The arrest of Richard Sorge

Early on the morning of Saturday 18 October 1941 officers of Tokyo’s political police, the Tokkō, knocked at the door of a house in the Azabu district where Richard Sorge lived – correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung, member of the Nazi Party and trusted adviser to the German ambassador. That same morning his radio operator, Max Clausen, and Branko Vukelić, a journalist with the French Havas agency, were also detained. A few days earlier the Japanese members of the same ring had fallen into police hands: the painter Yotoku Miyagi (on 10 October) and the journalist Hotsumi Ozaki, a former adviser to Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, arrested on 15 October (some Japanese sources give 14 October). In this way the Japanese broke up the most effective Soviet spy ring in Asia, which for eight years had been passing to Moscow information from inside Japanese politics and the German embassy. On the same day General Hideki Tōjō became Prime Minister of Japan.

Chronologies often record under 18 October that Red Army reinforcements from Siberia arrived in Moscow and that Joseph Stalin had been assured that Japan would not attack the USSR from the east. This compresses several matters spread out over time. The assurance in question came above all from Sorge, but as early as August and September, and on 18 October its author was in custody. Divisions from the Far East had been travelling west since June, and in October and November they did not arrive in Moscow on a single day but were sent one after another to threatened sectors of the front. On that particular day one of them, the 32nd Rifle Division from the Far East, was fighting at Borodino and Mozhaisk, which the Germans took on 18 October.

“Ramsay” in Tokyo

Sorge arrived in Japan in September 1933 with a task that he himself later described as almost the sole purpose of his mission: to establish whether Japan intended to attack the Soviet Union. As a journalist of Nazi views he won the confidence of the German embassy, and especially of the military attaché, later ambassador, Eugen Ott. Ozaki, an expert on China, a member of Konoe’s circle of advisers and an associate of the research department of the South Manchuria Railway, gave him an insight into the thinking of the Japanese elite. The reports, transmitted by Clausen from a hidden radio set under the code name “Ramsay”, went to the Red Army’s Intelligence Directorate.

In the spring of 1941 Sorge, who knew the cables reaching Ott from Berlin, warned of a German attack and gave a succession of approximate dates, including the second half of June. These warnings, like many others, did not change Stalin’s convictions, and the German attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June took the Soviet leadership by surprise. The popular version according to which Sorge gave the exact date of 22 June rests on a report whose authenticity many historians dispute.

North or south

From 22 June the most important question became the one that had been the whole point of Sorge’s work from the start. In April Japan had bound itself to Moscow by a neutrality pact, but its Foreign Minister, Yōsuke Matsuoka, was now demanding a strike against Siberia, and Berlin was pressing for the same through Ott. On 2 July an Imperial Conference decided to move south, into Indochina, while preparing for war in the north and striking if the Red Army collapsed. Under the name of “special manoeuvres” of the Kwantung Army, the forces in Manchuria were built up to some 700,000 men. Sorge and Ozaki followed this mobilisation closely. The Americans, who were reading Japanese diplomatic correspondence, were asking themselves the same question at the time.

The answer came in late summer. At the beginning of August the Japanese General Staff gave up the idea of attacking the USSR in 1941, and the Imperial Conference of 6 September directed war preparations against the United States, Britain and the Netherlands. According to a report of 25 August, cited in most studies, Ozaki learned from people in Konoe’s innermost circle that the high command had decided not to start a war with the USSR that year. On 14 September Sorge wrote that, in the unanimous judgement of his people, the possibility of a Japanese attack, which had existed until recently, had disappeared, at least for that year. He listed the conditions under which it might return: the fall of Moscow, a great superiority of the Kwantung Army over the Soviet forces in the Far East, chaos in Siberia. In his last reports, from early October, he added that the Soviet Far East could be considered safe, and asked to be recalled from Japan since his task had been accomplished.

How the ring was uncovered

It was not intercepted messages that brought the ring down. The Japanese were tracking an unknown radio transmitter, but they never broke the ciphers, which were based on one-time tables. What undid it was an investigation into Japanese communists who had returned from the United States. At the end of September 1941 the Tokkō arrested Tomo Kitabayashi, a former member of the Communist Party USA, and the trail led to her acquaintance Miyagi. Miyagi tried to kill himself by jumping from the window of the interrogation room, and then began to talk. His statements pointed to Ozaki and Sorge.

The police wanted to arrest everyone at once, so that the foreigners could neither escape nor take refuge in the embassy. The prosecutors, however, wary of Japan’s ally and of people close to the Prime Minister, decided to arrest and interrogate Ozaki first, and to move against the German only once they were certain. Ozaki was taken into custody just as the Konoe government was in its death throes. The prince resigned on 16 October over a dispute with the War Minister, Tōjō, about withdrawing troops from China, and the arrest of his former adviser further weakened his position. Investigators questioned Konoe about the case only in 1942.

At Clausen’s the police found the radio set; at Sorge’s, material that enabled them to read earlier messages. Ambassador Ott, informed the next day that his friend had been detained “on suspicion of espionage”, took it for a symptom of Japanese spy mania and demanded an explanation. The matter was soon confirmed: after a few days of interrogation Sorge admitted that he had been a communist for years and was working for Moscow. Japan made the case public only in May 1942.

The divisions from the Far East

A legend grew up around Sorge’s reports according to which they allowed Stalin to withdraw from the Manchurian border the “Siberian divisions” that saved Moscow at the last minute. Research in recent decades calls for it to be substantially corrected. The transfer of troops from east to west began even before the German invasion: an army made up of divisions from Siberia was already standing near Moscow at the beginning of July. According to a compilation by the British researcher Nigel Askey, based on Soviet unit data, 28 divisions were transferred from the eastern districts to the west between 22 June and the end of 1941, 11 of them in June and 3 in July – before Sorge could have known anything about the Japanese decisions of August and September. Only 11 of them came from the Far Eastern Front and the Trans-Baikal Military District, that is, from the forces facing the Japanese. Several rifle divisions from this group, among them the 32nd, 78th and 93rd, went to the Western Front outside Moscow in the autumn. Other studies give slightly different figures, depending on whether they also count tank brigades and regiments and replacements, but the overall picture is similar. The Far Eastern Front, moreover, retained substantial forces throughout the war, because the Kwantung Army remained in Manchuria.

Historians also disagree about how much weight Sorge’s reports carried in Moscow. In the Intelligence Directorate some of the leadership suspected him of playing a double game, and his reports were repeatedly disregarded. Moscow also had other sources: according to some historians Soviet cryptanalysts were reading part of the Japanese diplomatic correspondence, and military intelligence was watching the movements of the Kwantung Army across the border. Most researchers believe that the news from Tokyo strengthened the Stavka in its decision to draw on the last reserves from the east in October and November, but was not its only basis.

Place in the war

18 October 1941 was one of the most difficult days of the autumn campaign. After the launch of Operation Typhoon and the encirclement of the Soviet forces at Vyazma and Bryansk, the Germans were breaking through the Mozhaisk Line, and in Moscow itself panic had broken out two days earlier. Georgy Zhukov had been in charge of the capital’s defence since 10 October. The divisions from the east, though fewer than legend has it, were among the best-trained and most fully equipped units the Red Army could then commit to the Battle of Moscow. In November they defended the approaches to the capital, and in December they took part in the counter-offensive alongside new armies formed in the interior, also from recruits from Siberia and the Urals.

Japan did what Sorge had predicted. The Imperial Conference of 5 November set a final deadline for the negotiations with Washington; on 1 December the decision for war was taken, and on 7 December 1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and British and American possessions in Asia. In the north all remained quiet throughout the war, until August 1945, when it was the Soviet Union that attacked Japan.

Sorge himself spent three years in Sugamo prison. A Tokyo court sentenced him to death on 29 September 1943, and on 7 November 1944, the anniversary of the October Revolution, he was hanged together with Ozaki. Moscow, to which, according to several accounts, the Japanese offered an exchange, replied that it did not know any such man. The Soviet Union acknowledged him only in 1964, when it posthumously awarded him the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.