
Richard Sorge: The Soviet Union’s Master Spy - benbreen
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/03/richard-sorge-the-soviet-unions-master-spy/
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InTheArena
I think there is just a fascinating parallel in the lives of two men who were
both responsible for the key bit of knowledge that turned the fates of the
European and the Pacific - Sorge and Rochefort.

Sorge’s key contribution to the war was the knowledge that the Japanese would
not attack Russia in 1941, which allowed Stalin to move forces to save Moscow.
Rochefort on the other hand led the intelligence effort that allowed Nimitz to
ambush the Japanese fleet six months later. Both of these men ultimately lost
“office politics” which led to them both being marginalized and ignored by
their governments after their great victories. Rochefort ended up the better
of the two, only being reduced to building dry docks, while Sorge ended up
being shot,even though the Japanese tried multiple times to trade him back for
their own captured spies.

One side note - it’s amazing how good and ruthless the soviet spy network was.
They were simultaneously stealing Japanese war plans, hitlers sexual history,
Churchill oppositions private notes and atomic designs from the US. It’s not
for nothing that the red scare occurred after the war.

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selimthegrim
Not a spy, but Leslie Groves lost out on office politics pretty badly too

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dreix
There's a German graphic novel called 'Die Sache mit Sorge'. Great book.

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senozhatsky
From the article - "No other agent had served Moscow for so well or so long."

That's very questionable. No one knows who the greatest spy was/is.

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PaulRobinson
Well, that's not true, it's just that there is a chance it's still classified.

Spies might work clandestinely but they serve somebody and as such they can
not do so entirely alone as those who they serve must know who they are.
Records always exist.

Over time, such things get declassified and historians can take a long, hard
look at reevaluating the evidence.

Even the most small details of the Second World War are now mostly
declassified, and so we can see individual contributions in the context of
that war and all wars proceeding it. So, with the caveat there might be others
we do not yet know about, a statement like that can be made.

It's worth remembering that history is fluid, and we have to update the facts
constantly. Churchill's war diaries were taken as fact until about 1990, when
it became apparent that he had lionised himself to some degree.

The goings-on at Bletchley Park were classified so well until the late 1970s,
that when the first book was published about what happened there, people who
had worked there still refused to talk about their experiences.

So, yes, there may be greater and better Soviet spies than Richard Sorge.
However, the line you're referring to is from Owen Matthews, "his latest and
most thorough biographer", and if you read the article it's clear that the
book he has written is thorough and stands in the context of a huge amount of
research around the Soviet spy machine in that era.

It is possible a greater spy will emerge in future, sure. For now though, the
chances of another character popping up pre-1945 is pretty slim.

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varjag
> Even the most small details of the Second World War are now mostly
> declassified, and so we can see individual contributions in the context of
> that war and all wars proceeding it.

We shouldn't extrapolate the customs of democratic societies to the rest of
the world. The bulk of Soviet WW2 archives are to remain classified in Russia
until at least 2040.

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DCoder
Moreover, some archives were destroyed a) to prevent them from being captured
during the war, especially in the 1941 defense of Moscow, and b) to cover up
whatever the leaders considered too sensitive later. This second portion also
includes docs relating to post-WW2 events like the Totskoye nuclear exercise
[0], destroyed decades after the fact because "the archives ran out of space".

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totskoye_nuclear_exercise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totskoye_nuclear_exercise)

