Hearings on American Aspects of the Richard Sorge Spy Case (HUAC, 1951)

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Ten years after Richard Sorge's arrest, the House Committee on Un-American Activities brought two men to Washington who knew his case from the files. On 9 August 1951 it heard Yoshikawa Mitsusada, the Tokyo procurator who had interrogated Sorge in 1941 and 1942 and was by then chief of the special investigation bureau of Japan's attorney general's office. On 22 and 23 August it heard Maj. Gen. Charles A. Willoughby, intelligence chief to General MacArthur since 1939, who was awaiting retirement^1,2. The printed volume, 120-odd pages, also reads into the record long extracts from the Japanese case papers¹.

The procurator

Yoshikawa's testimony, through an interpreter, is the most useful part for historians. He describes how the case opened in October 1941 with the arrest of a woman who had returned from America, which led to Miyagi Yotoku, an artist, then to Ozaki Hotsumi, an adviser in Prince Konoye's circle, and then to Sorge, Max Clausen and Branko Vukelić. The police found the radio transmitter and a German statistical yearbook used as the code book¹.

He says Sorge denied everything for about a week, then wrote in German that he had been an international Communist since 1925, and confessed. He denies any coercion. He then explains how the long statement was made: Sorge typed it himself in the examination room, corrected it, and handed it over; an official interpreter translated it into Japanese; the Justice Ministry printed the translation in two parts in February and April 1942. His 1949 affidavits, read into the record, say he kept a rejected 24-page first draft on Shanghai and gave it to US Army G-2 in February 1949; that draft is the typescript the CIA later released¹.

His memory is not perfect: asked when Sorge was arrested, he says "I think it was November 1941"; it was 18 October^1,4.

The general

Willoughby's purpose is plain from his opening statement. The Sorge case, he says, was "only a chip in the general mosaic of Soviet strategy", and the real story ran back to Comintern operations in Shanghai around 1930 and forward to American Communists of 1951¹. His staff had compiled 34 "consecutive exhibits" on the Japanese case, which he describes as authenticated, notarized translations, and he hands the committee two metal trunks of Shanghai Municipal Police files, obtained with help from British, French and Chinese officials and the CIA¹. Counsel adds that the Army had delivered the exhibits to the committee between March 1949 and February 1951, and copies to the FBI and the State Department¹.

Much of the rest concerns Agnes Smedley. The Army had released Willoughby's report naming her a Soviet agent in February 1949; she denied it and threatened to sue, and the Secretary of the Army, Kenneth Royall, called the release an "inadvertence". The committee lets Willoughby answer his critics at length^1,3.

How to read it

These are political hearings, held in 1951 to link a Soviet spy ring to American Communists, and Willoughby says so¹. The value is in the sworn detail from Yoshikawa about how the Japanese built the case and how Sorge's statement was produced, and in the trail of documents from Japanese files to G-2 to Congress. Willoughby went on to publish his version as a book in 1952². The volume also quotes press items, including a 1949 newspaper column by Harold Ickes and a passage from Time. Read Willoughby's claims about individuals with care. For the ring itself, see The Sorge spy ring.