German visitors found the house tiny, spartan and impossibly untidy. The writer Friedrich Sieburg called the place ‘hardly more than a summerhouse’,23 and remembered the two or three rooms he saw as scarcely larger than tables, ‘stuffed full of books, papers and all possible kinds of articles of everyday use’.24 Rudolf Weise, head of the official German news bureau (Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, or DNB), found that ‘the shortcomings’ of the two upstairs rooms, ‘in furnishings, comfort, and even cleanliness, cannot easily be described’. One or two good bronzes and porcelain pieces were the only evidence that the place was home to a man with some pretensions to good taste.25
Sorge’s daily routine was to rise at five, bathe in the small Japanese-style wooden tub-bath, then do his callisthenics and chest-expander exercises. His maid Honmoku would arrive to make him a Japanese breakfast, with the German addition of coffee. He would spend the morning at his typewriter and reading the Japan Advertiser. After going out for lunch he would return home for an hour’s nap, then head out for the embassy, the German Club, and the German News Agency in the offices of Domei, Japan’s official news bureau. After 5 p.m. Sorge was usually to be found at the bar of the Imperial Hotel for aperitifs, followed by dinner in town, or parties with the German community.
In early 1934 Prince Albrecht Eberhard Karl Gero von Urach, a member of the royal house of Württemberg and a first cousin to the King of Belgium, arrived in Tokyo as the correspondent of the rabidly pro-Nazi Völkischer Beobachter. He carried a letter of introduction to Sorge from Hasso von Etzdorff, the former first secretary in Tokyo who had recently moved back to Berlin.26 Urach was eight years younger than Sorge, carefully dressed and more reserved than his hell-raising older colleague. Nonetheless they became close. The Great War, of course, bound them. Though Urach had been too young to serve, his father had commanded the student division, ironically known as the Berlin Mayflies, in which Sorge had served in 1915. Urach found Sorge ‘a typical Berliner’ with his raucous love for drinking and women, but respected his knowledge of Japan. He also found his friend refreshingly forthright in his political beliefs. Sorge never made any attempt to conceal unorthodox views, such as an often-expressed admiration for the Red Army and for Stalin.27 Again, Sorge was adept at using honesty – or an appearance of honesty – as a species of camouflage. If the man could praise the Bolsheviks to the correspondent of the Völkischer Beobachter, what could he possibly have to hide?
Sorge himself understood that his peers saw him as ‘a slightly lazy, high-living reporter’.28 That was, indeed, part of Sorge’s true nature. But it was also his cover. Some, in hindsight, saw through the false ingenuousness of Sorge’s lovable, louche alcoholic act. It was ‘a calculated part of his masquerade’, American reporter Joseph Newman of the New York Herald Tribune wrote later. ‘He created the impression of being a playboy, almost a wastrel, the very antithesis of a keen and dangerous spy.’29
In March 1934, Eugen Ott was mercifully released from his Nagoyan exile and joined the embassy staff in Tokyo as senior military attaché, with a promotion to full colonel. Both Ott and Sorge were, for different reasons, delighted by the move. Ott may have been ‘rigid and stiff’, as Araki remembered him, but like many self-possessed men he seemed to have gained vicarious satisfaction from flamboyance in others. The Otts moved into a European-style villa in the bourgeois Nagai compound in Shibuya in downtown Tokyo. Sorge became a regular visitor, even reluctantly donning evening dress when other guests were present. He would often stay behind to play chess, drink whisky and chat – off the record, naturally – about the politics of Germany and Japan.30
Ott quickly developed contacts with pro-German officers in the top ranks of the Japanese military – men like Colonel Oshima Hiroshi and the Japanese military intelligence spy chief Colonel Kenji Doihara – who were to play a central role in transforming Japan into a military dictatorship and ally of Hitler’s. At the same time Sorge applied his considerable energies to establishing himself as a serious authority on Japanese culture and politics – in other words, into making himself something more than merely a journalist or even a diligent, run-of-the-mill rezident. ‘I plunged into an exhaustive study of Japanese affairs,’ Sorge explained in his prison confession. ‘I did not believe that I should concern myself exclusively with the technical and organisational work of receiving orders and conveying them to my co-workers and forwarding reports to the Moscow authorities. I could not reconcile myself to such a simple concept of my responsibilities as the leader of an intelligence group operating in a foreign land. I had always felt that a man in such a position should cultivate a thorough understanding of all problems related to his activities. The collection of information had an importance of its own, but I was convinced that the ability to appraise it and to evaluate the over-all political picture was of vital importance.’31
In early 1934 the first courier sent by Centre from Shanghai – pre-arranged before Sorge’s departure – arrived in Tokyo. He (or conceivably she – the courier is not named in the archives) wrote to Sorge care of the German embassy. They met in a room in the Imperial Hotel to establish their bona fides. The next day they met again at the Ieyasu shrine, where among the forest of stone lanterns the courier handed over a package ‘chiefly containing money’ and the number of a postbox in Shanghai for emergency communications.32
Sorge put Centre’s dollars to good use – at least as he saw it – embarking on an extensive series of tours around Japan. His companion for trips to Nara, Kyoto and Yamada was the writer Friedrich Sieburg, whom Sorge probably knew from Berlin. The journeys were an insight not only into the ancient culture of Japan but also into the almost maniacal scrutiny under which all foreigners were kept.
‘In those two or three journeys to the provinces there were many police, in uniform and plain clothes, who controlled us closely, starting conversations with us almost by force,’ Sieburg wrote. ‘For the most part they were these eye-catchingly “nondescript” young men who always accepted with pleasure the visiting cards that I had ordered in a Japanese print shop on Sorge’s advice. On trains people would constantly begin to talk to us in broken English or German, asking us for our visiting cards and accepting them as though they were valuable documents. They would ask extremely politely if they may be allowed to keep the card. In the station at Yamada we were stopped by a whole group of uniformed policemen who bowed and asked if they could photograph us.’33
Sorge also set about amassing a private library, which by the time of his arrest numbered nearly a thousand books on Japanese history, economics, politics, and philosophy. He commissioned several translations of Japanese classics and in his spare time – still dreaming perhaps of a future in academia – worked on a book about the eleventh-century epic The Tale of Genji. With the help of various translators – Sorge’s knowledge of Japanese never rose beyond the colloquial – he read magazines and government pamphlets in the libraries of the German embassy and the Tokyo East Asia German Society.34 And he corresponded with at least a dozen Japan-kenners around the world. Combined with the confidential information that Ott would share with him and intelligence from his Japanese network, Sorge soon became, without exaggeration, the best-informed foreign observer of Japan in the world.
With the arrival of Wendt, Vukelić and Miyagi, Sorge’s network was, in theory, ready to start its covert work. In practice, however, the cadres that Centre had hastily, and apparently randomly, selected for the rezidentura were proving useless. By spring, Wendt had assembled his transmitter in the attic of his house in Yokohama and successfully made contact with the powerful Soviet military radios of ‘Weisbaden’ (Vladivostok). But though the radio man was supposedly under less scrutiny than Sorge was in Tokyo, Wendt clearly lacked his boss’s iron nerve. Even when he did pluck up the courage to communicate with Centre, Wendt’s transmissions were often incomplete. Wendt ‘drank all the time and often neglected to send out the information’, wrote Sorge. ‘Spying work must be done bravely. He was cowardly.’35
Miyagi was also proving anything but a natural-born spy. He had come to Japan under the impression that his help was required to set up a Comintern group of idealistic Japanese socialists, not to act as a secret agent. ‘What Sorge asked me was things about Japanese political and military issues,’ Miyagi told interrogators. ‘He was not trying to organise a Comintern ring’ at all.36 Sorge finally put his cards on the table during their fifth meeting, in January 1934, and told Miyagi bluntly that he needed his help to undertake espionage against his fellow countrymen. The naive, Tolstoy-loving artist had a crisis of nerve, or perhaps of conscience. But Sorge was clearly a persuasive man. He convinced Miyagi, by the latter’s account, that he had been chosen as a soldier of the revolution, and that a soldier obeyed orders. The clinching argument was that Miyagi’s secret work would be ‘an important mission from the viewpoint of world history and … the main task was to prevent a Japanese-Russian war’.37 At the same time Miyagi made Sorge promise that he could return to California as soon as a better qualified man could be found (none ever was). In the meantime, Miyagi agreed to ‘participate in the ring, understanding completely that this activity was against the laws of Japan and that I would be executed in wartime for my espionage’.38
The first report Miyagi compiled for Sorge was on the mood of the army, gleaned mostly from newspaper reports and street gossip. Sorge was unimpressed. Miyagi had no local contacts of any sort, and though friendly and gregarious, Miyagi did not move in the kind of circles that could be of any use to the spy ring. What Sorge needed to make his Tokyo assignment worthwhile was a Japanese agent of a much higher calibre.
Ozaki Hotsumi had spent the two years since the end of his Shanghai posting working in Osaka at the foreign desk of the Asahi Shimbun and living a quiet family life with his wife Eiko and young daughter Yoko, born in November 1929. A sweeping purge of Japanese communists had caught several of his old friends and comrades, but since Ozaki had always been careful never to formally join the party he remained above suspicion.
In May 1934, Sorge decided that the time was ripe to seek out his old Shanghai collaborator. He sent Miyagi as his emissary. Using the alias of Minami Ryuichi, Miyagi tracked down Ozaki at the offices of the Asahi and passed on the invitation to meet ‘an old foreign friend from Shanghai days’. Ozaki was naturally suspicious, at first assuming that ‘Minami’ was a police provocateur. It took two further meetings before Ozaki agreed to meet the foreigner that he assumed was Agnes Smedley’s American journalist friend, Mr Johnson. It would be two years before Ozaki discovered, by chance, Sorge’s real name.39
Sorge and Ozaki met on a Sunday afternoon in early May of 1934 on the steps between the Sarusawa-ike Pond and the Kofukuji Five-Storey Pagoda in the deer park of the old Imperial city of Nara. It is one of the few places in the Sorge story that has been preserved absolutely intact. Then, as now, Nara park was a favourite destination for day trippers eager to feed the eerily tame deer and visit the ancient temples. In a tea pavilion, among crowds of Japanese tourists, ‘Johnson’ explained that he was now posted to Tokyo, and asked Ozaki to help him gather information ‘for the Comintern’ as he had done in Shanghai. Ozaki, by his own account, readily agreed without qualm. ‘I made up my mind to do spy activity with Sorge again. I accepted his request readily, and since then up to the time of my arrest I have been engaged in espionage activity,’ Ozaki would later tell his interrogators.40
After the war Ozaki was to become a hero for Japanese leftists as a true patriot who put his conscience before blind obedience to his country.41 In Junji’s Kinoshita 1962 play A Japanese Called Otto, Ozaki is portrayed as a man moved by high humanist ideals. Principled he may have been, but Ozaki’s confession suggests that he was, from the beginning, a willing and conscious spy for Moscow.42 ‘I have thought that … the role of protecting Russia was one of the most important activities,’ Ozaki would later tell the police. ‘Keeping the Comintern or Russia accurately informed of the various situations inside Japan, which is the most probable attacker of Russia among the world powers, and let her take measures as a means of protecting Russia, was the most important mission for us … I sometimes thought secretly that, as a communist in Japan, it is even something to be proud of that I engaged in such difficult and disadvantageous work.’43
At the same time Ozaki was no naive novice. He knew – and immediately warned Sorge – that any covert work in heavily policed Japan would be a very different proposition from operating in freewheeling Shanghai. Sorge, for his part, seems to have underestimated just how valuable Ozaki’s position and contacts at the Asahi would become. It appears that Sorge at first envisioned Ozaki as a kind of high-functioning Miyagi, a busy go-between operating at the rezident’s beck and call. Sorge suggested that he quit his job and find work as a private tutor in Tokyo, an idea that Ozaki sensibly rejected – especially since Sorge offered him no salary for his secret work.44 Instead Ozaki agreed to apply for a transfer to the Asahi’s Tokyo office. He also wanted to finish a translation of Smedley’s Daughter of Earth, on which Ozaki had been working ever since he left China in 1932 (the finished book, entitled A Woman Walks the Earth Alone and extensively filleted of overtly communist references by Japanese censors, appeared in August 1934 under Ozaki’s pen name of Jiro Shirakawa).45
In the event, the devil’s own luck that would recur so often in Sorge’s espionage career struck over the summer. Ogata Taketora, the Asahi’s august editor-in-chief, persuaded the paper’s board to sponsor a think tank in Tokyo, to be known as the Toa Mondai Chosa Kai, or ‘East Asia Problems Investigation Association’. The idea of the association was to bring together top Asahi writers and senior Japanese policymakers to produce learned papers on pressing current events – while in the process offering the paper a privileged insight into the highest councils in the land. Members of the new research centre included economists, political analysts, representatives of the Foreign Ministry, army and navy, delegates from the General Staff, other government ministries, Japan’s major financial-industrial groups, various intellectuals, and of course an expert on Soviet affairs.46 Naturally Ozaki, as the paper’s respected expert on China, was asked to join.
By early September the Ozakis were setting up home in Tokyo. In a single stroke, Sorge’s main agent would have access to the latest top-level information – albeit unclassified, the association being a public forum – on every strand of Japan’s political, economic and military life. And so was born the virtuous circle that would link Ozaki, Sorge and Ott and help propel them all to greatness in their respective fields.
The key to Sorge’s success was that he seldom stole secrets – he traded them. Ozaki fed Sorge all the information he gleaned at the Association. Sorge shared it with Ott, making himself indispensable to the rising star of the embassy and boosting Ott’s own standing in the eyes of his masters in Berlin. In turn Sorge would feed back what he had seen and heard from Ott – as well as titbits gleaned from British and French journalists by Vukelić – to Ozaki, giving him an unprecedented insight into the workings of German and European power politics.47 And all the time, the sum total of this gold mine of intelligence would pass to Moscow. Of the three, Ott was of course the only unwitting party. But he was also the only one, in the final reckoning, to escape the hangman’s noose.
Prosecutor Mitsusada Yoshikawa, who questioned Ozaki extensively in prison and developed considerable sympathy for his prisoner (before calling for him to be sentenced to death) was convinced that Sorge’s information was the key to Ozaki’s rise. Ozaki ‘wanted to be associated with Sorge because the latter was an important source of information and analytical interpretation’.48 Ott, for his part, found that Sorge’s information helped him quickly to become Dirksen’s most valued adviser on political affairs – an unusual position for a military attaché.49 In autumn 1934, Sorge’s luck struck once again when Dirksen developed severe asthma that rendered him a semi-invalid for much of the winter in Tokyo’s damp, smoggy climate.50 By the following year Ott wo
uld effectively be running the embassy.
In September, Eugen Ott set out on an official trip to Manchuria. He asked Sorge, his new friend and confidant, to accompany him as an official embassy courier.51 In 1932 the Japanese had established a puppet state in Manchuria and part of Inner Mongolia they named Manchukuo. In the same year Ott’s acquaintance, Colonel Kenji Doihara – chief of Japanese military intelligence and one of the pro-German ultra-nationalist officers who dominated the Japanese Kwangtung Army in Manchuria – had organised the kidnapping of the deposed Emperor of China, Henry Pu Yi. The hapless young Pu Yi was established as the putative emperor of the new state – though Manchukuo remained unrecognised by any nation other than Japan itself. Dirksen, after lobbying from Japan’s foreign minister Koki Hirota, recommended to his superior in Berlin that Germany recognise it too as a way of bringing Germany and Japan closer together. State Secretary Bernhard von Bülow was initially sceptical.52 But it was already clear by the time of Sorge and Ott’s official visit that Manchuria would be a crucial bellwether not only of Japan’s imperialist intentions but also of the power struggle between the hotheads of the Kwangtung Army and their supporters in the General Staff and the more cautious political establishment in Tokyo.
As honoured guests from a country whose favour Japan was actively courting, Ott and Sorge were entertained lavishly. Ott inspected troops and visited Manchukuo’s new capital, Hsinking (modern Changchun). They travelled on the South Manchuria Railway, almost certainly on the brand-new Asia Express. Built at the Showa steel works in Japan specially for the Chinese rail gauge, the Asia Express reached a top speed of 133 kilometres per hour and was the fastest scheduled train in Asia – as well as one of the fastest trains in the world – at the time.
An Impeccable Spy Page 16