Agent Sonya

by Ben MacIntyre

  In Shanghai a week later, Ursula was summoned to a meeting with Grisha Herzberg and Karl Rimm, Sorge’s successor. A message had come from the Center, a cross between an invitation, a suggestion, and an order. “Would you be prepared to go to Moscow for a training course?” asked Rimm. “This will last at least six months. And there is no guarantee you will return to Shanghai at the end.”

  Sorge’s parting message—“This is only a beginning for you”—now became clear. He must have “reported fully to the Red Army intelligence branch” and recommended her for further training. This was flattering, but surely impractical. “What about Michael?” she asked.

  “A condition of accepting this offer is that you must leave him somewhere else,” Rimm said flatly. “You cannot risk taking him to the Soviet Union as he is bound to learn Russian there.” There was an elementary, if cruel, logic at work. After training in Moscow, she must slip back into civilian life without anyone knowing where she had been. Michael was picking up languages quickly: German from his parents and pidgin, the Chinese-English hybrid spoken by many urban Chinese, from his nanny. If the child returned speaking even a smattering of Russian, the secret would be out.

  Ursula had never faced such a painful decision: she was being asked, in effect, to choose between her child and her ideological vocation, her family and espionage.

  “The thought of giving up my work never occurred to me,” she later wrote. Like a religious zealot, she had found a single, unwavering faith around which to wrap her life. The rise of Hitler, mounting Japanese aggression, and the continuing slaughter of Chinese communists had redoubled her determination to fight fascism. A training course would underline her commitment. Perhaps she would be reunited with Richard Sorge. Under the Center’s rules, agents and officers were forbidden to make contact with one another while on separate deployments. She could not write to him, nor he to her. But there was a chance he was still in Russia. Long before his departure from Shanghai, she knew that Sorge’s relentlessly wandering eye had alighted elsewhere. She knew he probably did not love her, or any of his women. But she longed to see him one more time. Ambition, ideology, adventure, romance, and politics combined to make up her mind: she would go to Moscow, the capital of communist revolution. “My decision was quickly made,” Ursula wrote. But where would Michael live? Berlin was out of the question. Leaving him in Shanghai was not an option, since she had been warned she might never return. After a long discussion with Rudi, they agreed that Michael would spend the next six months with his paternal grandparents at their chalet in Czechoslovakia, on the ostensible grounds that “a change of climate” would do him good. Leaving Rudi in Shanghai would not excite comment since “it was quite usual for foreigners in China to send their wives and children on prolonged home leave to Europe.” Rudi believed his marriage could be saved. His own commitment to communism was growing. If the Soviet intelligence service wanted Ursula to go to Moscow, he would not (and probably could not) stop her. Misha would be well cared for by his parents, and once her training in Russia was complete, Ursula would collect their son, the family would be reunited, and they could make a new start. That was Rudi’s hope. When the time came to say goodbye, he held his son tightly until the child wriggled free.

  Separation from her two-year-old son would leave a permanent scar. Ursula defended that bleak decision for the rest of her life. But she never quite forgave herself.

  On May 18, 1933, Ursula and Michael boarded a Norwegian freighter bound for Vladivostok. Just before the ship weighed anchor, Grisha appeared with a large locked trunk containing documents for delivery to the Center. During the long voyage she recited nursery rhymes to the little boy and told him stories. They spent hours talking to a canary that lived in a cage on deck. “The thought of the parting knotted my stomach,” she wrote. The weather was warm, and the scent of the timber cargo filled the air. “Misha will be in his grandmother’s loving care,” she told herself. “The mountain air will be ideal for him.”

  At the Vladivostok docks they were met by a Russian naval officer and escorted to the Moscow train. On the first night in their little cabin Michael was restless, disturbed by the clatter of the tracks. “I lay down beside him on the bunk until he went to sleep in my arms, and I realized once again how difficult it would be to part from my son.” Nine days later they arrived in Moscow and handed over the trunk to waiting officers, before boarding another train, to Czechoslovakia, followed by a taxi to the little village of Grenzbauden.

  Max and Else Hamburger, now permanently resident in Czechoslovakia, warmly welcomed mother and child. Robert Kuczynski had left the chalet several months earlier, and was now in England. “I told Rudi’s parents that we were considering a move to the Soviet Union,” Ursula wrote. She explained that she would be spending several months in Moscow, exploring the possibilities. The Hamburgers were “not too happy about the plan,” but agreed to care for their grandson as long as necessary.

  Ursula’s mother arrived from Berlin a few days later.

  For Berta Kuczynski, this should have been a happy occasion, a long-awaited get-together with her eldest daughter and first grandchild. But the poor woman was utterly distracted. In the months since Robert’s flight, Nazi harassment had escalated. The Gestapo returned to Schlachtensee, demanding to know where Kuczynski had gone. Jürgen’s home was also raided and searched. The KPD leader Ernst Thälmann was captured at the home of a man named Hans Kluczynski, and the similarity of the names brought renewed attention to the Kuczynski family—spelling was never a Gestapo strong point. Jürgen himself was arrested, but released after two hours of questioning. Secretly, he began to smuggle the family library out of the country: about two-thirds of the fifty thousand volumes would be saved. Jürgen and Marguerite were now living an underground life, in constant fear of arrest.

  In May the Nazis staged public bonfires of “Jewish and Marxist” literature, including subversive works like Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth. Every book in the Marxist Workers’ Lending Library, created by Ursula in 1929, was put to the torch. Her friend Gabo Lewin, who had taken over as librarian, was beaten up and thrown in prison. Soon after, Berta Kuczynski performed a book burning of her own. Faithful Olga Muth stood beside the boiler furnace in the basement shoveling in left-wing books and papers, while the rest of the family carried down anything and everything the Nazis might consider incriminating, including many of Ursula’s papers. When the moment came to destroy Robert Kuczynski’s handwritten manuscripts, Ollo could be heard muttering angrily: “They call themselves the Workers’ Party, and everything your father wrote was to improve the lives of the workers.” A few days later the Gestapo reappeared in force, and this time they ransacked the house. “They just barged in,” Brigitte recalled. “We were still in bed and had to quickly make ourselves presentable and go downstairs into one room where we were made to sit while they searched.” Ollo stood by, “calm and collected,” arms folded. As they left in frustration, one Gestapo officer turned and spat: “We’ll get her yet.” Ursula was now on the wanted list, along with Robert and Jürgen. It was time to get out. Berta put the old family house up for sale and prepared to flee.

  The woman who appeared at the chalet in Grenzbauden was a pale, prematurely aged shadow of the glamorous mother Ursula had left three years earlier. Berta barely noticed her grandson. “She could not enjoy anything any more,” wrote Ursula. After just a few hours, Berta announced she was going back to Berlin.

  Two-year-old Michael picked up the strained atmosphere. “He began to cry bitterly and kept repeating: ‘Mummy stay with Misha, please mummy stay with Misha.’ ” Knowing she would be unable to control herself if she had to say goodbye, Ursula packed her bag in the dawn light, embraced Max and Else, and then stole away, weeping silently, while her son was asleep.

  The officers at the station in Moscow greeted her as “Sonya.” It was the first time she had heard the code name conferred on her by Richard Sorge,
and she immediately recalled the bar song in Shanghai. The word brought memories of the man on the motorbike flooding back. “Perhaps that is why I liked it,” she later wrote. “The name sounded like a last greeting from him.”

  The waiting car went south and up into the Lenin Hills, the low wooded range on the right bank of the Moscow River looking down over the city. Near the village of Vorobyevo, a name derived from the Russian for “sparrow,” they pulled up at the gates to a large complex of buildings surrounded by a double metal fence and patrolled by armed military police and guard dogs. This was the “Eighth International Sports Base” and also, more secretly, the “Radio Training Laboratory of the People’s Commissariat of Defence.” Unimaginatively code-named “Sparrow,” this was the domain of Jakob Mirov-Abramov, the Comintern master spy who had recruited Agnes Smedley back in 1926 and was now the head of communications for the Soviet intelligence services.

  Sparrow was equipped with laboratories, workshops, and the latest wireless technology. The top floor was a broadcasting dome, with two transmitters (500 watts and 250 watts) and a powerful Telefunken receiver. Here some eighty handpicked trainees, of all nationalities and both sexes, studied the art of clandestine shortwave radio operations: constructing transmitters and receivers, assembling and concealing wireless equipment, and coding and decoding messages in Morse. Students were also taught languages, history, and geography, indoctrinated in Marxism-Leninism, and trained in unarmed and armed combat, sabotage, mixing and handling explosives, surveillance and countersurveillance, and all the arcane techniques of spycraft including dead drops, brush contacts, and disguises. Before being deployed around the world, graduates of the spy school were put through “arduous training at an army sports camp,” a course so physically demanding they were afterward “sent to recuperate at a sanatorium in the Crimea.”

  Mirov-Abramov was a “friendly, competent and loyal comrade,” but also a martinet and an obsessive technical boffin, who demanded dedication and total obedience from the handful of people he selected for training. One colleague wrote:

  Candidates were accepted by Mirov-Abramov after careful scrutiny. He proved an excellent psychologist. He invited the candidate into his office and asked whether he [or she] wished to make himself available to take part actively in the fight against Hitler and Fascism. After several meetings, Mirov-Abramov asked the candidate to sign the written conditions for this training, thereby totally committing himself to the Soviet espionage system. The candidates selected were young, intelligent people with a special gift for languages or technical matters. Unsuitable candidates were eliminated by continual examinations. The trainees had to change their names and promise never to reveal their true identities, not even to their colleagues. During the training they had to break off all links with friends, were never allowed to leave the school alone, and were not permitted to take photographs or talk to anyone about the school and their curriculum. The betrayal of secrets was punishable by death.

  Ursula passed the interviews with Mirov-Abramov, signed the contract, and pledged her loyalty, on pain of death, to Soviet intelligence.

  Why did she do it? Ursula was a married woman (albeit unhappily) and a mother, a Jewish, bookish, tender, middle-class intellectual who enjoyed the ordinary pleasures of shopping, cooking, and bringing up a child. As the world slid into war, people of similar backgrounds were fleeing for sanctuary, but she deliberately turned in the other direction, running toward danger, relishing the risks. Although Ursula was open and direct by nature, her existence hereafter would be shaped by intense secrecy and deception, concealing the truth from people she loved as well as those she detested. Soviet espionage was a job for life, and, not infrequently, death. Ursula looked back on the shape of her life as if it had been preordained, depicting her choices as the logical consequence of political conviction. But there was more than ideology at work. In the internal theater of her psychology, espionage offered an opportunity to prove she was the equal of her favored brother, a player in world affairs like her father, a more effective revolutionary than Agnes Smedley. Sparrow spy school offered the education she had never had and the romance that comes with membership of a secret elite. Life with Rudi offered safety and certainty. She wanted neither.

  Spying is also highly addictive. The drug of secret power, once tasted, is hard to renounce. Ursula had observed the babbling, inconsequential expatriates of Shanghai, knowing that she was not of them, but a person apart, with another, secret existence. She had faced extreme peril, for herself and her family, and she had got away with it. Survival against the odds brings with it an adrenaline high and a sense of destiny from cheating fate. Espionage is finally a work of the imagination, a willingness to transport oneself, and others, from the real to an artificial world, to seem to be one sort of person on the exterior but another, secret human on the inside. Since earliest childhood, in her writings, Ursula had used her rich imagination to explore an alternative reality, with herself at the center of every drama. Now, as a trained intelligence officer, she would have the opportunity to write her own story in the pages of history.

  Ursula became a spy for the sake of the proletariat and the revolution; but she also did it for herself, driven by the extraordinary combination of ambition, romance, and adventure that bubbled inside her.

  The “foreign group” of trainees included two other Germans, a Czech, a Greek, a Pole, and “Kate,” an attractive Frenchwoman in her late twenties “of great intelligence and feeling” who would become Ursula’s roommate and friend. The daughter of a French dockworker, Kate’s real name was Renée Marceau. (She would later be dispatched to assassinate General Franco, the Spanish Nationalist leader, using a false British passport in the name of “Martha Sunshine.” The plot failed, but she escaped from Spain and was awarded the Order of Lenin.) The recruits came from utterly different worlds; Ursula found them fascinating. The group was housed together in a large red-brick building on the Sparrow site, surrounded by cherry orchards.

  Ursula threw herself into training: “All we had to do was learn.” Under instruction from a former navy radio operator, she practiced assembling a wireless from parts available in civilian radio shops and learned how to send coded messages. With daily lessons, her Russian improved rapidly. Rather to her own surprise, she quickly picked up the technical skills, learning to build transmitters, receivers, rectifiers, and frequency meters. To Ursula’s delight, the group was joined by Sepp “Sober” Weingarten, Sorge’s bibulous radio operator, who had been sent back from Shanghai for a much-needed refresher course. (His wife, who accompanied him, had finally twigged that Sepp was a communist spy. She was furious.) The food in the compound was excellent. “I blossomed: my cheeks grew rounder and rosier, and for the first time in my life I weighed over ten stone.”

  At weekends Ursula went sightseeing with Renée, accompanied by a minder, polite but vigilant. They wandered the streets for hours. “I loved the cold of the Moscow winter,” she wrote. She made discreet inquiries among her instructors about Sorge’s whereabouts and was told only that he had departed to take up another assignment. She was not told where, and knew better than to ask. The rules were clear: agents and officers might fraternize in Moscow and when jointly deployed, but contact at any other time was strictly forbidden. Sorge was in Japan, laying the groundwork for his next feat of espionage. Ursula’s lover had moved on, emotionally as well as geographically. Soviet espionage had thrown them together, and now held them apart. She wondered if she would ever see him again, and the thought made her heart twist.

  Memories of Sorge came rushing back when, one afternoon in the lift of the Novaya Moskovskaya hotel, Ursula felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to find a beaming Agnes Smedley. “We fell into each other’s arms,” Ursula wrote. Agnes was preparing to return to China. Ursula believed the meeting was fortuitous; in fact, Agnes had almost certainly been instructed to “bump into” her friend and check up on her progress. Unsurprisin
gly, their friendship never quite rekindled, but together they called on Mikhail Borodin, the former adviser to Sun Yat-sen who was now editing the English-language newspaper Moscow News. In the autumn of 1933, she and Agnes were given tickets to the October Revolution celebrations in Red Square. In a dazzling display of Soviet muscle, an army of athletes marched abreast under Stalin’s approving gaze, carrying tennis rackets, boats, flags, and soccer balls in what became known as the “Parade of a Hundred Thousand Singlets.” Through Agnes, Ursula was introduced to other foreign communists, including the Hungarian Lajos Magyar, a journalist at the official newspaper Pravda, and Wang Ming, the chief Chinese delegate to the Comintern, who, unbeknownst to Ursula, had almost certainly sent Ding Ling’s husband, Hu Yepin, to his death in 1931. “It was unusual for students at our school to meet so many people outside the collective,” wrote Ursula. She was being naïve, perhaps deliberately: Agnes was spying on her; she was being introduced to foreign communist luminaries to reinforce her loyalty, observe her reactions, and keep an eye on her. She was under tuition, and also under surveillance.

  Ursula was busy, stimulated, and healthier than ever before. But she was also continuously tortured by yearning for her little son. She found she barely missed Rudi, but the separation from Michael was agony, and getting worse with every day. Only Renée was aware of her private pain and guilt. She found herself trailing after groups of children “just to hear their bright voices.” “My constant longing for him drew me to every child I came across. When I stood in front of shops and saw the prams standing outside I could understand how women could steal children, simply in order to change their clothes, feed them, and hear them gurgling.” Michael’s third birthday came and went. They had been apart for seven months. Ursula knew she would “never be able to recoup those lost months.” Michael was growing up fast more than a thousand miles away, while she built radio transmitters in a guarded camp, making friends with people whose real names she did not know. Her duty, as a mother, was to be with Michael; but her other duty was stronger. Sometimes, late at night, she cried. But she never once thought of quitting.