Michael Batson

Richard Sorge had one of the greatest impacts on the outcome of World War Two of any individual, yet most people have never heard of him. He was not a politician or a diplomat, he didn’t command troops, fly planes, captain battleships or even fire a gun, and he never fought in any of the battles. What he had was access to key inside information at critical times. He caused entire armies to move from one part of the world to another which saved the Soviet Union from disaster in 1941 in the bloody battles outside Moscow and enabled Stalin’s eventual victory in 1945, thereby reshaping modern Europe. He was a spy but also shared many of the fundamental traits of a high-class conman: personable, well dressed, amiable, well mannered, good looking, attractive to women and utterly without conscious or scruples. His penetration of the German embassy in Tokyo also made him the most highly placed Soviet agent in the world at the time. Sorge (“Sor-gei”) was born in Tsarist Russia of a German father and a Russian mother. He grew up in Berlin in comfortable middle-class surroundings. He became possibly the only person in history to have been a card-carrying member of both the German Nazi Party and the Soviet Communist Party at the same time. The espionage ring he created and ran for nine years in Tokyo, when no Russian agent had ever succeeded in settling in Tokyo, was the greatest spy ring of the age. He had previously run another spy ring in Shanghai, then the centre of