Despite her obvious happiness at seeing Sorge, Katya’s life was also shot through with regret. Her neighbours at Nizhny Kislovsky, Boris and Sonya Glovatsky, had left for a summer tour of Siberia with a theatre company to perform plays to builders, miners and foresters. Katya, her dreams of a theatrical career abandoned, did not accompany them. She told her friends at work that her husband ‘worked in defence’ and that she received the status and perks of being the wife of a Red Army officer. Her sister Marfa never met Sorge but felt ‘that we knew him well … Katya said he was a scholar-specialist on the East. Katya always called him a brilliant revolutionary. We knew he was doing hard and dangerous work.’ But Katya confided to her friend Vera: ‘I don’t know if I am married or not. We count our meetings in days and the time were are apart in years.’9
Moscow’s political climate was changing as fast as the city itself. The previous December a lone assassin had shot Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s last rival for leadership of the party, in his office at the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. Though Stalin had acted as pallbearer and wept at Kirov’s funeral, the murder was his work. Finally the undisputed master of the party, Stalin set about purging his enemies among the old Bolsheviks. Sorge’s old mentor, Comintern founder Grigory Zinoviev, had been expelled from the party (for a second time) and arrested in December 1934. In January 1935 Zinoviev was tried with his old comrade Lev Kamenev, forced to admit ‘moral complicity’ in Kirov’s assassination and was sentenced to ten years in prison.
Most importantly for Sorge, he found the Fourth Department in disarray and his old boss and recruiter Jan Berzin gone in the wake of a serious espionage disaster. In February 1935, Danish police had ambushed a meeting of senior Soviet military intelligence officers in a Copenhagen apartment. Four top European rezidenty were arrested, along with ten local agents. The debacle was the worst mass arrest of illegals in the history of Soviet intelligence. Blame was laid, Sorge may not have been entirely surprised to hear, at the feet of Alexander Ulanovsky, his old chief in Shanghai.
Just as in China, Ulanovsky had disregarded Centre’s instructions not to have anything to do with local activists and recruited five of the ten arrested local agents from the ranks of the Danish Communist Party. One turned out to be a police informer. Worse, at least two of the Fourth Department officers who had just arrived from Germany had no reason to be at the meeting other than just ‘to catch up with old friends’, according to a report into the disaster prepared for the People’s Commissar for Defence, Artur Artuzov. Another of Ulanovsky’s mistakes was to recruit the American chancer and assassin George Mink, a former taxi driver from Philadelphia who had made a career as a communist trade union organiser in Maine. Mink had made himself useful to the OMS by murdering at least one potential traitor to the Party in Hamburg. But with his multiple links to the underworld, as well as the thoroughly infiltrated local branches of the Profintern, Comintern and Danish Communist Party, Mink was a five-bell liability.10 With a lack of judgement that characterised his various disastrous personnel choices in China, Ulanovsky nonetheless recruited Mink as his deputy. Both Mink and another American comrade were scooped up at the fateful spies’ get-together in Copenhagen.11 All were jailed for up to five years. Worse, the identity of British comrades who had assisted in the establishment of the Danish Fourth Department station the previous year were also revealed.12
The mass arrests were a major blow to Berzin’s fledgling apparat. Copenhagen had become Soviet military intelligence’s major European espionage hub after the Nazis’ rise to power had rendered Berlin too risky an environment. The underground West European Bureau of the Comintern had also been evacuated to Copenhagen.13 All those networks now lay exposed and unusable. Artuzov’s ruthless deputy, and soon to be successor, General Kliment Voroshilov, wrote scathingly on the Fourth Department’s report into the disaster, ‘from this unclear and naive account it is obvious that our foreign intelligence is still lame in all four of its legs’.14 Berzin offered his resignation and was demoted to deputy commander of the Far Eastern Army.
So it was General Semyon Uritsky, Berzin’s former deputy, who greeted Sorge on his triumphant return to Moscow. Uritsky was a former pharmacist and keen amateur novelist from Odessa who had made a career organising the Red partisan movement against the Whites in south Ukraine during the civil war. Like Berzin before him he had proved himself a ruthless commander in the field, leading a punitive expedition against anti-Soviet partisans in the Caucasian enclaves of Chechnya and Ingushetia in 1919–30.15 Promoted to komkor (corps commander, or lieutenant general), Uritsky had headed a secret Soviet mission to Germany in 1932 where he negotiated the final phase of the covert military training of German pilots and tank commanders on Soviet territory.16 It is possible that while in Berlin Uritsky also came across Eugen Ott, who at the time was still actively involved in the undercover training programme as a liaison officer to Sondergruppe R.
Uritsky received Sorge with unfeigned enthusiasm. Sorge had the impression that his new chief had thoroughly vetted his background and the reliability of the information he had sent, and been impressed. First and foremost, Sorge had proved that ‘spy activity was possible’ in Japan. They discussed in detail ‘the bright prospects I foresaw there’.17 Both men seem to have learned from the debacle of the Noulens affair that a rezident must be allowed to make his own operational decisions, free of Centre’s micro-managing tendencies. Sorge asked for ‘absolute freedom to contract any relations I deemed necessary with the German embassy’ and also, crucially, for formal permission to share information with the Germans in order to build his bona fides with Ott. He also requested that the newly registered agent Ozaki be recognised as ‘a direct member of our group’ – presumably to avoid the danger of some Fourth Department functionary attempting to reassign Ozaki to other work elsewhere in Asia.18
Uritsky agreed to all Sorge’s conditions – at least by Sorge’s own account – promising that he would have ‘freedom of activity to select problems to work on as the situation would develop and change’.19 The chief also outlined a detailed list of seven questions that were of crucial importance to the security of the USSR. What was Japan’s policy toward the Soviet Union, with particular attention to whether or not Japan planned to attack? Were there any signs of reorganisation and strengthening of such Japanese Army and air units that might be directed against Russia? Were Germany and Japan planning to form an alliance? Was Japan planning any further expansion in China? Was Japan likely to strike any deals with Britain and America to encircle the USSR? Was the influence of the Japanese Army on national policies growing? What was the status of Japan’s breakneck industrialisation? In short, Sorge’s task was to keep Moscow informed of whether Japan intended to invade the USSR – either alone or in alliance with Germany – and how well equipped is was to do so.
The last outstanding question was how to get the rezidentura’s communications on a professional footing. Before he left for Moscow, Sorge had briefed the hapless Wendt on the dangers that faced him if he remained in Japan. Exactly why Sorge did not simply tell him that he was about to be fired for incompetence is not clear. Perhaps he wanted to help Wendt save face. In any case, the sobering talk had the desired effect and the inept Wendt resigned from the job on his own initiative. By the time Sorge began searching for a new radio man, Wendt was already safely back in Moscow with his wife, ready to brief his replacement.20 Men in Moscow with the operational experience necessary to work in Tokyo’s hazardous environment formed a shortlist of just two: Sorge’s old China comrades, Sepp Weingarten and Max Clausen.21
There was one problem. Clausen was, in Sorge’s view, by far the better radio operator, both in terms of his technical skill and his ability to work under constant danger. But in the two years since he had last worked with Sorge in Shanghai and Canton, Clausen’s relations with the Fourth Department had deteriorated almost to breaking point. The difficulty was Clausen’s wife, Anna. Anna Wallenius’s late husband had seen his factories expropriat
ed by the Bolsheviks and the couple had been forced to flee to Shanghai with nothing except what they could carry. Max had never told Anna about his secret life because of her hatred of communism. Not surprisingly, Berzin judged Anna a liability – and indeed for a spell had refused to allow Max to marry her. When, in autumn 1933, Clausen was recalled to Moscow from his last post as radio man in Harbin, the Fourth Department tried to insist that he left Anna behind in China. They even offered to provide him with a dummy wife – a Soviet agent – with whom to travel back to Moscow, possibly because his Chinese visa mentioned that another had also been issued to Clausen’s spouse.22
Clausen balked and refused to leave China without Anna.23 With bad grace Berzin agreed – evidence that specialists of Clausen’s calibre and experience were hard to replace. But when the Clausens did finally step off the Trans-Siberian express in Moscow in October 1933 they were treated with suspicion. On their first night all their luggage, as well as their passports, disappeared.24 Anna – who soon discovered that her husband was in fact an officer of the Red Army, not least because he took to wearing his uniform during their strolls around town – quickly soured to the delights of the capital of socialism.25
Things got worse. After six-weeks’ leave in a sanatorium on the Black Sea, Clausen was summoned to Fourth Department headquarters in January 1934 and dressed down for supposedly ‘unsatisfactory’ work in China. He was to be consigned to a spell of ‘reform through labour’ at a collective farm deep in the Russian provinces. Exactly why the Fourth Department would go to the trouble of bringing its star radio man and his wife back to Moscow only to send them into humiliating exile is not clear. In any case, the Clausens were soon on a train to Engels – formerly Pokrov – the capital of the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. This curious community was peopled by the descendants of Saxon German settlers who had been brought to Russia in the 1780s by Catherine the Great. In 1934 it was home to the ZiU bus factory and boasted two municipal newspapers printed in the archaic dialect of Volga German.
From the railway station at Engels the Clausens were driven 120 kilometres eastwards across the featureless Volga steppes to Krasny Kut, a small settlement on the Yeruslan river. To the east, across the vast seas of grassland, lay Kazakhstan, to the south Stalingrad. They must have felt they had reached the end of the earth. Max was assigned to work at Krasny Kut’s motor tractor station, one of a newly founded system of bases spread across Russia that lent out brand-new Soviet-made tractors to local collective farms.26 He set up a system of radio-telephones to link the farms spread out over the vast landscape, something of a demotion from his former activities setting up international clandestine transmitters. Clausen also set up mobile radio clubs that would broadcast Radio Moscow and other improving programmes to audiences of wondering peasants. Anna found a part-time job as a teacher.27
The couple soon adapted themselves to their harsh new life, showing a toughness and stoicism that were among Clausen’s best qualifications for life as a spy. By February 1935 he was so settled that he chose to ignore a telegram from the Fourth Department ordering him back to Moscow. He had no idea that the call had ultimately come from his old boss Sorge. Whatever the message from Moscow was about, Max clearly did not want to find out. A month later, Berzin followed up with another more peremptory summons, which Clausen again proudly refused to answer. In March the regional party chief personally drove from Engels to Krasny Kut bearing a third telegram, this time signed by the deputy People’s Commissar for Defence, General Voroshilov himself.28 Handing Clausen the message, the party man said simply: ‘So – Max must go back to Moscow.’29 Leaving Anna behind, Max set off for the two-day journey to Centre.
Clausen found Berzin, not a man used to being defied, in an unfriendly mood. (Unbeknown to Clausen, Berzin was dealing with the fallout of the Copenhagen debacle and was on the verge of resigning.) The general demanded why Clausen had twice ignored orders. ‘I rejected them because my position was stable and life was getting better in the Volga Republic,’ Clausen bravely told his boss – or so he claimed to his Japanese interrogators. ‘As a result I did not want to return to Moscow.’30 The meeting was ‘the crossroads of whether I would lead my life as an honest worker or whether I would be sent abroad as an international spy’, Clausen wrote in his post-war memoir. In fact, as a serving officer under military discipline, he formally had no choice. Berzin ordered him back to the radio school in the suburbs of Moscow, where he found his old comrade Weingarten studying the structure and capacity of American transmitters and – surely a clue to the Fourth Department’s plans – Japanese short-wave receivers.
A month later, to Clausen’s surprise, his old boss Sorge appeared. True to Shanghai form, he chose to interview the two radio men at a bar near the radio school. By the end of their meeting it was clear that it would be Clausen whom Sorge wanted as his Tokyo radio man.31 Clausen, who had always liked and respected Sorge, agreed. It was to be Clausen’s greatest, and final, mission.
Sorge and Katya left for a short holiday, as he had promised, at the Black Sea resort of Gagra. According to her sister, Marfa, Sorge told Katya that he forgot which language he should be speaking when he woke up in a hotel in strange town. ‘He remembered, of course, but [Katya] decided that his nerves were giving out,’ wrote her sister. All the same, Katya told Marfa that on the whole she found her husband a ‘calm, quiet, well-balanced person’.32
During the summer Sorge also saw old comrades. One was Ignace Reiss, born Nathan Markovic Poreckij, one of the founders of the Fourth Department and one of the great Soviet illegals, and his wife Elizabeth.33 Reiss had worked with Sorge in Moscow in 1933, and it is more than possible that they also knew each other in Berlin in the late 1920s. Sorge also caught up with his old Comintern patron Otto Kuusinen and Grigory Smoliansky, the former first secretary of the party’s central committee. Neither Comintern leader could have been optimistic about the future. Stalin, always suspicious of the Comintern, was now in unrivalled control of the party. At the same time the Comintern itself was veering into what would soon be called ‘rightist deviation’ – the heretical willingness to make pacts with non-Soviet controlled leftist parties in the face of the rising fascist threat. Grigory Zinoviev had already been purged, while the old Comintern boss Nikolai Bukharin had been sidelined from politics and was at that time editing the Party newspaper Izvestia. Foreigners, even loyal communists, were being treated with undisguised suspicion.
By mid-July the Hotel Lux was filling up with delegates from around the world, arriving in Moscow for the Seventh Comintern Congress. The Fourth Department ordered Sorge to stay away. His new mission in Japan was too important for him to expose himself, even to loyal party members, just for the sake – in the words of the report on the Copenhagen debacle – of ‘catching up with old friends’. Even his old recruiter to the OMS, Manuilsky, agreed, also vetoing Sorge’s request to attend the conference. So tight was the security around Sorge’s precious new cover in Japan that he had even been removed from all but the most secret membership rolls of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Uritsky may also have been protecting Sorge by keeping him away from the failing Comintern. At the congress, in defiance of Stalin’s line, Bulgarian party leader Georgy Dimitrov and his Italian counterpart Palmiro Togliatti insisted on advocating a new policy of forming ‘popular fronts’ with fellow leftists – as opposed to only ‘united fronts’ with Soviet-approved workers’ parties. They were backed in this act of political suicide by Manuilsky. The scheme, heretical to Stalinists, was overwhelmingly approved by the delegates. The idea of uniting socialist forces was in fact an eminently sensible one. It would soon yield results in Europe, leading to the election in France of leftist prime minister Léon Blum in 1936 and the victory of the leftist Popular Front in Spain. But to Stalin any movement not under his direct control was an anathema. By backing popular fronts, the Comintern had, in effect, signed its own death warrant. Stalin was already plotting the destru
ction of its leadership. The Seventh Congress was to be the Comintern’s last.
In August 1935, just as the congress was drawing to a close, Sorge took the risk of meeting with the Finnish communist Niilo Virtanen, an old friend from the IKKI secretariat. The account of this meeting – albeit at second hand, through Otto Kuusinen’s estranged wife, Aino – suggests that Sorge was far from enthusiastic about returning to Japan, and had developed serious doubts about his relationship with the Soviet Union. The two men met at the Bolshaya Moskovskaya Hotel and drank heavily. Virtanen confided his anguish at the destruction of the Comintern and his disillusionment with Stalin. Sorge, in turn, admitted that he was tired of working as a spy. Virtanen later told Aino that Sorge had complained of wanting to leave the Soviet secret service but was unable to do so. He sensed that he was in danger in the Soviet Union, but could not flee to Germany. The Soviet hagiographic tradition has Sorge as a steely, determined and ruthless professional, the indefatigable spider spinning a web of deception. But in truth Sorge was as much trapped in the web he had made as any of the agents he charmed and seduced. As he prepared to leave for Tokyo, Sorge realised that he simply had no choice but to continue his mission, despite his personal misgivings.34
When Sorge broke the news of his imminent departure to Katya she called her friend Vera to comfort her. ‘Come,’ Katya told her friend tearfully. ‘Richard is leaving and I am staying behind.’35 Had Sorge perhaps promised Katya that she could join him in Japan, as Vukelić and Wendt’s wives had? If so, it had been an impossible proposition. Centre would never have allowed its star agent a Soviet wife en poste. As a concession Uritsky promised Sorge that he would be away for no more than two years. They also agreed that regular couriers would carry Sorge’s personal mail to and from Katya so that they could stay in closer touch. Uritsky also confirmed that Sorge and his team would be solely responsible to the Fourth Department, ‘and did not have any duty to receive any instructions from any other place … even if Stalin himself ordered me’.36
An Impeccable Spy Page 18