An Impeccable Spy by Owen Matthews

Author:Owen Matthews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

15

Attack Singapore!

‘Nobody could ever disturb his inner loneliness; that was what gave him his independence and probably explains how he was able to influence the people around him’1

Christiane Sorge, Memoir

In the spring of 1940, as the Wehrmacht stormed to victory over the Netherlands, Belgium and France, it seemed that the future world might indeed belong to the Third Reich. The tide of war had trapped Sorge in Tokyo. His only hope for a speedy return to Moscow was for Hitler’s victory over Western Europe to be swift and total, and that it would leave the Soviet Union unharmed. ‘The Germans here say that the war will soon be over and I must know what will become of me,’ Sorge wrote to Centre. ‘May I count on being able to return home at the end of the war? … It is time to settle down, put an end to this nomad existence … We remain, with health somewhat undermined it is true, always your true comrades and co-workers.’2

But a return home remained a vain hope while Japan pondered whether to enter the world war. Sorge’s mysteriously intimate knowledge of Japanese politics made him a man much in demand not only by his querulous spymasters in Moscow but also, and especially by, the Germans. Ambassador Ott had been trying to persuade Sorge to join the embassy staff for much of 1939. His proposal was followed up by an official offer from the Reich Foreign Ministry of ‘a high position to administer activities related to information and newspapers in the embassy’.3 Effectively, the ministry wished to headhunt Sorge’s excellent brain and have him all to themselves.

The offer put Sorge in a tricky position. He already had informal access to the embassy’s secret files and telegrams through his close friendship with Ott. As an embassy official that access would be freer, and formalised. But Sorge also needed plenty of spare time to conduct the arduous business of meeting with his agents, writing and encoding reports – not to mention the relative freedom to travel and meet contacts that his journalistic cover allowed him. More important, an official job at the embassy would entail a full security check – including a scan of the police records at all his former addresses in Berlin, Hamburg, Solingen and Frankfurt. ‘If I had accepted the position I would have had to present my identification,’ Sorge told his interrogators. ‘What I am could have been discovered after checking my past career.’4

Sorge refused the job offer. Ott became angry, but eventually offered a compromise. Sorge would have a desk at the embassy and fulfil some official duties, such as turning out a daily news summary for the embassy staff. But he would not become an employee of the Reich. At the same time, crucially, Sorge would ‘continuously maintain the role of a private collaborator to ambassador Ott’.5 The two old friends signed a formal contract confirming Sorge’s strange, semi-official status, at the heart of the embassy but not one of its staff.

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