An Impeccable Spy

by Owen Matthews

  9Fesyun, Documents, No. 29.

  10Deakin and Storrey, Case of Richard Sorge, p. 58.

  11Frederic Wakeman Jr, Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1996, pp. 145–50.

  12Other agents in Germany, Western Poland, Italy, Turkey, Persia, Afghan-istan and Japan had no radios and still had to work through official embassy channels (Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 159).

  13Jonathan Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence, Oxford, 2015, p. 28.

  14Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 160.

  15Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 166.

  16Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 168.

  17Despite the rushed and imperfect nature of the team’s preparation, Basov seemed to consider the latest Shanghai team unusually well furnished with legal cover. Basov reported to Centre in February 1930 that ‘we understand legalisation to be the existence of a good cover story alone without supporting proper documents, military docs, birth certificates. But the conditions of work demand that our agents need to have these documents – it is expensive but necessary and will set them up for productive work in future,’ Chunikhin, Richard Sorge: Notes, Doc. 28

  18Wakeman Jr, Policing Shanghai, p. 98. A private survey in 1929 of the gambling houses of the French Concession alone estimated that $150,000 changed hands every day in the average casino, which boasted between 1,000 and 5,000 clients in a 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. shift.

  19Harriet Sergeant, Shanghai: Collision Point of Cultures, 1918–1939, New York, 1990, p. 14.

  20Wakeman Jr, Policing Shanghai, pp. 145–50.

  21Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 142.

  22Sorge Memoir, Pt 5, ‘My espionage group in China 1930–33’, pp. 124–33.

  23E. Prudnikova, and O. Gorchakov, Legendy GRU, St Petersburg, 2005, p. 53.

  24Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 182.

  25Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 181.

  26Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 182.

  27Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 196.

  28Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 194.

  29Ruth Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley, Oxford, 2004, pp. 86–8.

  30Whymant, Stalin’s Spy, p. 32.

  31Price, Lives of Agnes Smedley, p. 194.

  32See Werner, Sonja’s Rapport, chapter 3.

  33Price, Lives of Agnes Smedley, p. 200.

  34Price, Lives of Agnes Smedley, p. 203.

  35Price, Lives of Agnes Smedley, p. 204.

  36Agnes Smedley, ‘The Social Revolutionary Struggle in China’ and ‘The Revolutionary Peasant Movement in China’, Lewis Gannett Papers.

  37Chen Hansheg, ‘Shi MoTe Lai zai shanghai’, trans. courtesy of Robert Farnsworth, quoted in Price, Lives of Agnes Smedley, p. 466.

  38Julius Mader, Dr Sorge-Report, 3rd extended edition, Berlin, 1986, p. 119.

  39Whymant, Stalin’s Spy, p. 33.

  40Price, Lives of Agnes Smedley, p. 203.

  41Agnes Smedley to Karin Michaelis, 23 July 1930, Karin Michaelis papers quoted in Price, Lives of Agnes Smedley, p. 201.

  42Price, Lives of Agnes Smedley, p. 205.

  43Willoughby, Shanghai Conspiracy, p. 28.

  44Curiously, he was not able to connect with Weingarten’s transmitter in Shanghai.

  45State Department passport (130) pile, Agnes Smedley, 4 July 1930; Douglas Jenkins to the Honorable Secretary of State, August 1930, 800.00b, Smedley, Agnes/9 RG 59, quoted in Price, Lives of Agnes Smedley, p. 458.

  46Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 182.

  47Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 188.

  48Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 198.

  49‘The Revolution in China, and the Menace of Imperialistic Intervention’, Izvestia, 216, 7 August 1930.

  50Price, Lives of Agnes Smedley, p. 200.

  CHAPTER 5

  1Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbours, chapter 2.

  2Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 211.

  3Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 216.

  4After his failed attempt to extract money from Ulanovsky, Pik’s next project was another extortion operation. Pik approached a local businessman and huckster, one Israilevich, alias ‘Bomont’, posing as a Belgian. Pik had got wind of a blackmail scheme that Bomont was attempting against an American woman who ran a Shanghai brothel. Pik had learned of the scheme from one of the prostitutes, a Russian woman named Anna Zalewsky. Zalewsky had demanded $18,000 from her madame, which she proposed to divide with Bomont. Pik demanded a cut of this blackmail operation, threatening to expose Bomont to the American consul. When Bomont refused to include Pik in the deal he made good on his threat to expose Bomont – but got nowhere as it turned out that Bomont was not, as Pik had believed, an American citizen after all. Pik then attempted to blackmail a member of the American consular staff with homosexual revelations, which again backfired after the man committed suicide. At this point Pik turned to literature, letting it be known that he was writing a sensational book about the private lives of many prominent citizens, including members of the Shanghai Municipal Council. The work was never published, presumably because some of the subjects of the scandalous memoir paid Pik some hush money. At the same time Pik also attempted to expand his circle of spying clients by peddling information to the Shanghai departments of the German Gestapo political police, as well as to Japanese naval intelligence. One of his associates at this time was the extravagant and scandalous Shanghai society hostess who styled herself ‘Princess Sumeyer’, who claimed to be the daughter of the Indian Maharajah of Patiala. The princess was also a Japanese agent. In the summer of 1941, Pik seems to have turned his hand to contract murder. An anonymous brochure published in Russian in Shanghai, entitled ‘Who are you, Evgeny Hovants?’, exposed the eponymous Hovants, a prominent member of the local Russian community, as a Soviet police agent. The author, an émigré named Mamontov-Ryabchenko, was shot some months later – and before he died named Pik as the organiser of his murder. For this mis-step Pik was tried in a British Settlement court, found guilty and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He was, however, released after the Japanese occupied Shanghai and was used once again as an intelligence agent. Pik prepared lists of foreigners he counted as enemies of Japan or linked to foreign espionage services, who should be interned for Japanese naval intelligence. Before the end of the war Pik fled to Japan, but his ship hit a mine. His incredible luck held, however: his leg broken, he was rescued from the sea and delivered safely to Japan. There, posing as a German citizen called ‘K. Kluge’, he spent several months recovering in hospital in Kyoto. After the Americans occupied Japan, Pik was arrested and imprisoned in Sugamo prison in Tokyo as a war criminal, but was released after a few months. It is likely that he was recruited by American intelligence and worked for them for some years after the war. See Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, pp. 218–19; Viktor Usov, Sovietskaya Razvedka v Kitae 20–iye gody XX veka, Moscow, 2007, pp. 356–7.

  5Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 227.

  6Price, Lives of Agnes Smedley, p. 211.

  7Ruth Werner, Sonja’s Rapport, Berlin, 1977, p. 44.

  8Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 307.

  9Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 313.

  10Werner, Sonja’s Rapport, p. 55.

  11Sorge Memoir, Pt 7, ‘General remarks on Efficiency’, p. 146.

  12Paul Monk, ‘Christopher Andrew and the Strange Case of Roger Hollis’, Quadrant magazine, 1 April 2010.

  13http://fbistudies.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/20150417_ReportandChronologyHollis.pdf.

  14The evidence seems compelling that MI5 had kept tabs on Ursula Kuczynski and her second husband and fellow Soviet agent, Len Beurton, in Oxford; knew they were active and dangerous communists, and had reasons to at least suspect that they were in fact agents working for the Fourth Department. ‘Sonja’ was already a known communist before she moved to Oxford in 1940. Hollis was expressly warned about the couple by his staff. Yet Hollis chose in every case to set aside such warnings and do nothing about them. He was personally responsible for preparing and sending reports to the US intelli
gence services about dangerous communists in Britain who might be of possible concern to the United States – yet he omitted all mention of Kuczynski in every such report. Hollis cleared the Soviet atomic spy Klaus Fuchs and others, whose ‘controller’ or courier was ‘Sonja’ herself.

  On two separate occasions Hollis refused permission for US intelligence officers to interview ‘Mrs Beurton’, arguing that this would serve no useful purpose and that she was merely a harmless housewife. He arranged for himself and Kim Philby to be the recipients of reports from the Radio Security Service and then, according to two key and credible wit-nesses, consistently marked their reports that there was an illegal wireless transmitter operating in the Oxford area: ‘No Further Action’. Years later, while Hollis was under investigation by Peter Wright and other British counter-intelligence officers, it was learned that his Peking roommate – the retired British Army officer, Captain Anthony Staples – recalled that Hollis had been visited there both by an American woman and a German man: Agnes Smedley and Arthur Ewert. Ewert was the Comintern’s chief secret agent in China. Could he have been Hollis’s recruiter? Many in British counter-intelligence believed so. That Hollis knew Karl and Luise Rimm (GRU operatives who joined the Shanghai rezidentura after Sorge’s departure for Tokyo), likewise came out only much later. There is also evidence that Luise Rimm had a love affair with Roger Hollis lasting three years, until the Rimms were recalled to Moscow. For many years, Hollis also obfuscated that he had travelled via Moscow to and from England in the 1930s, immediately before applying for a job at MI5. He also said nothing about who he met while he was there. His contacts with Comintern officers in Shanghai, the fact of Hollis’s 1934 and 1936 visits to Moscow, and a fortnight’s visit to Paris in November 1937, have led to the suspicion that Hollis was recruited by the GRU. For example, his visit to Paris was made immediately after he had been offered a job at MI5 to start the following year. Paris was the epicentre of Soviet intelligence operations in Western Europe, including Britain. ‘Sonja’ also visited London in 1938, the year Hollis began work at MI5; she was posted to Oxford by the GRU immediately after Hollis’s job at MI5 required him to move to nearby Blenheim Palace, from late 1940 until 1943. ‘Sonja’ then became the courier and controller of Klaus Fuchs, whom Hollis cleared; and he insistently shielded her from all surveillance or interference throughout the 1940s. Writing from behind the Iron Curtain as Ruth Werner, ‘Sonja’ declared coyly that she often felt she had had a protective hand within MI5 during the 1940s. The record is clear that Hollis was that protective hand, for reasons that make no apparent sense unless he was the agent ‘Elli’ and was working, like Sonja, for the GRU. See Paul Monk, PhD, and John L. Wilhelm, ‘British Patriot or Soviet Spy? Clarifying a Major Cold War Mystery. An Analysis of Chapman Pincher’s Indictment of Sir Roger Hollis’, presented at the Institute of World Politics, Washington, DC, 10 April 2015.

  15This story is based on the testimony of Einar Sanden, which remains to be corroborated. It comes very late in Pincher’s account of the case and depends upon alleged tape recordings of interviews with Luise Rimm in her old age. If it could be authenticated, it would certainly add to the many threads of evidence suggesting that Hollis was recruited by the GRU and that those soundings began in China in the early 1930s. See Chapman Pincher, Their Trade is Treachery, London, 1981, chapter 11.

  16‘Extracts’, Police interrogation, Hotsumi Ozaki, 5 March and 21 July 1942, ID 923289, RG 319. For more on Ozaki and Smedley see Chalmers Johnson, An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring, Stanford, CA, 1990.

  17‘Extracts’, Police Interrogation, Hotsumi Ozaki, 5 March and 21 July 1942.

  18‘Extracts’, Police Interrogation, Hotsumi Ozaki, 8 March 1942.

  19Whymant, Stalin’s Spy, p. 36.

  20Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Vol. 2, p. 8.

  21Price, Lives of Agnes Smedley, p. 217.

  22Werner, Sonja’s Rapport, p. 55.

  23Deakin and Storrey, Case of Richard Sorge, p. 87.

  24Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 355.

  25Frederick S. Litten, ‘The Noulens Affair’, China Quarterly, No. 138, June 1994, pp. 492–512.

  26Sorge reported that an intermediary had suggested a $50,000 bribe to the Chinese judges to release his wife Tatiana Moyesenko in December 1931. In May 1932, Centre actually sent a $20,000 bribe in an attempt to commute the Noulens’ life sentence passed by a Chinese court in Nanking the previous August.

  27Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 401.

  28Historian James Weland has concluded that senior commanders had tacitly allowed field operatives to proceed on their own initiative, then endorsed the result after a positive outcome was assured (James Weland, ‘Misguided Intelligence: Japanese Military Intelligence Officers in the Manchurian Incident, September 1931’, Journal of Military History, 58 (3), 1994, pp. 445–60).

  29Each year at 10 a.m. on 18 September, air-raid sirens sound for several minutes in numerous major cities across China in commemoration.

  30Deakin and Storrey, Case of Richard Sorge, p. 64.

  31Robert H. Ferrell, ‘The Mukden Incident: September 18–19, 1931’, Journal of Modern History 27 (1), 1955, pp. 66–72.

  32Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China, Cambridge, MA, 2009, p. 93.

  33Prange interview with Teikichi Kawai, 13 January 1965, Target Tokyo; Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Vol. 2, p. 208; Johnson, Instance of Treason, p. 80.

  34Price, Lives of Agnes Smedley, p. 218.

  35Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 407.

  36Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 407.

  37See Jamie Bisher, White Terror: Cossack Warlords of the Trans-Siberian, London, 2009.

  38Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 412.

  39‘Extracts’, Police Interrogation, Teikichi Kawai, 31 March 1949.

  40Deakin and Storrey, Case of Richard Sorge, p. 76.

  41Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Vol. 2, p. 105.

  42‘Extracts’, Police Interrogation, Teikichi Kawai, March 1949–1 April 1949.

  43Deakin and Storrey, Case of Richard Sorge, p. 81.

  44Wakeman Jr, Policing Shanghai, p. 160.

  45Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 632.

  CHAPTER 6

  1Sorge Memoir, Pt 6, ‘Espionage of my group in Japan’, p. 134.

  2Sorge Memoir, Pt 6, ‘Espionage of my group in Japan’, p. 135.

  3‘Extracts’, Examination No. 10 by Preliminary Judge, 28 July 1942; Deakin and Storrey, Case of Richard Sorge, p. 95.

  4Sorge Memoir, Pt 6, ‘Espionage of my group in Japan’, p. 136.

  5Raymond W. Leonard, Secret Soldiers of the Revolution: Soviet Military Intelligence, 1918–1933, Westport, Conn. and London, 1999, p. 17.

  6N. S. Cherushev, and J. N. Cherushev, Rasstrelenaya Elita PKKA (Komandiry 1ogo i 2ogo rangov, Komkory, Komdivy, i im ravniye): 1937–41, Moscow, 2012, pp. 322–496.

  7Prange et al., Target Tokyo, p. 96.

  8Alekseyev, Your Ramsay, p. 279.

  9Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent, p. 206.

  10Ya Gorev, ‘Ya Znal Sorge’, Pravda, 1964, p. 13.

  11Deakin and Storrey, Case of Richard Sorge, p. 101.

  12Massing, This Deception, p. 69.

  13Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Vol. 1, p. 228.

  14Curt Reiss, Total Espionage, New York, 1941, pp. 88–9, 219; Democratic Idea: The Myth and Reality is perhaps Haushofer’s best-known work.

  15Evgeny Sergeev, Russian Military Intelligence in the War with Japan, 1904–05, London, 2012, p. 28.

  16Reiss, Total Espionage, p. 219.

  17Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Vol. 1, p. 228.

  18Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Vol. 1, p. 229.

  19Deakin and Storrey, Case of Richard Sorge, p. 100.

  20Hede Massing, ‘The Almost Perfect Russian Spy’, True, December 1951, p. 96.

  21Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Vol. 1, p. 348.

  22Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Vol. 1, p. 334.


  23Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Vol. 3, p. 315.

  24Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Vol. 3, p. 315.

  25Ralph de Toledano, Spies, Dupes, and Diplomats, New York, 1952, pp. 70–1.

  CHAPTER 7

  1Quoted in Michael Yudell (ed.), Richard Sorge: A Chronology, richardsorge.com, 1996.

  2Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Vol. 1, pp. 228, 359.

  3Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Vol. 1, p. 229.

  4Deakin and Storrey, Case of Richard Sorge, p. 108.

  5Deakin and Storrey, Case of Richard Sorge, p. 109.

  6Whymant, Stalin’s Spy, p. 49.

  7Whymant, Stalin’s Spy, p. 51.

  8Deakin and Storrey, Case of Richard Sorge, p. 110.

  9See Edward Behr, Hirohito: Behind the Myth, New York, 1989, chapter 5.

  10Saionji, who had spent time in republican Paris during the Commune in the 1870s, distrusted the role of military men in politics. He admired England and likened the role of the emperor to that of the British monarchy, aloof from politics except in exceptional circumstances; that is a constitutional monarch as well as a theocratic sovereign. Deakin and Storrey, Case of Richard Sorge, p. 104.

  11Deakin and Storrey, Case of Richard Sorge, p. 113.

  12Prange interview with Araki, 6 January 1965, Target Tokyo.

  13Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Vol. 1, p. 230.

  14Der Spiegel, 20 June 1951, p. 29.

  15John Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power, London, 1967, pp. 127–8.

  16Der Spiegel, 20 June 1951, p. 28; Reiss, Total Espionage, p. 9; Dirksen, Moscow, Tokyo, London, p. 143.

  17Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Vol. 3, p. 163; ‘Sorge’s Notes’, and ‘Extracts’, Interrogation of Richard Sorge, 22 December 1941, p. 27, Record Group 319, File ID923289, Pt 47, Box 7484, Pt XV, p. 192.

  18‘Extracts’, Preliminary Judge Examination of Sorge No. 10, 28 July 1942.

  19Article IV in Kinjiro Nakamura, Zoruge, Ozaki Hotzumi Supai Jiken No Zenbo: Soren Wa Subete o Shitte Ita (‘The Entire Picture of the Sorge-Ozaki Hotzumi Spy Incident’ – hereafter Entire Picture), Osaka, 1949, p. 17.

  20Toshito (ed.), Gendai-shi Shiryo, Vol. 1, p. 267.

  21Review of Dusan Cvetic, ‘Who Was Branko Vukelić?’, Yugoslav Monthly Review, October 1964, p. 38.