An Impeccable Spy

Over the course of 50 interrogation sessions, Richard Sorge removed the scabbard of ‘a slightly lazy, high-living reporter’, which had shielded him for 12 years, and revealed his inner steel: the blade of an unyielding communist and consummate dissembler, the only person in history in the reckoning of Owen Matthews, his latest and most thorough biographer, to have been simultaneously a member of the Nazi party and the Soviet Communist party. His closest confidant in the spy rings that he set up in China and Japan was his radio man, Max Clausen, who told the Japanese police: ‘It is very difficult to explain Sorge’s personality’, since he ‘has never shown his true self’. A former foreign correspondent himself, he has a Russian wife whose family home outside Moscow was preserved largely thanks to vital information that Sorge sent back to the Fourth Department (regarding Japan’s preparedness to go to war with Russia).

Source: spectator.us