Burn After Reading (25 page)

For a few weeks Sorge vanished from sight. His editors in Germany were left with the impression that he was still in New York, but the letters and postcards they received from Sorge during this period had been written by him in advance and were mailed at proper intervals by the courier.

Sorge reached Moscow unobserved and found a new man, General Uritsky, at the head of the Fourth Bureau; and he also found a whole set of new policies based on an uncanny estimate of the situation.

As seen through a Kremlin window, the Europe of 1935 was unsettled and turbulent. France was as usual in the throes of grave domestic controversies. Britain seemed firmer, but its stability was deceptive. The Kremlin was looking through Hitler rather than at him. Germany was a problem, Uritsky told Sorge, but subsidiary in importance, and well under control. The problem of the Third Reich would resolve itself, either when Hitler collapsed under the weight of his own blunders, or when he was destroyed by war.

Soviet intelligence was mainly interested, Uritsky said, in what would happen
after
Hitler's collapse. The United States was certain to have a hand in his destruction and would, therefore, emerge as the dominant world power. Consequently, he said, Soviet intelligence was moving fast to cover the United States. It was moving even faster to provide coverage for the countries that Uritsky expected to become stepping stones in the ascendancy of the United States. Foremost among these was Japan, with whom a showdown seemed inescapable. Sorge was to probe for the signs of that showdown and to find out in what direction the Japanese expected to move: whether against the Soviet Union or against Britain and the United States. He was to discover Japanese aspirations and intentions, its war potential and the secrets of its war machine, and especially to survey on a
month-to-month basis Japanese relations with the United States as they deteriorated toward war.

Uritsky gave Sorge a generous budget, considerable independence and a new radio operator, a heavy-set, stolid German named Max Klausen, whom Sorge knew from his Shanghai days.

Sorge returned to New York, then went on to Germany, and finally back to Tokyo. Klausen followed him in a roundabout route: in Tokyo he found a primitive radio set built by a predecessor and made a new one with a maximum range of two thousand five hundred miles. He was set to operate his “music box” from behind the façade of an export-import business, selling German presses for blueprints and fluorescent plates, an excellent front to attract such customers as the Japanese Army and Navy, the big Tokyo banks and Japanese industrial plants.

When Klausen arrived in Tokyo in November, 1935, he found plenty of work awaiting him. Sorge was already receiving invaluable information daily on the policies and plans of the Japanese Government from a certain Hozumi Ozaki. He was a confidant of Prime Minister Prince Konoye, a highly respected publicist who was a charter member of the Breakfast Club, a cabal of the highest political and diplomatic echelons where much of Japan's secret diplomacy was openly discussed.

Within the spy ring, the Soviet Union was called “Wiesbaden,” after the famous German spa. It was to “Wiesbaden” that Klausen sent his signals via a Soviet relay station that was located near Vladivostok. The traffic was in a numerical code keyed to the pages of a German statistical year book. Klausen used the call letters AC to which he added a number and two letters, changing the latter frequently. “Wiesbaden's” call signals began with XU and followed the same arrangement. To the radio operators in “Wiesbaden” Klausen was known as “Fritz.”

For six years, Klausen operated his station without interruption and his was a busy transmitter, indeed. Sorge managed to procure an incredible amount of information. In 1939,
“Fritz” made a total of sixty transmissions, totaling twenty-three thousand one hundred and thirty-nine words. The peak was reached in 1940, when almost thirty thousand words were sent.

Ozaki remained Sorge's most important supplier of information, but there were other informants. Altogether his ring totaled thirty-six members, from a fifty-seven-year-old dressmaker to a twenty-one-year-old clerk at the China Research Institute, the cover-name of a Japanese intelligence agency. Among Sorge's employees were government officials, journalists, artists, students, two brokers and a physician. Some of them had access to the files of the Japanese secret service. Additional intelligence was acquired from the files of the German Embassy which were open to Sorge.

Included in the mass of intelligence were innumerable original documents, many of them given to Ozaki by high-ranking government officials who sought his advice. Ozaki was able to pass on to Sorge certain top secret state papers which Prince Konoye had given him. The documents were photographed on microfilm and taken out of Japan, mostly by couriers who came especially from Moscow to collect them, but occasionally by Klausen or by Sorge himself. Within a few months, Max carried to Shanghai a score of microfilm rolls of a thousand frames each. This was followed by another shipment of thirty rolls, then many more, until a regular shuttle service was operating between Tokyo at one end and Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Manila at the other. Sorge himself once went to Manila as an official courier of the German Embassy, carrying confidential documents in the diplomatic pouch. He also had microfilm copies of those same documents under his shirt. The pouch was consigned to Berlin; his microfilms were for Moscow.

Sorge's material was of extreme importance in shaping Soviet policies. Although Japan was regarded as the Soviet Union's perennial competitor in the Far East and its most likely enemy in war, Sorge steadfastly assured Moscow that Japan would
not
attack the U.S.S.R., but in the end would wage war against the United States.

These reassuring dispatches culminated in a message which Sorge had Klausen put on the air very early in October, 1941. By then, the Soviet Union was reeling under the savage onslaught of the Nazis. In 1941, during the first few months of the Russo-German war, the Red Army lost millions of men; reinforcements were desperately needed to stave off defeat. If only the Far Eastern divisions of the Red Army could be moved to Europe !

In his last dispatch, Sorge advised the Fourth Bureau without equivocation that the Japanese Government and High Command had definitely made up their minds
not
to move in a northerly direction against the Soviet Union, but they would strike south against British possessions, against the Netherlands East Indies and the Philippines, and across the Pacific against the United States. That last message advised Moscow that Japan would definitely launch an attack on the United States “probably in December [1941] but certainly not later than January, 1942.”

The Kremlin was relieved and moved enormous contingents of their Far Eastern army to Europe, using these reinforcements to stem the German advance in the last moment. Sorge's intelligence saved the day for Stalin; probably it saved the Soviet Union itself; it certainly saved Moscow. The Germans were at the outskirts of the city. They could see the onion-topped churches and the tall building of the Moskva Hotel. The Red Army had suffered all the anticipated losses, but miraculously it was still in the field, and, more than that, putting in fresh divisions. Hitler asked General Franz Halder, the chief of his General Staff, how the Russians managed to conjure up those fresh divisions, but Halder could not explain the mystery.

The veil has now been lifted. “The Sorge spy ring in Tokyo,” wrote Brigadier Dixon and Dr. Heilbrunn, “could inform Russia in 1941 that Japan would not attack her, and this intelligence enabled the Russians to transfer their reserves from the Far East to the European theatre where they arrived in time for the battle of Moscow. Russia was then assured of a one-front
war, while Germany had to keep a considerable part of her forces in the West in defense of a second front. Germany fought from then on with one arm tied behind her back, while Russia could use both fists.”

Sorge was not allowed to enjoy the fruits of his triumph. On October 18, 1941, he was arrested at his home by officers of the
Tokkoka
. His downfall must have struck him as an ironic anticlimax. Three days before his arrest, he gave Klausen a dispatch for Moscow, telling the “Center” that he saw no further reason to continue operations in Japan. He suggested that he be transferred with new instructions.

Klausen thought the message was premature. He told Sorge nothing about his opposition to the suggestion, but never put that message on the air.

Sorge was kept in a cell at the headquarters of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Board, more or less unmolested, left to stew in his own juice while damning evidence was being extracted by the most cruel means from his fellow conspirators. He and Ozaki were finally hanged on November 7, 1944. Klausen was sentenced to life imprisonment, but was released by the American Occupation authorities in 1945.

Sorge remained a wayward intellectual to the bitter end, a fanatic and an idealist with a poetic turn of mind. Whenever in his double life he was seized by doubts and scruples, he escaped into poetry, a pastime he bashfully concealed even from his few friends. Only a handful of his poems survive, but they afford an insight into the soul of this very strange man. One of them began :

“… eternally a stranger who condemns himself—never to know real peace …”

During the decade before Pearl Harbor, the world of espionage acquired a new figure who could not help being conspicuous. He was the secret agent of Japan who attained a comic prestige with an oddly sinister overtone. The “spy of the Rising Sun” became a favorite cartoon character, a familiar little man bowing deeply and hissing, “So solly, please,” with a toothy smile, his hands fumbling busily in someone's pocket.

The Japanese themselves saw nothing funny in their spies. They regarded espionage as a deadly serious business, an important instrument of national policy. Fundamentally oriental in character, Japanese espionage was distinctly schizophrenic. In Asia, it operated with unbridled savagery, but in the United States, for instance, it could be civil and courteous. In Asia the Japanese manipulated narcotic drugs, prostitution, pornography, gambling. Its basic aim was to gain its ends by corruption. Rape, murder, kidnaping, arson, and counterfeiting were primary weapons in the arsenal of Japanese secret agents. Their victims were handled with medieval cruelty and even their own agents, if they happened to be Chinese or Caucasians, were treated with contempt.

This system triumphed in Manchuria, whose conquest was largely the handiwork of the secret service, but it failed in China. The lords of Tokyo had to bring in their armies after all; no amount of Japanese-inspired corruption could bring about China's collapse.

Their espionage effort against the Western world was more subtle. It was a large-scale and smooth maneuver in which spies were used along conventional lines with an organization patterned after Western intelligence services.

In the lore of espionage, the Japanese who attained the greatest fame was General Kenji Doihara, sometimes called the Lawrence of Manchuria. The epithet thus gave him major credit for the cheap conquest of Manchuria, which he captured, according to legend, with a pocketful of espionage tricks and a handful of spies.

In actual fact, Doihara was no master spy. His prominence was due chiefly to the fact that, being the brother of the concubine of an Imperial prince, he was given credit for other people's achievements. There was, indeed, a major espionage
coup
behind the lightning conquest of Manchuria, and there were fantastic secret maneuvers in China and elsewhere in Asia, but they were thought up and managed by faceless, nameless specialists who loathed Doihara for hugging the limelight.

The Japanese spy system was not spectacular at all, nothing like Canaris' “Fox Lair” in Berlin or the Fourth Bureau on Znamensky Street in Moscow. It was bureaucratic and pseudo-Prussian in its stolidity and humdrum efficiency.

The structure of the Japanese secret service is difficult to blueprint because it was vague and widely dispersed. It consisted of four major agencies operating as equals, although the semblance of a central intelligence agency existed within the Foreign Office.

This secret service arm operated under the nominal direction of the Foreign Ministers. The instructions issued to agents in the field were frequently signed by the ministers themselves. The Foreign Office supplied resident directors for networks abroad. It provided quarters in its various embassies and legations. It took care of the technical services, supplied the documents of authentication (including the customary forgeries), made necessary disbursements and handled the lines of communications.

The anchoring of the secret service in Japan's diplomatic machinery proved cumbersome even in peacetime, and disastrous in war. Rupture of diplomatic relations inevitably disrupted the espionage system of Japan when and where it was most urgently needed. This happened in the United States on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese Embassy had to close down. With its departure, the entire apparatus of Japanese espionage in the United States had to be dismantled. The espionage effort was shifted to the Embassy in Rio de Janeiro, then to Argentina and Chile, where it was too far removed from the United States to be effective.

The Department of Naval Intelligence was another senior branch of the service and it naturally played a very great part in the preparations for Pearl Harbor. It was a somewhat bizarre coincidence that Kichisaburo Nomura, who was the Japanese Ambassador in Washington at the time of Pearl Harbor, was once director of Naval Intelligence. It operated along more or less traditional lines, under a captain of the Imperial Navy.