JUNE 1 2019 LISTENER 53
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masters, all the while
drinking heroic quanti-
ties of whisky, seducing
dozens of women with a
Bond-like precision and
riding his high-powered
motorbike around Tokyo
like a wild, drunken,
rowdy boy, until a near-
fatal crash forced him into a car, which he
drove with equal recklessness.
A
nice middle-class boy turned fanati-
cal communist, Sorge was born to
a German engineer and his Russian
wife in the Russian mining backwater of
Baku in 1895. He was bright, and ought to
have been the academic he spent so much
of his life wishing he’d become. Instead,
after enlisting in the German army shortly
after the outbreak of World War I, Sorge
read Marx while recovering from leg
wounds and, on his medical discharge,
gained a doctorate in economics and a
taste for revolutionary politics and labour
bust-ups.
Matthews’ history grinds a little
through these early years, as Sorge falls
in with the Comintern
before being recruited by
Soviet military intel-
ligence and developing
a taste for the high life
and the spy life in his first
significant mission, to the
“whore of the Orient”,
Shanghai, in the early
1930s.
It is when Sorge reaches
Japan in 1933 that both
his life and Matthews’
book truly come alive. Through sheer
force of character, Sorge quickly assem-
bled and then commanded one of the
most effective spy rings in history, which,
through key Japanese agent Hotsumi
Ozaki, was privy to Japan’s most secret
discussions. Meanwhile, Sorge charmed
his way into Tokyo’s small German com-
munity, befriended Germany’s senior
diplomats and became their invaluable
expert on Japan – all the while, and in
plain sight, stealing their secrets. All this
was fed back to Russia, where Stalin was
paranoid about invasion.
Sorge’s tragedy was that he was the spy
who, at first, wasn’t believed. When he
alerted Moscow to Hitler’s plan to invade
in 1941, it was dismissed as suspect intel-
ligence from a suspect agent.
However, Matthews credits Sorge’s
insights into Japanese military intentions
- not to invade Russia in 1941 but to go
south, instead – as allowing Stalin to move
crack troops from the east to the west,
saving Moscow from the Germans, and
Russia’s war.
There are – unsurprisingly, given the
ripping-ness of the yarn – already more
than 100 books about Sorge. For com-
pletists, Matthews’ distinguishes itself
from the others by being the first written
with access to Russia’s archives, and he
writes very well.
But then it’s such
a great story, about
a man who knew
too much, and was
listened to too little.
A spy better than
Bond. l
AN IMPECCABLE SPY,
by Owen Matthews
(Bloomsbury, $32.99)
to politick and to help each other out
on communal tasks such as shearing. As
Ásgeirsdóttir, who has a sideline scanning
pregnant ewes, travels the region, we get
to know this tight, pragmatic community.
In autumn, corporate types from
Reykjavík begin to circle, hoping to snap
up pristine landscapes for a hydropower
plant. Ásgeirsdóttir ends up embroiled as
an activist and politician, bemoaning each
moment taken from her beloved Ljótar-
staðir. If in places the text needs a good
edit and proof, that is a minor quibble
against the simple enjoyment of walking
alongside a stroppy,
independent woman
living so close to
nature at its worst and
best. l
HEIÐA: A Shepherd at
the Edge of the World,
by Heiða Ásgeirsdóttir &
Steinunn Sigurdardottir
(Hachette, $32.99)Sorge was described as
“the most formidable
spy in history” by no lessan authority than Ian
Fleming.Incredible: the tragedy of
Richard Sorge, left, was that at
first his Soviet masters didn’t
believe him.
A stroppy,
independent
shepherd and
her dog: Heiða
Ásgeirsdóttir.