Richard Sorge

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Sorge arrived in Yokohama on the 6th of September 1933, carrying press credentials from the most prestigious newspaper in Germany and a Nazi Party membership card fresh from Berlin. Joseph Goebbels had attended his farewell dinner. Every German diplomat in Japan would come to trust him. And the entire time, he was feeding the Soviet military intelligence service everything he learned.

  Sorge's codename was "Ramsay". He was born in the Caucasus, educated in Marxist theory, wounded twice in World War I, and had spent years building spy networks across Europe and China before Japan. He would spend the next eight years at the center of one of the most consequential intelligence operations of the twentieth century. His information touched the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the fate of the Battle of Moscow, and possibly the outcome of the entire war.

  How did a German journalist with a limp and a drinking problem become, in Ian Fleming's words, "the most formidable spy in history"? And why did the country he served deny knowing him at all?

• 2. A Life Shaped by War

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  Sorge was born on the 4th of October 1895 in Sabunchi, a settlement near Baku in the Russian Empire, the youngest of nine children. His father, Gustav Wilhelm Richard Sorge, was a German mining engineer employed by the Deutsche Petroleum-Aktiengesellschaft and the Caucasian oil company Branobel. The family returned to Germany in 1898 after his father's contract expired.

  He attended Oberrealschule Lichterfelde from the age of six and described his father's politics as "unmistakably nationalist and imperialist", views Sorge shared as a young man. He also believed Friedrich Adolf Sorge, an associate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, was his grandfather; the man was actually his great-uncle.

  When war came in October 1914, Sorge enlisted in the Imperial German Army at eighteen and was posted to a reserve infantry battalion of the 3rd Guards Division. He served first on the Western Front and was wounded at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. Transferred to the Eastern Front and promoted to corporal, he was seriously wounded a second time in April 1917: shrapnel severed three of his fingers and broke both his legs, leaving him with a lifelong limp. He was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class, then declared medically unfit and discharged.

  The war had transformed him. The young nationalist who enlisted in 1914 came out of the trenches convinced of what he called the "meaninglessness" of the conflict. During his convalescence, he read Marx, Engels, and Rudolf Hilferding. A nurse's father proved the decisive influence, pulling him toward communism. He studied philosophy and economics at the universities of Kiel, Berlin, and Hamburg, worked as an assistant to the sociologist Kurt Albert Gerlach in Kiel, and witnessed the sailors' mutiny that helped spark the German Revolution. He received his doctorate in political science from Hamburg in August 1919 and joined the Communist Party of Germany.

• 3. The Making of a Spy

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  Soviet intelligence recruited Sorge and sent him across Europe as a journalist to assess the prospects for communist revolution. From 1920 to 1922, he lived in Solingen, where he was joined by Christiane Gerlach, the ex-wife of his former professor Kurt Albert Gerlach. She recalled their first meeting: "It was as if a stroke of lightning ran through me. In this one second something awoke in me that had slumbered until now, something dangerous, dark, inescapable." They married in May 1921.

  Relocated to Frankfurt in 1922, Sorge gathered intelligence about the business community and helped organize the library of the Institute for Social Research. In 1924, he was assigned to guard a Soviet delegation at the KPD's congress and came to the attention of Osip Piatnitsky, a senior Comintern official. Piatnitsky recruited him. Sorge and Christiane then moved to Moscow, where he formally joined the International Liaison Department of the Comintern, that year also an OGPU intelligence body. Apparently his devotion to his work ended the marriage.

  By 1929, despite being accused of supporting Stalin's last factional opponent, Nikolai Bukharin, Sorge was invited to join the Red Army's Fourth Department, the body that later became the GRU, by its head, Yan Karlovich Berzin. He remained with it for the rest of his life.

  His preparation for Japan was characteristic. Sent to Germany in November 1929 with instructions to join the Nazi Party and avoid left-wing contacts, he took work with the agricultural newspaper Deutsche Getreide-Zeitung as cover. He then went to Shanghai in 1930, where he worked as editor of a German news service and for the Frankfurter Zeitung, built contacts with Chinese officials and military advisors, and met both journalist Agnes Smedley and a young Japanese newspaper correspondent named Hotsumi Ozaki. That chance meeting would define his Japan mission.

• 4. Master of the German Embassy

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  Sorge arrived in Japan in September 1933 with a clear assignment from his GRU superiors: determine whether Japan was planning to attack the Soviet Union. His task, as he later described it to his captors, was "for many years the most important duty assigned to me and my group; it would not be far wrong to say that it was the sole object of my mission in Japan."

  His cover was almost perfect. As the Tokyo correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, the most prestigious newspaper in Germany, Sorge held the highest status of any German journalist in the country. His reputation as an ardent Nazi who detested the Soviet Union made him welcome at the German embassy, where German diplomats including ambassador Herbert von Dirksen came to rely on his expertise in Japanese politics. The Japanese values of honne and tatemae, the gap between private truth and public presentation, made the country particularly opaque to outsiders, and Sorge's fluency in Japanese and deep interest in Asian history gave him unusual standing.

  He befriended General Eugen Ott, the German military attaché, and seduced Ott's wife, Helma. She copied Ott's reports on the Imperial Japanese Army and passed them to Sorge. When Ott was promoted to ambassador in April 1938, he and Sorge took breakfast together daily, and Sorge sometimes drafted the cables that Ott sent to Berlin under his own name. One German diplomat later recalled that Ott gave Sorge "free run of the embassy night and day"; he had his own desk there. The friendship between the two men was such that Ott also used Sorge as a courier to carry secret messages to German consulates in Canton, Hong Kong, and Manila.

  Ozaki, meanwhile, had developed a close relationship with Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe and copied secret documents for Sorge. The network also included radio operator Max Clausen, French magazine journalist Branko Vukelic, and Japanese journalist Miyagi Yotoku, who worked for the Japan Advertiser. Clausen operated under the cover of his business, M Clausen Shokai, suppliers of blueprint machinery, set up with Soviet funds and commercially successful from summer 1937 onward.

  By October 1934, Sorge was so trusted by Ott that when the two visited the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo together, Sorge wrote the report that Ott submitted to Berlin under his own name. That report was received favorably at the Bendlerstrasse and the Wilhelmstrasse. A Japanese journalist who knew Sorge described him in 1935 as "a typical, swashbuckling, arrogant Nazi... quick-tempered, hard-drinking". It was a role he played to perfection, while Hanako Ishii, a waitress at a bar he frequented, moved into his house in the summer of 1936 and tried, without much success, to curb his drinking and his nearly suicidal motorcycle riding.

• 5. Intelligence That Shook the War

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  On the 30th of May 1941, Sorge sent Moscow a message that read: "Berlin informed Ott that German attack will commence in the latter part of June. Ott 95 percent certain war will commence." On the 20th of June, he reported again: "Ott told me that war between Germany and the USSR is inevitable."

  Stalin ignored it. He ignored similar warnings from other sources as well. When Sorge learned of Operation Barbarossa on the 22nd of June, he went to a bar and, visibly drunk, repeated in English: "Hitler's a fucking criminal! A murderer. But Stalin will teach the bastard a lesson. You just wait and see!"

  The historian Gordon Prange, writing in 1984, concluded that the closest Sorge came to providing the exact date of the German invasion was the 20th of June, a date given to him by Oberstleutnant Erwin Scholl, the deputy military attaché at the German embassy. Sorge himself never claimed to have discovered the correct date of the 22nd of June in advance.

  What followed in the summer and autumn of 1941 proved to be Sorge's most consequential work. On the 6th of September, an imperial conference in Tokyo decided against war with the Soviet Union and ordered preparations for a possible war against the United States and Britain instead. Ozaki reported this to Sorge. On the 14th of September, Sorge advised Moscow that the possibility of a Japanese attack "has disappeared" and laid out the three conditions under which Japan would reconsider: Moscow being captured, the Kwantung Army becoming three times the size of Soviet Far Eastern forces, or a civil war in Siberia.

  This intelligence made possible the transfer of Soviet divisions from the Far East to reinforce the defense of Moscow, where the German Army suffered its first strategic defeat of the war. Various writers have speculated that Sorge's September report was the most important single piece of military intelligence produced in World War II. The Soviet Union, however, was not relying on Sorge alone: its codebreakers had independently broken the Japanese diplomatic codes and reached the same conclusion. That fact was deliberately concealed in Soviet propaganda after 1964, which preferred to celebrate Sorge as a lone hero spy rather than acknowledge signals intelligence.

• 6. Arrest, Silence, and Death

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  By 1941, the Kempeitai, the Japanese secret police, had noticed an increasing volume of encrypted radio messages it could not read. The SS Standartenführer Josef Albert Meisinger, known as the "Butcher of Warsaw", had been stationed at the German embassy as the Gestapo resident and ordered to monitor Sorge. Sorge managed to obtain the key to Meisinger's apartment through his lover Margarete Harich-Schneider, a German musician, and learned that Meisinger had concluded the espionage allegations against him were groundless. He also neutralized Meisinger by spending considerable time getting him drunk.

  Ozaki was arrested on the 14th of October 1941 and interrogated immediately. The Kempeitai discovered that Ott's wife was a regular visitor to Sorge's house and that Sorge had spent his last free night sleeping with her. Sorge was arrested on the 18th of October 1941 in Tokyo. His penultimate message to Moscow had reported: "The Soviet Far East can be considered safe from Japanese attack."

  Under torture, Sorge confessed. The Soviet Union denied he was their agent. Japan made three separate approaches offering to trade Sorge for one of their own spies; all three were declined. In September 1942, Sorge's wife Katya Maximova was arrested by the NKVD on the grounds that she was a "German spy" because she was married to a German citizen. She was sent to the Gulag and died there in 1943.

  Of everyone in Sorge's life, only Hanako Ishii tried to visit him in Sugamo Prison. Fearing he would name her under torture, she asked him directly. He promised he would never mention her. He struck a deal with the Kempeitai: if it spared Ishii and the wives of the other ring members, he would reveal all. She was never arrested.

  Sorge was hanged at 10:20 Tokyo time on the 7th of November 1944, at Sugamo Prison, and pronounced dead nineteen minutes later. Hotsumi Ozaki was hanged earlier the same day. Wartime fuel shortages meant Sorge was not cremated; he was buried in a mass grave in the nearby Zoshigaya Cemetery. He left his estate to Anna Clausen, the wife of his radio operator.

  In November 1949, under pressure from American occupation authorities, Hanako Ishii located and recovered Sorge's skeleton. She identified him by his distinctive dental work and the poorly-set broken leg he had carried since 1917. She took the body to the Shimo-Ochiai Cremation Centre. She kept his teeth, his belt, his spectacles, and had a ring made from his gold bridgework, which she wore for the rest of her life. When she died on the 1st of July 2000 in Tokyo, her ashes were interred beside his.

• 7. How History Remembered Him

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  The Soviet Union did not officially acknowledge Sorge until 1964, twenty years after his death. In November of that year, it awarded him the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. The KGB, seeking to improve its image, had begun the cult of the "hero spy" and claimed Sorge as one of its own, even though he worked for the GRU, not the KGB.

  In West Germany, the first serious attempt to rehabilitate Sorge came earlier, in the summer of 1953, when the publisher Rudolf Augstein published a seventeen-part series in Der Spiegel. Augstein argued that Sorge was not a Soviet agent but a German patriot whose intelligence was directed against Hitler, not against the United States. Augstein also challenged the American officer Charles Willoughby, whose book The Shanghai Conspiracy claimed that Sorge had caused the "loss of China" in 1949 and that his spy ring was infiltrating the U.S. government.

  The novels that followed split into two rival interpretations. Hans-Otto Meissner, who had served as third secretary at the German Embassy in Tokyo and had known Sorge personally, wrote Der Fall Sorge as a thriller blending fact and fiction, portraying Sorge as a cool, rumpled master spy driven by colossal egoism. He omitted Hotsumi Ozaki entirely and exonerated the German foreign ministry of any involvement in Nazi crimes. The American historian Cornelius Partsch noted that Meissner had Sorge constantly breaking into locked offices, when in reality security at the embassy was sloppy and Sorge was trusted to wander freely.

  Hans Hellmut Kirst's competing novel offered a different Sorge: a deeply traumatized World War I veteran who suffered nightmares and panic attacks, walked with a pronounced limp, and spied for the Soviet Union as the lesser of two evils. Kirst also gave Meisinger his proper role as a villain. Partsch concluded that the two rival portrayals published in 1955 have shaped Sorge's image in the West ever since.

  The tributes from those who studied intelligence were unambiguous. Douglas MacArthur called Sorge's case "a devastating example of a brilliant success of espionage". Kim Philby said simply, "His work was impeccable". The chief prosecutor who obtained Sorge's death sentence, Mitsusada Yoshikawa, said: "In my whole life, I have never met anyone as great as he was." Ian Fleming called Sorge "the most formidable spy in history", and Tom Clancy named him "the best spy of all time".

  In 1964, the Soviet press began repeating Sorge's claim that Friedrich Adolf Sorge was his grandfather, a claim that was false: the man was his great-uncle. In 2016, one of Moscow's Moscow Central Circle rail stations was named after him. Hanako Ishii, the only person who loved Sorge and the only person who tried to save him, received a Soviet and then Russian pension until her death.