Nicholas
Shakespeare at the Spectator offers a review of Owen Matthews’ An Impeccable
Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent.
Interviewed
on the Today programme
on 7 March, a former executive of the gigantic Chinese tech firm Huawei
admitted: ‘It is the nature of humanity to spy, to conduct espionage.’ A
gold-plated incarnation of this impulse is the tall, craggy-faced German
journalist who was arrested in his pyjamas in his Tokyo house in October 1941.
‘I am a Nazi!’ he insisted to the Japanese police, who, before entering his
study, had politely removed their shoes. On the sixth day of his interrogation,
he finally broke. He raised his vigilant, deep-set blue eyes, which could have
charmed the whiskers off Blofeld’s cat, and said: ‘I will confess everything.’
Over the course of 50
interrogation sessions, Richard Sorge removed the scabbard of ‘a slightly lazy,
high-living reporter’, which had shielded him for 12 years, and revealed his
inner steel: the blade of an unyielding communist and consummate dissembler,
the only person in history in the reckoning of Owen Matthews, his latest and
most thorough biographer, to have been simultaneously a member of the Nazi party and the Soviet Communist party. ‘No other
agent had served Moscow for so well or so long.’
You can read the rest of the review via the below link:
You can read the rest of the review via the below link:
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