Book review: An Impeccable Spy, by Owen Matthews

Ian Fleming called him “the most formidable spy in history,” Frederick Forsyth claimed he “altered the history of our planet” and John Le Carré dubbed him “The spy to end spies.” Richard Sorge was born in Baku in the Russian Empire in 1895 but subsequently moved with his German father and Russian mother to Berlin, where he was brought up. He was barely 18 when the First World War began, he saw action on the Western and Eastern Fronts and was severely wounded in the legs and hands, which led to the award of the Iron Cross and his discharge from the army. These experiences shattered his German nationalism and led to his conversion to revolutionary Marxism and his membership of the German Communist Party. In 1924, Sorge was head of security for the Russian delegation at the Frankfurt conference of the Communist International, after which he was invited to Moscow to head up the new Comintern intelligence bureau. He carried out Comintern work in Norway, Sweden and the UK and in Germany again before being recruited by Soviet military intelligence for espionage work in the Chinese port city of Shanghai.