TY - BOOK AU - Matthews,Owen TI - An impeccable spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin's master agent SN - 1408857782 PY - 2019/// CY - London, New York PB - Bloomsbury Publishing KW - Sorge, Richard, KW - Spies KW - Soviet Union KW - Biography KW - Espionage, Soviet KW - Japan KW - History KW - World War, 1939-1945 KW - Military intelligence KW - Secret service KW - Biographies KW - lcgft N1 - Includes bibliographical references (pages 405-415) and index; 'From the schoolhouse to the slaughter block' -- Among the revolutionaries -- 'A fanatic riff-raff from a ruined century' -- Shanghai days -- The Manchurian incident -- Have you considered Tokyo? -- The spy ring forms -- At home with the Otts -- Moscow 1935 -- Hanako and Clausen -- Bloodbath in Moscow -- Lyushkov -- Nomonhan -- Ribbentrop-Molotov -- Attack Singapore! -- The butcher of Warsaw -- Barbarossa takes shape -- 'They did not believe us' -- Plan north or plan south? -- Breaking point -- 'The greatest man I have ever met.' N2 - The thrilling true story of Richard Sorge - the man John le Carré called 'the spy to end spies', and whose actions turned the tide of the Second World War. 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' ER -