An Impeccable Spy

by Owen Matthews

  Clearly, Sorge sensed danger when the general recall of all Fourth Department agents all over the world was ordered by Yezhov in November 1936. But it is also likely that when Sorge promised that he would return to Moscow by April 1937, he probably meant it. His only personal contact with Centre was through other Fourth Department agents, like Aino Kuusinen. In Tokyo he avoided contact with any Russians, especially with Soviet diplomats – who were in any case unaware of his true identity. News of the purges would have come obliquely, through the dispatches of Western correspondents such as the New York Times’s Walter Duranty (who famously wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Great Famine of 1931–32 that ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’). Centre’s radiograms contained only the driest summaries of personnel changes at Fourth Department HQ, and gave no sense of the rising panic as the department was decimated by the NKVD.

  In a sense, Sorge was protected by his ignorance and isolation. Other agents in Europe who had a closer understanding of the death trap into which they were heading ran for their lives. ‘Suddenly, revolutionists with a lifetime of devoted activity would pop out, like rabbits from a burrow, with the [NKVD] close on their heels,’ recalled American communist spy Whittaker Chambers in his 1952 memoir. Veteran agent Alexander Barmine fled from the Soviet legation in Athens, Fyodor Raskolnikoff from the Soviet legation in Sofia, Walter Krivitsky from Amsterdam, Ignace Reiss from his station in Switzerland. Reiss – aka Ignace Poretsky, Sorge’s old acquaintance from Moscow – sent a defiant letter of resignation personally to Stalin. ‘Murderer of the Kremlin cellars! I herewith return my decorations and resume my freedom of action,’ Reiss wrote before going underground.12

  Almost all the defectors were hunted down and killed by NKVD assassination squads, some of them after years on the run. Yezhov would spend over 300,000 French francs on such mokriye dela, or ‘wet operations’, the NKVD slang for murder.13 Only Barmine succeeded in outrunning the NKVD hunters, escaping to the United States and enrolling in the US Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA.14

  The spies who obeyed Uritsky’s recall were equally doomed. Theodore Maly, the former priest who recruited Kim Philby and the rest of the Cambridge Five spies as idealistic young students in the early 1930s, was among the star agents who returned and were shot. Sorge’s own survival came down to the fact that he had neither returned to Moscow nor run. But just as Sorge was unaware of just how close he had come to danger, so he also could not know that his refusal to travel to Moscow in 1937 had stained his reputation with the Fourth Department for ever.

  Colonel Boris Ignatyevich Gudz was on the Japan desk of the Fourth Department as the Purge broke over the department. ‘We were busy with concrete cases concerning the security of our country, but in the next door building [the NKVD] was busy fabricating cases,’ Gudz told Russian television in 1999. ‘We called them lipochi [‘little nonsenses’], but they presented these nonsenses to their bosses to show their successes … Many of my chiefs protested, including my own superior, the head of counter-intelligence Olsky. But he was quickly fired and sent to work in the State Restaurant Directorate. They were all later shot.’15

  Gudz, an ethnic German born in Ufa in 1902, had spent 1934–36 as a spy in Tokyo working in the NKVD’s own rezidentura under official cover as Third Secretary of the Soviet embassy. Though they lived in the same city Gudz had no idea of Sorge’s existence, in part because of the institutional rivalry (that continues today) between Russia’s civilian and military intelligence services, but mostly because the Fourth Department kept Sorge’s identity a closely guarded secret. On his return to Moscow in the summer of 1936, Gudz found his bosses more preoccupied with the hunt for traitors than with his reports from Tokyo. ‘I was met coolly. The years of repression had begun, and search was on for enemies of the people,’ Gudz recalled. ‘My boss didn’t even want to hear my report on my residency and sent me on holiday.’16

  It was only when Gudz was transferred to the Fourth Department’s Second (Far Eastern) Department in 1937 that he began to read Sorge’s telegrams. ‘Immediately on seeing his file and his reports I understood the enormous value of this spy,’ Gudz said. ‘Everything about him was of the highest class. He was a wonderful, gregarious journalist, an experienced political analyst and – very important for a spy – an excellent actor. And this despite the fact that he had never undergone any specialist training as an intelligence officer. Sorge had access to unique information. It was our job to supply Sorge with information and instructions based on thorough, detailed investigation of his operations … But Sorge mostly acted on his own initiative, often taking huge risks.’17

  But despite Sorge’s obviously excellent work, there was a problem. Sorge was, in Gudz’s words, a ‘nevozvrashenets’ – literally, a ‘non-returned person’ – and therefore inherently unreliable. ‘Sorge was a great spy,’ Gudz recalled. But after 1937 Agent Ramsay would never again be fully trusted.

  ‘It wasn’t just him that Stalin distrusted. Once I entered Uritsky’s study when he was reading a report on preparations for war in Berlin. [Uritsky] repeated several times – “How can I go in and tell [Stalin] this when he believes in nothing?”’18

  Gudz would play his own odious role in the Great Terror. In late 1936 he wrote a secret denunciation of his sister Galina’s husband, the journalist and short-story writer Varlam Shalamov, for supposed anti-Soviet attitudes.19 Shalamov had already been imprisoned once for protesting against Stalin in 1929 – and had in fact met his future wife, also a political prisoner, in the Vishera camp in the North Urals. On the night of 12 January 1937 the NKVD came for Shalamov at the communal apartment they shared with Gudz at Chisty Lane 8 in central Moscow. His harrowing memoir of his years in prison camps, Kolyma Tales, published in the West in 1966, became a classic of Gulag literature. But the denunciation did not save Gudz or his family. In May 1937, Gudz’s other sister Alexandra was arrested (she would die in 1945, in a bitter irony, in a Gulag on the Kolyma Peninsula, close to her imprisoned brother-in-law). Gudz himself was immediately fired from the Fourth Department and eventually found work as a bus driver. He was lucky. A colleague from his tour in Tokyo was arrested and confessed to working as a Japanese spy, naming Gudz as an accomplice. ‘Every night I awaited arrest,’ Gudz remembered. But the Purge had its own incomprehensible logic. Nobody came for him and he continued to live at Chisty Lane, in the apartment directly below this author’s, until his death in 2006 at the age of 104.

  Back in Tokyo, Sorge decided to take his mind off work – and the alarming news from Moscow – by taking Hanako on a short holiday. He bought her a new suitcase for the occasion. They went to the Atami hot spring resort eighty kilometres south-west of Tokyo, a Western-style hotel ‘famous for steaks and geishas’.20 They took a train that wound up a steep and wooden valley, through Hakone and up towards Mount Fuji. It was December, and natural hot springs steamed in the cold. ‘Sorge took a very long bath,’ Hanako recalled. ‘We had dinner in the room, drank hot sake, and went to bed. He was very passionate, but gentle, not like a wild animal bearing its teeth. That wasn’t Sorge’s way.’21

  The following day it was raining. Sorge spent most of the day typing on his portable typewriter, while Hanako ‘looked out at the rain tap-tapping on the window pane’.22 After a while she got bored and began to compose a poem. Sorge joined her in bed. ‘Miyago, do you want to study?’ he asked in Japanese, using the name that had begun as a mistake and become a pet name. ‘Sorge will help you study.’ She replied that she wanted to study opera and that she dreamed of becoming a professional singer. ‘Sorge knows a German music teacher … I will take you to him immediately. Does that make you happy?’ True to his word, on their return to the city Sorge arranged piano lessons for Hanako with his friend, Dr August Junker of the Musashino Music College. ‘What a fine character he had,’ Hanako told an interviewer in the 1980s. ‘When Sorge made a promise, he always kept it!’23

  Katya, of course, had a di
fferent experience of Sorge’s promise-keeping. He continued to assure his wife that he would soon return, and at this stage he almost certainly believed it. ‘I hope sincerely that this will be our last year apart and we will meet the next one together and forget about our long parting,’ he wrote to Katya on 1 January 1937. ‘Here it is twenty degrees – and where you are it’s probably twenty degrees of frost. But I would prefer to live in the cold with you.’24 He confirmed that he had just received letters from Katya (and from her friend Vera) from August and October – a five-month time lag that would account for the delay in discovering Katya’s pregnancy, and its sad end.

  Early in 1937 Katya moved out of her basement on Nizhny Kislovsky lane into a large room on the fourth floor of an apartment building on the Sofiiskaya Embankment,25 next to the British embassy and directly opposite the Kremlin. The view from the window ‘is so big you couldn’t walk around it in a year’, Katya wrote in delight. She assured Sorge that she had taken his entire bookshelf of German books with her. ‘Often I try to imagine it,’ Sorge wrote of the apartment that was intended to be their future marital home. ‘But I cannot.’26

  Katya concentrated some of the affection that she could not lavish on her absent husband on a new female work colleague, Marfa Ivanovna Lezhnina-Sokolova. She had come from a village near Vyatka and was assigned to Katya’s brigade at the factory. The young woman was so unused to life in the big city that she even thanked the speak-the-time machine in the metro.27 Katya took the new arrival under her wing and began giving her lessons in reading and writing. Soon Marfa moved into a corner of Katya’s apartment.

  Katya told her that the young woman’s company ‘made her happier and younger’. They would go to the cinema on Pyatnitskaya Street together, and when summer came go swimming on Sundays at the river beach at Serebryanny Bor to the west of the city. When Marfa admired a stuffed tiger toy that Sorge had given Katya she immediately made a gift of it. Marfa remembered that they would read books together in the mornings and become so absorbed that they would be late for work, running for the tram stop across the bridge and sometimes taking a taxi. In the car Katya would give her young protégée biscuits and sandwiches to make up for her missed breakfast. Katya Maximova ‘made me a person’, Marfa said in a 1965 interview. ‘She helped me to learn my profession and gave me a passion for books for life. She gave me all her soul.’28

  Sorge had promised Uritsky that he would come to Moscow by April 1937. But by that time details of the gathering pace of the Purge had reached even distant Tokyo. He would have to further delay his return, Sorge wrote to Katya in spring 1937, due to the ‘unhealthy atmosphere in Moscow’.29 A second show trial in January 1937 had another Comintern founder, Karl Radek, as its sacrificial victim, along with seventeen others. Ominously, in his public confession on the defendants’ stand Radek had spoken of a secret ‘third rightist-Trotskyite organisation’ of enormous size that was devoted to organising a ‘Fronde [armed uprising] against the Party’.30 The hunt for the adherents of this mysterious secret conspiracy would be Yezhov’s carte blanche for expanding the Purge still further.

  Meanwhile Aino Kuusinen was discovering just how serious a mistake she had made in obeying Uritsky’s summons. She found the director in the same irascible mood that she had left him in the previous year. The general again railed against Sorge’s ‘inadequate’ work and his free spending of the Fourth Department’s money. Most of all, he was furious at having been defied. Uritsky tried several times to get Aino to write letters to Sorge persuading him to return, claiming that Sorge had disobeyed orders and that Stalin himself had personally ordered him back to the USSR. Aino, logically enough, responded that if Sorge did not listen to Stalin it would be unlikely that he would heed her.

  The bullying ceased only in July 1937, when Uritsky was fired. He was replaced by his former boss Jan Berzin, just back from directing Soviet efforts to help the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. In a month Berzin himself was gone, to be replaced by another chief who lasted only a fortnight. By the end of the year both Uritsky and Berzin would be arrested, tried for spying for the Germans and Japanese, and eventually shot. In all, Soviet military intelligence had six different heads between 1937 and 1939, five of whom would be executed.31 Aino was herself arrested in early 1938 and spent fifteen years in the Gulag and internal exile.

  Unbeknown to Sorge, Uritsky’s ongoing irritation at the Tokyo rezidentura’s expense claims and the rezident’s failure to return to Moscow when summoned had unleashed the full paranoia of the Purge against Agent Ramsay and all his works. The Japanese department of the Fourth Department split into two factions: those who trusted Sorge, and those who did not. General Alexander Nikonov, the Fourth Department chief who reigned for a single fortnight in August 1937, commissioned a report into the possibility of liquidating the Ramsay group altogether.

  In the event Nikonov’s successor, General Semyon Gendin, para-chuted in from the NKVD to take over the wreckage of the Fourth Department, found enough of value in Sorge’s reports to argue that he should stay en poste. But Gendin, while saving the Tokyo operation, also fatally labelled Sorge and his team ‘politically inadequate’ and ‘probably penetrated by the enemy and working under his control’.32 The Tokyo reports that Gendin forwarded to Stalin from September 1937 until his own arrest on 22 October 1938 were prefaced by deep scepticism. ‘To: Central Committee, Comrade Stalin, Top Secret’, reads one of Gendin’s memoranda. ‘I present the report of our source close to German circles in Tokyo. This source does not enjoy our full trust, however some of his material deserves attention.’ It was a stain on Sorge’s reputation that would have profound implications for the future.33

  Plenty of once-idealistic foreign communists like Sorge lost their faith as a result of the bloodbath of 1937. ‘Millions were massacred, including those communists who made the Russian revolution,’ wrote the Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers who, like Sorge, had defied orders to return to Moscow. Chambers rejected communism in April 1938 in disgust at Stalin’s crimes. He listed the reasons for his profound disillusionment as: the deliberate mass murder of peasants in Ukraine and Kuban during collectivisation; the deliberate betrayal of the German working class by the communists, who refused on Moscow’s orders to cooperate with the Social Democrats to resist the rise of the Nazis; and the betrayal of the Spanish Republican government by the USSR, whose agents were more focussed on massacring their political enemies than helping them win their struggle against fascism. He might have added the ugly fact – of which Sorge was certainly aware – that Stalin’s hatred of moderate socialists was so intense that he had ordered the German Communist Party to vote with the Nazis in the Reichstag to defeat the Social Democrats. ‘The gigantic ulcer of corruption and deceit had burst,’ Chambers wrote. ‘Stalin had consolidated his power by massacring thousands of the best men and minds in the Communist Party on invented charges.’34

  Did Sorge suffer a similar crisis of faith? It is likely that he did. Sorge had already confessed his disillusionment to Niilo Virtanen in 1935. But, trapped in Tokyo, he had no one in whom he could confide his doubts. The Japanese members of the spy ring looked to Sorge as a boss, a pillar of calm, self-assured resolution. Clausen, who was probably the closest Sorge had to a true confidant in Tokyo, also needed his leadership and encouragement. Hanako did not even know he was a communist in the first place. And his confessions and prison memoir were no place to admit to doubts, as Sorge was hoping until the very end that the Soviet Union would save him.

  There are clear signs that Sorge began to go off the rails as a result of the strain. He had always drunk heavily. But as 1937 progressed his bottle-mates Wenneker and Prince Urach noticed a marked increase in his already epic consumption. On his debauched progresses through the bars and dance halls of Ginza, Sorge passed through ‘exultation, tearful misery, aggressiveness, paranoia and megalomania, delirium, stupor and the grey solitude of the hangover that can only be relieved by more alcohol’, Urach remembered.35 When Wei
se of the German News Agency asked Sorge to stand in for him during a vacation, he returned to discover that Sorge had been drunk most of the time he was in charge.36

  Meanwhile Ozaki and Miyagi continued diligently with their work, apparently oblivious to the dramas unfolding in Moscow and in their boss’s own heart and mind. The ever-helpful engineering firm owner Shinotsuka handed Ozaki a list of all the major arms manufacturers in and around Tokyo as well as a copy of the army’s latest pamphlet on Principles of National Defence. Miyagi was busy recruiting more helpers, mostly from among the ranks of known communist sympathisers. One was Kuzumi Fusako, the ex-wife of a Christian minister who had spent five years in jail for her communist beliefs after a wholesale round-up in 1929. Miyagi enlisted Kuzumi for her extensive contacts in leftist circles. Another helper signed up by Miyagi was his personal doctor, Tokutarō Yasuda. Dr Yasuda had a fashionable medical practice with many prominent patients – and as a celebrated anthropologist and historian was also well connected in Tokyo’s intellectual circles. Miyagi suggested that the doctor could help ‘disrupt the plans to destroy the USSR, to prevent a Japanese-Soviet war’. Yasuda readily agreed to pass on any high-level gossip he heard in his consulting rooms.37

  Miyagi’s web expanded quickly through the less-than-secure network of Mrs Kuzumi’s leftist prison friends. Yamana Masazano was an uneducated thirty-four-year-old romantic, recently released from jail where he had been imprisoned for his communist ties. Miyagi signed him up and sent him north to Hokkaido to count army camps and troop movements near the Japanese–Soviet border in southern Sakhalin island (known as Karafuto to the Japanese). Former university professor Ugenda Taguchi had also done prison time for his leftism, and agreed to help Miyagi on economic information from Hokkaido and Manchuria. Another helper was Takashi Hashimoto, also a leftist recently returned from Manchuria, who helpfully told Miyagi that the Japanese military was secretly sending troops disguised as construction workers northward to Karafuto to build army camps.