Agent of the Seven Intelligences

Thirty-five years ago, on November 5, 1964, the USSR became one more hero. Richard Sorge, who received the highest award, had been dead for twenty years; the Japanese executed him on November 7, 1944. Who was this man - a super agent who changed the course of world history, or one of many thousands of soldiers in a secret war, who owed his fame only to a resounding failure?

In December 1967, another Soviet trade delegation arrived in Tokyo. The purpose of the visit was quite ordinary: the foreign trade comrades had to agree with their Japanese partners on the exchange of exhibitions of the achievements of socialist and capitalist economies. However, the attention of the receiving party clearly exceeded all reasonable limits. Wherever the car with the head of the Soviet delegation was heading, there were two escort cars in front and behind, bumper to bumper. People in black suits, without uttering a word, accompanied him while walking around Tokyo.
The silence was broken only once, when such a zealously patronized guest decided to lay flowers on grave #17121 at the Tama Cemetery. “One of my ‘bodyguards’ came up to me,” said the head of the delegation, “and with the sweetest smile in the purest Russian language said: ‘This will happen to everyone who dares to spy in Japan.’” Need I say that the ashes of Richard Sorge rested in the grave, the escort of the Vneshtorg chief was made up of counterintelligence officers, and he himself was a KGB general?
As the general recalled, “it was an impudent challenge, and it was impossible not to accept it.” After returning to Moscow, he called one of the employees, who had once successfully worked in the Far East, and asked for proposals for the deployment of operations in the Land of the Rising Sun. The intelligence veteran prepared an extensive report. Among other recommendations, the general especially liked one: “To obtain information from Japanese ruling circles, it is best to use the Sorge method.”
However, it turned out that gaining access to Richard Sorge’s case is not at all easy. And the general had to turn to KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov for help. He did not need to make an appointment with Yu.V., as he was called in Lubyanka. The general headed a unit conventionally called Andropov’s personal intelligence service.

Outstanding internationalist
In essence, the title of Hero of the Soviet Union was received not so much by Richard Sorge, but by the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff for courageous non-interference in the process of democratic removal of Khrushchev. The reward came at the right time for the hero.
After the arrest of Colonel Penkovsky in 1962 and the subsequent humiliating personnel purge in the GRU, military intelligence officers were in dire need of moral rehabilitation of their department. And for many years, Richard Sorge, aka Ramsay, became the face of the GRU advertising campaign. And since the propagandists of that time had only experience in creating personality cults, the campaign quickly turned into a well-trodden rut. Sorge’s great-uncle was a friend and ally of Karl Marx himself, therefore, under the pen of the literary assistants of the GRU, the talented journalist Sorge turned almost into a Marxist theorist. From the fact that Sorge's father was German and his mother was Russian, and his reconnaissance group included people of several nationalities, it was concluded that Sorge was an "outstanding internationalist."
The journalist Hozumi Ozaki, who helped Sorge, was just one of the consultants of the Japanese Prime Minister Prince Konoe, and Sorge’s canonizers trumpeted Ozaki’s enormous influence on the prince. Ramsay's group itself appeared on the pages of his biographies as a gigantic network that penetrated all layers of Japanese society, which included 35 employees and which had 160 sources of information.
Naturally, tasks for an agent of this level in Moscow were given exclusively by the chiefs of military intelligence. And the results of his work were assessed personally by Stalin. The leader did not believe the message of Comrade Sorge, who named the exact date of the German attack on the Soviet Union. Then Stalin corrected himself and took Sorge’s information that Japan would not participate in the war against the USSR as a guide to action: he transferred most of the troops from the Far East to Moscow. But then, after the arrest of Ramsay’s group in October 1941, Stalin allegedly became afraid that the great intelligence officer Sorge, who had returned to Moscow, would begin to criticize him for his lack of foresight, and after three years of deliberation, he did not exchange Ramsay for the Japanese intelligence officer.
Foreign authors also contributed to the globalization of Sorge’s image. True, they did this for a different purpose: to scare their inhabitants with the “hand of Moscow.” The creators of the version that Sorge and Ozaki pushed Japan to attack the United States had slightly different goals. It appeared in the United States in 1951 to make it easier to replace the image of Japan as an enemy with the image of Japan as a loyal ally of America.
Everything negative from Sorge’s life stories was, of course, excluded. Therefore, readers on the other side of the Iron Curtain knew that Sorge, among other things, was a playboy and a double agent, but on this side - not.

German journalist
As Andropov’s personal intelligence chief said, before handing over Sorge’s file to him, Yu. V. read it himself and mocked the unbridled boasting of his “neighbors” - the GRU. In reality, everything was simpler and more interesting.
Richard Sorge was sent to Tokyo in 1933 under the guise of a journalist for several German newspapers. He had to restore contacts with a prominent specialist on China, the Japanese journalist Hozumi Ozaki. Sorge met him and brought him into cooperation during his first intelligence trip to Shanghai.
Ozaki had one invaluable quality - he graduated from a prestigious school in Tokyo. His classmates came from the most influential families in the country. Using these contacts, the journalist eventually entered one of the powerful political cliques that actually ruled Japan.
In fact, Ramsay’s entire group was needed only to ensure the transmission of messages from Ozaki to Sorge and further to the Center. Of course, Sorge also used other sources of information, including open ones - newspapers and magazines. But, as a rule, everything was double-checked through Ozaki and the artist Yetoku Miyagi, who had extensive connections.
Largely thanks to the information that Ozaki supplied to Sorge, he managed to become a consultant to Prince Konoe, later the country's prime minister. When it was discovered that the journalist was well aware not only of the state of affairs in China, but also in many other countries, they began to discuss a variety of problems with him, in particular those related to Germany.
Sorge began to receive valuable information about German affairs in the mid-30s: he slept with the wives of almost all German diplomats. However, in order to receive information that was not refracted in pretty ladies’ heads, the formerly famous German communist Sorge needed to prove his loyalty to the Reich. And the matter was not limited to joining the NSDAP. To do this, it was necessary to sign a signature on cooperation with Nazi intelligence.

Nazi spy
Sorge asked Moscow and received consent to re-recruitment. Starting this game, he hardly understood that, like any other “double,” he would lose the Center’s trust once and for all. After all, his own experience testified to the opposite. In 1925, he was recruited by the head of the international relations (intelligence) department of the Comintern, Joseph Pyatnitsky. In 1929, Sorge began to collaborate with Soviet military intelligence. And since 1937, when all intelligence services were united for a short time under the leadership of the “iron commissar” Nikolai Yezhov, Ramsay’s reports began to arrive at the NKVD. And, despite the rivalry between these departments, no mistrust arose.
Sorge began collaborating with NSDAP intelligence, from where his information went to the VI Directorate of the RSHA to the notorious Walter Schellenberg. However, already in 1938, the Center began to persistently invite Ramsay on vacation. Sorge understood what awaited him in Moscow and did not go. In response, the Center stopped funding Ramsay's group. And Sorge, either out of resentment or out of lack of money, began working for German naval intelligence. The next recipient of Sorge’s information, as the head of Andropov’s personal intelligence service recalled, was the Abwehr. As a result, Richard Sorge's analysis of Japanese affairs was simultaneously received by seven or eight competing Nazi intelligence agencies.
In addition to money, Sorge received information from German intelligence officers, which he continued to send to Moscow. But the Center did not show due interest in his messages. Sorge did not even suspect that a Soviet agent embedded in the SS was copying and forwarding to Moscow his reports arriving in Berlin. Ramsay's message that the war would begin on June 22 was not believed in Moscow, not only because Sorge was a multi-station spy.

Unrecognized agent
As Soviet state security veterans said, Stalin, in principle, did not trust the agents’ reports. Of all the reports from the intelligence services, he more or less believed information from decrypted enemy telegrams, recordings of overheard telephone and other conversations, and testimony obtained during interrogations with bias. The leader believed that under torture a person might say too much, but he would not hide the truth.
The Kremlin learned that on July 2, 1941, the Japanese Imperial Council decided not to go to war with the USSR from intercepted encrypted messages from the embassies of Japan's allied countries in their capitals. Ramsay's messages about the council meeting, which came in October, also influenced the decision of Headquarters to transfer troops from the Far East. But these were reports that Sorge sent not to Moscow, but to Berlin. As an experienced journalist, he compiled his analytical notes, taking into account the level of future readers. Therefore, short and simple reports were sent to Moscow, and lengthy and better reasoned reports were sent to Berlin.
Moscow did not need Sorge. This sealed his fate. No matter how much Sorge’s apologists would like it, there were no hints in the intelligence officer’s file that he was going to be exchanged for the Japanese, according to the head of Andropov’s personal intelligence service. Recently, a version has emerged that the Japanese lieutenant colonel needed for the exchange was shot due to a misunderstanding and that there was no one left for the exchange. But that's a lie. Throughout the war, the Khabarovsk NKVD had at its disposal the Japanese intelligence officer Tomita, who was arrested at the border in 1937.

Sorge's method
What did the KGB manage to learn from the Sorge case? As the intelligence veteran had advised, special attention was paid to the manner in which Ozaki approached Japanese Prime Minister Prince Konoe. The man introduced by the KGB into one of the groups in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party did not belong to the Japanese elite and had no chance of occupying any significant post. But in accordance with the plan developed in Moscow, he recruited the most promising member of the party. He, like Ozaki in his time, cleverly using information received from the KGB, rose to one of the highest levels of Japanese power. At the same time, not forgetting to provide Moscow friends with the most valuable information not only about Japan, but also about other G7 countries.
In Sorge's life, everything happened in the reverse order. First he was executed, then he was awarded, and only then did he bring real benefits to the country, and not those invented by biographers.

EVGENY ZHIRNOV

Military intelligence officers were in dire need of moral rehabilitation. Richard Sorge became the face of the GRU advertising campaign

Magazine "Kommersant Power" No. 43 dated 02.11.1999, page 52

Authors:

Evgeny Zhirnov

Themes:

Kommersant History