China sends ‘Judas’ back to Japan

Press, 22 September 1980, Page 28

China sends ‘Judas’ back to Japan

3y DONALD KIRK in Tokyo. An "unwitting Judas” was the way General Douglas MacArthur’s occupation headquarters described one of Japan’s highest-ranking Communists soon after World War 11.

The “Judas”, Ritsu Ito, is now back in Japan after nearly 30 years of exile and imprisonment in China, and the Japanese are clamouring to find out his role in betraying one of history’s , greatest spies, Richard Sorge, hanged in Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison nearly 36 years ago. Ito was taken to hospital almost immediately after his return from Peking and has thus been able to avoid all questions about the arrest of Sorge and some 20 others rounded up by the Japanese police in October, 1941, for spying for the rSoviet Union.

Doctors treating Ito for a kidney ailment say he looks five years older than his actual age of 67, and have prescribed “absolute rest for at least two weeks.”

His only visitors have been his two sons and his wife, Kimi, confined to the same small hospital in a Tokyo suburb with a heart condition. Kimi, seeing him for only a few minutes, is said to have avoided all talk of politics, even though she had denounced him in 1953 after the Japan Communist Party had purged him for serving as a police informant.

Japanese journalists are determined to pry the truth from Ito, regardless of how long he stays in the small hospital in a suburb west of Tokyo. Reporters watch the hospital gates, while newspapers carry photographs of the hospital exterior, with arrows pointing to Ito’s room.

It was 30 years ago that Ito, then the leader of the hard-line faction of the party, went underground to avoid a manhunt for Communist leaders. Nearly a year later, in 1951, he left secretly for China, carrying with him the mystery of whether he had deliberately exposed Sorge and his spy network. Arrested for Communist

activity in June, 1941, Ito not only confessed his own membership of the party, but apparently spilled the names of other members, including a Japanese woman who had lived in Los Angeles and then returned to Japan. The police picked up the woman’s closest contact, who broke a leg in an attempt to kill himself by jumping from the window of the building where the police were torturing him. Finally armed with all the names, the police roused Sorge from his bed and arrested him, to the shock of the German Ambassador, whom Sorge had dutifully served as press officer while writing for a German newspaper. A writer, Hotsuki Ozaki, is convinced that Ito revealed more than just one name. Ozaki is tne younger half-brother of Hotsumi Ozaki, a brilliant Japanese journalist who served as Sorge’s most trusted confederate, and was the only other person hanged in the case. Ozaki, disputing the description of Ito as an "unwitting Judas”, calls him “the living Judas” in his book about the case.

The younger Ozaki, watching Ito confront a mob of reporters on his arrival at Japan’s international airport at Narita, said he was disanpointed at Ito’s obvious efforts to remain silent. “If the crucial points of the scandal remain unknown,” said Ozaki, "it will reflect very badly against Ito.” In fact, many Japanese believe Ito may have been forced to reveal all his secrets • to the Chinese long ago. Within two years of his arrival in Peking, while he was in charge of a Japanese-lan-guage radio station beaming propaganda broadcasts to Japan, he was arrested and purportedly questioned by a top member of the Japan Communist Party. Next, the party newspaper, “Akahata”, published in Tokyo, revealed Ito’s expulsion from the party and denounced him as “the most heinous traitor and the enemy of the people and the party.” The newspaper charged that for years Ito had been “collaborating with imperialists and selling comrades to the American re-

actionary forces by leakout party secrets.” The real story, in the view of many Japanese, is that Ito functioned as an agent first for the Japanese police and then for American occupation authorities while working his way up in the hierarchy to the party’s politburo. Although he was arrested during the war, he managed to avoid harsh treatment — and may have told still more while in prison.

To the Chinese Communists in 1953, Ito’s betrayal of a Soviet spy ring, deliberate or not, would doubtless have appeared as a betrayal of the entire Communist cause, since China and the Soviet Union were still on good terms then. So highly valued were Sorge’s services that the Kremlin posthumously named him a hero of the Soviet Union. Busts of Sorge are still on display in Moscow, and he has been portrayed on a Russian postage stamp.

The reason for such recognition is that Sorge provided one report that may have saved Moscow and the Stalin regime from destruction.

In a coded message radioed from a small transmitter operated by another German in the ring, Sorge told the Kremlin the Japanese . had adopted a “southern” strategy — that is, the Japanese armies would overrun South-East Asia and not attack the Soviet Union.

Realising that he faced no Japanese threat, Stalin withdrew most of his forces from the Far East and threw them against the Nazi armies then on the outskirts of Moscow and besieging Stalingrad.

For whatever he did to destroy Moscow’s spy network in Japan, Ito is believed to have paid the price in the form of torture and years of toil in remote regions of northwest China. Japanese officials say the Chinese finally decided to let him go as a “good-will gesture” towards Japanese authorities, who learned only two months ago that he was still alive.—Copyright, London Observer Service. «