Max Hastings - The Secret War - Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945

On the eve of war, Moscow Centre could boast that the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack groups in Germany provided excellent information from the Nazis’ inner circle. The ‘Lucy’ Ring in Switzerland had established itself soundly, but only began to provide important intelligence from 1941 onwards. The Trepper–Gourevitch networks trod water until 1940. The extensive Soviet secret machine in the US, which will be described elsewhere, produced a steady stream of technological intelligence, which would have been more useful to the Russians in advancing their own defence base if their industries had been capable of exploiting it.

We have left to last the best of all Moscow’s men – or rather, the most spectacular. Richard Sorge grips the imagination of posterity, more because of what he was than through his influence on history, which was marginal. He dispatched to Moscow a flow of privileged political and strategic information, acquired through an access to high places achieved through sheer force of personality. Much of his material was ignored, however, or merely duplicated similar reports from more authoritative Berlin sources. Some historians who selectively quote Sorge’s occasional brilliant insights have ignored his misjudgements and false prophecies – ‘noise’. His character and career as an agent were nonetheless extraordinary.

‘Ika’, as Sorge was nicknamed, was born in Baku in 1895, one of nine children of a German petroleum engineer and a Russian mother. After completing school in Germany he found himself thrust into the Kaiser’s war as a young soldier. While convalescing in Königsberg after suffering a bad wound, he was indoctrinated into communist ideology, allegedly by the father of one of his nurses, though there was already a family precedent: Sorge’s grandfather had been an associate of Marx and Engels. When the war ended he became a Marxist instructor, and acquired a PhD in political science. In 1921 he married Christiane Gerlach, having persuaded her to abandon a previous husband. His communist and revolutionary links attracted the unfavourable attention of the police, and he found Germany becoming too hot to hold him. In 1924 the couple moved to Moscow, where Sorge was recruited and trained as a Soviet agent. Uncertainty persists about his movements in the next five years, though it is known that he visited Britain. Christiane left him, without the formality of a divorce – his immense appeal to women made him careless about whether they stayed or went. The combination of rough-hewn good looks and a hypnotic, driven personality enabled him to attract, and often to maintain in tandem, an impressive range of lovers of all shapes and sizes. Though sceptics later condemned Sorge as a charlatan as well as a betrayer – a fundamentally shallow figure despite his intellectual pretensions – he was a strikingly successful one.

In 1929 the Red Army’s Fourth Department – later the GRU – offered him an overseas assignment. He requested China, and arrived in Shanghai that November under cover as a freelance journalist, with a wireless-operator in tow. He achieved rapid social success in the European concessions, and made well-informed friends. Also agents. He himself was masquerading as an American, but dropped the pose with Agnes Smedley, the American China traveller, whom he enlisted in Moscow’s service. In 1930 he met twenty-nine-year-old Hotsumi Ozaki, a struggling magazine writer with communist sympathies, whom he also recruited and who played a notable part in his subsequent career. Like almost all those who worked with him, Ozaki fell under the foreigner’s spell. Long afterwards, another of his Japanese network said wonderingly of the superspy that Sorge became, ‘You meet a man like him only once in a lifetime.’ The GRU agent threw himself into researching every aspect of Chinese life, and his reports earned warm approval from his chiefs.

In January 1933 he returned to Moscow, where he ‘married’ again: a young Russian girl named Yekaterina Maximova – ‘Katcha’ – to whom he wrote emotional letters through the years that followed. He himself wanted to stay in Russia, but what use was a foreign spy in his employers’ own country? The GRU decided to post him to Tokyo. In preparation for this assignment, Sorge travelled to Germany, now Nazi-ruled, to secure appropriate credentials, and achieved another brilliant social and professional success, while somehow evading exposure of his communist past. He met the publisher of Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik , an ardent National Socialist, and secured from him both a contract as a ‘stringer’ and a letter of introduction to the German embassy in Tokyo.

He also gained the goodwill of the magazine’s founder, Karl Haushofer, a second ‘stringing’ arrangement with Täglische Rundschau , and a letter addressed to Lt. Col. Eugen Ott, a German officer serving an exchange term with a Japanese artillery regiment. The editor-in-chief urged Ott to ‘trust Sorge in everything; that is, politically, personally and otherwise’. Through these sponsors the spy pulled off a further coup: he became a member of the National Socialist Party. Thus armoured, this avowed Nazi set off for Tokyo via the United States with a wireless-operator, Bruno Wendt of the Red Army, carrying in his luggage a copy of the 1933 German Statistical Yearbook to provide the key for his coding. Sorge was thirty-eight, and on the threshold of one of the greatest espionage careers in history.

Arrived in Japan, with remarkable speed he established a relationship with the German ambassador Herbert von Dirksen, a Prussian aristocrat; and a much closer one with Colonel Ott, who embraced another former Frontsoldaten as kin. Sorge, with characteristic recklessness, promptly began an affair with Ott’s wife Helma, an Amazonian six-footer who was herself a former communist. This appears to have done no harm to the spy’s relationship with her husband, who seemed, as he remained, mesmerised by his new friend. The colonel was an austere and unbending figure who perhaps saw qualities in Sorge which he envied, not least exuberance. The newcomer also ingratiated himself with the convivial and charming Captain Paul Wenneker, who joined the German mission in 1934 as naval attaché.

Sorge’s intimacy with the embassy won him some respect and attention from the Japanese, though at this stage the Tokyo government had by no means committed itself to an alliance with Hitler – German residents were subject to police surveillance as intrusive as that imposed on other foreigners. Sorge threw himself into acquiring information of all kinds about the country, its people, history and culture, forming a library of over a thousand books, though he never learned to read Japanese, nor even to speak it well. His sexual indiscretions would have earned censure in any spy school, but his management of the relationship with the German diplomatic community at the colonnaded and handsomely gardened embassy offered a masterclass in penetration. Despite his avowed National Socialist allegiance, he was gaily critical of German government policies.

At meetings with Dirksen and Ott – who was now transferred to become military attaché – Sorge appeared to provide as much information as he received. Indeed, they recognised that the journalist knew more about Japan than they did. He started to assist in the compilation of diplomatic reports for Berlin, and forged a long-distance relationship with the editor of the Nazi Party newspaper, contributing to its columns and attending local Tokyo branch meetings. Meanwhile, patiently and skilfully, Sorge built up his network of informants for Moscow. Hotsumi Ozaki, his old friend and source from Shanghai, was now a respected journalist in Osaka, whence he was able to transfer to Tokyo. In that pre-social-media universe, for the next two years Sorge was able to prevent Ozaki from discovering his real name: the German was known to him only as ‘Mr Johnson’, the American cover identity he had worn in his China days.