An Impeccable Spy
Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent
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Narrated by:
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Mike Grady
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By:
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Owen Matthews
About this listen
Bloomsbury presents An Impeccable Spy by Owen Matthews, read by Mike Grady.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PUSHKIN HOUSE PRIZE
'The most formidable spy in history' IAN FLEMING
'His work was impeccable' KIM PHILBY
'The spy to end spies' JOHN LE CARRÉ
Born of a German father and a Russian mother, Richard Sorge moved in a world of shifting alliances and infinite possibility. In the years leading up to and during the Second World War, he became a fanatical communist – and the Soviet Union’s most formidable spy.
Combining charm with ruthless manipulation, he infiltrated and influenced the highest echelons of German, Chinese and Japanese society. His intelligence proved pivotal to the Soviet counter-offensive in the Battle of Moscow, which in turn determined the outcome of the war itself.
Drawing on a wealth of declassified Soviet archives, this is a major biography of one of the greatest spies who ever lived.
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- By: Charles Emmerson
- Narrated by: Charles Emmerson
- Length: 25 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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In Petrograd, a fire is lit. The Tsar is packed off to Siberia. A rancorous Russian exile returns to proclaim a workers' revolution. In America, black soldiers who have served their country in Europe demand their rights at home. An Austrian war veteran trained by the German army to give rousing speeches against the Bolshevik peril begins to rail against the Jews. A solar eclipse turns a former patent clerk into a celebrity. An American reporter living the high life in Paris searches out a new literary style.
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Splendid in all respects
- By Paul Custer on 02-11-20
By: Charles Emmerson
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From Warsaw with Love
- Polish Spies, the CIA, and the Forging of an Unlikely Alliance
- By: John Pomfret
- Narrated by: Donald Corren
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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From the award-winning and acclaimed author of The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, From Warsaw with Love tells the epic story of how Polish intelligence officers forged an alliance with the CIA in the twilight of the Cold War. In 1990, soon after the Polish people voted in their first democratic election since the 1930s, the young Polish government sent a veteran spy, who’d battled the West for decades, to rescue six American officers trapped in Baghdad.
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Fascinating and well researched
- By wacek szymkowiak on 07-23-24
By: John Pomfret
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Betrayal in Berlin
- The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation
- By: Steve Vogel
- Narrated by: Joel Richards
- Length: 17 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Its code name was “Operation Gold”, a wildly audacious CIA plan to construct a clandestine tunnel into East Berlin to tap into critical KGB and Soviet military telecommunication lines. The tunnel, crossing the border between the American and Soviet sectors, would have to be 1,500 feet (the length of the Empire State Building) with state-of-the-art equipment, built and operated literally under the feet of their Cold War adversaries.
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Fascinating Book
- By Toni Bowes on 01-11-20
By: Steve Vogel
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Jackal
- The Complete Story of the Legendary Terrorist, Carlos the Jackal
- By: John Follain
- Narrated by: Paul Christy
- Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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On an August night in 1994, French counterespionage officers seized the world's most wanted terrorist from a villa in the Sudan. After more than two decades on the run, Carlos "the Jackal" had finally been caged. For years he had murdered and bombed his way to notoriety, evading capture thanks to powerful backers and the blunders of Western secret services. Jackal is the definitive biography of this self-proclaimed "professional revolutionary", ladies man, and cold-blooded killer.
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Its' like James Bond (but for the bad guys)
- By Grant Wentworth on 06-17-18
By: John Follain
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The Art of Betrayal
- The Secret History of MI6 - Life and Death in the British Secret Service
- By: Gordon Corera
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 17 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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From Berlin to the Congo, from Moscow to the back streets of London, these are the stories of the agents on the front lines of British intelligence. And the truth is often more remarkable than fiction.
MI6 has been cloaked in secrecy and shrouded in myth since it was created a hundred years ago. Our understanding of what it is to be a spy has been largely defined by the fictional worlds of Ian Fleming and John le Carré. Gordon Corera provides a unique and unprecedented insight into this secret world and the reality that lies behind the fiction.
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Good details but lacks thorough research
- By Unapologetic on 09-06-17
By: Gordon Corera
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Agents of Influence
- A British Campaign, a Canadian Spy, and the Secret Plot to Bring America into World War II
- By: Henry Hemming
- Narrated by: Henry Hemming
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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As World War II raged into its second year, Britain sought a powerful ally to join its cause - but the American public was sharply divided on the subject. The Canadian-born MI6 officer William Stephenson, with his knowledge and influence in North America, was chosen to change their minds by any means necessary.
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Shaken, not stirred.
- By Reeka on 06-21-20
By: Henry Hemming
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Goering
- The Rise and Fall of the Notorious Nazi Leader
- By: Roger Manvell, Heinrich Fraenkel
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 14 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In Goering, Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel use firsthand testimonies and a variety of historical documents to tell the story of a monster lurking in Hitler's shadows. After rising through the ranks of the German army, Hermann Goering became Hitler's right hand man and was hand-picked to head the Luftwaffe, one of history's most feared fighting forces. As he rose in power, though, Goering became disillusioned and was eventually shunned from Hitler's inner circle.
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From Fighter Pilot Ace to Cartoon Villain
- By aaron on 03-27-21
By: Roger Manvell, and others
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The Berlin Wall
- By: Frederick Taylor
- Narrated by: Daniel Philpott
- Length: 19 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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The appearance of a hastily constructed barbed wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. A city of almost four million was cut ruthlessly in two, unleashing a potentially catastrophic East-West crisis and plunging the entire world for the first time into the fear of imminent missile-borne apocalypse.
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TEAR. DOWN. THIS. WALL
- By Simone on 05-23-13
By: Frederick Taylor
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Spymaster
- Startling Cold War Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief
- By: Tennent H. Bagley
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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From the dark days of World War II through the Cold War, Sergey A. Kondrashev was a major player in Russia’s notorious KGB espionage apparatus. Rising through its ranks through hard work and keen understanding of how the spy and political games are played, he “handled” American and British defectors, recruited Western operatives as double agents, served as a ranking officer at the East Berlin and Vienna KGB bureaus, and tackled special assignments from the Kremlin.
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An brilliant personal Cold War perspective
- By Iamnotaspy on 01-09-15
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The Secret War
- Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945
- By: Max Hastings
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 30 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Spies, codes, and guerrillas played unprecedentedly critical roles in the Second World War, exploited by every nation in the struggle to gain secret knowledge of its foes, and to sow havoc behind the fronts. In The Secret War, Max Hastings presents a worldwide cast of characters and some extraordinary sagas of intelligence and resistance, to create a new perspective on the greatest conflict in history.
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Better read than listened to
- By B. In -t Veld on 03-25-17
By: Max Hastings
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Mengele
- The Complete Story
- By: Gerald Posner, John Ware, Michael Berenbaum - introduction
- Narrated by: Bruce Mann
- Length: 15 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on exclusive and unrestricted access to more than 5,000 pages of personal writings and family photos, this definitive biography of German physician and SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Josef Mengele (1911-1979) probes the personality and motivations of Auschwitz's "Angel of Death". From May 1943 through January 1945, Mengele selected who would be gassed immediately, who would be worked to death, and who would serve as involuntary guinea pigs for his spurious and ghastly human experiments (twins were Mengele's particular obsession).
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ONE OF THE WORST BOOKS I HAVE EVER READ
- By PAUL on 08-02-20
By: Gerald Posner, and others
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Do Not Disturb
- The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad
- By: Michela Wrong
- Narrated by: Michela Wrong
- Length: 18 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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We think we know the story of Africa’s Great Lakes region. Following the Rwandan genocide, an idealistic group of young rebels overthrew the brutal regime in Kigali, ushering in an era of peace and stability that made Rwanda the donor darling of the West, winning comparisons with Switzerland and Singapore. But the truth was considerably more sinister.
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What is true and what isn't?
- By Buretto on 11-30-21
By: Michela Wrong
What listeners say about An Impeccable Spy
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- BallaghMan
- 07-31-20
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.
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- pedro filipuzzi
- 04-02-22
awsome
A wonderful masterpiece of espionage. Better than any James Bond's books. packed with real life situation. Mesmerazing. Impossible to let it down.
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- reader
- 06-28-20
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.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Vlr
- 07-03-21
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!
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- Larry
- 10-21-20
Truth better than fiction
Great bio. Many new facts about WWII. Better than most spy fiction I’ve read, excepting Tinker Tailor, of course.
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- Nicholas Robinson
- 01-22-22
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.
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- Cynthia
- 04-24-20
Lots of Politics
There were more political details than I would have liked, but I really enjoyed the details about his personality.
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- Igor Alexeev
- 08-05-20
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.
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- peter
- 12-19-20
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.
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