Books
Review: Agent Sonya
If you are gripped by the novels of John le Carré, you will find Ben Macintyre’s latest book irresistible
October 15, 2020 12:15
If you are gripped by the novels of John le Carré, you will find Ben Macintyre’s latest book irresistible
October 15, 2020 12:15Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy by Ben Macintyre (Viking, £25)
If you are gripped by the novels of John le Carré, you will find Ben Macintyre’s latest book irresistible. But, as in so much of Macintyre’s work, the story of “Sonya” — a German Jewish girl (real name Ursula) who became a top spy for Stalin’s Soviet Union — is not fiction. And the book’s impressive range of photographs and written sources attest to its truth.
Ursula was the second of the six children of Robert and Berta Kuczynski, left-leaning, secular Jews living in Berlin. Born in 1907, Ursula (unlike her Marxist older brother Jürgen) was denied an academic education. Growing up a sulky but energetic teenager pouring out poems and short stories, she described herself as “grumpy and growling…with a Jew’s nose and clumsy limbs”.
As the political situation in post-First World War Germany deteriorated, with the thwarted attempt at a Soviet-style revolution by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the murder of Walther Rathenau, and the Beerhall Putsch of that rising star of Fascism Adolf Hitler, Ursula, by her late teens, felt the best hope lay in joining the German Communist Party (KPD).
After a year in New York, she returned to Berlin, married a sensible young German Jewish architect named Rudi Hamburger and the pair went off to Shanghai, where, installed amid the city’s wealthy and elegant European enclave, Rudi had a professional contract to fulfil.
Ursula soon produced a son, Michael, whom she adored. But, appalled by the desperation and poverty she saw among the native population and the barbarity of the Chinese Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek, she began to undertake intelligence work, as “Agent Sonya”, for the USSR.
With Japan’s invasion of China and Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, “Sonya” was moved by her Moscow-based bosses to a series of high-risk locations, from Japanese-occupied “Manchukuo” to Poland and spy-infested Switzerland, acquiring en route a succession of secret service colleagues (and lovers) and adopting various innocent-looking identities with which to worm her way into the local elite and transmit all she learned back to Russia. Ursula acquired two more children and it is touching to read how her deepest emotions were often torn between the requirements of her two core commitments: parenthood, and the belief that the road to world peace lay along the path of communism.
Towards the end of the book, having followed her family to England, Ursula/Sonya has become “Mrs Burton” a quiet housewife and mother living with a Mr Burton unobtrusively in wartime Oxfordshire baking excellent cakes.
Every so often she cycles off into the nearby countryside — to deliver secret information to the Soviets obtained from the leading atomic physicist and superspy, Klaus Fuchs, about the creation of nuclear weaponry. “Sonja” the passionate Jewish believer in peace, having helped Stalin defeat Hitler, thereby helped usher in the Cold War.
Daniel Snowman is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research (University of London)