Joseph Fitsanakis at intelnews.org offers a
piece on the release of Japanese documents about the Richard Sorge (seen in
the above photo) spy ring in Japan during WWII.
Japan has released secret documents from 1942
relating to the Tokyo spy ring led by Richard Sorge, a German who spied for the
USSR and is often credited with helping Moscow win World War II. The documents
detail efforts by the wartime Japanese government to trivialize the discovery
of the Sorge spy ring, which was at the heart of modern Japan’s biggest spy
scandal.
Thirty-five people, many of them highly placed
Japanese officials, were arrested in Tokyo in October of 1941 for spying for
the Soviet Union. Sorge, the German head of the spy ring, had fought for the
Central Powers in World War I, but had subsequently become a communist and
trained in espionage by Soviet military intelligence. He was then sent to Tokyo
where he struck a close friendship with the German Ambassador and joined the
German embassy. He eventually informed Moscow that German ally Japan was not
planning to invade Russia from the east. That tip allowed Stalin to move
hundreds of thousands of troops from the Far East to the German front, which in
turn helped the USSR beat back the Nazi advance and win the war.
You can read the rest of the piece via the
below link:
You can also read an earlier post about
Richard Sorge via the below link:
Note: To learn more about Richard Sorge and the
Japanese spy ring, I suggest you read Gordon W. Prange's Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring.
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