And yet when Schellenberg called up Sorge’s files from ‘three or four’ security agencies – the Gestapo, the SD Internal Security Department, and the RHSA’s own archive – it was immediately clear that in the 1920s the man had deep, extensive and unmistakably suspicious contacts with a swathe of known Comintern agents. While no definitive proof could be found that Sorge was an active member of the German Communist Party or Comintern, ‘one could not help coming to the conclusion that he was at least a sympathiser’, Schellenberg wrote in his post-war memoirs. ‘But he had close ties with people in influential circles and had always been protected against rumours of this sort.’2 The mystery remains as to why these compromising files were not discovered back in 1934, when Sorge applied for his Nazi Party membership, well before his ‘influential’ contacts from Tokyo had any reason to cover for him.
A less subtle and more brutal man than Schellenberg would have immediately moved to shut Sorge out of the embassy, or denounced him to the Japanese authorities as a communist. Instead, Schellenberg decided to continue to use Sorge’s undoubted talents, while all the time watching for him to make a slip. According to Schellenberg, von Ritgen insisted that ‘even if we assume that Sorge had connections with the Russian Secret Service, we must, after safeguarding our own interests, find ways of profiting from his profound knowledge’. In the end, Schellenberg ‘agreed that I should protect Sorge from attacks by the [Nazi] Party, but only on condition that he included in his reports intelligence material on the Soviet Union, China and Japan … When I reported this to Heydrich he agreed, with the proviso that we immediately establish surveillance on Sorge. Heydrich was skeptical about the whole thing and warned that Sorge may be furnishing us with disinformation.’3
Schellenberg claimed, in effect, that he had agreed with no less a figure than the Reich’s security chief that Sorge be treated as a potential Soviet agent nearly a year before his eventual arrest by the Japanese. But this does not fit the facts. If Schellenberg was truly convinced that Sorge was a Soviet spy, leaving him with an office in the embassy, security clearance and the confidence of Ott, Thomas and the DNB would have been a grave security risk. More likely is that the information Schellenberg had dug up cast some suspicion on Sorge, but nothing more concrete. Indeed some parts of the ‘evidence’ against Sorge – for instance Schellenberg’s belief that Sorge was ‘in touch with extreme right wing elements in Germany between 1923 and 1928’ – were simply untrue. Sorge had lived in Moscow for most of that period, a fact which Schellenberg was apparently not aware of. Schellenberg wrote his memoir The Labyrinth while he was on trial for war crimes at Nuremberg in 1949 (it became an international bestseller).4 The author’s aim was to cast himself in the role of German patriot and, more importantly, an all-knowing spymaster. Sorge’s future arrest was to prove a shock and deep embarrassment to Schellenberg and the RHSA – such a shock, in fact, that for weeks afterwards the Germans continued to protest that Sorge was innocent. Schellenberg’s claim to have rumbled Sorge so early has a distinct ring of hindsight.5
What is clearly true is that the suspicions of the Nazi security apparatus had certainly been aroused. But Schellenberg faced an operational problem in fulfilling Heydrich’s order to put watchful eyes on Sorge. Reich security had nobody at the German embassy in Tokyo with sufficient experience in counter-intelligence to trap an agent of Sorge’s calibre. Until, that is, the file of Colonel Joseph Albert Meisinger landed on Schellenberg’s desk in March 1941.
Meisinger had been a Freikorps comrade of Reinhard Heydrich’s in the early 1920s, when the future Nazi security supremo had been a minor Bavarian police official. Both men would find their true calling in the Nazi secret police. From 1933 Meisinger carved a niche for himself in the Reich’s secret state police, or Gestapo, as an expert on questions of homosexuality, illegal sexual relations between Jews and Aryans, and abortion (which had been made illegal under Nazi law). Meisinger sent thousands of ‘social deviants’ to the newly established concentration camps, and played a leading role in purging the ranks of the Foreign Ministry of suspected homosexuals.6 In September 1939 he was appointed deputy commander of Einsatzgruppe IV in newly occupied Poland, a death squad charged with murdering opponents of the Nazi regime. On 1 January 1940, promoted to Standartenführer or colonel, Meisinger was made commander of the state police in the Warsaw District. There, he unleashed a brutal campaign of wholesale slaughter against Poles and Jews.7 Among his more notorious actions were the mass shooting of 1,700 people in a forest near Palmiry, the execution of fifty-five randomly selected Warsaw Jews as a reprisal for the murder of a Polish policeman, and the execution of 107 Poles as a reprisal for the murder of two Germans.8
For these and other, less public, acts of sadism and brutality Meisinger quickly earned himself the soubriquet the ‘Butcher of Warsaw’.*9 By March 1940 his superiors were so appalled by his behaviour that even the Gestapo wanted Meisinger arrested and tried for war crimes. Such actions would become standard operating procedure for Einsatzgruppen operating in Russia after the launch of Operation Barbarossa the following year. But for 1940, they were shocking. Even Schellenberg, no stranger to violence, found that the ‘huge file’ he had collected on Meisinger ‘proved him to be so utterly bestial and corrupt as to be practically inhuman’.10
Fortunately for the Butcher, his old Kampfkamerad, Heydrich, intervened to prevent Meisinger’s impending court martial and possible execution. ‘Meisinger knew too much,’ according to Schellenberg – apparently a reference to his old comradeship with Heydrich.11 A face-saving compromise was arranged. With Heydrich and Schellenberg’s blessing, Meisinger was to be sent to Tokyo as a police attaché to the embassy. The Gestapo colonel was swiftly packed, like a dangerous bacillus, into a Kriegsmarine submarine and sent east. Schellenberg had found just the right man to investigate the mysterious Dr Sorge.
Meisinger certainly made a powerful impression on his arrival in Japan in early April 1941. One German lady in Tokyo remembered him as ‘such a terrifying presence my knees gave way when I went into his office’.12 A rumour went around the embassy staff in Tokyo that Meisinger ate raw steak with his fingers. His official post was as the Reich security liaison officer to the Japanese Secret Intelligence Service. But word quickly spread that his real role was to seek out enemies of the Third Reich within the German community.
Sorge’s response to the arrival of Meisinger, a deadly threat to his spy career and his life, was simple. At the earliest opportunity, he invited this terrifying man to go drinking with him in Ginza. Over beers at the Imperial Hotel, Lohmeyer’s, Das Rheingold, Die Fledermaus, Ginza Lion and his usual repertoire of other bars, Sorge worked his old magic – just as he had with Ott, Wenneker, Scholl, Matzky and the rest. Like Sorge, Meisinger had been an infantry private in the First World War, in the 230th Minenwerfer Company of the Bavarian Pioneer Battalion. Like Sorge, he had been wounded, won an Iron Cross, and been promoted to a non-commissioned officer. Sorge’s status as a war hero, his rough charisma, his abundant knowledge of both Tokyo’s nightspots and its high politics, won the colonel over. By May, according to a German diplomatic colleague, Meisinger ‘felt honoured that Sorge valiantly helped him devour his stock of whisky on many an occasion, even though he made great fun of the fat Meisinger while doing so’.13 Within weeks of his sub-marine arrival in Tokyo, Sorge had converted the Butcher of Warsaw into his newest bottle-mate.
As Sorge was defusing the Meisinger threat, he was also attempting to decipher the diplomatic conundrum of whether Japan was actually going to heed Ribbentrop’s increasingly insistent pleas that Tokyo join in Germany’s war. Ambassador Ott and his sand-table had, so far, failed to persuade Konoe and the Imperial General Staff of the wisdom of attacking Singapore – not, primarily, because they feared beleaguered Britain but mostly because they were wary of making an enemy of America. ‘Germany was somewhat disappointed by the Japanese atti-tude after the conclusion of the three-country alliance, for Germany expected that Japan would by t
his alliance take a more aggressive attitude toward the United States and Britain,’ Sorge reported to Moscow. ‘But all that Japan tried to do was to bring Indochina into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere … Thus this diplomatic game ended with a complete Japanese victory.’14
Ribbentrop attempted to break the deadlock by inviting Foreign Minister Matsuoka to Berlin for an official visit in March 1941. The visit was intended as part of a convoluted web of diplomacy that Hitler was weaving to disguise his preparations for Barbarossa. Hitler was already resolved to invade Russia. But nonetheless, in late 1940 and early 1941, Berlin floated several diplomatic démarches designed to disguise Germany’s true intentions until the invasion force was ready. One was a proposed deal with Stalin to carve up the Balkans between the USSR and Germany – a false-flag operation that allowed Hitler to pass off his build-up of troops on the Eastern front as an invasion force intended for Yugoslavia and Romania. The other deal was the (in retrospect) bizarre suggestion that the Soviet Union actually join the Axis.
The deal – which Molotov discussed with Hitler and Ribbentrop in Berlin in February 1941 – would entail the Soviet Union signing up to the Tripartite Pact formula of recognising the ‘leadership’ of Germany, Italy, and Japan in, respectively, Europe and East Asia. The existing Axis powers would, in turn, agree to respect Soviet territory. All would pledge to give no assistance to the other’s enemies. A secret protocol assigned areas of influence beyond Europe’s borders. The Persian Gulf and India would be within the Soviet sphere, Japan got the Pacific, Germany central Africa, and Italy northern Africa.15 Though after the war Molotov would try to pass these negotiations off as Stalin playing for time before the inevitable German invasion, in truth, for several months in early 1941, Stalin seems to have believed that his sworn enemy in Berlin was still more interested in dominating Europe and Africa than invading the Soviet Union.
Matsuoka’s role in this scheme, from the German point of view, was as a useful dupe. Berlin had told the Japanese nothing about Barbarossa. They had also kept quiet about Stalin’s demands of chunks of the proposed Japanese sphere of influence – notably in Mongolia and India – as the price of his agreement to join the Axis powers. Hitler needed Japan to attack Singapore, but not other areas of the Pacific rim that might bring America into the war, such as the Philippines, a former US protectorate. And, most immediately, he needed Matsuoka to rubber-stamp his double-dealing with Stalin until such time as Barbarossa was ready.
Sorge believed himself to be supremely well informed about Matsuoka’s European visit thanks to Ozaki’s friend Prince Saionji, who was to be one of the envoy’s travelling entourage. Saionji, at the outset, believed that the foreign minister had no special mission other than to make the personal acquaintance of Hitler, Ribbentrop, Mussolini and Stalin. There would be ‘no world-shaking results’ from Matsuoka’s visit, Ozaki confidently reported.16
Both Saionji and Ozaki were quite wrong. Matsuoka made his way via Trans-Siberian express to Moscow, where he held brief and cordial talks with Stalin and Molotov where the idea was floated of a non-aggression pact with Japan along the lines that Hitler had signed two years previously. On arrival in Berlin, Matsuoka was feted with all the pomp the Reich could muster, driven down the Unter den Linden avenue in an open car under the fluttering flags of the Axis powers and accorded a long audience with the Führer in the newly completed Reich Chancellery. The interview consisted mostly of a lengthy harangue by Hitler about the treacherousness of Britain, which revealed nothing of Germany’s real game plan to attack the Soviet Union. But under his effusive admiration for Hitler, Matsuoka offered only the vaguest of assurances of Japan’s intention to eventually take Singapore. After a brief visit to Mussolini in Rome, Matsuoka boarded his train back to Moscow where Stalin waited to seal the Russo-Japanese non-aggression pact.
Matsuoka spent a week in Moscow. By Molotov’s post-war account, the Japanese was subjected to the full force of Stalin’s wiles, fuelled by copious amounts of vodka and champagne – true to Stalin’s well-known tactic of getting both friends and enemies paralytically drunk during talks. Japan’s true interest lay in ensuring that there would be no war on its northern flank, Stalin argued, freeing the emperor’s forces to conquer Asia. The clear subtext was that Japan had nothing to gain from joining Germany in any possible attack on the USSR. ‘Japan was deeply resentful toward Germany and gained no benefit from their alliance [with Berlin],’ recalled Molotov in a 1979 interview. ‘Our talks … had great significance,’ Matsuoka told the American ambassador to Russia, Laurence Steinhardt, on 8 April that both Hitler and Ribbentrop had urged him to ‘make friends’ with the Soviet Union.17
Stalin’s charm offensive paid off four days into Matsuoka’s visit with the signing of a neutrality pact between Moscow and Tokyo. Stalin made a great show of their newly forged comradely relations. ‘At the end of Matsuoka’s visit Stalin made a gesture that caught the whole world’s attention,’ recalled Molotov. ‘He personally went to the station to see off the Japanese minister. No one had ever expected this; Stalin never met or saw off anyone. The Japanese and the Germans were stunned. The train was delayed for an hour. Stalin and I made Matsuoka drink a lot, and we almost carried him onto the train. Seeing him off was worth it because Japan refused to wage war on us.’ Before he left, reeling from Soviet hospitality, Molotov and Matsuoka sang a chorus of the Russian folk song ‘The Reeds Were Rustling’. ‘Why, he could barely stand up in the station,’ remembered Molotov. ‘Matsuoka paid for his visit to us.’18
Much as it might have pleased Stalin to believe that Matsuoka was a victim of his wiles, in truth the Japanese–Soviet non-aggression pact rested on nothing but the foreign minister’s word. And Matsuoka, on his return to Tokyo, was quick to reassure Ott on 6 May that the pact ‘did not nullify the Tripartite Alliance’. He also claimed, with a two-facedness that was the hallmark of Matsuoka’s career, that Japan would not, in fact, remain neutral in the event of a war between Germany and the USSR.19
Nonetheless, it was a setback for German diplomacy. Ott told Sorge ‘clearly that he never expected it and that such a Japan–Russia Neutrality Treaty was far from a happy thing for Germany’.20 Ott, Sorge, and indeed the rest of the Japanese cabinet had been taken by surprise by Matsuoka’s move. But news of the unexpected pact was greeted with general approval in Tokyo. Konoe personally met his foreign minister at Tokyo station and accompanied Matsuoka to the Imperial Palace for toasts. The Imperial General Staff also signalled its support – though the powerful pro-Axis faction led by General Araki’s group in the army ‘was not happy and took an opposing stand’, Miyagi informed Sorge.21
Despite the new pact, the volatile factional politics of the Japanese military meant that in reality a change of heart towards Stalin remained only one power-shift away. ‘Personally I did not think that the treaty made the Russo-Japanese relationship safe,’22 Sorge would later tell his interrogators.
Moscow, too, continued to keep a wary eye on any Japanese preparations to attack northwards into the USSR. Centre tasked the Ramsay group with drawing up a detailed order of battle of the Japanese military, an enormous undertaking that Ozaki and Miyagi completed by early May. The result was an impressive chart – drawn, naturally, by Miyagi, the artist of the spy ring – that showed the strength, equipment and location of Japan’s fifty-division-strong army with extraordinary accuracy. In the early stages of the Pacific War in 1942, the Americans would discover to their surprise that it was their Soviet allies who had by far the most reliable information on their Japanese opponents – thanks to the work of Sorge and his colleagues.23
‘If we could predict a Japanese attack on Russia two months in advance, that attack could be avoided through diplomatic negotiations,’ Sorge later explained to the Japanese. ‘If we could tell one month in advance, Russia could move major military forces to the border and could make complete defence preparations. If we could warn two weeks in advance, Russia could at least make defensive preparations
at the front line. And if we could advise a week in advance, that should help minimize the sacrifice.’24 Precisely the same logic applied to the more immediate threat of Operation Barbarossa. If Stalin could be warned in time – or rather if he could be induced to believe the reports of Sorge and others of German invasion plans – then the Soviet Union could be spared a bloodbath, or even complete destruction.
Throughout the spring of 1941 the regular military couriers arriving from Berlin via the Trans-Siberian railway brought yet more snippets of gossip about German preparations for war. These officers were more than glorified postmen. They were all military specialists who under the terms of the Axis agreement came to brief their Japanese counterparts on their respective areas of expertise – mechanised warfare, naval gunnery, bombing patterns and the like – and were briefed by the Japanese in return. Most of these couriers carried letters of introduction to Sorge from his old friends now back in Berlin – including Colonel Matzky, Ambassador Dirksen and even Karl Haushofer. The visitors were all taken on Sorge’s inimitable tour of Ginza’s nightspots, and in their cups gossiped about plans for war against Russia – as well as what they had learned about the latest Japanese military hardware.
In late April 1941, Sorge learned from Colonel Kretschmer, the embassy’s new senior military attaché, that he had received instructions from Berlin to warn the Japanese War Ministry that Germany would be taking ‘defensive measures’ to counter supposed Soviet troop concentrations on the eastern frontier of the Reich. ‘These instructions were very detailed and included a map of Soviet military dispositions,’ Sorge recalled in prison. ‘Although it was uncertain whether or not the situation would lead to actual hostilities, Germany had completed her preparations on a very large scale … I understood [from Kretschmer] that the decision on peace or war depended solely on Hitler’s will, and was quite irrespective of the Russian attitude.’25
An Impeccable Spy Page 31