An impeccable spy : Richard Sorge, Stalin's master agent / Owen Matthews.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Matthews, Owen, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Espionage, Soviet.

History.

Japan.

Soviet Union.

Sorge, Richard, 1895-1944.

Sorge, Richard.

Spies--Soviet Union--Biography.

Spies.

Espionage, Soviet--Japan--History.

World War, 1939-1945--Military intelligence--Japan.

World War, 1939-1945.

World War, 1939-1945--Secret service--Soviet Union.

Military intelligence.

Secret service.

Genre:

Biographies.

History.

Physical Description:

viii, 435 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, portraits ; 25 cm

Other Title:

Richard Sorge, Stalin's master agent

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.

Summary:

The thrilling true story of Richard Sorge - the man John le Carré called 'the spy to end spies', and whose actions turned the tide of the Second World War. Richard Sorge was a man with two homelands. Born of a German father and a Russian mother in Baku in 1895, he moved in a world of shifting alliances and infinite possibility. A member of the angry and deluded generation who found new, radical faiths after their experiences on the battlefields of the First World War, Sorge became a fanatical communist - and the Soviet Union's most formidable spy. Like many great spies, Sorge was an effortless seducer, combining charm with ruthless manipulation. He did not have to go undercover to find out closely guarded state secrets - his victims willingly shared them. As a foreign correspondent, he infiltrated and influenced the highest echelons of German, Chinese and Japanese society in the years leading up to and including the Second World War. His intelligence regarding Operation Barbarossa and Japanese intentions not to invade Siberia in 1941 proved pivotal to the Soviet counteroffensive in the Battle of Moscow, which in turn determined the outcome of the war. Never before has Sorge's story been told from the Russian side as well as the German and Japanese. Owen Matthews takes a sweeping historical perspective and draws on a wealth of declassified Soviet archives - along with testimonies from those who knew and worked with Sorge - to rescue the riveting story of the man described by Ian Fleming as 'the most formidable spy in history'.

Contents:

'From the schoolhouse to the slaughter block'

Among the revolutionaries

'A fanatic riff-raff from a ruined century'

Shanghai days

The Manchurian incident

Have you considered Tokyo?

The spy ring forms

At home with the Otts

Moscow 1935

Hanako and Clausen

Bloodbath in Moscow

Lyushkov

Nomonhan

Ribbentrop-Molotov

Attack Singapore!

The butcher of Warsaw

Barbarossa takes shape

'They did not believe us'

Plan north or plan south?

Breaking point

'The greatest man I have ever met.'

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 405-415) and index.

ISBN:

1408857782

9781408857786

9781408857793

1408857790

OCLC:

1041893424