Agent Sonya

by Ben MacIntyre

  But even in oldest age, her unconscious reminded her that she was still, and always had been, a spy: “A nightmare haunts my sleep: the enemy is at my heels and I have no time to destroy the information.”

  KLAUS FUCHS WAS RELEASED AFTER nine years in prison and flew directly to East Germany. Grete Keilson, a Communist Party official and an old acquaintance, greeted him at the airport; they married three months later. Fuchs was feted by the GDR, awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit, the Order of Karl Marx, and the National Prize. Fuchs missed living in the West, but never expressed any regret. He died in 1988. The East German spymaster Markus Wolf wrote that Fuchs had “made the single greatest contribution to Moscow’s ability to build an atom bomb [and] changed the world’s balance of power by breaking America’s nuclear monopoly.” Harry Gold, Fuchs’s KGB handler in the United States, was sentenced to thirty years in prison. He was released after serving half his sentence and spent the rest of his life working as a clinical chemist in the pathology department of John F. Kennedy Hospital in Philadelphia.

  Jim Skardon went on not to catch a succession of spies. He was perplexed that he had “never been given any sort of promotion to senior officer before his retirement in 1961.” Two years later Kim Philby escaped to Moscow and later wrote a memoir mocking Skardon’s “scrupulously courteous” interrogation methods—by which he meant entirely ineffectual. Milicent Bagot remained a pillar of MI5, unsettling her male colleagues by the force of her personality and the depth of her knowledge about communist subversion. She wrote a detailed account of the Comintern’s international machinations and was one of the first officers to raise doubts about Philby’s loyalty. Long after Bagot’s retirement in 1967, MI5 continued to seek her help in rooting out communist spies. She never missed a choir rehearsal and died in 2006. Roger Hollis became director general of MI5 in 1956 and remained in that post until his retirement in 1965. The investigation into whether he had been a GRU mole was ongoing at the time of his death in 1973, and the theory that he was a traitor rumbles on, refusing to die. One good reason to doubt it is Vladimir Putin. Russia’s president, a former KGB colonel, is proud of his country’s espionage history. If Hollis had been a top-level Soviet spy from 1932 until 1965, the GRU files would contain a mass of evidence. None has ever come to light, even though “authorized” Russian historians have, from time to time, been granted access to those archives. Proof that Russia ran a British traitor inside MI5 who was never caught would be a publicity coup of immense value to Moscow. This, then, is the main objection to the theory that Hollis protected Ursula: if the head of MI5 had been a Soviet supermole, Putin would be unable to resist boasting about it.

  Three months after Ursula left Britain, Agnes Smedley died in Oxford after surgery for an ulcer. The Danish writer Karin Michaëlis described her as “a lonely bird of tremendous wingspread, a bird that will never build a nest [who] renounced everything, fame, personal happiness, comfort, safety, for one thing: complete dedication to a great cause.” Her ashes were buried at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Peking in 1951. The full extent of Smedley’s espionage was not revealed until 2005.

  The body of Richard Sorge was exhumed after the war by his Japanese lover, Hanako Ishii, cremated, and reinterred in Tokyo’s Tama Cemetery. He was finally acknowledged by Moscow in 1964, declared a Hero of the Soviet Union, and elevated to cult status by KGB propagandists. In 2016, a Moscow railway station was named after him. Chen Hansheng, Sorge’s closest Chinese collaborator, is regarded as a pioneer of social science in China. His research underpinned Maoist theories on the strength of the “peasant masses,” but he fell afoul of the communist regime and was accused of being a Nationalist spy. Denied medical treatment for glaucoma during the Cultural Revolution, he lost his sight. Chen died in 2004 at the age of 107. The novelist Ding Ling, Ursula’s friend in Shanghai, wrote some three hundred books and suffered the full gamut of persecution under Chinese communism: Mao’s initial approval, then condemnation for criticizing the party’s male chauvinism, enforced public self-confession, censorship, imprisonment for five years during the Cultural Revolution, forced labor for twelve more, and finally rehabilitation in 1978. Patrick T. Givens, the cheerful Shanghai spy hunter, left the Municipal Police in 1936 and retired to the three-hundred-year-old Bansha Castle in Tipperary. Hadshi Mamsurov, Ursula’s boss at the GRU, survived the purges, the lethal infighting inside Soviet intelligence, and the war; he formed the “Spetznaz” special forces, liberated two concentration camps, and retired to his native Ossetia with the rank of general. The intrepid American journalist Emily Hahn continued to write for The New Yorker well into her eighties.

  Alexander Foote published his memoirs, Handbook for Spies, disguising Ursula as “Maria Schultz.” MI5 collaborated on the publication, regarding the book as “a successful exercise in anti-Soviet propaganda.” A baseless theory has since emerged that Foote was a double agent, working for MI6 all along. He was given a job in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, and became a friend of the writer and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge. In a rare moment of understatement, Foote described his clerical work as “very tedious” compared to life as a spy. He died in 1956. Sandor Radó was released from a Soviet prison in November 1954, after the death of Stalin, and returned to Hungary. Two years later, he was officially rehabilitated and appointed head of the Hungarian cartographic service, and then professor of cartography at Budapest’s University of Economic Sciences. In 1958, Melita Norwood was secretly awarded the Soviet Red Banner of Labor, the civilian counterpart to Ursula’s military medal. She was identified by MI5 as a security risk in 1965, but not publicly exposed until 1999, when the KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin defected with six trunkloads of files: these described Agent Hola as “a committed, reliable and disciplined agent [who] handed over a very large number of documents of a scientific and technical nature.” When the story broke, she was photographed by the press outside her suburban home laden with shopping and thus memorably dubbed “The Spy Who Came in from the Co-op.” At eighty-seven, she was too elderly to face prosecution. Soon after her exposure, Norwood received a signed copy of Ursula’s autobiography, with a handwritten message from her former handler: “To Letty, Sonya salutes you!”

  Joe Gould resumed his career in the film industry after the war, becoming advertising manager for United Artists Corporation and then Paramount, where he organized publicity for the Hitchcock film Psycho. His last job was as director of public affairs for the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C. In 2009, he was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star for his wartime work.

  The survivors of the Tool missions settled in East Germany after the war. Erich Henschke became editor of the Berliner Zeitung, then a Berlin city councillor, and finally a correspondent for East German state television. Paul Lindner was made editor in chief of Radio Berlin International. Toni Ruh was appointed director of customs for the GDR and then East Germany’s ambassador to Romania, where he killed himself, for reasons unknown, in 1964. Lindner died of natural causes five years later. The Hammer spies were each awarded the Silver Star at a ceremony in 2006 and commended for “gallantry in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service.” Lindner and Ruh were the first German nationals, and the only Soviet spies, to receive American medals for wartime bravery.

  In October 1950, Olga Muth turned up at the British embassy in West Berlin and offered to spill the beans on Ursula Beurton. The former nanny told MI6 that she had worked for the Kuczynskis since 1911. “Ursula started to use the greeting ‘Heil Moscow!’ when she was about 20 years old,” said Ollo, as she launched into a rehearsed denunciation. Muth went on to describe Ursula’s espionage in Poland, Danzig, and Switzerland, her radio equipment, and the secret meetings in the Molehill. She related how her employer had told her “to turn a blind eye to these activities, and to forget all that went on.” Triumphantly, Ollo reached her summation: “Ursula was nothing more or less than a Russian spy.” None
of this was news to MI6, and anyway Ursula was out of reach in East Berlin. British intelligence suspected Ollo’s sudden appearance was a plot orchestrated by Mrs. Beurton herself: “The possibility cannot be excluded that Ursula has sent her to us to discover our present interest in the family.” Olga Muth was politely ushered out of the building. Once again, British officialdom had declined to hear Ollo’s condemnation: the first time, in Switzerland, because she was incomprehensible; and the second because it was suspected she might be Ursula’s spy.

  The four younger Kuczynski sisters, Brigitte, Barbara, Sabine, and Renate, remained in Britain, at first monitored closely by MI5, then tolerated, and finally forgotten by the Security Service. Jürgen Kuczynski renounced British citizenship and settled permanently in East Germany. Appointed a professor at Humboldt University, he founded the Institute for Economic History, sat in the East German Parliament, and ran the Society for the Study of Soviet Culture, instructing its members: “He who hates and despises human progress as it is manifested in the Soviet Union is himself odious and contemptible.” He was an unreconstructed Stalinist who criticized Stalinism in his 1973 memoirs and earned a rebuke from the party; he described himself as a “true party-line dissident.” Jürgen was regarded as a loose cannon by party officials and was even briefly suspected of being an “imperialist agent,” yet he prospered in the new communist state. In 1971, he was appointed adviser on external economic affairs to Erich Honecker, the GDR’s hard-line leader. And he continued to write, compulsively, more than four thousand works in all, including his monumental, forty-volume History of Labour Conditions. He estimated his own output at “roughly 100 books,” proving that his numeracy was no match for his literacy. The vast Kuczynski library, seventy thousand volumes collected by three generations, now occupies one hundred meters of shelving in the Berlin Central Library.

  Jürgen died in 1997 at the age of ninety-two.

  Jürgen and Ursula bickered, competed, resented, and adored each other until the end of their days. After a particularly explosive row, the cause of which is lost to history, he wrote: “Do you really feel that you can seriously jeopardize our relationship! You suggest that I would desert you in a world in which so much dirt is being thrown, or that I could change my relationship to you, something that forms a firm basis in my life….On this matter you won’t be able to change things because the past has too strong a pull.”

  THIS BOOK WOULD HAVE BEEN impossible to write without the help of Ursula’s family and in particular her sons, Peter Beurton and the late Michael Hamburger. Both responded to my inquiries and repeated visits with boundless patience and hospitality. Following Michael’s death in January 2020, his son and daughter, Max and Hannah, kindly took over the complex and time-consuming task of assembling, collating, and copying the family’s large photographic archive.

  John Green, historian and author of the definitive biography of the Kuczynski family, has been unstintingly generous in sharing his expertise, conducting additional research in the German archives, and following up numerous leads. Galina Green of Trend Translations did a superb job of translating Ursula’s books into English. I am also grateful to the staff of the National Archives in Kew and the Bundesarchiv and Stasi archives in Berlin. Robert Hands did another masterful copyedit on the first draft, as he has for each of my last six books, while Cecilia Mackay’s photographic research has been immaculate. I have been fortunate to have access to the work of a number of scholars and academics working in German, including Thomas Kampen, Bernd-Rainer Barth, and Matthew Stibbe. Mikhail Bogdanov and Tom Parfitt were exceptionally helpful in Russia. Andrew Marshall first alerted me to the story of the Tool missions. Several friends and experts (some of whom have asked to not be named) read the manuscript, improving it greatly and saving me from numerous errors; they include Rosie Goldsmith, Jon Halliday, Natascha McElhone, Sandra Pearce, Roland Philipps, and Anne Robinson.

  The publishing teams at Viking and Crown have done another superlative job, in difficult coronavirus times, with great professionalism and enthusiasm. Jonny Geller, my agent, has been a rock of support and wisdom.

  Yet again, my children have accompanied their father on another book marathon with endless good humor and tolerance. I spent much of the lockdown in 1920s Berlin and 1930s Shanghai; my thanks to my beloved Barney, Finn, and Molly for their excellent company throughout the journey. And finally, to Juliet, my love.

  Robert René Kuczynski, Ursula’s father: statistician, bibliophile, and refugee.

  Olga Muth, the family nanny known as “Ollo” (left), with Brigitte, Jürgen, and Ursula Kuczynski, and their mother, Berta (second from right)

  Ursula Maria Kuczynski, age four, in 1910.

  The family home on Schlachtensee lake in the exclusive Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf.

  Ursula as a teenager, reading a book in a tree on the Schlachtensee estate.

  The six Kuczynski siblings (from right to left): Jürgen, Ursula, Brigitte, Barbara, Sabine, and Renate.

  Members of the German Young Communist League marching in the May Day parade, Berlin 1925.

  Ursula selling communist literature from her book barrow in Berlin.

  Rudolf Hamburger, the ambitious young architecture student, at around the time he met Ursula.

  Chinese communists executed during the “White Terror” in Shanghai, 1927.

  A photograph taken by Ursula as she docked in Shanghai harbor: “Encircling the ship in floating tubs were beggars…”

  Agnes Smedley: American radical, revolutionary, novelist, and spy.

  “Portrait of a Pirate”: a photograph taken by the Polish photographer and spy Hirsch Herzberg, alias “Grisha.”

  Playing “see-saw” with a fellow communist spy, probably Richard Sorge, during an excursion to the country outside Shanghai.

  Certificate for the Order of the Red Banner, presented to Ursula in the name “Sophia Genrikovna Gamburger” at the Kremlin in 1937.

  Richard Sorge, Ursula’s recruiter and lover, who was described by Ian Fleming as “the most formidable spy in history.”

  Ursula with the Chinese academic and communist undercover agent Chen Hansheng and his wife.

  Rudi and Ursula, sleeping after a picnic in the countryside, just before her departure for Moscow: the poignant last moments of a marriage.

  Michael Hamburger talking to a canary on board the Norwegian freighter bound for Vladivostok in May 1933.

  Ursula sunbathing on the deck of the SS Conte Verde.

  The house in Mukden. The bamboo poles holding up the aerial for her transmitter can be seen at either end of the roof.

  Ursula’s homemade Morse code tapper, constructed from a metal ruler, a cotton reel, a strip of wood, and a length of copper wire.

  Johann Patra, Ursula’s lover and fellow spy in Japanese-occupied Manchuria.

  A traditional Chinese porcelain mender. As a love token, Ursula gave Johann a gong, similar to the one hanging from the bamboo pole, visible at the left of picture.

  Mao Zedong, General Zhu De, and Agnes Smedley, Yunan Red Army base, 1937.

  Colonel Gaik Lazarevich Tumanyan, head of Soviet military intelligence in Asia and Ursula’s boss from 1933–1938.

  Ursula in about 1935: an unlikely looking Red Army officer.

  General Yan Karlovich Berzin, the chief of the Fourth Department, executed during Stalin’s purges.

  Colonel Khadzi-Umar Mamsurov, known as “Comrade Hadshi,” Ursula’s Soviet spymaster from 1938.

  Len Beurton in 1939. Ursula wrote: “He was twenty-five years old, with thick brown hair, eyebrows that met and clear hazel eyes.”

  Adolf Hitler in the Osteria Bavaria, his favorite Munich restaurant.


  Alexander Allan Foote, Spanish Civil War veteran and opportunist spy.

  Alexander “Sandor” Radó, the Jewish Hungarian cartographer and mastermind of the Rote Drei espionage network in Switzerland.

  La Taupinière, the Molehill, Ursula’s home in the Swiss mountains above Lake Geneva.

  Olga Muth, known as “Ollo,” the family nanny, seen here with Ursula’s sisters Renate and Sabine.

  Nina, Ursula’s daughter by Johann Patra, age two. Ursula used the children’s toys to smuggle radio parts.

  Rudi Hamburger in 1939, soon after his recruitment by Soviet military intelligence.

  Emily “Mickey” Hahn, the intrepid New Yorker correspondent, clad in male attire for a dinner party in Shanghai.