Richard Sorge - Wartime Intelligence Supplied By The Sorge Ring

Wartime Intelligence Supplied By The Sorge Ring

Sorge supplied the Soviet Red Army with information about the Anti-Comintern Pact, the German-Japanese Pact and warned of the Pearl Harbor attack. In 1941, Sorge is said to have informed them of the exact launch date of Operation Barbarossa. Moscow answered with thanks but Joseph Stalin largely ignored it, as was also the case with information supplied by the other networks, including Leiba Domb's Red Orchestra spy network on the German Borders. Stalin was reportedly so angry with Domb's information that he ordered that Domb be 'punished for spreading such lies'. (The order was not followed).

Gordon Prange's analysis (1984) was that the closest Sorge came to predicting the launch date of Operation Barbarossa was 20 June 1941 and Prange comments that Sorge himself never claimed to have discovered the correct date (22 June) in advance. The date of 20 June had been given to Sorge by the deputy military attaché, Lieutenant-Colonel Erwin Scholl, at the German embassy in Tokyo. As Sorge took pride in and sought the credit for the spy ring's work, Professor Prange may have taken Sorge's failure to claim that he had discovered the correct date as conclusive evidence that Sorge in fact did fail to discover it. Kim Philby's recruiter A. Deutsch was also the spymaster of Gestapo officer Willi Lehmann, who on June 19 cabled the Barbarossa launch date to NKVD in Moscow. Stalin considered this as disinformation, too.

The Soviet press reported in 1964 that on June 15, 1941, Sorge had broadcast a dispatch saying that, "The war will begin on June 22." Writing before previously-embargoed material was released by the Russian authorities in the 1990s, Prange and those writing with him appear not to have accepted the veracity of this report. More recently, Stalin was quoted as having ridiculed Sorge and his intelligence prior to the launch of Operation Barbarossa:

"There's this bastard who's set up factories and brothels in Japan and even deigned to report the date of the German attack as 22 June. Are you suggesting I should believe him too?"

Sorge advised the Red Army on September 14, 1941, that the Japanese were not going to attack the Soviet Union until:

1. Moscow was captured
2. the size of the Kwantung Army was three times that of the Soviet Union's Far Eastern forces
3. a civil war had started in Siberia.

Sorge transmitted information toward the end of September 1941 that Japan was not going to attack the Soviet Union in the East.

"This information made possible the transfer of Soviet divisions from the Far East, although the presence of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria necessitated the Soviet Union's keeping a large number of troops on the eastern borders..."

Various writers have speculated that this information allowed the release of Siberian divisions for the Battle of Moscow, where the German army suffered its first tactical defeat in the war. To this end, Sorge's information might have been the most important spy work in World War II. At Khimki, a place at the Moscow city border en route to Sheremetyevo International Airport, there is still a memorial plaque reminding visitors of this defining point of modern history.

The second most important piece of information he allegedly passed along concerned the Battle of Stalingrad - the turning point in the war which is considered one of the bloodiest and largest battles in history. Richard Sorge alerted Moscow that Japan would attack the Soviet Union from the East as soon as the German army captured any city on the Volga, thus effectively disrupting oil supplies from Baku and also ammunition and food supplies sent by the allies from the Persian Gulf through Iran, Soviet Azerbaijan and up the Volga river. However, by mid-1941 the Japanese had made their strategic decision to go south and east, instead of north, so the information (if given) seems to have been speculative at best.

The Nazi German Jewish spy Ivar Lissner was Sorge's rival and opponent. Lissner was gathering intelligence in Japan and East Asia for the Nazis, working for Admiral Canaris in his spying capacity.