Agent Sonya

by Ben MacIntyre

  The work was both dull and dangerous; unrewarding but not unrewarded.

  Soon after Michael’s sixth birthday, an incoming message unlike any before arrived from the Center. Addressed to her personally, it read: “Dear Sonya, the People’s Commissariat for Defence has decided to award you the Order of the Red Banner. We congratulate you warmly and wish you further success in your work. The Director.”

  Established after the Revolution, the Order of the Red Banner was the highest Soviet military medal, awarded for courage and heroism on the battlefield. Stalin himself had been thus honored, as had Trotsky. She was initially embarrassed by the honor, wondering if her “value was being overrated,” but then suffused with a quiet pride. Over the previous six years she had risked her life repeatedly in Shanghai, Manchuria, and Poland. A German Jewish communist spy under Nazi rule in Danzig, Ursula knew that arrest meant deportation to Germany, imprisonment, and death. She had underrated herself, for here, from the head of the Fourth Department, was recognition of her achievement as a secret soldier of the Red Army.

  A few days later, on the street outside the apartment, she encountered the wife of a Nazi official who lived upstairs, a fascist busybody who had failed to spot Ursula was Jewish.

  “Do you get a lot of interference on your radio?” the woman asked.

  “I haven’t heard anything,” Ursula replied, feeling a sudden chill. “What time was it?”

  “Around 11:00….Last night it was quite bad again.”

  Ursula had sent a long message to Moscow the previous evening.

  The woman prattled away: “My husband says there’s someone transmitting quite near us. He’s going to arrange for the block to be surrounded on Friday…”

  That evening, after the lights went out in the floor above, she dashed off a message to Moscow, explaining that she was moving the radio to another location immediately and would be listening for a reply. At a safe house owned by a member of Hoffman’s network, she set up the radio. Moscow’s response was repeated several times: “Return to Poland.” The Danzig mission had lasted three months.

  Yet another message arrived after her return to Warsaw: a comrade would meet her at a designated rendezvous site in a few days’ time. When Colonel Tumanyan himself appeared, grinning broadly, she had to restrain herself from kissing him. Decorated Soviet military heroes don’t kiss each other. Tumanyan brought congratulations from General Berzin, who was back in Moscow as chief of Red Army intelligence after a year in Spain dispensing military advice to the Republicans locked in civil war. “The director is satisfied with your work,” Tumanyan told her, but as they strolled through Warsaw the Armenian grew grave. “May I speak to you as a friend, not a superior? You no longer seem to radiate your former happiness. How are things with Rudi?”

  To her own surprise, she unburdened herself to Colonel Tums: the state of her non-marriage, and the relationship with Johann Patra that had produced Nina. “I told him that I valued Johann highly and still missed him, but did not want to return to him.” She described her frustration with the work in Poland. “I feel inexperienced,” she said. “I don’t know enough about the latest techniques in radio construction. Above all, I would like to receive further training.”

  Tumanyan nodded sympathetically: “Then you will come to Moscow for a few months, and afterwards return to Poland.”

  Without quite meaning to, Ursula had turned another page in her story.

  ON JUNE 15, 1937, IN the heart of the Kremlin, one of the oldest Bolsheviks pinned a medal on one of the youngest, a rising star of the Red Army.

  Mikhail Kalinin, a former butler and early disciple of Lenin’s, was the first president of Soviet Russia, a member of the Politburo, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, an obedient crony of Stalin, and to ordinary Soviet citizens a figure of almost inconceivable grandeur. The city of Kaliningrad was named after him. By 1937 he was a figurehead, taking little part in government but wheeled out for ceremonial occasions. On this day, he was presenting the Order of the Red Banner to some two dozen soldiers and sailors for sundry acts of courage, as he had done many times before. What made this occasion different was that one of the recipients was a thirty-year-old woman.

  Earlier that morning, Ursula put on a gray suit and polished her shoes before climbing into an army truck. At the Kremlin, the medal-winners were led down long corridors and into the main auditorium. A few minutes later, “an elderly grey-haired comrade entered the room.”

  Kalinin held on to Ursula’s hand, as he attached banner number 944 to her lapel. “The Red Army men applauded loud and long, maybe because I was the only woman.” On the old man’s face she saw an expression of “pure kindness.” This was misleading, because Kalinin was a brute. Three years later, as a member of the Soviet Politburo, he signed the execution order for twenty-two thousand Polish officers imprisoned in a forest near Smolensk: the notorious Katyn massacre.

  Ursula had traveled from Warsaw to Moscow via Czechoslovakia, where she left the children with Rudi’s parents, along with the ever-capable Olga Muth. Else Hamburger was ill and would die within the year. Rudi, who remained in Poland, had pleaded with Ursula “not to cause additional grief to his mother during these hard times” and so they stuck to the fiction that Nina was Rudi’s child. Using a false Soviet passport supplied by Tumanyan in the name Sophia Genrikovna Gamburger, Ursula traveled on to Finland, before crossing the border into Russia.

  The Red Army rolled out the red carpet. Tumanyan insisted she take a brief holiday at a special holiday camp in Alupka on the Black Sea, and then stay with him and his family in their Moscow apartment. The Red Army was rigidly hierarchical, but for Ursula nothing was more natural than to establish a close friendship with the tough old Soviet warhorse who was also her boss. Back at the Sparrow compound, she began another rigorous training course: operating a sophisticated “push-pull” transmitter, cooking up explosives, and constructing a variety of timed fuses using electric wire, ignition cord, and an acid that ate through a rubber seal to set off a detonator. In a field outside Moscow, she practiced blowing up railway lines. Some of the instructors were communists who had seen action in Spain, where civil war was raging between Franco’s Nationalists (supported by Hitler) and the Republicans (backed by the Soviet Union). Others were experienced deep-cover agents, teaching “what a partisan operating behind enemy lines must know.” Her colleagues and instructors treated her with respect. She wore the Red Banner, presented by the great Kalinin, pinned to her lapel.

  In her spare time (and without telling her senior officers, who would have disapproved), Ursula wrote a short novel. Based on Sepp “Sober” Weingarten, it told the story of a communist secret agent who falls in love with a White Russian but conceals his true allegiance. The heroine of the story is so awed by the wonders of life in the USSR that she eventually converts to Marxism-Leninism, and they live happily ever after in the Soviet socialist paradise. “The manuscript was really worthless,” she later admitted. But for a piece of clunking communist propaganda, it was surprisingly well written, the work of a natural storyteller.

  Ursula felt the separation from her children keenly, the now-familiar combination of guilt and anxiety. At least the children have each other, she told herself. But would they reject her, as Michael had done after her prolonged earlier absence? She eagerly devoured every letter from Czechoslovakia. She was tormented by the knowledge that some of their earliest memories would be formed without her, but never once did she contemplate abandoning the work. Like every spy, she compartmentalized her different lives: Moscow was one world, motherhood another. There was much to distract her.

  A message came from headquarters. “A good friend of yours is in Moscow and wants to see you, if you agree.”

  “God, you’re as slim as ever,” said Johann, as he threw his arms around her in the lobby of 19 Bolshoi Znamensky Lane. Patra had been brought back from China for a wir
eless refresher course. He would soon be returning to Shanghai.

  Patra blithely expected their relationship to resume after almost two years apart, and immediately asked Ursula to return to China with him. She told him that this was impossible. They might share a child—she proudly showed him photographs of his daughter—but the romantic bond had gone. “In spite of his undoubted qualities, he was even more irritable, hard and intolerant than before.” They parted as friends.

  Many of her German communist comrades were now in Moscow, driven into exile, including Gabo Lewin and Heinz Altmann, who had taught her to shoot in the Grunewald forest back in 1924. Lewin now edited a German-language communist newspaper; Altmann was a journalist. Karl Rimm, Sorge’s replacement in Shanghai, appeared one day at the compound wearing the uniform of a senior officer. She hugged him—“not exactly etiquette”—and they dined together that evening. The happiest reunion was with Grisha Herzberg, the Polish photographer from Shanghai with the dark eyes and mournful manner who was steadily ascending through the ranks of Red Army intelligence. They took a barge trip together on the newly opened Moscow-Volga Canal, their rediscovered friendship only slightly impeded by the restriction that, under the rules, neither could tell the other where they had been, what they had done, or what they might do next. They went swimming and then lay on the banks of the canal, “happy to bask in the unbroken sunshine.”

  Yet a dark shadow loomed across Ursula’s happiness: her friends and colleagues were already being murdered at an astonishing rate.

  Stalin’s Great Purge was one of the most extensive serial-killing sprees in history. Triggered by raging paranoia and a conviction that the revolution was being undermined from within, between 1936 and 1938 the Soviet state arrested 1,548,366 people accused of disloyalty, counterrevolution, sabotage, and espionage. Of these, 681,692 were killed. Most of them were innocent. The NKVD (precursor to the KGB) extracted confessions by torture and forced each victim to name other “enemies of the people,” creating an ever-expanding vortex of suspicion and destruction. The luckier victims were sent to the system of labor camps known as the Gulag. The rest were summarily executed: party officials, intellectuals, the wealthier peasants (kulaks), Poles and other minorities, Trotskyites, semi-Trotskyites, bureaucrats, scientists, priests, Jews, musicians, writers, and anyone else who might, however improbably, pose a threat to Stalin’s authority. Signing off on the daily execution lists, Stalin was heard to remark: “Who is going to remember this riffraff in ten, twenty years’ time? No one.”

  The Soviet armed forces were seen as a particular hotbed of treachery, and the military intelligence service, a rival to the NKVD, was accused of harboring fascist spies. The officer class of the Red Army and Navy was virtually wiped out, along with most of the Comintern. Spies were suspect; spies who had contact with foreigners, or were non-Russian, doubly so. And because the NKVD itself was composed of spies, it began to accuse, and then systematically kill, its own people.

  General Yan Berzin’s survival skills finally deserted him: the chief of the Fourth Department was sacked, arrested, and shot in the basement of the Lubyanka, the NKVD headquarters. His predecessor was killed too. His successor lasted just a few days before he, too, was executed. “Unfortunately, comrades in leading positions changed frequently at that time,” Ursula wrote, with grim euphemism. “Unfortunate” does not begin to do justice to the arbitrary and unstoppable carnage. “The whole Fourth Directorate has fallen into German hands,” Stalin declared in May 1937. Of the six military intelligence chiefs between 1937 and 1939, all but one perished. The fabled recruiters of the British communist spies known as the “Cambridge Five” were recalled to Moscow and fed into the grinder.

  Many of the people Ursula most loved and admired were arrested and brutally murdered, one by one, some before her arrival, some during her stay in Moscow, and many more subsequently. German communists who had taken refuge in Russia were killed in the hundreds or sent back to Nazi Germany to meet the same fate. Gabo Lewin, her childhood friend, was convicted of counterrevolutionary activity and sent to the Gulag. Heinz Altmann, who had urged her to join the communist youth league back in 1924, preceded him into captivity. Manfred Stern, whom Ursula met in Shanghai in 1932, had gone on to lead the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War under the nom de guerre “General Kléber.” Stern was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labor, and died in the Gulag in 1954. Jakob Mirov-Abramov, Agnes Smedley’s recruiter, who had admitted Ursula to the Sparrow training camp, was tortured into a confession and shot on November 26, 1937; his wife was executed three months later. Karl Rimm was liquidated in 1938 for membership in a “counter-revolutionary terrorist organization,” swiftly followed by his wife, Luise. Richard Sorge survived because he wisely refused to return from Japan when summoned, and since his bosses were being replaced and killed so fast, he got away with it. The Hungarian journalist Lajos Magyar and the writer Karl Radek—people Ursula revered as the loyal intellectuals of revolution—were summarily dispatched into oblivion. Boris Pilnyak, whose novel Ursula read immediately after Michael’s birth, was accused of being a spy and plotting to kill Stalin; he was tried on April 21, 1938, and executed the same day. Mikhail Borodin died in the Lubyanka after severe torture. Sepp Weingarten vanished. So did Isa Wiedemeyer. Foreign communists in Russia were swept up in the butchery: Agnes Smedley’s ex-husband, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, was sentenced on September 2, 1937, and immediately executed. Stalin’s friendship was no protection. A year after Ursula received her medal from Mikhail Kalinin, his Jewish wife, Ekaterina, was arrested, tortured in Lefortovo Prison, and sent to the camps.

  Ursula later claimed to have been ignorant of the purges, the scale of the bloodletting, the flimsiness of the trumped-up charges, and Stalin’s personal agency in the criminal slaughter. She accepted the myth that capitalist spies were sowing an atmosphere of distrust inside the Soviet Union, making it “no easy matter for those responsible to distinguish between the mistakes of honest comrades and enemy actions.” In the jargon of mass slaughter, “mistakes” was a weasel word used to justify executions based on no real evidence.

  But Ursula knew that her friends and colleagues were being annihilated, and that they were innocent. She later wrote: “I was convinced that they were communists and not enemies.” She did not say so at the time. She did not inquire what they had been accused of, or where they had gone, for to display any form of curiosity was itself an invitation to death. Like millions of others, she kept her mouth shut, uttered no word of remonstrance, and wondered who would be next.

  Grisha Herzberg disappeared, suddenly and completely, soon after the idyllic day spent sunbathing with Ursula on the banks of the Moscow-Volga Canal. The date and place of his execution are unknown. Like so many others, the thirty-two-year-old Pole simply vanished overnight. They had arranged to meet for dinner. Grisha did not appear. Ursula did not inquire of the Center where he had gone. It would be years before she dared to mention his name again.

  Ursula was terrified, secretly. She had faced danger before, but nothing like the insidious, pervasive dread of awaiting false accusation of treachery. As a foreign-born spy with links to many of those liquidated, she was in mortal danger. The threat from the Soviet state was far greater than anything she had faced from the enemies of communism. Her gender was no protection, for Stalin was an equal-opportunity murderer. A request to return to Poland might be seen as an admission of guilt. Like many people faced with a horror too unspeakable to name, Ursula chose to pretend it was not happening, that her friends would return and that those who did not must have made mistakes. She looked away, while constantly looking behind herself.

  How she survived is a mystery. She put it down to luck, but there was more to it than that. Ursula had a remarkable capacity to inspire loyalty. In a profession based on deception and duplicity, she was never betrayed. Victims of the purges were encouraged to identify other traitors, but Ursula was never deno
unced. Years later she concluded that someone must have “held a protective hand over me.” That “someone” was Colonel Tumanyan, the Armenian-Georgian veteran who had steered Ursula’s career through Manchuria and Poland. Tums had always watched Ursula’s back, and he had faithfully guarded her secrets. He knew about her relationship with Patra and her troubled marriage, her struggle to balance espionage with daily domestic life. “He was the sort of person with whom you could discuss such things,” and although he always “maintained the authority of his military rank,” behind the dark eyes was a sensitive soul. She had come to see him as a friend. As long as Tumanyan was in command, she felt safe.

  And then, like so many others, Tumanyan was gone.

  Ursula was summoned to the Center, to find her boss’s office stripped of his personal effects and a heavily built man in the uniform of a colonel seated at his desk, with shaven head and deep-set eyes, who stated impassively that Colonel Tumanyan had been given a “new assignment.” She never discovered what had happened to Tums, and the expression on the face of her new boss suggested it would be extremely unwise to ask.

  Khadzi-Umar Mamsurov, known as “Comrade Hadshi,” was the son of Muslim peasants from North Ossetia, and one of the toughest fighters in the Red Army. During the Spanish Civil War he led a partisan unit behind Nationalist lines, where his reputation for ruthlessness won him literary immortality: Ernest Hemingway based Robert Jordan, the main character in For Whom the Bell Tolls, partly on Umar Mamsurov.

  Colonel Mamsurov was a skilled office politician who had adapted the techniques of guerrilla fighting to the treacherous terrain of Stalinist bureaucracy, and would rise to become deputy head of Soviet military intelligence. Ursula came to admire his indestructible resilience, but he had none of Tumanyan’s sensitivity. Comrade Hadshi was not watching Ursula’s back. He was too busy watching his own.