That Man Again

This book would seem to be a popular rewrite for the German public of General Willoughby’s book about Richard Sorge. It is more lively than Willoughby’s documented and authoritative Shanghai Conspiracy, but adds little or nothing besides “imagination” and romance to our knowledge of Moscow’s master spy in the Far East. Indeed it reads rather like an Edgar Wallace spy story—all complete with beautiful girls described in detail.

The author, who was a junior attaché at the German Embassy in Tokyo, knew Sorge, liked and admired him, and no more suspected him of being a Communist than did the rest of the German Embassy staff. This, however, is easier to forgive than his naiveté and his lack of information, which enables him to write that “the men the Kremlin picked were chosen irrespective of race and creed”—as if a Communist could have a creed other than Communism! Von Meissner adds an epilogue suggesting that Sorge is still alive thanks to an exchange of captured spies between Japan and Russia. But he has little evidence to offer for this statement— merely the contention that Sorge’s former Japanese mistress, who had betrayed him, caught a glimpse of him in Shanghai in 1947. f.u.

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This book would seem to be a popular rewrite for the German public of General Willoughby’s book about Richard Sorge. It is more lively than Willoughby’s documented and authoritative Shanghai Conspiracy, but adds little or nothing besides “imagination” and romance to our knowledge of Moscow’s master spy in the Far East. Indeed it reads rather like an Edgar Wallace spy story—all complete with beautiful girls described in detail.

The author, who was a junior attaché at the German Embassy in Tokyo, knew Sorge, liked and admired him, and no more suspected him of being a Communist than did the rest of the German Embassy staff. This, however, is easier to forgive than his naiveté and his lack of information, which enables him to write that “the men the Kremlin picked were chosen irrespective of race and creed”—as if a Communist could have a creed other than Communism! Von Meissner adds an epilogue suggesting that Sorge is still alive thanks to an exchange of captured spies between Japan and Russia. But he has little evidence to offer for this statement— merely the contention that Sorge’s former Japanese mistress, who had betrayed him, caught a glimpse of him in Shanghai in 1947. f.u.