An Impeccable Spy

by Owen Matthews

  Erich Kordt, Ribbentrop’s latest envoy to the Japanese, met Sorge during these tense days. Kordt was expecting to meet the ‘the intelligent German journalist who supposedly was more knowledgeable about Japan’s complicated political conditions than anyone else’ that he had heard so much about in Berlin. He was also, doubtless, hoping to have a good time on the town with a man he had been told was ‘decidedly bohemian, very receptive to feminine charms and more than willing to partake of a good drink’. Instead, when he was introduced to Sorge after midnight at the bar of the Imperial Hotel, Kordt found him drunk, ‘bizarre’, and ‘in a belligerent mood’.8

  The two men, naturally, talked politics. Sorge declared flatly that the Japanese were ‘pirates’ but that they would never oblige the Germans by striking Singapore. Furthermore, he taunted the visitor from Berlin, there would soon be a deal between the Japanese and Washington. This was a reference to Konoe’s recent instructions to Japan’s new ambassador in Washington, Admiral Nomura, to try to defuse the escalating tensions with the US – a key snippet of information gleaned by Ozaki over his breakfast miso soup. The US had indeed recently demanded that the Japanese withdraw from the Axis as their price of recognition of Japanese conquests in Manchuria and Tokyo’s economic demands in Asia. It was a tempting deal for Konoe – if he could persuade the army in Manchuria to make peace with the Chinese after so much blood and sacrifice.

  One more week would tell whether or not Nomura would reach agreement with the Americans, Sorge bragged. Kordt, taken aback, replied that he could not imagine that Tokyo would deal with Washington behind Hitler’s back. ‘Yes, that’s beyond you,’ retorted Sorge rudely. ‘But in two weeks I can get you all the details.’ The Japanese authorities had declared another ‘National Spy Prevention Week’, Sorge explained, which meant that every city block had to report to the police any neighbour who had contact with foreigners.9 By next week all this should have blown over, and his ‘friends’ would be able to visit him once more and inform him of the latest news on the talks. It is a measure of Sorge’s desperate mood that he had no qualms about sharing such sensitive information with a senior German diplomat, and a stranger to boot – as well as casually mentioning that his top-level Japanese sources had reason to fear discovery during Spy Week. At three in the morning, having drunk the best part of a bottle of brandy, Sorge departed into the Tokyo night. Kordt had found the famous Sorge ‘a real braggart’.10

  ‘A funny sort of telegram’, as Sorge described it, finally came across the ether from Moscow in the last week of May. Its blunt message was that ‘we doubt the veracity of your information’. Sorge was, by coincidence, with Clausen when this infuriating cable came in. It drove him to wild anger, by Clausen’s account. ‘Now, I’ve had enough of this!’ Sorge shouted, springing to his feet and pacing the room, clutching his head. ‘Why don’t they believe me? Those wretches, how can they ignore our message!’ Somewhat disingenuously, Clausen claimed that ‘this was the only time when both of us were beside ourselves’.11 What Sorge could not have known was that his earlier cable reporting Niedermayer’s intelligence, garbled by Clausen and further truncated in Golikov’s summary, had actually found its way onto Stalin’s desk. Stalin scrawled on the report that the information came from ‘a shit who has set himself up with some small factories and brothels in Japan’. The khozain of the Kremlin had apparently confused Sorge with Clausen.12

  In a last-ditch attempt to get his warnings believed in Moscow, Sorge resorted to the extraordinary tactic of leaking his information to the Western press. He summoned Vukelić and ordered him to approach four US papers with Scholl and other couriers’ information about Barbarossa – though shorn of the names of the sources. Vukelić could not run the story on his own agency’s wire, Havas, as it was now controlled by the Vichy puppet government of France. But Vukelić did have some luck with Newman of the New York Herald Tribune. On 31 May 1941 the Tribune ran a story headlined ‘Tokyo expects Hitler to move against Russia’. The piece was buried deep inside the paper. A Manhattan news desk had given a little more credence to Stalin’s man in Tokyo than Stalin himself. But not much.

  As the disappointments mounted up, Sorge’s suave composure began to show more cracks. He came home reeling drunk more frequently than ever before. One night in early summer, Sorge lurched into his study to find Hanako reading. He seized her and made love to her so roughly that she buried her face in her hands with embarrassment. The abrupt change from Sorge’s usually gentleness and consideration alarmed her deeply.13 Some days later Hanako found Sorge on his couch, weeping with his hand over his forehead. It was the first time she had ever seen her lover cry, as she related in her 1949 memoir:

  ‘Why do you weep?’ she asked.

  ‘I am lonely,’ Sorge replied.

  ‘How can this be when you have so many German friends here in Tokyo?’

  ‘They are not my true friends,’ was Sorge’s bitter response.14

  Sorge’s daily updates on the state of the secret Japanese–American talks alarmed Ott, who relied on his exceptionally well-informed friend for insider news on the Konoe government’s covert diplomacy with Washington. ‘We learned a little about these from the American press, something from our ambassador in Washington, and a good deal from Richard Sorge,’ recalled Third Secretary Meissner.15 Sorge also shared the information with Schellenberg in Berlin, further blurring the lines between Sorge’s career as a Soviet spy and his valued role as a German intelligence source.

  ‘Sorge’s intelligence material grew more and more important to us, for in 1941 we were very keen to know more about Japan’s plans concerning the United States,’ wrote Schellenberg.16 Of particular concern was the American offer to mediate between Japan and the exiled Chinese Nationalist government in Chungking. An end to the fighting in China would have unpredictable consequences for the Soviet Union and Germany. Moscow worried that it would make an attack on the USSR more likely. Berlin feared the exact opposite – that a peace deal with China would encourage Japan to throw its forces southward into its planned Asian empire instead of joining in with their attack on Stalin.

  Ott decided to send Sorge to Shanghai to find out more. As before, he was given diplomatic protection as an official Germany embassy courier. Sorge’s Shanghai trip presented the perfect opportunity to flee. His duty to warn his masters in Moscow of the impending catastrophe of Barbarossa had been discharged, and they had not heeded him. There seemed little point in continuing his long and lonely mission – though he mentioned nothing of this crisis of confidence to his Japanese interrogators.

  Why did Sorge not take this opportunity to disappear into the chaos of war-torn China? He certainly considered the possibility, strongly hinting to Hanako that he might not return. But he also cared, in his brusque way, for what would happen to Hanako if he left her. He attempted to find a new future for her, using the grimly practical logic of a man used to ordering the lives and loves of his subordinates. He suggested that Hanako get married.

  ‘Who should I marry?’ she had asked, taken aback, according to an interview she gave in 1965.

  ‘Don’t you have a friend?’

  ‘I have no friend,’ she replied, hurt. ‘Always and only you.’

  ‘I may not be in Japan much longer. Your heart will ache if you keep thinking about me. If you marry a wise Japanese man, you will make a fine wife. A wife has no worries. Yes, I think you should marry.’

  ‘If I must, let it be one of your friends,’ she answered.

  ‘I don’t know many Japanese men. Let me see.’ Sorge reflected for a moment, pacing his study. ‘I have a friend who is an adviser to the Manchurian Railroad.’ Sorge assured Hanako that Hotsumi Ozaki was a kind, intelligent man who could make her happy.

  At his next rendezvous with Ozaki – at Sorge’s house, for fear of the current spy mania – he breezily informed his star agent that he had a splendid wife for him. It is revealing of Sorge’s obsession with work, and his indifference to his colleagues as people, tha
t despite having worked together for twelve years Sorge never bothered to ask if Ozaki already had a wife. Ozaki, for his part, evidently never considered Sorge enough of a personal friend to talk about his family affairs. It is also telling that it never seems to have crossed Sorge’s mind that Ozaki or Hanako might object to his brilliant plan.

  ‘I have found out that Ozaki-san is already married,’ Sorge informed Hanako. ‘Too bad! I don’t know of anyone else.’ He looked down at his desk, scratched his head, then turned back to his work.17

  Prince Urach, the former correspondent on the Volkischer Beobachter who was now briefly back in Tokyo on a new assignment, told a more distasteful story. Speaking to Der Spiegel in 1951, Urach claimed that Sorge tried to ‘sell’ Hanako to him, saying that their affair was over.18 Hanako’s version of events is rather different. She claimed that Urach told Sorge that he wanted to take her to Germany with him, but Sorge refused, saying that ‘it would be difficult for me to live’ without her.19 Given that during his earlier Tokyo career Urach had annoyed Sorge by ‘pawing’ Hanako, it is perhaps more likely that the German aristocrat continued to hold a torch for his friend’s pretty mistress. In any case Sorge’s bizarre attempts to pass Hanako on to his top agent, then to his friend the Nazi newspaper correspondent, had both failed. If Sorge absconded during his trip to China, Hanako would be left alone with the stigma of having been the mistress of a foreigner and a spy.

  Sorge’s disintegrating mental state did not go unnoticed at the embassy. Ott had become seriously worried about Sorge’s heavy drinking and – as much conscious of his position as concerned for his friend’s well-being – confided to Urach that he feared a scandal. News had reached the ambassador of at least two incidents in which a drunken Sorge had crashed his Datsun into telegraph poles, and of screaming rows and even a fist fight between Sorge and local Nazis.

  ‘Something needs to be done about Sorge,’ Ott told Urach, by the latter’s account. ‘The man is drinking harder than ever and he seems like a nervous wreck … It goes without saying that one’s first concern is for the good name of the embassy.’ Ott ‘had some evil premonition that something unpleasant might happen’ and asked Urach to try to persuade their mutual friend to return to Germany in early June, which the ambassador had privately warned Urach would be the last possible safe date to cross the USSR before the outbreak of hostilities. Ott proposed to use his influence to secure Sorge ‘a good press position in Berlin’. Knowing his man, Ott even donated a quantity of whisky to help Urach’s campaign of persuasion.20

  Urach, knowing Sorge’s vocal anti-Nazi attitudes, had little hope that he would succeed in tempting his friend home to the Reich. ‘At home he would be just another journalist, while here he was Sorge, who knew what was going on,’ recalled Urach. ‘What would he want in “Germany, the great concentration camp”?’ Ott was deeply disappointed when Urach reported his failure. But when Urach suggested that Ott try himself, as Sorge’s ‘day-in, day-out friend’, to persuade him, Ott refused. He would also not countenance simply ordering Sorge back to Berlin. ‘That won’t do,’ said Ott. ‘I’m his friend!’21 Had Ott been less pusillanimous about dealing with Sorge’s spiralling personal crisis and actually insisted that he return to Germany – a command that even Moscow Centre could not possibly have argued with – he might have saved his friend’s life.

  On Thursday 15 May, Sorge called in on Helma Ott at the ambassa-dor’s residence after his usual breakfast meeting with her husband. As he passed through the hallway a tall, blonde German woman emerged from the drawing room. She was evidently a house guest of the Otts. There was a moment of awkward silence before Helma appeared and introduced them. ‘Ah, you don’t know one another. Sorge – Mrs Harich-Schneider.’

  Margareta – or Eta, as she preferred to be called – Harich-Schneider had just arrived in Tokyo, leaving her two daughters behind with relatives in Germany. She was a celebrated harpsichordist, whose concerts were often reviewed in the arts pages of the Frankfurter Zeitung. ‘Not a completely unknown name,’ said Sorge, bowing with exaggerated formality before exchanging a few words and hurtling away.

  In an interview in 1982, Eta recalled that she had been immediately intrigued by Sorge’s craggy, striking face and deep blue, vigilant eyes. Sorge had something demoniacal about him, she thought.

  ‘Who is that interesting man?’ she asked her hostess.

  ‘A journalist – Frankfurter Zeitung,’ Helma answered. She had evi-dently noticed the spark that passed between Eta and Sorge, because she snippily added: he ‘doesn’t have any interest in women’.22

  So began the final, and most dramatic, love affair of Sorge’s Tokyo career.

  Sometime before 20 May 1941,23 Sorge boarded the daily 06.30 Japan Air Transport flight from Tokyo’s Haneda airport to Shanghai, via Osaka and Fukuoka. Shanghai was a place of happy memories for Sorge. It was the place where he had fallen in love with Asia, and built his first espionage ring. The local German community in Shanghai feted Sorge, the famous newspaper correspondent. A dinner was held in his honour by the German News Agency bureau chief. A young diplomat named Erwin Wickert entertained Sorge to tea at his home, and recalled that the visitor flirted outrageously with his young wife.24 Armed with letters of introduction from Ott, Sorge made the rounds of senior Japanese officials in Shanghai, including the Japanese consul general and military and naval attachés, as well as meeting various old Chinese contacts.

  ‘About ninety per cent of [the Japanese] were categorically opposed to peace mediation, and said that if Konoe and Matsuoka pushed it through they would be met with fierce resistance,’ Sorge later told his captors. ‘I got the impression that the Japan-US negotiations [over a peace settlement in China] were doomed to fail.’25 Sorge reported his findings back to Ott using a top-secret military cipher book that the ambassador had given him – a clear sign that Ott himself was unaware of the suspicions of Schellenberg and of Meisinger’s mission to investigate Sorge’s reliability.

  As it happened, Meisinger was himself also in Shanghai, though there is no evidence that hunter and hunted crossed paths there. Meisinger’s official mission was to meet the Gestapo officials in China, who were subordinate to his Tokyo bureau. But the colonel also had another, more esoteric, interest.

  Ignatius Timotheus Trebitsch-Lincoln, born Abraham Schwarz, was a Hungarian-Jewish petty thief, actor and sometime Anglican missionary who had briefly worked as a curate in Kent before being elected a member of the British parliament for Darlington in County Durham in 1910. After the outbreak of the First World War he volunteered his services to the German military attache in London – and after being rebuffed, fled to New York where he published a sensational book entitled Revelations of an International Spy. Extradited to Britain and convicted of espionage (or rather, attempted espionage), he served time in Parkhurst prison. After a spell in Germany after the war – where he served as the chief press censor for the short-lived Kapp regime in Berlin and met Adolf Hitler – Lincoln moved to China and converted to Buddhism.By 1941 he had established his own monastery in Shanghai, where all initiates were required to hand over their possessions to ‘Abbot Chao Kung’ – as Lincoln was now styling himself. He also earned money writing anti-British propaganda for the occupying Japanese authorities. Lincoln had come to the Gestapo’s attention thanks to an eccentric plan that he wished to present to the Reich. He proposed to travel to Tibet (then still an independent state) and persuade the Lhasa government to ally itself to Berlin, thereby turning the mountain kingdom into a base of operations against British India.Meisinger evidently did not enquire too deeply into how a Hungarian adventurer and multiply convicted fraudster planned to persuade a Buddhist theocracy to join the unfolding world war on the side of the Nazis. He cabled the RHSA in Berlin triumphantly to announce his recruitment of Lincoln. Unfortunately for Meisinger’s scheme, the German consul general in Shanghai got wind of this insane plan and cabled Berlin to warn that ‘Abbot’ Lincoln was a notorious fraud, with no significant
connections to the Buddhist community in China and even fewer in Tibet. Ribbentrop sent a stinging rebuke to Meisinger, reminding him that ‘the self-evident assumption for his posting to the Tokyo embassy was that he concern himself exclusively with police questions’.26

  While Meisinger was busying himself with his mountebank monk, Sorge returned to Tokyo. It is not clear why he finally decided not to remain in China, as he mentioned nothing of his plans to his Japanese interrogators and we have only Hanako’s account of his deep personal crisis and dreams of flight. One reason may have been practical. The Japanese occupation police in Shanghai required locally issued travel documents for all foreigners which Sorge could only have obtained through the German consulate general. To reach communist-held areas he would have had to cross at last two front lines. The Soviet embassy might have helped – but to do so they would also have had to seek authorisation from Moscow Centre, which would hardly condone the flight of such a crucial agent at this juncture. And then of course there was the unresolved question of Hanako. In short, Sorge was once again trapped.

  There was one further reason for his return, linked to the great question of Barbarossa. Sorge’s old friend and bottle-mate Erwin Scholl was on his way from Berlin to Tokyo, surely bearing important news about Germany’s plans. Scholl, freshly promoted to lieutenant colonel, was en route to Bangkok to take up a new assignment as military attaché after two years at the Foreign Department of the General Staff in Berlin. If Sorge could catch Scholl during his layover in Japan, perhaps his old friend would be able to provide operational information that would finally change Moscow Centre’s mind.

  Sorge’s plane touched down in Tokyo, according to the Japan Air Transport timetable for 1941, at 4.30 p.m. It was probably 27 May. Certainly, Sorge dined with the Otts that evening at the ambassador’s residence. The mood was gloomy. As the party sat down to dinner around 8 p.m. Wenneker arrived with the news that the battlecruiser Bismarck, the largest ship in the German fleet,* had just been sunk by the Royal Navy’s plane-launched torpedoes and naval gunfire in the North Atlantic. The sinking was significant not just for Germany’s plans to defeat Britain but also for the Japanese, who could hardly have been encouraged to attack Singapore after this resounding sign of Britain’s continuing naval prowess.