An Impeccable Spy
Page 19
In late August, Sorge had to leave for Japan. According to Katya’s sister Marfa, Sorge asked her to sew a large package of money into the lining of his coat before he left. ‘“What a lot of money they entrust you with,” Katya said. “They entrust me with more than money,” Richard replied, not without pride.’37
We know from their later letters that Sorge’s parting from Katya was painful. ‘It has been a year since I left you early in the morning,’ he wrote to his wife in August 1936. ‘I am closer and closer to you and more than ever. I want to come back to you. But in our life it is not personal wishes that are in charge – they must regretfully take second place.’38 Sorge was not hypocrite enough to mention duty, communism or protecting the Motherland, despite the fact that both he and Katya knew that their correspondence would be read by the Fourth Department through whose secret post it was sent. He had privately told Virtanen that he felt trapped; he told Katya that he dreamed of settling in Moscow and living the life of a scholar. Most probably, Sorge believed that this departure would be his last and that he would return soon. Two more years and he would be able to hand over the rezidentura to another man. His communist and internationalist duty discharged after nearly twenty years of service to the party, Sorge could reasonably look forward to an honourable retirement. More important, he perhaps hoped that two more years would be enough time for him to excise the demons in his nature – his thirst for danger, the call of the booze, and beer halls and whorehouses – and the narcotic thrill he seems to have drawn from his endless betrayals of all those around him.
Sorge spent a few days in Berlin visiting his mother and sister. In Amsterdam he destroyed – or possibly handed back – his Austrian passport and boarded a ship to America under his own name.39 Stopping at the New York tailor’s to pick up his new suit, he forgot that he had left it under his assumed name. The tailor seemed unfazed by the discrepancy. ‘People in the United States do not think it strange if the same man uses two different names,’ Sorge noted dryly in his memoir.40
Sorge called Hede Massing, his old friend from Berlin days who was now working under cover in New York. ‘But how did you find me?’ she exclaimed when she heard the familiar voice. Sorge just laughed. They met at the Café Brevoort on East 8th and 5th in Manhattan. Massing found her comrade much changed. ‘He had been transformed into a boisterous, hard-drinking man,’ she wrote later. ‘Little of the charm of the romantic idealistic scholar was left though he was still startlingly good looking. His cold blue eyes slightly slanted and heavy browed had retained their quality of looking amused for no reason at all. His hair was still thick and brown, but his cheeks and the heavy sensuous mouth were sagging.’41 They arranged to meet in New York again before his departure, but Sorge never showed up for the rendezvous. It would be the last time they ever saw each other.
10
Hanako and Clausen
‘A gay, dissolute adventurer with a brilliant mind and unassailable conceit’1
Hans-Otto Meissner on Sorge
While Sorge was away in Russia, Ozaki and Miyagi had been busy cementing their own spy ring. Ozaki invited Kawai to a conspiratorial dinner at the Sakai restaurant near Tokyo’s Ueno Pond, where he introduced the journalist to Miyagi as ‘an artist from France’.2 After an evening of heavy drinking the three repaired to a machiai – a species of shady bar – where they summoned young geishas to entertain them. Miyagi asked for a round, chubby one.3 The next day the three met again, their comradely conspiracy sealed by the previous night’s revels. Kawai was inducted into the methods of Miyagi’s growing team of informants, agreeing that as Japanese they had no need to conceal their meetings as they were forced to when seeing Sorge. Kawai was to show up at Miyagi’s studio whenever he had anything to report, and Miyagi would take notes on tiny pieces of paper that he would hide among his brushes and paints.4
Miyagi also busied himself with fulfilling Sorge’s order to provide ‘information on the Japanese Army based on documents and pamphlets’.5 It turned out that a remarkable amount of apparently sensitive intelligence was – as every foreign correspondent knows – available in the public realm, if one only knew where to look. At a specialist bookshop in Kanda, Miyagi bought magazines and military and technical pamphlets filled with articles ‘by Japanese military officers on the introduction of Soviet weapons, anatomy of Red forces and the new weapons of France, Germany and England’. Miyagi gave the important bits to Akiyama to translate into English for the boss.6
Ozaki also unearthed an old acquaintance, Shinotsuka Torao, who owned a small factory in the industrial Tokyo suburb of Kansai that produced military equipment. Pretending that he needed technical information for his studies at the Association, Ozaki asked Shinotsuka for help – introducing Miyagi as a student of military affairs who was ‘helping him with his work’.7 Happy to do his patriotic duty, the unwitting new informant turned out to be a fund of knowledge. Over dinners in Ginza, Shinotsuka told Miyagi all about Japan’s newest aircraft, the Kawasaki 88 and the Mitsubishi 92, as well as the exact numbers, armament and capabilities of the army’s bomber fleet and details of the navy’s complement of ‘reconnaissance planes, scout planes, attack planes, fighters and torpedo planes’. At a later meeting the garrulous factory owner shared details of the layout and locations of the army’s flying units and the navy’s bases at Yokosuka, Kasumigaura, Sasebo, and Omura. He also chatted about the navy’s new aircraft carriers Akagi and Kaga – which six years later would wreak devastation at Pearl Harbor.8
With such a valuable source to mine, Miyagi had to stay in Tokyo and postpone his plans for field trips around Japan to gather military information. He tried to persuade Kawai to go in his place, disguised as a travelling book salesman, but Kawai did not initially share his friend’s work ethic nor his devotion to the cause. ‘Kawai’s communist conviction was low and his private life was not good either,’ Miyagi would tell his interrogators. ‘Therefore, from the viewpoint of spying activities, he could not be trusted.’9 He had no idea how much pain Kawai would soon endure at the hands of police torturers in order to keep his own and Sorge’s secrets safe.
Sorge returned to Tokyo in early September 1935. Parading in his new American suit, he seemed his old, boisterous, bachelor self. To his German cronies he praised American women, joking that ‘the girls over there are fully grown!’ He had no way to communicate with Moscow Centre – or with Katya – until Clausen’s expected arrival later in the year.
On the evening of 4 October, Sorge celebrated his fortieth birthday at the Das Rheingold on Chome 5 in West Ginza. He sat with the proprietor, ‘Papa’ Keitel, who had recently redecorated to reflect the mood of the times: a large Nazi swastika flag hung behind the bar; framed photographs of Adolf Hitler decorated the booths where homesick Germans and curious Japanese patrons scoffed beer and sausages.10 Sorge’s waitress that night, dressed in a uniform of Bavarian dirndl skirt and bodice, was Hanako Miyake.11 She was pretty and slender, with a round face marked by two beauty spots on her nose and eye. Papa had given her the German name of ‘Agnes’. At five feet five inches Hanako was tall for a Japanese woman, and self-conscious about her height. The first thing she noticed was Sorge’s broad shoulders and unkempt hair. The handsome stranger looked ‘German to his last bone’, Hanako recalled when interviewed in 1965.12 Sorge ordered champagne. Keitel turned to the waitress to relay the order. ‘Agnes,’ he announced, ‘today this man turned forty. It is his birthday.’ Sorge nodded, smiling broadly, and said, ‘So des, so des.’ (‘It is so, it is so.’). Hanako asked another waitress: ‘Who is that foreigner talking to Papa? Is this his first visit here?’ Her colleague ‘Berta’ replied that ‘he used to come here quite frequently, but he has not come recently. He is a very nice person … He does not speak Japanese, but he is very generous.’13
Hanako carried the champagne to Sorge’s booth, then took a small folding chair from one of the nearby tables and joined the two men. They popped the cork and drank to Sorge’s health. Hanako would late
r recall her first meeting with Sorge in great detail:
‘Are you Agnes?’ Sorge asked.
‘Yes, I am,’ she answered.
‘I am Sorge,’ he replied, shaking her hand. His voice sounded to her Japanese ears somewhat hoarse and unmusical, Hanako told the interviewer, but his tone was kind and his ‘whole demeanour proclaimed a man of good breeding’.14
‘How old are you, Agnes?’ Sorge asked in English.
‘I am twenty-three years old,’ Hanako replied in her few words of German (she was actually twenty-five, but Papa had instructed his girls to subtract a few years from their age).15 Sorge smiled at her accent and began chatting up the pretty waitress, not realising that Hanako understood only two phrases in German: ‘I am very happy today’, and ‘Agnes, what would you like to have? I want to buy you a present.’
‘Please give me a record,’ she said.
‘Let us go buy you one tomorrow.’
Hanako loved music. So did Sorge. He produced his notebook and wrote the time of their date, the next day at Sorge’s favourite record shop. At the end of the evening he left a memorably large tip, which Hanako shared with ‘Berta’.16 Anxious that Sorge made a habit of picking up waitresses, Hanako quizzed Berta on whether ‘that foreigner has anyone he likes especially in this bar? … Does he have a favourite?’
‘Dora used to serve him occasionally when he came here,’ ‘Berta’ replied. ‘But since he does not call for anyone specifically, I don’t think he has a favourite.’17
Hanako found Sorge already at the music shop when she arrived, listening to records. He told her she could choose anything she liked, so she found three records of arias sung by one of her favourite tenors, Beniamino Gigli. Sorge added some of his own favourite piano and violin sonatas. ‘I am very fond of Mozart,’ he told her. ‘Please accept these.’18
Sorge suggested going for dinner, which ‘Agnes’ accepted. They went to Lohmeyer’s, the German restaurant Sorge often frequented with Wenneker and Ott. Hanako was shy – all the more so because a Japanese woman walking with a Westerner drew curious and disapproving stares. They also, between Hanako’s halting English and German and Sorge’s basic Japanese, had almost no common language. Nonetheless, when Sorge suggested another date she agreed. After dinner, with characteristic disregard for bourgeois niceties, he told her he had to go to the office of Domei, the Japanese press agency, and therefore could not walk her home.
They began seeing each other regularly, though for months Sorge forbore to make any sexual advances on the bashful young woman. For Hanako it would be a fateful and life-changing relationship. For Sorge, less so. For their first dates Sorge called her ‘Agnes’. When Hanako eventually told him her real name, Sorge mistakenly thought that Miyake was her given name, so took to calling her ‘Miyako’ and continued to do so even after she had corrected him. She did not object, saying she found Hanako – which means ‘little flower’ – ‘a child’s name’.19
Clausen had set off for Japan, via Shanghai, in September. Though he ‘felt a big pride’ at being appointed radio operator to such a crucial station, he must have had mixed feelings about leaving Russia.20 The Fourth Department had forbidden him from taking Anna with him, effectively keeping her hostage against his good behaviour. Even more insensitively, Uritsky blithely suggested that he divorce his present wife and ‘take a German woman … If you are willing, I can introduce you to one’.21 Clausen flatly refused, and instead arranged to meet Anna in Shanghai in November, where they would be officially married far from the irritating scrutiny of Uritsky.
The Fourth Department furnished Clausen with two genuine passports, one Austrian and one Canadian, doctored with Clausen’s photograph. They also gave him $1,800 in American dollars. One thing he did not take were any radio parts, since Clausen was planning to improvise a radio using the bits and pieces assembled by Wendt and left for collection in Yokohama. Like Sorge, he travelled via New York, where he was contacted by a Soviet agent named Jones who offered to give him more money. Rashly, Clausen declined. After being fined $300 by US customs in San Francisco on 14 November – it is not clear why – he found that he now no longer had the money he needed to bring Anna from Shanghai to Tokyo and set up home with her in Japan.22 In the event Clausen need not have worried. When the Tatsuta Maru liner docked in Shanghai, Anna was nowhere to be seen. It would not be until the spring of 1936 that the Soviet authorities grudgingly – and at Sorge’s insistence – finally issued her an exit visa. Clausen proceeded alone to Japan.
Because Sorge had no way to communicate with Centre before the arrival of his radio operator, they had arranged that the chief would wait for Clausen every Tuesday evening at the Blue Ribbon Bar off Sukiyabashi.23 Clausen arrived in late November with some days to spare before his rendezvous. He decided to pass the time by going to a party at the German Club, where he had been invited by a fellow German passenger. There, Clausen was surprised to bump into his past and future boss dressed as a Berlin sausage-seller, draped in strings of cardboard bratwursts and in an exuberant mood. The two men ignored each other until they were formally introduced by the club’s director, a public meeting that happily removed the necessity of concealing their previous acquaintance.
Clausen took rooms in the Bunka Apartments and set to work building his improvised transmitter. Though separated from his ‘Anni’, Clausen’s ‘technical ability and enthusiasm for his work knew no bounds’, Sorge wrote.24 The radio apparatus he cobbled together may have resembled a Heath Robinson device, but its effectiveness was formidable. For the receiver Clausen cannibalised an ordinary Japanese-made radio, discarding the case and speaker in favour of headphones and adding three American-made vacuum tubes he found in a radio parts shop to modify it for short-wave reception. The transmitter was a Bakelite panel attached to a wooden box, the tubes and coils readily detachable. The tuning coils were fashioned from copper gasoline tubing intended for automobiles, which he purchased at a hardware store in Kyōbashi-ku. The entire apparatus was made to fit inside a suitcase.25 When the Japanese police finally captured Clausen’s transmitter, an official radio specialist called it ‘one of the strangest conglomerations of various stray parts I have ever seen – a terrific assortment of materials that included one or two beer bottles and other miscellaneous items’.26
While Clausen was assembling the radio that would become so essential to the spy ring’s operations, a chain of events that could have sent the entire Sorge group to jail was set in train by the arrest of a lowly Comintern informant in Manchuria. Back in 1933, before he ever worked for Sorge, Kawai had been sent on an intelligence-gathering mission in northern China and Manchuria by Ozaki and Smedley. During this trip Kawai recruited one Tatsuoki Soejima as an assistant. Two years later, in the autumn of 1935, Soejima was picked up by Manchukuo police in Hsinking on suspicion of passing military secrets to the Comintern. During his brutal interrogation the terrified Soejima mentioned his old acquaintance with Kawai. A formal request to bring Kawai in for questioning duly made its way from the Japanese consulate in Hsinking to the Tokyo police.27
At dawn on 21 January 1936, eight policemen charged into Kawai’s apartment in Suginami-ku and dragged him out of bed. After a couple of days in Suginami police station he was transported to Manchuria in uncomfortable stages, arriving two weeks later in a Hsinking prison in Manchukuo to answer to thirty-seven charges of espionage.28 Kawai was beaten by two policemen armed with an iron bar as his interrogator screamed questions. Even in his agony Kawai realised that his questioners suspected nothing of his recent spying activities for Sorge in Tokyo. He denied all knowledge of Comintern activities in China. To confuse his captors he claimed to be a Shina ronin – a member of one of the secret right-wing patriotic societies who had a sinister reputation and enjoyed semi-official protection from the Kwangtung Army. After an hour of torture, Kawai passed out. But he had said nothing about Sorge. Of all the members of the ring who were eventually interrogated, Kawai was the only one who never talked.
Sorge decided to ask Gunther Stein, a fellow journalist, for permission to use his apartment on Motomachi-Cho in Azabu-Ku for the radio transmissions. It was a calculated risk. Stein was a German writer of leftist sympathies who had known Sorge ‘for a long time’, as Sorge later confessed to the Japanese. Stein had been a correspondent in Moscow for the Berliner Tageblatt, but as a half-Jewish socialist was fired when Hitler came to power. He wisely decamped to London and joined the staff of the London News Chronicle, which sent him to Tokyo in the spring of 1935. Sorge and Stein ran into each other at a Foreign Ministry press conference – ‘an extremely happy event’ for both men, according at least to Sorge. The rezident confided to his old acquaintance that he was ‘engaged in something more than news reporting’. Later he told Stein that he was ‘working for the Moscow authorities’. Sorge reported to Centre that Stein was ‘a useful man’ whom he was ‘manoeuvring … gradually toward participation in our work’.30 He asked for permission to recruit Stein as a full member of the ring – a request that Centre, without giving its reasons, denied.