The delay would be vital for Sorge’s most important task: to get Moscow some kind of firm confirmation that Plan North had been abandoned. In the course of August, hard evidence began finally to come conclusively together. Wenneker returned from an inspection tour of Manchuria and told Sorge that the units being assembled for possible use on the Russian front were inexperienced and second-class; the best troops were being sent south to fight in China. Ozaki obtained more details of the looming oil crisis, which was fast becoming the main argument for Japan’s southward expansion. But what truly counted were reports from Wenneker that the Japanese Navy had successfully opposed opening a war on two fronts, north and south, and had won approval to occupy Thailand by the end of the year.3
This information was quickly followed by a similar report from Ozaki. In a three-day meeting between the commanders of the Kwangtung Army, the Imperial General Staff and the civilian government, it was decided to postpone an attack on Russia until the following year. The army, especially the radical nationalists who styled themselves the Young Officers, was ‘absolutely dissatisfied with the decision’, Ozaki reported. But the generals could not totally ignore both the navy and the government. A full-scale assault northwards required massive logistical support and thousands of tons of fuel – which was by now mostly controlled by the navy. Miyagi, too, chimed in with the welcome news that troops called up in a second wave of mobilisation were being issued with tropical shorts, not overcoats. On 24 August, Prince Saionji, dropping in on Ozaki at the South Manchuria Railway building, confirmed that the ‘army and government have already made their decision not to go to war’ with Russia.4
Reporting the news to Sorge, Ozaki added some caveats. The Kwangtung Army would still attack if its own strength was three times that of the Red Army in Siberia, or if the Soviet Union was defeated and ‘signs of internal collapse in the Red Army in Siberia become clear … if such a situation does not occur by the middle of September at the latest, the Russian problem will be left over definitely until next spring’s snow-melting … at the earliest’.5 Despite Ozaki’s caution, Sorge ‘looked as happy as if he had been released from a heavy burden’.6 He was at last able to compose the message that Moscow had been waiting for so anxiously. ‘Green Bottle [the Japanese Navy] and the government have decided not to launch a war [against Russia] in the course of this year,’ he wrote on 22 August, and handed the message to Clausen.
The radio man failed to send it.
By now Clausen was motivated by far more than just resentment of Sorge and fear of discovery. By his own account, he was actively sabotaging the ring’s work. ‘My way of thinking was changing at that time. It was unbearable for me to send such information to Moscow,’ Clausen told the Japanese police after his arrest. But this apparent confession may not be the whole truth. In prison, Clausen was bargaining for his life. Of his decision to scrap sections of an earlier transmission pertaining to oil, Clausen told his captors that ‘the portion reported that the stock of petroleum of the Japanese Army was decreasing very much. This was very important to Japan and nobody else knew that sort of thing except us.’7 In other words, Clausen was attempting to claim that he was really on the Japanese side.
In fact, Clausen did get around to transmitting the gist of Sorge’s fateful message – but three weeks later, on 14 September. ‘INVEST [Ozaki] … says that Jap government has decided not to attack USSR this year, but the armed forces will remain in Manchuria in case of a possible attack next spring in the case of a defeat of the USSR by then. INVEST remarked that the USSR can be absolutely free after 15th Sept. INTERI [Miyagi] says that one of the battalions of 14th infantry divisions destined for North has been stopped in the barracks of the guards division in Tokyo.’8 So perhaps Clausen was more coward than traitor after all.
The radio man even decided to add Sorge’s vital news that ‘PAUL [Centre’s bizarrely insecure codename for Wenneker – whose first name actually was Paul] told me that the next German advance will be on the Caucasus via the Dniepr. PAUL believes that if the Germans do not obtain oil soon they will lose the war. That is why the attacks on Leningrad and Moscow are all more or less feints, main attack will be on Caucasus.’9
Sorge had given the Kremlin its first, absolutely accurate warning that Hitler was preparing an attack on Stalingrad. For good measure, Sorge also passed on Wenneker’s equally spot-on prediction that Japan would soon be at war with America. ‘Navy friends of PAUL say that war against USSR is no longer being discussed. The sailors no longer believe in the possibility of success of talks between Konoe and Roosevelt. Preparing for attack on Thailand and Borneo he thinks that Manila must be taken [as a staging post]. That means war with America.’10 Few dispatches in the history of intelligence have nailed so much prophetic information in so few words. Sorge did not, as would later be claimed, explicitly warn Stalin of the Pearl Harbor attack. But he signalled the inevitability of war between America and Japan three months before it happened.
Sorge, happily ignorant of the delay in his vital message, was elated. Eta moved into her own apartment on 1 September. He brought flowers and drank whisky as she played Scarlatti and even shouted a cheery ‘good night’ to the policemen lurking outside. A few days later he visited again, in triumphant mood. ‘The draft is finished,’ he bellowed – presumably of the cable Clausen eventually sent on 14 September. ‘Ott can go to hell. I have beaten them.’ He took Eta on a wild, drunken drive through the streets of Tokyo, the speed and the whisky surging into an adrenaline-fuelled simulacrum of his coming, imagined flight from the city.
Ozaki travelled to Manchuria to gather further confirmation. When he returned to Tokyo on 19 September he was able to report just how close the USSR had been to danger. From the statistics director of the Mantetsu’s Ho-t’ien branch, Ozaki had learned that back in July the Kwangtung Army had suddenly ordered the railway to be prepared to handle 100,000 tons of military freight per day for forty days, summoning 3,000 freight cars to be brought from northern China.11 By the time Ozaki visited, most of the rolling stock had been returned. The 3,000 trained railwaymen drafted in to take over the Trans-Siberian had also been dispersed, with only ten or so remaining.12 Though the Kwangtung Army had prepared contingency plans for a possible attack the following spring – including a plan for a new road to be constructed to Khabarovsk – Plan North had well and truly been stood down.
Exactly what role Sorge’s information played in Stalin’s decision making has been hotly debated by Russian historians. But it is clear from the wide circulation that Sorge’s reports received that the Fourth Department, the top members of the Politburo and Soviet Army, had finally begun to trust Sorge’s information. Towards the end of September, troops began moving from the Far Eastern Military District in large numbers to fight the Germans on the plains of European Russia. By December, fifteen infantry divisions, three cavalry divisions, 1,500 tanks and some 1,700 aircraft were redeployed.13 In all, Stalin would shift over half the available troops in Siberia to the defence of Moscow.14 Though this left the Soviet Far East desperately vulnerable to a possible Japanese assault in 1942, it was clear – as Sorge had repeatedly warned – that the best way to protect Russia’s east was to beat off the Germans in the west.
Around 27 September, when the typhoon-season atmospherics made it difficult to transmit, Clausen also received an intriguing message from Centre asking a series of questions about potential bombing targets in Japan. ‘What is the location of the petroleum storage facilities and docks on the islands around Kobe? Where is the Air Defence command of Tokyo located? Also where are anti-aircraft bases to be established?’15 And so on. The mood in Moscow, even though Leningrad was now besieged and Kiev had fallen, had clearly switched from defensive to offensive. ‘Around that time,’ Sorge claimed to his captors, ‘they sent me a special telegram of their appreciation’ – though there is no trace of such a message in the Soviet archives.16 In accordance with Centre’s request, Sorge sent Miyagi to reconnoitre the anti-aircraft empla
cements that were springing up in Tokyo’s parks and gardens. It would be the young Okinawan’s final mission.
While Miyagi was busy scouting the capital for air defences, Ozaki met up with his old friend Prince Saionji at the Kuwana house of assignation – not quite as sleazy as it sounds, as these establishments were a cross between a modern love hotel and a private dining establishment. Saionji was expecting guests, but hurriedly showed Ozaki a long handwritten note on the latest status of Japan’s negotiations with the US. The document revealed that Konoe was fast running out of time to strike a deal with Washington. The navy was pressing for a full-scale offensive against Singapore, the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines to begin no later than the beginning of October. Though Konoe was ready to offer Roosevelt a partial withdrawal from central China and southern Indochina, the reality was that with both the Japanese public and military against such a compromise, the chances of a peace deal had shrunk to next to nothing. ‘Although the United States, of course, desires to reach agreement in the negotiations, there is a great gap between her and Japan in the conditions and enthusiasm for the negotiations,’ Saionji warned Ozaki.17
Meanwhile at least one member of Sorge’s spy ring had decided that it was time to get away. Vukeli ć’s ex-wife, Edith, had had enough of the deprivations of wartime Japan – not to mention the constant fear of living in a house with a secret radar antenna installed in the attic. Edith pleaded with Sorge to give her the money to join her younger sister in Australia. The rezident may have been relieved to see her go, despite the loss of a valuable transmission station. Since her divorce Edith had been a volatile security risk to the group. American intelligence even claimed after the war that Sorge had seduced her after her separation from Vukelić as a means of keeping her loyal and quiet, though this assertion is not supported by any extant testimony. In any case, Sorge extracted $400 from Centre for her travel expenses – amended to $500 in pen by Clausen in the draft of the message subsequently found by Japanese police – and on 25 September, Edith and her son Paul sailed to Perth.18
Vukelić, like Clausen, was also having his doubts about working for the ring. In autumn of 1940 he and Yoshiko had their first baby, a boy christened Kiyoshi Jaroslav Yamasaki-Voukelitch. They called the child Yo for short.19 Vukelić ‘had a good wife and child and loved them from the bottom of his heart’, recalled Clausen. ‘So it was natural for him to turn away from this adventurous and dangerous life.’20 Vukelić had also established a name for himself as a foreign correspondent – and evidently preferred journalism to spying. Sorge wrote in his prison memoir that he had gone to Japan ‘for the purpose of this spy activity, and was a journalist to disguise my true work’, and found his ‘work as a journalist was rather bothersome to me … As for Vukelić, however, journalism came to be as if it were his true profession and doing spy activity as if it were his part-time work.’21
Vukelić’s enthusiasm for communism was fading as fast as his appetite for the thankless risks of espionage. ‘Communism will be defeated anyway and that therefore it would be useless to work for the principle any longer,’ he confided to Clausen in the mid-summer of 1941 – though the radio man dared not, by his own account, return the confidence and admit that he strongly agreed. Vukelić was also becoming more reluctant to fulfil the orders of a boss who had ‘a very strong personality and demanded absolute obedience from his men’.22 When Clausen brought a document to be photographed, Vukelić claimed to be too busy – but actually ‘stayed at home another two hours and read a book he liked’.23 He would avoid his colleagues for a week at a time. The imperious Sorge – who had only recently discovered that his best agent Ozaki was married, despite working with him closely for nine years – was equally tone-deaf to the signs of Vukelić’s disaffection.
Edith Vukelić would be the only member of the group to escape in time. On 28 September the Tokko’s Thought Section renewed its postponed request to arrest Miyagi’s old Californian landlords, the Kitabayashis. This time investigator Tamazawa made no objection. The couple were arrested at their home in Wakayama province for possible violation of the National Defence Security Law and transferred to Roppongi police station in Tokyo – by coincidence, the closest precinct to Miyagi’s home.24 The questioning of the hapless Kitabayashis about their communist past and their current associates began.
October brought chilly winds and sudden storms to Tokyo Bay. On 4 October, Sorge celebrated his forty-sixth birthday with Hanako at Lohmeyer’s restaurant, six years to the day after they had first met. Hanako recalled in her memoir that she wore a Western skirt and jacket for the occasion. He only had time for a drink. They sat at a table in the middle of the restaurant. Sorge remarked on how many police seemed to be following him these days. The coming war with America was on his mind; he believed that Japan would inevitably lose. ‘America is strong, she is big, she produces many good things,’ Sorge said in his simple Japanese. ‘If Japan fights with America, Japan will never win. She will be defeated over and over.’25 Hanako remembered trying to lighten the mood with a joke. ‘Perhaps Japan will imitate Germany and try a blitzkrieg,’26 she ventured. Sorge smiled.
They parted on the pavement at half past six. ‘I don’t think you should come home with me tonight because the secret police are following me,’ Sorge told her. ‘I think you should stay at your mother’s tonight. And when things look bright, I’ll send you a telegram.’
‘You won’t be lonely?’ Hanako asked.
‘Even if I am, it will be all right,’ Sorge replied. ‘You had better go home now. Please remember me to your mother.’
Sorge turned into the gathering dusk towards Shimbashi station. He never had been one for walking his girlfriends home. As Hanako walked in the opposite direction she turned to catch a glimpse of him but he had already disappeared in the crowd.27
A birthday party had been arranged in Sorge’s honour at economic attaché Erich Kordt’s house. The Otts and the Mohrs came to toast their incorrigible friend. But Sorge quickly became drunk and sarcastic, and Kordt was thoroughly relieved when he abruptly left his own birthday celebration at around nine. Alone, Sorge made his way to Weise’s apartment, where he drank with the DNB bureau chief until morning.28
That evening Clausen was also busy with a radio transmission. Nervous of sending from home, he had set up his apparatus at Vukelić’s house. ‘In light of the fact that there will be no war against the USSR this year, a small number of troops are being returned to the Islands [Japan],’ Clausen telegraphed. Sorge passed on Ozaki’s warning that the Kwangtung Army was still a danger, readying rail lines ‘for a possible attack next March, if the progress of the German-Russian war gives the Japanese such an opportunity’.29 He ended with the reassuring news that ‘no troops have been transferred from Northern China to Manchuria’. Clausen packed up his remarkable, home-made transmitter and drove home, doubtless with a sense of relief. The next person to open the well-used suitcase would be an officer of the Tokko.
Two days later Sorge met Ozaki at their favourite restaurant, the Asia in the Mantetsu building. The boss seemed distracted and irritable and seemed to be coming down with a cold. Ozaki passed on the latest reassuring – to Stalin at least – news that Konoe had given up on talks with the US and that the whole government was considering resigning, for good this time. The navy had won.
‘War with the United States will begin in the near future, this month or next,’ Sorge wrote in a draft dispatch that was later discovered among his papers. As they parted, the last two faithful members left in the Sorge spy ring agreed to meet the following Monday at the same place. It was the last Sorge and Ozaki would see of each other as free men.
The Tokko’s questioning of the Kitabayashis proceeded slowly. After ten days of desultory interrogation the elderly (to the young policemen) couple appeared to be minnows with little to say. There was one item, though, that interested the Tokko. Where had Tomo Kitabayashi got the sum of dollars that had been discovered on her arrest? Truthfully, she answ
ered that her old lodger Yotoku Miyagi sometimes gave her money. The young interrogator, hearing the name Miyagi for the first time, decided to try the oldest interrogator’s ruse. ‘Miyagi didn’t say that. Don’t tell lies!’ he snapped, according to the later account of prosecutor Mitsusada Yoshikawa.30 Resignedly concluding that Miyagi had already talked, Tomo immediately told the full story as she knew it. She and Miyagi had been members of the American Communist Party, she admitted, and though she denied having engaged in any communist activity since her return to Japan she told them that Miyagi was engaged in spying.31
This was an unexpected lead. A few enquiries revealed that Miyagi was already a person of interest to the Tokko First Section’s Cultural Department, in charge of keeping tabs on the theatrical and artistic world. The morning after Tomo had first mentioned Miyagi’s name, the chief of the Cultural Department himself set out with two detectives from Roppongi police station to arrest him.32 They knocked on his door at around 7 a.m. on 10 October. His landlady answered, one of the detectives later recalled, and quaked at the sight of their Tokko identity cards. When they asked for her artist lodger she exclaimed, ‘Miyagi is not a bad person!’33 They found their suspect still asleep in his room. On his table were sheaves of papers, including a detailed and absolutely incriminating study of Japan’s oil stock levels in Manchuria. Such information – holding as it did the key to whether Japan would go to war with Russia or America – counted among the most closely guarded military secrets in the country. Even more damningly, the papers were written not only in Japanese but also in a typed English translation. ‘We thought it strange that an artist had such a kind of document,’ one of the officers later testified, an example of the Japanese habit of boasting through understatement. It was immediately clear to the Tokko officers that this man was no minnow but a very significant shark.34
An Impeccable Spy Page 39