Aoyama, speeding from his arrest of Clausen, eventually joined the waiting posse. He and Saito led the group, gingerly trying the door and, as with Aoyama’s last visit, finding it unlocked.
The officer’s reflexive politeness got the better of his need for stealth. ‘Excuse me,’ Saito called out. ‘Good morning!’ Sorge, in his pyjamas but shaven, appeared at the top of the stairs. He invited his unexpected guests into his study and waited – in another moment of exquisitely Japanese courtesy on the part of the Tokko agents – while they removed their shoes. Saito recalled that Sorge’s face was expressionless. The three men sat down on the sofa, with Sorge in the middle. As the arresting officers composed themselves for an embarrassing conversation, their commander, Hideo Ohashi, bounded in. The spell of awkwardness broken, the policemen seized Sorge by his arms. Someone found a coat and draped it over the suspect’s shoulders as they marched him out of the house and into a waiting car. Ohashi remained behind to begin the search. Surveying the piles of papers, the thousand-book library, and very un-Japanese mountains of clutter in Sorge’s study, the Tokko chief picked up the phone to summon a two-ton truck to collect the mountain of evidence.64
By the time Prosecutor Yoshikawa arrived at Toriizaka police station, he found Sorge properly dressed in slacks and a shirt brought from his home. He had also had time to compose himself for the duel of his life.
Sorge went on the offensive immediately. ‘Why have you arrested me?’ he demanded. Yoshikawa showed his prisoner the warrant he had signed.
‘We are holding you on the basis of the National Public Security Preservation Law on suspicion of espionage,’ the prosecutor replied formally. ‘Have you not been guilty of spying for the Comintern?’65
‘No!’ roared Sorge, banging his fist on the table. ‘I am a Nazi! Inform the German ambassador at once! This arrest will be a reflection on the good relations between Japan and Germany! I am a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung and an information officer in the German embassy!’ Sorge refused to speak unless Ambassador Ott was present. As he bluffed for his life, perhaps Sorge regretted his refusal of Ott’s offer of a staff position at the embassy that could have conferred him diplomatic immunity.
Yoshikawa remained calm in the face of Sorge’s storm of imperious bluster. ‘There are also communists in the German Nazi Party,’ the prosecutor observed, quite accurately. He sent his prisoner down to the cells to cool off before being transferred to Sugamo prison. The prosecutor’s subordinates were more cowed. As the police attempted to search him, Sorge bellowed for Aoyama and raised his fists at the terrified guards. The policeman duly came running and ordered the body search to be abandoned. Pacified, Sorge entered his cell. ‘This is the end,’ he told the young policeman that he had once knocked down. ‘I shall leave all my possessions to you, Mr. Aoyama. Please discuss this with my lawyer.’66
Vukelić was the first of the foreigners to break. Inspector Suzuki, speaking to his prisoner through a French interpreter, used the oldest ruse in the interrogator’s book: he claimed that Sorge had already confessed. Vukelić, asking constantly after the well-being of his wife and son, told all. He explained the uses for the cameras found at his house, including the high-speed telescopic lens, the microfilms, the photographic plates and all the rest. He also revealed that his copy of the 1933 German Statistical Yearbook was the spy ring’s code book. Only an empty electric phonograph cabinet found at his house baffled Vukelić (it later emerged that this was where Wendt had once kept his short-wave set, now at the bottom of Yamanaka Lake). Occasionally during his testimony Vukelić would pause to ask: ‘Has Sorge told you this?’67
As a reward for his confession Vukelić was allowed to receive Yoshiko’s daily letters, and also to wear socks against the damp and cold of Sugamo prison in winter. Suzuki developed a fondness for the suspect, though he noted immediately the difference between the gentle, uxorious Yugoslav and his steely boss. ‘Sorge was top-flight, Vukelić second-rate,’ Suzuki recalled.68
Clausen held out a little longer. His main concern seems to have been for Anna. While she was still free, he refused to say a word to his interrogators, Taiji Hasebe and Tonekichi Horie, chief of the Asian department of the Tokko. Though he maintained stoic silence, it was clear to his questioners that Clausen was deeply upset. On 20 October, they tried the obvious lie, telling Clausen that his wife was now in Sugamo prison (in fact she would remain at liberty for nearly another month). They also told him – quite truthfully – that they knew from Vukelić that Anna Clausen had acted as a secret courier between Tokyo and Shanghai.69 What finally broke him were the Japanese transcripts of the draft messages in English that Clausen had carelessly left lying about his study. Ogata, chief of the Tokko’s Foreign Section, stayed up all night reading the translations as they were produced. Among Clausen’s papers was a ten-page typescript detailing top-secret details gleaned by Ozaki of the recent Japanese–American peace negotiations in Washington – something so deeply classified that even the Tokko department head had never heard of them. Leaving the unencoded messages to be found by police ‘was Clausen’s fatal error’, recalled Ogata.70
This final disaster did the trick. Clausen began to talk, spilling the secrets of the Statistical Yearbook code. The Tokko men had already identified the book as the key to the ring’s communications because they had found the 1933 edition on Clausen’s shelf well-thumbed, but all other years untouched. The cipher key was swiftly passed to the Japanese Telecommunications Ministry, who began decrypting the pile of messages they had been intercepting since 1936 which lay in a thick file known as ‘Dal X’. They even reunited Clausen with his radio set, with which the Japanese engineers had been tinkering in vain. Clausen’s professional pride kicked in and he set them right. ‘We Japanese had tried to reach Harbin with it,’ said Yoshikawa, ‘but we had no luck. But once we called Clausen in, he made a few rapid adjustments, turned a few knobs, and he got Harbin in about a minute.’71
Clausen’s decade of silence broke like a dam, and with it all his unspoken resentment of Sorge. He sat down to write a lengthy con-fession in clear but clunky English – the only language he had in common with his interrogators. One of the first things he admitted was that he and Sorge were officers of the Red Army and worked directly for Soviet military intelligence.
This presented his captors with an immediate problem. Miyagi and Ozaki had admitted spying for the Comintern – still notionally an international organisation independent of the Kremlin. The 1925 Public Security Preservation Law, under which all the suspects were being held, had been drafted as an anti-Comintern statute, aimed at the Japanese Communist Party and other socialist groups. If the spy ring was in fact working on behalf of a foreign power, then the case would fall within the purview of the War Ministry and its own intelligence agency, the Kempeitai. To the Tokko and the Justice Ministry prosecutors who were running the case the choice was clear. There was no way they were going to surrender their prize spy case to a rival agency. The Sorge spy ring would go to trial as the last and greatest – albeit fictitiously attributed – Comintern espionage case.72
Sorge was proving an altogether tougher nut. The German embassy, as Sorge calculated, reacted with alarm and disbelief at his arrest. Sorge’s colleagues in the German press corps presented the embassy with ‘a declaration signed by all of them attesting to Sorge’s human and political reliability’,73 as Ott duly reported to Berlin. Helma Ott was furious, and her husband was convinced that the police had made a terrible mistake. Ott ventured an explanation to the German Foreign Ministry – that Sorge had been set up by the police in order to embarrass ex-Prime Minister Konoe by implying that one of his advisers had been leaking material about the US–Japanese talks.
The local Nazi Party organisation, including Meisinger himself, protested against ‘the obvious blunder of the overzealous Japanese secret police’.74 Ott lodged an official complaint with the Foreign Ministry, along with an urgent request to see the prisoner. The new prime minister, G
eneral Tojo, nervous of the political implications of the case, passed the buck to his Minister of Justice, who bounced it to the chief prosecutor, who laid the request at the door of Prosecutor Yoshikawa. If no confession was forthcoming from Sorge within a week, the prosecutor knew, then the pressure from the Germans to release Sorge could become critical.
Sorge knew it too. Far smarter than Clausen, he realised that it would be useless to pretend that he had not been collecting sensitive intelligence. But he also understood that his best chance of survival was to pretend to be working for the Reich – or more precisely, to admit to the work he had been doing for German military intelligence, the Abwehr, while concealing his ties to Moscow.75 In the meantime he stalled while they waited for Ott to be given permission to visit. Sorge claimed not to understand the interpreter’s German. His interrogators switched to English.76 They questioned him in relays, bombarding him with new information gleaned from Ozaki, Miyagi, Clausen, Vukelić and – now – Kawai, who had been arrested on 22 October. The incriminating papers found on Sorge’s desk, including seven pages of a report from Ozaki, were quoted to him as soon as they were translated. Still he refused to talk, and demanded Ott.77
Few who read this can claim really to know what goes on in the minds of captive, tortured men. We have just the dry written record, and some interviews with Sorge’s questioners, to tell us what happened in his head between the fifth and the sixth days of his interrogation. The prison was bitterly cold. The prisoner was exhausted by continuous questioning and sleep deprivation – a method that the Soviet NKVD called ‘the conveyor’. He was probably still feverish. Certainly he knew that he stood alone in his silence. To his captors he was ‘most contemptuous’ when he learned Clausen had become an ‘informant’ and grimly joked that even if Clausen ‘escaped the noose in Japan if he ever got back to the USSR he would be taken care of’.78 But the knowledge that even his closest collaborators had abandoned him, and the cause, must have been devastating – all the more so because he had come so close to abandoning the cause and the job himself.
In any case, exactly why Sorge broke at around 10.45 a.m. on the sixth day after his arrest will always remain a mystery. Cold logic dictated that his chances of survival through rescue by the German embassy would be greater if he remained silent. And yet, he talked. It was Inspector Ohashi’s shift. The policeman had brought some of his own precious charcoal from home to dispel some of the chill of the interview room. Ohashi began with his often-repeated point that his confederates had confessed and that Sorge had no reason to continue to lie. ‘You have engaged in spying activities,’ Ohashi told his prisoner. ‘Your answer must be yes.’
To Ohashi’s surprise, Sorge said exactly that. ‘Yes.’
‘You have been active for the Comintern?’
Sorge again replied, ‘Yes.’79
Perhaps it was Sorge’s unbending pride that drove him. Prosecutor Yoshikawa was, by chance, in the prison that day, though he had decided to give up his interrogation for a couple of days. ‘I did not wish to question Sorge anymore that week,’ Yoshikawa recalled, ‘and yet for some reason I went out to Sugamo. Perhaps this would be the day, I thought.’80 When Ohashi summoned the prosecutor to take over after this incredible breakthrough, he brought with him a gaggle of senior officials – the Tokko’s Ogata and his deputy, Prosecutor Tamazawa, and Judge Nakamura Toneo. The cell was too small for them to all sit in, but finally Sorge had his audience. He stood politely as the grandees filed in. Tamazawa had the impression that Sorge was ‘very polite, very well brought up’.81 Yoshikawa restarted the questioning where Ohashi had left off. As if in a dream Sorge returned to his earlier position of complete denial.
‘All your colleagues have confessed,’ Yoshikawa pressed on. ‘We have your radio, your codes, and we know everything about you. In order to lessen the sentence on your assistants and on yourself, don’t you think it is time for you to confess?’ Another change came over Sorge. He seemed to stiffen and go pale, and asked for paper. On it he wrote, in German: ‘I have been an international communist since 1925.’ Yoshikawa read it out loud to his colleagues. ‘You have been spying for the Comintern,’82 he said to Sorge.
Abruptly the prisoner sprang from his chair, drew himself up to attention, threw his prison coat on the floor and began pacing up and down the cramped cell, hands in his pockets. ‘Indeed, I am a communist and have been doing espionage. I am defeated!’ Sorge shouted. ‘I have never been defeated since I became an international communist. But now I am beaten by the Japanese police.’83 He sat down again, buried his face in his hands, and wept bitterly. It was, Yoshikawa recalled, ‘obvious that he was emotionally very disturbed … we were all surprised and aghast at Sorge’s behaviour. He completely broke down before us. He was a pathetic picture of a caught, defeated, and emotionally defeated person.’84
‘I will confess everything,’ Sorge said finally. ‘If I can have a rest.’85
21
‘The Greatest Man I Have Ever Met’
‘A devastating example of a brilliant success of espionage’1
General Douglas MacArthur on Sorge
Ambassador Ott came to visit his old friend at Sugamo prison some days after Sorge’s breakdown and admission of guilt. Having earlier insisted on seeing Ott, Sorge now shrank from a confrontation with the man whom he had deceived so thoroughly for so many years.
‘I have betrayed the ambassador, and therefore I do not want to see him,’ Sorge told Yoshikawa. ‘You may be politically of different minds,’ the prosecutor replied. ‘Yet you ought to say good-bye to him as a friend.’2
Ott had not yet been informed that Sorge had confessed. Still convinced of his friend’s innocence, he was ‘proud, stern, angry, and very serious as he walked into the big conference room’, accompanied by several senior embassy officials, recalled Yoshikawa. Sorge was brought in with his hands cuffed and a bamboo basket over his head – the usual practice in Sugamo for preventing prisoners from communicating while outside their cells. Ott ‘had a very pained expression on his face. [Sorge] and Ott looked intently at one another, and then the questions began.’3 By prior arrangement, all the questions had been agreed in advance and avoided any talk of the charges facing the accused.
‘How are you?’ Ott began, according to Yoshikawa’s account.
‘I am well,’ Sorge replied.
‘How is the food you are receiving?’
‘It is satisfactory.’
‘Are you being well treated?’
‘Yes, I am.’
Within ten minutes the prepared questions were over. Ott asked his friend if he had anything to say. There was moment of tense silence. ‘Mr Ambassador, this is our final farewell,’ Sorge said in a low voice.4 ‘When Sorge uttered these words Ott’s face suddenly became pale and weak,’ Yoshikawa remembered. ‘It seemed to me as though he had now for the first time caught the true meaning of things and that he understood the significance of what Sorge had said. Sorge’s words provided an emotional and dramatic climax to their close friendship.’5 In that moment Ott realised that his trusted friend and confidant, the man with whom he had shared not only his personal and professional secrets but also his wife, was a traitor. Yoshikawa ordered Sorge to be taken back to his cell. ‘He rose quietly from his chair, made a slight bow to the ambassador, and walked slowly out of the room.’6
Ott, clearly shaken, took his leave, thanking the prosecutor for his cooperation. ‘For the good of our two countries, investigate this case thoroughly,’ Ott told the prosecutor. ‘Get to the bottom of it!’7 Ott would publicly maintain, until at least Christmas 1941, that Sorge was a ‘martyr to Japanese suspicion and spy mania’ and claimed that he expected his friend to be freed.8 After the war, Ott continued to insist that: ‘No, it is impossible, I still don’t believe that [Sorge] was a spy.’9 But the truth was that Ott’s own position was severely compromised by his association with Sorge. The ambassador, with fading hope that the whole espionage nightmare would somehow prove an unfort
unate mistake, held off for as long as possible before reporting the grim truth to Berlin.
His painful confrontation with Ott out of the way, Sorge’s mood changed. Recovering some of his former confidence, he set about charming those around him. Both Inspector Ohashi of the Tokko and Yoshikawa would recall their prisoner with admiration and fondness. ‘Sorge had a wonderful personality,’ Yoshikawa told an interviewer in 1965. ‘He was open and warm-hearted … In my whole life, I have never met anyone as great as he was.’10
Sorge asked for his old typewriter and offered to draft a memoir of his life in espionage. Prosecutor Yoshikawa, shrewdly suspecting that his prisoner would be unable to resist the temptation to boast about his own exploits, agreed. Sorge set to writing his confession in the same spirit that he approached everything in life – energetic, didactic, convinced of his own righteousness. It is clear from the tone of his prison memoir that Sorge expected eventually to be freed. Unlike Clausen, who did his utmost to convince his captors that he was no longer a communist, Sorge implicitly addressed his memoir over the heads of his Japanese captors to his own superiors in the Fourth Department. His chief message was that he was not only an extraordinary and devoted spy, but also a great newsman, scholar and expert on all things Japanese. ‘When necessary, I performed my duties with speed, resolution, courage and resourcefulness,’ he wrote of himself. ‘My research was likewise of importance to my position as a journalist. It enabled me to gain recognition as the best reporter in Japan.’11
An Impeccable Spy Page 41