The Sorge spy ring

The most productive Soviet spy in prewar Asia did his work in plain sight. Richard Sorge was the Tokyo correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung, a member of the Nazi Party and, by 1938, a man with his own desk in the German embassy. He was also an officer of the Red Army's Fourth Department, the military intelligence service later known as the GRU, working under the code name Ramsay⁵.

A network built from nothing

Sorge reached Yokohama on 6 September 1933 after a spell in Berlin establishing his credentials as a pro-Nazi journalist⁵. Unlike a diplomat, he had no official cover to protect him, which puts him in the tradition of Soviet Illegals and legends. His instructions, as he later described them to Japanese interrogators, centered on one question: whether Japan was planning to attack the Soviet Union⁵.

The core of the ring was small. Max Clausen, a German radio operator, ran the transmitter and later a blueprint-copying business that served as cover. Branko Vukelić, a journalist writing for the French magazine Vu, gathered material, and Miyagi Yotoku translated Japanese reports and built his own small circle of informants⁵. The most valuable member was Hotsumi Ozaki of the Asahi Shimbun, a China specialist whom Sorge had first met in Shanghai in 1930. From 1937 Ozaki belonged to a policy group around Prince Fumimaro Konoe and then to the prime minister's informal "Breakfast Club," which put him in rooms where Japan's choices were being made⁷.

Inside the German embassy

Sorge's second source was the German embassy itself. He befriended the military attaché, Eugen Ott, and helped him write reports to Berlin. When Ott became ambassador in April 1938, Sorge breakfasted with him most days and sometimes drafted cables that went out over Ott's name⁵. A Gestapo officer at the embassy, Josef Meisinger, was later asked to look into Sorge and cleared him⁵.

In 1941 this access produced the ring's best-known reports. On 30 May Sorge relayed that Berlin had told Ott a German attack on the Soviet Union would begin in the second half of June. On 20 June he reported Ott's view that war was inevitable⁵. Stalin was receiving similar warnings from other sources and discounted them⁵.

After the invasion, the question of Japan returned to the center. Through Ozaki, Sorge followed the decisions of that summer, including the Imperial Conference of 2 July 1941, which chose to move south into Indochina while reinforcing the Kwantung Army in Manchuria. On 14 September Sorge told Moscow that, in the judgment of his group, the possibility of a Japanese attack that autumn had disappeared⁵.

Arrest and trial

Japanese political police watching Communists who had returned from exile picked up a thread that led to Miyagi, and his interrogation led them to the rest of the group^6,8. Ozaki was arrested in mid-October 1941, and Sorge and Clausen on 18 October^5,6. Ott at first protested to the Japanese, assuming the arrest was a case of spy mania⁵.

Sorge made a long statement in custody. A typed fragment in German, corrected in his hand, survives in CIA's files; the accompanying note says that most of the original manuscript burned in the air raids on Tokyo and that parts of the confession were evasive². The Tokyo District Court sentenced Sorge and Ozaki to death on 29 September 1943, and their appeals were rejected in January 1944⁶. Both were hanged at Sugamo Prison on 7 November 1944⁵. Clausen received a life sentence and was freed by the American occupation in 1945; Vukelić died in Abashiri Prison in January 1945, and Miyagi died in Sugamo before his trial ended⁵.

How the story came out

The first public account came from the American side. On 10 February 1949 the US Army released a report by the intelligence staff of General Douglas MacArthur's Tokyo headquarters, "The Sorge Spy Ring," drawn largely from Japanese files. A Canadian diplomat who sent it to Ottawa called it highly colored, and its charge against the American writer Agnes Smedley, who denied it, made front pages⁴. Its author was General Charles Willoughby¹. In January 1953 CIA acquired 150 to 200 copies of a further Willoughby compilation, A Partial Documentation of the Sorge Espionage Case, and kept them inside the agency³.

Moscow said nothing until late 1964, when a Pravda article began a campaign to make Sorge a popular hero. A decree of 5 November 1964 named him a Hero of the Soviet Union; Clausen and his wife Anna were decorated in January 1965¹. A CIA review of that campaign judged that the Soviet accounts added little, relied on the same Japanese investigation as Western writers, and showed no wish to publish an accurate history¹.

What the record does not show

Moscow's own operational files on Ramsay have been only partly opened, and much of what is known still rests on Japanese interrogation records and on Sorge's statement, which he shaped to protect others. Those papers show what Sorge sent; they show less about how his reports were judged when they arrived^1,2.

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