One of the most successful Soviet writers of the 1950s–1960s, Roman Kim, really wanted a hero to appear in our literature who could stand up to the famous James Bond. Despite more than a million copies of his own detective stories, he was unable to complete this task, but he managed to tell about his life to his younger colleague, Yulian Semenov, who described the adventures of Kim and his partner, Maxim Isaev, in the novel “No Password Needed.” So Kim gave us Stirlitz, but he himself went into the shadows, into darkness, as it was thought, forever. Today his works have been almost forgotten, but another one has become known - a secret life in which there are much more questions than answers. A relative of the Korean queen, a student of the mentor of the future Japanese Emperor Hirohito, Roman Kim returned to Russia to become the best specialist in the USSR in the secret fight against Japanese intelligence. An outstanding scientist, literary critic, Japanese specialist and, at the same time, a tough, uncompromising counterintelligence officer - a real “ninja from the Lubyanka”, who did not know defeat and managed to deceive Stalin. By the way, it was Kim who told Soviet readers about ninjas, which were then unheard of in America. His biography even today resembles the ninja’s favorite trick - the “inverted bag”, all the facts in which are contradictory, unreliable and convincing at the same time. sign of information products 16+