Agent Sonya Page 8

  The man Givens had arrested was clearly “the main fulcrum for subversive communist plotting,” with six passports “stolen, ‘borrowed,’ or expertly forged,” a staff of nine people, no fewer than fifteen safe houses around the Far East, ten bankbooks, eight post office boxes, four telegraphic addresses, two offices, one shop, and an enormous budget for subversion: in the preceding ten months he had dispensed a staggering £82,200 to communists in China, the Malay states, Japan, Burma, Indochina, Formosa, and the Philippines. Soviet cash was also funding Mao’s Red Army in its war with the Nationalist government. The Noulenses, it seemed, were involved in “every phase of communist activity” in the Far East, with “Moscow as the controlling centre.”

  Noulens was really Yakov Matveyevich Rudnik, a Ukrainian Jew with an impeccable revolutionary pedigree who had taken part in the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917, before going on to work as a Comintern agent in the Crimea, Austria, France, and finally China. His wife, Nikolaevna Moiseenko-Velikaya, was the daughter of an aristocrat and a gifted mathematician who left her post in the economics faculty of the University of Petrograd to become a spy. They had arrived in Shanghai in March 1930.

  Givens never discovered the real identity of the man in his custody, but he was triumphant: “These archives offered a unique opportunity of seeing from the inside and on unimpeachable documentary evidence the workings of a highly developed communist organization of the ‘illegal’ order.”

  Rudnik’s arrest was a hammer blow to Soviet espionage in the Far East. Stalin himself immediately gave orders to the Comintern to “close all its extensive Shanghai operations and evacuate its staff immediately.” Soviet spies began fleeing in anticipation of mass arrests. Agnes Smedley headed to Hong Kong, “leaving in such haste that she carried no luggage.” Gerhart Eisler, the German enforcer who had insisted Ursula wear a hat, made for Berlin. Some did not escape fast enough, or had nowhere to go, and dozens of communists were arrested. The party organization in Shanghai, already fragile, was left in tatters. In Hong Kong, the British police picked up a young Indochinese cook named Nguyễn Ai Quốc, the son of a Confucian scholar whose embrace of communism had taken him to France, America, China, and Britain (where he worked as a pastry chef on the Newhaven–Dieppe ferry). As head of the Indochinese Communist Party, he had been in regular communication with Noulens and was sentenced to two years in prison by the Hong Kong Military Tribunal. After his release in 1933, Quốc went on to become the architect of Vietnam’s independence movement, prime minister, and leader of the Vietcong during the Vietnam War. He is better known as Ho Chi Minh.

  Armed with the Noulens documents, the Chinese authorities tracked down hundreds more communists in what was chillingly described by the British as the “resolute, timely and decisive application of repressive measures.” The urban communist movement in China was shattered, its leadership dispersed, the survivors living in fear. The secret police combed the city, raiding one safe house after another. Zhou Enlai fled to the mountains of Jiangxi disguised as a priest. By the beginning of 1932, there were just two CCP Central Committee members left in Shanghai. A foreign journalist (writing before the Holocaust) described the White Terror as “having no parallel in history except perhaps the invasions and slaughters staged by the Huns in the fourth and fifth centuries.”

  Sorge remained undiscovered. None of his agents were on the Noulens payroll, and as yet the police had not made the connection. Sorge was now “the sole senior Soviet intelligence officer in the city,” with the unenviable task of sorting out the mess and doing “everything possible to free the Rudniks.” Ursula, Isa Wiedemeyer, Grisha Herzberg, and the rest of Sorge’s team were told to stand ready to flee at a moment’s notice. But as the days passed without the emergency escape signal, Ursula began to relax. The suitcase of documents and the trunk of weapons were returned to their hiding place in Ursula’s cupboard. The meetings resumed. “From now on,” she wrote, “I kept a suitcase ready packed for Misha and myself.”

  By repeatedly changing their identities, the imprisoned Rudniks were keeping the authorities at bay. It is very hard to prosecute someone if you do not know who they really are. Meanwhile, the “Noulens Affair” had become an international cause célèbre, with left-leaning celebrities, fellow travelers, intellectuals, scientists, and writers lining up to insist that the accused couple were simply peace-loving union organizers cruelly hounded by the fascistic Chinese government.

  At this moment, Sorge asked Ursula to perform a task more dangerous than anything she had attempted before. “Will you hide a Chinese comrade whose life is in danger?” This was an instruction framed as a request. It was also a calculated gamble. Concealing a communist fugitive in the house on Avenue Joffre would be impossible without Rudi’s knowledge. Indeed, it required his active collaboration. Ursula knew that Sorge was testing both her resolve and the state of her marriage, but there was no choice. “I had to take Rudi into my confidence.” She was under no illusions. Rudi was unlikely to react well to the discovery that his wife was a communist spy.

  DURING THEIR TIME IN SHANGHAI, Ursula had detected a small but distinct shift in Rudi’s politics. Like her, he was appalled by the White Terror, the grinding poverty, the complacency of the expatriate bourgeoisie growing fat on Chinese misery. Moreover, events in Germany were propelling him further to the left. In two years, the Nazi Party had been transformed from a rump group of extremists into the most powerful political force in Germany, combining terror tactics with conventional political campaigning amid a blizzard of racist, anti-communist, nationalist propaganda. The paramilitary brownshirts beat up opponents, staged mass rallies, and smashed the windows of Jewish shops, while Hitler toured the country whipping up anti-Semitic fury. In the elections of July 1932, the Nazis would win nearly fourteen million votes to become the largest single party in the Reichstag. Facing electoral oblivion, the KPD increasingly turned to violence.

  For Ursula, the disturbing news from Germany was further proof that only communism could resist the rise of fascism, and to her satisfaction Rudi was coming around to the same view: “He moved closer to me politically,” she wrote.

  But there were limits: when Ursula told Rudi she wanted to shelter a fugitive Chinese communist under their roof, he exploded. “You are over-estimating yourself,” he insisted, “and you’re not as tough as you think. The risk for you, and for Misha, is just too great.”

  She responded with equal force. “Your attitude could cause the death of a comrade, and for that I would never be able to forgive you.”

  The argument raged back and forth, until Rudi relented or, rather, bowed to an eventuality over which he had little control, and agreed to shelter the communist. He was now, against his will and better judgment, complicit in the conspiracy, a part of the Sorge network. This might have brought Ursula and Rudi closer. But something vital had broken.

  Their secret houseguest arrived the next afternoon, a small, polite, evidently grateful, and extremely scared young Chinese man, who spoke no English at all. Hamburger tried to make the best of the strange situation: “Once he was actually living with us, Rudi was anxious to make our guest feel at home and was warm and friendly towards him, in so far as this was possible without a common language.” The young communist hid in the upper floors of the house, emerging only at night to walk in the garden. When there were dinner guests, he lay motionless in bed, fearful his movements would be heard in the rooms below. Even the servants were unaware of his presence. After two weeks, he was gone, spirited into the interior and the safety of the Jiangxi Soviet area. The immediate threat was lifted, but a crackling tension lingered. “It was clear to me,” Ursula wrote, “that our marriage could not continue like this much longer.”

  The secret meetings resumed, but less frequently. Sorge was affectionate and solicitous toward Ursula, but preoccupied with the Noulens case and going through one of his periodic bouts of extreme recklessness. He drove his sp
eeding motorcycle into a wall and smashed his left leg. “What difference does another scar make?” he joked when Ursula dropped in on him in the hospital. The Noulenses, awaiting trial in Nanking Prison, had a five-year-old son, known as Jimmy. (His real name was Dmitri; even the children of spies have cover names.) Agnes Smedley had returned to Shanghai to coordinate the Noulens Defense Committee. She became Jimmy’s temporary guardian, a role she fulfilled by “showering him with presents like a little prince.” When Ursula suggested this was not a good idea, Agnes angrily retorted that Ursula should take the child into her own home. Ursula was tempted. “I would try to give him the maternal affection he needed and Misha would have a big brother.” But Sorge quashed the idea, since it would establish a direct link between Ursula and the imprisoned Soviet spies. “It meant giving up my illegal work and neither he nor I wanted that,” she wrote. But Agnes did: having got Ursula into the spy game, she now wanted her out.

  Determined to extend the Soviet sphere of influence in the Far East, Moscow increased its covert support for Chinese communism. A fresh cadre of Soviet agents arrived in Shanghai to rebuild the communist networks after the Noulens debacle and “maintain the combative spirit of party members and their sympathizers.” Arthur Ewert, a veteran German revolutionary, appeared in 1932 and took over as the Comintern’s chief liaison with the CCP, along with his wife, the Polish-born Elise Szaborowski, known as Szabo. The Ewerts would eventually meet a grisly fate: Szabo perished in a German concentration camp, while Arthur Ewert was captured in Brazil and tortured into insanity. The fat, bald, smiling man that Ursula had seen handling guns in her spare room a few months earlier revealed himself to be Colonel Karl Rimm, code-named “Paul,” a Red Army veteran from Estonia and Sorge’s deputy. Rimm ran a restaurant in the French Concession with his wife, Luise, a “buxom, motherly” Latvian woman who coded and decoded wireless messages to and from Moscow.

  There was one more notable figure on the fringes of this group, a twenty-seven-year-old Englishman named Roger Hollis, significant less for what he was in 1932 than what he would become many years later. The son of an Anglican bishop, Hollis had flirted with communism at Oxford before he dropped out, set off for China as a freelance journalist, and then joined British American Tobacco, the multinational company whose Shanghai factory manufactured fifty-five billion cigarettes a year. Hollis was sociable and socialist; he certainly knew some of the Sorge group, including Karl Rimm, and may have met Sorge himself. According to Sorge’s biographer, Hollis was “one of the guests at the Hamburger house.” Hollis’s flatmate, Anthony Staples, later gave evidence that an American woman and a German man, believed to be Agnes Smedley and the new Comintern chief, Arthur Ewert, had visited Hollis at his home. There is even some evidence that the Englishman had a three-year affair with Luise Rimm, Karl’s wife. Ursula later claimed to have no memory of Roger Hollis.

  The presence, or otherwise, of this shadowy Englishman in the Sorge circle would be irrelevant, had Hollis not made a significant career change on his return to Britain from the Far East. In 1938, he joined MI5, the British Security Service, and would go on to become its director general with direct responsibility for hunting down Soviet spies in Britain at the height of the Cold War. Many years later, the suspected links between Hollis, Ursula, and her communist friends would provoke a damaging internal mole hunt inside MI5, based on the unproven but persistent conspiracy theory that Hollis was a communist spy, recruited in Shanghai back in 1932.

  Sorge’s network forged close internal bonds, as secret societies always do. The group went on excursions to the Chinese countryside, sightseeing trips that were also espionage work outings. Rudi seldom accompanied his wife on these jaunts. “Generous and good hearted as always, he was pleased for me whenever I had a chance to get out of Shanghai, even if he could not come himself.” Rudi insisted he had too much work—the Modern Home furniture business now had twenty Chinese employees and a backlog of orders—but in reality he was also holding back, unwilling to get entangled in Ursula’s spy community. There is a poignant photograph from this time of Rudi and Ursula asleep in the sun during a picnic. He has his arm around her, as if trying to cling on. She sleeps at an angle to him.

  They continued to make plans together. In May 1932, she wrote to her parents: “Rudi and I think more and more that once his contract finishes, we will make a new start in Russia. I’m pretty confident that we both will find work in R[ussia]. There are a hundred reasons for R[ussia] and against Shanghai—Unfortunately, not all of them writable.” In another letter she wrote: “I’m going to study Russian here intensively for the next six months, I want Rudi to learn Russian too. You never know.” She did not explain that many of her new communist friends spoke Russian, nor that her instructions from the Center were written in Russian, nor that Sorge had advised her to learn the language if she wished to continue working for Soviet military intelligence in the future.

  Ursula’s photograph albums contain numerous images of the young communist and her spy friends at play: Ursula linking arms back-to-back with Karl Rimm to play “see-saw”; Agnes Smedley in earnest conversation with Chen Hansheng, the university lecturer and secret communist agent. On one occasion, Ursula and Agnes joined the rest of the gang for a three-day boat trip up the Yangtze. “Szabo cooked for us all in the houseboat kitchen…and Agnes told jokes.” Sorge was carefully fostering team spirit. “It may have been unusual for comrades who worked illegally to meet for such a sightseeing excursion, but it was not irresponsible,” wrote Ursula. To outside observers, they looked like any other group of expatriate friends, an assortment of foreigners thrown together by chance in a strange land. Ursula would look back on those days as “something quite rare and precious.” She was still only twenty-five years old: “I ran races around the meadow with Richard [Sorge] and Paul [Karl Rimm] until we all collapsed into the grass from too much running and laughing.” Her zest for life was infectious. She would always cherish the memory of a simple game of tag, in a field, with her friends and her secret lover.

  One evening early in 1932, Ursula joined Sorge, Rimm, and Grisha at a hotel room in downtown Shanghai to welcome another new arrival. “Our dark-eyed, dark-haired host was a vivacious man whom I had not seen before.” He was introduced as “Fred.” The party was bibulous and convivial. Fred told funny stories, and sang German and Russian songs in a fine baritone. “He had a beautiful voice,” Ursula recalled. Two days later, Sorge asked Ursula to deliver a cardboard tube to him containing rolled-up documents. Fred invited her to stay for a drink. For reasons she could never quite explain, Ursula felt drawn to confide in this man she barely knew, describing her political alienation from Rudi and the strain her clandestine work was putting on their marriage. “Should we separate?” she asked. “Fred listened patiently and told me he felt honoured by my confidence.” Sensibly, he offered no opinion on her marriage. After three hours of intense conversation, Ursula headed into the night, oddly elated. Later it occurred to her that the sympathetic Fred had been interviewing her, “probing my suitability for the work.” Later still, she discovered who he was.

  Fred’s real name was Manfred Stern, one of the heroes of twentieth-century communism and, almost inevitably, one of its victims. An early revolutionary, he had led a partisan unit of the Red Army against the “Mad Baron,” Roman Ungern-Sternberg, whose brother, Constantin, was a fixture of Shanghai’s German club. Stern joined the Fourth Department of the Red Army and was deployed to New York in 1929, where, from a safe house on Fifty-seventh Street, he ran a network of spies extracting America’s military secrets, copying stolen documents in a photographic shop bought for the purpose in Greenwich Village, and shipping them back to Moscow. The sympathetic, sweet-voiced Fred was a rising star of Soviet military espionage. He was in China as chief military adviser to Mao and the CCP, and as a recruitment agent for the Center. Moscow was beginning to take an interest in Agent Sonya.

  Michael was now a toddler and be
ginning to speak. “Misha is walking around in a white blouse with green flowered linen underpants,” she told her mother. “For three weeks now he has been walking independently through the garden and all the rooms, smelling all the flowers, falling over, getting up again growling, trying to take the steps to the garden, tumbling down, screaming murderously, suddenly discovering a little bird on a tree and falling silent in the middle of a wail. Says ‘Daddy, Daddy, Mummy’ and especially ‘money-money-money,’ which, to my horror, the Amah has taught him. I made up for it by teaching him ‘dirty’—and now he repeatedly chants ‘dirty money.’ ”

  On January 28, 1932, Japanese imperial forces attacked Shanghai. The previous autumn Japan had invaded Manchuria, occupying 1.3 million square kilometers of China and establishing a puppet government in the region the Japanese renamed Manchukuo. Next, the expansionist Japanese military turned its attention to Shanghai, where Japan had existing extraterritorial rights. Claiming to be defending its citizens against Chinese aggression, Japan assembled thirty ships, forty airplanes, and seven thousand troops around the Shanghai shoreline, and then attacked the Chinese areas of the city. The Chinese Nineteenth Route Army put up a fierce resistance. The conflict barely touched the international concessions, but it seriously alarmed Moscow, since Japanese incursions into China represented a potential threat to the Soviet Union. Sorge was instructed to find out what was going on. He dispatched Ursula Hamburger and Isa Wiedemeyer to the war zone.