Who is it that traitors really betray? Their countries, in the case of spies and turncoats. Their friends, colleagues and even family members whom they deceive, of course. But has any traitor ever believed that they were betraying themselves?

‘To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good,’ was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s formulation in The Gulag Archipelago. ‘Or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.’ For most of history’s spies, their treachery was not a species of disloyalty but rather a form of higher loyalty to a greater good. Treason, then, exists somewhere on the spectrum between idealism and narcissism.

Richard Sorge was a great spy but a bad man. He was born in 1895 into a wealthy expatriate banking family in Baku – now capital of Azerbaijan, but then the Russian Empire’s wealthiest, most corrupt and most violent city – to a German father and Russian mother who never spoke her native language to her children. Their bourgeois values were shattered on the Western Front, and Sorge became a Communist, and a career intelligence officer for the Soviet Union, posted to Shanghai in 1930 and then Tokyo three years later. Sorge is most famous for having tried to warn Stalin of Hitler’s invasion plans in June 1941. Stalin, infamously, ignored Sorge’s warning – along with those of at least 18 other agents, including some inside the German government and armed forces.

As Hitler’s forces stormed towards Moscow in the late summer of 1941, Sorge was able to confirm definitively that the Japanese would not attack the Soviet Union and were planning to expand their Pacific empire instead. This time, Stalin believed him. The Soviet General Staff withdrew five army corps from eastern Siberia, leaving the Asian part of the USSR dangerously undefended. Those troops, desperately needed, were thrown into the defence of Moscow. In retrospect, Hitler’s failure to take the Soviet capital in December 1941 was the moment when he began to lose the war. This gives Richard Sorge a strong claim to be not only the greatest spy of the Second World War but also one of the most successful intelligence agents in world history.

In many ways, Sorge was a hero. He always thought of himself as a soldier, from his teenage years fighting for the kaiser in the trenches, to his last moments on the gallows in Tokyo’s Sugamo prison, when he stood to attention and saluted the Red Army and the Soviet Communist Party. He was a good German who was appalled by the rise of the Nazis (though his Communist faith pre-dated that) and believed that the Soviet Union was the last, best hope of humanity.

At the same time, he was also an infamous scoundrel, an arrogant poseur, and a pathological liar. He regularly seduced the wives of his friends and benefactors, ruthlessly employing his sexual charisma to manipulate his mistresses into working for him. He lied to and exploited almost every one of his wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including the members of the spy ring he built in Tokyo. The British journalist Murray Sayle noted a striking similarity between Sorge and another Soviet spy, the Briton Kim Philby, whom Sayle had interviewed in Moscow in 1967.

Though of different generations Philby and Sorge were ‘psychic twins’, wrote Sayle. Both men found ‘the dull, unclassified lives that the rest of us lead simply not worth living. Both were born to peripatetic parents, far from what was to pass for home… Both enjoyed privileged educations which turned them, at least outwardly, into convincing representatives of their respective upper classes… Both became Communists as impressionable students, both at times when Communism was high fashion among young intellectuals’.

Sorge was both arrogant and damaged. It’s possible that these characteristics are invariably linked. But what turned him onto the path of Communism – and espionage – was the experience of having his life, ideals and body damaged as a young student volunteer during the First World War. The German survivors of the angry and deluded generation of 1914 would later describe the bloodshed of the Western Front as the Kindermord – the massacre of the innocents. As Sorge later wrote in a long memoir penned in a Japanese prison cell, the experience of the trenches ‘stirred up the first and most serious psychological unrest in the hearts of my comrades and myself… after our thirst for battle and adventure had been glutted, several months of silent and pensive emptiness began’.

The Russian shell that shattered Sorge’s legs and ended his military career in 1918 – his third serious wound of the conflict – also destroyed his last illusions about the prewar world. ‘I was plunged into an intense confusion of the soul,’ he wrote. Sorge, lying in agony in a Berlin military hospital, came to believe that ‘a violent political change was the only way of extricating ourselves from this quagmire’. Like many of his contemporaries, Sorge had undergone a violent rebirth, which isolated him in an inner world divorced from his family and class, placing in doubt the very foundations of the society in which he been raised.

Another German infantry corporal, who was also recovering from his wounds in a nearby hospital at the same time, was similarly tormented. ‘There followed terrible days and even worse nights. In those nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible,’ wrote Adolf Hitler in his 1925 memoir Mein Kampf. ‘In the days that followed, my own fate became known to me… I for my part decided to go into politics.’ The anger and revulsion which drove a generation of young war veterans into radical politics on both left and right had an identical wellspring.

Sorge threw himself into a violent apprenticeship in the practicalities of street Communism as defeated Germany descended into violence, anarchy and near-revolution. He led ‘fighting units’ on the streets; he even did a stint as a literal underground agitator as a miner in the Ruhr. But it was in the Communist intellectual salons of Frankfurt that Sorge found his people and his role – not as a fighter but as a teacher. He was recruited by Moscow agents for the Communist International. Sorge was classic spy material. ‘To betray, you must first belong,’ Kim Philby once told Sayle. ‘I never belonged.’ Nor did Sorge.

‘They integrated you with imperial ambitions and then let you loose into the world with a sense of elitism – but with your heart frozen,’ recalled John le Carré about his own childhood – an upbringing and background he shared with many of England’s most notorious traitors. ‘When you’ve become that frozen child, but you’re an outwardly functioning, charming chap, there is a lot of wasteland inside you that is waiting to be cultivated.’

Sorge jumped at the chance to serve the revolution. In 1925 he and his new wife – stolen from his Frankfurt professor – found themselves in Moscow amid the firebrand foreigners who flocked to the home of world revolution. ‘Sorge’s ghost has marched to glory, but behind him in wretched procession come the lost intellectuals, the lost patriots, the lost priests, defending countries and religions of which our children may never hear,’ wrote Le Carré, who had spent time among the denizens of a later shadow world and understood Sorge’s communist milieu better than most. ‘The fanatic riff-raff from a ruined century.’

Whether it was entry-level espionage jobs checking in on the squabbles of European Communist cells or, later, when he had been selected for the world’s first truly professional espionage service by Jan Berzin, architect of Soviet military intelligence, the job of spy suited him. He was a member of a caste of high priests of revolution, adept of a clique of men who enjoyed the power of secret knowledge. And it was on assignment in Asia, under deep cover as himself – a German foreign correspondent, a high-living man of means – that he found his true metier. He had the chutzpah to return to his native land, sign up as a member of the Nazi Party and pitch his stories to rabidly National Socialist magazines. He sailed to Shanghai hiding in plain sight under his own name, but with a large part of his true self concealed underneath a roguish smile and rugged good looks.

A French journalist who knew him in Tokyo described Sorge as possessing a ‘strange combination of charm and brutality’. Sorge had a talent for situations, which served him well throughout his erratic and changeable life. The ease with which he was able to move from one milieu to another, from one place, woman, friend, to another, was staggering. Men and women alike found his self-destructive charisma irresistible. He could be savagely elemental, temperamental, capricious, often as selfish as a child. His story reminds one of a man constantly trying out a series of savage caricatures of himself on the world, adopting slightly new variants of his social persona. As with many lonely people, he had a burning desire to be loved, and to be fabulous, but loved from afar. And that was his paradox; the more fabulous and successful he became, the more impossible it became for him to be loved for himself.

Like many apparently gregarious people, Sorge kept his inner self a closely guarded secret. He was a man with three faces. One face was of Sorge the social lion, the outrageously indiscreet life of the party, adored by women and friends. His second, secret, face was turned to his masters in Moscow. The third, the private man of high principles and base appetites living in a world of lies, he kept almost entirely to himself.

Spying, wrote Le Carré, gave Sorge ‘a stage, I think; a ship to sail upon his own romantic seas; a string to tie together a bundle of middle-range talents; a fool’s bladder with which to beat society; and a Marxist whip with which to scourge himself’. ‘This sensual priest had found his real métier; he was born wonderfully in his own century. Only his Gods were out of date.’

Which begs a question – who are the traitors of our own age, and what could their ideological and moral landscape look like? The TV series Homeland attempted to recreate a Sorge-style turncoat, a wolf in sheep’s clothing who walked among his peers concealing a heart filled with murderous intent. But the conceit was never convincing. Islam may indeed inspire some to righteous, murderous rage, but the idea of a highly educated, high functioning member of a Western elite – a modern Sorge – secretly working for a radical islamist regime feels far-fetched. Israel is perhaps a closer fit and has been borne out by reality in the form of Mossad agents in the US defence establishment.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that we live in an age where traitors work only for themselves. CIA mole Aldrich Ames and FBI spy Robert Hanssen both worked for Russian money. Only the Cubans, it seems, are still ‘keeping it real’. Ana Montes, a senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, spied on behalf of the Cuban government for 17 years. Manuel Rocha, a former US ambassador to Bolivia, is accused of acting as a Cuban agent for more than 40 years. But those are legacy cases, on the hook for decades. They are vestiges, echoes of a largely lost Cold War world.

Which is not to say that ideals of a kind no longer exist. Chelsea Manning, the US non-commissioned officer who leaked the State Department Papers and footage of US helicopters apparently targeting civilians in Iraq, risked freedom to expose what she believed was a profound wrong by her government. Edward Snowden, though he, ironically enough, ended up in Moscow’s embrace and under the protection of Russia’s Federal Security Service, leaked details of the National Security Agency’s surveillance techniques in order, he claimed, to hold his government accountable to its own fundamental principles of freedom.

We would like to imagine that today there are brave men and women in Russia, Belarus, Afghanistan and Iran who volunteer their services to Western governments because they believe that by betraying their regimes they are helping to bring a better future for their children. The question is: would we call such people traitors, or covert freedom fighters?