An Impeccable Spy

by Owen Matthews

  The secret signal was intended for Yotoku Miyagi, a young painter who had arrived in Yokohama on 24 October 1933. Miyagi was born in 1903 on Okinawa, the southernmost of Japan’s home islands. He was the second son of a peasant family. When he was two years old his parents emigrated, eventually settling in California, leaving him in the care of his maternal grandfather. The old man sowed the seeds of Miyagi’s idealism. ‘When I was a little boy, my grandfather’s discipline was: “Do not maltreat the weak and be conscientious,”’ Miyagi would tell his captors in 1942.44 Miyagi attended the village school and the Okinawa Prefecture Normal School, but did not graduate because he developed the first symptoms of tuberculosis at the age of sixteen. In the hope of improving his health – and fulfilling his dream of studying art – he joined his father on his small farm in Brawley, California in June 1919.

  Miyagi enrolled in the San Diego Public School of Art. A year in the dry Californian air of the Imperial Valley healed his lungs, and he moved to Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo neighbourhood, where he established himself as an artist and joined three Japanese friends to open a small restaurant called ‘The Owl’. All his young life Miyagi had suffered from discrimination, first as an Okinawan – considered second-class citizens by the Japanese of the period – and again in America – not only from whites but also from fellow Japanese of the second generation who looked down on new immigrants. It is no coincidence that many prominent Japanese communists – including Kyuichi Tokuda, their most famous leader – were of Okinawan origin, just as many Bolsheviks came from the oppressed ranks of Russian Jews. When Miyagi met socialists in America, he was immediately drawn to their egalitarian doctrine. He became a communist, Miyagi explained to his interrogators, because of the ‘inhuman discrimination practiced against the Asiatic races in the United States’.45

  Miyagi and his partners in the Owl restaurant established a Marxist study group, which was quickly spotted and supported by the Communist Party of the United States. But his personal conversion was not immediate. When the group – now a club with the name Romei Kai, or ‘Society of the Dawn’ – split into communist and non-communist factions, Miyagi stayed with the latter, largely because of his deep dislike of the ‘mainland’ Japanese who mixed their communist ideals with a strand of nationalism that he strongly distrusted.46 Yet he continued to read Russian literature and to drift leftward, and in 1931 he joined the Proletarian Arts Society, a Comintern front. That year the Soviet Communist Party dispatched Tsutomu Yano (also known as Takedo), a prominent Japanese communist who had spent time in Moscow in 1930, to the West Coast of the United States to recruit new members. He picked up Miyagi at a meeting of the Arts Society. Miyagi, displaying a weakness for strong-willed authority figures that would bring him fatally under the sway of Richard Sorge, was talked by Tsutomu into joining the party. The distinguished visitor even filled out Miyagi’s Communist Party card. Tsutomu also, unbeknown to Miyagi, registered him with the Comintern – though not with the Communist Party of the USA – under the codename of Joe, which he would bear for the rest of his future career as a spy.

  Miyagi had married a fellow Japanese immigrant, Yamaki Chiyo, in 1927. The couple took lodgings with a poor Japanese couple in Los Angeles, where Miyagi remained even after he split with Chiyo in 1932. His new landlord, Yoshisaburo Kitabayashi, was decidedly not a communist. But his wife Tomo, a tiny, anxious-faced woman, was both a member of the party and of the Proletarian Arts Society.47 This humble pair would play a fateful role in Miyagi’s – and Sorge’s – future.

  Like Vukelić before him, the sickly, low-born Miyagi was a far from obvious candidate for recruitment into the Fourth Department’s Tokyo spy ring. His only apparent qualifications were a cheerful demeanour, a fluency in English and Japanese, and a ready-made cover as an artist. Nonetheless in spring 1932, two party officials came to call on him at the Kitabayashi house. One was Miyagi’s original recruiter, Tsutomu Yano. The other was ‘an American’ – or so Miyagi claimed to the Japanese authorities – who called himself Roy, an old acquaintance from Los Angeles party circles. Roy remains a mysterious figure. It is possible that he was a cousin of Miyagi’s father, Yosaburo, a second-generation Japanese immigrant who was arrested in January 1932 at a Communist Party meeting in Long Beach and charged with plotting the overthrow of American institutions.48 Though the Japanese-American ‘Roy’ was indeed a US citizen, perhaps Miyagi was trying to throw investigators off the scent of his communist relative by implying that his recruiter was a Caucasian.49

  The visitors proposed that Miyagi help the cause by travelling to Tokyo for ‘a short time’ to establish a Comintern group in Japan – the same false flag used with Vukelić in Paris and with Hotsumi Ozaki in Shanghai. Miyagi, pleading the prevalence of tuberculosis in Japan, protested his ill health. But in September 1933, Yano and Roy were back. The moment had come for Miyagi to serve world peace, they said, promising their new agent that his mission would last no more than three months.50 Miyagi, who had been eking out a precarious existence selling paintings that summer, accepted.

  Before he left, Roy gave Miyagi instructions to look out for a certain classified ad in the Japan Advertiser and handed him $200 for expenses, plus an extra dollar bill for identification when he reached Japan. His contact would be carrying a bill with the consecutive serial number. Miyagi boarded the Buenos Aires Maru at the Californian port of San Pedro. He arrived at Yokohama on 24 October. Soon after he left, Miyagi’s landlady, Tomo Kitabayashi, severed her ties with the party and became a Christian, joining the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.51 It would be some years before she would remember her young communist lodger and his mysterious visitors.

  Miyagi met Vukelić outside the offices of an advertising agency in Kanda district in early December 1933. They successfully compared dollar bills and doubtless marvelled at the mysteriously efficient logistics of the secret organisation they had just joined. A meeting with the boss was set up.52

  Sorge rendezvoused with his newest recruit at an art gallery in Ueno. Sorge wore a black tie, Miyagi a blue one. Cautious even with agents recruited and sent by Centre, Sorge confined himself to general chat. Miyagi, too, was nervous. In coded telegrams, Sorge told Centre that he had doubts about the young artist’s commitment.53 But for the moment the last component of Sorge’s new team – a native Japanese agent – was now in place. The Tokyo spy ring was almost complete.

  *The site is now occupied by the Library of Japan’s National Parliament.

  8

  At Home with the Otts

  ‘He was much more intelligent and charming than was reasonable, and also wicked. He loved what he was doing. Betrayal was his element’1

  John le Carré on Kim Philby

  By Christmas 1933, Richard Sorge’s infiltration as a respected member of Tokyo’s tight-knit German community was nearly complete. In early December the Tüglische Rundschau had published his first essay on Japanese politics, a piece which, according to Sorge, ‘received a very good evaluation in Germany’.2 More importantly it won him the respect of the embassy’s staff. Commercial Secretary Josef Knoll was, in Sorge’s estimation, ‘the number one as far as political knowledge was concerned’. Hearing of Sorge’s article, ‘Knoll came to trust me not a little.’3

  By the time the new German ambassador, Herbert von Dirksen, arrived to take up his new posting in mid-December, Sorge was already developing a solid reputation as a Japan-kenner – a Japan expert.4 Dirksen was a Prussian aristocrat of the old school who had just completed a five-year stint at the German embassy in Moscow, one of the Reich’s most important diplomatic missions. His appointment to Japan, a far smaller embassy, was something of a mystery, even to Dirksen himself. Germany’s war minister General Werner von Blomberg had dropped one hint: Hitler intended ‘to establish closer relations with Japan’. Both Germany and Japan had left the League of Nations in 1933. Both were making a bloody transition to fully fledged authoritarian states. Dirksen – and So
rge – came to the obvious conclusion. Realising ‘the necessity of applying some kind of brake to the Russian machine, after the relations with Germany and the Soviet Union became more strained’, Hitler intended to build an alliance with Japan in order to effect a military encirclement of Russia, Dirksen wrote in his 1950 memoir. ‘I never believed in the possibility of a Russo-Japanese war on Japanese initiative [alone].’5 In other words the Japanese would, when the time came, have to be pushed into war with the USSR. It would be the German ambassador to Tokyo’s job to push them.

  Dirksen took over a staff of just one counsellor, four secretaries, two service attachés and two typists. His relations with Sorge were cordial and respectful from the beginning, but never became friendly. In Dirksen’s world view, journalists existed on a lower plane of being from diplomats. Nonetheless, Sorge’s immodest assessment that he was soon ‘regarded as a man of consequence’ by the ambassador and his staff was probably not far from the truth.6 Sorge’s position at the embassy was to become the core of one of the most successful penetrations of an enemy institution in the history of espionage. ‘The fact that I successfully approached the German embassy in Japan and won absolute trust by people there was the foundation of my spying activity in Japan,’ Sorge would later confess. ‘I could carry out my spy activity only standing on this foundation. In Moscow the fact that I infiltrated into the centre of the embassy and made use of it for my spying activity was evaluated as extremely amazing, having no equivalent in history.’7

  Sorge’s rapid conquest of the embassy’s senior staff was testament to his charisma and intelligence. But Tokyo’s German community was also a tiny village. Any new arrival was an event. The arrival of a charmer like Sorge was a sensation. ‘Women were fascinated by him, and if the men envied him they tried hard not to show it,’ recalled Frieda Weiss, the wife of a German diplomat. ‘At any social occasion he attended he attracted a crowd of admirers, men and women. He was the life and soul of any party … he was a social lion.’ Weiss recalled how Sorge swung her around in a fiery tango at a party.8 Araki Mitsutaro, a Japanese society hostess who often visited the embassy, remembered ‘first the beauty, then after study the ugliness of his face, but always it was an interesting face’.9 Paul Mousset, a French journalist who met Sorge in early 1934, was struck by Sorge’s ‘strange combination of charm and brutality’.10 Reuters’ veteran Japan correspondent Captain Malcolm Kennedy found Sorge ‘quiet, unassuming, intelligent’.11 In Sorge’s own estimation, the embassy staff thought of him as ‘an eccentric, first-class journalist’ who was ‘completely isolated from political parties and factions, being neither a follower of Nazism or Communism’. As on outsider to the embassy, Sorge’s brilliance posed no threat. ‘I think I gave not a little humanistic charm to … members of the embassy because I was not ambitious. I did not seek for position; I did not seek benefits.’12 No benefits, at least, from the point of view of the diplomats whose trust and confidence Sorge was so thoroughly to exploit in the cause of defending the USSR.

  Soon after the German community celebrated Christmas Eve at their modest clubhouse, Captain Paul Wenneker reported for duty as the new naval attaché. Sorge recognised a fellow gregarious soul. Wenneker was ‘very sociable, charming, and friendly’, remembered Araki Mitsutaro.13 Dirksen described the new naval man as ‘a frank and outspoken sailor, a cheerful and reliable comrade’.14 Sorge and ‘Paulchen’ Wenneker quickly became ‘boon companions’. In the accelerated hierarchy of expatriate life, Sorge was already an old hand and was able to take the young officer under his wing. Wenneker ‘was a man of noble, martial character’, wrote Sorge. ‘But he was quite out of his depth in political matters when he arrived and I was able to be of some help to him there … Like me Wenneker was a bachelor and we travelled together.’15 The two new friends travelled to the ancient onsen, or hot springs, of Atami, a hundred kilometres south of Tokyo. And together they caroused in Ginza.

  Ginza is today a crowded, overwhelming, neon-lit maze of upmarket shops and restaurants. Behind the glass-sided skyscrapers of the main avenues are warrens of small streets full of bars, beer halls and eating establishments. Even in 1934, the area was rumoured to have over two thousand bars. Ginza was where traditional Japanese culture met the West, the place where modern Japan’s thrilling synthesis of the two was born. Electric trams shared the streets with rickshaws. Women in kimonos mixed with women in modern dresses, with hems just below the knee. Traditional samisen music mingled with jazz and the latest craze to come to Tokyo, tango – played at the Florida Dance Hall and the Silver Slipper. Sorge loved to tango with the ‘taxi-dancers’ – ladies in elegant gowns who would be paid to dance by the number. He also frequented the area’s brothels, though perhaps it was more for the amusement of visitors and for sociological research than for his own carnal purposes. His friend, the leftist writer Friedrich Sieburg, noted that in brothels Sorge was ‘obsessed with the fate of all these girls who had been ruthlessly sent to the big cities … he was unbelievably popular in the milieu’.16

  Then there were the German bars and beer halls, which were just coming into fashion among Japan’s bourgeoisie. Sorge and Wenneker frequented the Die Fledermaus bar and Lohmeyer’s basement restaurant, which was run by an army veteran from the German colony of Tsingtao, home of the Germania Brewery, then (and now, under the brand Tsingtao) the producer of the finest pilsner in Asia.17 But their favourite was the Das Rheingold bar, run by the genial Helmut ‘Papa’ Keitel. Papa was also a Tsingtao veteran who had been captured when the colony fell to the Japanese in 1915,18 married a Japanese woman and set up his bar in Tokyo a year after the great earthquake of 1923. He created the Das Rheingold as a gemütlich – cosy – little corner of the Fatherland in Tokyo. He selected pretty young Japanese women to be his waitresses, dressed them in uniforms of Bavarian dirndls and pinafores and gave them German names such as Bertha, Dora and Irma.

  Something of the spirit of the Das Rheingold survives in the splendid 1934 Ginza Lion Beer Hall which still stands, now improbably enveloped inside a much larger modern building in Ginza. The cavernous interior is built in bizarre neo-Aztec style, executed in glazed brick, perhaps a tribute to Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel, via Albert Speer’s angular modernism. The waiters and waitresses are still dressed in Bavarian outfits and struggle under vast plates of sausages and steins of beer. In the 1930s beer halls like the Ginza Lion were becoming fashionable among the salarymen of the Japanese petit bourgeoisie. Sorge himself preferred smaller, more authentic drinking establishments. Perhaps he found cavernous, rowdy spaces like Ginza Lion too redolent of the Nazi Munich he had seen the previous year. A handful of cosier, hole-in-the-wall beer joints still survive under the brick railway arches of Ginza station. Built in 1934, the overground railway runs over the top of a row of tiny bars, filled with the excitable chatter of tipsy Japanese and the explosive laughter of foreigners, wreathed in the savoury smoke of grilling seafood and cigarettes.

  Certainly Sorge fell deeply in love with the city. ‘He who finds himself on the streets of Tokyo for the first time in those new year days could return home delighted by the wonderfulness of the colours, transformed into delight by the touchingly happy holiday mood of the Japanese and a little frightened by the Asian noise of Ginza the main commercial street of Tokyo,’ Sorge would later write in the Frankfurter Zeitung.19 Many later visitors would be impressed by Sorge’s deep affec-tion and fascination for Japan.

  In December 1933, with the help of Aritomi Mitsukado of the Jiji Shimpo, Sorge found a house to rent at 30 Nagasaki Street, in the then quiet residential district of Azabu.* It was a modest, two-storey wooden building, surrounded by similar houses (one of his neighbours was an engineer for Mitsui Mining; the other a clerk at a credit union). One of the three approaches to the Sorge residence led visitors past the Toriizaka police station. There was no back door, and no way to enter or leave unobserved by ever-vigilant neighbours. In short, it was an utterly impractical place for a spy to live. That was the point. S
orge would remain there, hiding in plain sight, for nearly a decade.

  ‘I get the impression of leading [the police] by the tips of their noses,’ he reported breezily to Moscow on 7 January 1934.20 But Sorge could have been under no illusions that the police surveillance was anything other than a constant and deadly threat. He knew that police would search his home whenever he left town (‘this was standard procedure for all foreigners’, he told Centre), and he knew that his elderly maid, Honmoku, would be regularly questioned by the Tokko – the special higher police – and later by the Kempeitai military police. Indeed Sorge joked to Clausen about collecting matchboxes from various brothels and leaving them for Honmoku to find.21 But the danger was very real. In March 1934, William Bickerton, a young New Zealander teaching at Ichiko high school, was arrested under the Peace Preservation Law on suspicion – entirely correct as it later emerged – that he had been acting as a liaison between the Comintern and the underground Japanese Communist Party. Despite protests from the British embassy, Bickerton was brutally interrogated and beaten (though he refused to talk) and was eventually released and deported.22 Unlike in Shanghai, foreignness was no protection from the spy mania.

  The ground floor of Sorge’s little wooden house consisted of a living room of eight tatami mats – the traditional rice-straw floor mat, measuring about 1.6 square metres each, that served as the standard measure of living space in Japan – a dining room of four and a half mats, a small kitchen and a bathroom with a Japanese-style squatting toilet. Up a narrow staircase was an eight-mat study that was filled with bookcases, filing cabinets and a sofa, the only Western-style item of furniture. The house also had a private telephone line, a great novelty in the district. The six-mat bedroom was furnished with several traditional Japanese futon mattresses piled on each other to create something more like a European bed.