In the warm predawn darkness of June 22, 1941, three million men waited along a front hundreds of miles long, stretching from the Baltic coast of Poland to the Balkans. Ahead of them in the darkness lay the Soviet Union with its border guarded by millions of Red Army troops echeloned deep throughout the huge spaces of Russia. This massive gathering of Wehrmacht soldiers from Adolf Hitler's Third Reich and his allied states–notably Hungary and Romania–stood poised to carry out Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's surprise attack against the country of his putative ally, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Since military secrets are typically the hardest to keep, Stalin soon began to hear rumors of the invasion. But even when Winston Churchill contacted him in April of 1941 warning him that German troops seemed to be massing on Russia’s border, Stalin remained dubious. Stalin felt even more secure in his position when the Germans failed to invade the following May.

What Stalin did not realize was that Hitler had simply overstretched himself in Yugoslavia and only planned to delay the invasion by a few weeks. Hitler aimed to destroy Stalin’s Communist regime, but he also hoped to gain access to resources in Russia--particularly oil. Throughout the first half of 1941, Germany dug in to safeguard against an Allied invasion of Western Europe as it began to mobilize millions of troops to invade the Soviet Union. Stalin even refused to believe the report of a German who informed the Soviets that the troops were massing on the Soviet border at that very moment.

Spies are a feature of countless works of fiction in which they often discover secrets on which the fate of nations hang in the balance. Reality is generally rather more mundane as spies often gather low-level intelligence that only makes sense when it is examined by analysts and compared to information from other sources. Espionage provides clues to what the enemy is planning, but on its own it rarely changes the course of a war. Moreover, real spies are generally anonymous and not the bold, swashbuckling action heroes depicted in fiction. Spies must hide in plain sight, and that is best achieved by being as innocuous as possible.

However, there are exceptions. Occasionally, a spy will be so successful that they are able to place themselves in a position where they have access to information at the highest levels and secrets that really can change the course of world events. Sometimes these spies may even be as handsome, charming, charismatic, and bold as their fictional counterparts.

One such spy was a man named Richard Sorge. Experiencing the horrors of World War I firsthand turned Sorge into an ardent communist, after which he worked as a spy for the USSR in Germany, China, and Japan before and during World War II. He obtained vital military and political secrets and maintained his cover for over nine years despite frantic searches for the spy who was leaking information to Russia. His effortless charm meant that he didn’t need to steal secrets because people told him willingly including the many women that he seduced.

Sorge was not, by most standards, a pleasant man. He was coldly intelligent, utterly ruthless, and extremely manipulative. He lied continually to his friends, his colleagues, and his lovers, but he was also one of the most successful spies ever, and the information he provided may have fundamentally changed the course of World War II--at least when heeded. Fittingly, his story also had almost unbelievable twists and turns producing one of the most complicated stories and legacies of any participant in the war.