During their weekend at the embassy dacha, Eta found her lover tense and irritable, but also dreaming of – or perhaps reconciling himself to – the idea of escape. ‘Germany is sliding towards total destruction,’ Sorge complained. Yet all the local German diplomats could ‘worry about is getting a bigger petrol ration’.43 He also urged Eta to break free of the Otts’ hospitality and get a place of her own. ‘Make yourself independent from these wretched people,’ he urged her. ‘I won’t be around all that much longer. One of these days you will be on your own here.’ Shocked by Sorge’s talk of leaving Japan, Eta pressed him to tell her more. ‘I may have to leave the country suddenly. I may have no choice. I cannot explain the reason. But if it happens, and some people at the embassy tell you I have run off with another woman, don’t believe them!’44
One night soon after their return to the city, Eta attempted to soothe Sorge’s brooding mood by playing Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ to him by candlelight in the embassy ballroom. After the impromptu concert Sorge slipped away and let himself into Eta’s old room – now the embassy Gestapo headquarters – with the key that she had stolen for him. There, as the Otts slept upstairs, he rifled the contents of Meisinger’s files. Sorge discovered that his Gestapo codename was ‘Post’ – and that the Butcher of Warsaw had reported to Berlin that Sorge was entirely politically reliable, noting his regular attendance at Nazi Party meetings. That probably did more to ease Sorge’s anxieties, or at least one of them, than Beethoven could ever do.
The Meisinger threat may have receded, but the Japanese police were taking an ever closer interest in Sorge, Hanako and Clausen. By now all the members of the ring – in common with most foreigners in Tokyo – were receiving regular home visits from the local police. These visits were superficially scrupulously cordial, but no less nerve-wracking for it.
The early August visit by an unknown Kempeitai agent to Clausen’s house in the middle of his radio transmission had been an anomaly. His more usual caller was Officer Shigeru Aoyama, Sorge’s old acquaintance from the Toriizaka police station.45 Aoyama usually dropped in at the Clausen house when he was out, questioning the maid on details of her employers’ lives. Amid the usual round of domestic gossip, Aoyama picked up one intriguing gem. ‘My master gets up in the middle of the night and fiddles around with a machine with shiny knobs,’ the Clausens’ servant told Aoyama, as he recalled in a 1965 interview. As an amateur radio operator himself, Aoyama recognised the description and had a flash of recollection. About ten days before, an official of the Ministry of Telecommunications had been at the Toriizaka station asking questions about unregistered short-wave transmission in the Azabu area. Arresting a prominent German businessman without very good reason was a formidable step for a young police constable. But Aoyama wondered if he had now possibly stumbled across the rogue radio station.46
Aoyama politely questioned Anna Clausen about her husband. Either careless or, more likely, scared, Anna blurted out that if she asked her husband what he was doing after midnight, he ‘would get very angry and scold her severely’. She also blamed her husband’s friend Richard Sorge – whom Aoyama had never before connected to Clausen. ‘Sorge is a bad influence on my husband,’ Anna told the courteous policeman. ‘He takes my husband, who has a very weak heart, to all sorts of outlandish places at ridiculous hours, such as Kunenuma to go fishing. So please, Mr Aoyama, when you next see Sorge, please scold him for me.’47 Aoyama concluded that the Clausens ‘were a very close and intimate man and wife’. He also decided that even if her husband had any questionable relationship with Sorge or had been sending out illegal messages, Anna knew nothing of it.
The keen young policeman decided to follow up this intriguing lead by paying a visit to Dr Sorge himself sometime in early August 1941. When no one answered his knock, Aoyama assumed that the house was empty. He tried the door and found it unlocked. Overcome by curiosity, he mounted the stairs and entered Sorge’s study. He found Sorge sitting at his typewriter, fixing him with a furious glare. Sorge yelled that the policeman was trespassing. Knowing himself in the wrong, Aoyama retreated in a flurry of apologies. Sorge’s anger soon evaporated and the men parted with assurances of mutual respect.
The next encounter with the police was less amicable. Sorge’s loyal old housekeeper Fukuda Tori had retired and been replaced by another, slightly less elderly woman. The new housekeeper was summoned to Toriizaka station by officers who wanted to know Hanako’s address. When she protested that she had not worked for Sorge very long and did not know where Miyake-san lived, the questioners became aggressive. ‘You had better let us know the next time Miyake-san comes, or we won’t put up with it!’ the police told the woman, according to Hanako’s later hearsay account. ‘I cook my master’s meals and get paid for it!’ the servant replied defiantly. ‘There’s no reason why you people should push me around!’ More amused than annoyed, the policemen joked: ‘This old bitch is fresh!’ and smacked her backside. Weeping with rage, she fled to Sorge’s kitchen.48
A few days later Aoyama was back, again asking for Hanako. Sorge was out, but Hanako was at home and Aoyama brought her in to the station.49 In a narrow upstairs room, she was questioned by the local chief of police, a severe-looking elderly man in plain clothes. The interrogation began with routine queries on Hanako’s name, age, address and education, which the chief took down in pencil on a long form. Then the tone changed abruptly. ‘I don’t see why an educated woman like you … lives with a foreigner,’ said the officer sharply. ‘Aren’t there enough men in Japan?’
Longing for escape, Hanako tried to claim that she had been separated from Sorge for a long time. ‘There is nothing between us now.’50
‘If you have nothing to do with him, why do you go there all the time?’ the chief retorted.
Hanako ventured that he must be mistaking her for someone else.
‘Stop lying!’ her interrogator shouted. ‘You’re the only Japanese woman who visits Sorge. I know exactly when you get there and when you leave. From the window here I can see you lying in bed with your backside bare!’ The policeman told Hanako that she should separate from Sorge immediately. ‘You know that a Japanese woman who lives with a foreigner is not considered a Japanese national,’ he said. ‘We will get severance pay from him. We will take care of the details.’
The suggestion that she lived with Sorge only for money stung Hanako into defiance. ‘What will you do about it if I refuse?’ she asked, but her anger quickly dissolved into tears of anger and humiliation and she turned to the window to hide them.
‘What do you see in these hairy ketto [barbarians]?’ said the chief, continuing his tirade. ‘We cannot compete with these hairy foreigners. They are so sweet and nice to our women.’51
‘May I leave now if you have no more questions?’ Hanako responded coldly. The police had no reason to detain her. But they told Hanako to return when next she visited Sorge to sign a written transcript of their interview to be used as the basis for a report on her to the Ministry of Home Affairs. Hanako departed without answering.
When Hanako told Sorge about the incident the following day, he was furious. ‘If Japan takes you away from me, I will have Germany take all German girls away from their Japanese men,’ he ranted, becoming ridiculous in his impotent rage. ‘I can do it! I’ll send a telegram to Germany!’ Calming down a little, he took his lover’s hand. ‘I am strong,’ Sorge assured Hanako, she recalled twenty years later. ‘You needn’t worry.’52
Sorge may have been powerless against the collective might of the Japanese police force, but against a single officer, his physical strength and the aura of untouchability that still surrounded him as a well-connected foreigner still made him a formidable opponent. A few days after Hanako’s first interrogation Aoyama made the mistake of knocking at Sorge’s door once more. Hearing a familiar voice talking to his maid, Sorge strode out of the dining room to confront the policeman. Aoyama asked for Miyake-san. ‘What do you want with Miyake-san?’ demanded
Sorge. ‘Anything concerning her I’ll answer.’
‘You don’t understand,’ the officer retorted, and attempted to push past Sorge. Aoyama began to tell the maid that she should send Hanako to the police station when she next appeared when Sorge knocked him to the ground with a short uppercut.53
Sorge had made many impulsive mistakes in his espionage career, all involving fellow foreigners. Seducing the wife of his most important intelligence source, crashing his motorcycle while carrying a pocketful of compromising documents, drunkenly praising Stalin to a roomful of Nazis. But an assault on a Japanese police officer was a different level of error. Sorge, realising that he could be in handcuffs within minutes, quickly attempted to apologise as he helped the stunned young policeman to his feet. ‘I am very sorry about this,’ said Sorge. ‘I did not think. I was so worried about Miyake-san.’ He instructed the maid to bring a pair of his best shoes, which he presented to Aoyama with a bow. The young man accepted both apology and shoes and made his exit.
‘I didn’t think Mr. Sorge would get so angry,’ he told the maid as he left. ‘He is touchy! It will be awkward for me to try to reach her [Hanako] here.’54
Once again, Sorge’s fiendish luck had held (though, unbeknown to him, it was at this point that it had finally run out). Aoyama told his colleagues about the assault, but they did not show up in force to arrest him. But it was also becoming clear to Sorge that his relationship with Hanako must end, for her own safety. Back in Moscow he had lectured the besotted Hede Massing on ‘how lonely and ascetic the life of an apparatchik must be, with no attachments, no strings, no sentimentalities’.55 The time was approaching for Sorge to perform painful triage on his own personal life.
Hanako’s second interrogation sealed the break. Aoyama had spotted Hanako in the street on her way to Sorge’s house, and called from an upper window of the police station. This time both Aoyama and his boss were more courteous, though the former complained – fortunately in a jocular tone – about the power of Sorge’s punch. The senior policeman showed Hanako a thick file of Japanese women who had broken off their relationships with foreigners – all, he claimed, in exchange for substantial compensation. But their former aggressiveness had disappeared. Perhaps Sorge’s gallant violence in defence of his mistress, and Hanako’s loyalty, had struck a chord of respect in the policemen. In any case, they made Hanako sign a transcript of their earlier interview with a thumbprint, and sent her on her way.
The situation clearly could not go on. Agitated and pacing up and down his study, Sorge hit on a plan. Urging Hanako to send her mother and niece to their native village for their own safety, he told Hanako to ready herself to flee to Shanghai. ‘I have lots of money in the bank at Shanghai,’ Sorge told her – the only hint that this dedicated servant of the revolution may have been preparing his own private golden parachute in a Chinese bank, as the Clausens had done. He proposed that Hanako travel alone, and that he would join her later. ‘My work here will be finished soon,’ he said, by Hanako’s own account. ‘Then I will join you in Shanghai and we will live together there.’56
It took Clausen to identify a serious flaw in his boss’s plan. The three of them had gathered in Lohmeyer’s restaurant to plot Hanako’s exfiltration from Japan. Most of the conversation was conducted in German between the two men and Hanako could not follow. But it was clear that Max had pointed out that it would be impossible for Hanako to travel without a passport. And in the circumstances it would be extremely unlikely for the police to issue her one. The mood of the dinner turned bleak.
‘I feel very depressed,’ Sorge told Hanako in Japanese. ‘Tonight I am not going to work. Tonight I am going to get drunk,’ he announced. ‘You drink, too,’57 he ordered his companions.
Back home together, Sorge played some of the popular German classics he loved, Beethoven and Mozart. Drunk and sorry for himself, he contemplated the future. ‘I don’t know what to do … When Sorge is gone, you will think, “Sorge is a great man!” … Would you like to die with Sorge?’
Hanako replied that she was scared of dying.
‘Well, everybody is afraid of dying,’ he replied as he fell sleep, his disjointed stream of consciousness recorded by Hanako in her memoir. ‘But Sorge is a strong man,’ he continued, ‘I shan’t forget you, but now I can do without you … I will write many good books. You will find out later … Sorge is great! … I will die soon.… Something is very wrong with me today.’58
Sorge’s final gift to the most long-standing – some might say long-suffering – mistress of his life would be to fix her problems with the police. About a week after her second interrogation, Sorge invited Hanako to a swanky restaurant in Nihonbashi. She wore a silk kimono for the occasion. To her surprise they were not alone. Mr Tsunajima, an interpreter from the German embassy, appeared, smartly dressed, and then both officer Aoyama and his boss. ‘Miyake-san, you are very attractive in a kimono,’ the older policeman commented. ‘Aoyama can’t talk about anything but “Miyake-san, Miyake-san”.’
Aoyama himself had removed his moustache. ‘I shaved it off after Mr Sorge hit me, to make a new man of myself,’ he explained with a smile. Sorge, in his most charming mode, set about convincing the police to forget the dossier they had compiled on Hanako. The formal dinner – and perhaps some other persuasion of which Hanako was not aware – did the trick. Days later, the police chief appeared at Nagasaki Street and set fire to Hanako’s file in one of Sorge’s iron incense-burning pots.59
Sorge took Hanako to Lohmeyer’s, the scene of their first dinner, to break the news that she would have to move out. He spoke once more about her finding herself a nice Japanese husband. ‘I don’t like Japanese men,’ Hanako retorted. Back home, after their date, Sorge extracted a bottle of vermouth from his liquor stock and put Edwin Fischer’s recording of Beethoven’s Fantasia on the record player. In this last conversation, according to Hanako, Sorge came close to revealing the truth about his life. ‘You will find out later what Sorge has done,’ he told her, the exaltation of the music and the booze seizing him. ‘Sorge is wise, strong, he doesn’t worry about danger … Sorge is ready to die for the cause.’ He then asked Hanako what she wished for most in life.
‘I want Sorge,’ she replied.
‘You can’t have Sorge. Sorge is going to die.’ Then the drink abruptly filled him with a more optimistic vision and he changed tack. ‘I want to live! It would be wonderful if both of us could go back to Russia together … You would like to go to Russia with Sorge?’
‘Yes, I would like to.’
‘If you and I return to Russia, Japan will be in bad shape. Everyone will die. I know it. The United States is very strong. Japan can’t win. Russia won’t fight the United States. I told Stalin that Russia could not fight against America. Do you know who Stalin is?’
Hanako said that she did.
‘You 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. The Japanese people are a little weak. French and American men are not strong, but Russian men are strong … Let’s drink together, then let’s sleep together.’60
Hanako had heard the last, and most honest, of her lover’s drunken rants. The next day Sorge suggested that the time had come for her to take her things to her mother’s. He also insisted that she accept $2,000. And this time Hanako made no objection.
20
Breaking Point
‘I am a Nazi!’1
Richard Sorge to his interrogators, 19 October 1941
Mid-August 1941, with hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops entraining for northern Manchuria and workers of the Mantetsu busy building railway sidings for a possible advance on Siberia, was the moment of maximum peril for the Soviet Union. A Japanese attack hung poised on news of the success of the Wehrmacht
in the west. Konoe’s attempts to make peace with America were faltering.
It was also the moment of greatest danger for Sorge. At least five deadly threats hung over the spy ring. Harutsugu Saito, the sharp young agent of the foreign section of the Tokko political police, had just returned from an assignment in China and resumed his surveillance of Sorge. The Japanese Ministry of Communications were also closing in on the location of the coded short-wave transmissions they had been chasing since 1936. The local policeman, Aoyama, had a tantalising lead on Clausen as the possible operator of an illegal radio. Hanako had also come to the police’s attention, and though she knew little about the specifics of Sorge’s work, it was clear that if the police chose to arrest and interrogate her violently she could reveal plenty of suspicious details about her lover’s activities. And of course Meisinger of the Gestapo, despite his good reports on Sorge, remained a menacing and unpredictable threat.
Unbeknown to Sorge yet another jeopardy was heading his way from a sixth, and entirely unexpected, direction. In June 1941 the Tokko remembered the little Japanese-American lady with a suspiciously communist past who was now earning her living as a seamstress in Wakayama province – Tomo Kitabayashi, Miyagi’s old landlady from California. Officer Mitsusaburo Tamazawa of the Tokko’s Thought Section was asked to authorise a warrant for her interrogation, along with her husband. Mitsusaburo reviewed the evidence against her and found it insubstantial. He recommended that the ‘old lady’ (Kitabayashi was fifty-six at the time) be spared interrogation during the hot summer months and recommended that her questioning be postponed until September. Thus the spy ring received a stay of execution thanks to one policeman’s curiously old-world chivalry.2
An Impeccable Spy Page 38