In any normal intelligence organisation in normal times, the devas-tating conclusions of the Kolganov memorandum would have destroyed the reputation of any rezident. But these were not normal times. The archives show that despite his reservations, Kolganov continued to circulate Sorge’s information to the highest echelons of the Kremlin and the army. The universal pall of suspicion cast by the Purge seems to have devalued the very meaning of the terrible accusations Kolganov bandied about so freely. If Sorge was under the control of the Germans, why did he try so desperately to warn Stalin of Barbarossa? If he was being run by the Japanese, why was so much of the important top-secret information he revealed provably true? It seems that Kolganov did not trouble himself with such questions. By the crazy illogic of the period, as far as Centre was concerned the Tokyo rezidentura was both thoroughly compromised and vitally important.
The stakes, for the Soviet Union, could not have been higher. An attack by Japan on the USSR in the summer of 1941 would have spelt the end of Stalin’s regime and utterly changed the outcome of the Second World War. Even without the benefit of hindsight, it was clear at the time to both Sorge and Ozaki that the Japanese position in the two months between the beginning of Barbarossa and the onset of winter in the Soviet Far East would be crucial to the outcome of the conflict. As Sorge reported to Centre on 3 July, Ott and the Japanese were all too aware of exactly how powerful the armies and aircraft that Stalin had stationed in the Far East were. These forces would soon be desperately needed to defend Moscow. Indeed, in early July Stalin ordered four divisions from the Far Eastern garrison westward. Could Stalin risk leaving Siberia undefended by transferring even more of those vital troops? The answer to that question depended on what Agent Ramsay could report on Japan’s intentions.
Ott suffered a further setback when Matsuoka – the most pro-German member of the government – quit along with the whole cabinet on 16 July. Konoe’s dramatic resignation was a protest against the Japanese high command’s resistance to his efforts to strike a peace deal with the United States and end the war in China. Konoe’s drastic démarche worked. The emperor summoned him back to power immediately, and even gave his valued prime minister permission for a last-ditch attempt to avert war with America by proposing a personal summit with US President Roosevelt. But Matsuoka, Germany’s most vocal ally, remained out of power.
As the stakes rose for the Sorge spy ring, so did the risks. The Tokyo authorities stepped up their spy mania another notch by forbidding the use of any language but Japanese in long-distance telephone conversations. Security in the institutions where Ozaki worked grew tighter. When Kawai went to see Ozaki at the offices of the South Manchuria Railway in June, he was made to present his credentials and sign a form. ‘They are even watching you inside your own office,’ Kawai warned his recruiter, ‘so you have to be careful.’ Ozaki did not seem unduly troubled at being singled out for special surveillance. ‘They are watching me closely because I am one of Matsuoka’s boys,’ he replied easily.29
But by late July, Ozaki was less sanguine. He had grown tense, lost his usual bonhomie, and had become fearful of arrest, Kawai recalled. When he met Kawai by chance on a crowded commuter train in Ginza the two old comrades went for a quick beer (probably in one of the little bars that still exist today, tucked under the railway arches). Ozaki confided that he felt ‘like a rat in a bag’.30 Miyagi, too, was nervous. He believed that he was being shadowed as he criss-crossed Tokyo on errands for the ring and dreamed of retiring to the quiet life of a painter in his ancestral Okinawa. ‘It is foolish for people like us to engage in this sort of thing,’ Miyagi told Kawai. ‘I never intended to do this on a permanent basis. Now I can’t seem to get away from it!’31
The growing jeopardy did not, however, make Ozaki any more cautious. When Kawai went to call on Ozaki at his house on 27 July he was again followed for part of his route by police agents, who he managed to shake off. Ozaki was not at home; but Kawai was surprised to see his wife pouring tea for an old party comrade, Ritsu Ito. Ito had served two years in jail in the 1930s for his links to the Communist Youth League, had been rearrested in November 1939 and then, curiously, released in August of 1940 to resume his old job as Ozaki’s deputy at the South Manchuria Railway’s Investigation Department. Had Ito been released on condition that he became a police informer on the activities of Ozaki, Kawai wondered?32
By mid-July it was also becoming alarmingly clear that the Japanese Army was mounting a mass mobilisation. New training camps were being hastily built all over Japan, Miyagi reported, still dutiful to the ring despite his growing fear. Thousands of call-up papers had been issued, including to Miyagi’s sometime helper Yoshinobu Odai, who heard rumours at his recruiting centre that his unit was bound for Manchuria. The key question for Sorge was whether the main thrust of this mobilisation would be directed at Siberia, or Southeast Asia.
This was the moment when the careful bookkeeping of the South Manchuria Railway came into its own as a source of intelligence. Every movement of troops, armour and war materials across Japan and China could be traced in precise detail through the Mantetsu’s meticulous hour-by-hour timetables, updated nightly by a team of slide-rule-wielding technicians. More, the origin, destination and make-up of each train – the number of passenger carriages, boxcars, cattle wagons or flatcars – gave a complete, if coded, picture of Japan’s land-based war effort.
The problem was that even with this insider information Ozaki could still not reach any definitive conclusion. His Mantetsu colleagues estimated that 250,000 troops were being sent north, 350,000 to the south. But, worryingly, the railway had mobilised a team of 3,000 experienced railway workers accompanied by special cranes to lift rolling stock in order to change the wheel gauge. There was only one possible use for such equipment: to transform Japanese wagons for use on the Trans-Siberian railway. New track was also being laid to provide more passing places for locomotives near the Soviet border crossing of Ushumun, evidently the likely focus point of a possible invasion. Ozaki was also disturbed by a meeting of the Showa Research Association where the chief of the Military Affairs Section of the War Ministry frankly stated that ‘if Russia should be defeated in her fight with Germany … Japan should naturally send troops to Siberia. It is ridiculous not to eat the food being set before you.’33
Miyagi attempted to help solve the conundrum in the way he knew best: by gathering small, apparently insignificant details. Exuding his usual clownish charm, Miyagi travelled tirelessly around the provinces chatting to soldiers in teahouses and bars. Asking direct questions about their destination would have resulted in Miyagi’s immediate arrest as a spy, so he instead gossiped about the quality of the kit that the conscripts were issued. Weren’t the new army-issue greatcoats splendidly warm? Thank goodness for those tropical cotton uniforms in this summer heat. And so on. Piecing together the recruits’ gripes about their new equipment, Miyagi was able to make informed guesses about where each unit was heading. He found a disturbingly high number were ready to wrap up warm for a winter war in Siberia.
On 28 July, the Japanese troops who had been occupying parts of French Indochina since the previous year moved into the capital, Saigon, and occupied the city without a shot being fired under an agreement with the Vichy puppet government. Indochina offered excellent ports, a rich supply of rice and labour for the Japanese Empire. The first ripe persimmon had indeed fallen quite effortlessly into Japan’s lap.
This easy victory would have profound consequences for the course of the war. In response to the invasion of French Indochina, the US swiftly imposed an oil embargo on Japan. In a stroke, Japan was cut off from 80 per cent of her fuel supplies. Washington also froze all Japanese banking assets – followed soon after by Britain, Australia and the Netherlands, which together controlled the entire banking infrastructure of Asia. With no possibility of buying vital oil and steel supplies, Japan would now be forced either to curtail her plans for a pan-Asian empire – or to seize the oilfields of the D
utch East Indies to make up for the loss of Texas and Pennsylvania oil. The US oil embargo, more than any other event in 1941, set Japan on a collision course with its Asian neighbours and with America itself.
Though Berlin had pressured the defeated French not to resist Japan in Indochina, the fall of Saigon was also bad news for German hopes of pushing the Japanese to attack Russia. More Japanese troops and ships were steaming south at the exact moment that Berlin needed them heading in the opposite direction. The German General Staff had also begun to realise that they had grossly underestimated the strength of the Red Army. On 16 July the Germans finally took Smolensk after intense fighting, but failed to prevent most of the Soviet Army escaping eastwards to defend Moscow. Opening a second front against the Soviet Far East was, therefore, becoming an increasingly urgent priority for Berlin if the Russian war was to be won quickly.
Ribbentrop began badgering Ott in a series of urgent cables to hurry up the Japanese assault on the Soviet Far East – an assault that both Scholl and the ambassador had blithely promised was imminent. To help the Japanese in their decision, Kretschmer and his aides again got to work on the basement sand table Wenneker had used to plan an attack on Singapore, this time to plot tactics for amphibious assaults on the Soviet Pacific ports of Vladivostok and Khabarovsk. For Ott, the only unequivocally good piece of news from the Russian front was that advancing Wehrmacht troops had captured Soviet soldiers drafted in from Far Eastern garrisons, revealing that Stalin had already begun denuding his Siberian defences to save Moscow.
Both Sorge and Ott were under enormous pressure from their respective masters – the ambassador to deliver a Japanese offensive against Siberia; the spy to avert it. The strain was beginning to tell. For the first time in their seven-year friendship they argued openly over politics. Sorge insisted, banging the breakfast table, that Germany would be defeated within three years and that Hitler’s plan was as doomed as Napoleon’s Russian campaign had been. Sorge made a point of pouring cold water over Ott’s hopes whenever he could. Whenever he ‘obtained various information items from Ozaki and Miyagi’, Sorge recalled, he ‘distorted them conveniently, propagandised them, and worked so that the German side should not have a hope that Japan would join the war’.34 At the Domei news agency, Sorge – by now the longest-serving German correspondent in Tokyo – even summoned a meeting of his German press colleagues and harangued them on the folly of Barbarossa. He also raised eyebrows in the Japanese Foreign Ministry by insisting that he had secret information that Soviet air strength was in reality much larger than the Germans had been telling them.
On 2 August, Sorge drove up to the embassy dacha at Karuizawa, leaving the summer heat and pressure-cooker atmosphere of Tokyo behind him, to spend the weekend with Ott, and his old friend Erwin Scholl. Karuizawa, a town in the mountains near Nagano, was a traditional summer resort where the wealthy bourgeoisie of Tokyo escaped the humidity of the capital on the pine-forested slopes and hot springs of Mount Asama. Perhaps the irony of taking a holiday on the slopes of an active volcano was not lost on Sorge. At least he would have felt at home. In recent years Karuizawa had become a favourite vacation spot for Tokyo’s German community, and boasted a German bakery that made pumpernickel bread and apfelstrudel. That weekend the main cinema was showing the latest film from Berlin, Verklungene Melodie (‘Faded Melody’), a romantic melodrama starring Brigitte Horney.35
The German embassy’s summer residence was a pretty two-storey wooden building, set in a lush garden. In the evenings the three old comrades, free of the oppressive claustrophobia of Tokyo, relaxed in the bar of the Mampei Hotel. The hotel, built in 1936 in an odd mixture of Japanese and half-timbered Bavarian styles, still stands today. Pre-war photographs show a cosy, club-like bar furnished with leather armchairs and art deco brass lamps. Remarkably, an archive photograph in the hotel’s 2017 brochure shows a pair of Westerners contentedly playing chess in the lounge sometime in the late 1930s. They are – unmistakably – Ott and Sorge.
Over drinks, the three old friends conferred over politics and the news from the Russian front. Ott confided that, despite Berlin’s relentlessly upbeat propaganda, German progress was slow and the losses heavy. Barely six weeks into Barbarossa, it was clear that the invasion was not going to plan. Sorge, for his part, seems to have shared his own insider knowledge of Japanese politics.
On their return to Tokyo, Ott was so impressed by Sorge’s knowledge of the workings of the Konoe cabinet that he suggested to Colonel Kretschmer, the senior military attaché, that he pick Sorge’s brains on Japanese strategy. ‘Sorge’s connections are really incredible!’ remarked Kretschmer, thanking Ott for the tip.36 Kretschmer cabled the key points of Sorge’s analysis – strongly sceptical of Japan’s desire for Plan North, naturally – to Berlin on 9 August. For the first time in his career Sorge had the undivided attention of the top spymasters of both Berlin and Moscow.
Around 5 August, Sorge met with Ozaki for the first time in a month. Ozaki reported a rumour that the Japanese Army had scheduled an attack on the Soviet Union for 15 August, but postponed the plan because of German setbacks on the road to Moscow. Three days later Clausen transmitted part of Sorge’s message to Centre. ‘The Germans are pressing the Japanese to join the war on a daily basis. But the fact that Moscow was not occupied last Sunday, contrary to what the German Supreme Command promised, has cooled Japanese enthusiasm.’37 That was the part of the message that got through. The rest, which Clausen failed to send and was later discovered in draft when the police raided his house after his arrest, read: ‘Even Green Box [Japanese Army] has the impression that the White-Red [German-Russian] war may develop into a second China Incident because White is repeating the same mistakes as Green in China.’38
Both Sorge and Ozaki knew that these August days would be critical for the outcome of the war. Ozaki had told him the Japanese Army calculated that an offensive could not be launched later than the end of August because the Siberian winter would render large-scale operations impossible after mid-November. ‘In the coming two to three weeks Japan’s decision will be made,’ Sorge warned Moscow in a 12 August cable. ‘It is possible that the General Staff will take the decision to intervene without prior consultation.’39
Both senior members of the ring also realised that Tokyo’s policy would be dictated by something more immutable than politics or even the seasons – the vital factor of Japan’s strategic supplies of oil. In the wake of the American embargo on imports at the beginning of August, the entire Japanese military had only its existing supplies to fuel the rest of the war effort. If the stocks were low, Plan North would necessarily have to be abandoned and all resources concentrated on capturing the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies.
Ozaki turned to Yoshio Miyanishi, a colleague in the economic department of the South Manchuria Railway, to help him understand how much fuel Japan actually had left. Claiming that he needed the information for a government report on energy supply and that the picture would not be complete without knowing how much oil the army and navy had privately stockpiled, Ozaki persuaded Miyanishi to obtain the latest, top-secret numbers. Within a few days Miyanishi had come back with a detailed answer. A total of 2 million tons of petroleum, including naphtha, heavy oil, crude oil, and lighting oil, was available for civilian purposes. The same quantity had been hoarded by the army, and under nine million tons for the navy. At normal consumption rates, this meant that Japan had less than six months’ supplies of fuel in its stockpiles.
‘An examination of the oil supply situation revealed that Japan was placed in a position of choosing one out of two solutions: advancing to the south and acquiring oil in the Netherlands Indies, or yielding to the United States and receiving a petroleum supply from her,’ Ozaki would explain to his interrogators.40 The Imperial General Staff’s freedom of action was being shrunk every day by the American oil embargo. However much the army may have wanted to take Siberia, Japan simply did not have the petrol to do it.
On 9 Augu
st, Sorge returned for a second weekend to Karuizawa, this time with Eta Harich-Schneider and Helma Ott. Eta was by now gripped with ‘Richard Sorge fever’, as she would later tell an interviewer.41 Sorge, by Eta’s account, had promised her that all his other affairs – including with Helma and her friend Anita Mohr – were firmly in the past. He also told her that ‘the little Japanese woman’ who had lived with him ‘at times’ had been sent away in May.42 This was less than the full truth. In fact, Hanako was spending at least three nights a week in the house at Nagasaki Street and would continue to do so until September. Eta was there most other nights, though she did not notice any sign of female presence in the house.
An Impeccable Spy Page 37