Hiding Her Light Under a Bustle: Agent Sonya

Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy by Ben MacIntyre

Viking

Pp.328

Spies, especially female spies, capture the imagination. Ursula Kuczynski, codenamed Sonya, was a German Jew, a dedicated communist, a colonel in Russia’s Red Army, and a highly trained spy. From planning an assassination attempt on Hitler in Switzerland to spying on the Japanese in Manchuria and helping the Soviet Union build the atom bomb, Sonya conducted some of the most dangerous espionage operations of the twentieth century. Ursula Kuczynski married several times – she had many names, both real names and codenames. The novel is subtitled ‘Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy’, and, although she had many lovers, none of her partners ever betrayed her. MacIntyre, meanwhile, is obsessed with her conflicting duties towards the party and her family, which he embodies by talking about making jam and baking cakes.

Ursula had a relatively comfortable and privileged background, and became a communist through ideology. She moved to Shanghai, where she was appalled by the discrepancy in conditions caused by wealth. Bored and sickened by her life in Shanghai, she was anxious to do something more meaningful. She was clearly passionately idealistic, but with sexism bordering on misogyny, MacIntyre is unable to believe that she supported the Communist cause for reasons of ideology alone and frequently espouses the theory that she was attracted to the glamour and the excitement of espionage. “Ursula was committed to communism, but also increasingly addicted to danger, the romance of risk, the addictive drug of secrecy.”

Throughout the book he clearly points us in a certain direction, editorialising in a blunt fashion as if he doesn’t trust the reader to make up their own mind, or perhaps he mistakes condescension for humour. He is also critical of other authors, which is spiteful and unprofessional, merely heightening the sense of smugness. There is a lot of repetition, suggesting the lack of a disciplined editor and, whereas this is a great story and would make a great film or novel, this biography has got both a muddled and didactic approach. He sets the scene very well, even if he does it multiple times, and he clearly enjoys the complicated details of the meetings between handlers and recruits in which two people walk towards each other “holding a green book in one hand and a tennis ball in the other, exactly as Sonya had instructed. At 4pm on the dot, a stocky man appeared, wearing a pair of gloves and holding a second pair in his left hand.”

In 1932 when Japanese forces attacked Shanghai, Ursula was “dispatched” to the war zone to discover if Japanese incursions into China presented a potential threat to the Soviet Union. Later she was sent to Mukden, a city in Manchuria in Inner Mongolia (invaded by the Japanese in 1931) “to liaise with the communist partisans, provide them with material assistance, and transmit military and other intelligence to Moscow by radio.” She built her own radios (which she had to bury in the fields) and assembled aerials on the roof (which she had to dismantle each night). She moved to Switzerland, where she ran a spy network, using the “peaceful land of cowbells and cuckoo clocks” as a base to launch operations into enemy territory. 

Threatened by possible exposure, she left Switzerland and took her family to England where she settled in Oxfordshire. When Ursula moved to Great Rollright, she cycled into the countryside to put messages in a hollow tree and receive drops with her instructions, but there were no communications and she began to worry. Basically, the GRU had got the wrong tree. After the war, Ursula continued to spy for the Communist Party, and in 1949, she went to Berlin where she continued her work in East Germany. She worked with many ‘famous’ spies, including Alexander Foote, a radio operator who spied for Russia and Britain, and Klaus Fuchs, who supplied information from the American, British and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after WWII.

It seems incredible that Ursula was not caught. Her brother and father were already under surveillance by MI5 and the whole family were considered suspicious. She had been made a colonel in the Red Army – the only woman to rise so high in Soviet military intelligence. All of her previous husbands, lovers and many of her recruits were interrogated, but none betrayed her. Many men couldn’t comprehend that a woman could be a spy. MacIntyre writes, “Some in MI5 wondered how Ursula could possibly have time to spy since ‘her hands are fairly full with domestic duties.’”

She became dissatisfied with the Communist regime due to instances such as Stalin’s Great Purge, the crushing of the Hungarian revolt against Moscow in 1956, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and the put down of the Prague Spring in 1968, but she still believed she was helping to make the world a safer place by stealing atomic secrets from one side and sharing them with the other. Her own children did not know anything about her life as a spy until she published an autobiography, Sonja’s Rapport in 1977, which would probably be a great read. MacInytre’s attempt to place her experiences into a domestic and female context is clearly done for dramatic effect, but somehow manages to undermine the commitment and consequences of this remarkable woman.