174 Ë War and Dénouement
that date and rmly and consistently denied knowledge of the matters described in
Himmler’s notes, attributing them to the secret activities of Usui, Manaki, and Bam-
mat which he had not overseen. He then added: “I just want to say that this matter
of using espionage agents is something that every General Sta does and, therefore, I
did not consider it important enough to tell you about it in detail.”¹⁹
It is di cult to con rm whether any attempt on Stalin’s life actually took place.
Had an attempt of this signi cance actually occurred (and been thwarted), it would
have been celebrated as a great success for Soviet counterintelligence activity. Yet no
such record has surfaced. The archive of the former NKVD in Georgia has no record on
such an attempt. In an interviewOshima gave in Tokyo in 1959, he stated that the case ̄
of the Stalin assassination squad was revealed at the Tokyo trial.²⁰What is certain is
that many schemes and conspiracies were hatched by the Japanese and their agents.
According to one account, Japan’s subversion organ in Berlin managed to dispatch
about thirty agents each year to the Soviet Union through Finland, Estonia, Lithuania,
Poland, Turkey, and elsewhere.²¹Yuriko Onodera, wife of Makoto Onodera (Japan’s
military attaché in the Baltic states at the time) said that the “Manaki organ” in Berlin
worked on a plan to assassinate Stalin, and that her husband himself once transported
small bombs from Berlin to Estonia to be given to his agents.²²
What is equally clear is that Soviet agents had also penetrated Japan’s diversion-
ary organs. Again according to Yuriko Onodera, while working with émigré activists
in Europe, her husband came to realize that Manaki’s activities were an open secret in
Europe and immediately alerted his friend Usui to this problem.²³It appears that Man-
aki’s Russian mistress in Paris was a Soviet double agent.²⁴Within the Bammat group
there was also a Soviet agent.²⁵Oshima’s o ce, too, was penetrated by a Soviet double ̄
19 NARA, RG331, Numerical Case Files Relating to Particular Incidents and Suspected War Criminals,
Case 247 (interrogations of 5 and 6 March 1946). At the time (1946), Usui was dead (killed in the war),
and Manaki, held in Vietnam, was never interrogated by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. It was Manaki
who had led Japan’s subversion organ in Berlin in 1938–39.
20 His November 1959 interview given to Kenichir ̄o K ̄omura cited above. The Himmler statement was
presented as Exhibit No. 489. The Soviet prosecutors were of course familiar with it. See GARF, f. 7867,
op. 377, d. 460, l. 2.
21 Suzuki,Chudoku taishi ̄ Oshima Hiroshi ̄ , 93.
22 Yuriko Onodera, “Onodera Makoto Rikugun shosh ̄ ̄o no j ̄oh ̄o katsudo 1935–1946” [The Intelligence ̄
Work of Major General Makoto Onodera], 33 (a manuscript available at the Tokyo University Historio-
graphical Institute, Tokyo). The sentence about planning to assassinate Stalin was marked by some-
one (evidently as a politically inconvenient revelation) and covered over with a thin piece of paper on
which a dierent sentence was written, One can still read the original sentence through the paper.
23 Yuriko Onodera, “Onodera Makoto,” 34–35.
24 Suzuki,Chudoku taishi ̄ Oshima Hiroshi ̄ , 94–95.
25 See Georges Mamoulia,Les combats indépendandistes des Caucasiens entre URSS et puissances
occidentales: Le cas de la Géorgie (1921–1945)(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009), 227.