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.
Another recruit, Yotoku Miyaki, was a painter born in 1903, whose family had moved to California when he was a child. The American Communist Party talent-spotted Miyaki for the Comintern, and the slightly-built young man was persuaded to move back to Japan, where he proved a superb agent. In keeping with Moscow’s stringent finance policies, though Miyaki received a salary from Sorge, he supplemented this through giving language lessons and selling his pictures, which commanded respectable prices. Another key Sorge subordinate was a Yugoslav-born journalist, Branko de Voukelitch. The Fourth Department peremptorily instructed Voukelitch to strengthen his cover by divorcing his wife Edith and marrying a Japanese woman. This the compliant agent duly did, confusing himself as well as his associates by falling sincerely in love with a well-born local girl, Yoshiko Yamasaki, who eventually married him.
It was a reflection of Colonel Ott’s intimacy with Sorge that when he toured Manchuria in 1934, he took along the Russian spy as his courier in the Nazi interest. Sorge subsequently ghosted Ott’s report to the army economic department, which won plaudits in Berlin. The following year, the Japanese police broke up another Soviet spy ring in Tokyo run by an American, John Sherman, a development which increased Moscow’s dependency on Sorge. He once said, ‘Spying work must be done bravely,’ and indeed he became a famous figure in Tokyo’s social, journalistic and diplomatic circles, careering about the city on a motorbike, drinking heroic quantities of alcohol, bedding every woman within his reach. He rented a two-storey Japanese-style house at 30 Nagasaki Machi, and Moscow kept him supplied with sufficient funds to sustain the rackety life he loved. He had a housekeeper who became devoted to him, together with a maid and a laundryman who were routinely quizzed by the police. But even the pathologically suspicious Japanese had no clue that Sorge might be a spy; they regarded him merely as an influential acolyte of the Nazis.
He performed a daily tour of newspaper offices and the German Club before making his way to the embassy, where he now spent so much time that he was provided with his own office in which to conduct research and prepare material for transmission to Berlin; privacy was also useful for photographing documents for Moscow. A German diplomat spoke later of Sorge as ‘a gay, dissolute adventurer with a brilliant mind and an unassailable conceit’. The spy wrote a memorably ironic letter to his Moscow ‘wife’ Katcha in 1937: ‘it is very hard, above all this solitude’.
It was indeed a ceaseless challenge for the Soviet agent to sustain a masquerade as a Nazi stooge while he partied and womanised. In the evenings he frequented a string of bars and clubs – Lohmeyer’s restaurant in the Ginza, which had a loyal German clientèle; the seedy little Fledermaus; and the Rheingold, whose proprietor Helmut Ketel was an ardent admirer of Hitler. It was there that Sorge met ‘Agnes’, one of many bar girls who fell for him. Agnes proved to have staying power. She was twenty-three, and her real name was Hanako Ishii. She became increasingly a fixture in his house, and he paid for her to take lessons to fulfil a cherished ambition to become a singer. But Sorge was no more faithful to Hanako than to any other woman: he conducted a long parallel relationship with Anita Mohr, wife of a locally based German businessman, who was described as a ‘blonde bombshell’. Hanako appears to have provided a convenience rather than an object of real affection.
Sorge’s priority was always service to Moscow. As the weight of GRU material increased, so did the difficulties of transmitting it. Wendt, his radioman, was incompetent, and Sorge insisted that a better man must be found. In 1935 the spy left Tokyo, supposedly on holiday, bound for the United States. From there he travelled covertly to the Soviet Union, to confer with his chiefs and sort out the communications issues. In Moscow he was rebriefed about priorities, foremost among which was to explore Japan’s intentions towards the Soviet Union. Thereafter, in descending order he was ordered to study the Japanese army and industry; policies in China; positioning towards Britain and the US.
Soon after Sorge’s return to Tokyo, a new wireless-operator and courier joined him from Moscow. Max Clausen held officer’s rank in the Red Army. To provide cover he established a blueprint-copying business in Tokyo, which became a notably profitable pet project. Clausen’s first intelligence task was to build his own wireless set, common practice among agents in countries to which it was deemed too difficult or dangerous to dispatch a professionally constructed one. He used a domestic radio receiver, attached the transmitter to a Bakelite panel mounted on a wooden box, and wound tuning coils from copper tubing intended for motor manufacture. In the absence of instruments to measure wavelengths, Clausen transmitted on a 37–39 metre band, and received on 45–48.
Sorge persuaded a friend and fellow-journalist, Gunther Stein, to allow the Soviet operator to message Moscow from his flat. Stein initially recoiled from accepting this appalling risk, but eventually assented. Since Clausen dared not set up an external aerial, he stretched two copper-stranded wires, seven metres in length, around the room from which he transmitted. Stein also became a useful informant for the Sorge ring, exploiting friendships he had formed at the
