An Impeccable Spy

Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent

By: Owen Matthews

Narrated by: Mike Grady

Length: 16 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

Bloomsbury presents An Impeccable Spy by Owen Matthews, read by Mike Grady.  

Richard Sorge was a man with two homelands. Born of a German father and a Russian mother in Baku in 1895, he moved in a world of shifting alliances and infinite possibility. A member of the angry and deluded generation who found new, radical faiths after their experiences on the battlefields of the First World War, Sorge became a fanatical communist - and the Soviet Union’s most formidable spy.    

Like many great spies, Sorge was an effortless seducer, combining charm with ruthless manipulation. He did not have to go undercover to find out closely guarded state secrets - his victims willingly shared them. As a foreign correspondent, he infiltrated and influenced the highest echelons of German, Chinese and Japanese society in the years leading up to and including the Second World War. 

His intelligence regarding Operation Barbarossa and Japanese intentions not to invade Siberia in 1941 proved pivotal to the Soviet counteroffensive in the Battle of Moscow, which in turn determined the outcome of the war.    

Never before has Sorge’s story been told from the Russian side as well as the German and Japanese. 

Owen Matthews takes a sweeping historical perspective and draws on a wealth of declassified Soviet archives - along with testimonies from those who knew and worked with Sorge - to rescue the riveting story of the man described by Ian Fleming as 'the most formidable spy in history'.

©2019 Owen Matthews (P)2019 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic reviews

"A fascinating biography. Owen Matthews tells the story of Sorge’s extraordinary life with tremendous verve and expertise and a real talent for mise en scène. Shanghai in the 1930s and prewar Tokyo, Sorge’s stamping grounds, come vividly alive in these pages and the portrait of Sorge himself that emerges is richly authentic." (William Boyd, New Statesman)

"Gloriously readable. Every chapter of Matthews’s superbly researched biography reads like something from an Eric Ambler thriller." (Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times)

"A superb biography. Alive to Sorge’s human flaws as much as to his professional competence, and with a salutary vein of anger running through it. More than a hundred books have been written about him and this is undoubtedly the best: detailed, wry, sympathetic and occasionally oddly moving." (Ben Macintyre, The Times) 

Lots of Politics

There were more political details than I would have liked, but I really enjoyed the details about his personality.

Best book on Richard Sorge, his activities and era!

This is the most comprehensive and informative monograph on master spy Richard Sorge ever produced. It is marred only by the narrator’s dogged and neigh-on 100% success in mispronouncing every single foreign name, geographical location and word! What a tour de force, that! Even Sorge’s name, which he begins by, correctly pronouncing the “S” as a “Z” in the German fashion but botches the end, making him ZorgAY” instead of “ZORgeh”.
Oh, well, other than those irritating pin-pricks, Mr. Grady is a good narrator. Clearly monolingual, how one wishes he had done his homework for this very important, superbly researched and written book!

Not exciting

This book is a gossipy tale chiefly of Sorge's loves and affairs with an occasional espionage event described in detail. The narration is a bit lack luster and maybe this undermines the narrative but after about 10 hours I realized I didn’t know much more of this potentially gripping story than I gained from the first chapter. I think this has been written to appeal to romance readers and should have been serialised in Cleo.

Truth better than fiction

Great bio. Many new facts about WWII. Better than most spy fiction I’ve read, excepting Tinker Tailor, of course.

Very good story. Needs more accurate narration.

The book. The book is both well researched and engaging. The pre-dominant theme – Sorge’s talent and appetite for “seducing” people – at times felt forced and overplayed. But overall the story holds together well and is not really at “disfigured” by historical facts. This is not a fictional spy-novel, but an account of actual events that would be hard to fully appreciate without knowledge of the historical background on which it unfolds. I seriously doubt that many readers/listeners could claim that much historical knowledge before starting the book. So, a good chance to actually learn something. 😊

The narration. “Artistically” it is not bad at all. It is clear and keeps good pace. One problem – and rather annoying one – is that the narrator mercilessly mangles foreign words, names and places, although they are quite accurately spelled in the text itself. This is a disappointingly poor standard for an an international spy narrative which is packed with foreign words.

Brilliant.

If you’re a World War II buff at all this is a great insightful read into the German Japan Russian end of the global conflict. Really really good.

a wonderful book

Even if you have no interest in spying, you'll learn a great deal about World War II events and particularly the perfidy of Stalin and how one man determined the outcome of World War II by discouraging Japan from attacking the USSR in 1941 which would likely have caused the German conquest of Russia and then possibly of the UK too. An enthralling book.

awsome

A wonderful masterpiece of espionage. Better than any James Bond's books. packed with real life situation. Mesmerazing. Impossible to let it down.

Things To Love, Others Not So Much

First of all just let me say I wonder about the reader who complained that there was "too much romance" in this story, and that they had given up after ten hours of it. I'm afraid they must have been reading another book about Sorge of which I am not aware. The only other major Sorge book I am aware of is by Prange, who turns it into a spy novel, complete with live conversations, people laughing in response to others' comments, and a whole lot more descriptive of Sorge's love life than this one is—in fact, I'd say that Sorge's love life gets no more than passing references, apart from the reading of his letters to his wife Katya. Of his first wife Christiane and his later love, Hanako, there is not enough to interest anyone interested in Sorge's relations with the opposite sex, let alone romance fans.

This book is very heavy on the details of the Sorge ring (the "Ramsey Network") and how it operated, with a fair amount of detail about the 4th Department and the intrigues back at Centre, and if the Prange book is the Reader's Digest version of Sorge, this is the Spy Monthly Top Ten version.

The only place this book falls down is in the narration. Although narrator Grady is overall a competent reader with a pleasant voice, he often sounds as if he's reading from a text, often coming to the end of a sentence, vocally, but then suddenly discovering that there was more to the paragraph on the next line. It can sound kind of like "In March of that year Sorge travelled to Shanghai to meet up with the contact."

"llyushin, who had been sent by Centre to check up on the Ring."

Not an actual example, but you get the picture. And then there is the mispronunciation . . . Lordy, Lordy, the mispronunciation. Grady starts the book and indeed goes fully halfway through it calling Sorge "Sor-gay," which, while not nearly as bad as the Prange book narrator's "SORJ" (I kid you not) is *not* the actual German pronunciation of "Zor-GUH," which if you aren't expecting it gets pretty grating . . . until suddenly and out of nowhere, Grady starts pronouncing it "Sor-GUH," which is half-way there, and then sometimes even the correct "Zor-GUH," which when you hear it you want to applaud—until it becomes "SorGAY" again in the following sentence. And then back. And back again.

As a rule, though, Grady does pretty well with the German, except (and I just CRINGED) when he calls Eugen Ott "Yugen."

It's as if someone just shoved this book in front of Grady and said "Read!" Okay, I'll admit that if you don't speak German you might not know that it is pronounced "OY-gen," but it is not your JOB to know that it is pronounced "OY-gen." It IS Grady's job, unless I misunderstand the description of "narrator."

But let's not go to the Japanese, of which I am, unfortunately, a teacher. The pronunciation of Prince Fumimaro Konoyé is admittedly a tongue twister until you know that it's pronounced "KO-NO-EH," not "Ko-no-YAY" or any of the other permutations thereof. Fortunately this is the most egregious example of the Japanese names, but I don't speak Chinese and I doubt whether Mr. Grady does either.

In short, Mr. Grady is an excellent narrator—just not for a long book with approximately three foreign names in *every* sentence.

Otherwise, this is by far the best Sorge book I have yet read.

Great narrator voice, intriguing story

While I had a few tiny quibbles with the writing of this book at times, overall it was very good for anyone interested in this genre. The narrator is one of my absolute favorite voices for calm, nighttime listening. Very few moments where the volume changes enough for me to be startled out of semi-nap on my bus ride home (one of my criteria for audiobooks!).

the greatest spy in history

scholarly work on a much overlooked spy..who really saved the soviet union..probably the most important spy in history..his information enabled stalin to move reserves to beat the germans..every school boy should know his name...few do..it is thought it may well have been sorgie who recruited roger Hollis

A Gripping Tale

This was the most informative and intriguing spy story I have read. A thrilling read.