Shanghai’s “Mysterious Westerner”: The Walden affair and Soviet Military Intelligence Operations in China, 1933–1935

During the 1930s, Shanghai was a major center of Soviet espionage. By 1935 Chinese and Japanese agents of the USSR’s military intelligence service, the Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie or RU, had successfully penetrated key Guomindang, Japanese, and U.S. targets, providing critical intelligence for Moscow and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). These accomplishments collapsed after the detention of RU leader Yakov Bronin (commonly known as Joseph Walden) and several of his Chinese associates in May 1935, the culmination of a series of tradecraft errors and misjudgments. As attempts to establish Bronin’s nationality foundered, a classic confrontation developed between Chinese authorities seeking Bronin’s immediate rendition and those of the International Settlement and French Concession, both determined to uphold the principle of extra-territoriality. Once Bronin’s fraudulent claim to French nationality was exposed he was duly extradited and received a 15–year jail sentence for espionage, leaving RU networks and the parallel intelligence apparatus of the CCP in a disarray from which they did not fully recover until the Sino-Japanese war.