Richard Sorge

Richard Sorge (October 4, 1895 – November 7, 1944) was a German communist and spy who worked for the Soviet Union. He has gained great fame among espionage enthusiasts for his intelligence gathering during World War II. He worked as a journalist in both Germany and Japan, where he was imprisoned for spying and eventually hanged. His GRU codename was "Ramsay" (Рамза́й). He is widely regarded as one of the best-known Soviet intelligence officers of the Second World War, according to Phillip Knightley, the author of The Second Oldest Profession (1986).

Early life
Sorge was born in the settlement of Sabunchi, a suburb of Baku, Azerbaijan, which was part of Imperial Russia at the time. He was the youngest of nine children of Wilhelm Richard Sorge (d. 1907), a German mining engineer, and his Russian wife Nina Semionovna Kobieleva. His father's lucrative contract with the Caucasian Oil Company having expired, Richard Sorge's family moved back to Germany: in Sorge's own words,"'The one thing that made my life a little different from the average was a strong awareness of the fact that I had been born in the southern Caucasus and that we had moved to Berlin when I was very small.'"

The cosmopolitan Sorge household was "very different from the average bourgeois home in Berlin."

Although Sorge considered Friedrich Adolf Sorge, an associate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, to be his grandfather, he was in fact his great-uncle.

In October 1914 Sorge volunteered to serve during World War I. He joined a student battalion of the 3rd Guards, Field Artillery. During his service in the Western Front he was severely wounded in March 1916 when shrapnel cut off three of his fingers and broke both his legs, causing a lifelong limp. He was promoted to corporal, received an Iron Cross and was later medically discharged.

During his convalescence he read Marx and adopted communist ideology, mainly due to the influence of the father of a nurse with whom he had developed a relationship. He spent the rest of the war studying economics at the universities of Berlin, Kiel and Hamburg. Sorge received a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Hamburg in August 1919. He also joined the Communist Party of Germany. His political views, however, got him fired from both a teaching job and coal mining work. He fled to Moscow where he became a junior agent for the Comintern.

Red Army spy
Sorge was recruited as a spy for the Soviet Union and using the cover of being a journalist he was sent to various European countries to assess the possibility of communist uprisings taking place.

From 1920 to 1922, Sorge lived in Solingen, in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. He was joined there by Christiane Gerlach who had been the wife of Dr Kurt Albert Gerlach, a wealthy communist who had also been Sorge's professor of political science in Kiel. Sorge and Christiane married in May 1921. In 1922, he was relocated to Frankfurt, where he gathered intelligence about the business community. In the summer of 1923, he took part in the "Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche" (First Marxist Work Week) in Ilmenau, Thuringia, an event subsidized by Felix Weil. After an attempted communist coup in October 1923, Sorge continued his work as a journalist. At the same time, he helped with organizing the library of the Institute for Social Research, of which Kurt Albert Gerlach was meant to be the first director.

In 1924, he and Christiane moved to Moscow where he officially joined the International Liaison Department of the Comintern, also an OGPU intelligence gathering body. Apparently, his dedication to duty led to his divorce. In 1929, Sorge became part of the Red Army's Fourth Department (the later GRU, or military intelligence). He remained with the Department for the rest of his life.

In 1929 Sorge arrived in England to study the labour movements then prevalent in the region, the status of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the country's political and economic conditions. He was instructed to remain undercover and not to become involved in politics while living in England.

In November 1929 Sorge returned to Germany where he was instructed to join the Nazi Party and not to associate with left-wing activists. To help develop a cover for his spying activities he obtained a post working for the agricultural newspaper, Deutsche Getreide-Zeitung.

China 1930
Sorge moved to Shanghai in 1930 to gather intelligence and foment revolution. Officially, he worked as the editor of a German news service and for the Frankfurter Zeitung. He contacted another spy, Max Clausen. Sorge also met German Soviet spy Ursula Kuczynski and American journalist Agnes Smedley, both his lovers. Smedley, a well-known left-wing journalist, worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung. She introduced Sorge to Hotsumi Ozaki, who was employed by the Japanese newspaper, Asahi Shimbun. Later Ozaki agreed to join Sorge's spy network, as well as Hanako Ishii, Sorge's next lover.

As a journalist, Sorge established himself as an expert on Chinese agriculture. This gave him the freedom to travel around the country making contacts with members of the Chinese Communist Party. In January 1932, Sorge reported on fighting between Chinese and Japanese troops in the streets of Shanghai. In December he was recalled to Moscow.

Japan 1933
In May 1933, the Soviet Union decided to have Sorge organize a spy network in Japan. As a cover, he was sent to Berlin with the code name "Ramsay" ("Рамзай" (Ramzai, Ramzay)), to renew contacts in Germany so he could pass as a German journalist in Japan. In Berlin, he insinuated himself into Nazi ranks, read much Nazi propaganda, in particular Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, and attended so many beer halls with his new acquaintances that he gave up drinking lest his tongue be loosened by alcohol.

His total abstinence does not appear to have made his Nazi companions suspicious and was an example of his devotion to and absorption in his mission. He later explained to Hede Massing, "That was the bravest thing I ever did. Never will I be able to drink enough to make up for this time." Sorge was a heavy drinker and, later, his drinking came to undermine his work. While in Germany, he was able to get commissions from two newspapers, the Berliner Börsen Zeitung and the Tägliche Rundschau. He also got support from the Nazi theoretical journal, Geopolitik. Later he was to get work from the Frankfurter Zeitung.

Sorge arrived in Yokohama on September 6, 1933. He was warned by his spymaster not to have contact with the underground Japanese Communist Party or with the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo. His spy network in Japan included Red Army officer and radio operator Max Clausen, Hotsumi Ozaki, and two other Comintern agents, Branko Vukelic, a journalist working for the French magazine, Vu and a Japanese journalist, Miyagi Yotoku, who was employed by the English-language newspaper, the Japan Advertiser. Max Clausen's wife Anna acted as ring courier from time to time. From summer 1937, Clausen the spy operated under cover of his firm set up with Soviet funds but which in time became a commercial success, M Clausen Shokai suppliers of blueprint machinery and reproduction services.

Sorge built a network in 1933 and 1934 to collect intelligence for the GRU in Japan. His agents had contacts with senior politicians and through that, to information of Japan's foreign policy. He also recontacted Hotsumi Ozaki who developed a close contact with the prime minister Fumimaro Konoe. Ozaki copied secret documents for Sorge.

Collecting intelligence from inside Germany was more dangerous and difficult at the time, so Sorge was sent to Japan to collect information on Germany's plans. This was a similar tactic with the other Soviet rings spying on Germany. The evidence of his communist past in German security files was overlooked, or hidden, according to Prange.

Officially, Sorge joined the Nazi party and became a German journalist in Tokyo, where he came to work closely with the German embassy and ambassador Eugen Ott. He used the embassy for double-checking his information, having access to telegrams in Ott's office. He even had an affair with Ott's wife, proof that he was entirely trusted at the embassy, but the stress also increased his drinking.

Wartime intelligence supplied by the Sorge Ring
Sorge supplied the Soviet Red Army with information about the Anti-Comintern Pact, the German-Japanese Pact and warned of the Pearl Harbor attack. In 1941, Sorge is said to have informed them of the exact launch date of Operation Barbarossa. Moscow answered with thanks but Joseph Stalin largely ignored it, as was also the case with information supplied by the other networks, including Leiba Domb's Red Orchestra spy network on the German Borders. Stalin was reportedly so angry with Domb's information that he ordered that Domb be 'punished for spreading such lies'. (The order was not followed).

Gordon Prange's analysis (1984) was that the closest Sorge came to predicting the launch date of Operation Barbarossa was 20 June 1941 and Prange comments that Sorge himself never claimed to have discovered the correct date (22 June) in advance. The date of 20 June had been given to Sorge by the deputy military attaché, Lieutenant-Colonel Erwin Scholl, at the German embassy in Tokyo. As Sorge took pride in and sought the credit for the spy ring's work, Professor Prange may have taken Sorge's failure to claim that he had discovered the correct date as conclusive evidence that Sorge in fact did fail to discover it. Kim Philby's recruiter A. Deutsch was also the spymaster of Gestapo officer Willi Lehmann, who on June 19 cabled the Barbarossa launch date to NKVD in Moscow. Stalin considered this as disinformation, too.

The Soviet press reported in 1964 that on June 15, 1941, Sorge had broadcast a dispatch saying that, "The war will begin on June 22." Writing before previously-embargoed material was released by the Russian authorities in the 1990s, Prange and those writing with him appear not to have accepted the veracity of this report. More recently, Stalin was quoted as having ridiculed Sorge and his intelligence prior to the launch of Operation Barbarossa: "There's this bastard who's set up factories and brothels in Japan and even deigned to report the date of the German attack as 22 June. Are you suggesting I should believe him too?"

Sorge advised the Red Army on September 14, 1941, that the Japanese were not going to attack the Soviet Union until:
 * 1) Moscow was captured
 * 2) the size of the Kwantung Army was three times that of the Soviet Union's Far Eastern forces
 * 3) a civil war had started in Siberia.

Sorge transmitted information toward the end of September 1941 that Japan was not going to attack the Soviet Union in the East. "This information made possible the transfer of Soviet divisions from the Far East, although the presence of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria necessitated the Soviet Union's keeping a large number of troops on the eastern borders..." Various writers have speculated that this information allowed the release of Siberian divisions for the Battle of Moscow, where the German army suffered its first tactical defeat in the war. To this end, Sorge's information might have been the most important spy work in World War II. At Khimki, a place at the Moscow city border en route to Sheremetyevo International Airport, there is still a memorial plaque reminding visitors of this defining point of modern history.

The second most important piece of information he allegedly passed along concerned the Battle of Stalingrad - the turning point in the war which is considered one of the bloodiest and largest battles in history. Richard Sorge alerted Moscow that Japan would attack the Soviet Union from the East as soon as the German army captured any city on the Volga, thus effectively disrupting oil supplies from Baku and also ammunition and food supplies sent by the allies from the Persian Gulf through Iran, Soviet Azerbaijan and up the Volga river. However, by mid-1941 the Japanese had made their strategic decision to go south and east, instead of north, so the information (if given) seems to have been speculative at best.

The Nazi German Jewish spy Ivar Lissner was Sorge's rival and opponent. Lissner was gathering intelligence in Japan and East Asia for the Nazis, working for Admiral Canaris in his spying capacity.

Arrests and trials
As the war progressed, it was becoming increasingly dangerous for Sorge to continue his spying work. Nevertheless, in view of the critical juncture of the war, he continued spying. However, due to the increasing volume of radio traffic from one-time pads (used by the Soviets), the Japanese began to suspect a spy ring operating. The Japanese secret service had already intercepted many of his messages and begun to close in. Ozaki was arrested on October 14, 1941, and interrogated.

Sorge was arrested on October 18, 1941, in Tokyo. German ambassador Eugen Ott heard of Sorge's arrest the next day from a brief memo notifying him that Sorge had been arrested "on suspicion of espionage" together with Max Clausen. Ott was both surprised and outraged, and assumed it was a case of "Japanese espionage hysteria". He thought that Sorge had been discovered passing secret information on the Japan-US negotiations to the German embassy, and also that the arrest could be due to anti-German elements in the Japanese government. It was not until a few months later that Japanese authorities announced that Sorge had in fact been indicted as a Soviet spy.

Initially, the Japanese believed that, due to his Nazi party membership and German ties, Sorge was an Abwehr agent. However, the Abwehr denied that he was one of their agents. Even under torture, he denied all ties with the Soviets. The Japanese made three overtures to the Soviets, offering to trade Sorge for one of their own spies. However, the Soviets declined all the offers, maintaining that Sorge was unknown to them. He was incarcerated in Sugamo Prison.

Execution
Richard Sorge was hanged on November 7, 1944, at 10:20 a.m. Tokyo time in Sugamo Prison; Hotsumi Ozaki was hanged earlier in the same day. The Soviet Union did not officially acknowledge Sorge until 1964. It was argued that Sorge's biggest coup led to his undoing, because Stalin could not afford to let it become known that he had rejected his intelligence data about the German attack in 1941. However, it should also be mentioned that nations seldom officially recognize their own spies.

Sorge was survived by his mother, then living in Germany, and he left his estate to Anna Clausen. He was buried in the Sugamo Prison (Zhogaya) graveyard, but his remains were later relocated to Tama Cemetery in Fuchū, Tokyo. His lover Hanako Ishii continued to visit his grave until her death in 2000.

Posthumous recognition
In 1954 the German film director Veit Harlan wrote and directed the film Betrayal of Germany (Verrat an Deutschland) about Sorge's espionage in Japan. In Nazi Germany Harlan was the favorite filmmaker of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and director of numerous propaganda films, including the antisemitic reel Jud Süss. Harlan's film about Sorge is a romantic drama, with Harlan's wife Kristina Söderbaum, also known for numerous propaganda pieces in Nazi Germany, as the main protagonist of Sorge. The film was prohibited in Germany only two days after its release in 1955 and only released again after re-editing.

In 1961 a movie called Qui êtes-vous, Monsieur Sorge? (Who Are You, Mr. Sorge?) was produced in France in collaboration with West Germany, Italy and Japan. This movie was very popular in the Soviet Union as well. The part of Sorge was played by Thomas Holtzmann. In 1964, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev saw the film and asked the KGB whether the story was true. When it was confirmed that it was indeed true, Khrushchev posthumously awarded Sorge with the title of Hero of the Soviet Union on 5 November 1964. Sorge's widow Hanako Ishii received a Soviet pension. She eventually died in July 2000 in Tokyo.

Three East German journalists published Dr. Sorge funkt aus Tokyo in 1965 in celebration of the half-Russian, half-German hero who had acted against fascism (East Germany and the Soviet Union were then allied in the Warsaw Pact). In the lead up to the award, Sorge's claim that Friedrich Adolf Sorge was his grandfather was gladly repeated in the Soviet press. In a strange cold war oddity, these authors stirred up a free speech scandal with patriotic letters to former Nazis in West Germany, causing the Verfassungsschutz to issue a stern warning in early 1967: "If you receive mail from a certain Julius Mader, do not reply to him and pass on the letter to the respective security authorities."

A comic book based on Sorge's life, titled "Wywiadowca XX wieku" ("20th Century Spy"), was published in 1971 in Poland to familiarize younger readers with Sorge.

Sorge also appears in Osamu Tezuka's Adolf manga.

Author Chapman Pincher, in his 1981 book Their Trade is Treachery, asserted that Sorge, a GRU spy himself, recruited Englishman Roger Hollis in China in the early 1930s to spy for the GRU. Hollis later returned to England, joined MI5 just before World War II began, and eventually became Director-General of MI5 from 1956 to 1965. As detailed by former MI5 staffer Peter Wright in his 1988 book Spycatcher, Hollis was accused of being a Soviet spy, but despite several lengthy and seemingly thorough investigations, no conclusive proof of this was ever obtained.

One of Aleksandar Hemon's first stories in English is "The Sorge Spy Ring" (Triquarterly, 1997).

The 2003 Japanese film Spy Sorge, directed by Masahiro Shinoda, details his exploits in Shanghai and Japan. In the film he is portrayed by Scottish actor Iain Glen.

Quotes

 * "A devastating example of a brilliant success of espionage." - Douglas MacArthur, General of the Army


 * "His work was impeccable." - Kim Philby


 * "In my whole life, I have never met anyone as great as he was." - Mitsusada Yoshikawa, Chief Prosecutor in the Sorge trials who obtained Sorge's death sentence.


 * "Sorge was the man whom I regard as the most formidable spy in history." - Ian Fleming


 * "Richard Sorge was the best spy of all time." - Tom Clancy


 * "The spy who changed the world." - Lance Morrow


 * "Somehow, amidst the Bonds and Smiley's People, we have ignored the greatest of 20th century spy stories - that of Stalin's Sorge, whose exploits helped change history." - Carl Bernstein


 * "Richard Sorge's brilliant espionage work saved Stalin and the Soviet Union from defeat in the fall of 1941, probably prevented a Nazi victory in World War Two and thereby assured the dimensions of the world we live in today." - Larry Collins


 * "The spies in history who can say from their graves, the information I supplied to my masters, for better or worse, altered the history of our planet, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Richard Sorge was in that group." - Frederick Forsyth


 * "Stalin's James Bond." - Le Figaro

Cultural References
There are several fictional representation of Sorge's life:
 * The German Letzte Karte spielt der Tod by Hans Hellmut Kirst, published in English as The Last Card (New York: Pyramid Publications, Inc., 1967) and Death Plays the Last Card (London: Fontana, 1968).
 * The French L'Insensé by Morgan Sportes (Grasset, 2002) translated into Japanese as Sorge hametsu no fuga (Iwanami Shoten, 2005).
 * The 1997 novel Stepper by Australian Brian Castro.
 * The 2000 short story collection The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon.
 * The later chapters of Osamu Tezuka's manga Adolf.