An Impeccable Spy

by Owen Matthews

  Ott and Colonel Kretschmer were, so far, the only members of the embassy staff to have been officially advised of the date of the invasion. But the matter was by now an open secret. Across the road from the embassy, the Japanese Imperial General Staff were studying their own intelligence reports from Berlin and Moscow of the imminence of war with Russia.

  On Sunday 15 June, Sorge took Eta to another party. The stifling atmosphere of disapproval at the Otts’ was becoming unbearable. ‘We are both adults, and here I am creeping through the back gate to meet you in secret as if I were their little daughter,’ she said. Sorge advised her to get a place of her own and learn Japanese ‘fluently enough so you can bribe the police who handle foreigners’.12 Eta had other news: Helma had asked her to vacate her quarters in the residency and move into a smaller guest room so that Colonel Meisinger could set up the new Gestapo office in her first-floor suite.

  Sorge invited Eta back to his house for ‘one more whisky’. In exalted mood, he danced around his little study, carried away with a vision of himself as a slayer of the German Satan. ‘If anyone destroys Hitler it will be me!’ he shouted, to Eta’s puzzled amusement. That night, not without some calculation from Sorge, he and Eta became lovers.13

  Five days later Eugen Ott finally told Sorge what he had already heard from Scholl – that the invasion was planned for the following week. Sorge sent a final warning to Centre, citing Ott as his source. ‘War between Germany and the USSR is inevitable,’ Sorge cabled on 20 June. ‘German military superiority will allow the destruction of the Soviet Army as effectively as was accomplished at the beginning [of the war] because the strategic defensive positions of the USSR are still as weak as the Polish ones were.’ He also reported that Agent Invest (Ozaki) ‘has told me that the Japanese General Staff is already discussing the question of the positions that will be taken in the event of war’.14

  Why did Stalin refuse to heed the warnings that were flowing in from across the world? After the war, Molotov explained away Stalin’s scepticism as a form of caution. ‘We are blamed because we ignored our intelligence,’ Molotov told journalist Felix Chuev in 1969.15 ‘Yes, they warned us. But if we had heeded them, given Hitler the slightest excuse, he would have attacked us earlier.’ As we have seen, Molotov always insisted that Stalin knew that war was coming. The khozain’s only priority, according to his foreign minister, was to postpone conflict for as long as possible so that the USSR could build up its army sufficiently to resist a German attack. ‘Stalin reckoned before the war that only in 1943 would we be able to meet the Germans as equals.’ Delaying war was the reasoning Molotov cited for signing the pact with Ribbentrop in 1939. It was also, he claimed, the logic behind Stalin’s refusal to prepare for an invasion in 1941.

  But Molotov’s narrative does not tally with the physical evidence – the actual documents that were recorded as crossing Stalin’s desk in May and June 1941. Stalin appears to have developed a profound mistrust of intelligence reports, and expressed his contempt in blue or red wax pencil scrawls across a slew of documents. The sight of that inimitable handwriting still has the power to bring out goosebumps as one turns over the page in the stillness of the archives.

  Stalin defaced Sorge’s report of 20 May with his dismissive insult about ‘a shit’ who ran ‘small factories and brothels’. On 17 June, five days before the start of Barbarossa, Stalin received a report signed by Pavel M. Fitin, chief of NKGB foreign intelligence, asserting that ‘all preparations by Germany for an armed attack on the Soviet Union have been completed, and the blow can be expected at any time’. The source was Agent Starshina, the intelligence officer in Germany’s Air Ministry. Again Stalin’s blue pencil struck, scrawling a note to Fitin’s chief, People’s Commissar for State Security Vsevolod Merkulov. ‘Comrade Merkulov, you can send your “source” from the headquarters of German aviation to his fucking mother. This is not a “source” but a dezinformator – a dis-informer.’16

  This was neither caution nor healthy scepticism – it was the irrational, hysterical suspicion of a leader convinced that he alone knew the truth while all around him were deceiving him. One has to remember that just three years previously, Stalin’s secret police had been ordered to destroy the flower of the USSR’s foreign intelligence apparat on the grounds that it was thoroughly infiltrated with foreign spies. There’s no reason to believe that Stalin knew that these charges were very largely fabricated. He was certainly aware of Sorge’s career – in 1940 the khozain had instructed his secretary, Alexander Poskrybyshev, to order up Agent Ramsay’s personal file for inspection – and would therefore have also been apprised of Centre’s wild suspicions of the 1937 era that the Tokyo rezidentura was ‘under control of the enemy’.17 The purges had created such a thick cloud of suspicion that Stalin himself had become blinded by it.

  Molotov’s reminiscences capture some of the flavour of that pervasive, deadly atmosphere of distrust. ‘I think we could not have relied on our intelligence,’ Molotov recalled. ‘You have to listen to them, but you also have to verify their information. Intelligence agents could push you into such a dangerous position that you would never get out of it. Provocateurs everywhere are innumerable. That’s why you cannot trust intelligence without constant and scrupulous checking and rechecking.’18

  ‘Some naive people, philistines, have written in their reminiscences that the intelligence agents spoke the truth,’ asked his obsequious interlocutor Felix Chuev. ‘You couldn’t trust such reports,’ Molotov answered. ‘When I was the Predsovnarkom [Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars] I spent half the day reading such intelligence reports. The only thing missing was the date of the invasion! And if we had trusted these reports [and gone on a war footing], the war could have started much earlier.’19

  In fairness to Molotov, many of the early warnings of Barbarossa – including Sorge’s – were indeed inconclusive. On 2 May, Sorge fatally hedged his report with the possibility that the German invasion may indeed wait until after victory over Britain. In his 20 May message Sorge admitted that the danger ‘may pass for the year’. Even in his cable of 15 June, he admitted that ‘the military attaché is not sure of whether there will be war or not’.20 But by mid-June the sheer volume of reports coming into the Kremlin from all over the world – including Sorge’s account of his conversations with Scholl and Ott – were so detailed and specific that it is hard to read Stalin’s dogged refusal to heed them as anything but an act of wilful self-deception. Or, possibly, deception.

  Stalin could have been misled by his minions – or perhaps by Hitler himself. Why was Stalin so ready to believe that he was being lied to from all quarters except for Golikov’s? Marshal Zhukov, in a series of interviews in 1965–66 with the renowned war correspondent and poet Konstantin Simonov, offered an intriguing explanation: that Stalin had indeed been duped by Hitler. Zhukov recalled a meeting with Stalin at the beginning of January 1941 where he expressed concern over the large numbers of Wehrmacht forces in German-occupied Poland (dubbed the ‘Government-General’ by the Nazis). Stalin replied that he had ‘sent Hitler a personal letter, advising him that this was known to us, that it surprised us, and that it created the impression among us that Hitler intended to go to war with us’. Hitler had responded by sending Stalin a personal, confidential letter where he admitted – according to Zhukov – that the Soviets’ ‘information was correct, that there actually were large troop formations deployed in the Government-General’.21

  But these troops, Hitler assured Stalin, ‘are not directed against the Soviet Union. I intend to observe the [non-aggression] Pact strictly and swear on my honour as a chief of state that my troops are deployed in the Government-General for other purposes. The territories of Western and Central Germany are subject to heavy English bombing and are easily observed from the air by the English. Therefore, I found it necessary to move large contingents of troops to the east, where they can secretly reorganise and rearm.’22 As far as Zhukov could tell, Stalin believed Hitler�
��s assurances. (This reference to secret personal correspondence between Hitler and Stalin was not published in Simonov’s original book and was not revealed until 1987.) The January 1941 letter was evidently not the only duplicitous communication Hitler sent Stalin. Russian historian and war veteran Lev Bezymensky asked Zhukov in a 1966 interview about the Hitler–Stalin letters. ‘Sometime in early June [1941] I decided to try again to convince Stalin of the accuracy of the intelligence reports on the approaching danger,’ Zhukov answered:

  Until then Stalin had turned aside similar reports by the chief of the General Staff … Defence Commissar Timoshenko and I brought along staff maps with the locations of enemy troops entered on them. I made the report. Stalin listened attentively but remained silent. After the report he sent us away without giving us his opinion … A few days passed and Stalin called for me … He opened a case on his desk and took out several sheets of paper. ‘Read,’ said Stalin … It was a letter from Stalin to Hitler in which he briefly outlined his concern over the German deployments, about which I had reported a few days earlier … Stalin then said, ‘Here is the answer.’ I am afraid that after so many years I cannot exactly reproduce Hitler’s words. But this I do remember precisely: I read the June 14 issue of Pravda and in it, to my amazement, I discovered the same words I had read in Hitler’s letter to Stalin in Stalin’s office.23

  The communiqué that Zhukov read, issued by the official Soviet news agency TASS and reprinted in the party newspaper Pravda, opened by denouncing England for spreading rumours that Germany and the USSR were ‘close to war’. Zhukov was amazed to see ‘Hitler’s very arguments printed in this Soviet document.’24

  Golikov also did his bit to reinforce Stalin’s conviction that the German build-up on the Soviet border was British disinformation. During May and June 1941, as intelligence about Barbarossa from a cornucopia of sources mounted up, Golikov only doubled down on his conviction that an invasion of Britain remained Hitler’s primary objective, eagerly seizing on all reports that seemed to contradict the evidence of a planned invasion of Russia. In early May, Golikov sent all top Kremlin and military cadres – including Marshals Timoshenko and Zhukov – a report from a source in the German embassy in Bucharest which claimed that ‘a German move to the East in the near future is excluded’. The message concluded that rumours that Germany would attack the USSR ‘are being spread deliberately with a view to causing uncertainty in Moscow’.25 The informant was, paradoxically, precisely the kind of German dezinformator that Stalin so feared.

  On 31 May, Golikov followed up with another special summary which stated that ‘the German command has rather quickly restored its main dispositions in the West, continuing concurrently its movement of troops to Norway … having in view the execution of the main operation against the British Isles’.26

  Golikov continued to believe – or claimed to believe – as late as 1961, that Sorge had been under hostile control. Both Golikov and Zhukov attended a Moscow screening of French director Yves Ciampi’s hagiographic film Qui êtes-vous, Monsieur Sorge? The film takes extensive liberties with the truth – but it does accurately depict Sorge’s despair at his reports not being heeded in Moscow. After the premiere Zhukov stood up in the theatre and called over to Golikov, ‘Why, Filipp Ivanovich, did you hide these reports from me? Why did you not report such information to the chief of the General Staff?’ Golikov replied: ‘And what should I have reported to you if this Sorge was a double agent, both ours and theirs?’27

  For Sorge in Tokyo, the reasons for the Kremlin’s stubborn refusal to give credence to his warnings of war remained inexplicable. Moscow must have seemed very remote. Centre had become a ghost, a disembodied stream of numbers whispering across the airwaves, heedless of Sorge’s voice crying its warnings from the wilderness. No wonder he drank and wept for his loneliness; even the distant gods in the Kremlin, to whom he had devoted his life, had turned a deaf ear to him.

  *

  As deadly jeopardy massed on the border of the Soviet Union, Sorge faced his own nemesis closer to home. Colonel Meisinger may have become a bottle-mate. But alcohol-fuelled camaraderie in Die Fledermaus did not mean that the threat from the Butcher of Warsaw had disappeared entirely. Meisinger was soon due to move his office and files into the ambassador’s guest suite, currently occupied by Eta. So Sorge recruited Eta to help him obtain a copy of the key before she moved out. It was her first mission as the latest, unwitting, cog in the Tokyo spy ring.

  On the evening of Friday 20 June, Eta was once again playing for her supper at the residency, performing Bach for an audience of the Otts’ guests. Sorge waited in the clammy heat of the garden. After the concert, Eta accepted compliments and bouquets before claiming sudden tiredness and slipping upstairs. Back in her room she peeled off the pink ball gown, put on dark street clothes and slipped her room key into her pocket. But the guests had by now spilled out into the hallway, making it impossible for her to join Sorge without being noticed. Opening her first-floor window, she jumped down, landing in a flowerbed wet with summer rain. Muddy and bruised, she hurried to her lover’s car and they sped out of the embassy gates. At Sorge’s house, exhilarated by the escapade, she allowed him to clean the mud from her legs and dress her grazes with bandages. ‘You see!’ Sorge told her. ‘This is what happens when you get mixed up with a gypsy like me!’28

  That night Sorge came close to confessing the truth of his double life to Eta. He talked about the war, about his life as a communist organiser in the Ruhr, about the Russian woman, ‘who was not really his wife, but whom he considered such’ and to whom he was, Eta thought, still deeply attached. He admitted that he was working ‘for the defeat of Hitler’, and that his friendship with Ott was solely to obtain information that would help serve that cause. ‘I, Richard Sorge, am going to deal with those pigs in Berlin,’ he promised.

  ‘That would be nice,’ Eta recalled herself replying, unimpressed. She admired his courage, but his drunken bravado was hard to bear.29

  The following morning, as Eta packed her things in preparation for her move to a smaller room upstairs, Sorge returned the key that he had copied. He would now have free access to the Gestapo’s new Far Eastern headquarters whenever he came for dinner at the Otts’ – as long as he took care not to step on the creaky floorboard on the lower corridor about which Eta warned him.

  Sunday, 22 June dawned clear and warm from the plains of eastern Poland down to the Carpathian Mountains – perfect flying conditions. In Tokyo the day was hot, with light summer showers. Sorge had arranged to meet Eta in the embassy grounds at five. He wore a smart white linen suit; Eta was in a patterned dress and wide straw hat. She was desperate to tell him the latest outrageous news from the residency. The previous evening, after dinner, Eta had discovered Helma Ott rummaging through her possessions and preparing to confiscate the bonsai tree and bowl that Sorge had given her. A scandal had ensued. But Eta found her lover in a bleak mood. ‘Let’s go and booze at the Imperial,’ he said. ‘I need a drink.’

  Germany was at war with Russia.

  At lunchtime in Tokyo news had come across the wire that Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had announced the invasion. ‘At this moment an advance is taking place that, for its extent, compares with the greatest the world has ever seen. I have decided today to place the fate and future of the Reich and our people in the hands of our soldiers. May God aid us, especially in this fight!’30 A few hours later – about the time Sorge drove off with his mistress in the direction of the bar, Molotov took to the airwaves to inform the Soviet people that ‘without a declaration of war, German forces fell on our country, attacked our frontiers in many places … The Red Army and the whole nation will wage a victorious Patriotic War for our beloved country, for honour, for liberty … Our cause is just. The enemy will be beaten. Victory will be ours!’31

  In the New Grill of the Imperial, Eta ordered red wine. Sorge asked for a double whisky, the first of very many.

  Seven time zones to the w
est, nearly three million Wehrmacht soldiers advanced along a 1,600-kilometre-long front that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Luftwaffe bombers crossing the borders found the Soviet territories sleeping and utterly unprepared. ‘As we flew above the enemy’s country, everything below seemed to be asleep,’ wrote Leutanant Max-Hellmuth Ostermann of Luftflotte 1’s 7/JG 54 squadron. ‘No anti-aircraft fire, no movement, and above all no enemy aircraft were present to confront us.’32 The Germans bombed as far as Kronstadt, on the outskirts of Leningrad, and Sevastopol in the Crimea.33 From the Kremlin, Stalin ordered a general counter-attack – oblivious to the reality that the initial momentum of the German ground and air attack had completely destroyed the Soviet organisational command and control within the first few hours, paralysing every level of command from the infantry platoon to the Soviet high command in Moscow.34

  Eta left Sorge at sunset, preferring even the tedious company of the Otts to that of her heavily drunk lover. Sorge had grown morose and aggressive. Around eight in the evening he made his way to the public telephone in the hotel lobby and dialled the ambassador’s private line. ‘The war is lost!’ Sorge shouted to a startled Ott. He then called other friends, including Anita Mohr and other pillars of German expatriate society, with the same dire message. Helma Ott pooled her indignation over Sorge’s behaviour with her friends. The man was drunk, but this was really too much.35 Helma’s personal, profoundly vacuous, explanation for the war was that ‘we told the Russians that we needed the products of the Ukraine, and if they’re not willing to give them to us, we just have to take them for ourselves, that’s all’. So simple. Her only son, Podwick, would freeze to death at Stalingrad two years later.

  Sometime later that evening, the embassy’s radio attaché Erwin Wickert heard Sorge’s raised voice as he crossed the lobby of the Imperial on his way to bed. Sorge was at the bar, haranguing half-a-dozen guests at the top of his voice. ‘A fucking criminal,’ he shouted in English. ‘A murderer! Signs a friendship pact with Stalin then stabs him in the back. But Stalin will teach that bastard a lesson.’36 Wickert attempted to calm the man he knew to be Ambassador Ott’s friend, whose behaviour was drawing frosty stares.