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Richard Sorge

It seems that the Rote Kapelle network initially sent the information that German forces were going to attack the Soviet Union. Since the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was considered to be valid and the source of the information was unclear, Moscow virtually ignored it. But when Sorge sent the confirmation from Tokyo, the information was passed on to the great Stalin himself. He, however, disregarded it and decided to trust Hitler and the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. Sorge's report from Tokyo on German intentions was filed under the heading "Doubtful and Misleading Information."

Sorge flew from Berlin to Yokohama on Junker's first commercial flight from Germany to Japan, with brief stops in New York and Vancouver. Besides the flight log of Flight 1995, kept in the Museum of German Aviation in Frankfurt, there are no records of this historical endeavor. There is no list of passengers, but it is almost certain that the flight was almost full. It seems the passengers were cosmopolitan, and the flight was tumultuous ("Winds over the Pacific were just horrid!"); that something was wrong with the heating system, so the passengers were freezing even with miraculously retrieved fur hats and leather gloves; that no one else slept on the flight; that the food was edible, but for some reason there was no water so they all drank champagne (courtesy of Junker); that the plane almost went down in the middle of the night, somewhere over the Pacific; that first men, then women, disgorged themselves all over the aircraft and the vomit froze on the floor; that Sorge briefly befriended a certain Mary Kinzie, an American poetess, which did not go unnoticed by New York gossip-scribes. On September 9, 1933, in the early afternoon, Sorge and his shadowy co-passengers arrived at the Yokohama airport, reeking of vomit, emptied of champagne and lobster, with particles of undigested food thawing on the soles of their shoes. Some of them were proud of German air-industry and reliability, some of them were happy to be alive.

In the early sixties, in the de-Stalinized Soviet Union, the campaign of Sorge's glorification was set on course and a number of books that contained Sorge's pictures and previously unrevealed documents from Soviet archives were published. Most of the books were embellished (if not embroidered) with, so to speak, fictitious additions. At the same time, a street in Moscow and a tanker were named after Sorge. In the spring of 1965, the Soviet authorities issued a postage stamp, at the value of 4 kopecks, in his honor. The commemorative stamp showed Sorge full face on a scarlet background together with a reproduction of the medal of the Hero of the Soviet Union.

Father: Wilhelm Richard Sorge, a German engineer, a stout man with a nipple-like wart on the nape of his neck and cloudy eyebrows. Working on the Azerbaijan oil fields, when he fell in passionate love with Sorge's mother. Sorge was conceived and born in Baku.

Sorge went to Moscow (from Tokyo, via New York, ostensibly visiting Wiesbaden), for the last time, in 1935. In New York, he encountered, for the first time, Mary Kinzie. In her memoirs, entitled The History of Nothingness, Ms. Kinzie depicts Sorge: "When I saw him in 1935 he had become a violent man, a volcanic drinker. Little was left of the charm of the romantic idealist, of the cosmopolitan writer whom I had fallen for on Junker's flight. Nevertheless, he was still extraordinarily good-looking: his cold blue eyes, surrounded by circular darkness, had retained his capacity for vicious self-mockery. He said: 'My personality is split between a man who hates himself and a man whom I hate.' His hair was still potently black, but his cheekbones and sullen mouth were tired" (p. 101).
In Moscow, Sorge visited Yekaterina Maximovna, whom he was believed to have married in 1933, and who died in Siberia in 1943, in a women's camp, her throat cut by a sharp piece of ice in the hand of a jealous working-unit leader. Sorge was looking forward to meeting General Berzin, but General Berzin was gone and was replaced by General Semyon Petrovich Uritsky, who was arrested and shot as a Japanese spy in November of 1937.

Mother: Nina Kobelev, a conventional Russian beauty (big eyes, bony pink cheeks, rotund nose, small mouth with thick lips, cobwebby mustache-shadow, long silky hair, etc.), the daughter of Wilhelm's landlord in Baku. Sorge was born on October 4, 1895, after 37 hours of hard labor. Let us note an obvious thing: Germany was his Fatherland, Russia was his Motherland.

Having agreed to write the full confession, Sorge demanded a (black-and-green) Pelikan fountain pen and a hard-covered notebook with blank sheets. Yoshikawa himself delivered the writing devices. Sorge thanked him and said, in poor Japanese: "Honourable Procurator, this fountain pen is a poisonous fountain pen." Yoshikawa replied: "Honourable Spy, it is the redeeming fountain pen." Then they both laughed.

Sorge never disguised himself, but changed names often. He bragged to Max Klausen that he had more names than women ("And that is a lot, Max!"). He was known as I. K. Sorge, R. Sonter (Moscow 1924 - 1928); Johann, Sebastian (Sweden, 1928); Christopher, Christian (England, 1929); Johnson, Jim, Gimon, Marlowe (Shanghai, 1930 - 1932); Richard Sorge (Tokyo, 1933 - 1944); and there were many other, unknown, evanescent names.

Sorge's activities were much less adventurous than an avid reader would hope. In his written confession, Max Klausen, referring to the years 1933 - 1939, says: "Six dangerous years passed uneventfully," pointing toward the routine of everyday spying. Sorge's spying meant patiently collecting diverse, and sometimes ostensibly trite, information: a gossip about the Anti-Comintern Pact negotiations; a rumor about the Cabinet changes; the essence of a drunken soldier's swaggering about the military life in Manchuko; someone else's husband being with someone else's wife -- a useful information for the future Index; air of insurgent desires of young army officers, brought from afar by Miyagi; chitchat among foreign journalists; a careless remark of the German ambassador about "everybody being crazy in Berlin about the Russia attack." In 1936, however, Sorge obtained a position as the unofficial secretary to the German military attaché, Colonel Ott ("an honest, pleasant, gullible man, with oily military hair, and a thousand and one WWI stories"), and in 1939 he became the German embassy press attaché. This position enabled him to access documents that were considered confidential, even top-secret. Only occasionally he would photograph the document, as in the case of the preliminary document for the Anti-Comintern Pact. Mostly, there was no need for surreptitiousness for he would take any desired document to his improvised office (ex-coffee-kitchen, still reeking of beer from the party celebrating the anniversary of the Hitler ascension) where he would photograph it, or even make notes, at his will. In his article in Literaturnaya Gazeta (January 20, 1965), entitled "The Man Who Never Knew Enough," Victor Venykov aptly notes: "A spy is above all a man of politics, who must be able to grasp, analyze and connect in his mind events which seemingly have no connection. He must have the breadth of a historian, the meticulous powers of observation, the spirit and the mind of Tolstoy. Espionage is a continuous and demanding labor and the spy forms himself in that process. Least of all was Sorge like those secret agents whom certain Western authors have created. He did not force open gates in order to steal documents: the documents were shown to him by their very owners. He did not fire his pistol to penetrate the places which he had to penetrate: the doors were graciously opened to him by the guardians of the secret. He did not have to kill. But he was murdered by the brutal machinery."

In October 1935, Sorge met, at the Rheingold, Miyake Hinako, a geisha with mild socialist inclinations ("Like many other women I used to read left-wing novels"). She didn't mind Sorge's relentless promiscuity ("It is only natural, isn't it, for a famous man to have several mistresses"). After Sorge's execution, Hanako-san patiently pestered the strict prison authorities to allow her to recover Sorge's body. The ascetic coffin was retrieved from the part of the Sugamo prison cemetery that was reserved for nameless vagrants. Decomposition was rather advanced, and only a large skeleton remained. The large skull (she kissed his ex-forehead) and the bones were those of a foreigner; and there were clear marks of damage to the bones -- the eternal result of Sorge's war wounds. Hanako recognized the teeth (and imagined a smile) from their gold filling (from which, in 1946, she had a ring made). She had the coffin removed to the quiet Tama graveyard, just outside Tokyo. "The Society for the Relief of Those Sacrificed in the Ozaki Case" raised funds for Sorge's gravestone, upon which the inscription, in English and Japanese, reads: "Here sleeps the brave stranger who devoted his life to opposing war, and to the struggle for the piece [sic!] of the world." In the early summer of 1965, Hanako-san was invited to visit the Soviet Union. At the Black Sea ("This sea is not as black as our sea" -- a polite chuckle from the escorting throng followed) resort of Yalta, Hanako-san saw a performance of Press Attaché in Tokyo, a play dealing with Sorge's life in Tokyo, in which she was rendered by a certain Yekaterina Maximovna.

Sorge worked for the Fourth Bureau of the Red Army Intelligence, which none of the members of his ring (Klausen, Voukelitch, Ozaki, Miyagi) knew -- they all referred to "the Moscow center" and were happy to work for peace in the world. Jan Karlovich Berzin (real name: Peter Kyuzis) was the all-seeing head of the Fourth Bureau. He was the son of poor Latvian parents, born in Madona, 1890. At the age of nineteen he was arrested by the Tsarist police for involvement in an assassination plot (a plan to throw a hand grenade at the chief of the Okhrana in the Bolshoi had failed), was sentenced to death and then pardoned because of his youth. He spent some time in prison but surfaced again in 1917 as a member of the Petrograd Bolshevik Party and charged at the Winter Palace. He was the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs in Soviet Latvia in the spring of 1919, when the military success of the White armies led him to take over command of the Latvian Rifle Division. His first act of command was shooting the previous commander (name lost) with his Luger, having accused, tried, and sentenced him for "revolutionary feebleness" in front of the petrified Rifle Division, right through his left eye (the unfortunate previous commander's brain spurting on the numb political commissar, who later committed suicide). The legend of this execution followed Berzin when he was being made head of the Fourth Bureau and reached Sorge the day before he was to meet him. Berzin and Sorge quickly became friends (Sorge: "I respected his blood-red facial scars and his bright gray hair"). They used nicknames when addressing each other: Berzin was Starik, Sorge was Ika. In 1935, Berzin was arrested and strangled with piano wire (a rather creative execution) as a German spy. It seems that Sorge never found out about Berzin's political death. He never mentioned him, however, after his last visit to Moscow in 1935. Sorge never admitted working for the Red Army, and the Soviet Union maintained, after his arrest, that he had worked for the Comintern, which was supposedly beyond the jurisdiction of the Soviet authorities.

The encoded message carrying reports on Sorge's (and his co-spies') activities were sent regularly, although at different, previously agreed upon, times. Max Klausen was the telegraphist (and only the telegraphist). Sorge trusted his blunt ignorance and his ("almost admirable") lack of will. The radio operated from Voukelitch's home in the Bunka apartment complex, across from a rather malodorous canal, named Chanomizu -- "honourable tea-water"; or from Klausen's apartment, in the Akasaka district, with the windows perennially behind curtains of drying bed sheets and underwear; or, almost never, from Sorge's place (No. 30 Nagasaka-cho) in Azabu, an affluent part of the city. The book used for coding messages was an edition of the Complete Shakespeare, probably one of the Cambridge editions from the late twenties. Max Klausen: "We would send the number of the play in the book (we called it the Book), then the number of the act, then the number of the scene upon which the scramble-code would be based. I had never read Shakespeare and found it quite boring, but Sorge was able to quote lengthy passages from any play. I remember once we used a passage, I forgot from which play, where there was a phrase 'God's spies.' Sorge recited the whole passage (I also remember butterflies in that passage) and then said: 'We're God's spies, except there's no God,' and we got a kick out of that and laughed like mad."
(The passage that Klausen alludes to is from The History of King Lear and goes as follows:

"...so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we'll talk with them too --
Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out,
And take upon 's the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies.")

On the outset of Sorge's mission to Japan, Berzin told him: "The only thing you should trust and rely upon is the omnipresence of surveillance. There'll be eyes everywhere, and nowhere." Sorge was all too well aware of being watched: even on the Junker flight, he felt a gaze adhered to his body (although that may have been Mary Kinzie). Once in Japan, the following things made Sorge aware of the surveillance:
he was being watched by Maritomi Mitsukado, a reporter for Juji Shimpo, who would always somehow find him in any bar or at any party and then ask a transparent question like: "Do you think this tyranny will last forever?" (Sorge: "What tyranny?");


his maid and laundryman were frequently questioned and tortured by police;


a woman he slept with (name lost) got up in the middle of the night and went through his pockets, finding nothing;


in bars and restaurants, even at the Imperial Hotel, he was constantly monitored by plainclothesmen of the Thought Police (sticking out of the careless crowd by being too focused on him);


his house was searched and his suitcase examined, during his absences;


most of all, it was a sense that he developed, a sense that someone's gaze was always at the nape of his neck, like a wart.
Sorge: "When you know you're being watched, you assume a role and play it, even when you sleep -- even when you dream. Most of my life I played Richard Sorge, and I was someone else, somewhere else. The ubiquitous surveillance makes everything look differently -- you see things through someone else's eyes. Everything is more present -- more real -- because you see nothing alone."


Sorge's group maintained radio contact mainly with Vladivostok (code name: "Wittenberg") and, seldom, Moscow (code name: "Munich").

In 1924, upon a decoy invitation from the Moscow Marx-Engels Research Institute, left by the illustrious scholar Chichikov, Sorge left Germany for good and went to Moscow. Having spent some weeks in different (apart from German roaches) apartments, Sorge finally settled in the Lux Hotel, Room 101. The Lux was the place where all foreign comrades working for the Comintern lived. Indeed, a day after he took off his socks, poured down his throat a gigantic glass (with misty fingerprints all over) of vodka and unpacked his two suitcases (one of which was full of books: Das Kapital, Doctor Faustus, Seven Sweet Little Girls, etc.), he was visited by comrades Pyatnitski, Kuusinen, Klopstock. The three Comintern activists were infamous for never leaving the proximity of each other ("They were called the 'Three Kings,' but then Klopstock disappeared in the late thirties, I think"). They talked to him all night long, becoming friends along the way, and effortlessly recruited him for the Comintern Intelligence Division.
PYATNITSKI: "The Comintern is not a party but a world organization of national Communist parties. It toils for world Communism, for the incorporation of the whole world into a single Communist society."

KUUSINEN: "That is, it seeks to do away with private ownership of the means of production, with class exploitation and oppression, with racial tyranny, and to unite nations in accordance with a single master plan."

KLOPSTOCK: "In form and theory, the Comintern is the brains directing activities of the sections as they endeavor to achieve a goal for this stage in the development of world Communism."

ALL: "Welcome!"

In the thirties the Lux Hotel became a virtual detention camp, for foreign comrades were more liable to become foreign spies. The hotel tenants' revolutionary activities were palsied, as they were perennially waiting for the NKVD footsteps to stop before their doors. A car stopping noisily in the middle of the night, in front of the hotel, would have a suicide or two as a consequence. No tenant would let the cleaning personnel into his or her apartment, and after a while cleaning was abandoned altogether. Hence already uncontrollable roaches multiplied exponentially. By 1941, none of the residents from the thirties were left in the hotel, apart from now gigantic cockroaches and a comrade from Yugoslavia, mad and dying, preserved only due to a careless bureaucratic error.

Beside German Imperialism (1927), a study of the political will that led to the slaughter of WWI, and The Accumulation of Capital and Rosa Luxembourg (1922), a study of the life and theories of the great German revolutionary, Sorge's most important work was Marxism and Love (1921), a work about human relationships in the context of merciless exploitation. In the Introduction, Sorge writes: "Thus love is not possible in a class society, for every human relationship is a relationship of property, exploitation, and ideological subjugation. Love as a concept can be achieved only in a classless society, where a man is a man and a woman is a woman. Just as the decisive intensification of class struggle, exposing the cruelty of capitalism, leads towards the revolution, the intensification of purely sexual relations would expose the inhumanity of individual human relations. The consequent objectified vacuum of inhumanity would simply require a revolutionary action. Love, to sum up, is not what we need now -- what we need now is sex!" Scholars claim that Marxism and Love is more a product of the unfulfilled desire for Christiane, the wife of Kurt Gerlach, his teacher at the Kiel University, than a product of studious research. Some, however, tried to show that Marxism and Love (and some articles like "Anal Sex and Revolution" from 1923) influenced Wilhelm Reich. Sorge himself was not too proud of his early theoretical work: "I am convinced that my handling of these difficult theoretical questions was cumbersome and immature, and I hope that the Nazis burned every last copy."

Sorge's house was what the Japanese in those days called a bunka jutaku, or "an up-to-date residence," which was, by contemporary European and American standards, rather small. Alphonse Kauders, who visited Sorge in 1939, described it as "scarcely more than a two-story doghouse in a small garden." In the upstairs room that Sorge used as his study, the untidiness that surrounded him amused his friends (Kauders: "It was like a Verdun of things") and horrified his housemaid ("German pig!"), for there was a seeming chaos of books, maps, magazines, and papers. Kauders recalls that many of the books were on economics (notably on the geisha wage system), that there were American movie magazines (obtained from Gimon), and that there was "some quite interesting Asian pornography." There were one or two fine Japanese prints and some expensive pieces of bronze and china. There were photographs of Japanese creek dams and a photograph of Greta Garbo on the thin walls. The room also contained a gramophone, and a pet owl (fed with local mice and cockroaches) in a cage. Sorge respected Japanese customs by removing his shoes at the front door and by wearing velvet slippers on the stairs and in the tiny corridor. He slept in Japanese fashion, on a mattress laid on the tatami, with his head on a small round, hard pillow. Kauders, describing Sorge's bathroom, remembers that the fanatically clean Sorge scrubbed himself daily, as if there was no tomorrow, and then, drawing up his knees, climbed into the wooden tub, filled with scorchingly hot water."

Sorge's grandfather, Adolph Sorge, had served as the secretary for the First International during Marx's lifetime. Grandpa Adolph told Sorge, throughout his childhood, Marx stories: about Marx reading Shakespeare (in English) and the Greek tragedies (in Greek) every July; about Marx and Engels playing tennis (Marx always losing), as the officials of the First International watched them, moving their heads "left-right, left-right, like a clock pendulum"; about Grandpa Adolph, stopping by Marx's home and taking him to a bogus meeting, covering Marx's secret trysts with his (recently fired) housemaid; about Marx's pathological fear of dentists -- Engels or Grandpa having to go with him and hold his hand as the blood soaked his immortal beard; about holding, piously, the manuscript of The Communist Manifesto, knowing that it was something that was to change the world forever, "the world that philosophers theretofore only attempted to interpret."

During his stay in Shanghai, Sorge was a frequent visitor of the infamous opium houses. In 1932, in the middle of the siege of Shanghai, in Gong Li's opium bar, Sorge had a sensation of the physically split personality: Sorge stepped out of his own body and left it to wallow in its opiatic stupor, while he walked among the defenders, with a German nostalgia for trenches, handing out grenades to poorly clad and armed Chinese, not fearing Japanese bullets, hallucinating about "the eye of the ubiquitous sniper, the infinite preciseness of the supreme sharpshooter."

Sorge was admitted to the Tokyo branch of the Nazi Party in October 1934. In his speech, preceding an orgiastic drinking contest, Colonel Ott said: "One cannot but feel that our cause will be only strengthened by the energy of Dr. Richard Sorge, our beloved fellow German. There's no better occasion to use, once again, our Führer's timeless words: 'We have hundred of thousands of the most intelligent sons of peasants and workers. We will have them educated and are already doing so, and we wish them someday to occupy the leading positions of state and society, along the rest of our educated strata, and not the members of the alien people. We are determined to thwart and thrust aside this alien people that knew how to insinuate itself and seize all the leading positions for itself, for we want our own people for that position.' I deeply believe that Dr. Richard Sorge's blood will only enhance the purity of German blood. Welcome, Richard, welcome!"

The Thought Police inspectors, with the typical bureaucratic thoroughness, made an inventory of the items seized at Sorge's house upon the arrest. Those bare objects -- the physical tools of espionage -- were to form the first grim and material skeleton in the body of proof to be forged against him. They included three cameras; one copying camera with accessories; three photo lenses (one telescopic); developing equipment; two rolls of film with photographed documents (the nature of the documents is unknown from the police files); one black leather wallet containing $1,782; sixteen notebooks with details of contacts with agents and notes in an unknown language; Sorge's Nazi Party card (with membership fees paid until 1951) and a list of Party members in Japan; two volumes of the Complete Shakespeare (no data as to what edition); seven pages of reports and charts in English; and, lastly and fatally, two pages of a typewritten draft, also in English, of the final message of achievement, compiled to be sent to "Wittenberg" on October 15.

Sorge: "In the summer of 1914, I visited Sweden on vacation, and returned to Germany by the last boat available. The Austrian Archduke had been assassinated in Sarajevo, and World War I broke out. I volunteered for service immediately, joining the army without reporting to my school or taking the final graduation examination." This period may be described as "from the schoolhouse to the slaughterhouse." Sorge was sent to the Eastern Front (Galicia). He was befriended by an old stonesman from Hamburg, a real leftist, whose head was shattered to smithereens before Sorge's very eyes, a piece of skull bone cutting his face (a permanent scar remained). In July 1915, Sorge was wounded by shrapnel in his right leg. In 1916, a bullet struck him from the back, taking out his bowels. Sorge was transported to a field hospital, conscious, watching with listless amazement his viscera throbbing in his hands. Exhausted surgeons gave him no hope of survival, but patched him up and let him occupy a bed. Sorge's next-bed neighbor, a Jewish boy, crushed his skull against the bed frame, as Sorge was helplessly writhing in his own pain. In early 1917, fully and miraculously recovered, Sorge was sent back to the Galician front, where he became one of the best sharpshooters in his division, specializing in eliminating enemy snipers.

Sorge was a passionate chess player. He played against Kurt Gerlach (Sorge: 25 -- Gerlach: 50); Pyatnitski, Kuusinen, Klopstock (Sorge: 12 -- Pyatnitski, Kuusinen, Klopstock: 12); Berzin (Sorge: 131 -- Berzin: 127); Klausen (Sorge: 1 -- Klausen: 0); Ozaki (Sorge: 50 -- Ozaki: 49); Hanako (Sorge: 111 -- Hanako: 0); Ott (Sorge: 45 -- Ott: 12); and he played against himself daily.

Sorge: "Legitimate and plausible cover is absolutely essential for a spy. I worked as a news reporter and found that the foreign correspondent is conveniently situated for the acquisition of information of various types, but that he's closely observed by the police. I believe, however, that the best thing an agent can do is render himself an intellectual: a professor, a writer, a scholar. Generally speaking, the intellectual class is made up of men of average or less than average intelligence, and the agent who assumes such a cover would be quite safe from detection by police. Moreover, as an intellectual with extensive scholarly connections (which he would utilize as sources or transmitters of information) he could associate with people who possess information they know nothing about, he could ask ostensibly ludicrous questions and develop trust. I think that intellectuals are the pets of the world, digging holes in the backyards of history. They can move around without arousing suspicion."

In the files of the Frankfurt Police, dating from 1927, there is a vague and unconfirmed report showing that a Dr. Richard Sorge left for the United States on January 24, 1926, and spent some time in California, working in Hollywood film studios. The only admission, however, made by Sorge of visiting America was on his way to Japan. Herr Alexander Hemon, a researcher at the German Foreign Office Archives, claims that there is a possibility that Dr. Richard Sorge, identified by the police as being in Frankfurt in 1925 and 1926, was "not the Soviet spy who was working in Tokyo and on mysterious missions abroad, but someone else, of whom we know nothing."

On the evening of Tuesday, October 7th, 1941, Sorge had arranged a customary meeting with Ozaki at the Asia Restaurant, in the South Manchurian Railway building. He kept the appointment in vain, devouring sake, absentmindedly flirting with a woman ("a Mary Kinzie lookalike"), gorging on escargot at the next table. Miyagi was due to come to Sorge's house two days later, but failed to appear. On Friday, October 10th, Klausen and Voukelitch called on Sorge, by a prior arrangement, in an atmosphere of mounting disquiet. Voukelitch telephoned Ozaki's office and received no answer. Klausen: "The air was heavy, and Sorge said gravely -- as if our fate was sealed -- 'Neither Joe nor Otto showed up to meet us. They must have been arrested by the police.'"
After Voukelitch and Klausen left Sorge's house and strayed toward their respective fates (Voukelitch: died of typhus in the prison hospital; Klausen: scorched in his prison cell by an American bomb during an air raid), Sorge could not rest and instead made frantic love to Hanako, who was gentler and smoother than ever. At two o'clock after midnight, a plainclothesman (name lost), with two uniformed, sleepy policemen, knocked politely on Sorge's door and, receiving no answer (Sorge and Hanako approaching another climax), shouted: "We have come to see you about your recent traffic accident." Sorge appeared at the door in pajamas and slippers and then was, without further exchange, bundled into an inconspicuously black police car, protesting (in whisper, so as not to wake his neighbors) that his arrest was illegal.

The procurator directly responsible for the interrogation of Sorge was Yoshikawa Mitsusada of the Thought Department of the Tokyo District Court Procurator Bureau. Yoshikawa had an extensive knowledge of current political and economic thought, including Marxism. It was rumored that he had been a Marxist himself when he was a student at Tokyo Imperial University. Soon after graduating from the university, he had written a comprehensive study of the geisha wage system. It seems that there was some mutual admiration between the two of them. Yoshikawa: "In my whole life, I have never seen anyone as great as he was." After the sentence, at their last meeting, Sorge asked Yoshikawa to be kind to Hanako-san: "She will marry a professor in the end and have a boring and happy life. Don't do anything to her."

Some of Sorge's information, seemingly petty, was passed on by way of the Fourth Bureau to the GPU, which used it to build the foundations for what would become the KGB's Sixth Division of the First Directorate -- the infamous Index. The Index was a vast collection of biographical and personal data about everyone who might, even very remotely, be of use at some time or another, to Soviet espionage. The Index files contained information about sexual preferences (obtained by voyeuristic monitoring or tempting agents); eating (restaurant bills, etc.), and sleeping (calls in the middle of the night, monitoring, etc.) habits; about sports teams affiliations; about reading interests (subscription lists, library records, etc.) and, often, recorded stories, apparently unrelated, which helped the one in charge of the particular individual to assess what sort of person he or she was to utilize. The information could be used for blackmail, or for assuming the right approach when recruiting, or for plugging damaging information into the public's mind. Cold War defectors brought numerous stories about the Index and, almost without exception, claimed that the official slogan was "We know everything!" In pre-computer times, only the Nazi Gestapo had much the same kind of organization, but it was not nearly as detailed nor all embracing as the Index. There are claims, dating all the way from the sixties, that the United States Government agencies (CIA, FBI, or both) are building a computer database, based on the principles similar to the Index's, but none of those claims has ever been confirmed.

Some of Sorge's information, seemingly petty, was passed on by way of the Fourth Bureau to the GPU, which used it to build the foundations for what would become the KGB's Sixth Division of the First Directorate -- the infamous Index. The Index was a vast collection of biographical and personal data about everyone who might, even very remotely, be of use at some time or another, to Soviet espionage. The Index files contained information about sexual preferences (obtained by voyeuristic monitoring or tempting agents); eating (restaurant bills, etc.), and sleeping (calls in the middle of the night, monitoring, etc.) habits; about sports teams affiliations; about reading interests (subscription lists, library records, etc.) and, often, recorded stories, apparently unrelated, which helped the one in charge of the particular individual to assess what sort of person he or she was to utilize. The information could be used for blackmail, or for assuming the right approach when recruiting, or for plugging damaging information into the public's mind. Cold War defectors brought numerous stories about the Index and, almost without exception, claimed that the official slogan was "We know everything!" In pre-computer times, only the Nazi Gestapo had much the same kind of organization, but it was not nearly as detailed nor all embracing as the Index. There are claims, dating all the way from the sixties, that the United States Government agencies (CIA, FBI, or both) are building a computer database, based on the principles similar to the Index's, but none of those claims has ever been confirmed.

In August 1941, Hanako-san was summoned to the Thought Police headquarters and urged by a man named Nakamura to break off relations with Sorge ("They don't know what loyalty means! They don't know the value of the family!"). The typically Sorgean, sardonic reaction was to invite Nakamura to dinner -- an invitation that was embarrassingly ignored.

In the Sugamo prison, Sorge was befriended, somewhat surprisingly, by Captain Ohashi -- the head of the guards. After Sorge had written his confession, Ohashi brought newspapers to Sugamo everyday, together with a supply of Sorge's own tea. Sometimes, they'd drink tea together in Sorge's cell (Sorge: "If I am sentenced to death, Captain Ohashi, I shall become a ghost and haunt you"). In October 1944, after the execution day had been set, Ohashi bought some fruit and sake and gave what he described as a "farewell party" for Sorge. Ohashi begged a farewell gift from Sorge -- preferably Sorge's black Italian shoes with leather soles and silk laces. After Sorge was led to the execution, the polished pair of shoes was found in his cell (toes facing the wall), with folded silk socks inside, and a note for Ohashi: "I will never forget your kindness during the most difficult time of my eventful life."

Before getting to Yoshikawa, Sorge went through the obligatory interrogation conducted by lower procurators, which chiefly meant rather routine torture: Sorge was compelled to remain in a kneeling position, in formal Japanese style, for hours, while three procurators struck him repeatedly, stamped their feet on his knees, or twisted his head and arms in a judo hold. On occasions, they'd burn hair or pierced particularly painful points (nipples, testicles, anus) on his body. Every once in a while Sorge would just close his eyes and try to ignore the immense pain. The momentary trance would be smashed by a full-fist blow from behind to his ear or the nape of his neck -- the pain would be so intense that Sorge vomited uncontrollably. Naturally, he did not sign the confession under torture.

While in high school, Sorge's best friend was a Jewish boy named Franz, with whom he shared an interest in German history -- particularly Barbarossa and Bismarck. The friendship was abruptly broken off after Franz tried to kiss Ika, over the book about Barbarossa's incursion, full of pictures of heavily armored German knights on stout curtained horses.

Sorge broke down in the Buddhist chaplain's room in Sugamo, after the signed statements by Klausen, Voukelitch, Ozaki, and Miyagi were shown to him. Yoshikawa made the following appeal: "What about your obligations as a human being? Your friends, who have risked their lives and families to work with you, for your cause, have confessed and may hope thereby to secure some mitigation, however slight, of their sentences. Are you going to abandon them to their fate? Are you going to betray them? Are you going to be remembered as a typical Western man, caring more about himself than anyone else? If I were in your place, I'd confess." Sorge said: "Honourable Procurator, I have been defeated, for which I congratulate you," after which he requested the pen (black-and-green Pelikan) and paper (blank sheet, hardcover notebook). He wrote an autobiographical confession, which amounted to some 50,000 words and began with the words: "For the first time in my life, I want to tell the truth: I have been a Communist since 1928."

Neither the German, Japanese, nor Soviet public was ever informed about Sorge's trial and execution. Indeed, there was no official acknowledgment from any of the governments, apart from a brief cable from the German ambassador (recently promoted ex-Colonel Ott) in Tokyo, closing the case as far as Berlin was concerned: "The German journalist Richard Sorge who, as previously reported, has been condemned to death for espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union, was, according to a communication from the Foreign Ministry, hanged on November 7th." (Let us note a well-known fact: November 7, 1944, was the twenty-seventh anniversary of the October Revolution.)

In 1919, Sorge wrote a poem which began with the line: "Eternally a stranger, fleeing from himself" and read it in the Gerlach's salon before the audience of leftist university professors, Christiane, and Kurt himself. Kurt Gerlach mercilessly mocked Sorge's poetic instincts: "'Fleeing from himself' -- bah! Where would you go? That's bourgeois gibberish, Ika. Man is a product of social relations -- formed in history by history -- not a self, not an essence hoarded in the center of the metaphysical fluff. 'Eternally a stranger' -- bah!" Sorge burned the sheet with his poem and made no literary attempts (his confession notwithstanding) for the rest of his life.

After the disastrous courting attempt, driven by the choking desire for Christiane ("Dear Ika! I have liked you, even your self-mocking and sardonic wit. But what you did last night is not what a decent woman can bear..."), Sorge attempted suicide. Lacking courage to end his life with his mind clear, he fueled his death wishes with cheap pear schnapps, while a razor lay, ominously, on the table before him. The courage, however, reached its zenith after the second glass, declining rapidly thereafter, until he passed out. He woke up sixteen hours later (reeking of vomit, emptied of schnapps) not knowing where he was or why he was there. After that unfortunate incident, he would see Christiane only from afar, embers of his former desire suffocating under the ashes of orgiastic rampages.

During Sorge's preliminary trial, Stalingrad was under siege. Sorge, who perceived that this was the battlefield where the war was to be decided, took great interest in news about the battle. He'd ask Yoshikawa in the court, whispering, about Stalingrad, while the judge would be talking to his clerk. Yoshikawa would reply in undertone, telling him about the general situation ("They're keeping their positions," or "It looks good"). The preliminary judge knew what was going on, but did nothing to stop them. When Stalingrad was saved, Ohashi watched Sorge, through the peephole of his cell, dancing, clapping hands, and kissing the walls with joy.

Moments before the execution, the chief chaplain of the Sugamo prison (accompanied by Yoshikawa and Ohashi) offered Sorge tea and cake and said: "Life and death are one and the same thing to one who has attained personal beatitude. Impersonal beatitude can be attained by entrusting everything to the mercy of Buddha." Sorge said: "I thank you, but: no!"

Sorge was lead into a vaporous, windowless, bare room, with a gallows standing in the center. He was led across the room and placed beneath the gallows, while a noose was affixed around his neck. There was no staircase to climb, no platform to stand on. The trap was in the floor, immediately beneath his feet.

posted by nobs @ 1:51 PM