Agent Sonya

by Ben MacIntyre

  But Ursula’s life had one more surprising chapter. In 1956, she became a full-time writer, adopting yet another name, a new vocation, and a fresh identity. Henceforth she would be Ruth Werner, novelist.

  Ursula had written from earliest childhood, channeling a vivid imagination into her stories of romance and adventure. Spies and novelists are not so very different: each conjures up an imagined world and attempts to lure others into it. Some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century were also spies, including Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Ian Fleming, and John le Carré. In many ways Ursula’s life had been a fiction, presenting one sort of person to the world, while being someone else in reality. As Ruth Werner she became, once again, another person.

  Ursula went on to write fourteen books, mostly stories for children and young adults. These were labeled as fiction, but they were richly autobiographical, depicting her experiences as a young communist in Berlin, her love affairs, her life in China and Switzerland. The books were partly a ruse to circumvent the East German censors and write about her secret life, but they also fed an inner compulsion. She had always seen herself as the central character in her own rolling drama; she was a natural thriller writer, in life and on paper. Ursula was careful to disguise identities, but these tales were, in essence, true, beautifully written, and closely observed descriptions of an adventurous, incident-packed life. They sold extremely well; several were bestsellers. Ursula became far more famous as Ruth Werner, a pseudonym picked at random, than she would ever be under her own name.

  In 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, he was denounced by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, and the truth about the full horror of the purges began to emerge. Ursula was appalled, and furious, to learn about Stalin’s crimes and the extent of the criminal butchery. “I lost so many friends,” she wrote. Back in 1937, in Moscow, she had known that innocent men and women were being murdered, including many of those closest to her, but she had not protested. To have done so would have been suicidal. Like millions of others, she had looked away and got on with her job. She suffered survivor’s guilt. “Why I was left unscathed? I don’t know, perhaps because the choice of so-called guilty ones was a matter of chance.”

  The year that Ursula switched careers and changed her name, Rudolf Hamburger finally emerged from the Gulag.

  For ten years, Rudi took notes and drew sketches, recording his hunger, exhaustion, cold, boredom, and love as one of 1.5 million prisoners in the Soviet labor system. In Karaganda Labor Camp on the Kazakh steppes, Rudi met Fatima, an Iranian woman imprisoned after an unauthorized Muslim meeting in her home. She worked in the kitchens. They made love in the stores hut. “In the hasty pleasure of love we can forget the inhumanity of our long exile,” he wrote. Fatima got pregnant and aborted the child. Soon after, Rudi was moved again. “She cries and her black, wet eyes accompany me until the gate is far behind me….Is there still happiness, peace, humanity somewhere in the world?” he wondered. Transferred to a lumber camp in the foothills of the Urals but too weak for forestry work, the once-promising architect performed routine building maintenance. “It all appalls me,” he wrote. “The insignificant tasks I am set, the barracks and barbed wire to prevent me from forgetting where I am, the hunger and the bugs. What do I have to look forward to, if I do survive through to freedom, starved, bitten by beasts, grey-haired, a creature alienated from life and work? But Fatima was right—do not give up. To give up is death.” A fellow inmate received four kilos of sugar from home, sat on his bed, consumed it in a single sitting, and immediately died: suicide by sugar. In 1951, Rudi was transferred to yet another camp, whose inmates were constructing the world’s largest hydroelectric power plant, and then back to the “dreaded Urals.”

  In 1953, Rudolf Hamburger was formally released, into an alternative captivity. He could not leave the Soviet Union. “Where do you want to go?” he was asked. He had no passport, and only his discharge papers to identify himself. “What do I know of this country after nine and a half years of hermetic seclusion? I am like a blind man asked if he wants his room painted red or blue.” He wound up in the small Ukrainian city of Millerovo, managing a construction site. By now, Ursula and others knew of his whereabouts and were lobbying for his return to Germany, but Rudi did not fit into the defined bureaucratic categories, being neither a prisoner of war nor a refugee from Nazi Germany. It would take another two years before the paperwork was completed.

  Finally, in July 1955, Rudi Hamburger returned to Berlin. Ursula had told her children he was “coming back after a long stay in the Soviet Union.” Michael had last seen his father sixteen years earlier. Ursula also took this opportunity to explain to her daughter that her father was not Rudi, as she always believed, but a Lithuanian sailor she knew nothing about. Fifteen-year-old Nina responded primly: “Mummy, I am not at all happy that you had so many men.”

  Rudi had been damaged by a decade of captivity, but not destroyed. “It was not a broken man that I met, but he had changed from the picture I had of him,” Ursula wrote. “Greying, slightly bowed, a brittle voice, and dazed, like a man emerging from a cellar into the light, a semi-stranger with a smile that hid a touch of melancholy.” His politics unchanged, Hamburger joined the communist-dominated ruling Socialist Unity Party. “Perhaps we will develop in the future a completely new, unprecedented type of human being, a man born of the new economic system,” he wrote. He settled in Dresden, where he was employed as an architect by the city council. Rudi never spoke of his experience in the camps, remarking only (and, in a way, accurately) that he had “worked on Soviet construction sites.” Michael did not discover his father had been in the Gulag until the 1970s.

  In 1958, Rudi Hamburger was recruited as a Stasi informant, with the code name “Karl Winkler.” His task, as one of the Stasi’s 170,000 snoopers, was to report on his colleagues. He refused to collect and pass on compromising material, but his work for the Stasi was rated “good.” Rudolf Hamburger had been brutally mistreated by the communist espionage system, and he ended up working for it.

  Rudi and Ursula’s son, Michael Hamburger, became one of Germany’s leading Shakespeare scholars. For thirty years, he worked as dramaturge and director at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. Nina Hamburger was a teacher. Peter Beurton, the youngest, became a distinguished biologist-philosopher at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin. Ursula’s children idolized her, did not entirely trust her, and wondered how well they really knew her. “I do not think my mother had us children as cover for her spy work,” said Nina in later life; it was more a question than a statement. Looking back, Peter reflected on the dual, competing drives in his mother’s life: “There were two important things to her, her children and the communist cause. I don’t know what she would have done if she had had to choose between them.” Ursula’s younger son resented the way his mother had seemed to dig out her children’s secrets. “She always asked two questions too many. She always wanted to know a little more than I wanted to tell. There was always a tension. My sister told her everything. My brother told her nothing, and kept his secrets hidden.”

  For Michael, in particular, an extraordinary childhood left deep scars. The father he adored had disappeared, inexplicably, for most of his youth. His mother was not the person she had seemed. The knowledge that she had risked her children for her cause haunted him. “She did what she did out of conviction, for the liberation of mankind, and I am proud of her for that. But if she had been caught in Poland, I would have been packed off to an orphanage, or worse. That thought still gives me tremors.” By the age of ten he had lived in six different countries and more than a dozen homes. The family life Michael remembered with such poignancy had been riddled with secrets. “I have been married and divorced three times,” Michael Hamburger said at the age of eighty-eight. “Perhaps I never really learned to trust anyone.” He died in January 2020, soon after reading the manuscript of this book.

  In 1966, another
of Ursula’s lovers lurched back into her life. Johann Patra was now living in Brazil with his wife and son, working as an electrical engineer, and growing vegetables on a small farm. “As you know, I’ve never been interested in material wealth,” he wrote to her. He spoke of emigrating to East Germany. Ursula invited him to visit, but warned that he might find it hard to adapt. The following January, a gaunt, trembling figure she hardly recognized appeared at the door. “He was close to a breakdown. He could not speak. Nor, for that matter, could I.”

  When Johann had recovered his composure, he described his life. The Center had never reestablished contact with him in China, but he had maintained links with the communists and discovered the fate of the Mukden network. “Shushin was killed; she didn’t betray anyone; her husband was arrested a little later, I don’t know what they did to him, but he lost his mind and is supposed to have confessed.” No one knew what had become of their children. In 1949, with the final defeat of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and the founding of the People’s Republic, all foreigners had been forced to leave China. He felt homesick for Europe. They talked for hours, but Ursula sensed an unbridgeable gulf. “We were strangers to each other.” Patra remained an inflexible Marxist. “He was not prepared to consider other opinions. It was like talking to a brick wall. But all his good qualities were still there: his will-power, his self-sacrifice, his compassion.” It struck her again that their relationship would never have worked; he left without ever meeting his daughter, Nina. From São Paulo, Patra wrote a letter explaining that he had changed his mind about coming to Germany, having concluded the revolution would never happen in Europe. “In the GDR, too, middle-class values prevail.”

  In 1977, eleven years later, a package for Ursula arrived from Brazil, a cloth parcel stitched with care. “I weighed it in my hand. The parcel was not heavy. While I was cutting the seams with the scissors, I saw Johann in front of me, sewing it slowly and carefully with a thick needle and coarse thread. The memory brought sadness and pain. A narrow cardboard box, lined with wood shavings and a Brazilian newspaper. What had he sent me?” She removed the last wrappings of tissue paper, and the circular china disk lay in the palm of her hand: the porcelain seller’s gong.

  A month later, she learned that Johann Patra was dead.

  Ursula outlived all her lovers. Len Beurton was never fully comfortable living in East Germany and was prone to bouts of depression. Ursula had recruited him into intelligence, trained him, and married him. He had always been the junior partner, providing solidity and care, but little of the excitement or romance of her earlier loves. Len sometimes talked of returning to the United Kingdom, but he never did. The orphan from Barking never stopped loving the girl he had met, holding a bag of oranges, outside a Swiss supermarket. Len died in 1997 at the age of eighty-three. Rudolf Hamburger died in Dresden in 1980. Ten years later he was posthumously rehabilitated by Moscow. His memoir of the Gulag, Ten Years in the Camps, was published in 2013 and has been described by one critic as “uplifting in its irrepressible hope for humanity.”

  She had loved Rudi for his kindness, Patra for his revolutionary strength, and Len for his long, sweet comradeship. But she had found the love of her life in 1931, screeching through Shanghai on the back of a fast motorbike. The framed photograph of Richard Sorge hung on Ursula’s study wall for the rest of her life. “She was in love with Sorge,” said her son Michael. “She was always in love with him.”

  The communists showered Ursula with honors and acclaim. In 1969, a second Order of the Red Banner followed the first, received in the Kremlin in 1937. She was awarded the National Prize of East Germany, the Order of Karl Marx, the Patriotic Order of Merit, and the Jubilee Medal.

  In 1977, she published an autobiography, Sonya’s Report, revealing that the famous writer had been a prolific spy. Her children were astonished to discover their mother’s past. It was an instant bestseller. The book was written under Stasi control; the prudish state censors told her to remove the parts relating to her unconventional love life. She refused: “I have no reason to feel ashamed on moral or ethical grounds. Shame on you for demanding such an omission.” Even so, the final book was partly a work of communist propaganda. The original, unexpurgated version, including what the state did not want her to reveal, is in the Stasi archives. At the age of eighty-four, she was permitted to travel to Britain to publicize her memoirs. Some MPs called for her arrest, but the attorney general ruled against prosecution. An embarrassing trial was the last thing MI5 wanted.

  Ursula’s communist convictions mellowed, adjusted, and gently dissipated, but it never evaporated. Her faith was profoundly shaken by discovering the truth about Stalin’s Great Purge, but she defended her past: “I had not worked those twenty years with Stalin in mind.” Her enemy, she insisted, was always fascism. “For that reason I hold my head up high.” Yet she was too much of a realist to pretend that Soviet communism truly reflected the ideals she had espoused as a teenager. The crushing of the Hungarian revolt against Moscow in 1956; the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, ostensibly to keep fascists out of East Germany but in reality to prevent its citizens from escaping; the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to destroy the fledgling reform movement: Ursula witnessed these events with mounting anxiety. By the 1970s, she had come to the realization, in her words, “that what we thought was socialism was fatally flawed.”

  Looking back over her life, she accepted she had been naïve. In old age she condemned “the dogmatism within the party which increased with the years, the exaggeration of our achievements and the covering up of our faults, the isolation of the politburo from the people.” She felt “bitterness against the party leaders who could manipulate me and mislead me” and wondered if she should have distanced herself from the decaying East German regime. She admitted she had “knuckled under to what I knew was wrong” and taken advantage of the opportunities offered by the state. “I fought the ills that were known to me, but only to the extent that would permit me to keep my party membership and to write further books.”

  But even as communism crumbled in the late 1980s, her core left-wing values remained unchanged. “I still believed that a better socialism could be achieved…with glasnost and perestroika, with more democracy instead of dictatorship and absolute power, with realistic economic measures.”

  The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 came as both a shock and a relief. “You cannot divide a nation forever by a wall,” she wrote.

  On October 18, 1989, as the old leadership of the GDR was swept away, eighty-two-year-old Ursula addressed a huge rally in Berlin’s Lustgarten and predicted a new era of reformed communism. “My speech is about loss of trust in the party,” she said, her words interrupted by bursts of applause. “I have to say to you, after the changes that are now happening, go and become part of the Party, work in it, change the future, work as clean socialists! I have courage, I am optimistic because I know it will happen.” It didn’t, leaving Ursula disillusioned for the first time in her life. In a last interview, she was asked how she felt about German reunification and the collapse of communism. “It does not change my own view of how the world should be,” she said. “But it does create in me a certain hopelessness, which I never had before.”

  Ursula Kuczynski was not a feminist. She had no interest in the role or rights of women in the wider world. Like other independent-minded women of her time, she had entered a male-dominated profession and excelled at it, using every possible advantage that her gender gave her. She was impelled by ideology, certainly, but hers was not the sort of communism adopted over sherry in warm Cambridge common rooms by faddish middle-class English undergraduates in the 1930s. Hers was a faith born of painful personal experience: the savage inequalities of Weimar, the horrors of Nazism and a world that left dead babies lying in the streets. She was ambitious, romantic, risk-addicted, occasionally selfish, huge-hearted, and tough as only so
meone who had lived through the worst of twentieth-century history could be. She was never betrayed. Dozens of people—in Germany, China, Poland, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom—had ample opportunity to expose Ursula, and bring her life and espionage to a swift and unpleasant end. None, save Ollo, ever did. For a die-hard communist, she was exceptionally good fun, stylish, and warm. She had a gift for friendship, an ability to inspire enduring loyalty, and a willingness to listen and support people whose opinions were radically different from her own. As a revolutionary, she was surprisingly open-minded. She knew how to love and how to be loved. Like all great survivors, she was fantastically lucky.

  Ursula Kuczynski died on July 7, 2000, at the age of ninety-three.

  A few weeks later, at a ceremony marking the fifty-fifth anniversary of victory in the Second World War, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, signed a decree proclaiming Ursula a “super-agent of military intelligence” and awarding her the Order of Friendship.

  Ursula Kuczynski lived long, as the porcelain mender had predicted. She was ten years old when the Bolshevik Revolution took place and eighty-two when the Berlin Wall came down. Her life spanned the whole of communism, from its tumultuous beginnings to its cataclysmic downfall. She embraced that ideology with the unqualified fervor of youth, and saw it die from the disappointed perspective of extreme old age. She spent her adult life fighting for something she believed to be right, and died knowing that much of it had been wrong. But she still looked back with satisfaction: she had fought Nazism, loved well, raised a family, written a small library of good books, and helped the Soviet Union keep nuclear pace with the West, ensuring a fragile peace. She lived several whole lives in one very long one, a woman of multiple names, numerous roles, and many disguises.