Un espía impecable

Richard Sorge was a man with two homelands. Born in Baku in 1895, the son of a German father and a Russian mother, he moved in a world of unstable alliances and infinite possibilities. Sorge belonged to that outraged and disappointed generation that found radical new ideas after his experience on the battlefields of the First World War; he became a fan of communism and the best spy for the Soviet Union. Like many good spies, Sorge was a tireless seducer, combining his charm with ruthless power of manipulation. Thanks to his magnetism, he managed to survive in all environments, conquer all women and make friends with all the great personalities he encountered. As a foreign correspondent he went into and influenced the highest echelons of German, Chinese and Japanese societies in the years leading up to and during the Second World War. His personal story is fascinating because of the number of scenarios where it happens (from revolutionary Russia to imperial Japan, through the German trenches of the First World War to the Nazi rise or the pre-war United States and China shaken by civil war). He became an incalculable value for Nazis, Japanese and Russians, and from the other side of the world it will be he who warns of Operation Barbarossa and the Japanese intentions not to invade Siberia in 1941, which was fundamental for the Soviet counteroffensive in the Battle of Moscow, and that in turn determined the outcome of the war.