ESPIONAGE: Timely Reminder

Actually it was an old story, but the spy-thriller was good for a one-day splash on U.S. front pages. Repatriated Americans on the Gripsholm had brought back most of the story to the U.S. in 1943, it had been published at least three times in the Japanese press since the war, and nine months ago the U.S. magazine Plain Talk carried it in full.

In Washington the Army handed out a flamboyantly written 32,000-word report from Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters —the story of a Russian spy ring in Japan before Pearl Harbor. Chief of the ring was a slick German Communist named Dr. Richard Sorge, a lady-killing, hard-drinking grandson of Karl Marx’s secretary, who wormed himself into a job as press attaché on the German Embassy staff in Tokyo. He was able to warn Moscow of the German attack on Russia 33 days before it took place. In October 1941 the Japs caught him and later hanged him.

What made the story headline news in the U.S. was that MacArthur’s G2, Major General Charles A. Willoughby, whose staff prepared the report, had included (as had Plain Talk) the names of two old workhorse propagandists for a Communist China. They are U.S. Journalist Agnes Smedley, who does most of her writing for leftish U.S. publications, and German-born Foreign Correspondent Guenther Stein, a British subject, who has written for the Christian Science Monitor. Willoughby’s report charged that both were spies in the Sorge net, but it did not document the charge and both hotly denied it.

Why was the report belatedly released and why did the Army make such an occasion of it, when, after all, Sorge’s prewar spy ring had worked against the Axis, not the U.S.? MacArthur’s headquarters thought that it was a timely reminder of a fact which most Americans learned in the investigations of Communist spy rings in the U.S. and Canada. The most effective spies the U.S.S.R. has are apt not to be Russians, but Communists of other nationalities who are perfectly willing to work for headquarters in Moscow, without thought for the welfare of their own countries.