The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945

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.

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 British embassy. So too did Torao Shinotsuka, owner of a small military-equipment factory in Kansai, who provided extensive material on military aircraft and naval armaments. Anna Clausen, Max’s adored wife, arrived in Tokyo from Moscow to share the wireless-operator’s hazardous existence.

The Soviet network’s membership thus expanded at a period when Japan was entering a period of paranoia about foreign espionage, and reinforcing its domestic security agencies. In 1936 there was a bad moment when Tokyo police arrested Taikichi Kawai at the request of their Manchurian counterparts. Kawai had been an informant of ‘Mr Johnson’ in Shanghai. In captivity he was brutally interrogated. Unlike most agents under torture, however, he gave away nothing significant. Sorge’s luck held. His work was giving the highest satisfaction to both of its beneficiaries, Moscow Centre and the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. The latter was especially delighted by a report which he compiled on the 1936 Japanese army revolt, but which he insisted should circulate among the Nazi hierarchy only under the coy initials ‘RS’, because he remained fearful of a Gestapo investigation of his political past.

He helped Ott and Dirksen draft a cable to Berlin, asking for information about a rumoured German–Japanese negotiation. Sorge sought to promote Moscow’s agenda by urging on the German embassy team the view that such an alliance would be mistaken, and rooted in absurd rumours that Stalin’s fall was imminent. He published an article on the Japanese army in Die Wehrmacht magazine. His reputation with the Tokyo embassy and with Berlin soared after the fulfilment of his prediction that Japan’s war in China would prove protracted. More important, however, was the mass of information about Japanese deployments on the Soviet border which Ott provided to Sorge, who swiftly forwarded it to the GRU. Moscow also professed appreciation of industrial data delivered by Hotsumi Ozaki at monthly restaurant meetings. The journalist had become influential in government circles, and correspondingly well-informed: for a time he even served in the Japanese prime minister’s office as an expert on China. Even though he lost that role when the government changed in 1939, he secured a new job as a Tokyo-based researcher for Japan’s Kwantung army in Manchuria.

In 1938 Herbert von Dirksen was invalided home. His successor as ambassador was none other than Colonel Ott. Sorge thenceforward found himself drafting the German embassy’s dispatches for Berlin, while transmitting his own to Moscow. On his forty-third birthday he was presented with a signed photograph of Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop as a token of Berlin’s appreciation for his services. No foreign penetration of a British diplomatic mission could be compared in significance with that achieved by Sorge of Hitler’s Tokyo embassy. When a Russian general defected to Tokyo in 1938, the spy was immediately able to warn Moscow that its codes were compromised. In May 1939, when tensions on the Russo–Japanese border erupted into local clashes, thanks to Ozaki Sorge could tell Moscow authoritatively that the Japanese had no intention of escalating the ‘Nomonhan Incident’ into a wider war. On this issue as on many others, however, doubts persist about the use made of his material. Sorge supposedly gave the Soviets detailed Japanese order-of-battle information, but Georgi Zhukov as the Red Army’s local commander complained bitterly about the absence of such data. It seems likely either that Sorge later exaggerated his own contribution, or that the GRU failed to pass on his material.

He sought to strengthen his cover by publicly taunting Soviet diplomats when he met them at international receptions, but the stress of his fantastic high-wire act increasingly told on him, and was reflected in massive infusions of alcohol. In the company of Hanako, he succumbed to morose, drink-fuelled monologues, especially when she begged him to give her a child: ‘I am an old man. I am going to die soon. I can do without a baby! Oh, poor Sorge. You should study so that you can get along without Sorge …’ One night he crashed his motorbike, with agonising consequences – many days in hospital and the loss of his teeth. For the rest of his life he could swallow meat only if it was minced.

He had sense enough to abandon biking, and instead acquired a small car. He embarked on a whimsical cultural improvement programme for Hanako, persuading her to read Gone With the Wind, which he himself considered ‘magnificent’. Several hundred pages later she said, ‘I like Captain Butler.’ Perhaps providing a glimpse of his self-image, Sorge demanded, ‘Do you think I am like Rhett Butler?’ But Clausen wrote later about him: ‘He is a true communist … He is a man who can destroy even his best friend for the sake of Communism.’ He could also destroy a comrade. The spy’s treatment of his wireless-operator was cavalier, even brutal. And his lifestyle was ever more at odds with the ideal of a dedicated servant of the Party. Sorge had made himself probably the best-informed secret agent in the world. Nonetheless, his rashness made an ultimate train wreck inevitable, even if in 1939 this still lay a surprising distance in the future.

By the coming of war, the Soviet Union’s huge expenditure on espionage, and its access to highly placed communist sympathisers in many lands, should have made the Kremlin the best-informed centre of government on the planet. Yet those in Moscow who received and processed the reports from the field were far too fearful of offending the only audience that mattered – Joseph Stalin, master of the Kremlin – to forward any intelligence that was likely to prove unwelcome. Even when important information reached Moscow, it was seldom properly reviewed, far less exploited by policy-makers. Christopher Andrew has written: ‘The Soviet capacity to understand the political and diplomatic intelligence it collected … never approached its ability to collect the intelligence in the first place.’ Stalin acted as his own analyst, preferring to drill endless wells of espionage in search of imagined conspiracies rather than to use intelligence to inform policy-making. Soviet intelligence officers feared for their lives, with good reason, if they told Stalin what he did not want to hear. He seemed to credit only reports that identified plots against himself or the state, at home and abroad. Where these did not exist, Russia’s most senior intelligence officers invented them. Stalin used the product of his codebreakers to some effect where and when this was available, but entered the greatest conflict in history almost blind through his own acts of will.

After Munich, with the doom of Czechoslovakia sealed, the Czech intelligence chief František Moravec was approached by three rival bidders for his services: Admiral Wilhelm Canaris for the Germans, Colonel Louis Rivet for the French, and MI6’s local man, Major Harold Gibson, for the British. Mistrusting the French, Moravec determined to throw in his lot with Britain. In anticipation of the Nazi occupation he did his utmost to reinforce links with local informants before himself leaving his country. He was able to transfer to London large sums of foreign currency, and hoped thus to ensure that he could sustain a Czech intelligence service in exile, though few of his agents were ever heard from again. On 3 March 1939 the Abwehr’s Paul Thummel, Moravec’s best German source, met him in Prague and reported that the city would be occupied on the 15th. ‘Agent A-54’ also warned that his entire staff would be seized by the Gestapo, and could expect no mercy. Moravec was amazed that Thummel declared himself willing to continue his own collaboration. The only proviso, said the Abwehr man, was that the Czechs must ensure that everything about himself in their files was destroyed. With that assurance, the two men parted. Thummel said, ‘Good luck, Colonel. This is not goodbye but Auf wiedersehen.’ The German officer took away with him two addresses for future correspondence, one in Holland, the other in Switzerland.

In Prague on the night of 13 March, Harold Gibson of MI6 – ‘Gibby’, as Moravec always called him, a small, slight figure with a moustache in proportion – drove a car into the Czech Intelligence Department’s garage. This was loaded with hundreds of files packed in canvas bags, which were borne away to the British embassy. The following afternoon, a Dutch civilian plane chartered by Broadway landed at Ruzyn airfield outside Prague to collect passengers for England – Moravec and ten officers of his staff. He chose them unsentimentally, he wrote later, taking those who would be most valuable in London, and those who knew too much to be left to the Gestapo. He felt obliged to leave behind his own wife and two daughters, and indeed to conceal from them his intended destination: he said he was merely making an overnight trip to Moravia.

The plane took off with difficulty amidst a snowstorm, which for a time threatened to force them down into the path of the approaching Germans. Moravec carried a briefcase containing 200,000 Reichsmarks and 100,000 Dutch guilders in cash – about £32,000 – to provide his little team with further seed money for future operations. As the plane passed over the mountains where lay Czechoslovakia’s frontier, the colonel buried his head in his hands and sobbed unashamedly at the prospect of exile. After a brief stop in Amsterdam, the party landed safely at Croydon. When former Czech prime minister Edvard Beneš later arrived in London, Moravec reported to his Putney residence to offer his services and those of his officers, which were readily accepted – his role was formalised the following year, when Beneš formed a government in exile. The colonel’s wife and children escaped from Prague and walked to safety in Poland, from whence they joined him in Britain.

In June 1939 Moravec was delighted to receive a letter, forwarded from a Zürich cover address, which began, ‘Dear Uncle, I think I am in love. I have met a girl.’ On the same page was a secret ink message, appointing a rendezvous in The Hague. It was from agent A-54, the Abwehr colonel Paul Thummel. The Czech officer who duly met him early in August warned Thummel that Moravec’s shrunken organisation no longer had cash to lavish upon him as generously as in the past, but the German responded dismissively that ‘more important matters than money are at stake’. He told the Czech that an invasion of Poland was planned for 1 September, and provided details of the latest Wehrmacht order of battle. He also handed over a list of Polish traitors working for the Germans. Thummel subsequently provided the Nazis’ amended timetable, including on 27 August a final date for the Polish invasion of 3 September 1939. For the people of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and now of all Western Europe, the sparring was over: the death struggle had begun.

* Both the GRU’s and NKVD’s officers and agents referred to their respective headquarters as ‘Centre’.

* Hamburger, like many others in this book, used a variety of names in the course of her career, starting out as Kuczynski and ending up as Werner. To avoid confusion, only one name is used throughout for all those described.

2

The Storm Breaks

1 THE ‘FICTION FLOOD’

The first significant excitement of the British secret service’s war came in November 1939. A document later known as the ‘Oslo Report’ was sent anonymously to the British legation in Norway, then forwarded to London by its naval attaché. The parcel that reached Broadway contained several pages of German typescript and a small cardboard box. It represented the outcome of an earlier ‘feeler’ message to the legation, saying that if the British wanted to receive details of new scientific developments in Germany, they should make a minor change in the wording of a BBC broadcast to Germany: instead of starting, ‘Hello, this is London calling’, it was to say, ‘Hello, hello, this is …’ This was duly done, and after a short delay the ‘Oslo Report’ was submitted.

Its narrative covered a remarkable range of enemy activities. The anonymous author asserted that the Germans were developing acoustic and radio-controlled torpedoes; detailed the wavelengths on which German radar stations were operating; suggested bombing the Luftwaffe research station at Rechlin; and much else. The box contained a trigger tube, to be employed for new anti-aircraft shell proximity fuses. But the credibility of the whole document was undermined by the inclusion of two nonsenses: a claim that the Luftwaffe’s Ju-88 bombers were being produced at the impossible rate of 5,000 a month; and that a German aircraft-carrier, the Franken, was approaching completion at Kiel. These mistakes contributed to a verdict by Whitehall that the document should be dismissed as a German plant.

But the report was also read by Dr Reginald Jones, the outspoken, combative, twenty-eight-year-old assistant director of Air Ministry scientific intelligence. Jones shines forth as an authentic star in the wartime secret firmament. He was a social hybrid, son of a sergeant in the Grenadier Guards who displayed precocious brilliance at his south London school, and later proved as much at ease holding forth at grand country-house parties as fighting his corner in meetings chaired by the prime minister. Having had a notable early career in physics and astronomy at Oxford, where for a time he worked under Frederick Lindemann – later Lord Cherwell – he became fascinated by the possibilities of exploiting infra-red technology for the detection of aircraft, and in 1936 went to work for the Air Ministry. He was intolerant of slow-mindedness or bureaucracy wherever he encountered it, and there was plenty of both at Broadway Buildings, where after a brief stint at Bletchley Park he was invited to share an office with Fred Winterbotham.

In the course of the war Reg Jones became one of the foremost British investigators of German air technology. In November 1939, however, his achievements still lay in the future, and he was seen in Whitehall simply as a pushy young ‘boffin’ who seemed too free with his opinions in the presence of senior officers. Jones, almost alone, elected to believe that the Oslo document was authentic. His instinct became a near-certainty in the summer of 1940, when the Luftwaffe began to use the Wotan navigational beam to guide its bombers over Britain, exploiting principles mentioned by Oslo’s author. R.V. Jones, as he is known to posterity, found the information invaluable in devising counter-measures during the ‘Battle of the Beams’ that influenced the Blitz – which gained him the ear and the admiration of Winston Churchill. Again and again through the years that followed, when the British gained hints about new German weapons – the acoustic torpedo, for example – Jones was able to point out to service chiefs that Oslo had warned of them. After the war, in a retrospective on his own intelligence career, the scientist used the example of the 1939 document to urge that ‘casual sources should not be treated flippantly. It was probably the best single [scientific intelligence] report received from any source during the war.’

Only after an interval of almost forty years did Jones establish the document’s authorship. It was the work of a forty-five-year-old German physicist named Hans Ferdinand Mayer, who adopted a scientific career after being badly wounded on his first day in action as a conscript in 1914. He had been employed by Siemens since 1922, doing work that resulted in the award of eighty-two patents and the publication of forty-seven papers, and also spent four years as professor of signals technique at America’s Cornell University. During the inter-war years he formed a warm friendship with an Englishman working for GEC named Cobden Turner, who became godfather to Mayer’s second son. The German was especially impressed by a good deed: when he told Turner about the tragic case of a Jewish schoolchild disowned by her Nazi father, the Englishman arranged for the little girl to come to England, where for eight years she lived as a member of his own family.