview was a melodramatic one: ‘Do you have sharp sensitivities or not? This is the most important condition for this kind of work.’ ‘No’, was Vukelić’s frank answer.32
Inexperienced and lacking in self-belief, Vukelić – or rather ‘de Voukelitch’ as he had begun to style himself in imitation of French aristocracy – may not have been the most promising of recruits. However he spoke eight languages, was a skilled amateur photographer – a talent very useful to an espionage ring – and had a real, if modest, track record as a freelance reporter. More importantly, he had not been a party member since his youth, and his police record was also far in the past. At their next meeting Olga brought Vukelić some papers to translate and 3,000 francs for living expenses, along with instructions that he was to develop his cover career as a journalist.33 By October 1932, after going through several vettings by mysterious and nameless Eastern European men, Vukelić was told that he had been selected to go to Japan.34 ‘I envy you for going to such a beautiful country,’ Olga told him. His assignment would last two years, she said, after which he hoped to be ‘allowed to go to Soviet Russia as a compensation for my effort and enjoy the peaceful and cultured life in the paradise of socialism’.35 His wife Edith was a qualified instructor in Danish Gymnastics – a type of callisthenics very popular in Japan at the time – and this would give her a cover story of sorts for her presence in Tokyo.
Vukelić was recovering from appendicitis but nonetheless dragged himself across Paris to apply for a Japanese visa and offer his services to French newspapers and magazines. By happy chance, the pictorial weekly Vue was preparing a special number on the Far East and agreed to consider his photographs. The Yugoslav Politika newspaper also agreed to take his articles on a freelance basis. On 30 December 1932, the Vukelić family – Branko, Edith, and their three-year-old son Paul – boarded an Italian ship sailing from Marseilles to Yokohama. They had only the flimsiest of cover stories, no training in covert work, and no instructions on what to do on arrival, other than wait at the Bunka Apartments for someone to contact them with the prearranged code.
The Soviet archives reveal that the likely reason for Centre’s haste in dispatching the ill-prepared Vukelić – while Sorge was still in Shanghai – was fear that the French Sûreté Nationale police were on his trail. In June 1932, Izaia Bir, a senior Soviet spy, had been arrested along with six associates in Paris. The French Communist Party leader Jacques Duclos had already fled France for fear of what Bir would reveal. An intensive hunt for communists was under way in France, hence Centre’s haste in deploying their fledgling agent across the world to the as yet non-existent Fourth Department rezidentura before he could be caught and betray his recruiters.
Vukelić may have escaped arrest by the Sûreté, but what he did not realise until it was too late was that France’s thrifty communists had radically miscalculated the cost of living in Japan. The budget they provided for Vukelić and his family was just 1,800 yen for the first six months, or ten yen a day. This covered only rent and the most basic meals at the Bunka (its motto in its final days as a low-rent flophouse in the 1990s remained, with endearingly Japanese frankness: ‘No luxury but every comfort’). He was told that his new boss would make contact in August. In fact, Sorge only got in touch in November.
During their first, long-awaited rendezvous, Sorge gave Vukelić cash and advise
d him to ‘to rent a house, move there with his wife and child, and begin to work in earnest as a reporter’.36 Before their meeting, Sorge had cabled to Moscow that he planned to use Vukelić as a spy in the British, French, and American communities, to act as the ring’s photographer, and to use his home as a radio site. But it seems that Sorge immediately clocked his new associate as a dud, untrained amateur. Vukelić, for his part, told Japanese police that his first impression of Sorge ‘was not very good’. He suspected – probably correctly – that Sorge considered him ‘not the serious kind’, and he later discovered that his boss thought of him ‘as an outsider and could not get out of this feeling until the last day of our cooperative work’.37
Nonetheless, Sorge and Vukelić began meeting regularly at the Florida Kitchen restaurant in Ginza. Sorge soon dropped the Schmidt pseudonym, since as reporters working under their real names he and Vukelić would be sure to meet at the Japanese press agency Domei and at official press conferences.38 Nonetheless Sorge was careful that his new friends at the German embassy should not know of their meetings, as he feared that Vukelić ‘was on the other side of the ideological fence from them’.39 Vukelić duly moved into a house at Sanai Cho 22 in Ushigome-ku, which Sorge would indeed later use as a radio post.40 Vukelić augmented his income by giving language lessons at home while Edith taught gymnastics at the Tamagawa Gakuen school.41
Vukelić’s first mission, on 6 December, was to place an advertisement – at five sen a word – in the Japan Advertiser. ‘UKIYOE prints by old masters’, it read. ‘Also English books on the same subject. Urgently needed. Give details, titles, authors, prices to Artist, c/o The Japan Advertiser, Tokyo.’42 The telephone number for replies was that of an advertising agency in Tokyo’s Kanda district.43
An Impeccable Spy Page 14