ReviewStalin’s superspy in China and Japan: champagne Communist Richard Sorge seen in a new light in An Impeccable Spy

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent by Owen Matthews Bloomsbury 4/5 stars The title of Owen Matthews’ highly readable biography of Shanghai- and Tokyo-based Russian superspy Richard Sorge opts for the adjective “impeccable”. British double agent Kim Philby, a man who knew a thing or two about the spy business, first described Sorge this way, but it’s not entirely clear why. Sorge was certainly a successful spy who, in the 1930s, created an unparalleled network of agents in China and Japan – what became known as the “Sorge ring”. But impeccable? His espionage accomplishments were undeniable, but he took risks that endangered himself and others. His lifestyle was far from impeccable – much crashing of motorcycles, drunken rants and constant womanising – and the bottle and the bedroom repeatedly exposed him and his informants. Not always impeccable then, but Sorge was without doubt an outstanding spy – working tirelessly, he cultivated contacts as high up as the Nazi ambassador in Tokyo and among the inner circles of the Japanese government. Sorge seems to have suffered from that great affliction of the spy: loneliness. Lasting attachments were an impossibility; in constant fear of exposure, he was never able to reveal his true self to anyone. Excessive drinking and risky sexual entanglements are the spy’s recourse against loneliness. In this sense Sorge was similar to other secret agents, Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess – also recently subjects of new biographies. We’ve had biographies of this spy before, too – more than 100 in fact, mostly by Japanese Sorge-obsessives. For English readers, the Sorge canon began in 1952, with Charles Willoughby’s Shanghai Conspiracy, which portrayed the agent as a robotic Soviet fanatic. Hans-Otto Meissner’s The Man with Three Faces (1955) provided a more human treatment. Meissner had met Sorge (indeed, Sorge attended his wedding) while assistant to the German ambassador in Tokyo from 1933 to 1942, General Eugen Ott, a man who unwittingly supplied the secret agent with copious amounts of intelligence. In 1966, Oxford University dons F.W. Deakin and G.R. Storry wrote the well-researched but dense The Case of Richard Sorge, which failed to capture his reckless spirit. In 1984, American historian Gordon W. Prange posthumously published Target Tokyo. The ultimate question when assessing the career of a spy is did they deliver the goods? Did all the boozing and bugging, the filching and lying, the cramped attics with hidden radios, the betrayals of friends and lovers achieve anything? The answer in Richard Sorge’s case is that it did. Prange, however, was a Japanophile and so the more louche Shanghai segment of Sorge’s story was largely overlooked. Most recently, in 1996, Tokyo correspondent Robert Whymant published Stalin’s Spy, making use of the KGB’s Sorge files. All interesting, but Sorge is worthy of a new biography for a new generation of readers. Matthews’ book benefits from his background as a former Moscow bureau chief for Newsweek magazine. He is also clearly at home researching and writing about Sorge’s key years in Tokyo. One criticism is that, as with previous Sorge biographers, he is prone to minor mistakes regarding the spy’s Shanghai sojourn, between 1929 and 1932, such as geographical errors that betray a lack of familiarity with the city, and which inevitably call into question the accuracy of facts that are more difficult to verify. Spy lovers and Prince Charles chased by bikini model: past headlines Sorge was born in 1895 in Baku, in Azerbaijan, of a German father and Russian mother. As a right-wing youth, he volunteered to fight for the kaiser in World War I, was injured by shrapnel (the cause of a lifelong limp), came to see the meaninglessness of war, moved to the left and joined the German Communist Party. There, he was spotted by Moscow and enrolled in Soviet military intelligence. Some time was spent in England and back in Germany before he was sent to Shanghai in the unimaginative disguise of a journalist (the Shanghai press corps was riddled with undercover agents). Sorge had become a professional spy. In 1929, he was evidently a disciplined and dedicated Bolshevik. Yet Shanghai suited his other persona – the one that liked champagne, women and cabarets. Sorge quickly acquired a taste for the city and found that the role of debauched expat came easily to him. There followed cocktail-fuelled evenings at the Arcadia nightclub with the American left-wing journalist Agnes Smedley; fast motorbike rides around the city; and socialising with multinational communist figures. Here he met Japanese journalist Hotsumi Ozaki, who would work with him to the end, and here he also perhaps recruited an Englishman named Roger Hollis – later to head MI5 and rumoured to be British intelligence’s “fifth man”, after Philby, Anthony Blunt, Maclean and Burgess. But China is also where the doubts about his own masters began. Matthews notes that Sorge maintained secret bank accounts in Shanghai that Soviet military intelligence didn’t know about. Moscow began to have doubts about him, as ultimately it did about any agent in the corrupting Chinese city. But he nonetheless built an effective intelligence gathering machine. The life and times of a Mossad agent, and what he did after quitting the spy game This network survived his 1933 move to Tokyo. Japan was to be the making of Sorge, raising him from capable sleuth to superspy. Sorge was intellectually charged in Tokyo in a way he had not been in China. He built a library on all matters Japanese; commissioned translations of Japanese classics; started work on an academic study of 11th-century classic The Tale of Genji; and struggled to master Japanese. Sorge swiftly became a figure of note in Tokyo’s expat colony. This led him into the confidences of Ott (whose wife he seduced). With Ozumi simultaneously infiltrating Japanese elite circles, the “ring” gathered crucial intelligence for Moscow. Matthews is right to emphasise that to understand Sorge’s legend as Joseph Stalin’s “master agent”, it also must be understood that after Japan’s 1931 annexation of Manchuria, it was widely suspected that the Soviet Union was in Tokyo’s sights – particularly resource-rich Siberia. In short, the Japanese army favoured a northern campaign while the navy preferred a southern expansion – the Philippines, rubber-rich Malaya, strategic Singapore and Hong Kong, and the oilfields of the Dutch East Indies. North meant war with Russia; south meant war with Britain, France, the Netherlands and potentially America. The navy saw a land war against Russia as endless; the army saw taking on combined European and American sea power as overwhelming. Russia and Japan did fight a battle, at Nomonhan, in Mongolia. But Japan’s army in Manchuria overreached itself while the Soviet Union retaliated with everything it had, defeating the invaders. Japan’s navy won the argument. Stalin, however, hadn’t been listening, being otherwise engaged with purging his closest comrades. Sorge was recalled to Moscow – but he ignored the telegram and no doubt dodged the bullet to the back of the head his German father and years in Shanghai would have made inevitable. Now, though, he was lonelier than ever. He took the purges badly; like many old Bolsheviks, he felt betrayed by Hitler and Stalin’s 1939 non-aggression pact. Matthews makes the case that Sorge considered running but could not. He had loyalties – to his spy ring and his rarely seen wife, Katya, in Russia, who would surely have been executed had he done so. Stalin’s master agent may have lost faith in his employer but he remained in place. The ultimate question when assessing the career of a spy is did they deliver the goods? Did all the boozing and bugging, the filching and lying, the cramped attics with hidden radios, the betrayals of friends and lovers achieve anything? The answer in Sorge’s case, as Matthews rightly argues, is that it did. Ex-CIA officer jailed for 20 years for spying for China Even the small amount of intelligence provided by Sorge that Stalin did pay attention to (the Japanese army were being issued with tropical cottons and not greatcoats, for instance) told him there would be no war on two fronts. When the Germans did invade Russia, in June 1941, the Red Army was better prepared than it might have been. Sorge and the members of his ring were arrested by the Japanese soon afterwards. Separated from his fellow agents, from Katya and from his Japanese lover Hanako, his loneliness was complete when Moscow denied any knowledge of him. At his trial, Sorge argued that he had done nothing against the national interests of Japan; that it was Japan’s militarists that had bought their country to this disastrous state of affairs. In 1943, an investigating magistrate in Tokyo begged to differ and sentenced him to hang. Despite the many biographies, Sorge remains obscure, swathes of his career hidden from view and many of his actions mysterious. Perhaps this, though, is the hallmark of a successful life in espionage.