The technological wonders of the South Manchuria Railway were of more than casual interest to Sorge. Between the Russian handover of the railway to Japanese control in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905 and the annexation of Manchuria in 1931, the Mantetsu company that ran the railway had functioned as a state within a state inside China. It was wildly profitable, providing over a quarter of the Japanese government’s tax revenues in the 1920s, thanks to its freight trade of soybeans and oil from the Chinese interior. In 1927 the Mantetsu was carrying fully half the world’s supply of soy to Japan and other Asian markets,53 and by the mid-1930s the railway was transporting over 17 million passengers per year.
The real importance of the Mantetsu, however, was as a vehicle of Japanese colonisation of Manchuria. The company had its own army (infamously, it had been the railway troops of the Kwangtung Army who had organised the provocation that had led to the invasion of Manchuria) as well as its own research bureaus, urban planning departments, police and secret service, and company towns. As Japanese colonists piled into Manchuria with official encouragement – numbering over 800,000 by 1940 – the Mantetsu built up-to-date modern settlements for them all along the length of the railway, with modern sewer systems, public parks, and creative modern architecture far in advance of what could be found in Japan itself. The ideological message was clear. The Japanese had arrived as the civilisers of China – and the rest of Asia too.
The railway was also a vital military asset, as important to the Japanese Army as battleships and coaling stations were to its navy. And here was the rub. Under the terms of the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth that settled the Russo-Japanese war all lines north of Changchun were still controlled by Russia.54 At Kuanchengzi station the width between the rails changed from the standard gauge of 4 feet 8½ inches (originally invented by British railway pioneer George Stephenson) to the much wider Russian gauge of 5 feet (a uniquely Russian gauge invented in 1842 by George Washington Whistler, an American railway engineer and father of the artist James McNeill Whistler). In practice – and this practical detail would play a vital role in the escalating tensions between Moscow and Tokyo – that meant that Japanese rolling stock could not physically cross on to the Soviet-controlled part of the track. It also meant that after Japan overran all of Manchuria, a large section of strategically vital railway running deep into Manchukuo remained, bizarrely, under Moscow’s control. By the time Sorge visited in 1934 the Japanese government was making increasingly emphatic overtures to the Soviets to buy the Manchukuo section of the railway – with the clear implied threat that in the event of a refusal they would simply take it.
On their return to Tokyo, Sorge and Ott both penned lengthy reports on the political and military situation in Manchuria. Ott was so impressed by Sorge’s account of the mission that he asked permission to forward it to General Georg Thomas, chief of the Economics Department of the General Staff headquarters in Berlin. It was the beginning of a long-term association between Thomas and Sorge that would result in the commissioning of many more reports from Sorge – with the result that until late 1941 the Wehrmacht’s main source on Asia’s economics was a ranking Soviet spy.55
The most immediate benefit of the Manchurian expedition was to cement the trust and friendship between Sorge and Ott, and confirm Sorge as a trusted and authoritative source on all things Japanese. Ott’s only reservation about his charming, well-informed friend was Sorge’s drinking, which worried Ott considerably. ‘I had him watched for months,’ Ott would later recall, ‘because I feared that while drunk he might talk about things from our conversations.’56
This delicate juncture in Sorge’s relationship with his most valuable source was not, perhaps, the wisest moment to seduce Ott’s wife. Yet that was precisely what Sorge did, soon after his return from Manchuria.
Helma Ott was six-foot tall, haughty and imperious, with grey hair and a grave manner. Her Japanese friends nicknamed her matsu no ki, ‘the pine tree’. She had a reputation for rudeness with the wives of Ott’s subordinates, and she looked down, not only literally, upon Japanese women.57 Helma was a year older than Sorge when they embarked on their affair in the autumn of 1934. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Helma was that she had once been a communist, and had indeed been a member of the party.58 Her first husband, Ernst May, was a visionary architect who had studied in England under Raymond Unwin, the prophet of the garden city movement.59 He was also an enthusiastic socialist. May and Helma moved in left-wing circles in May’s native Frankfurt until their divorce in 1918. It is possible that Sorge may even have met Helma during the revolutionary fervour of 1919. Certainly they must have had many common Red friends and acquaintances from Frankfurt.
Regrettably for Helma’s new role as good Nazi wife to the upstanding Colonel Ott, May went on to become something of a socialist celebrity. As architect and planner for the city of Frankfurt he created the revolutionary large-scale housing development programme known as Neues Frankfurt. Many of his prefabricated constructivist buildings – such as the bow-fronted Siedlung Römerstadt and the Zickzackhausen, or zigzag houses – survive today. In 1930, with Neues Frankfurt complete, May left Germany for the USSR where his team of progressive architects – known as May’s Brigade – set to planning entire socialist utopian cities including the Urals mining city of Magnitogorsk.60
In any case, Helma’s communist past continued to be, even in Tokyo, a source of mild embarrassment. Perhaps she and Sorge found common ground in Tokyo as fellow left-wingers in an increasingly Nazi world. More likely, Helma was in a loveless marriage and found the hell-raising, handsome new arrival too much of a temptation. Sorge’s prodigious libido certainly seems to have got the better of his judgement.
In the event, Ott did not object to his wife’s dalliance. The only sign he gave of knowing of his wife’s affair with his new best friend was to nickname Sorge ‘der unwilderstehliche’ – the irresistible one. What private pain was masked by this jocularity we cannot know. Helma seems to have had oddly maternal feelings for Sorge. She attempted to make his bohemian den on Nagasaki Street more gemütlich – as well as more private – by having curtains made. In any case, the affair was brief. Sorge remembered it with his usual lack of sentimentality. Some years later, after the Shanghai radio man Max Clausen had joined Sorge in Tokyo, Clausen’s wife Anna suggested that Helma Ott was ‘beautiful’. ‘Oh, don’t talk to me of that woman,’ answered Sorge. ‘But what do you want me to do? We need her.’61 And when Sorge’s last Japanese mistress found snapshots of a grey-haired Western woman whose eyes were ‘full of happiness and shone beautifully’, she was convinced that the woman in the photo loved whoever had taken it. When she quizzed Sorge on this subject, he identified the woman as his old lover Helma Ott. ‘But there is nothing between us now. She is just a friend. Mrs Ott is kind and good.’62
Eugen Ott’s continued faith in his wild friend was confirmed in the most public way when Sorge’s Nazi Party card, number 2,751,466, finally arrived at the Tokyo chapter of the National Socialist Workers’ Party. Sorge was officially enrolled in the local party organisation on 1 October 1934 – making him possibly the only person in history to have been a simultaneous member of both the German Nazi Party and the Soviet Communist Party. He became a regular at party meetings, and when the chairman left later in the year Sorge’s fellow Nazis urged him to take the position. Sorge consulted Dirksen and Ott, who supported the idea. ‘You should become head of the branch,’ Ott told Sorge. ‘Then the Nazis will have another intellectual leader.’63 Sorge apparently heard no irony in the remark. But Ott’s approval of his candidacy was a clear endorsement of the esteem in which he was held both in the community and by Ott himself.
In the event, Sorge declined the honour – sensibly, since by no means all members of the German community in Tokyo were Nazis and many, including several German Jews and Lutheran Christian missionaries, were openly opposed. Nonetheless, Sorge made a point of sporting a Nazi lapel badge while at the embass
y. He also gave occasional lectures after party meetings, including one memorable evening when he spoke to the assembled Nazis, presumably with remarkable authority, on the Comintern and its techniques of spreading revolution.
In January 1935 a new Soviet agent arrived in Tokyo on a solo mission. Her name was Aino Kuusinen, the estranged first wife of Otto Wille Kuusinen, the Finnish-born secretary of the Comintern’s Executive Committee. She and Sorge had first met in 1924, when he was working in the Comintern’s secretariat. After her separation from her husband, Aino was recruited by the Fourth Department and assigned to secret work in the United States. In the ‘free air’ of America, Aino’s doubts about communism grew – or so she claimed after retiring to Italy in 1965.64 She seems to have kept her wavering faith to herself, for Berzin assigned her to Tokyo with the unusually cushy assignment of infiltrating Japanese high society while posing as a writer. Centre provided her with a Swedish passport in the name of ‘Edith Hansson’ and plenty of funds. But unlike Sorge, Kuusinen was not required to recruit agents or establish her own communications with Centre. Instead, she was to receive cash and send her messages via Sorge, an arrangement which obviously irritated him. As in Shanghai with the Noulens, Centre was ready to compromise Sorge’s security in order to solve the Comintern’s – in this case marital – problems. The two also got off to a bad start when Aino objected to Sorge taking her out to a ‘German ale house of the lowest kind’, presumably the Das Rheingold, for their first meeting.65
Despite the irritation of having to deal with Aino Kuusinen, Sorge must have been pleased with his achievements. After just a year and a half in Tokyo, he had built the foundations of a formidable espionage machine. His recruitment of a Japanese source as well-connected as Ozaki, his friendship with the increasingly influential Eugen Ott, the position he had carved out in the Nazi Party, the Tokyo press corps and the German community – this was already penetration on a level that few Soviet agents had ever achieved. However, Wendt remained a problem. There was still no effective communication with Moscow other than by microfilm, laboriously couriered by hand via Shanghai by the otherwise fairly useless Vukelić. But beyond the Fourth Department’s poor choice of radio man, Sorge’s own planning had been meticulous. Unlike the chaotic arrangements he had inherited in Shanghai, in Tokyo Sorge was able to operate freely without any compromising entanglements with local communists, uncontrollable left-wing foreign celebrities, and most importantly bumbling Comintern cadres.
There was only one structural flaw in Sorge’s system: the freelance recruiting efforts of his enthusiastic Japanese acolytes, Miyagi and Ozaki. It would ultimately prove fatal to everyone in the group. Soon after his arrival in Japan, Miyagi had run into Akiyama Koji, an old acquaintance from California whom he had met through his communist landlady Mrs Kitabayashi. Forty-five years old and unemployed, Akiyama was looking for work, so Miyagi engaged him to translate materials he had gathered into English for Sorge for 100 yen a month, freeing up Miyagi for his field work.66 It was a risk, as Akiyama was neither a fully fledged communist nor even a fellow-traveller. Sorge, for one, was nervous, particularly since the military reports that Miyagi was giving Akiyama to translate were certainly suspicious if not outright compromising. ‘Lately it seemed that Miyagi was often meeting with a former friend from America,’ Sorge wrote in his prison memoir. ‘He talked about him several times, and whenever I expressed my anxiety about his association he declared emphatically that the man was trustworthy.’67
Ozaki had also engaged in some recruiting of his own. In early 1935 he decided to write to his old Shanghai informant – and Smedley protégé – journalist Teikichi Kawai, asking him to come home in order to ‘study the situation in Japan’. Kawai readily agreed, doubtless remembering how impressed he had been by Sorge and Smedley during their earlier association in China. Kawai arrived in Tokyo in March and took a room with another old friend from Shanghai, Fujita Isamu, a virulent ultra-nationalist. Fujita was a risky room-mate but also a useful one, as he was deeply involved in the intrigues of the Japanese Army’s power structure and knowledgeable about its constantly shifting factions.68 Ozaki enrolled Kawai in his own second-tier, exclusively Japanese, subset of the Sorge spy ring.
‘Until the spring of 1935 the execution of our duties was completely out of the question,’ Sorge wrote. ‘The time was spent in getting to grips with the especially difficult Japanese situation.’69 Nonetheless, by March 1935, and well ahead of the two-year schedule that Berzin had set him for setting up a Tokyo rezidentura, Sorge was ready to report in person to Centre – and to see his wife Katya once again. More conveniently still, Ozaki had announced that he would be spending the spring and summer on an extended fact-finding mission in China with a team from the East Asia Problems Investigation Association. They arranged to rendezvous in September, on their mutual return to Tokyo.70 Sorge also hoped to be in Moscow to catch up with old friends who would be attending the Seventh International Congress of the Communist International in July.
After an exchange of messages with Centre preparing the logistics of his journey, Sorge told Ott that he was ready for a holiday ‘in America’. In May 1935 he boarded a steamer from Yokohama bound for San Francisco, the first stage of his long journey back to Moscow.
*Today this area, including the site of Sorge’s house, is occupied by a hulking shopping mall, office building and multiplex cinema.
9
Moscow 1935
‘He had been transformed into a boisterous, hard-drinking man’1
Hede Massing
Sorge was met in New York by a Fourth Department agent who supplied him with an Austrian passport with which he would travel to Russia. It bore the real owner’s ‘long and outlandish’ name, but the alias would protect Sorge’s genuine German passport from showing Soviet entry stamps. Sorge visited a tailor to order a new American suit, visual evidence for his Japanese friends of his time in the States.2 He was unused to the tradecraft of travelling under an assumed name. At the steamship office he had to consult his new Austrian passport to remind himself of his new identity. Once on board the ship an American customs official discovered that Sorge had omitted to pay US exit tax. To avoid being taken off the liner he paid the man a bribe of $50 – something unthinkable in Japan. (‘Things are very flexible in the United States,’ Sorge noted.3) He was naturally keen to avoid a thorough inspection by US law enforcement, as his suitcase was full of secret microfilmed material. As he cockily told the Japanese after his arrest, this was a violation of standing instructions that expressly forbade any agent to ‘make a long journey carrying articles to be delivered through many countries’.4 Once more Sorge’s luck carried him through.
Sorge found Moscow much changed. Photographs of the city from 1935 show Soviet-made Moskvich cars and brand-new, twenty-seat GAZ buses jockeying horse-drawn carts for road space on the newly named Gorky Street, formerly Tverskaya.5 A grand ‘General Plan for Moscow’ was transforming the city into a new socialist metropolis. The first line of the Moscow Metro had just opened. New constructivist buildings by radical architects such as Le Corbusier and Konstantin Melnikov (though none by Helma Ott’s former husband, Ernst May, who had left Moscow in 1933 after his plans had been rejected) were replacing the pre-revolutionary wooden and baroque merchant palaces. The boxy new Hotel Moskva rose over Manezh Square, its facade asymmetrical because Stalin had signed two different sets of alternative plans and no one had dared question which one the khozain actually wanted. And to symbolise the victory of the future over the past, new electrically lit Soviet stars were that summer being installed on the tops of the Kremlin’s towers.
Sorge’s first call was, naturally, to Katya. Her friend Vera Izbitskaya, remembered the couple coming to find her at the Intourist travel agency offices on the second floor of the Metropol Hotel on the day of Sorge’s arrival. ‘Shining with happiness,’ Katya cajoled her friend into coming to celebrate her husband’s return. Vera protested that she needed to stay until the end of the wo
rking day but Sorge refused to be thwarted. ‘No, girls, we must mark my arrival,’ he told them.6 Vera found Sorge ‘charming and humorous’, though the women ‘didn’t know what was true and what was made up’ about his banter. But Sorge was serious about one thing. Speaking only to Katya, but within earshot of Izbitskaya, he promised that ‘now I will not go anywhere, my Katyushka. We will not part again. They promise me work in Moscow in the Institute of Marxism and Leninism. I love my work … and now we will go to the South. I have been dreaming of going to the Black Sea.’7 Perhaps, at the moment he said it, Sorge even believed his own promise.
The couple were able to enjoy at least a little of the settled married life about which Sorge always claimed to dream. Katya took a holiday from her factory job to spend more time with her husband. Visiting friends would only call by for a moment, knowing that the couple wanted to be alone. Katya’s tiny room felt like a kind of home. A whole bookcase of Sorge’s German books stood by one wall, as well as the old cross-country skis that he would never use again.8
It was, in many ways, a happy time to be in Moscow. Food rationing that had been in place since the civil war had just ended. A brand-new metro station – Kominternovskaya, now Aleksandrovsky Sad – had opened a few metres from Katya’s communal apartment on Nizhny Kislovsky Lane. The papers were full of the news of the production exploits of hero miners in Donbass and record-breaking long-distance flights. The first Moscow International Film Festival was held that summer, with Sergei Eisenstein as chairman of the jury. The avant-garde Chinese opera director Mei Lanfang was visiting with his troupe. Perhaps Sorge, with his interest in the Orient, and Katya with her passion for theatre, went to see it.
An Impeccable Spy Page 17