- Richard Sorge
Infobox Military Person
name= Richard Sorge
caption=Russian postage stamp honoring Richard Sorge
born=October 4 ,1895
died=November 7 ,1944
placeofbirth=Sabunchi ,Azerbaijan
placeofdeath=Tokyo ,Japan
nickname=Ramsey
allegiance=USSR
branch=
serviceyears=1920-1941
rank=
unit=
commands=
battles=
awards=
relations=
laterwork=Richard Sorge (Russian: Рихард Зорге) (
October 4 ,1895 -November 7 ,1944 ) is considered to have been the best Soviet spy inJapan before and duringWorld War II , which has gained him fame among spies, andespionage enthusiasts. HisNKVD codename was "Ramsay". He was also ajournalist , working inGermany andJapan .Early life
Sorge was born in the settlement of
Sabunchi , [ [http://www.warheroes.ru/hero/hero.asp?Hero_id=489 Hero of the Soviet Union Richard Sorge] ] [ [http://www.hrono.ru/biograf/zorge.html Khrono.ru. Richard Sorge] ] suburb ofBaku ,Azerbaijan , which was part ofImperial Russia at the time. He was the youngest of the nine children of Adolf Sorge (d. 1911) a German mining engineer and hisRussia n wife Nina Semionova Kobieleva. [F.W. Deakin and G.R. Storry, "The Case of Richard Sorge" (New York, 1966), pp. 23-24; quoted by Prange] 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." [ Partial Memoirs of Richard Sorge, Part 2, p. 30; quoted in part by Prange according to whom Sorge was 11 when the family moved (Prange, p. 8 and Appendix Chronology) and in full by Whymant according to whom Sorge was two years old at the time of the move (Whymant, p. 11); Whymant refers to a "glimmering memory of this ambiance [in the southern Caucasus] " as staying with Sorge for the rest of his life which rather suggests that two years old is a somewhat low estimate of Sorge's age at the time of the move]
The cosmopolitan Sorge household was "very different from the average bourgeois home in Berlin." [quoted by Whymant, p. 12]
Although Richard Sorge claimed
Friedrich Adolf Sorge , an associate ofKarl Marx andFriedrich Engels , was his grandfather, in fact, he was Richard Sorge's great-uncle. [F.W. Deakin and G.R. Storry, "The Case of Richard Sorge" (New York, 1966), pp. 23-24; quoted by Prange]In October 1914 Sorge volunteered to serve during
World War I . He joined a student battalion of the 3rd Guards, FieldArtillery . During his service in theWestern Front he was severely wounded in March 1916 whenshrapnel cut off three of his fingers and broke both his legs, causing a lifelong limp. He was promoted to corporal, received anIron Cross and 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 studyingeconomics in universities ofBerlin ,Kiel andHamburg . Sorge received aPh.D. inpolitical science at the University of Hamburg in August 1919. [Prange, Appendix Chronology] He also joined the Ilmenau,Thuringia , an event subsidized byFelix 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 theInstitute for Social Research , of which Kurt Albert Gerlach was meant to be the first director.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
Japan ese 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 a great deal of Nazi propaganda, devoted particular attention to
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 toHede Massing , "That was the bravest thing I ever did. Never will I be able to drink enough to make up for this time." [Hede Massing , "This Deception" (New York, 1951), p. 71; quoted by Prange] 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 "Borsen Zeitung " and the "Tagliche 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 onSeptember 6 , 1933. He was warned by his spymaster not to have contact with the underground Japanese Communist Party or with the Soviet Embassy inTokyo . His spy network in Japan included Red Army officer and radio operatorMax Gottfried Friedrich Clausen [His name is often spelt with an initial 'K' but "Clausen" appears on his driving licence and as his signature - Charles A. Willoughby, "Shanghai Conspiracy" (New York, 1952), photograph at p.75; referred to by Prange] ,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.In 1933-1934 Sorge built a network to collect intelligence for the
NKVD in Japan. His agents had contacts with senior politicians and through that, to information of Japan'sforeign policy . He also recontactedHotsumi Ozaki who developed a close contact with the prime ministerFumimaro Konoe . Ozaki copied secret documents for Sorge.At the time, collecting intelligence from inside Germany was more dangerous and difficult. 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 Nazi party and became a German journalist in Tokyo. In Tokyo, 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 Frau Ott, 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 , theGerman-Japanese Pact and warned of the Pearl Harbor attack. In 1941, Sorge is said to have informed them of the exact launch date ofOperation Barbarossa . Moscow answered with thanks butStalin largely ignored itFact|date=July 2007. (This was also the case with information supplied by the other networks, includingLeiba 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'. Luckily, 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. [Prange, p. 347] The date of 20 June had been given to Sorge by Lt-Col Friedrich von Schol who was assistant military attache at the German embassy in Tokyo. [Obi Toshito, ed., "Gendai-shi Shiryo, Zoruge Jiken" ("Materials on Modern History, The Sorge Incident") (Tokyo, 1962), Vol. I, p.274; quoted by Prange] 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.In 1964, the Soviet press reported that on 15 June 1941 Sorge had broadcast a dispatch saying that, "The war will begin on June 22." [I. Dementieva and N. Agayantz, "Richard Sorge, Soviet Intelligence Agent," "Sovietskaya Rossiya", 6 September 1964; quoted by Prange] 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 ofOperation 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?" [
Simon Sebag Montefiore "Stalin The Court of the Red Tsar" (London, 2003), p. 360; referred to in the Notes below as "Sebag Montefiore"]On 14 September 1941, Sorge advised the Red Army that the Japanese were not going to attack the Soviet Union until:
# Moscow was captured
# the size of theKwantung Army was three times that of the Soviet Union's Far Eastern forces
# a civil war had started in Siberia. [Prange, p. 407]Toward the end of September 1941, Sorge transmitted information 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
Various writers have speculated that this information led to events that allowed the Soviet Union to repulse and eventually turn the tide against the Nazis. To this end, Sorge's information might have been the most important spy work in World War Two. AtKwantung Army inManchuria necessitated the Soviet Union's keeping a large number of troops on the eastern borders..." [Mayevsky, Viktor, "Comrade Richard Sorge", "Pravda", 4 September 1964; quoted by Prange]Khimki , a place at the Moscow city border enroute toSheremetyevo 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 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 fromBaku and also ammunition and food supplies sent by the allies from thePersian Gulf through Iran, Soviet Azerbaijan and up the Volga river.Fact|date=February 2007Arrests 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 pad s (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 warned about the secret police closing in. He decided to leave Japan along with his Japanese lover, whom he had met at a local bar. However, a minor mistake cost him dearly. Instead of burning a note warning him, he threw it away on the road. The incriminating note was promptly recovered by the policemen tailing him. Sorge was arrested on
October 18 , 1941 in Tokyo, in the house of his lover.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. Sorge was not exchanged for Japanese prisoners of war, because the Soviet government as well as Sorge himself denied that he was spying for the USSR. He was incarcerated inSugamo Prison .Execution
*"His work was impeccable." -
Kim Philby *"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 *"Stalin's James Bond." - "
Le Figaro "Sorge makes yet another appearance in the later chapters of
Osamu Tezuka 's manga ] about Richard Sorge's life includes some scenes shot inKitakyushu , including one at theWest Japan Industrial Club inTobata ward, and another (a press conference) at theMitsui club inMoji-ko .
* [http://www.richardsorge.com/ Sorge: A chronology] , edited by Michael Yudell.
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