‘I tell you, he’s nothing but a common criminal,’ Sorge told the young diplomat. ‘Why does nobody kill him? For instance, some army officers?’
Such careless talk was dangerous, Wickert warned. One never knew who might be listening and pass on his words to the Gestapo.
‘Meisinger is an arsehole! You’re all arseholes!’ was Sorge’s reply. ‘And if you think the Japanese will attack Siberia, you all have another think coming! There, your Ambassador is completely mistaken!’37
Sorge then attempted to make his way to the lavatory, but almost collapsed. Wickert concluded that it might not be wise for Sorge to attempt to drive himself home and hurriedly arranged a room at the hotel for him. With the help of a lift boy, Wickert helped the drunk upstairs. Sorge had to rush to the sink to vomit, then fell asleep in his clothes.
*
On the other side of Asia, day two of Operation Barbarossa had already dawned with German troops eighty kilometres inside the Soviet border on most sectors of the brand-new Eastern front. A thousand Soviet aircraft had been destroyed the previous day, mostly on the ground. At an airfield near Minsk, a young aviation engineer and pilot named Isaac Bibikov climbed into one of the surviving Polikarpov-2 fighters and took off westwards to meet the second day’s wave of German bombers that poured over the frontier. Bibikov was shot down somewhere over the cornfields and rolling countryside of western Belarus, and his body never found. His niece, the author’s mother, would discover Isaac’s fate only in 1944.
On Monday 23 June, Sorge was back in his office at the embassy. His mood was angry. He lashed out furiously at a secretary who chattered excitedly about the German victories, and railed at his colleagues that Hitler’s mistake would cost him the war.38 The economic attaché Kordt was taken aback by how deeply the outbreak of war had affected the usually cheerful – or at least flippant – Sorge. Kordt claimed in his memoir that Sorge confided to him that ‘he felt particular sympathy for the Russian people, having been born in Russia of a Russian mother’ – though the two men were never particular friends and it seems doubtful that Sorge would choose such an inauspicious moment to share his Russian background.39
Centre did not bother giving Agent Ramsay the satisfaction of acknowledging that he had been right all along. Instead Golikov sent an abrupt note the day after the invasion began. ‘Inform us of all information you have on the position of the Japanese government in connection to the German war against the USSR. Director.’40
The previous evening the Soviet ambassador Smetanin had rushed to the residence of Foreign Minister Matsuoka to seek reassurance that Japan would honour the terms of the non-aggression pact he had signed on his jovial, karaoke-filled stopover in Moscow in April. Matsuoka could give no such assurance. As Soviet forces crumpled and Hitler’s blitzkrieg stormed eastwards towards Minsk, Kiev, Leningrad and Moscow, the USSR’s ability to fight and win a war on one front hung in the balance. What was clear to the Kremlin, even in the first days and weeks of Barbarossa, was that a war on two fronts against both Germany and Japan would be impossible.
The very existence of the Soviet state depended on the Japanese resisting the temptation to invade the Soviet Far East.
19
Plan North or Plan South?
‘Please write what Sorge has said and what Sorge has done. Sorge is a big man. He does good things all the time. Do you know what Sorge is? Sorge is a God … God is always a man … People need more Gods. Sorge will become a God … Do you know what Sorge has done? I have arranged that the Japanese government will be defeated soon’1
Sorge to Hanako, August 1941
Ozaki, along with the whole Konoe cabinet, had always been sceptical that Hitler had the appetite for the titanic risk involved in an attack of the Soviet Union. ‘Ozaki himself had the opinion that it would be a crazy matter for Japan to go to war against Russia,’ Sorge wrote in his prison confession.2 The reality of Barbarossa, therefore, came as a profound shock to him. It also seems to have triggered a sense of personal guilt at not having seen the danger. In this moment of crisis for the motherland of world revolution, Ozaki decided the time had come to be not merely an observer but an actor.
Neither Sorge and Ozaki were modest men. Like many advisers, they both came to believe that they knew better than their masters. They also knew intimately the process of how the presentation of information could shape major political decisions. Both understood that information is power – and both Sorge and Ozaki in their own ways had long dreamed of stepping out of the shadows and onto the political stage. As early as 1939, Ozaki had suggested to Sorge that he might use his ‘considerable persuasive power socially as an expert on Chinese problems and contact politically with influential people’ to nudge his powerful friends into a more pro-Soviet position.3 Back then Sorge had vetoed the idea, fearful that overt lobbying would jeopardise his agent’s position.
By late June 1941, however, the time for discretion was past. The Konoe group’s ‘attitude toward Russia was considerably flexible’, Ozaki reported, so ‘there was some ground to enable my political manoeuvring’.4 Even better, Sorge’s earlier insistence that Ozaki maintain scrupulous neutrality on the subject of Russia had paid off. The prime minister ‘evaluated me fairly highly’ for even-handedness and even sought out Ozaki’s advice. ‘This was a chance for [Ozaki] to disclose his opinion about the current crucial problem of whether Japan should join the war against Russia,’ Sorge told his interrogators. To Moscow, he wrote ‘saying that we had a possibility of carrying out a positive political activity and asking whether we should go ahead and do it’.5
Centre, inundated with disastrous news of retreat and with more emergencies to address, ‘did not particularly reject’ the Tokyo spy ring’s scheme for active intervention, ‘but answered that we did not need to do so’ Sorge later wrote.6 That was a sufficient green light for Ozaki. He lost no time in forcefully arguing against any Japanese military adventures in the Soviet Union at the Breakfast Group’s early morning meetings. The USSR would never threaten Japan, Ozaki told the inner circle of Konoe advisers on 25 June. Siberia had none of the natural resources such as rubber, oil and tin that Japan needed for its war effort. A winter war in Siberia against an enemy skilled at defensive war would be bloody and hard. As fellow Breakfast Group member Shigeharu Matsumoto, editor-in-chief of the Domei news agency, recalled to an interviewer in 1965 that Ozaki forcefully invoked the memory of the Soviets’ unexpected efficiency at Nomonhan two years previously. A war against Russia would also be pointless, Ozaki argued, because Japan’s natural economic dominion lay to the south, not to the north – as he should know, as one of the early architects of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Furthermore, he concluded, a Japanese–Russian conflict would only play into the hands of the United States and Britain, who very likely would strike Japan ‘after her oil and iron reserves were depleted. Moreover, if Germany should succeed in defeating the Soviet Union, Siberia might fall into Japan’s lap without her raising a finger.’7 Ozaki, a pacifist and international communist spy, was passionately promoting Japan’s imperial destiny in Southeast Asia in defence of the USSR.8
The Breakfast Group debate was lively – not least on the subject of the interpretation of where that imperial destiny might lead Japan. Domei chief Matsumoto, for one, saw Operation Barbarossa as a heaven-sent opportunity to seize a slice of Russia while the Germans did the bulk of the fighting on the Western front. Thus Japan could get rid of its historic northern enemy, as well as confirming the Japanese as the master race of Asia by expelling Europeans from north-east Asia forever.
Ozaki later admitted that the passion of his argument was fuelled by indignation at being contradicted by men he saw as inferior to himself: ‘my main motive was caused by my feeling of repulsion because my opinion was being opposed strongly by these people’.9 Happily for Stalin, Ozaki’s point of view proved the more persuasive. The cabinet advisers concluded, recalled Matsumoto, that ‘it would have been very difficult to defeat Ru
ssia’ and ‘only the Russians can survive in Siberia … It is much too cold there for Japanese.’10
True, persuading the Breakfast Group was not the same as persuading Konoe himself. And even Konoe was not Japan’s supreme authority in military matters – as had been proved on a regular basis over the last decade as the Kwangtung Army and the War Ministry repeatedly overruled the civilian government’s decisions. Nonetheless, Ozaki’s voice was important in stoking the prime minister’s scepticism towards an invasion of the USSR. It was all the more significant because, as Ozaki had informed Sorge back in May, ‘if Konoe has to choose between a war with Britain and the United States or a war with Russia, he would rather choose Russia, because he doesn’t like Russia’.11
On 19 and 23 June, the top commanders of the Japanese Army and Navy had held two crucial, top-secret conferences to decide their policy towards the USSR. Within days, Miyagi and Ozaki had jointly gathered the gist of their decision, largely from conversations with Ozaki’s loose-tongued Oxford-educated friend Prince Saionji, and Shinjiro Tanaka, the head of the political and economic desk of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
In essence, Ozaki told Sorge on one of his increasingly regular visits to his boss’s house, the current Japanese position was one of jukushishugi – waiting for the persimmon to ripen and fall into your lap. In other words, the army and navy had decided to wait and see, observing both the Tripartite Pact and the Japan–USSR Neutrality Pact until such time as Hitler convincingly beat the Soviets. At that point Japan would step in to prevent the Nazis from claiming Siberia. This fence-sitting exercise was grandly dubbed ‘a unified north-and-south integration strategy … in accordance with the future changes in the international situation’, as Sorge reported to Moscow.12 In the meantime, Japan’s military leaders agreed to continue with their plan to expand into Southeast Asia – while preparing for a possible invasion of Russia if, as Ott had confidently expected, the Soviet forces were overrun within three months.
While Ozaki bent the ears of Japan’s civilian policymakers and betrayed their secrets, Miyagi was busy gathering small titbits of intelligence and assembling them into an impressively complete collage of Japan’s military strategy. Miyagi, running the gauntlet of police checkpoints and intermittent surveillance of Sorge’s house on 26 June, brought him new maps of the northern Japanese islands of Hokkaido and Karafuto (Sakhalin) with airbases and military installations marked on them with the help of Miyagi’s Hokkaido-based agent, Ugenta Taguchi. Two days later Sorge penned a long report to Centre and handed it to Clausen. The radio man, with his by now usual mixture of cowardice and resentment, transmitted a truncated version to Centre only on 3 July. The crucial message was further garbled when an agent of the Kempeitai showed up at his door halfway through the transmission, forcing Clausen to cut the power, lock the door of the second-floor bedroom containing his radio equipment and make polite conversation with the policeman until he went away.13
Clausen’s interrupted transmission makes for confusing reading. He reported both Scholl’s prediction – actually based, as we know but Centre did not, more on wishful-thinking than fact – that Japan would attack the USSR ‘within five weeks’. The next paragraph contained the exactly contradictory news from Ozaki, who reported that ‘the Japanese government has decided to honour the non-aggression pact with the USSR … and send three divisions to Saigon and Indo-China. Even Matsuoka voted for this, although he had previously spoken for an orientation towards the USSR.’14 But even in its paradoxical and muddled form this telegram was taken seriously in Moscow. Con-firmation that the Japanese had not yet made any firm decision on ‘Plan North’ was some comfort. Golikov ordered it distributed to top members of the General Staff.
More solid intelligence followed. On 2 July, in conditions of the deepest secrecy, the Emperor Hirohito himself summoned a gozenkaigi – a ‘conference with the August Presence’ – with his cabinet to discuss matters of strategy. The emperor wore a naval uniform and sat on a dais between two incense-burning braziers, while his ministers and military chiefs knelt alongside low tables covered in brocade.15 It was a rare and fateful meeting of the greatest import for Sorge and his masters. In the days following the meeting Ozaki once more pumped Saionji, who had just learned the secrets of the gozenkaigi from Commander Fuiji of the Foreign Affairs Section of the Imperial Navy and was happy to share them with his trusted friend.16 ‘I had no secrets from Ozaki,’ Saionji would later recall.17 By 4 July, Ozaki was able to pass Sorge a precise account of Hirohito’s secret conference. The emperor had given his blessing to the plan for his armies to attack southwards. But at the same time Siberia and the Soviet Far East were also included in plans for Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere, a clear sign that Hirohito expected the persimmon to fall soon. Japan certainly wanted its slice of the Soviet Union – it just didn’t expect to have to fight for it.
There was another consideration holding Emperor Hirohito and the cabinet back from an immediate attack on Russia. With the overland route via Russia severed by the war, Japan could no longer import the military equipment from Germany which had been flowing as long as the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact had held. Now Japan hoped that perhaps the United States might become an alternative supplier of vital military technology, from radar and electronics to machine tools and engine parts. Saionji told Ozaki that Japan must ‘take a compromising attitude toward the United States’ – which meant supporting Ambassador Admiral Nomura’s continuing attempts to strike the kind of non-aggression pact with Washington as it had agreed with Moscow the previous year.18
Even as Admiral Yamamoto’s naval strategists worked on their secret plans to destroy the US Pacific Fleet, official Tokyo still held on to the hope that a peace deal with America would give them a free hand to expand in Asia. The possible consequences of an accord between Washington and Tokyo in the summer of 1941 – chief among them the cancellation of Japanese plans to make an attack on Pearl Harbor and consequently the removal of any reason for the US to enter the Second World War – remains one of the most tantalising might-have-beens of the conflict.
In a meeting with Ambassador Ott soon after the gozenkaigi, Matsuoka attempted to put a brave face on the setback to German plans. He told Ott that the emperor was concerned that if Japan attacked the USSR, Stalin would bomb Japanese cities – to which Ott, not very reassuringly, countered that according to German intelligence the Soviet Union had a mere 300 heavy bombers capable of reaching Japan stationed in the Far East and none of its latest aircraft.19 According to the foreign minister’s personal secretary Toshikazu Kase, Matsuoka then disingenuously attempted to persuade Ott that ‘Japan’s effort to restrain the United States and Great Britain in the Pacific constituted a no less vital contribution to the common [Axis] cause than an intervention in the Soviet-German war’.20 But in the end Matsuoka, evidently embarrassed at his own defeat at the Imperial Council, also gave Ott the quite false impression that ‘Plan North’ would eventually win out and that the Japanese attack on Vladivostok was just a matter of time. ‘Everything indicates that Japan will enter the war against Russia,’21 Ott optimistically reported to Berlin on 3 July.
Sorge knew better. Over the embassy breakfast table, Sorge quizzed Ott on the progress of his efforts to persuade Japan to join Hitler’s attack on Russia. Ott passed on Matsuoka’s assurance that Japan would go to war within two months. But of the two men it was Sorge who had the clearer insight into Japan’s true intentions.
‘Matsuoka told such a story to Ambassador Ott in order to please him,’ recalled Sorge. But he knew from Ozaki that ‘the truth might be different’.22 On 12 July, Sorge wrote another lengthy cable to Centre – a message that Clausen did not mangle quite as badly as the previous one. Sorge reported that Ott had doubted that the Japanese would attack Vladivostok before the Germans took Sverdlovsk, the capital of the Urals. Since the Germans were at that moment only at Smolensk – some 2,200 kilometres to the west of Sverdlovsk – this remained a remote possibility. ‘If the Red Army suf
fers defeat then there is no doubt that the Japanese will join the war, and if there is no defeat, then they will maintain neutrality,’ Sorge wrote.23
The version of this telegram in the military archives bears Stalin’s initials alongside those of Molotov, Beria and army chief Marshal Voroshilov. A handwritten note on the bottom written by a Fourth Department official says: ‘in consideration of the high reliability and accuracy of previous information and the competence of the information sources, this information can be trusted’.24
Sorge’s reports were, finally, receiving the credence they deserved.25 Centre even broke the habit of a lifetime and sent explicit thanks to Agent Ramsay. A message acknowledging the 12 July cable began with ‘a portion expressing their gratitude for our previous information’.26 But at the same time, Centre decided to do a thorough check on the reliability of its suddenly vital agent in Tokyo.
In the first days of the war Stalin had relieved Golikov of his post and sent him on a top-secret mission to London and Washington to ask for military aid to the USSR and to drum up support for the opening of a second front in Europe.27 The new director of the Fourth Department was General Konstantin Kolganov, who ordered the old archives combed and all the old accusations against the Tokyo rezidentura re-examined. The result was a scathing document entitled ‘On the Sources of Political Distrust of INSON [Sorge]’ that Kolganov submitted to the Red Army leadership on 11 August 1941.
‘For a prolonged period INSON worked under the former leaders of the Intelligence directorate who turned out to be enemies of the people,’ read Kolganov’s report. ‘From this emerges the conclusion – that if enemies of the people sold themselves to foreign intelligence agencies why could he not sell out INSON also? … The former chief of the Japanese department Sirotkin turned out to be a Japanese spy. Sirotkin told the organs of the NKVD that he gave INSON up to the Japanese with all his sources … at the end of 1938.’ Kolganov was either unaware or ignored the fact that Sirotkin had withdrawn his charges against Sorge at his trial. But that was only one of many confusions in the damming report. Kolganov confused Clausen with Vukelić: ‘In 1935 Inson was sent a radio operator code-named FRITZ, an extremely murky character. It is clear only that he is a Serbian officer who is married to a Russian white émigrée.’ And he overlooked Sorge’s years of work with the Comintern prior to joining the Fourth Department. ‘INSON has no previous history of work for the Party … how he came into the Party and then into the intelligence directorate is unclear,’ wrote Kolganov – without pausing to consider that the reason for this gap in institutional memory was because most of the Fourth Department who had known Sorge personally had been murdered in the Great Purge. ‘The question of INSON is not a new one … The basic question is: why have the Germans or the Japanese not destroyed him, since he has been betrayed to them? There is always one answer – that [they] do not liquidate him in order to send him here for intelligence work. Therefore it is necessary always to compare the information provided by INSON with other sources … and in general thoroughly to analyse it and take a critical attitude to it. INSON is extremely arrogant and has a high opinion of himself that is necessary to bear in mind when directing him.’28
An Impeccable Spy Page 36