Russian Spies at the Top

By Neil Landers

How Australia and Japan coped differently with shocking spieling revelations. A story about human frailties, Cold War politics and an anti-espionage chief spying for the Russians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: booksunleashed
• Release date: Oct 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463044148

Book preview

CHAPTER TWO

A ‘Brilliant Success of Espionage’

Sorge was born in Baku, an oil boomtown on the shore of the Caspian Sea, said Owen Matthews at the start of An Impeccable Spy, a comprehensive biography published in 2019, from which most details in this book about him come. A British writer and former Moscow bureau chief of Newsweek magazine, married to a Russian woman, Matthews said Sorge’s father was a German drilling engineer and his mother Russian. A rebellious paternal great-uncle, Friedrich Sorge, had earlier migrated to the US, where he became a passionate communist. In New York in the 1870s Friedrich became secretary-general of an international communist organisation and corresponded frequently with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in London.

When Sorge was four years old his father moved to a prosperous part of Berlin, where Richard by his own account became a brilliant but difficult student who avidly read classic German authors such as Goethe and Schiller. Aged 18 when war began in 1914, he joined the German army and was injured three times fighting Russians on the eastern front. The third time his legs were shattered by shrapnel. In 1916, when he was able to walk fairly well again, he enrolled in the economics faculty at Berlin University and became strongly attracted to communism.

In February 1917 a revolution began in Saint Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, and quickly spread. Soldiers began to mutiny and head home as the army collapsed. When they arrived they began to form soviets, local ruling committees, with striking workers. In March Emperor Nicholas II was forced to abdicate. Bolsheviks, a revolutionary socialist faction led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew a provisional government and, renamed the Communist Party, established in Moscow a one-party government of what became officially the Soviet Union. When Lenin died in 1924 Joseph Stalin took control after a power struggle.

Sorge was formally discharged from the army in early 1918 and went to Kiel, headquarters of the German Imperial Navy and a centre of growing mutiny by sailors and opposition to the German government. Violence there spread to other German cities. Despite its victory in the east the war was starting to go badly for Germany. On 9 November Emperor Wilhelm II abdicated and on 11 November Germany capitulated to Allied forces. A democratic republican government was able to suppress leftist uprisings and establish what became known as the Weimar Republic.

In Kiel Sorge became a student of a communist professor of political science. Under him he became a committed communist who angrily addressed rebellious sailors on the evils of capitalism. Sorge’s war injuries caused a pronounced limp and frequent pain for the rest of his life. He was however tall, good-looking and those injuries increased his attractiveness to women. He began an affair with the professor’s wife Christiane, who like many later women found him irresistible. In 1921, after her divorce, he married her.

In Germany, Holland and Belgium he continued revolutionary activities with workers. In 1924 he moved to the headquarters in Moscow of the Comintern, the controlling body of international communism. Christiane joined him but didn’t like Moscow and they later separated. Soon he began secretly working for Russia in a Comintern spy network, at first in Germany and then Scandinavia. Back for a while in Moscow he began learning Russian from Katya, an aspiring actress who he later married.

In June 1929 he was sent on assignment to Britain. Christiane, who still had a good relationship with him despite being separated and finalising a divorce, joined him in London. Stalin, who was consolidating his power in Moscow, had expressed hopes for a revolution by British workers. Sorge knew that was unlikely and he faced problems there. Whitehall had ended diplomatic relations with Moscow after police raids in 1927 had revealed an extensive espionage network. His controllers in Moscow had told him to avoid contact with the British Communist Party. Known sympathisers were being watched and the party in Britain was believed to be heavily infiltrated with government agents.

Owen Matthews in An Impeccable Spy conjectured that Sorge was sent there to collect sensitive information from a top Soviet spy. In 1964 Christiane told an MI5 interviewer the trip was to meet a ‘very important person’. She walked with Sorge to a London street corner, she claimed, and while he talked with another man she kept her distance and watched for signs of danger.

‘Who Sorge’s contact may have been was a mystery that worried British spycatchers for decades to come – notably Peter Wright, the Australian-born head of MI5 counter-intelligence,’ Matthews wrote. Wright believed the person Sorge met was Charles Ellis, an Australian who in 1922 began working for British military intelligence in Constantinople. Ellis in 1923, while serving as British vice-consul in Berlin, was recruited by Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. After working for SIS in Vienna, Geneva, Australia and New Zealand, under cover as a journalist for a British newspaper, he later worked at SIS with Kim Philby, Moscow’s master spy in Britain. Ellis came under suspicion by maintaining contact with Philby after the latter disappeared, following the defections of fellow Cambridge Ring spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1957, and later surfaced in Moscow, where he spent the rest of his life.

‘Wright’ Matthews continued, ‘came to believe that Ellis, like Philby, was a Soviet spy, and that he had also passed secrets to the Germans. In 1964 Christiane – by then living in retirement, improbably enough, in a convent in New York – was questioned by a colleague of Wright’s and shown photographs of possible suspects. Christiane tentatively identified Ellis as the man she had seen in London – ‘this man looks familiar’, she told her MI5 interviewer – but could not say with certainty.’

Matthews said however it seemed odd that Sorge at such an early stage in his career would be given such a sensitive task as contacting a top Soviet spy inside the British establishment.

Soon after that, just ahead of a major purge of Comintern staff in Moscow, Sorge was moved to the payroll of the Fourth Directorate of the Red Army General Staff, which had administrative control of foreign-born espionage personnel. He had shown exceptional promise at the Comintern and could speak not only German but English and French. He was establishing a reputation as a journalist and academic, ideal covers for a spy. Importantly also, he was not Russian. The Far East was becoming an increasing priority for Moscow and the Red Army needed better intelligence on China.

Late in 1929 Moscow Centre, in overall command of foreign espionage, moved him to the world’s busiest spy centre, the International Settlement in Shanghai. During three years there he met Agnes Smedley, a crusading left-wing American journalist and by then a well-known author after a semi-autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth. Smedley, an early advocate of women’s rights, was disgusted by all the vice she saw in Shanghai, something Sorge had begun to enjoy. She soon however became his mistress. At a meeting of a Comintern committee where she and Sorge were both members she introduced him to Hotsumi Ozaki, a correspondent for Japan’s leading newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun. Like Sorge, Ozaki was a womaniser and enjoyed more than a few drinks. They got along well.

From Shanghai, Moscow Centre moved Sorge to the city where they most needed someone with his skills – Tokyo. Japan was becoming an industrial powerhouse and militarising rapidly. In 1931 its Kwangtung Army, acting against the express orders of the political and military leadership in Tokyo, had invaded Manchuria and established a puppet state, Manchukuo, which also covered parts of China and Mongolia, all near or bordering Siberia. After Japan in 1905 defeated the Russian Empire in a war the Kwangtung Army had been formed as a security force to protect Japanese interests in that region. Its military victories in 1931 had silenced critics in Japan but added to government problems being caused by the world’s growing Great Depression.

Japanese intentions had become an urgent concern in Moscow.

Sorge had been fairly well known in Shanghai. That might have led to problems with inquisitive authorities in Japan if he went there on one of the ships that sailed frequently from the large Japanese concession in that spy and crime-infested city. Japanese were suspicious of all foreigners and kept any who lived there under informal surveillance. So he was sent via a boat to Vladivostok, by land to stops in Moscow and Germany, a boat to the US, and another boat across the Pacific. In September 1933 he disembarked at Yokohama.

The ring he formed during the next several years, and its results, were described later to the US government by General Douglas MacArthur, who ruled Japan from 1945 to 1951, as ‘a devastating example of a brilliant success of espionage’. Some members were sent by Moscow Central. Others he or colleagues recruited in Japan. To varying degrees all were idealistic and opposed to Japan’s increasing militarism. Most believed they were working for the Comintern.

Sorge controlled the ring tightly and was a brilliant spy in his own right. He was now an excellent academic in some fields and a journalist who wrote for Germany’s leading newspaper, the Frankfurter Zeitung. His war injuries had helped increase his attractiveness to women. They also helped with men, who often had like him fought in World War 1. Soon after he arrived his best friend became Eugen Ott, a now senior military officer who had been in the same division as him on Germany’s eastern front. Ott soon afterwards became Nazi Germany’s ambassador to Japan and began speaking regularly to Hitler. Ott’s wife Helma by then was Sorge’s latest lover, which helped increase his access to secret communications between Germany and Japan.

To improve his credentials, Sorge joined the Nazi Party and began writing for a Nazi publication read by most of the party’s leaders.

He also soon had an even better source than Eugen and Helma Ott to high-level decisions being made in Japan: Hotsumi Ozaki, who had been shocked by the actions of Japanese soldiers he had seen during troubles in Shanghai, and had returned to Tokyo in 1934. A top journalist on Japan’s leading newspaper, he was well-informed on many matters. He was now respectably married with a daughter. And as an upper-class descendent of a samurai family, Japan’s ancient warrior ruling class, he was able to mix easily with people at high levels. In 1937 he joined a government think tank and in 1938 was made an assistant to the prime minister’s office. He resigned from the Asahi Shimbun and moved into a basement office in the prime minister’s official residence, where he became a friend of the Prime Minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoe.

According to Owen Matthews in An Impeccable Spy, Ozaki had access to all government papers that crossed the desks of the prime minister’s colleagues in the cabinet office. He began attending an unofficial breakfast kitchen cabinet of ministers, experts and advisers that became known as the Breakfast Group and each week advised Prince Konoe on foreign affairs.

Japan’s armed forces had become more powerful than the civilian government. They were however badly split. The army, making little progress in China, wanted to invade Siberia, with its vast open spaces and many undeveloped resources. But Japan’s oil reserves were running low. Without oil its whole war machine would grind to a halt. The navy had its eyes on operating oilfields in the Dutch East Indies and wanted to strike south towards those, and also rice fields and other developed resources, such as mines and rubber plantations, in South-East Asia.

Britain’s so-called impregnable fortress of Singapore was not a serious problem. Churchill was unable to send more troops and scouts had established that it could be attacked across the narrow water separating it from Malaya. But the big US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii was. The navy was getting the upper hand in Japan’s internal high-level dispute and already its commander, Admiral Yamamoto, was planning a naval and air attack on Pearl Harbor. Pilots had begun training for this and vessels were being prepared. Japan had been getting some oil from the US. The navy’s position strengthened further when the US banned oil exports after Japan invaded Indochina. It also banned exports of materials such as scrap metal that could be used in making military hardware.

In Washington Japan was still holding peace talks with the US. Prime Minister Konoe did not want war with the US and kept hoping they would succeed.

In Tokyo during 1941 Japanese police began closing in on Sorge’s spy ring. Some members were losing their faith in communism or no longer got on well with Sorge, who had begun drinking very heavily and was becoming erratic. A key member, Max Clausen, now despised Sorge. An exceptionally talented German radio operator who could make radio sets with all sorts of components, Clausen had been sent by the Fourth Department to Shanghai, where he had got on well with Sorge, and then joined him in Tokyo. On 22 August Sorge handed Clausen a message for Moscow saying the Japanese army and government had decided definitely not to attack Russia until at least spring in 1942. But Clausen, who resented the amount of work Sorge kept giving him and feared capture, did not send it until 14 September, which Sorge never knew. With that he sent a new message saying: ‘The sailors no longer believe in the possibility of success of talks between Konoe and Roosevelt …That means war with America.’

Owen Matthews did not support many claims over the years that a single message from Sorge caused Stalin to start moving a huge number of troops from Siberia towards Moscow. Rather, he sent many messages to Moscow Centre informing his chiefs about a fluid situation. Some of those chiefs, like Stalin, who detested Sorge, suspected he was a double agent. But even they began to give his reports the credence they deserved.

Near the end of September Stalin began moving many divisions in Siberia towards Moscow, as well as many tanks and aircraft. Russian historians still hotly debate the exact role of Sorge’s information in Stalin’s decision, according to Matthews. However, that combined message sent on 14 September, he said, was of historic importance. ‘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.’

German troops on the outskirts of Moscow, many shivering in summer clothes as winter set in, never knew what hit them when, on 5 December 1941, the Siberian divisions spearheaded a huge counter-offensive, the start of the end for Nazi Germany. In Washington peace talks were still officially continuing two days later when bombs began to fall on Pearl Harbor, bringing into the war the US, with all its skilled people and industrial might.

By then Sorge was in Tokyo’s Sugamo prison and his spy ring was history. The first important member of the ring to be arrested, on 10 October, was Yotoku Miyagi, who was born in Okinawa and brought up in California. There he became a commercial paint artist with a cheerful demeanour, good covers for a spy, and a communist. He was also fluent in English and Japanese. A Fourth Department agent, pretending to work for the Comintern, recruited him in California and sent him to Sorge in Tokyo. There he obtained lots of useful information by simply going to a specialist bookshop and buying magazines and other publications with articles written by Japanese military officers.

During questioning at a police station Miyagi suddenly jumped up and dived head first out a second floor window towards an approaching tram. He survived the suicide attempt by landing in shrubbery but later in custody began to talk about his work. In following days other members began to talk also after being arrested, trying to save their lives. Ozaki was arrested on 15 October. The next day Prince Konoe resigned and the warmongering General Hideki Tojo became prime minister, ensuring the attack on Pearl Harbor would proceed.

Sorge did not lack female company in Tokyo. Japanese and US police estimated that during his six years in the city he had about 30 mistresses. Some helped him obtain useful information for his paymasters in Moscow. There were also visits to Tokyo’s many brothels or to hotels with women from its more numerous hostess bars, often while drinking with senior Japanese or German military officers in the course of obtaining more information for his paymasters. He could deceive those men as well as he could women. When Nazi security chiefs began to suspect Sorge of working for the Russians they sent Gestapo Colonel Meisinger, known as the Butcher of Warsaw, the most ruthless and terrifying man in their whole security apparatus, to Tokyo to check him out. Sorge was soon taking him to favourite drinking places and convincing him what a great Nazi he was.

By far his most enduring companion was Hanako Miyake, a bashful young waitress he met at Das Rheingold, a Ginza district restaurant popular with the German community. The waitresses dressed in Bavarian clothes and all could speak at least some German. As customers downed their German beer and sausages they were happy to chat with them in booths between fetching orders. His relationship with her was different to all his others in Tokyo. Both loved music and began meeting during the day, often going to music shops, where they would listen to records and he would buy her some.

In the evening customers would usually leave a tip for the waitress who served them. If a tip was generous, and a waitress had liked a customer, it could lead to something more after she finished work. It was months before he made a sexual advance. She accepted and he became the one great love of her life. Good waitress tips remained OK but she always refused to accept money from him in the morning. She did not like his involvements with other women but was always waiting for him. When he was under stress it was always to her he turned.

Hanako first served Sorge on the evening of 4 October 1935 as he celebrated turning 40. On 4 October 1941, as Sorge tried to enjoy what he knew would probably be his last birthday dinner with her, he remarked about how many police now seemed to be following him. Outside on the pavement after dinner he told her not to go home with him because of police surveillance and suggested she go and stay with her mother.

On 19 October Sorge was arrested and tried at first to convince his interrogators that although he had been spying it was only for German military intelligence. That did not work and he struck a deal with the government’s chief prosecutor Mitsusada Yoshikawa. He would co-operate fully on condition that Hanako not be harmed. Yoshikawa, who later described Sorge as ‘the greatest man I have ever met’, promised that she would not and made sure the promise was kept.

CHAPTER THREE

Wartime Problems at Home and Abroad

Parts of Australia’s 8th division were already in Malaya awaiting a possible Japanese attack when the Pacific war began. They were soon in action against Japanese units that from Indochina had quickly overrun Thailand and begun landing along the coast of Malaya. The Japanese had air superiority as well as superior tanks and tactics. Before long, members of the 8th Division who survived fighting in Malaya were in Singapore. When the city fell on 15 February they, along with other Allied troops, became prisoners of war. The division ceased to exist and many of its members never saw Australia again. On 19 February the war came to Australia when 242 Japanese aircraft heavily bombed Darwin.

Australia had always looked to Britain for protection. In an historic speech that angered Churchill, Prime Minister Curtin had turned to the US for help. As a result, US aircraft soon began to land in Australia. One of the first places where they landed was at a rapidly expanding air base at Bankstown, alongside the Georges River on the southwestern outskirts of Sydney. So many arrived that for a while Bankstown, where I had been born in 1938 and grew up, became known as Yankstown.

Most Bankstown people got on well with the Americans. Shopkeepers were happy to take their money. My father’s best friend, born like him in Lancashire, owned a shoe shop near the station. He recalled that many were big men who were difficult to fit. Before long he was scouring warehouses throughout Sydney for size 10 and 11 shoes and boots for them. More than a few women later married one.

The top of a high hill between the shopping centre and the air base was sealed off and work began on a secret underground air control centre. Three stories deep, it was built to survive the largest bombs then known and was modelled on one which had controlled Spitfires and Hurricanes during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Some