Richard Sorge

Richard Sorge (October 4, 1895 – November 7, 1944) was a German communist and a key Soviet spy at the time of the Second World War. He worked as a journalist in both Germany and Japan, where he was imprisoned for spying and ultimately hanged. His GRU codename was "Ramsay" (Рамза́й).

Early life
Sorge was born in the settlement of Sabunchi, a suburb of Baku, Azerbaijan, then part of Russia. He was the youngest of nine children of Wilhelm Richard Sorge (d. 1907), a German mining engineer employed by the Caucasian Oil Company, and his Russian wife Nina Semionovna Kobieleva. His father's lucrative contract expired a few years later, and the 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.

World War I started in August 1914; in October 1914 Sorge enlisted in the German Army. He joined a student battalion of the 3rd Guards Field Artillery. He served on the Western Front, and was severely wounded in March 1916. Shrapnel cut off three of his fingers and broke both his legs, causing a lifelong limp. He was promoted to corporal, received the Iron Cross and was later medically discharged.

During his convalescence he read Marx and became a Communist, 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 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 the Soviet Union, where he became a junior agent for the Comintern in Moscow.

Red Army spy
Sorge was recruited as a spy for Soviet intelligence. With the cover of a journalist, he was sent to various European countries to assess the possibility of Communist revolutions.

From 1920 to 1922, Sorge lived in Solingen, in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. He was joined there by Christiane Gerlach, ex-wife of Dr Kurt Albert Gerlach, a wealthy Communist and professor of political science in Kiel, who had taught Sorge. 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" conference) in Ilmenau. Sorge continued his work as a journalist, and also helped organized the library of the Institute for Social Research, a new Marxist think-tank in Frankfurt.

In 1924, he and Christiane moved to Moscow, where he officially joined the International Liaison Department of the Comintern, which was 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 went to Britain to study the labor movement there, the status of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the country's political and economic conditions. He was instructed to remain undercover and stay out of politics.

In November 1929, Sorge was sent to Germany. He was instructed to join the Nazi Party and not associate with any left-wing activists. As cover, he got a job with the agricultural newspaper Deutsche Getreide-Zeitung.

China 1930
In 1930, Sorge was sent to Shanghai. For cover 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. Smedley, a well-known left-wing journalist, also worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung. She introduced Sorge to Hotsumi Ozaki of the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun (a future Sorge recruit), and to Hanako Ishii, with whom he would become romantically involved.

As a journalist, Sorge established himself as an expert on Chinese agriculture. In this role, he travelled around the country, contacting 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.

Moscow 1933
Sorge returned to Moscow, where he wrote a book about Chinese agriculture. He also married Yekaterina Maximova ("Katya"), a woman he had met in China and brought back with him to Russia.

Japan 1933
In May 1933, the GRU decided to have Sorge organize a spy network in Japan. He was given the code name "Ramsay" ("Рамзай" (Ramzai, Ramzay)). He first went to Berlin, to renew contacts in Germany, and obtain a new newspaper assignment in Japan as cover.

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 didn't make his Nazi companions suspicious. It was an example of his devotion to and absorption in his mission, as he was a heavy drinker. 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." Later, his drinking came to undermine his work.

While in Germany, he got commissions from two newspapers, the Berliner Börsen Zeitung and the Tägliche Rundschau, to report from Japan; also the Nazi theoretical journal Geopolitik. Later he was to get work from the Frankfurter Zeitung. He then went to Japan via the United States, passing through New York August 1933.

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 operated under cover of his business, M Clausen Shokai, suppliers of blueprint machinery and reproduction services. The business had been set up with Soviet funds but in time became a commercial success.

Between 1933 and 1934 Sorge formed a network of informants. His agents had contacts with senior politicians and picked up information on Japanese foreign policy. His agent Ozaki developed a close contact with the prime minister Fumimaro Konoe. Ozaki copied secret documents for Sorge.

As he was apparently an ardent Nazi, he was welcome at the German Embassy.

Wartime intelligence supplied by the Sorge Ring
Sorge supplied Soviet intelligence with information about the Anti-Comintern Pact and the German-Japanese Pact. In 1941, through his Embassy contacts, he learned of Operation Barbarossa, the imminent Axis invasion of the USSR, and even the approximate date. Moscow received the report, but ultimately Joseph Stalin and other top leaders ignored Sorge's warnings, as well as those of other sources.

It has been rumored that Sorge is said to have provided the exact date of "Barbarossa", but Gordon Prange in 1984 concluded that the closest Sorge came was 20 June 1941 and that Sorge himself never claimed to have discovered the correct date (22 June) in advance. The date of 20 June was given to Sorge by Lieutenant-Colonel Erwin Scholl, the deputy military attaché at the German embassy. 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.

The Soviet press reported in 1964 that on June 15, 1941, Sorge had sent a radio dispatch saying that "The war will begin on June 22." Prange, who did not have access to material released by the Russian authorities in the 1990s, did not accept the veracity of this report. More recently, Stalin was quoted as having ridiculed Sorge and his intelligence before "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 Japan would not attack the Soviet Union until:
 * 1) Moscow was captured
 * 2) The Kwantung Army was three times the size of Soviet Far Eastern forces
 * 3) A civil war had started in Siberia.

"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, a memorial plaque is located reminding visitors of this defining historical battle.

Another important item allegedly reported by Sorge may have affected the Battle of Stalingrad. Sorge reported that Japan would attack the Soviet Union from the East as soon as the German army captured any city on the Volga.

Sorge's rival and opponent in Japan and east Asia was Ivar Lissner, an agent of the German Abwehr.

Arrests and trials
As the war progressed, it was becoming increasingly dangerous for Sorge, but he continued spying. His radio messages were enciphered with unbreakable one-time pads (always used by the Soviets), and appeared as gibberish. However, due to the increasing number of these mystery messages, the Japanese began to suspect a spy ring operating. The Kempeitai (Japanese secret police) intercepted many messages and began to close in. Ozaki was arrested on October 14, 1941 and immediately interrogated.

Sorge was arrested shortly thereafter on October 18, 1941, in Tokyo. The next day, a brief memo notified German ambassador Eugen Ott 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. Nonetheless, he immediately sided with Japanese authorities to "investigate the incident fully". It was not until a few months later that Japanese authorities announced that Sorge had in fact been indicted as a Soviet spy.

He was incarcerated in Sugamo Prison. 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. Under torture, Sorge confessed, however the Soviets still denied he was one of their agents. 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.

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 Sorge's warning 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.

Posthumous Recognition
In 1954, German film director Veit Harlan wrote and directed the film Betrayal of Germany (Verrat an Deutschland) about Sorge's espionage in Japan. Harlan had been the favorite filmmaker of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and directed many propaganda films, including Jud Süss. Harlan's film is a romantic drama, starring Harlan's wife Kristina Söderbaum, as Sorge's love interest. 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 then Communist Poland to familiarize younger readers with spies such as 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.

Comments about Sorge

 * "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.