An Impeccable Spy

by Owen Matthews

  In 1965 one of Vukelić’s Japanese interrogators claimed that Moscow Centre had ordered Vukelić to divorce Edith and marry a Japanese woman in order to integrate himself into the local population more closely.31 There is no trace of such an instruction in the Soviet archives. The story seems unlikely – not least because Sorge, knowing from personal experience that relations between a Japanese woman and a Westerner were strongly frowned upon by traditional Japanese families, would almost certainly have opposed such a hare-brained scheme. But what is clear is that as Vukelić and Yoshiko’s affair continued, his scorned and increasingly erratic wife Edith presented Sorge with a growing security risk.

  Hanako told Sorge that it was ‘common knowledge’ that Vukelić made love to his Japanese mistress downstairs while his wife wept upstairs. (Hanako took a generally dim view of Vukelić – ‘he had no manners to speak of’, and rudely stretched out on the couch whenever he came to visit Sorge.32) Sorge and Clausen also knew that, since her husband had started his affair with Yoshiko, Edith had begun to see other men.33 Though all the members of the group were, at least nominally, ardent communists, Sorge hit on a thoroughly capitalist solution to the Edith problem: he paid her off. Edith moved into her own house in March 1939, and in exchange for setting up one of Clausen’s radio stations in the new location, she began to receive a modest salary of 400 yen a month from Centre’s funds, plus 100 more for expenses. ‘She was like a prostitute in a way, because she was permitting me the use of her house for radio work,’ was Clausen’s unpleasant characterisation of Edith’s new role. Edith’s ‘generous’ allowance was justified, Clausen told his interrogators, because she and the radio man engaged in the ‘illicit relations’ of espionage.34

  In December 1939 the Vukelićs’ divorce was finalised and Branko prepared to marry Yoshiko. Edith’s world began to fall apart, an early victim of the brutal human toll that the spy ring wrought on its members. Clausen, when he visited for his transmissions, found her house filthy. ‘After I worked in her home I did not feel like eating anything at all,’ he would haughtily confide to his interrogators. Nonetheless Clausen felt a degree of sympathy for Edith’s predicament. ‘Men simply used her body and soon went away from her. Thus she deteriorated gradually through her sexual life. But like most other women she is a woman. Although she was not bright she had sense enough to be able to use other people for herself … If she had had a stronger man than Vukelićh she might have been different. She cannot be said to be bad in everything. Simply her living conditions made her what she is.’35 Clausen might have added, with more truthfulness, that it was the Fourth Department that ultimately had ruined her life.

  Edith had been neutralised, her mouth sealed with money and her complicity in her husband’s espionage. Yoshiko was another question. Clausen had warned Sorge that Vukelić would not be able to keep quiet to his girlfriend about his communist faith and his participation in a clandestine spy ring. It is clear from their subsequent interrogations that Clausen was right. Vukelić had indeed told Yoshiko everything just before their marriage on 26 January 1940. Wisely, Vukelić did not let on to Sorge that Yoshiko knew his secret.

  The outbreak of war in Europe had one profound, practical effect on the day-to-day workings of Sorge’s group. Courier-runs for post and cash to Shanghai and Hong Kong ceased to be practicable as German nationals were not welcome in the International Settlement or in the British Crown Colony. Clausen, as an enemy national, was no longer a valued customer at the few British and American banks in Tokyo. As the courier-runs dried up in 1939, Clausen found himself personally bankrolling the ring in its entirety. He protested, to Moscow, that his cash flow was not enough to cover the 3,000 yen a month that Sorge demanded. This was not true, as Clausen himself later admitted: he could easily afford to contribute more, as his blueprint business had prospered considerably on the back of a vast increase in Japanese military spending on engineering commissions of every kind. By the end of 1939 Clausen had opened his own factory that turned an annual net profit of 14,000 yen.36 He opened a branch in Mukden to do work for the Japanese Army and had contracts with the Mitsui, Hitachi and Nakajima machine-building factories, as well as with the Ministry of the Navy. Clausen drove a Mercedes and his wife wore mink. But, as Clausen told his interrogators, he was unhappy about the prospect of his hard-won profits going to subsidise the work of the Soviet government. More, he was fed up with Sorge always treating him ‘like a sort of servant, since he had no one else to help him’.37

  Unfortunately for all concerned, the solution that Centre approved in November 1939 – to arrange handovers of cash and microfilm to diplomats from the Soviet embassy in Tokyo – was fraught with yet more risk. Hitherto the members of the Sorge spy ring had worked completely independently of the embassy for the sound operational reason that all Soviet diplomats were kept under constant close surveillance. It was with some unease, therefore, that Anna Clausen received an invitation from her husband to accompany him to the Teikoku Gekijo, Tokyo’s Imperial Theatre.

  ‘I’m supposed to meet a friend,’ Clausen claimed. Anna immediately guessed the truth – that this was the first clandestine meeting with a Soviet courier on Japanese soil. On 27 January 1940, Clausen and Anna found themselves sitting in a darkened theatre box next to a European of nondescript appearance. It was only two years later, when shown photographs by the Japanese police, that Clausen identified the courier as the Soviet consul, Helge Leonidovich Vutokevich. Fifteen minutes into the performance, the man slipped about 5,000 yen wrapped in a white cloth from his left hand into Clausen’s right, which Clausen exchanged for a packet containing thirty-eight rolls of microfilm.38

  In addition to running a fast-growing business by day, Clausen spent his evenings encoding and decoding lengthy documents in Centre’s fiendishly complex number cipher. At least once a week he would pack up his transmitter for the nerve-wracking car journey to one of his radio stations, where he would often work from three to six in the morning, straining to pick up the crackle of apparently random numbers as they streamed over the airwaves from Vladivostok.39 By 1940 Clausen had become very fat. His evenings, when not busy with encryption, were spent drinking with Sorge or other members of the German community. The only exercise he took was walking from a taxi to the bar at the Das Rheingold, and lifting heavy steins of beer. He was by nature a cheerful and stoical man, happily married, and increasingly prosperous. But by April 1940 he had begun seeing a German physician, Dr Wirtz, and was undergoing periodic hospital check-ups for shortness of breath and chest pains – an infirmity which he blamed on the fumes he inhaled in the factory rather than on his extraordinarily stressful lifestyle. When on 18 April Clausen made another courier contact – this time at the Tokyo Takarazuka theatre, with the Soviet embassy’s second secretary, Viktor Sergeyevich Zaitsev, to collect $2,000 and 2,500 yen – he asked the courier that in future Sorge take over this risky task.40 It is telling that Clausen chose to make this request through his unknown Soviet contact rather than face his hard-driving boss.

  In late May 1940, to nobody’s surprise except perhaps his own, Clausen suffered a serious heart attack. He survived, but Dr Wirtz ordered him to bed for three months of complete rest with an urgent recommendation to hand over his business affairs to his Japanese manager. Sorge, implacable, was having none of it. He ordered Clausen to continue transmitting, from his sickbed if necessary. The radio man dutifully obeyed, organising a slanting bed-table where he could encode and decode messages and at night instructing Anna how to assemble the radio, which she plugged into the antennas built into the siding of their house. When the set-up was ready the apparatus was balanced on two chairs by Clausen’s bed so he could transmit without getting up. As he tapped through the night, Anna kept watch on the street from a second-storey window. This was not exactly the convalescent regime that his doctor had ordered.41 Nonetheless, from Sorge’s point of view the problem had been solved. ‘Clausen has had a heart attack,’ Sorge reported with callous brevity to Moscow on 1
2 July. ‘He operates the wireless lying in bed.’42

  The arrangement was not only risky to Clausen’s health but to the security of the whole operation. On several occasions Clausen’s Japanese employees and Dr Wirtz breezed into the room while the table was scattered with secret documents. ‘Don’t write when you are sick,’ was the doctor’s only comment after glancing at the sheets of numbers. For several days Clausen lay in fear that Wirtz would become suspicious and make a report to the police or to the German embassy, but the incident passed without consequences – at least not in the sense that Clausen was arrested. But the years of constant fear, the pain of the coronary, and Sorge’s pitiless ingratitude was beginning to gnaw at the radio man’s hitherto unshakeable loyalty.

  ‘It is very difficult to explain Sorge’s personality,’ Clausen later told the Japanese, his words tinged with unmistakable resentment. Sorge ‘has never shown his true self. But he is a true communist … He is a man who can destroy even his best friend for the sake of communism. But judging from what I have observed, if he were in a different position he would be a miserably small-minded person … [He] did not need to have much courage in working in the embassy. On the other hand … he collected all information from his spy ring members and he himself tried to stay away from danger,’ Clausen confided. ‘When I myself was seriously ill and was being told by the doctor not to work, Sorge requested me to work the same as though I were well. Therefore he may be said to be inconsiderate of other people … [He] does not give money even when necessary but at the same time he spent money as though he were throwing it away. Thus his character cannot be said to be ideal. [He] always treated me as a kind of a servant … But he always treated women well. However, he did not like my wife.’43

  Ironically, both Sorge and Clausen, for all their shared communist ideals, had in a sense reverted to the class types of Wilhemine Germany. Sorge was the high-handed, luxury-loving bourgeois ordering his subordinate about with no regard for his well-being, Clausen the dogged and hardworking mechanic, grumblingly submitting to his fate. Certainly, Sorge seemed to make no special effort to be nice to his long-suffering and long-serving associate. Sorge never ‘showed a smiling expression toward Clausen’, Hanako said. ‘Sorge did not feel any necessity to be amiable to him.’44

  The news of Germany’s economic upswing under Hitler had, as Clausen admitted under interrogation, brought him ‘to have a very favourable attitude toward Hitler’s way of doing things’. The Nazi–Soviet pact doubtless further blurred the lines between Clausen’s conflicting loyalties to ideology and Fatherland. As he lay in his sickbed, Clausen’s commitment to spying, and to the man he had followed to Tokyo, was steadily draining away.45

  15

  Attack Singapore!

  ‘Nobody could ever disturb his inner loneliness; that was what gave him his independence and probably explains how he was able to influence the people around him’1

  Christiane Sorge, Memoir

  In the spring of 1940, as the Wehrmacht stormed to victory over the Netherlands, Belgium and France, it seemed that the future world might indeed belong to the Third Reich. The tide of war had trapped Sorge in Tokyo. His only hope for a speedy return to Moscow was for Hitler’s victory over Western Europe to be swift and total, and that it would leave the Soviet Union unharmed. ‘The Germans here say that the war will soon be over and I must know what will become of me,’ Sorge wrote to Centre. ‘May I count on being able to return home at the end of the war? … It is time to settle down, put an end to this nomad existence … We remain, with health somewhat undermined it is true, always your true comrades and co-workers.’2

  But a return home remained a vain hope while Japan pondered whether to enter the world war. Sorge’s mysteriously intimate knowledge of Japanese politics made him a man much in demand not only by his querulous spymasters in Moscow but also, and especially by, the Germans. Ambassador Ott had been trying to persuade Sorge to join the embassy staff for much of 1939. His proposal was followed up by an official offer from the Reich Foreign Ministry of ‘a high position to administer activities related to information and newspapers in the embassy’.3 Effectively, the ministry wished to headhunt Sorge’s excellent brain and have him all to themselves.

  The offer put Sorge in a tricky position. He already had informal access to the embassy’s secret files and telegrams through his close friendship with Ott. As an embassy official that access would be freer, and formalised. But Sorge also needed plenty of spare time to conduct the arduous business of meeting with his agents, writing and encoding reports – not to mention the relative freedom to travel and meet contacts that his journalistic cover allowed him. More important, an official job at the embassy would entail a full security check – including a scan of the police records at all his former addresses in Berlin, Hamburg, Solingen and Frankfurt. ‘If I had accepted the position I would have had to present my identification,’ Sorge told his interrogators. ‘What I am could have been discovered after checking my past career.’4

  Sorge refused the job offer. Ott became angry, but eventually offered a compromise. Sorge would have a desk at the embassy and fulfil some official duties, such as turning out a daily news summary for the embassy staff. But he would not become an employee of the Reich. At the same time, crucially, Sorge would ‘continuously maintain the role of a private collaborator to ambassador Ott’.5 The two old friends signed a formal contract confirming Sorge’s strange, semi-official status, at the heart of the embassy but not one of its staff.

  Sorge, in his new capacity as Ambassador Ott’s private adviser, began showing up to the embassy at six in the morning. At that early hour he had the place virtually to himself and was able to read the overnight telegrams from Berlin, scan the news wires, and rummage through colleagues’ desks. At the beginning of his espionage career Sorge had snapped photos of important documents during snatched moments when left alone in Ott’s or Scholl’s office. Now he had an office of his own where he could lock the door and photograph all the documents he needed in privacy. Moreover, since his job included selecting ‘important items of information and arranging them so that higher members of the embassy could look at them immediately’, he had official access to every report that came into the embassy with the exception of ‘eyes-only’ telegrams addressed personally to Ott.6 This security precaution proved no obstacle, however, because at seven on most mornings Sorge and Ott would breakfast together. A table would be set for them on the lawn, or in the plant-filled winter garden in case of rain, and a house boy would bring fresh rolls from the German bakery. Sorge would summarise the night’s news, while Ott would share his confidential correspondence from Berlin.7 The data and information he obtained at the embassy ‘were not obtained by means of plot, conspiracy, or violence’, Sorge told his captors. ‘I was shown them by Scholl and Ott, who asked for my cooperation.’8

  After his convivial early-morning chat with the ambassador, Sorge would return to his embassy office and compile the Deutscher Dienst, the embassy’s daily news-sheet distributed to staff and German expatriates. By ten in the morning his duties to the Reich were discharged, and Sorge would get into his Datsun and drive home to hammer on his typewriter. After lunch and his customary nap he would then head off to check the wires at the Domei news agency and spend the evening on the town.

  Sorge also continued to contribute almost weekly to the Frankfurter Zeitung. As with the embassy, he insisted on remaining a freelancer rather than a staffer in order to be able to control his own time. Over his six years in Japan the editors in Frankfurt commissioned a total of 163 articles from Sorge, and remembered him as ‘a most serious and thoughtful person, gifted with both an understanding of a newspaperman’s job and political insight’.9

  Today Sorge’s articles make for rather dense and often platitudinous reading. But he was considered by contemporaries to be one of Germany’s foremost commentators on Japanese affairs.10 Sorge, for his part, was proud of the prestige that his association with the Frankfurter
Zeitung gave him and boasted in his prison memoir that the newspaper ‘represented the highest standards of German journalism’.11 He also sent occasional – and even more turgid – longer articles to Haushofer’s Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, which kept Sorge’s name in the eye of senior Nazi Party circles.

  From Moscow’s point of view, Japan remained an urgent threat. From mid-1939 onwards Tokyo began negotiations to set up another Manchukuo-style puppet state in the occupied parts of China. Such an arrangement could have brought an official partition between Japanese-controlled China and the areas still held by the Kuomintang and communists – and in its wake possibly peace. That would be the most disastrous outcome for the Soviets, who counted on continued hostilities in China to keep the Japanese Army pinned down. A handwritten copy of the proposed secret treaty between Japan and its chosen puppet, a discontented Kuomintang official named Wang Ching-wei, found its way into the hands of Prince Saionji, and through him to Ozaki, Sorge, and Moscow.12 The Fourth Department passed copies of the document to its communist allies in China and agents in the Kuomintang with urgent instructions to scupper any peace deal with Japan’s proposed puppet state. Thus Sorge played his part in keeping the flames of conflict alive in China, the better to protect the USSR.

  The Fourth Department also remained intensely interested in Japan’s rearmament, which was fast making the Imperial Japanese Army a match for the Soviet forces in the Far East. ‘Investigate the production capacity of the Japanese Army and Navy arsenals and civilian factories about cannon, tanks, airplanes, automobiles and machine guns,’ the Fourth Department ordered Sorge on 19 February 1940.13 The cable ended with the kind of snippy criticism that was becoming commonplace from Centre. An army manual, obtained by Corporal Koshiro and sent to Moscow by courier, was not confidential and did not need to be obtained by clandestine means, griped Centre. In fact the second part of the manual was indeed secret, but the Fourth Department simply was not paying attention. ‘If you think it can be [bought] why don’t you use your legal agency and let them buy it?’ Sorge snapped back.14