Vol. 19 No. 10 · 22 May 1997
pages 13-15 | 5408 words
Spying doesn’t get any better than this
Murray Sayle
- Stalin’s Spy: Richard Sorge and the Tokyo Espionage Ring by Robert Whymant
Tauris, 368 pp, £25.00, October 1996, ISBN 1 86064 044 3
When Richard Sorge was hanged in Sugamo prison in Tokyo, on 7 November 1944, I was still a student and I regret that I never had occasion to take a drink or three with that wit, charmer, womaniser, tosspot, home-wrecker, author, journalist and master Soviet agent. I had better luck with my friend Kim Philby, Sorge’s only serious rival (that we know of) for the title Spy of the Century. Through one dizzying Moscow fortnight in 1968, Philby and I sampled the mind-expanding powers of Polish vodka, Cuban rum, Georgian wine, Armenian brandy and palate-cleansing Russian beer, with the odd mouthful of borscht to keep us going – and, as I now see, exactly the same descriptions apply to him. This enthralling new account of Sorge, by the veteran British journalist and old Asia hand Robert Whymant, confirms what I had long suspected: Sorge and Philby were psychic twins, two textbook examples of the rare species we might call Homo undercoverus – those who find the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not (Sorge literally, and Kim Philby had some close calls, too) worth living.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 19 No. 15 · 31 July 1997
From Peter Stollery
Richard Sorge. I haven’t read the book (LRB, 22 May), but I certainly saw the movie. It was called Qui Etes-Vous, M. Sorge? and was made in Czechoslovakia before 1962. I saw it in unusual circumstances.
I spent May, June and the first eight days of July 1962 in Algeria. I had a commission to write an article about the end of French rule. I went to Sidi-bel-Abbès, headquarters of the Foreign Legion, where I had lived for a year as a schoolteacher. In 1962 it was a very dangerous place: the most popular column in the daily Echo d’Oran, irregularly and hurriedly delivered from Oran, 80 kilometres to the north, was, ‘Les Attentats des Dernières 24 Heures’, which everyone read to learn who had been bumped off. You needed good nerves. Mine started to weaken after I was shot at during dinner with some friends, and went completely the next day when I learned that some people were looking for me. For some reason that I do not remember, I couldn’t leave town on the first train. Trains were almost the only thing still operating. Banks had run out of cash. My problem was how to hide out during the afternoon. So I went to the one cinema that was still open and showing an afternoon film. I still remember the fear when I left the protection of a succession of doorways, where I attempted to cut the angle and make it difficult to shoot me, to walk across the open area in front of the cinema and buy a ticket. The exposure was excruciating.
I was the only customer. Naturally, I watched very carefully to see if anything moved in the darkness. I knew that if I had been seen coming in I was a goner and that the back exit would be covered, which was my only hope if I had to run for it. Then I started to watch the movie. It was black and white, confusing and made no sense to me whatsoever. I kept wondering what the hell it was all about. I had never heard of Richard Sorge. I had never met anybody who had heard of Richard Sorge. And what was a Czech film about an unknown Russian spy doing running in a side-street cinema in Sidi-bel-Abbès, given the situation?
Of course, I have no answer. I don’t believe I saw the name again for twenty years. Now I have seen it three times. As to Murray Sayle’s review, I was surprised to learn that both Kim Philby and Richard Sorge drank a lot. In my experience, personal security and drinking do not go together.
Peter Stollery
The Senate, Ottawa
Vol. 19 No. 16 · 21 August 1997
From Gregory Blue
I was surprised to find the name Joseph Needham popping up in Murray Sayle’s thought-provoking review of Robert Whymant’s book on Richard Sorge and the wartime Soviet spy ring in Tokyo (LRB, 22 May). Your readers might have assumed that the reference was to the late Cambridge biochemist, sinologist and historian of science, who at the time was also a prominent anti-Fascist writer and organiser. In fact, there is a mistake in Sayle’s description of how the frustrated Sorge leaked news of the impending Operation Barbarossa to the Western press. The New York Herald Tribune’s article of 31 May 1941 reporting Japanese expectations of the Nazi invasion was not by Needham, but by Joseph Newman, the paper’s Tokyo correspondent. As there is a tendency for myths to accrue to Needham, whose assistant I used to be, it would be helpful if this story could be scotched at source.
Gregory Blue
University of Victoria
