...Ozaki proved to be extremely helpful in Sorge's fact-finding mission in
China. A dedicated leftist, the Japanese journalist provided Sorge with
scores of important contacts in the Chinese Communist underground.
Information Sorge received from these contacts was coded and then given to
Max Klausen, a Communist merchant seaman and radio operator.
The plans of the Sorge ring were thrown into turmoil when the Japanese
invaded Manchuria in September 1931. Sorge was uncertain as to how the
various political factions in China would react to this new threat. It was
evident to him that relations between Japan and the Soviet Union were
strained to the point where hostilities between the two nations might soon
occur.
Sorge met with a friend of Ozaki's, Teikichi Kawai, who worked as a
correspondent for the Shanghai Weekly. He quickly absorbed Kawai into his
circle, sending him on a mission to Manchuria, instructing him to find out
if Japanese militarists there planned to invade Northern China. He was also
to determine how the inhabitants were reacting to Japanese occupation and,
especially, what the Japanese and Chinese in the area thought about the
Soviet Union. Within a few weeks, Kawai returned to Shanghai to deliver a
detailed report to Sorge of conditions in Manchuria. Kawai was arrested a
few days later by Japanese police who maintained order in the Japanese
enclave in Shanghai and kept strict surveillance on their own nationals. As
would be the case with almost all of Sorge's spies, Kawai proved his
loyalty to his chief by telling nothing to the agents of Kempei Tai
(Japanese secret police). He was soon released without ever mentioning
Sorge or his mission in China.
Soviet spymasters in Moscow, at this time doubted Sorge's true value to
them. They had assigned another spy, Ursula Ruth Kuczynski, one of the
NKVD's cleverest agents who also used the cover of a journalist, to report
on Sorge's progress. Though married, Kuczynski, a sensuous brunette, was
always ready to employ her feminine wiles on behalf of the Communists, she
being a fanatical follower of Marx and Lenin. Kuczynski reportedly struck
up a relationship with Sorge when meeting Sorge at the Shanghai press club
that became briefly more intimate, though she learned nothing from him.
Meanwhile, Moscow began carping about what it considered to be extravagant
operating expenses and salaries for the Sorge ring but its doubts were soon
dispelled. On January 28, 1932, the Japanese invaded Shanghai under the
pretext that Chinese insurgents had attacked Japanese nationals in their
enclave. The attacks had been staged by Eastern Jewel who had paid gangs of
Chinese criminals to attack the Japanese and thus create the necessity for
the invasion.
As Japanese troops battled the 19th Chinese Route Army in the streets and
suburbs of Shanghai, Sorge learned from his contacts at the Japanese
consulate that Japan's incursion was only the preliminary act to a
full-scale war, which Japan intended to launch in gobbling up all of China.
Members of his ring fed him information on Chinese troop dispositions at
the time and Sorge himself witnessed the vicious street fighting in
Shanghai between Japanese and Chinese troops. His long, detailed report in
which he analyzed the inferiority of Chinese troops as to morale, equipment
and leadership and the excellent condition and leadership of Japanese
troops impressed GRU in Moscow.
Ozaki was recalled to Japan in early 1932, but the loss of the Soviet
spymaster's most important link to high-level Japanese information was
supplanted by many other contacts he had made, especially Kawai. Ozaki may
have, at this time, been suspected of being a spy either for the Soviets
or, more logically, the Kempei Tai or Special Service Organ. Chinese
intelligence, headed by the indefatigable Morris "Two Gun" Cohen, believed
Sorge was also a Soviet spy, as his abrupt departure suggested, but they
could not prove it.
Sorge was too clever for his pursuers. For the next nine months he
diligently applied himself as a journalist, writing lengthy, well-composed
articles of a decidedly right-wing nature for his German newspaper. His
published works cemented his relationship with the German Military Mission
to Chiang Kai-shek. So impressed with these articles were the Germans that
they arranged to have Sorge invited to Chiang's headquarters in Nanking
where he met the generalissimo.
Chiang was friendly and outgoing toward Sorge. He viewed the man, on the
advice of his spymaster Cohen, as an acceptable double agent, one whose
leftist contacts in Shanghai suggested he was a Soviet spy but who, in
reality, had merely set up these contacts to appear as such. Sorge,
according to the Chinese and the Japanese secret police and intelligence
services, was really a German agent pretending to be a Soviet agent
pretending to be a working journalist. Sorge, of course, knew that he was
suspected of being an agent for the Abwehr and he did much to promote that
perception. In reality, of course, Sorge was never anything more or less
than the top Soviet spymaster in the Far East, a role he would continue to
faithfully enact until his exposure and execution.
In December 1932, Sorge was recalled to Moscow. General Berzin and other
high-ranking Soviet intelligence chiefs hailed him as a brilliant
spymaster, one who had with apparent ease obtained deep and useful
information concerning Japan's military aims, as well as Chiang Kai-shek's
military power and sources of equipment and arms, along with an overall
perspective of foreigners and Chinese toward the Soviet Union.
After being feted and decorated, Sorge was allowed to pursue his own
interests. He began writing a book about Chinese agriculture. He met an
attractive young woman named Yekaterina Maximova, whom he married. Sorge
did not have enough time to either finish his book or enjoy his new
marriage. Summoned to General Berzin's office, he was told that the Fourth
Bureau had a new assignment for him. Japan was the one nation in the world,
because of language problems and fierce native patriotism, thought to be
impenetrable as far as the gathering of any real intelligence. The Fourth
Bureau and the GRU chiefs of the Red Army believed that since Richard Sorge
had penetrated Japanese and Chinese intelligence in Shanghai with such
excellent results that he might be the one man to run an effective Soviet
spy ring in Japan.
Sorge himself later related that his mission to Japan was "to study very
carefully the question of whether or not Japan was planning to attack the
Soviet Union. This was for many years the most important duty assigned to
me and my group. It would not be far wrong to say that it was the sole
object of my mission to Japan."
The mission originally specified that Sorge would spend only two years in
Japan to learn if he could actually conduct espionage activities in a
security-conscious country where spies were routinely ferreted out by
secret "thought" police (the unofficial title of the Kempei Tai). The
naturally furtive Japanese were always alert and on guard against foreign
intelligence probing, this unswerving attitude coupled to a traditional
distrust of all foreigners.
So that Sorge would have absolute control of his ring, it was decreed that
he was never to have more than four persons in his cell. Besides himself,
he was to be allowed a single Japanese contact, a wireless operator, and a
European. Most importantly, Sorge was to have no contact whatsoever with
the Japanese Communist Party or with the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo, Japan. He
was to wholly disassociate himself with any leftist-leaning groups and
appear to be a German journalist with decided sympathies for the fascist
states of Germany, Italy, and Japan. He was given the code name of
"Ramsey", and, on May 17, 1933, Sorge left Moscow for Berlin. He had
serious bridge-building to perform in Berlin before he could move on to
Japan. The Nazis had come to power with Adolf Hitler as chancellor only a
short time earlier. All of the secret police dossiers were now in the hands
of the Gestapo.
Sorge knew that his own early history of Communist activities were to be
found somewhere in German police files. Once in Berlin he hastily and
nervously began to shore up his past by obtaining references from those of
the right-wing who never knew about his Communist background. With these
references and those from editors of German newspapers for which he had
written while in China, he was able to present a self-portrait of a German
dedicated to the advancement of Hitler, the Nazis and Germany. On June 1,
1933, Sorge applied for a German passport, emphasizing in his application
his father's acceptable German background.
Somehow the Gestapo overlooked, ignored, or could not find evidence of
Sorge's leftist past in Germany, such as there was of it to examine. It is
also possible that a Communist mole in the Gestapo destroyed any records
dealing with Sorge's former Communist affiliations. His passport finally in
hand, Dr. Richard Sorge, German journalist, took passage for Japan,
arriving in Yokohama on September 6, 1933. Once in Yokohama, Sorge lined up
his other three contacts, a wireless operator named M. Bernhardt who used
the alias of Wendt, a Yugoslav Communist named Branko Vukelic, who worked
as a photographic technician and a correspondent for the French news agency
Havas in Tokyo, and a Japanese painter, Yotoku Miyagi.
None of these new Sorge associates were fully trusted by their superior.
Bernhardt was a heavier drinker than Sorge and the spymaster often found
him so drunk that he could hardly manage to transmit messages. Vukelic was
a frail person whose commitment to Communism seemed equally anemic. Miyagi,
like Vukelic, was vague in his commitment to the Soviet cause.
Sorge met secretly and separately with his three contacts. In a Tokyo art
gallery, while pretending to study paintings, he sat next to Miyagi and
told him to obtain certain political and military information. The
30-year-old Miyagi, though willing and intelligent, was a poor conduit of
information on Japan's military and political plans. He had lived in the
U.S. since he was sixteen and he had no real understanding of lifestyle and
policies in Japan. He earned a living by selling paintings but made few
important contacts among government officials. Most of the information he
passed along to Sorge was useless, gleaned from Japanese newspapers that
Miyagi read religiously each day.
Where Miyagi disappointed Sorge, Bernhardt angered the spymaster with his
seemingly purposeful negligence. Drunk most of the time, Bernhardt seldom
transmitted the reports Sorge put together from his own findings while
masquerading as a journalist. Bernhardt had set up two transmitters in
Yokohama, one in his own home and one in a small house occupied by Vukelic
and his wife Edith. Less than half of the messages Sorge brought to
Bernhardt were actually transmitted. Even the film that Sorge gave
Bernhardt to send to Moscow by courier was often misplaced or never
delivered at all.
When Sorge confronted the timid Bernhardt, the radio operator replied: "The
frequent sending and receiving of messages will be tantamount to inviting
discovery by the police." Sorge called him a coward and later angrily wrote
to his superiors: "A man who engages in espionage work must have some
courage." He demanded the replacement of Bernhardt, and soon the wireless
operator was on his way back to Moscow,
Vukelic, on the other hand, proved himself useful and was effective in
photographing documents Sorge had stolen or borrowed. Sorge realized that
he also needed a Japanese contact that could penetrate high- level sources
in the gathering of important information. To that end, he sent Miyagi to
contact Ozaki, his journalist friend during the time of his mission to
Shanghai. In the spring of 1934, Miyagi called the Tokyo offices of Asahi
where Ozaki was working as a journalist. Ozaki was first suspicious until
Miyagi told Ozaki that he was calling on behalf of an old friend of Ozaki
from Shanghai days, the journalist Ozaki had known as "Johnson."
At that point Ozaki told Miyagi he would do anything and everything he
could for Sorge. Ozaki, for his part, would accept no money from Sorge for
the valuable information he passed on to him. The Japanese journalist,
although a secret liberal, was not a member of the Japanese Communist
Party. He was above suspicion and operated out of genuine concern over his
country's military aims of unscrupulous aggression and conquest. He
supplied Richard Sorge with information because he sincerely believed that
his actions might keep Japan out of war.
Sorge's information from contacts at the German Embassy, coupled to what he
received from Ozaki, and his perceptive evaluation of this information soon
produced detailed reports that accurately portrayed Japanese military and
political activities. The Fourth Bureau was delighted with its masterspy in
Yokohama. Sorge, meanwhile, delighted in his ability to hoodwink the
much-vaunted Japanese secret police who had identified and classified him
as a fascist journalist who acted as a spy for Germany, a friendly power
and soon to be a partner to Japan's own aims of world conquest. Sorge was
therefore freely permitted to move about Japan without anything other than
occasional or cursory surveillance. "I think that I am managing to lead
them all by the nose," he wrote to General Berzin
Sorge's old friend Kawai then returned from China and settled in Tokyo.
Kawai, after leaving Shanghai in 1932, had gone north to Tientsen where, in
1933, he infiltrated Chinese Communist cells. Ostensibly for the Japanese
secret service, Special Service Organ, but in truth, he played a
double-dealing game like Sorge, and was really feeding the Communists
information about Japanese intelligence. Upon his return to Japan in 1935,
Kawai took up residence in the Tokyo home of Isamu Fujita, a top agent in
the Japanese espionage service, one of the plotters who had carried out the
spectacular 1928 assassination of Chinese warlord Chang Tso-lin.
Oddly, Kawai served his host Fujita by spying on the young idealists in the
Japanese Army who plotted the abortive coup of 1936, while feeding
information to Miyagi who passed it on to Sorge. Sorge was frustrated,
however, at having voluminous information he was not able to transmit to
Moscow since he had gotten rid of the alcoholic Bernhardt He decided to
personally deliver a full-scale report of conditions in Japan and traveled
to Russia via the U.S. He had the full cooperation of Japanese and German
officials since they believed he was on a fact-finding mission in the U.S.
for Germany.
Sorge did pick up some valuable information from U.S. Communists, passing
this along to his Nazi contacts in Berlin before secretly returning to
Russia. When he arrived in Moscow, however, he was shocked to see that
Joseph Stalin was conducting a reign of terror by purging the Party of all
the old Bolsheviks. Stalin had removed General Berzin from the Fourth
Bureau, replacing him with General Semyon Petrovich Uritsky, who had, in
1921, led a famous cavalry charge across the frozen waters of Kronstadt to
suppress a naval mutiny.
Sorge met with Uritsky in the summer of 1935, bringing with him a chart
that detailed all of the various militarists in Japan, from Hirohito (who
pretended to be merely the titular emperor but who, in truth, directed the
Japanese military toward world war) down through all the ranks. This chart
had been laboriously constructed by the painter Miyagi based on information
supplied by Ozaki It listed the names of hundreds of Japanese officers. The
chart indicated those who favored a strike south attack against the British
and Americans, and those who wanted to strike north against Russia. Sorge
reported that Japan would move across China in 1936 and would not attack
the Soviet Union. He backed up his contention by demonstrating to Uritsky
the disposition of Japanese troops and how they were massed for a China
strike which would preclude assembling more troops to attack Russia.
Uritsky and his superiors were impressed.
Sorge insisted that Ozaki be officially accepted as a member of his ring
and that he be provided a new wireless operator immediately. To all this
Uritsky agreed. Max Klausen, who had been Sorge's diligent wireless
operator in Shanghai, was assigned to the Tokyo ring. Klausen had been sent
to Germany where, as part of the Red Orchestra, he successfully spied upon
Nazi politicians. He happily accepted the assignment to Sorge and arrived
in Japan on November 28, 1935. He immediately set up a blueprint shop to
copy plans for architects and contractors as a cover for his espionage
activities.
Sorge arranged to meet Klausen every Tuesday at the Blue Ribbon bar in
Tokyo where he would give him information to send on to Moscow. Sorge
picked this bar because it was always packed with foreigners and was noisy.
Klausen spent most of his waking hours building a new wireless set while
secretly obtaining copper wire for the tuning coils, and more tubes than
what he had originally smuggled into Japan. By February 1936, Klausen's set
was operational, established in the home of Gunther Stein, the Tokyo
correspondent of the London News Chronicle, who was sympathetic to Sorge's
operations but knew little about the ring. Klausen however, was so gifted a
printer of blueprints that his shop actually began to make money from the
many orders he received from large construction companies and
manufacturers. He even fulfilled orders from the Japanese Army.
Suddenly, without any kind of warning, the Sorge ring came close to
annihilation at 5 A.M. on January 21, 1936. Japanese detectives of the
secret police who had maintained surveillance on Kawai broke into Kawai's
residence, rushed into his bedroom, and yanked him naked from his bed. He
was hustled outside to a car, and then to the airport where he was thrown
aboard a plane that flew to Hsinking in Manchuria.
Here the startled Kawai was charged by Japanese officials with being a
Communist spy who had spread propaganda for the Soviets and the Chinese
Communists in Manchuria. Savagely beaten for five days Kawai refused to
give his captors any information. The police learned nothing of the Sorge
ring in Yokohama and Tokyo. Kawai was then thrown into jail and held until
June 1936. He was then released and, some years later, returned to Japan,
his resolve to aid Sorge all the more strengthened by the brutal experience.
Also in 1936, dramatic events shook Japan, which caused Richard Sorge to be
sought out by German officials in Tokyo. Young militarists in Tokyo had
ostensibly made a move to control the military destiny of Japan a year
earlier. On July 16, 1935, Lieutenant-Colonel Saburo Aizawa visited the
Tokyo offices of Major General TetsuZan Nagata. Aizawa was angered over the
fact that General Jinzaburo Mazaki, who had been Inspector General of
Military Education for Japan and an advocate of launching a full-scale war
against China had been removed by more peace-loving officers, including
General Nagata. Once inside Nagata's office, the berserk Aizawa drew his
sword and hacked General Nagata to death.
The diehard nationalist was placed on trial but one closed to the public.
It dragged on month after month. On February 26, 1936, hundreds of young
military officers, none over the rank of captain, took control of most of
the important military and political installations in Tokyo. All were
supporters of Aizawa.
They demanded that the Japanese Army purge itself of liberal, peace-loving
officers such as the assassinated Nagata. Several military officers
opposing the insurrectionists were murdered, along with some officials. The
insurgents were later confronted by troops and capitulated. Thirteen of the
leaders, along with Aizawa, were quickly convicted and executed.
This crisis caused deep alarm among the international community in Japan.
The Germany Embassy summoned Sorge who conferred with several officials. He
told them that he believed the affair was the result of two factions of
Japanese militarists who held opposing viewpoints as to which direction to
take in the conquest of foreign lands. Mazaki, the deposed Inspector
General, was a war hawk who wanted to attack China. Nagata and his clique
wanted to avoid war at all costs, and another military faction wanted to
strike north against the Soviet Union.
Aizawa was not a rebel, according to Sorge, but a veiled messenger of the
Emperor. He traced Aizawa's connections to Hirohito's uncles and brothers
and thus concluded that Aizawa truly represented the Emperor. Aizawa had
struck down Nagata who opposed Hirohito's ambition to invade China. He also
willingly sacrificed his life by silently meeting execution, as did
thirteen others leading the 1936 revolt without ever revealing that
Hirohito himself had been the architect of the mock rebellion, one which
was meant to warn all those opposed to Hirohito that assassination would be
their fate if they did not follow the imperial design of conquest. Of
course, Hirohito could not himself overtly make his plans public so his
most fanatical officers demonstrated his will by eliminating opposition at
the cost of their own lives, a sacrifice that, in their incontrovertible
religious belief, would allow them into the highest strata of Shinto heaven.
So convincing was Sorge that he became known as the western savant on
Japanese affairs. High-ranking German officials shared with him their most
secret information regarding Japanese military movements and political
machinations. Sorge would analyze this information for the Germans and then
pass on the information to the Soviet Union. Through Eugen Ott, who was to
become the German Ambassador to Japan, Sorge learned that Japan and Germany
were secretly preparing a special pact in which both countries would aid
each other in their future aggressions. So intimate did Ott become with
Sorge that he asked Sorge to edit his top-secret reports to Berlin and
shared with Sorge reports he received from Germany regarding Japanese
affairs. Sorge appeared cooperative but he took pains to copy each and
every document Ott gave him to review. He then passed copies of these
documents on to the Fourth Bureau so that his Soviet masters possessed
up-to-date top secret information regarding impending events affecting the
security of the Soviet Union. So effective did Sorge become that he was
revered as a legendary spymaster within the Fourth Bureau.
Sorge not only predicted Japan's strike into the heart of China, but he
also predicted that the Chinese-Japanese war would drag on for years, and
again he would be proved correct. On July 7, 1937, the Japanese provoked a
skirmish with Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Peking, this
being enough of an excuse for Japanese troops to invade China, a war that
would last eight long and bloody years, until its end in August 1945. Much
of Sorge's insightful evaluations were based upon exhaustive reports he
received from Ozaki who had, by that time, established contacts with the
highest Japanese authorities, becoming a confidante of some of Prime
Minister Prince Konoye's top aides from whom he learned the inner
directives of the imperial throne room.
By May 1938, Sorge's drinking increased to a dangerous level. One night,
after drinking for hours with Prince Albert von Urach, an official in the
German Embassy in Tokyo, Sorge mounted his motorcycle to return home. He
roared through the empty Tokyo streets, somehow lost control of the cycle
and slammed into the wall of the U.S. Embassy. Although badly injured,
Sorge managed to call Klausen to the spot. Before fainting and being
removed to a hospital, Sorge was able to give Klausen secret documents he
had stolen that night from the German Embassy, along with a large amount of
U.S. currency. When he emerged from the hospital, Sorge bore terrible
facial scars that distorted his face into what was later described as a
"Japanese mask� of almost demoniacal expression."
No sooner was Sorge recovered from his wounds than a fresh crisis loomed.
Soviet General G. S. Lyushkov, a senior officer of the NKVD, and the Soviet
Frontier Forces, suddenly defected to the Japanese in June 1938. Lyushkov
brought with him detailed maps and data that identified all of the Soviet
military dispositions in Siberia. The defecting Russian, in a show of great
cooperation with the Japanese, pinpointed all defense positions maintained
by Russian troops along the Manchurian border. The reason for Lyushkov's
defection was clear to the Japanese. He was on Stalin's purge list and he
had fled to the arms of the Japanese to escape the dictator's wrath. Though
he discussed with the Japanese at length the internal disorders of the
Soviet Union and the ongoing Stalinist purge, Lyushkov could shed no light
on Soviet spies in Japan. He had had no relationship with the Fourth
Bureau, Moscow assured the anxious Sorge. The Sorge ring remained a mystery
to the Japanese secret police.
It was later claimed that the Japanese had, for some time, known about
Ozaki, Sorge, and his other associates. Reportedly, certain top-level
information was purposely given to Ozaki to pass on to Sorge and then
Moscow�information Hirohito wanted Stalin to possess, mostly intelligence
that would assure Stalin that Japan had no military aims toward the Soviet
Union. In this way, Hirohito allegedly kept Japan out of war with Russia
and was thus able to concentrate his military resources for his strike
through China and later across the Pacific.
Sorge, for his part, played down Lyushkov's defection, minimizing the worth
of his information regarding Soviet military installations, likening the
general's information to that of �migr�s leaving Germany and then writing
books condemning the Nazi regime. His German Embassy contacts seemed to
agree with him but Japanese officials showed no response to Sorge's
remarks. The Japanese, through a special envoy, Yosuke Matsuoka, conducted
secret meetings with the Soviets and, to the surprise of all, signed a
neutrality pact with Russia on April 13, 1939. The agreement, drafted
within twenty-four hours guaranteed the frontiers and borders of the two
powers.
The Germans, Sorge quickly learned, were in shock, particularly since
Hitler had been planning an attack on Russia and expected Japan to attack
the Soviets in the east. Because of this special standing with the German
Embassy in Tokyo, Sorge was privy to top-secret German plans and all that
the Germans knew about Japan's military and political movements. Also,
through Ozaki, who had a link to Japan's Prime Minister, Prince Konoye,
almost all top-secret plans of the Japanese fell into Sorge's hands. Sorge
himself was used by his close friend, Ambassador Ott, as a special envoy to
China to confer with German and Japanese officials there, learning the aims
of both.
Sorge was then in a position to supply Moscow with advance notice of
impending events of great importance to the Soviets. He obtained a
clause-by-clause copy of what was later known as the anti-Comintern Pact
between Germany, Italy, and Japan, sent by Sorge to Moscow six weeks before
the pact was signed. Sorge notified Moscow of Japan's full-scale attack on
China five weeks before the attack. Sorge, through his contacts in the
German Embassy, learned several weeks in advance of Hitler's impending
attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 and warned the Fourth Bureau of this
plan. In this instance, Joseph Stalin, much to Sorge's surprise, shock and
anger, remained passive, taking no precaution.
The Soviets had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany two years earlier
and it may have been that Stalin simply did not believe Sorge's report. He
had received a similar warning from British intelligence but also ignored
this report.
Sorge was furious at Stalin, asking associates "Why does he not react?"
When German panzer divisions roared into Russia, conquering hundreds of
miles of territory within days, Sorge sank into deep depression. His
mistress, Miyake, found him weeping in his study, which was crammed with
thousands of books on Japan and the Far East. He was inconsolable and wept
uncontrollably for hours on end. When she asked him why he was weeping.
Sorge replied "Because l am lonely. I have no real friends. "
" But surely you have Ambassador Ott and other good German friends."
"No, no," sobbed Sorge. "They are not my real friends."
In this rare view of Richard Sorge, his utter desolation and seemingly
intolerable loneliness symbolized the empty lifestyle of even the most
accomplished of spymasters. Sorge, nevertheless, continued to supply Moscow
with priceless espionage intelligence. His reports allayed the worst Soviet
fears that Japan would strike in the east and Russia would be compelled to
fight on two fronts, the possibility of which would surely cause the
collapse of its Communist State. Sorge emphasized to Moscow that the
Japanese had no intention of attacking Russia, that its armies were
preoccupied with China, and its fleet was in the south, intent on
overrunning the Pacific. He notified Moscow some time in advance of Japan's
move against French Indo-China and pointed out that relations between the
U.S. and Japan were worsening, ever since the U.S. attempted to mediate a
peace settlement between China and Japan.
Sorge also emphasized that the U.S., not the Soviet Union, would be Japan's
next major target. He followed this report with a message in which he
stated that though millions of troops had been mobilized, the Japanese Army
had sent only fifteen divisions to the north to protect the borders,
certainly far from the invasion force the Soviets expected. Of equal
importance was information Ozaki obtained for Sorge regarding the true aims
of the Japanese in the Pacific. Its largest fleet, including four of its
first line aircraft carriers, was preparing in the fall of 1941 a
circuitous route that would undoubtedly take it through northern waters and
within several hundred miles of Hawaii.
This was, as Sorge knew, the hub of U.S. naval operations, headquartered in
Pearl Harbor. Sorge wrote a lengthy memo for Moscow in which he described
the Japanese Navy preparations, and, although he did not have evidence
which specified the exact target of the fleet, Sorge himself reasoned that
the attack by the Japanese would be made in the early part of December 1941
and that it would be against Honolulu and Pearl Harbor. He sent this
message to Moscow but, as was the case with his warning of Hitler's
impending attack against Russia, the Pearl Harbor warning was not acted
upon. Stalin did not take the trouble to inform the U.S., his ally.
A short time later the most effective spy ring in the Far East was
dismantled because of a routine police sweep of Japanese Communists. On
September 28, 1941, local police checking members of the disorganized
Communist Party picked up an elderly seamstress named Tomo Kitabayashi. She
was grilled about those who had rented rooms from her and the old woman
blurted every name she could remember, including that of a young man born
in Okinawa and studying in the U.S., Yotoku Miyagi.
It took the police more than a week to locate Miyagi. They burst into his
home on October 11, 1941, and began a thorough search. Detectives found a
confidential memo written on the stationary of the South Manchurian
Railway, one which bore the signature of Hotsumi Ozaki What was a painter
doing with such a memo, police asked Miyagi. He refused to answer any
questions. Miyagi was interrogated and beaten but he kept silent. At one
point, in an effort to commit suicide, Miyagi leaped from a chair and
dashed to a second-story window, hurling himself through it. A tree beneath
the window, however, softened his fall and he only succeeded in breaking
his leg.
Questioning of Miyagi began again the next day and this time he broke,
offering a "voluntary statement." He said he belonged to a Communist spy
ring controlled by Richard Sorge and other members, including Kawai, Ozaki,
Vukelic, and Klausen. Realizing that important people were involved in
Miyagi's confession, the police took the matter to the Foreign Section of
the Higher Police (or Kempei Tai) in Tokyo. Officials there, however,
refused at first to accept Miyagi's statements. Sorge was a high-level
adviser to none other than the German Ambassador, General Ott. If he were
arrested, they concluded, even for routine questioning, German-Japanese
relations might be severely endangered.
It was decided to leave the Europeans in the so-called ring alone for the
time being. The Japanese were another matter. Ozaki was arrested on October
14, 1941. Despite his high standing with Prime Minister Konoye, Ozaki was
severely beaten and questioned. He eventually affirmed all of Miyagi's
statements, implicating Sorge, Vukelic, Klausen, and Kawai. It was then
decided that the Europeans would be arrested. Before police closed in,
Sorge met with Vukelic and Klausen He told them that Miyagi and Ozaki had
failed to appear several times at prearranged rendezvous. They called the
homes and offices of Miyagi and Ozaki and got no answers. Sorge properly
concluded in a despondent voice: "They must have been arrested by the police."
A few days later Sorge sent his last message to Moscow, one that Sorge
thought to be the exact date of the Japanese attack against Hawaii. The
last coded message was deciphered in Moscow and read:
"Japanese carrier force attacking United States Navy at Pearl Harbor,
probably dawn, 6th November." He also added in the same message that his
ring had been compromised and that he was disbanding the group, advising
them to save themselves as best they could.
Extract END.
