ΜΑΡΚΟΣ

November 7, 1944. In a Tokyo prison, the Japanese hang a man who was arguably the most important spy of the entire war, and they do it, pointedly, on the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Richard Sorge had sent Stalin the intelligence that may have saved Moscow, and his reward, from the Soviet side, was to be disowned and abandoned, and from the Japanese, the noose. Sorge was a German, a committed communist, who worked as a journalist in Tokyo, a respected correspondent moving easily in German and Japanese official circles, trusted even by the German embassy. It was the perfect cover, because Sorge was in reality a Soviet spy, running one of the most successful intelligence networks in history, gathering secrets from the very heart of the German and Japanese establishments in Tokyo. He gave Moscow two pieces of intelligence of enormous importance. First, in the spring of 1941, he warned Stalin of the coming German invasion of the Soviet Union, giving a strikingly accurate picture of Operation Barbarossa, including its approximate timing. Stalin, in one of the great blunders of the war, refused to believe the warnings pouring in from Sorge and many other sources, and the invasion caught the Soviet Union disastrously unprepared. But it was Sorge's second great report that mattered most, and that connects directly to the story I just told you. As the Germans closed on Moscow in the autumn of 1941, the agonizing question for Stalin was whether Japan, Germany's ally, would also attack the Soviet Union, striking into the Soviet Far East. If it did, the Soviet divisions stationed in Siberia and the Far East to guard against Japan would have to stay there, and they could not be used to defend Moscow. Sorge, from inside the circles of power in Tokyo, learned the answer and sent it: Japan would not attack the Soviet Union. Japan had decided to strike south instead, against the United States and the British and Dutch empires, for the oil and resources of Southeast Asia, the decision that would lead to Pearl Harbor. That intelligence was gold. Reassured that his eastern frontier was safe, Stalin was able to transfer fresh, tough, well-equipped divisions from the Far East to the west, and those Siberian troops arrived at Moscow in time to stiffen the defense and to form the spearhead of the December counteroffensive that drove the Germans back from the capital. It is one of the strongest cases in the whole war for a single spy's intelligence changing the course of events. Sorge's report helped make possible the salvation of Moscow. His own end was grim. The Japanese secret police closed in on his network, and Sorge was arrested in Tokyo in the autumn of 1941, even as his greatest reports were doing their work. He was interrogated, held for years, and tried. And here is the bitter part: the Soviet Union, for which he had risked and given everything, disowned him. Stalin's government denied that Sorge was their agent, refused to acknowledge him or to try to exchange him, and left him to his fate, perhaps out of embarrassment, perhaps out of Stalin's characteristic suspicion of his own most valuable people. Abandoned by the country he had served so brilliantly, Sorge was hanged by the Japanese on the 7th of November 1944, the Revolution's anniversary. Only long after the war, in the 1960s, did the Soviet Union finally acknowledge him and make him, posthumously, a Hero of the Soviet Union, putting his face on a postage stamp, the master spy belatedly claimed by the nation that had let him die. Richard Sorge is remembered now as perhaps the most consequential spy of the Second World War, the man in Tokyo whose secrets helped hold Moscow, hanged on this day, disowned by the very cause he had saved.