Burn After Reading by Ladislas Farago

Author:Ladislas Farago [Farago, Ladislas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612511801
Publisher: Naval Institute Press

15

A Man Called “Ramsey”

In the spring of 1935, a tourist arrived in New York en route to Berlin from Tokyo. He registered at the Hotel Lincoln on West 44th Street as Dr. Richard Sorge, a foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, one of Germany’s major newspapers.

The intelligence services of various countries had tried to keep up-to-date biographical cards on this fascinating man, but it proved somewhat difficult to follow him on his erratic course. His “suspect card” in the files of American counter-intelligence dated back to 1929 and contained a number of melodramatic entries. It put down Sorge as a very important member of the great Soviet espionage apparatus.

This Sorge was a melancholy intellectual who had been born in Baku, in Southern Russia, in 1895. His grandfather was Adolph Sorge, secretary to Karl Marx at the time of the First International; his father was a German engineer working for an oil firm in the Caucasus; his mother was more obscure, said to be a Russian. He was a sensitive, good-natured, studious boy, somewhat spoiled by his parents who called him “Ika.”

When, as a youngster, he moved with his family to Germany and found out more about his grandfather’s association with Marx, he became deeply interested in Socialism. The First World War (in which he fought at Ypern and Langemark) supplied the ferment for his ideas and, when it came to an end, young Richard groped his way to the Bolsheviks. A strange woman played an important part in Sorge’s conversion. She was the wife of a professor under whom he studied at Kiel University, the familiar neglected faculty wife who lures a student into a campus romance. She was considerably older than Sorge and she turned him into a fanatical idealist and took him to the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks received him with open arms and gave him odd conspiratorial jobs in various parts of Europe. Eventually he was absorbed by the Fourth Bureau of the Red Army General Staff and became a full-time Soviet espionage agent. Inside the apparatus he was known by the cover name “Ramsey.”

He was a key operative in the “Shanghai Conspiracy,” a major espionage operation of the late Twenties and early Thirties, when Soviet interest was focused on China. From Shanghai he returned to Moscow, but in May, 1933, he went to Germany where he joined the Nazi Party. He developed contacts with the new German intelligence agencies mushrooming under Hitler and joined General Karl Haushofer’s geopolitical study group, the quasi-scientific propagandists of the Lebensraum idea. He joined the editorial department of the Frankfurter Zeitung, which sent him to Japan toward the end of that same year.

In Tokyo, Sorge lived in a big house in an excellent residential district. He joined the German Club, became a confidant of the German Ambassador and an informant of the German Military Attaché. The Germans regarded Sorge as one of their own and trusted him implicitly. The only objection the Embassy men had to him was that he was prone to start affairs with their wives.

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