An Impeccable Spy

by Owen Matthews

  Sorge was led in next. It was only when he saw the formally dressed officials that he realised that the moment of his execution had come. ‘It is today?’ he enquired. ‘Yes, today,’ the governor answered. Sorge wore dark trousers, an open shirt and a loose jacket. He seemed calm and self-possessed. Asked about his property, he replied that he would like it left to Anna Clausen, doubtless to protect Hanako from further involvement with the police. Sorge left his Leica camera and dictionaries to his executioners, and requested that letters he had prepared be sent to his mother and sister though the German embassy. He politely refused the priest’s tea and cakes, but asked for a cigarette. The governor told him it was against the rules. Yuda Tamon, the official Tokko witness to the execution, spoke up impulsively. ‘Oh, let him have a cigarette!’ he urged. ‘I know it is against the rules, but it is his last wish. You can say you let him have some medicine at the last minute.’38 The governor still refused, and Sorge was led to the trapdoor.

  As his arms and legs were bound and the noose put around his neck, Sorge spoke three phrases in loud, clear Japanese. ‘Sakigun [the Red Army]! Kokusai Kyosanto [the International Communist Party]! Soviet Kyosanto [the Soviet Communist Party]!’ The door opened beneath his feet and Sorge dropped into oblivion.39 Governor Ichijima said he had ‘never seen anyone act as nobly as Ozaki and Sorge at their deaths’.40

  Other members of the ring died less gloriously. Miyagi succumbed to pneumonia halfway though his own trial in 1943, his weak lungs unable to bear the damp and cold of the prison. Vukelić was sentenced to life imprisonment and in July 1944 was transferred from Sugamo to the Abashiri prison on the freezing northern island of Hokkaido where he perished from starvation. Vukelić weighed only thirty-two kilos – five stone – when he died. Yoshiko was informed of his death on 15 January 1945.

  Clausen and Anna were luckier. They survived the war and were liberated by the Americans in August 1945. Both returned to Germany, where Max – the admirer of Hitler and lapsed communist – was feted as a socialist hero by the new East German regime.

  Ozaki’s remains were handed over to his wife and cremated at Ochiai cemetery in Shinjiku-ku, Tokyo. ‘There is nothing before me, not even colours,’ she wrote. ‘All that exists is a weary, endless amount of empty hours and empty space. I walked through the dark road in the rain holding the still-warm ashes of my husband in my arms. I said to the ashes of my husband, “This is the home to which you wanted to come so much. Now you have your study.” I put the ashes on the table in his study with tears in my eyes. Outside, it was pouring rain.’41

  Neither the Germans nor the Russians had any interest in giving Sorge a proper burial, so he was interred in Zoshigaya cemetery near Sugamo prison, a wooden board marking his final resting place.42 In July 1945 the prison was destroyed by Allied bombing. Sorge’s house burned too, together with his extensive library, which his defence lawyer had donated to the prosecutor’s office.43 Hanako only learned of Sorge’s execution in October 1945, two months after the Japanese capitulation, when the Allied occupation authorities published details of the case in the local press. The full story caused a sensation, not least because Ozaki came to be seen by many Japanese leftists as a hero and patriot, resisting militarism while so many of their countrymen had remained shamefully silent. The Ozaki case inspired several films and plays, including the 1962 play A Japanese Called Otto, by Junji Kinoshita. Over a hundred books have been written in Japanese about the Sorge spy ring, and a thriving Tokyo-based Sorge Society holds well-attended annual conferences.

  In 1948, Kawai, who had been liberated from prison by the Allies, and Ozaki’s half-brother Hotsuki encouraged Hanako to write a memoir. They published it in a leftist magazine they had founded, the Junken News. Hanako also painstakingly researched the possible site of her dead lover’s grave. With the proceeds of her memoir, Hanako was able to finance an exhumation, and identified Sorge’s body from his shrapnel-wounded legs and the gold bridgework in his skull, which she had made into a ring. She also bought a grave plot at Tama cemetery, where Sorge lies today among the dignified graves of Japanese notables under a granite stone with the Japanese inscription: ‘Here lies a hero who sacrificed his life fighting against war and for world peace.’44 Hanako died in Tokyo in 2000 at the age of eighty-nine and her ashes were interred alongside his.45

  After the war the American occupation authorities in Japan took a keen interest in the surviving judicial records of the Sorge ring, largely because they feared the Soviets might have mounted a similarly successful penetration operation on their own soil. General Douglas MacArthur, the US viceroy in post-war Tokyo, called Sorge’s achievement ‘a devastating example of a brilliant success of espionage’. US Army General Charles Willoughby was tasked with preparing a detailed report on the case for MacArthur. His findings were extensively cited during August 1951 sessions of the US House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy as it searched for possible Sorges in America – and for possible Soviet involvement in encouraging Japan to attack Pearl Harbor.

  During his testimony to Congress Willoughby gave the impression that Sorge had warned the Soviets of the planned Japanese attack on America. ‘Stalin did get the information,’ he told McCarthy on 22 August 1951. The next day Willoughby explained, more accurately, that ‘Pearl Harbor is a fixed date and did not appear in the Sorge message. But that was not important – the important thing was that the Japanese were aiming south into a collision with the United States and Britain’.46 But the myth that the Soviets knew of Japan’s plans for a surprise attack and failed to warn their allies in Washington of the danger was off and running. Senator Adlai Stevenson spoke of Stalin’s ‘duplicity’ over Pearl Harbor. Several books were written claiming that the Japanese attack on the US was a plot orchestrated by the Kremlin to defuse the danger to Siberia.47 Even Sorge’s German embassy colleague, Third Secretary Hans-Otto Meissner (not to be confused with Gestapo Colonel Joseph Meisinger), made the Pearl Harbor story the culmination of his bizarre 1955 book The Man with Three Faces. In this confection of memoir and invention, Meissner has Sorge sending a message to Centre ‘JAPANESE CARRIER AIR FORCE ATTACKING UNITED STATES NAVY AT PEARL HARBOR PROBABLY DAWN NOVEMBER SIX STOP SOURCE RELIABLE STOP JOE’.48 The telegram was entirely a figment of Meissner’s imagination (not least because JOE was Miyagi’s codename, not Sorge’s).

  It took the Soviets much longer to exhume Sorge’s memory from among the millions of Stalin’s victims. In 1956, Katya Maximova was officially rehabilitated, along with Sorge’s Comintern and Fourth Department colleagues who had perished in the Purge. But it was only in 1964, when a Franco-German film about the life of Sorge was premiered at the Moscow Film Festival, that the case caught the eye of Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev. French director Yves Ciampi’s 1961 Qui êtes-vous, Monsieur Sorge? (released in the US as Who Are You, Doctor Sorge?) was largely based on Meissner’s highly fantastical account of the case. Meissner even played himself in the film. But when Khrushchev saw the movie – Zhukov and Golikov also attended the screening – he demanded to have his own answer to the question posed by the title of Ciampi’s film. An official commission was formed to collect documents and testimony from the surviving Soviet intelligence officers who had worked with Sorge, and the results – including surprisingly extensive extracts from the top-secret Fourth Department cable traffic with Tokyo – were published as a book.

  The Soviet leadership decided that Sorge should join the official pantheon of Soviet saints. The Berlin Wall had recently gone up and the East German people needed a pro-Soviet, anti-fascist hero – a good German who was also a Soviet patriot. Sorge was made a posthumous Hero of the Soviet Union, and a bulky stone gravestone decorated with an image of the medal joined Hanako’s original, more dignified monument over his grave in Tokyo. The Soviet press swung into action, with a series of adulatory full-page articles in Sovietskaya Rossiya based on Sorge’s personnel files. A street in Moscow was named after him
, complete with a statue of a commanding figure in a flowing trench coat stepping out of a curtain of bronze shadow. A ship was also christened with his name, and a 10-kopek stamp was produced bearing Sorge’s rugged face. One such stamp was bought by the author’s father, then a visiting academic at Moscow University, at the request of William Deakin, head of St Antony’s College, Oxford. Deakin was working on the first Western scholarly account of the case and the stamp featured as the cover illustration of the first edition of The Case of Richard Sorge in 1966. In the same year the first novel based on Sorge’s career was published in the USSR, spawning a curious literary tradition that by 2017 included at least half a dozen fictionalised biographies of the famous spy in Russian.

  Sorge enjoyed another burst of officially sanctioned fame in the late 1970s. Again, the story of Sorge became a canvas on which the Kremlin’s power struggles could be projected. The KGB, and its director Yury Andropov, were rising in power and prestige and they needed a hero-spy – a dashing Soviet version of James Bond – to glamorise the image of the KGB. A new series of books and articles was commissioned. The Soviet writer Yulian Semyonov penned a series of novels called ‘Seventeen Moments of Spring’ that followed the adventures of a fictional Soviet mole in the Nazi intelligence apparatus in Berlin, which was made into a cult television serial in 1979. Semyonov said that his fictional hero, Max Otto von Stierlitz, was closely modelled on Sorge. In 1982 a new monument went up in Sorge’s native Baku. It is a bizarre piece of sculpture – a monumental bronze wall pierced by a pair of giant staring eyes intended to represent the all-seeing eye of Soviet espionage.

  The Soviet Union had officially canonised Sorge as a hero. Yet all the statues and the books could never quite efface the USSR’s actual suspicion, indifference and ultimate betrayal of its greatest spy. No other Soviet agent served Moscow so well or for so long. The spy network Sorge created was unique in the history of modern espionage in its access to the inner circles of power in both Germany and Japan. Yet at the moment of greatest danger for his adopted country, the atmosphere of paranoia that Stalin had created meant that the intelligence gold that he dutifully cabled to Moscow was ignored. Sorge was a flawed individual, but an impeccable spy – brave, brilliant and relentless. It was Sorge’s tragedy that his masters were venal cowards who placed their own careers before the vital interests of the country that he laid down his life to serve.

  *Confusingly, the People’s Commissariat for State Security (NKGB) reverted back to its old title, People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), between July 1941 and 1943.

  Notes

  Abbreviations used in the Notes

  PADAA: German Foreign Office Political Archive (Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts), Berlin

  RGASPI (known as RTsKhIDNI, 1991–99): Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, Moscow (former Archive of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, incorporating the Archive of the Comintern)

  TNA: The National Archives, London

  TsAMO RF: Central Archives of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, Podolsk

  INTRODUCTION

  1F. W. Deakin and G. R. Storrey, The Case of Richard Sorge, London, 1966.

  2John le Carré, Progress magazine, November 1966.

  CHAPTER 1

  1John le Carré, interview, New York Times, 17 August 2017.

  2Stalin, Works, Vol. 2, p. 188; Vol. 8, pp. 174–5, quoted in Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin, London, 2008, p. 237.

  3Anastas Mikoyan, Tak bylo, pp. 347–8, and Anastas Mikoyan, Memoirs, pp. 72–4, quoted in Montefiore, Young Stalin, Chapter One.

  4Jörg Baberowski, Der Feind, pp. 62–7, quoted in Montefiore, Young Stalin, Chapter One.

  5Russia’s first engineering university, the Bauman Institute in Moscow, had been founded only in 1830.

  6Mikhail Alekseyev, Your Ramsay: Richard Sorge and Soviet Military Intelligence in China 1930–1933, Moscow, 2010, p. 18.

  7Deakin and Storrey, Case of Richard Sorge, p. 22.

  8Deakin and Storrey, Case of Richard Sorge, p. 23.

  9Montefiore, Young Stalin, p. 188.

  10Anna Alliluyeva, The Alliluyev Memoirs, pp. 52–5, 84–6, quoted in Montefiore, Young Stalin, Chapter One.

  11Tom Reiss, The Orientalist, pp. 9–15, quoted in Montefiore, Young Stalin, Chapter One.

  12Julius Mader, Gerhard Stucklik, and Horst Pehnert, Dr Sorge funkt aus Tokyo: Ein Dokumentarbericht über Kundschafter des Friedens mil auggewählten Artikeln von Richard Sorge, Berlin, 1968, p. 40.

  13‘Richard Sorge did not know any Russian then; they spoke only German in his family’: Dorothea von During letter to General Willoughby, 2 July 1951, in Charles Andrew Willoughby, Shanghai Conspiracy: The Sorge Spy Ring, New York, 1952. p. 133.

  14‘Partial Memoirs of Richard Sorge’ (hereafter ‘Sorge Memoir’); Sorge typed this autobiographical material while in Sugamo prison. Unfortunately, it is incomplete, the rest lost when the Ministry of Justice burned in the bombing of Tokyo during the Second World War. The English translation quoted here is reproduced in Willoughby, Shanghai Conspiracy, pp. 90–230. Another version appears in ‘A Partial Documentation of the Sorge Espionage Case’, Military Intelligence Section, US Far East Command, US Congress House Committee on Un-American Activities, Tokyo, 1950.

  15Barry Moreno, ‘Sorge, Friedrich Adolf’, in Encyclopedia of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, 2004, p. 302.

  16F. A. Sorge, ‘Report of the North American Federal Council to the Hague Congress’, in Documents of the First International: The Hague Congress … Minutes and Documents, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958, p. 224.

  17Willoughby, Shanghai Conspiracy, p. 133.

  18Obi Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Zoruge jiken (‘Materials on Modern History: The Sorge Incident’), Tokyo, 1962, Vol. 1, p. 320.

  19Willoughby, Shanghai Conspiracy, p. 142.

  20Gordon W. Prange, Donald M. Goldstein, and Katherine V. Dillon, Target Tokyo, New York, 1985, see chapter 2.

  21Prange et al., Target Tokyo, chapter 2.

  22Prange et al., Target Tokyo, chapter 2.

  23Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  24Deakin and Storrey, Case of Richard Sorge, p. 24.

  25Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  26Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  27Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  28Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  29Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-Z0519-022/ CC-BY-SA 3.0 ADN-ZB/19.5.1981/Berlin. In an interview on WBA 6 radio on 6 April 1981, Correns said that Sorge ‘did an outstanding reconnaissance job for the Soviet Union … During the First World War and afterwards, we often discussed the future and shared our thoughts of what could be, once this terrible mass-murder is over … If my friend Richard Sorge could witness here today what the power of the people achieved after 1945, how proud would he be to have contributed to this.’

  30Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  31Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  32Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  33Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  34Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  35Prange et al., Target Tokyo, chapter 2.

  36Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  37Deakin and Storrey, Case of Richard Sorge, p. 25.

  38Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  39Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  40Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist�
�, pp. 91–8.

  41Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  42Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  43Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  44Murray Sayle, ‘Spying doesn’t get any better than this’, London Review of Books, Vol. 19, No. 10, 22 May 1997. Sayle tracked down Philby in 1967, four years after his defection, by hanging about at Moscow bookshops and theatres where the spy might show up. ‘After a few days, I forget how many exactly, I saw a man looking like an intellectual of the 1930s, all leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket.’ Sayle found Philby ‘a charming, entertaining man with a great sense of humour’, Jessica Mitford, ‘Old School Spies’, Washington Post, 26 March 1989.

  CHAPTER 2

  1Murray Sayle, Daily Telegraph, 21 September 2010.

  2Karl Marx to the editor of the Otechestvenniye Zapisky, November 1877, see http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm.

  3Friedrich Engels to Georgi Plekhanov, 26 February 1895, Marx–Engels Collected Works, Vol. 50, New York, 2004, pp. 449–51.

  4David Howarth, The Dreadnoughts, Amsterdam, 1980, pp. 158–9.

  5Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  6Sorge Memoir, Pt 1, ‘My past history as a German Communist’, pp. 91–8.

  7Hauptkrankenbuch Festungslazarett Kiel, Nr 15918, Krankenbuchlager Berlin, quoted in Dirk Dähnhardt, Revolution in Kiel, Neumünster, 1978, p. 66.

  8Dähnhardt, Revolution in Kiel, p. 83.

  9Prinz Max von Baden, Erinnerungen und Dokumente (Reihe Deutsches Reich – Schriften und Diskurse: Reichskanzler), Hamburg, 2011 p. 599 f.