The most important training involved the latest American breakthrough in communications technology: a handheld, portable, two-way radio transceiver that made ground-to-air communications possible for the first time. A predecessor of the mobile telephone, the equipment had been designed at the RCA electronics laboratories in New York before being refined and developed for the OSS by De Witt R. Goddard and Lieutenant Commander Stephen H. Simpson. The device would eventually become known as a “walkie-talkie,” but at the time of its invention this pioneering gizmo went by a more cumbersome and quaint title: the “Joan-Eleanor system.” “Joan” was the name for the handheld transmitter carried by the agent in the field, six inches long and weighing three pounds, with a collapsible antenna; “Eleanor” referred to the larger airborne transceiver carried on an aircraft flying overhead at a prearranged time. Goddard’s wife was named Eleanor, and Joan, a major in the Women’s Army Corps, was Simpson’s girlfriend. The Joan-Eleanor (J-E) system operated at frequencies above 250 MHz, far higher than the Germans could monitor. This prototype VHF (very high frequency) radio enabled the users to communicate for up to twenty minutes in plain speech, cutting out the need for Morse code, encryption, and the sort of complex radio training Ursula had undergone. The words of the spy on the ground were picked up and taped on a wire recorder by an operator housed in a special oxygen-fed compartment in the fuselage of an adapted high-speed de Havilland Mosquito bomber flying at over twenty-five thousand feet, outside the range of German anti-aircraft artillery. An intelligence officer aboard the circling aircraft could communicate directly with the agent below. As a system of communication from behind enemy lines, the J-E was unprecedented, undetectable by the enemy, easy to use, and so secret that it would not be declassified until 1976. At the Ruislip training school the German volunteers learned to use Joan, while aircrews of the Twenty-five Bomber Group based at RAF Watton were instructed on handling Eleanor, under the code name “Redstocking.” The call sign from Joan to Eleanor would be “Heinz”; the corresponding call sign from Eleanor to Joan would be “Vic.” Special coded messages on the BBC, in numbers, would indicate to the agents inside Germany when to make transmissions and when and where to expect airdrops: the signal that there was about to be a broadcast of coded information relevant to the Tool missions was a burst of “Rustle of Spring,” the popular solo piano piece written by Norwegian composer Christian Sinding.
On November 22, Simpson carried out the first operational test of the system by successfully recording transmissions from an OSS agent code-named “Bobbie” while circling at thirty thousand feet over Nazi-occupied Holland.
Washington was delighted with the way the mission was progressing. And so was Moscow.
At regular intervals, each of the German volunteers met Henschke in Hampstead. Paul Lindner described being “sworn in” as a GRU agent. “As of today,” Henschke declared over a pint in the Wells Tavern, “you must remember you are working for our Soviet friends, and you must consider all questions as if you were under the command of the Red Army.” Toni Ruh was enlisted with the same formality and passed on everything he learned “in the greatest detail” to the cutout: “We had to make reports to Comrade Henschke about all methods used in the school, also about the education in parachuting, about the task assignments, about our work in the prisoner-of-war camps and also about details from this [J-E] apparatus which we also did on an on-going basis.” Henschke passed on the information to Ursula, who funneled it to Moscow. The Tool spies never met the woman sending those reports and pulling the strings, their secret spymistress.
Through Ursula, the Center knew almost as much about the Tool missions as the OSS, and much more than MI6: Moscow learned the false identities of the spies, their fake papers and clothing, their equipment, and the scheduled times of their transmissions. The Red Army knew where and when the spies would be landing, their contacts in the anti-Nazi resistance, and the real meanings of Redstocking, Hammer, and Buzzsaw; they even knew the numerical code system and the piano music that the BBC would broadcast to alert the agents on the ground to their instructions. With the Cold War looming, here was an inside track on how the Americans organized clandestine operations, OSS training methods, and personnel. But the most interesting aspect of the mission to Moscow was the Joan-Eleanor system. Russia had no such technology. Ursula’s spies might drop it into the lap of the GRU.
“I reported all the details to the Centre, and the Director confirmed his interest,” Ursula wrote. America was about to launch the last great intelligence operation of the war, and, unknown to anyone in the OSS, the Russians had a secret front-row seat.
Gould was impressed by the Tool recruits, and, like every spymaster, he felt a strong personal bond with his agents, particularly Paul Lindner and Toni Ruh, the two-man team on the Hammer mission destined to drop into Berlin, the heart of the Reich. Gould wondered if he was committing “the professional sin of growing too close to these men.” He compiled detailed descriptions of both. Paul Lindner: “Face: Squarish; Complexion: usually pale. Subject notes that the fitter he feels, the more often he is asked if he is ill; will wrinkle brow when hunting for a word, may toss head occasionally; Distinguishing marks: red mark to right of nose bridge and under left eye, received from knuckle ring at hands of Nazis; also bayonet scar, upper right-hand buttock from SA handling in 1933.” Then there was Toni Ruh, “a large man with greying hair and a quiet, reassuring solidity.”
“This was a balanced team,” wrote Gould. The two principal actors in the Hammer production were ideally cast in their respective roles, reflected Gould, who was entirely unaware they were following a very different script, and an invisible stage manager was directing everything from the wings. The Center instructed Ursula to focus on the Tool missions and do everything necessary to get the Joan-Eleanor system into Russian hands.
Within MI5, only Milicent Bagot picked up the scent of what was really going on, and then only the faintest whiff. The indefatigable sleuth of section F2c was not privy to the OSS missions, but she had been watching Erich Henschke, or Karl Kastro, for some time. In September 1943, she noted that although “undoubtedly a lifelong communist with strong Marxist convictions, this man has so far not given any trouble…he appears to live a quiet life.” Her assessment was amended a year later, when an MI5 spy inside the Free Germany Movement reported that Kastro was not the innocent ice cream maker he appeared: “Kastro was connected to the Thälmann circle [and] received military training in the USSR and was part of the military apparat [unit] of the communist party [the Rotfrontkämpferbund, or Alliance of Red Front-Fighters].” She sent a note of warning to MI6: “Kastro is said to be an assumed name….[He] has been described as a ‘brutal and violent type.’ ” Milicent Bagot put Karl Kastro under surveillance. She did not trust Kastro and she had long suspected Ursula: if she caught them together, the game would be up.
While Gould saw no reason to question the loyalty of his recruits, the chill of the Cold War was already blowing through parts of the Allied wartime establishment. MI5 regarded the Free German League of Culture as a communist front. The OSS officer Bill Casey, the granite-minded lawyer in charge of the Secret Intelligence section who would go on to run the CIA, feared that some of those recruited for this highly sensitive mission might be communists. Casey’s misgivings brought him into conflict with Arthur Goldberg of the Labor Branch, who pointed out that the OSS was specifically intended to recruit “irregular forces,” including, presumably, people with irregular views. The dispute was referred upward to Major General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, founder and chief of the OSS.
Donovan was a man who relished battle: he had fought Pancho Villa in Mexico, the Germans in the First World War, J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, and, as New York district attorney, the bootleggers during Prohibition. He had modeled his OSS directly on MI6. Donovan was a swashbuckler, more piratical than political. “Excitement made him snort like a racehorse,” and the Too
l missions chimed perfectly with his “brave, noble, headlong, gleeful, sometimes outrageous pursuit of action and skulduggery.” Like Gould, he did not give a damn about the politics of the agents, observing that he would “put Stalin on the OSS payroll if it would help defeat Hitler.” He had no idea, of course, that Stalin’s agents already were on the Tool payroll. Donovan overruled Casey. The mission went ahead.
The same robust (or naïve) attitude influenced the American decision to employ one of the most prominent German communists in Britain on a top secret project of crucial importance. In November 1944, with the end in sight, the U.S. secretary of war ordered the creation of a new body to assess the economic damage being inflicted on Germany by Allied bombing, and to report on how far that campaign was eroding military, industrial, and agricultural production. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) did this in various ways: aerial surveillance, media reports, and even civilian nutrition offered clues to the effectiveness of the destruction; by carefully monitoring the serial numbers of destroyed tanks and planes, it could assess the level of arms production; freight train timetables were another index of economic health. There were some brilliant minds on the staff of the USSBS, including Richard Ruggles, a future economics professor at Harvard, and the celebrated liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith. But what the survey team needed most was someone who understood the German economy firsthand and could provide a detailed, statistical insight into Hitler’s arms industry and other key facets of Nazi production. There was only one such German in London.
Jürgen Kuczynski had just published the latest volume of his History of Labour Conditions, a detailed analysis of the German economy since 1933. In September, he received a letter inviting him to the American embassy, where he was offered a job on the USSBS, a substantial salary, a smart American uniform, and the rank of lieutenant colonel. He asked for “time to think it over.” That time, of course, was used to alert Ursula, who immediately informed the Center: “The reply came quickly. They were interested.” Brother and sister were now both colonels, in different armies.
The Tool agents were semisecret communists. Jürgen Kuczynski was an extremely public one. Even Roger Hollis, the head of MI5’s antisubversion section who had consistently played down the threat posed by Kuczynski, felt moved to issue a warning that “those who make use of his services should be aware that his conclusions on economic conditions in Germany may be influenced by his political beliefs.”
The USSBS would eventually compile 208 volumes of analysis, detailing the “decisive” impact of Allied strategic bombing. Only five members of the survey, including Jürgen, had access to the full reports, which were passed on to Roosevelt, Churchill, and Generals Eisenhower and Donovan. And Stalin. The Center gave Ursula a personal assurance that this intelligence haul, offering the clearest possible picture of Germany’s economic disintegration, was going straight to “the Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Army, J. V. Stalin.”
As the war raced to its bloody finale, Ursula was swept up in an exhausting whirlwind of espionage, child-rearing, and housework: on any given day she might be coordinating intelligence gathered from her father, brother, Tom, the chemist, and others in her network, gathering intelligence from the Tool missions, while hanging out the washing, doing the dishes, and struggling to keep the domestic ship afloat at Avenue Cottage. Melita Norwood produced a steady flow of intelligence from the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, which was now helping produce a plutonium reactor for the atomic bomb project. In a letter dictated to his personal assistant, Miss Norwood, G. L. Bailey reassured the government that his team would adhere to the “strictest secrecy [and] precautions will be taken to ensure that no unauthorized person obtains information.” Letty also typed up minutes from the Tube Alloys meetings and made an extra carbon copy for Sonya.
Michael was an inquisitive and intelligent teenager. How long, Ursula wondered, could she go on concealing her “nocturnal transmissions” from him? With a heavy heart, she sent him to boarding school in Eastbourne, telling herself it was best for the boy. Michael still yearned for his father. “Gradually, as the years passed, I realized he wasn’t coming back. I missed him terribly. My mother hardly ever talked about him.” When she traveled to London to meet Sergei she had to find a babysitter for the younger children. Ursula’s mother occasionally stepped in to help, but in September Berta came down with pneumonia. “Whatever happens, you should stay in hospital as long as the doctors think fit,” Ursula wrote. On the nights she transmitted to Moscow she worked into the early hours, wondering if the radio interception vans were prowling nearby. Every scrap of paper used for coding and decoding she burned in the fireplace. To try to alleviate the load, she sent seven-year-old Nina to a boarding school near Epping Forest. After a few weeks, the child developed a burst appendix and was rushed to a hospital, close to death. For three days and nights Ursula sat at her bedside, tortured with guilt, and then brought her daughter home. “I swore I would never send her away again.”
Len was not around to share the twin burdens of parenthood and spying, having finally been called up for RAF training. Whenever she could get away, Ursula cycled the twenty-five miles to visit Trainee Aircraftman Beurton in his barracks, but found him grumpy and bored. “Seeing each other twice a month is just not good enough,” she wrote. He was rejected for both pilot training and, ironically enough, radio operations. His request to be transferred to a fighting unit was also turned down. Behind the scenes, MI5 quietly blocked his every application. Milicent Bagot and her team were not going to let Beurton out of the country. “Rather gloomy letters from Len,” Ursula told her mother. Those morose letters were also being read by MI5. “I am arranging for him to be kept under observation,” wrote Shillito, adding that the surveillance would be discreet. “I do not want any action taken that would indicate to Beurton that his case is not being dealt with in a normal manner.”
In her optimistic moments, Ursula consoled herself that the Red Army was closing in on Berlin, the revolution would triumph, and a communist Germany would rise from the ruins. But in her darker hours, when the baby was crying and the mountain of radio work seemed insurmountable, she wondered if the war would ever end. Ursula was now a single mother, and a single spy. As always when her spirits were low, she turned in on herself, unwilling to let others glimpse the shadow of depression, the strain of her secret life. She confided in no one. Her habits of deception extended to her own feelings. In her darkest moments she lamented the impact the strange life she had chosen was having on her children, particularly Michael, who had spent his earliest years moving from country to country, language to language, with a succession of men who were not his father. “He should have had a different mother,” she wrote. “He should have spent his whole childhood in one place, with a father coming home in the evening, and a mother always there for him.”
Like every good communist, Ursula believed in anniversaries. On November 7, the date of the Bolshevik Revolution, she left the children with a neighbor and traveled to London to meet Sergei, who passed on anniversary greetings from the GRU director. She would have bought a red rose but there were none to be had in wartime Britain. Ursula returned to Avenue Cottage, cold and lonely. “I couldn’t celebrate the day with anyone. My thoughts returned to the past.”
It was almost two years since she had heard from Rudi Hamburger. She dared not ask Moscow what had become of him; and the Center would not have told her if she had. She feared he might be dead, but kept her fears from Michael and the other children. It was even longer since she had received word from Johann Patra. Agnes Smedley was back in America, living in a writers’ colony in upstate New York and still propagandizing vigorously on behalf of Chinese communism. Ursula still had no idea of the fates of Shushin, Grisha, and Tumanyan. Alexander Foote and Sandor Radó must still be spying in Switzerland, if they had not yet been caught. All that remained to her of Richard Sorge was a single tattered photograp
h.
On the other side of the world, in the condemned cell of Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison, Ursula’s recruiter waited for the hangman.
Richard Sorge’s spy network in Japan had achieved espionage miracles. Posing as an avid Nazi, whoring and boozing his way around Tokyo, Sorge penetrated both the German embassy and the cabinet of the Japanese prime minister, extracting the innermost secrets of both. In 1941, he had been able to reassure Moscow that Japan was unwilling and unable to invade Siberia, freeing up vital Soviet forces for the defense of Moscow. Two days before Operation Barbarossa, he had sent a message to the Center warning that “war between Germany and the USSR is inevitable.” But Stalin, ungrateful and mistrustful, had dismissed Sorge’s report of an imminent German attack as a false alarm.
When the Germans began to suspect Sorge might be batting for the other side, the vicious Gestapo colonel Josef Meisinger, a standout Nazi monster in a crowded field, was sent to investigate. Sorge quickly neutralized the threat by taking Meisinger on bibulous tours of Tokyo’s nightlife.
Agent Sonya Page 30