[MUSIC PLAYING]
[APPLAUSE]
OWEN MATTHEWS: Thank you.
Welcome.
It's delightful to see
so many people here.
The topic of spies seems to
be endlessly fascinating.
It just packs out houses
all over the country.
I'm here today to tell you
about a very brilliant spy who
was a very bad man.
And we'll get to whether
those things and in what ways
those two things are related,
the strange psychological
makeup of people of that sort
of mid-century generation
who spent their lives
deceiving everyone around them.
But, first, I want
to just run you
through the basics of the story.
How did this man Richard Sorge--
Sorge, actually,
strangely enough,
is an adjective that means
melancholy, Mr. Melancholy.
Although he certainly
was not melancholy
in his life and work.
He was hyperactive, priapic,
and extremely danger loving.
So the misnamed
Richard Sorge was
a man with a fatherland
and a motherland.
He was born in an expatriate
German family in Baku,
the oil city in the Caucasus,
capital of Azerbaijan,
in the Russian empire in 1895.
His father was an oil engineer.
His mother was the daughter
of a local merchant.
She was Russian, but she
didn't speak Russian at home.
And he spent the first
years of his life
as an expatriate living
in considerable luxury
in a suburb of Baku.
And that's one of
the things I think
that many spies have
in common in fact,
the sense of otherness.
I think Sorge never
really felt that he
belonged in the society
in which he grew up.
He wrote in his prison memoir--
Sorry.
It's a bit of a spoiler.
He gets hanged in the end.
Sorry.
[LAUGHTER]
It is actually in the
first introduction
of the book [INAUDIBLE].
In his prison memoir, he writes
that he felt from his childhood
this sense of not belonging
to this bourgeois world
of first Baku expatriate life,
and then later his father
moved to Berlin where they
lived in a wealthy suburb.
And his father became a banker.
So rather like Kim Philby,
and there's actually
rather a lot of similarities
between the life of Richard
Sorge and the life of Kim
Philby and particularly
their backgrounds as well,
he grew up in privilege.
But he didn't really
feel part of that world.
And Kim Philby wrote,
in order to betray,
you must first belong.
I never belonged.
And I think you could say
exactly the same thing
about Richard Sorge.
And the major event
that set his life
in train, his career in train
as a spy was the same event that
united, traumatized, slaughtered
so many of that generation.
It was what the Germans call
the Kindermord, the Massacre
of the Innocents, the
experience of fighting
on the Western Front.
And Sorge joins up in 1914
as a young, idealistic German
patriot unthinking.
We've all read our Philip
[INAUDIBLE],, August 1914,
young men all
across Europe having
no idea of the sort of the
slaughter they were signing up
for, sign up, including Sorge.
Within six months,
within eight months
he's on the River
Yser in Belgium
in a student battalion,
which is largely massacred.
And to get a sense
of the trauma and
the profound personal impact
of that war, the most lyrical,
not lyrical, but the most
powerful writing about that
is not actually Sorge.
It's someone who is
almost exactly his age who
fought in very similar
areas of the Western Front
and was, in fact, wounded in
the next door hospital in 1916.
It was Adolf Hitler.
And in "Mein Kampf," Hitler
describes the absolute rage
that he feels that the
Old World has betrayed
him and his generation
and has massacred
and caused this mass
pointless slaughter.
And the Old World
must be broken,
says Adolf Hitler in
precisely the same way,
this young banker's son Richard
Sorge finds himself filled
with rage at the Old World.
And Hitler, as we
know, goes onto create
his own national socialism.
But a whole generation
of communists,
and Richard Sorge among
them, find this wellspring
of ideas of motivation
in that disappointment
and in that horror.
And in practical
terms, actually, he
is in hospital where
one of his nurses
starts giving him
communist literature.
And he starts reading his way
to enlightenment as he puts it.
The forced confinement of
a hospital bed, I think,
also sows profound
restlessness in him.
And he joins the cohort of
young men of his generation
who become radical communists.
And, of course, we now
tend to associate Russia
immediately, first and foremost,
with communist revolution.
But, actually, strangely enough,
the Bolsheviks themselves,
the ideologues of
Bolshevism, thought
that Germany was much more
likely to go Bolshevik,
and the German proletariat
is much bigger.
It's much more ripe a place
for a communist revolution.
And, in fact, there
were-- we, again,
sort of tend to forget this, how
close Germany came to becoming
a Bolshevik communist country.
There were at least,
depending on how
you count them, five
or six revolutions
between 1918, the
[INAUDIBLE],, and in 1923.
There was the Red Roar, Munich.
There were various uprisings.
And the young Richard
Sorge was very involved
as a communist activist.
He lectured students in Kiel.
He was pursuing an
academic career.
In fact, he became an economist
after the end of the war,
after demobilization.
First he tried to
study as a doctor,
became an economist, and so on.
But, also, all this time, he was
also an underground agitator,
in fact, quite literally
underground agitator
because he signed up to work in
a mine to agitate the miners.
So he became actually a real
underground agitator in a mine.
So this young man, very
passionate, very, very didactic
having sort of a slightly
pedantic high opinion
of himself.
He's an academic.
Throughout his whole life as
a communist, strangely enough,
he never loses the sense of
his sort of patrician, what we
would today call entitlement.
Actually, he's constantly,
even when he's working as a spy
later in his career, he's always
sort of talking down and just
definitely being rude
to his subordinates
and bossing people about.
So he always considers himself
to be sort of officer class.
But to cut a long
story short, he
is identified by Russian agents
of the Communist International,
a Moscow run
organization designed
to spread world revolution.
He was recruited by the
Communist International,
does various spying work for
them throughout the 1920s.
Then at the end of the 1920s,
he is sent to Shanghai.
Shanghai is at that point the
entrepot of the Asian trade.
It's also basically
a colonial city.
Although it's not actually
formally a colony,
but various chunks
of central Shanghai
are controlled by
various colonial powers,
self-governing, self-regulated
colonial powers.
And, also, importantly,
if you're a spy,
it also has four separate
police forces none
of whom talk to each other.
So that's very, very handy
as you have a city which
is divided into little bits.
One of them is the
international settlement,
which is basically the
English settlement, which
is the one you want to avoid
because its police force is
run by Northern Irishman.
So they're very sort of
serious about their security.
And in fact, the
British Special branch
were actually
extremely effective
at rolling up communists in
fact in London and in Shanghai.
You have the French
who obviously--
Sorry.
I didn't mean obviously.
They are less concerned
with security.
You have the Chinese.
You have the Japanese.
You have a small sort of
nascent Japanese concession,
and you have the
local Chinese police
which control the
entire mainland
on behalf of the sort of falling
ailing nationalist government.
So Sorge starts to arise
in this city, which
is the capital of
espionage in the '30s.
And in that period,
more or less every sort
of great illegal Soviet agent
that ever operated anywhere
at some point pops
up in Shanghai.
And he has a very
successful career.
Well, he identifies
the things that
become sort of the
planks, the bulwarks
of his successful espionage,
and they're really simple.
It's just by being
incredibly charming.
He's just a really very
charming, personable man.
We can talk about this
in the Q&A afterwards,
but the way espionage has
changed over the intervening 80
years.
But in those glory days
when human intelligence
was everything, it
was just getting
information out of people.
Sorge basically didn't ever in
his career steal any secrets.
People gave him secrets.
They told him secrets.
And he traded secrets.
He was just a very personable
man, and men wanted to be him.
Women wanted him.
He was extraordinarily
charming, promiscuous sexually.
And he was actually
in many ways sort
of the prototype of James Bond.
In fact, Ian Fleming does write
about that, the Sorge sort
of swashbuckling, nightclub
hopping, man about town
as on the models of James Bond,
the sort of Soviet James Bond.
But the most interesting
part of his career
ensues not in Shanghai where
he acquits himself perfectly
respectively but in the
next most dangerous stage
where Sorge goes from
just being a rather
good effective everyday
spy to being a world
historical figure.
And he creates probably one
the greatest spy networks
in the world in Tokyo,
Japan, intensely mysterious
to the Soviets,
intensely dangerous
the Soviets because this newly
hatched imperial power, which
has defeated Imperial
Russia in 1905
has suddenly spread over
into Manchuria in 1931.
They start to expand into
huge swathes of mainland China
and acquire a large land
border with Siberia.
So, obviously, the
Soviets are really
very interested to know
what are the Japanese doing.
And Sorge is sent into this
totally spy mad country
with a very powerful not
just no police forces that
speak to each
other, but actually
5 interlocking overlapping
police forces that very much do
talk to each other.
You've got the [INAUDIBLE],, the
military intelligence, and so
on.
So this is actually
a police state
with a very tiny
expatriate community which
are very physically
obvious unlike in Shanghai
where you've sort of many
tens of thousands, hundreds
of thousands of Westerners.
In Tokyo, they're very rare.
So what does he do?
He creates essentially two
parallel spying networks, one
of them, and the
most important one,
based on his charm
aforementioned because he
decides to do two things.
One, he and his bosses decide
that he's not going to hide.
He's not going to go
under an assumed identity.
He's not going to go and
pose as something else.
He's not going to have
what the Russian spy,
Soviet spies of
that time described
as a boot, a false identity,
a constructed identity.
No, he was just going to go
as Richard Sorge, journalist,
because he was Richard
Sorge, journalist.
He actually hid in
absolutely plain sight.
And that was actually
a brilliantly
simple and effective
cover because he
was, in fact, actually rather--
I read his article,
so you don't have to.
But it's a rather pedantic,
rather sort of plodding
but nonetheless a
successful journalist.
And he becomes the correspondent
for the "Frankfurter Zeitung,"
which is the most prestigious
German paper at the time.
So there's no subterfuge.
He's just hides in plain sight.
And his main source
is a man to whom
he has obtained letters of
introduction, [INAUDIBLE] Eugen
Ott, a lieutenant colonel
in the German army,
former intelligence officer,
in fact, who is posted to Japan
and who is given to
Sorge as a contact.
As it turns, Eugen Ott becomes
firstly the military attache
and then the ambassador.
The German ambassador to Tokyo
is a very important position.
He's a very important
and interesting man
to know because as you know,
Germany and Japan later
go into a military alliance.
So that sort of nexus of the
Nazi Germany's representative
in imperial Japan is
a key man to know.
And he is best friends
with Richard Sorge
despite the fact that within
a month of arriving in Japan,
the first thing that Sorge does
as well as befriend Eugen Ott,
potentially a very
important source,
is he also seduces his wife.
[LAUGHTER]
So I call him an impeccable
spy, but there are many ways,
and I get to the other
ways in a moment,
that his work is very far
from impeccable in fact.
He is actually
incredibly reckless.
Despite the fact that this
guy has seduced his wife,
Eugen Ott, in fact,
even jokes about it.
He calls his new friend
the irresistible one.
There's obviously some sort of
strange interpersonal dynamic
in the Ott's relation, the
family relations, but anyway.
Ott begins to just
confide in Sorge.
Why does he confide in Sorge?
Because Sorge actually becomes
very good at networking.
He becomes the go-to guy for Ott
and other [INAUDIBLE] diplomats
because he seems to be amazingly
well informed about the ins
and outs, the inner workings
of Japanese politics.
He's just like his amazingly
well-connected journalist.
And, of course, the reason
why he's an amazingly
well-connected journalist--
I think you got there before me.
It was because his
major Japanese agent
was a young, idealistic
communist Japanese journalist
with whom he had worked and met
in fact in Shanghai, Hotsumi
Ozaki.
He gets transferred to the
headquarters of his newspaper,
"Asahi Shimbun."
And he gets transferred in
the way of a certain kind
of journalist.
His career progression
is from journalist
to as sort of analyst to sort
of leader writer to sort of
think tanker to
government advisor.
I mean, that's not
unprecedented as we
know from the current election.
I mean, the path from
journalism to politics
also existed in the 1930s Japan.
And, ultimately, at the height
of the spy rings effectiveness
and fame, you have Richard Sorge
is one degree of separation
from Adolf Hitler via his best
mate, Eugen Ott with whom he
has breakfast every
morning at the embassy.
And they chat about the
secret diplomatic cables
that come in from
Berlin and what
Sorge has heard about
the sort of latest gossip
on Japanese politics.
He's one degree of
separation from Hitler
because Ott is speaking
quite regularly to Hitler.
He goes to Berlin many
times to meet Hitler.
He's one degree of separation
from the Japanese prime
minister because Hotsumi
Ozaki is eventually
appointed to what's
called the Breakfast Club
or the Breakfast Council where
the top senior government
advisors meet with
the prime minister.
So he's one degree of separation
from the Japanese prime
minister, and he's
also one degree
of separation from Stalin
because he all this time
is sending messages to
Moscow headquarters,
long voluminous,
encoded messages,
which his boss, his immediate
boss, actually many of them
communicates on a
daily basis to Stalin.
So he finds himself
in one degree
of separation from
Japanese prime minister,
from Stalin, from Hitler.
And the way he holds
this all together is--
I mean, you're all
dealing with information
and the value of it.
This is a classic example of a
virtuous circle of information
which becomes self-reinforcing.
Sorge himself is
reinforcing his reputation
as a brilliant sort
of knowledgeable man
about Japanese politics
because of all the secret stuff
that he's learning
from his agent.
His agent Hotsumi Ozaki
develops a formidable reputation
for knowing brilliantly,
having incredible insight
into the workings of the Western
powers because of the stuff
that Sorge is passing to him.
And all the time, of course,
in this circle only Eugen Ott
is the dupe really, but
he's also the only one
that survives, Eugen Ott.
And all the sort of the cream
of this, all the secret stuff
is going straight to Moscow.
So there's a really simple
key to this, as well
as being his charm,
personal skills, and so on,
but he just creates this
information mill that
just bigs up everyone,
every participant
and makes them all incredibly
famous in their own fields
without anyone
really quite knowing
why or where they got this
brilliant information from.
Then next question is,
why is he important?
What did he do
that we have such--
General Douglas MacArthur,
later the American viceroy
and governor of
occupied Japan, he
calls Sorge a devastating
example of a brilliant success
of espionage.
The spies in history who
can say from their graves
the information I supplied to
my masters for better or worse
altered the history
of our planet
can be counted on the
fingers of one hand.
Richard Sorge was in that
group, says Frederick Forsyth.
The best spy of all
times, says Tom Clancy.
The spy to end spies,
say John Le Carre.
And his work was impeccable--
I suppose that's where
the title comes from--
says Kim Philby.
So what did he do that was
so incredible and world
changing and important?
One very simple thing--
it was not a simple thing,
one very major thing.
If anyone knows
anything about Sorge--
and in Russia and Japan both,
he's actually world famous.
In Britain he's
[? just one ?] name,
but if anyone happens
to be a spy buff
and happens to have
heard about him,
the one thing people
know about Richard Sorge
is that he warned
Stalin that Hitler
was going to invade in
June 1920-- in June of 1941
and was not believed.
That is true.
Sorge did in fact warn
the Soviets multiple times
that plans for Barbarossa
were advancing.
He even knew which
generals were--
was able to pass on which
generals were in charge
of which sections of the front.
He knew more or less
the date, because Sorge
was speaking regularly,
not only to Ott, but to all
the military attaches that were
going backwards and forwards
between Berlin and Tokyo
through the whole period,
through the months immediately
preceding the Operation
Barbarossa.
Because of course, if
you think about it,
unlikely though it may
seem, the quickest way
to go from Berlin to
Tokyo is, in 1941,
spring of 1941,
the quickest way?
And obviously you could fly.
But--
AUDIENCE: Train.
OWEN MATTHEWS: Train.
Yeah, you need to get on
the train to Vladivostok.
That's the fastest
way, if you're
going to travel across land.
And they're allies from 1939
till 1941 the Soviet Union
and Nazi Germany signed
a non-aggression pact.
Let's call it a
non-aggression pact,
but in fact, also it's
a military alliance.
And they carve up
Europe, Eastern Europe,
between them, Poland, notably.
And the Baltics.
And the Soviet Union is
supplying the German war
machine with an enormous
amount of material,
but also crucially allowing
Asian material, soybeans
and rubber, to cross on
that very same train track.
So Sorge is not only
sitting in the chancellery
of the German embassy reading
their confidential memos
and having daily chats
with the ambassador,
but he's also talking to his
friends and acquaintances
and old mates, who are coming
through with various dispatches
from Berlin.
So he's very well informed.
It must be said that Sorge
was not the only person
to warn Stalin of the danger.
In fact, as we now know,
there were 19 different agents
in various positions,
including a group
of agents called the Rote
Kapelle, the red choir, who
were anti-Nazi officials in
the German foreign ministry,
in the Luftwaffe, and so
on, who were also reporting
bits of crucial information.
And all of this was going
back to the headquarters
of Russian military
intelligence.
And it was being
reported to Stalin.
Stalin did not believe it.
Why?
This is a very interesting
part of the story.
And since everyone in
this room is actually
engaged with information
and the uses and misuses
of information, it's
a really solitary tale
and a terrifying one.
Because why didn't
Stalin believe
all of these reports that
were coming in, warning him?
Dozens of them over months.
Hitler is really
going to invade.
He's going to invade here.
Details like forensic
details, like Luftwaffe
has ordered 10,000
Messerschmitt engines.
I mean real forensics.
How was this ignored?
Very simple.
Because Hitler-- because
Stalin's intelligence
chiefs are too scared
to tell him something
that he doesn't want to hear.
It's a classic example
of group think.
And there have been
other examples.
I mean, if you read
Bob Woodward's accounts
of how the Iraq War
was fought and so on.
This idea of a clique of people
around the leader who become
obsessed, and particularly
intelligence professionals
become obsessed with
providing or filtering
any information
that the leader--
you become convinced
that the boss does not
want to hear that the Germans
are going to invade, therefore
everything that his
intelligence chief,
this man called Filipp Golikov,
General Filipp Golikov,
edits the information
that he's receiving
from Sorge and from all
the Rote Kapelle, and all
these other agents.
And he fillets it out, and
he leaves in the bits--
because if you
read the originals,
you see that every intelligence
report, it's never a slam dunk.
It's always like,
on the one hand,
but this other person says.
They're always
hedged in some way.
So what he does is,
he takes all the bits
which are hedging
against an invasion,
and puts those in his report,
in Golikov's report to Stalin.
And all the bits
that are mitigating,
that are, to us, hindsight
enlightened minds,
strong evidence that actually
it's really going to happen,
that part he either frames as--
he puts disclaimers in, or he
just leaves out altogether.
And so the result is
that actually several--
or he discredits the Source so
indeed, on one of the reports,
and one that Stalin
writes, and in fact, it's
one of the interesting and
very, very chilling things
about looking through
the Soviet archives,
is that Stalin has a very
distinctive handwriting.
And he always writes in very
thick blue or red wax pencil.
And so you're leafing
through these documents,
and you just see like
that's Stalin wrote on that.
And he says, "you can send your
source to his mother, Stalin."
S-T, he signs himself.
Which is a fairly
strong disapprobation.'
So Stalin actually is being
fed this disinformation from--
this skewed information
by his intelligence chief.
Why?
Why does that happen?
Because General Filipp
Golikov was the seventh head
of Soviet military
intelligence in five years.
The previous six
were all executed.
So clearly, that's
not a great job.
Or to put it more specifically,
there are certain things
that his six predecessors
did that obviously
were rather badly wrong.
So thematically, they
all did various things
to displease Stalin.
They all themselves became
victims of the purges,
along with hundreds of thousands
of other members of the party.
Basically, from 1937
onwards till 19--
till well into the '40s,
you have this mentality
of the purges.
Which of course, is
another kind of group
think, another toxic
kind of group think.
Because you have an
intelligence organization,
Soviet military intelligence,
and the secret police,
the NKVD.
You have the party, the
organ of government.
All of the major institutions
of the Soviet state
are suddenly consumed with
this paranoia, deadly paranoia,
that somebody is either
a saboteur or a spy,
and/or an enemy.
And of course, as we
now know with hindsight,
what they really all were,
were enemies in one way, shape,
or form of Stalin.
Or that's how it
started, at least.
So it wasn't really
about saboteurs or spies.
It was just about
political-- it was all
about purging the political
opponents in the party.
But the result, the
operational result,
is that you have swathes
of senior officers
within the Fourth
Department, which
is the contemporary name for the
Soviet military intelligence,
are just rounded up
and murdered, shot.
Accused, convicted, and so on.
Sorge was one of the very
few Soviet agents to survive.
Because at the end
of 1938, a call
went out to every
Soviet field agent.
They called them
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
bureau chiefs all
around the world,
saying come back to Moscow.
And by this point, because
it was 1938, already
the purges had really been
in full swing for a year.
So some of them got wise.
Some of them refused to return.
Some of them returned,
including some people
like Theodore Maly, who was the
recruiter of the Cambridge Five
and so on.
Very brilliant,
some of the greatest
spies the Soviet Union's ever
produced, went back to Moscow
and were imprisoned and shot.
The ones that refused to go back
were all themselves hunted down
and murdered, Mossad style.
The latest one was
murdered in 1961.
I mean, the KGB really
had a long memory.
They were hunted down and
murdered with one exception.
That exception is
Sorge, who, as well
as being charming and extremely
clever and manipulative,
also very importantly has
just the devil's own luck.
He just gets away with
so much egregious shit,
it's extraordinary.
And one of the
things that he does
is, completely unbeknown to
him, and he doesn't really
think this through,
but he agrees to go.
He said like, yes, I'm going.
He says he agrees
to the summons.
Yes, I'm on my way.
Yes, except that my
agent, Hotsumi Ozaki,
is in Manchuria at the moment
on a reporting expedition.
He's not going to be back
till the end of the month,
and I have to debrief him,
and all that, you know.
So he not deceitfully but
actually truthfully says,
gives them reasons why he's
not going to go right now.
And by the time he
actually is ready to go,
they didn't want him
to go back anyway.
It's over.
The guy who summoned
him has been shot.
Seriously.
And then his successor
has also been shot.
And then his successor's
successor has been shot.
One of the heads
of the department
lasts for 20 days
in August of 1937--
1939.
And then it's all over,
and he's still in Tokyo.
But everyone that he knows,
everyone he's ever worked with,
everyone who knows
him, and anyone
who even knows people that he's
worked with, they're all gone.
They're all in execution pits.
They completely decapitated not
only their own party apparatus,
not only their own security
apparatus and their army
senior staff, which puts them
in a very bad position when they
start to fight a war
with the Finns in 1940,
they also totally decapitated
their own security apparatus.
Sorge is in situ,
feeding them with some
of the greatest high
grade intelligence
that any spy has ever
provided to his masters.
And yet at the top,
there's this sort
of knot of paranoia
and disbelief.
And the people who are running
the intelligence that's
getting to the top, to Stalin,
are obsessed, not totally
unreasonably, with
their own survival,
instead of actually
telling the boss the truth.
So the result is that Stalin
indeed does not know--
is blindsided by
Operation Barbarossa.
Within two weeks,
[INAUDIBLE] troops
are already charging through
to Smolensk, et cetera.
I mean, we know the story.
The Blitzkrieg sweeps across
the plains the Western Russia.
Sorge, by the way, by that
time has been proved right.
Because I mean, 100
German divisions
crossing the Soviet
border is a somewhat hard
to ignore piece of evidence
that, mitigating that he
actually, OK, he was
actually telling the truth.
But the next question
to Sorge is OK,
so we know the Japanese--
the Germans have invaded us.
What are the
Japanese going to do?
Because the Japanese
are Germany's allies.
The Japanese have 2
and 1/2 million men
under arms in direct
proximity to the Soviet Union.
And we now know--
I mean, it's really clear.
I mean, I don't think
any serious historian
would dispute this.
If the Japanese had invaded
Siberia, the Soviet Union,
in the summer of 1941 in tandem
with their German allies,
there is absolutely no
way that Stalin could
afford a war on two fronts.
The war would have
been absolutely lost.
So the question for Sorge, June
23rd, the day after Barbarossa,
is why?
What are the
Japanese going to do?
And Sorge is able, by throwing
all of his espionage resources
into the breach, to
confirm by late summer
that Japan is actually
definitively not going
to invade the Soviet Union.
For a really interesting,
practical reason.
There's been a long back
and forth strategic debate
for years between the Japanese
army and the Japanese navy.
The Japanese army is on land.
It wants to continue
pushing through China.
The Japanese navy is
obviously on the sea,
and it wants to
continue pushing through
by sea through Southeast Asia,
to the Dutch East Indies,
to the Philippines, to
French Indochina and so on.
The navy wins the
strategic debate.
Why?
Because Japan is
running out of oil.
Japan has no oil to
run its war machine.
The Japanese-- the
Americans have blockaded.
In fact, in some
ways the Japanese,
if you go to the Japanese
equivalent of the Imperial War
Museum, the narrative
is amazingly
that actually the Americans
started the Second World
War against Japan, not
the other way around,
and that Pearl Harbor
was retaliation
for an act of war, which was
the Japanese-- the American
blockade of oil, which
ensued in July of 1941.
And in fact, under
the Geneva Convention,
an economic blockade
is, in fact, technically
an act of war, so they have
a point in their own minds.
So unusual to think of Pearl
Harbor as a self-defense move,
but anyway that's how some
Japanese saw it and see it
to this day.
But the point is that
the blockade is actually
economically devastating, and
compels the Japanese to take
the Dutch East Indies.
They cannot continue
fighting the war.
They cannot continue lighting
their houses or heating them
without that oil.
So rather as Hitler--
the Marxists do have a point.
There is a very strong
materialistic element
to world history.
Hitler was driven to
the oilfields of Baku
to fuel his war machine.
And that was why he
drove towards Stalingrad
and towards Baku, the place
of Richard Sorge's birth.
And so the Japanese
didn't invade
the Soviet Union in
1941, because they
were driven towards--
they had to get the
oilfields of [INAUDIBLE]..
Anyway, long story
short, we're going
to get to the
questions in a second.
Sorge is able to tell his
Soviet masters for sure
that Japan is not going
to invade that summer.
Which is enormously important,
because it allows the Germans--
the Soviet high command to
withdraw up to five army corps
to the defense of Moscow.
And as we now know,
actually Hitler
lost the war not at
Stalingrad, not at Kursk,
not anywhere else but
actually at Moscow.
Moscow was the
last point where he
could have won the Second
World War, if he'd taken
Moscow in the winter of 1941.
He didn't, because it was
reinforced by Siberian troops.
Hence, all the world historical
significance of Richard Sorge.
So that is the
thing that he does
that puts him into the
category of world class spies.
But the I just want to
leave you with two things.
Firstly, I am
personally fascinated
by the personality of
a man that can spend
nine years of his life lying
to everybody around him,
literally everybody.
He has a Japanese
mistress who doesn't
know about his espionage
activities or his Soviet wife.
Even his closest
spying colleague,
Hotsumi Ozaki, he
lies to him, too.
Sorge tells him
that he's working
for the Communist
International, not
for Soviet military
intelligence.
He has this almost
pathological desire to deceive,
and also running in
parallel with that,
this extraordinary desire for
danger and self-destruction.
And I said he got
away with all sorts
of egregious, crazy things.
One of the crazy things
that he got away with
was that one of his
favorite pastimes
was getting extremely
drunk and driving
a very powerful
motorcycle at high speed,
usually with girls on the back.
This is his major
seduction technique.
And so he had this
enormously powerful zoomed up
flat twin 500 CC very
powerful motorcycle, which
actually weighs 180 kilos.
It's a real monster.
And he drives this at
speeds 100 miles an hour.
And at one point he,
completely drunk,
having drunk at least a
bottle and a half a whiskey,
he crashes this
thing into a wall.
He doesn't even crash it.
He just doesn't notice the wall.
He just drives into the
wall, and the wall wins,
and he breaks his
jaw horrifically,
and he's taken to hospital.
And he stays conscious, forced
himself to stay conscious,
calls for his
friend, a colleague
from the German
embassy comes there.
He summons his mate, who
unbeknownst to the colleague
from the German embassy,
is actually his radio man,
a man called Max Clausen,
a Moscow-trained radio man,
German communist who's
working with Sorge.
He says, call Max Clausen.
He stays awake long enough
for Max Clausen to show up.
And he says like,
Max, check my jacket.
Because in his jacket pocket
the sometimes it's impeccable,
but not always
impeccable spy has
a radio that has a message
written on claire in English.
Because he communicates
for strange reasons
with Moscow Center in English.
In his jacket pocket,
which is just there,
like his spy message,
his report, which he's
just left in his pocket.
And he gets away with it.
And on the night of
Operation Barbarossa,
he gets drunk at the Imperial
Hotel, stands up on a table,
and tells an audience of
Nazis, Hitler is a bandit.
This is the end of him.
Stalin will be the
end, will put an end
to your criminal
activities, he shouts.
To which point, everyone says,
"hahaha, crazy old Richard."
Who is also the only
person, by the way, who is,
I think, simultaneously a
member of the Soviet Communist
Party and the German Nazi
party at the same time.
But I'll leave the
last word to Le Carré.
Because John Le Carré wrote
a very brilliant review
of the first ever book in
English to be published about
Sorge.
And I think John Le Carré nailed
him in a way that I have not
been able to better.
"He was a man's man.
And like most
self-appointed romantics,
he had no use for women
outside the bedroom.
He was an entertainer.
People, even his
victims, loved him.
Soldiers warmed to
him immediately.
He was an exhibitionist,
I suppose,
and the audience was
always of his own sex.
He had courage, great
courage, and a romantic sense
of mission.
When his colleagues
were arrested,
he lay in bed drinking
sake, waiting for the end.
He wanted to train as a singer.
He's not the first
spy to be recruited
from the ranks of
failed artists.
A French journalist
describes him
as possessing a
strange combination
of charm and brutality.
At times, he
undoubtedly betrayed
the symptoms of an alcoholic.
What did spying give to him?
A stage, I think, a ship to
sail upon his own romantic seas,
a string to tie together
a bunch of middle range
talents, a fool's bladder
with which to beat society
and a Marxist a whip with
which to scourge himself.
This sensual priest had
found his real metier.
He was born wonderfully
in his own century.
Only his gods were out of date."
Questions?
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Did he
ever leave Tokyo
and return to Russia or
Germany, or did he meet his end
in Japan?
OWEN MATTHEWS: Sadly,
he did not leave Tokyo.
No, although strangely enough,
actually one of the tantalizing
things about writing
about someone
who is so secretive and so
pathologically deceitful
is that you only catch
glimpses of the sort
of inner life, the
true inner life
in the reports of
conversations and so on.
And I think there are
indications that he had a bank
account, by the way,
his own personal bank
account in Hong Kong.
He had, which was still
operating, interesting enough,
even under Japanese
occupation during the war.
He suddenly made talk to
his friends about leaving,
about bailing out during
that critical period
at the end of 1941.
But the short version
is no, he never left.
He never left Tokyo.
He was arrested by the
merest chance, in fact.
Despite all of the extraordinary
things that he did,
the extraordinary
risks that he took.
And also I didn't mention
the Butcher of Warsaw.
In 1941, the Germans
become somewhat
suspicious about this man,
this journalist who is
so close to their ambassador.
The Germans have
been asking Sorge
to write various economic
reports and political reports
on the political
situation for the Germans.
The Germans have been
using him as a source.
And as it turns out, there is
some paperwork, or some whiff
of scandal concerned with
Sorge's own communist youth
in the 1920s, when
he's still roughhousing
with the communist
insurgents in Kiel and so on.
And the deputy head
of the SS decides
to send a man to check on Sorge.
And the man he decides
to send is a man called--
is a Gestapo colonel
called Josef Meisinger.
Josef Meisinger has
the unusual distinction
of being a man whom the Gestapo
want to hang for war crimes.
Now, that's a very high bar,
but nonetheless, Meisinger
manages it.
He gets saved from his
war crimes accusations
by the Gestapo by his
friends in the SS,
because he was actually
an old first World War
comrade of Heinrich Himmler.
Anyway, long story
short, they send
Meisinger, a Gestapo
colonel, in a submarine--
in a submarine-- to Japan to
investigate Richard Sorge.
So this is a man who is known
as the Butcher of Warsaw.
He makes a big social impression
on his arrival in Tokyo
by eating steak, raw
steak with his fingers.
He is generally a terrifying
man and incredibly dangerous
opponent.
And Sorge, of course, does
what he does with everyone,
is he takes him drinking
and whoring in Ginza.
And within a couple
of days, he's
best mates with the
Butcher of Warsaw.
And it turns out they're
also what the Germans call
Kampfkameraden.
They've actually were
serving in the same section
of the Western front,
et cetera, et cetera.
So he has this
extraordinary luck,
and evades every possible
jeopardy until the last minute.
At the last minute,
it's completely random.
It turns out his agents,
his Japanese agents,
have been recruiting
their own sub-agents.
So essentially, the Japanese
who he works with and sees,
the two of them, have themselves
recruited other people,
unbeknown to Sorge.
And there's a secondary,
well, almost tertiary ring
of agents, drawn from
former communists,
which is actually a very bad
thing to do, operationally.
Because they're all known
to the police and so on.
And just completely randomly,
one of a network of, in fact,
several dozen sort of sub-agents
gets ARRESTED questioned
by the police, and then
they just simply unravel
all the way up the line, and
they get to Sorge's assistant,
a guy called Miyagi.
Miyagi names Ozaki,
and name's Sorge.
So it's actually really
ultimately-- although he
does lots of extraordinarily
injudicious and dangerous
things, it was ultimately
through no fault of his own
that Sorge gets caught.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
So you've written
about Sorge, who
spied while posing as
a correspondent abroad.
And you yourself,
as I understand it,
are a correspondent abroad.
OWEN MATTHEWS:
Yeah, that's true.
AUDIENCE: One, are you
concerned that you've
sort of played yourself?
But more seriously, do you as
a journalist face suspicion
because of your profession?
Are you concerned that writing
about famous spy journalists
will make that worse?
OWEN MATTHEWS: That's
a really good question.
Yeah, I spent most of my
career in Russia and in--
I was based in
Istanbul for 15 years,
and working mostly in Iraq,
and Afghanistan, Syria, Iran,
Russia.
And I did mostly
conflict journalism.
So I'd covered wars in
Bosnia and Iraq and Iran,
and Iraq and Afghanistan,
all those places.
Last one Eastern Ukraine.
And the thing is, you
realize that particularly
in unstable countries,
everyone thinks
that you're a spy anyway.
I mean, whether
you can just be--
whether you're an
aid worker or--
I mean, you know
every single Afghan,
every single Syrian
thinks that you're--
every single Turk thinks that
you're a spy of some kind.
I mean, it's just sort of
a cultural sort of thing.
But on the other
hand, because it's
assumed to be
totally ubiquitous,
also it doesn't seem that
they take it very seriously.
But I mean, it
actually is a problem,
because strangely
enough, I have actually
come across several
people posing as--
I mean, rather
rarely, but actually I
think I would say three
occasions in the field,
I've come across people who
claim to be journalists who
are obviously not journalists.
And it's really interesting,
because you just
clock them immediately.
Because they're idiots,
and they just haven't--
they don't they know
what they're doing.
You have Google.
You know, they
have pathetic sites
that they've set up as covers.
It's immediately obvious
that these guys are not
professionals.
And the actual journalists,
they're like white blood
cells. they just sort of--
you are fucking right off.
Sorry, we're not having
anything to do with you.
And you tell, don't
take that guy.
So actually, it's really quite
hard to pose as a journalist.
To be a journalist
and a spy I think
is probably quite easy, because
we do exactly the same job.
But I'm constantly amazed at
how amazingly, badly informed
diplomats, and indeed
the very few spies that
are actual professional
spies that I know,
how badly informed they are.
Journalists are much better
at knowing the country,
just because they have
incredibly different--
it's a much wider acquaintance.
And I'm not even entirely
sure what spies actually
do anymore, in terms of
human intelligence spies.
Because as we know, I mean, as
you know much better than I,
data mining, the whole
Bellingcat story,
I don't know whether you--
you know what Bellingcat is?
Does anyone not know what
Bellingcat-- oh my god.
OK, sorry.
People, you need to work.
You need to read
about Bellingcat.
Bellingcat is extraordinary,
because it just shows
you the future of intelligence.
He set up this
organization, which
uses citizen journalism to
gain extraordinary forensics
on intelligence.
The thing they're most famous
for is the MH-17 shoot downing.
So it turns out a
missile is fired
from a field in
Eastern Ukraine that
knocks out a civilian
airliner out of the sky.
June 9, 2014.
I was there, actually.
It was incredibly horrific.
But anyway, different story.
But Bellingcat is able to
establish by cross referencing
social media posts
of the Volvo truck
that tows this Buk rocket array
into Ukraine and tracks it,
like it's spotted
here at this point,
and the image is time logged,
and here, and here, and here,
and here.
And then on its way back,
and here, and here, and here,
and here.
And then where did it come from?
Well, they look through Russian
soldiers' social media posts.
They say, oh, this
is the same Buk.
And actually it's
in this army base.
Anyway, an enormous array of
data points, all open source,
produce this extraordinarily
compelling and essentially
impossible to fake picture of
actually what really happened.
And in fact, that's actually
much more forensically
interesting and useful than
having a spy who's telling you
this happened or that happened.
So and in fact, and
very interestingly
and most recently,
the Bellingcat people
also identified the Skripal
would-be assassins brilliantly.
They ran the information which
the British police published,
the fake passports
that they used,
the two would-be
assassins of Skripal.
They published, they put
them out in a press release.
So Bellingcat says,
well, that's interesting,
using a Russian pun.
Let's just see if any of this
information on the passports
is true.
And it turns out that the
first name and the middle name
and the place of birth and
the date of birth of one
of the two fake passports,
which by the way,
have consecutive serial numbers.
They're so fake.
I mean, they're not fake.
They're real passports,
but they're obviously
generated deliberately
for this operation.
And it is actually exactly the
same first name, second name,
place, date of birth
as a person who
happens to work in Russian
military intelligence.
Oh, amazing.
So then, having discovered
this guy's real name,
they then look up
his open source data.
Where does he live?
He lives has a flat
in St. Petersburg?
What's his car registration?
OK, there's the
car registration.
So they find the car.
Where's that car registered
to pay its road taxes?
Oh, it's registered
to the headquarters
of the department of Russian
military intelligence
in central Moscow.
Oh, and what are the other cars
registered to that address?
Oh, the other 380
people who work there.
So all this crazy stuff is just
out there lying on the surface,
and you just need
to pick it apart.
No one's guarding
against that stuff.
But I mean, that's the
future of intelligence.
Not human intelligence, I mean.
But But it's all in the data.
And if you know where to look,
you just know everything.
AUDIENCE: So just talking
about data for a moment,
he lived in an age where
it must have been hard
for you to find data.
Did he leave a footprint of
all the people he seduced,
all the people he drank with?
Did they write about him?
OWEN MATTHEWS: Yeah, well,
actually one of the great--
he didn't write about them,
but they wrote about--
they didn't write about him.
He wrote about them.
One of the things,
actually, that makes it easy
and also challenging is
that actually every member
of the spy ring is arrested.
Every member of the spy ring
but one sings like a canary.
They're actually in captivity
, for different reasons,
actually.
The radio man spills the
beans, because he actually,
unfortunately for
Sorge, the radio man,
Max Clausen, having
started off as communist,
actually goes into business
using Soviet money,
becomes a very
successful businessman,
buys his wife fur coats, and
decides that actually he's not
actually a communist after all.
He's actually a Nazi.
So that becomes a
bit of a problem,
if you're actually a
professional Soviet
intelligence officer,
and causes a bit
of a fundamental contradiction.
So he's actually trying to
prove to his interrogators,
Max Clausen, the
radio man, is trying
to prove that he
is actually a Nazi.
Sorge is trying to
get swapped by Moscow,
so he's trying to
prove to his masters
what a great loyal
communist he is.
In fact, because he's expecting
to be exchanged, ultimately.
Which he's not.
The Russians totally disown him.
They screw him completely.
So all the members of the
spy ring actually confess.
In Sorge's case at
enormous lengthy.
He literally writes an
almost book length memoir
during the two years
that he's in jail.
So they all have very--
they all have very extensive
writings about themselves.
And also as we now
know, the Japanese,
from the first moment of
the spy ring's activities,
had been transcribing.
They identified the transmitter.
They didn't know where
exactly where it was,
but they were listening
in to transmissions.
And this is so Japanese.
From like 1932 until 1941,
they are transcribing
thousands and thousands of
streams, meaningless numbers,
which are being transmitted like
clickety click, click, click.
So letters.
Click, click, click,
click, click in code.
And they just didn't know.
They didn't know what
it is, but they just
keep transcribing it for years.
And they this gigantic archive.
And then finally they reach--
they find the operating set.
They find Max Clausen, and they
find a very well thumbed copy
of the German statistical
handbook from 1933.
And they put two
and two together,
and they are actually now
able to decipher these seven
years worth of random numbers
they've been painstakingly
writing down.
So we also have
literally the entire--
everything that Sorge
ever sent to Moscow Center
is also chronicled.
So there is actually
a lot of material.
AUDIENCE: Thank you
very much, Owen.
OWEN MATTHEWS: My
great pleasure.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much.
OWEN MATTHEWS: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
