Sorge's activities were much less adventurous than an avid reader would hope. In his written confession, Max Klausen, referring to the years 1933 - 1939, says: "Six dangerous years passed uneventfully," pointing toward the routine of everyday spying. Sorge's spying meant patiently collecting diverse, and sometimes ostensibly trite, information: a gossip about the Anti-Comintern Pact negotiations; a rumor about the Cabinet changes; the essence of a drunken soldier's swaggering about the military life in Manchuko; someone else's husband being with someone else's wife -- a useful information for the future Index; air of insurgent desires of young army officers, brought from afar by Miyagi; chitchat among foreign journalists; a careless remark of the German ambassador about "everybody being crazy in Berlin about the Russia attack." In 1936, however, Sorge obtained a position as the unofficial secretary to the German military attaché, Colonel Ott ("an honest, pleasant, gullible man, with oily military hair, and a thousand and one WWI stories"), and in 1939 he became the German embassy press attaché. This position enabled him to access documents that were considered confidential, even top-secret. Only occasionally he would photograph the document, as in the case of the preliminary document for the Anti-Comintern Pact. Mostly, there was no need for surreptitiousness for he would take any desired document to his improvised office (ex-coffee-kitchen, still reeking of beer from the party celebrating the anniversary of the Hitler ascension) where he would photograph it, or even make notes, at his will. In his article in Literaturnaya Gazeta (January 20, 1965), entitled "The Man Who Never Knew Enough," Victor Venykov aptly notes: "A spy is above all a man of politics, who must be able to grasp, analyze and connect in his mind events which seemingly have no connection. He must have the breadth of a historian, the meticulous powers of observation, the spirit and the mind of Tolstoy. Espionage is a continuous and demanding labor and the spy forms himself in that process. Least of all was Sorge like those secret agents whom certain Western authors have created. He did not force open gates in order to steal documents: the documents were shown to him by their very owners. He did not fire his pistol to penetrate the places which he had to penetrate: the doors were graciously opened to him by the guardians of the secret. He did not have to kill. But he was murdered by the brutal machinery."
 

 
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