Agent Sonya

by Ben MacIntyre

  She was a communist who never joined the party; a violent revolutionary and romantic dreamer; a feminist in thrall to a succession of men; a woman who inspired intense loyalty, yet inflicted enormous damage on many of her friends; she supported communism without considering what communist rule involved in reality. She was passionate, prejudiced, charismatic, narcissistic, reckless, volatile, lovable, hypercritical, emotionally fragile, and uncompromising. “I may not be innocent, but I’m right,” she declared.

  Ursula was entranced. Agnes Smedley seemed to embody political passion and energy, the very antithesis of the smug complacency she found in the bourgeois boudoirs of Shanghai. “Your very existence is not worth anything at all if you live passively in the midst of injustice,” Smedley insisted. Agnes was everything Ursula admired: feminist, anti-fascist, an enemy of imperialism and defender of the oppressed against the forces of capitalism, and a natural revolutionary.

  She was also a spy.

  In 1928, Agnes Smedley had met Jakob Mirov-Abramov, the press attaché at the Soviet embassy in Berlin, a Lithuanian Jew and a veteran Bolshevik. Nominally a diplomat, in reality he was European chief of the OMS, the intelligence-gathering arm of the Comintern. Mirov-Abramov (occasionally, and confusingly, Abramov-Mirov) was on the hunt for recruits to establish new espionage networks in the Far East, and this radical woman writer with a license to ask impertinent questions seemed ideally suited. Agnes needed little persuading that the logical next stage of her one-woman revolution was to become a spy: she got a job as Shanghai correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, saddled up the white charger of her imagination, and galloped off to China.

  By the time Agnes and Ursula met eighteen months later, Smedley was already an important cog in the machinery of Soviet espionage, supporting the Chinese communists in their desperate struggle to survive the White Terror, the Nationalist government’s continuing campaign of political extermination: she recruited other writers and intellectuals sympathetic to the cause, used her home for covert meetings and mail drops, and passed secret information back and forth between the CCP and the Soviet Union. Her reports and instructions were sent by radio, or via the Soviet vessels sailing in and out of Shanghai. Back in Moscow, she enjoyed a “very high standing.”

  Smedley would end up working for both the Comintern and the Fourth Department, but she did not know, or much care, which branch of Soviet intelligence she was serving, so long as she was fighting for ordinary Chinese workers. “The revolutionary movement out here is not a romantic idea or theory,” she wrote. “It is either rebel or die.” Her newspaper reporting was often indistinguishable from pro-communist propaganda. Her mental health continued to deteriorate. “I have a duty heavier than personal things,” she declared.

  Smedley knew she was being watched by the British Secret Service (whom she referred to contemptuously as “George and Mary”), along with the Americans, French, and Chinese. She was on the Chinese government’s blacklist of dangerous subversives, and expected to be shot in the back at any moment. Her letters were messianic in tone: “George and Mary etc. are again hot on the trail [but] were Jesus Christ living in China today, he would also be in the bad books of the British and other secret services.”

  Ursula was unaware of her new friend’s covert activities. She did not know that Agnes’s handbag contained a loaded pistol. She knew only that she had found a sister of the heart. From that moment, they were inseparable. “There was hardly a day when we did not telephone or see each other,” wrote Ursula. “Agnes was alone; her whole life had been devoted to the revolutionary struggle. I was a communist but had grown up without material worries and was now looking forward to my first child. I lived a sheltered and painless life. I was also quite inexperienced.”

  Smedley revealed to Ursula a very different Shanghai. They ate in local restaurants with Agnes’s Chinese friends, secret communists all. Agnes explained how she had helped to found the League of Left-Wing Writers, a group of Chinese thinkers set up at the instigation of the CCP to promote socialist realism—an astonishingly dangerous enterprise given the government crackdown. The league was banned almost as soon as it was founded, but it continued a precarious underground existence. Through Agnes, Ursula now found herself mixing with some of the leading lights of Chinese leftist literature: Lu Xun, the celebrated Chinese poet, the twenty-eight-year-old novelist Ding Ling, and her husband, the poet and playwright Hu Yepin. On Lu Xun’s fiftieth birthday, a party for one hundred artists and intellectuals (representing “dangerous thought,” as Agnes put it) was held at a Dutch restaurant. Ding Ling addressed the guests. Agnes guarded the door. Ursula returned home flushed with excitement from the adventure. She did not tell Rudi where she had been.

  Agnes also introduced Ursula to Chen Hansheng, alias Geoffrey Chen, a diminutive, bespectacled social scientist who spoke perfect English, having attended Harvard and the University of Chicago before moving to Berlin (where he studied the writings of Robert Kuczynski). Chen would become one of the most celebrated academics in China. He was also a dedicated secret communist, recruited by the Comintern in 1924. By 1930, Chen was teaching at Shanghai University and working part-time as Agnes’s “secretary.” He and his wife were linchpins of Smedley’s burgeoning spy network. Chen was also, briefly, one of her lovers.

  Ursula was flattered by Agnes’s attention, dazzled by her personality, and intrigued by her radical Chinese friends. But she was also a little daunted. “During the early days of our friendship, which was so precious to me, I could not understand why a person of Agnes’s stature should want to spend her time with me, or why I should have become her confidante.”

  Their relationship may have gone beyond friendship. Agnes’s sexual appetites were undoubtedly broad enough to include a pregnant married woman fifteen years her junior, but there is no firm evidence that Ursula had lesbian leanings. They certainly shared a bed on numerous occasions. But, as Smedley’s biographer observes, “at this time…there was no hard and fast line separating the different kinds of attachments that existed between women.” It is entirely possible that their relationship was passionate, romantic, and all-consuming without ever becoming physical. “I was always at her disposal,” wrote Ursula.

  Whether or not there was a sexual element to their blossoming attachment, Smedley had another motive for cultivating this clever, impressionable young communist who told her she “yearned to live an active, useful existence.” Immediately after their first meeting at the Cathay Hotel, Agnes sent a message to Moscow requesting permission to arrange the recruitment of young Mrs. Hamburger.

  Three weeks later, Agnes told Ursula to expect a visit at home from someone she could “fully trust.” At the appointed hour, the Woidts’ butler announced that “Mr. Richard Johnson” had arrived, and ushered in a man of about thirty-five. Ursula was immediately struck by his extraordinary good looks: “A slender head, thick wavy hair, his face already deeply furrowed, his intense blue eyes framed by dark lashes, his mouth beautifully formed.” The stranger had a pronounced limp and a strong German accent. Three fingers of his left hand were missing. He radiated charm, and danger.

  His real name was Richard Sorge. He was Agnes Smedley’s principal partner in espionage and her current lover, the most senior Soviet spy in Shanghai, an adept seducer and an officer of the Red Army intelligence service.

  Sorge did not stay long. But, in that brief half hour, Ursula’s life was changed irrevocably.

  IAN FLEMING ONCE DESCRIBED RICHARD Sorge as “the most formidable spy in history.” Despite being German and communist, and approaching middle age, in 1930 Sorge bore a distinct resemblance to the fictional James Bond, not least for his looks, appetite for alcohol, and prodigious, almost pathological, womanizing. Even Sorge’s sworn enemies acknowledged his skill and courage. After China, Sorge would move on to Tokyo, where he spied, undetected, for nine years, penetrating the innermost secrets of the Japanese and German High Comma
nds and alerting Moscow to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. When he met Ursula, Sorge was just setting out on his espionage career in the Far East, a journey that would lead, eventually, to a place in the small pantheon of spies who have changed the course of history.

  Born in Baku in 1895 to a German father and Russian mother, Sorge joined a student battalion in the kaiser’s army at the outset of the First World War and passed directly, as he put it, “from the schoolhouse to the slaughter block.” Most of his brigade was wiped out within days of arriving at the front. He was first wounded in 1915, then again a year later, and finally, almost fatally, in March 1916, when shrapnel tore into both legs and removed much of one hand. The young Sorge’s wartime experience turned him into a die-hard communist, convinced that only worldwide revolution would “eliminate the causes, economic and political, of this war and any future ones.” A strange mixture of bibliophile and brawler, pedantic scholar and hard-nosed functionary, he worked his way up through the Soviet secret world and finally into the ranks of the Fourth Department, the Red Army intelligence service, an organization described by its chief as a “puritan high priesthood, devout in its atheism…the avengers of all the ancient evils, the enforcers of new heaven, new earth.”

  Sorge was a dissolute warrior-priest: self-indulgent, belligerent, and unquestioning of the brutal regime he served, a born liar equipped with lethal charisma, boundless conceit, and almost unbelievable good luck. He possessed a “magical facility for putting people at their ease,” and getting women into bed. He was rigorously disciplined in his espionage and exceptionally messy in his personal life. He was also snobbish, nit-picking, and frequently drunk, a loud and louche habitué of fast motorbikes and loose company.

  In 1930, the Soviet exporters of communist revolution were looking east. To bolster the beleaguered CCP and spy on the Nationalist government, the Fourth Department envisaged a new network of illegals, spies operating under civilian cover. Agnes Smedley was one; Sorge, code-named “Ramsay,” was another. On orders from the Center, he secured a job as China correspondent for the thrillingly titled German Grain News and proceeded to Shanghai. Five months before Ursula’s arrival, Sorge set up home in the YMCA on Bubbling Well Road, bought himself a powerful motorbike, and paid a visit to Agnes Smedley, as instructed, to seek her help in “establishing an intelligence gathering group in Shanghai.” Agnes happily agreed to work with Sorge and then, with equal alacrity and gusto, slept with him.

  Posing as a news-hungry journalist, Sorge joined the Concordia and Rotary Clubs, and went drinking with the German military advisers to the KMT. The German community (“all fascists, very anti-Soviet,” in Sorge’s estimation) eagerly embraced this convivial newcomer, “a good bottle man,” regarding him as one of their own. Agent Ramsay “gutted them like a fat Christmas goose,” wrote another Soviet spy. Smedley placed at his disposal her expanding network of Chinese communist intellectuals, writers, soldiers, academics such as Chen Hansheng, and a young Japanese journalist, Hotsumi Ozaki, who would become one of Sorge’s most valuable informants. Communism was on the run in the cities, but in the remote regions of the southeast it was gaining ground. In the mountains, the insurgents would soon establish the Jiangxi Soviet, a self-governing state within the state. The fifty thousand peasant soldiers led by Mao Zedong were as merciless as the Nationalist forces, hunting down and executing enemies of the revolution: missionaries, land-rich peasants, officials, and gentry. On her journalistic trips to the interior, Agnes reported on the bloody progress of China’s Red Army and declared herself as “hard and ferocious as many Chinese, filled with hatred, ready to fight at a moment’s notice, without patience of any kind for the comfortably situated in life, intolerant of every doubting person.”

  Aided by an expert radio technician sent from Moscow, Sorge began providing the Center with a steady stream of information on Nationalist troop movements, command structures, and weaponry.

  While Sorge respected Agnes Smedley’s “brilliant mind,” he was less complimentary in other respects: “As a wife [by which he meant sexual partner] her value was nil….In short, she was like a man.” Agnes, however, had fallen in love with the dashing master spy she called “Sorgie” or “Valentino.” She could often be seen on the back of his motorbike, tearing up the Nanking Road, an experience that left her feeling “grand and glorious.” In breathless letters home, she extolled the virtues of this “rare, rare person.”

  “I’m married, child, so to speak,” she wrote to her friend Margaret Sanger, the American birth control pioneer. “Just sort of married, you know; but it’s a he-man also and it’s 50-50 all along the line and he helping me and me him and we working together in every way….I do not know how long it will last; that does not depend on us. I fear not long. But these days will be the best in my life. Never have I known such good days, never have I known such a healthy life, mentally, physically, psychically. I consider this completion, and when it is ended I’ll be lonelier than all the love in the magazines could never make me.” The incoherent letter is testament to the riot of Agnes’s feelings. Each new agent she recruited was a service to the revolution, and a love gift for Sorgie. In November 1930, with Moscow’s approval, she gave him Ursula, now six months pregnant.

  Years later, Ursula recalled her initiation into Soviet espionage.

  Having received Ursula’s assurance that the house was empty save for the servants, Sorge carefully closed the door to the sitting room and sat beside her on the sofa.

  “I have heard that you are ready to support the Chinese comrades in their work?”

  Ursula nodded eagerly.

  Sorge then launched into a short but impassioned description of the monumental difficulties facing the Chinese communists. “He spoke of the struggle against the country’s reactionary government, of the responsibilities and dangers involved in even the smallest degree of help for our comrades.”

  Again, she nodded.

  Then he paused, and looked into her eyes.

  “I want you to reconsider. At this point, you can still refuse without anyone holding it against you.”

  Ursula was slightly affronted. She had already vouchsafed her commitment. And implicit in Sorge’s question was a threat that if she opted to play her part now but attempted to back out in the future, it would be held against her in a way that might be very unpleasant indeed.

  Her “somewhat curt” response was framed in communist cliché: regardless of the danger, she was “prepared to take part in this work of international solidarity.”

  Sorge smiled. Her contribution would be strictly logistical, he said. Her apartment in the Woidts’ residence would be used as a safe house, where Sorge could conduct meetings with revolutionary comrades. Rudi never came home during the day. She would let the visitors in, provide refreshments, warn if anyone approached the house, and otherwise stay out of the way. “I was simply to let them have the room, but not to attend the discussions.”

  Before departing, Sorge remarked that in a few days’ time workers and students would be staging a demonstration in downtown Shanghai. She might like to go and observe the protest.

  Then Mr. Johnson was gone. Ursula still did not know his real name.

  A few days later she was standing on Nanking Road, outside the Wing On department store, her arms filled with shopping bags. The shopping, she calculated, would make her presence there on the day of the demonstration appear coincidental; she had also found a rather beautiful silk skirt in Wing On that fitted her figure perfectly. Crowds of students and workers were filing down the street in silent protest, flanked and observed by long lines of expressionless police. The tension was palpable, the atmosphere reminiscent of the May Day demonstration in 1924 when she had been hit by a policeman’s truncheon. In Shanghai, the mere act of marching was a provocative statement of rebellion. Suddenly the police surged forward, batons and fists flying. They dragged one man into the doorw
ay of a shop and began systematically beating him. Dozens of protestors were herded into side streets, where they were kicked and punched onto waiting trucks. They offered no resistance, wearing the blank-eyed look of the condemned. “I looked into the faces of young revolutionaries, whose death sentence had been pronounced at that moment, and I knew—if only for their sake—that I would carry out any task asked of me.” If they could face certain death with equanimity, then she would try to do the same.

  As she hurried away from the violent scenes on Nanking Road clutching her parcels, Ursula did not spot the balding, bespectacled man standing on a corner, watching her closely.

  Gerhart Eisler was a senior figure in the German communist hierarchy: he would eventually move to the United States, where he was rumored to be the covert leader of the American Communist Party. In 1929, after a stint in Moscow, he was acting as a liaison between the Comintern and the CCP, and “purging the party of spies and dissidents.” He had earned himself the nickname “the Executioner.” Eisler was checking up on Sorge’s latest recruit, observing her reactions to the demonstration. In the world Ursula had now entered, snooping on friends was as important as spying on enemies. Eisler was satisfied with what he saw. His only reservation was that Mrs. Hamburger did not appear sufficiently bourgeois. She should “look more ladylike on such occasions,” said the Comintern enforcer, because the more feminine she appeared, the less she would be an object of suspicion. Eisler had strong views on the sartorial aspect of spying: “She should at least wear a hat.”