This tiny spat revealed a growing gulf between Sorge’s team in Tokyo and their distant masters in Moscow. The purges had claimed five successive heads of the Fourth Department and dozens of senior personnel. Over ‘the past two years … organs of the NKVD have arrested more than two hundred persons, replacing the entire leadership, including chiefs of departments’, Fourth Department chief Proskurov reported in May 1940 to a commission of the Defence Commissariat and the Central Committee on the effects of the purges. ‘During the period when I was in command in the central [military intelligence] apparatus and its subordinate units, 365 persons were dismissed for political and various other reasons. Three hundred and twenty-six new persons were hired, the majority of whom were without intelligence training.’ The loss was evidently painful to Proskurov, both professionally and personally. ‘I reported on the rezidenty I had met – that is, those who were still there [not purged],’ recalled one agent sent to Europe to report on the state of Centre’s intelligence gathering apparatus in mid-1939. ‘I noticed that as I spoke Ivan Iosifovich [Proskurov] squeezed his cheekbones, the muscles in his face twitching,’ as he realised how many good men had gone. It may be that Proskurov’s refusal to allow Sorge to return in 1939 was intended to save him from a second wave of purges instigated by his own deputy (and eventual successor) Ivan Golikov.15
By 1940 very few officers remained at 19 Bolshoi Znamensky Lane who had known Sorge personally. Sorge and his rezidentura had become abstract figures to most of the consumers of their intelligence. General Gendin had followed his predecessors to the NKVD execution grounds the previous year. But Gendin’s suspicions that Sorge’s network had been ‘penetrated by the enemy’ and was ‘working under his control’ remained, hovering over the relationship between Centre and Sorge like a noxious smell.
Worse, in the wake of the signing of the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact, Stalin and the Defence Commissariat became even more critical of Soviet military intelligence than ever. Lieutenant Colonel Maria Poliakova, one of the few of Proskurov’s subordinates who had managed to survive the purges, recalled the director returning from a visit to the General Staff in a fury of frustration. ‘What do they take us for – fools? How could this be disinformation?’ Proskurov exclaimed. In May 1940, at a meeting with the deputy Commissar for Defence, Proskurov declared: ‘No matter how painful it is, I must say that no other army has such disorderliness and a low level of discipline as ours.’16
The operational consequence of this atmosphere of distrust from the top was Centre’s constant, nagging insistence on seeing primary documents rather than word-of-mouth information, however highly placed the source. Sorge’s reputation may have been tainted – but Proskurov nonetheless recognised solid raw intelligence when it saw it and wanted more.
‘It is very essential to have details about aircraft manufacturing plants,’ a typical message from 2 May 1940 read. ‘Also it is necessary to estimate the actual 1939 production totals in cannon manufacturing arsenals and factories. What measures are they taking to expand cannon production?’17 Another, of 25 May, scolded that ‘information must be obtained in advance. To report after-the-fact information is not good enough.’18 Sorge dutifully borrowed the reports of the German air attaché to the Mitsubishi aircraft factory in Nagoya, the Aichi-Tokei Company, and Nakajima Aircraft.19 General Thomas, head of the mili-tary’s Economics Department in Berlin, unwittingly helped Sorge’s task by commissioning a report from Sorge on the ‘The problems of Japanese wartime industry’, for which military attaché Maztky helpfully furnished extensive information, including ‘specific studies on aircraft, automobiles, tanks, aluminium, artificial petroleum, iron and steel among Japanese wartime industries’.20
Sorge’s team were excellent at obtaining statistics on propeller production or new engine modifications. But the rezident’s particular talents were wasted on such details. Sorge’s true value as a spy was an observer of the epochal diplomatic game that was unfolding between Germany and Japan, featuring Ott as a major player. By 14 June 1940, Germany’s blitzkrieg on Europe was more or less complete when Hitler entered a defeated Paris and had himself photographed in front of the Eiffel Tower. The British had evacuated their battered Expeditionary Force from the beaches of Dunkirk and abandoned their positions in Norway, the last outpost of resistance on the Continent. Mussolini had finally joined the war on Germany’s side and prepared to crush British armies in Egypt and Malta. Sorge, in his cups and ranting to fellow correspondents, called the Nazis ‘grave-robbers’.21 But Stalin was also doing some robbing of his own. On 15 June 1940 he sent the Red Army into independent Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia and installed pro-Soviet puppet governments in the territories to the east of the demarcation line that had been agreed with the Nazis.
Only one part of Hitler’s plan did not work: Britain did not collapse under the onslaught of bombing that the Luftwaffe unleashed on its cities in May 1940. Unlike his appeasing predecessor Neville Chamberlain, Britain’s new prime minister Winston Churchill vowed uncompromising resistance to what he referred to in his stirring radio addresses as the ‘Narzis’. Hitler ordered a vast invasion force massed on the coasts of France and Belgium ready to invade Britain. Known as Operation Seelöwe (Sealion), it was Hitler’s biggest military mobilisation yet. But no amphibious invasion of Britain could succeed as long as the Royal Air Force still challenged the Luftwaffe’s air supremacy, or as long as the Royal Navy outgunned the Kriegsmarine in the English Channel.
It was knocking out the Royal Navy, more than bringing the British Isles themselves under the German Reich, that was Hitler’s major preoccupation. As long as the British could blockade the Atlantic, North Sea and Mediterranean, Hitler’s vision of a greater German Reich could never prosper. Germany’s major military and diplomatic manoeuvres of the early part of the Second World War were driven by the need to destroy Britain’s naval power – specifically, to destroy the naval base of Malta, to break Britain’s control of the Suez Canal, and to take Singapore, the key to British naval supremacy in the Pacific and Indian oceans. As Sorge himself put it, reporting a conversation with Ott in the summer of 1940: ‘The Germans believed that a Japanese attack on Singapore would reduce British naval forces in the Mediterranean and Atlantic and so make it possible for Germany to invade England itself.’22
From June of 1940, therefore, it became an urgent priority for Ribbentrop to persuade Japan to enter the war on Germany’s side against Britain and take Singapore. But Ott faced a major problem in executing his chief’s demand. On the one hand, there had always been deep admiration for Hitler among Japanese militarist circles – an admiration that grew stronger after the success of Hitler’s blitzkrieg tactics. The Wehrmacht had shown that a new kind of mechanised lightning war could cut deep into the territory of even the most entrenched and technologically advanced enemy. The fall of the Netherlands and France left Indochina and the Dutch East Indies – a key source of oil and rubber – vulnerable.
On the other hand, Tokyo had so far been officially neutral in the unfolding world war, largely because Japan chose to remain in aggrieved isolation in the wake of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Admiral Yonai, the dominant figure in the government, was a strong opponent of a full alliance with Germany and instead argued – rightly, as it ultimately turned out – that Japan would be crushed if it attempted to go to war against both Britain and the United States. Tensions ran so high between the army’s Control Group and Action Group that one militarist faction even hatched yet another plot to murder Yonai and all the anti-German members of the government.23
The assassination plot was uncovered and thwarted. However, Yonai’s objection to military adventures was being fast eroded by the tempting prizes piling up in the Asia-Pacific region. Japan demanded, and received, a commitment from defeated France that it cease traffic in munitions from French Indochina to the Chinese nationalists. Japan also, with Germany’s blessing, signed a generous new deal for oil and rubber from the East Indies with the governmen
t of the Nazi-controlled Netherlands. The era of European domination in Asia appeared to be over.
In July 1940 the war minister Shunroku Hata demanded a reorganisation of the Japanese state along Nazi lines, as well as a full alliance with Germany. When Yonai refused Hata resigned, precipitating a constitutional crisis that brought Prince Konoe to power for a second time. Konoe may have spoken regularly of curbing the army’s power, but in reality he was a witting stooge of the militarists. Konoe’s new war minister was General Hideki Tojo, a militant nationalist and ideologue of Japanese imperialism popularly known as ‘Razor Brain’. Tojo’s presence in the cabinet was visible proof that Konoe was not his own master. Konoe also named Yosuke Matsuoka, a garrulous and ambitious politician with close ties to the Kwangtung Army, as foreign minister.
The Action Group of the Imperial Army had effectively mounted a soft coup against their opponents. The Konoe government was now under their control. Immediately upon formation of the second Konoe cabinet, the Breakfast Group – including Ozaki – re-formed, meeting at the official residence of the chief secretary, Kenji Tomita. Ozaki also maintained his position in the Investigation Department of the South Manchuria Railway, the nerve centre of military intelligence for China.
With the moderates now out of the way, negotiations could begin in earnest for a full-blown Japanese–German military alliance. Japan’s aims were clear, even from Miyagi’s ground-level point of view. ‘Japanese diplomacy hopes to strengthen the German-Italian alliance, exclude or boycott United States and British power from the Orient, resolve the war in China and establish a self-sufficient East Asia and new order in East Asia,’ Miyagi reported.24 On 23 August, Ribbentrop sent Heinrich Stahmer as his personal envoy to Japan to negotiate a new alliance.25 The South Manchuria Railway was in charge of all logistics of his visit to Tokyo, so Ozaki – and therefore Sorge and Centre – were aware of Stahmer’s itinerary almost as soon as Ribbentrop himself.26
By mid-September, Stahmer and Matsuoka had concluded nego-tiations for a tripartite alliance between Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Japan – or as Mussolini more snappily dubbed it, the Axis.27 In essence, the Axis entailed a global carve-up of spheres of influence in a future, Nazi-dominated world. Japan agreed to ‘recognise and respect the leadership of Germany and Italy in the establishment of a new order in Europe’, while Japan was accorded similar ‘leadership … in the establishment of a new order in Greater East Asia’. Japan’s sphere would encompass Manchuria and China, French Indochina and the Pacific Islands, Thailand, British Malaya and Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, Burma, Australia and New Zealand. British India was, in a curious nod to the spirit of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, to be considered as within the sphere of the Soviet Union.
Importantly, the Japanese would be allowed to choose whether and when they wished to join the war against Britain. Also, crucially, Germany shared Japan’s keenness to keep America out of the war – and hoped that the prospect of fighting in both the Atlantic and Pacific would encourage Washington to stick to its current policy of isolation. To that end, Matsuoka appointed Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, a high-profile advocate of US–Japanese friendship with many allies in Washington, including President Roosevelt himself, as Japan’s new ambassador to the United States.
Keeping Soviet Russia out of an alliance with Britain and America was also vital. Article V of the Tripartite Pact specifically affirmed that ‘the above agreement affects in no way the political status existing at present between each of the three Contracting Powers and Soviet Russia’. And Stahmer strongly hinted during his visit to Tokyo that better relations between Japan and the Soviet Union would help keep America neutral.28
The Japanese did not wait for the formal signing in Berlin on 27 September (‘in the 19th year of the Fascist era [1941]’, according to the document’s grand preamble29) to enact their side of the grand carve-up. A Japanese expeditionary force sailed from Taiwan to French Indochina on 19 September, overrunning Tonkin province after a few brief skirmishes. This was excellent news for Sorge. Every step Japan took south was a step away from the Soviet Union – and presumably towards the end of the war, and his return home.
‘I have just turned 45 and have been on this job for eleven years … the conditions here would undermine the strongest constitution,’ Sorge reminded Centre in October 1940. ‘I beg you not to forget that I have been living here without a break, and unlike other “respectable foreigners” have not taken a holiday every three or four years. That may look suspicious.’ He also claimed that ‘Max is unfortunately so seriously ill that a return to his former work capacity cannot be counted on … I am learning his job now and will take his work on myself.’30
This was untrue. Max was in fact back at work and being driven harder than ever. Despite his heart attack and three months in bed, Clausen managed to transmit about sixty times during 1940 – ten more than the previous year – encrypting and sending a gruelling 29,179 words, a record for the Tokyo rezidentura. But if Sorge’s lie was meant to hasten the recall that he and Clausen wished for so badly, the response from Centre was so tactless that it might have been calculated to extinguish the last vestiges of loyalty that Clausen may have retained for the cause, and for his bosses in Moscow.
Yet another new director had taken over. Proskurov had proved too outspoken in his views on the possibility of Hitler reneging on the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact. In June 1940 he fell victim to yet another purge of the top ranks of the Red Army, and was arrested and later shot. Proskurov’s successor was his one-time deputy General Filip Golikov, a man whose prime concern was remaining alive by feeding Stalin only information that conformed with the dictator’s prejudices. Keeping his demanding Japanese rezidentura happy came low on Golikov’s list of priorities.
‘Dear Ramsay, having carefully studied your materials for 1940 I believe that they do not answer to the tasks set before you … the majority of your materials are not secret and not timely … I demand that you activate your work and supply me with operative information,’ Golikov cabled in February 1941. ‘I believe it is necessary to curtail the expenses of your firm to 2,000 yen a month. Pay your sources only for valuable information and carefully. Use the income of the firm of Fritz [Clausen] for additional financing of our work.’31
Sorge protested vigorously. ‘When we received your orders to curtail our expenses we took that as a kind of punishment,’ Sorge cabled on 26 March 1941. ‘If you insist on curtailing our budget then you must be ready for the destruction of this small apparat which we have created. If you do not find it possible to agree with these suggestions then I will have to ask you to call me home. Having been here for seven years and becoming physically weakened I believe that this is the only way out of these difficulties.’32 But Centre was adamant. It was time to see a return on its investment in Tokyo’s blueprint-producing industry.
This was not welcome news to Clausen, who had worked for years at building Centre’s seed money into a highly profitable business.33 Indeed, by the beginning of 1941 Clausen, by his own account, had become more interested in his capitalist cover operation than in his supposed main job as an intelligence officer.
‘As I became disinterested in spying work and as my belief in communism became shaky, I came to devote myself seriously to this business,’ Clausen said in prison. ‘I put all of my money into this business and worked as hard as I could.’ Once, Clausen had considered himself ‘100 percent communist’ who ‘thought that the work of secret spying was sacred and important work’. Years of stress, bullying and callous treatment by Centre and especially by Sorge had made him ‘sick and tired of spy work’. Max had undergone, albeit somewhat belatedly, the ideological transformation that thousands of German communists of his class and generation had experienced. He told his interrogators that he had originally become a communist ‘because all of the people could not find employment’. But now that Hitler had succeeded in eradicating unemployment, Clausen felt a swelling pride in his homeland. ‘For the first time
I felt that I am a German,’ he said. ‘I have been wandering between my old communist ideology on the one hand and the newborn Germany and the patriotic Japanese people.’34
In his years in Tokyo, Clausen came to feel that the Japanese seemed quite content without the dictatorship of the proletariat. ‘This country does not need communism,’ he decided. As for his masters in the Kremlin, Clausen felt that Stalin had sacrificed the communist dream in the interests of rebuilding the Russian Empire. He concluded, therefore, that his ‘spying work was nonsense’. The order from Moscow instructing him to fund the ring personally proved the final straw for Clausen, who finally resolved to ‘stay out of involvement with Moscow’.35 Evidently scared of Sorge’s wrath, Clausen prevaricated about informing his chief that he ‘could not accept such instructions’ until January 1941. But in the meantime he took his own small revenge on Sorge, on Centre, and on his own former servile self. From November 1940, Clausen began destroying parts of Sorge’s reports without bothering to transmit them to Centre.
In his prison testimony, Clausen was trying to prove to his captors that he was no longer a communist fanatic, and had not been for some time. Sorge, on the other hand, hoped that the Soviet Union would step in and save him, as they had the Noulens in their Chinese captivity, so confessed to no weakening in his loyalty to communism. Nor could Sorge make any such an admission to Hanako, nor the wavering Clausen or the doggedly loyal Ozaki; much less to the Otts or through his letters to Katya, which were all read by Centre. In those climactic years of his Tokyo career, Sorge was utterly alone with his doubts, and his secrets. Perhaps the stress of keeping these emotions bottled up helps explain why Sorge so readily confessed to the Japanese, and in such detail and at such length. But he lied and concealed from his interrogators too. Our single insight into Sorge’s inner mind is his crie de coeur to Niilo Virtanen in Moscow in 1935, when he confessed to feeling desperate and disillusioned – and his often-repeated pleas to Moscow be allowed to return home.
An Impeccable Spy Page 29