Agent Sonya : Moscow's most daring wartime spy

Title:

Author:

Macintyre, Ben, 1963- author.

Summary:

"The New York Times bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor tells the thrilling true story of the most important female spy in history: an agent code-named "Sonya," who set the stage for the Cold War. In 1942, in a quiet village in the leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple, unassuming life. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her. They didn't know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. They didn't know that her husband was also a spy, or that she was running powerful agents across Europe. Behind the facade of her picturesque life, Burton was a dedicated Communist, a Soviet colonel, and a veteran agent, gathering the scientific secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the bomb. This true-life spy story is a masterpiece about the woman code-named "Sonya." Over the course of her career, she was hunted by the Chinese, the Japanese, the Nazis, MI5, MI6, and the FBI--and she evaded them all. Her story reflects the great ideological clash of the twentieth century--between Communism, Fascism, and Western democracy--and casts new light on the spy battles and shifting allegiances of our own times. With unparalleled access to Sonya's diaries and correspondence and never-before-seen information on her clandestine activities, Ben Macintyre has conjured a page-turning history of a legendary secret agent, a woman who influenced the course of the Cold War and helped plunge the world into a decades-long standoff between nuclear superpowers."-- Publisher.

Edition:

First large print edition.

Contents:

Whirl -- Whore of the Orient -- Agent Ramsay -- When Sonya is Dancing -- The Spies Who Loved Her -- Sparrow -- Aboard the Conte Verde -- Our Woman in Manchuria -- Vagabond Life -- From Peking to Poland -- In for a Penny -- The Molehill -- A Marriage of Convenience -- The Baby Snatcher -- The Happy Time -- Barbarossa -- The Road to Hell -- Atomic Spies -- Milicent of MI5 -- Operation Hammer -- Rustle of Spring -- Great Rollright -- A Very Tough Nut -- Ruth Werner -- Afterword: the lives of others.

Physical Description:

xxi, 582 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates (large print) : illustrations, maps, portraits ; 24 cm

Genre:

Biographies.

Large type books.

Personal Subject:

Werner, Ruth, 1907-2000.

Corporate Subject:

Soviet Union. Glavnoe razvedyvatelʹnoe upravlenie.

Subject Term:

Spies -- Biography.

Espionage, Soviet -- History -- 20th century.

Nuclear weapons -- History -- 20th century.

Cold War.

Publisher:

Random House Large Print ;

Publication Date:

2020

ISBN:

9780593295106

Publication Information:

New York, New York : Random House Large Print ; [2020].

Call Number:

LP 327.12 MACINTYRE

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Item Barcode	Collection	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
33607003384487	New Large Print Nonfiction	327.12 MACINTYRE	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

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Summary

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The "master storyteller" ( San Francisco Chronicle ) behind the New York Times bestseller The Spy and the Traitor uncovers the true story behind one of the Cold War's most intrepid spies.

"[An] immensely exciting, fast-moving account."-- The Washington Post

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Foreign Affairs * Kirkus Reviews * Library Journal

In 1942, in a quiet village in the leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple, unassuming life. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her.

They didn't know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. They didn't know that her husband was also a spy, or that she was running powerful agents across Europe. Behind the facade of her picturesque life, Burton was a dedicated Communist, a Soviet colonel, and a veteran agent, gathering the scientific secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the bomb.

This true-life spy story is a masterpiece about the woman code-named "Sonya." Over the course of her career, she was hunted by the Chinese, the Japanese, the Nazis, MI5, MI6, and the FBI--and she evaded them all. Her story reflects the great ideological clash of the twentieth century--between Communism, Fascism, and Western democracy--and casts new light on the spy battles and shifting allegiances of our own times.

With unparalleled access to Sonya's diaries and correspondence and never-before-seen information on her clandestine activities, Ben Macintyre has conjured a page-turning history of a legendary secret agent, a woman who influenced the course of the Cold War and helped plunge the world into a decades-long standoff between nuclear superpowers.

Author Notes

Ben Macintyre is writer-at-large and associate editor of the Times of London. He is the author of several books including Agent Zigzag, The Man Who Would Be King, The Englishman's Daughter, The Napoleon of Crime, Forgotten Fatherland, A Spy among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, and The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Macintyre (The Spy and the Traitor) recounts the life and career of Soviet intelligence officer Ursula Kuczynski (1907--2000) in this fascinating history. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Germany, Kuczynski was an active communist by the time she was 17. In 1930, she married a young German architect and moved with him to Shanghai, where she was recruited by (and became the lover of) infamous Red Army intelligence agent Richard Sorge, who gave her the code name Sonya and made her a "trusted lieutenant" in his spy network. After further training in the Soviet Union and divorce from her husband, Kuczynski liaised with communist partisans in Manchuria, providing material assistance and sending regular radio messages to Moscow. She also managed operations in Poland and Switzerland before arriving in England in 1941, where she transmitted atomic secrets to the Soviet Union from Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. Upon Fuchs's capture, Kuczynski fled to East Germany, but soon grew disillusioned with Stalin's paranoid brand of communism. After a 20-year career, she became one of the few Soviet agents allowed to leave the spy game alive. Macintyre's richly detailed account, though a bit ponderous at times, shines a new light on two of WWII's most notorious spy rings. Espionage fans will be thrilled. Agent: Jonny Geller, Curtis Brown. (Sept.)

Library Journal Review

Macintyre (writer-at-large, The Times of London) portrays the life of the astonishingly unexpected woman at the center of a 20th-century true spy story. Ursula Kusczynski, born in Berlin in 1907, was a dedicated Jewish Communist. That alone would have placed her in the middle of the tumultuous 20th-century history of Germany. As Macintyre explains, Kusczynski also was a spy for the Soviet Union: running agents, building radios, and transmitting coded messages in China, Poland, Switzerland, and England before, during, and after World War II. All the while her neighbors thought she was an everyday housewife raising three children. She even survived "retiring" from the KGB, and went on to have a successful career, using a pseudonym, as an East German novelist. Using prodigious research from MI5 and Bundesarchiv files, along with family documents and the cooperation of her children, Macintyre has written an insightful portrait of an amazing life. VERDICT This fast-paced historical account reads like a novel, with surprising twists and turns, and will thrill readers until the very last page. Readers who enjoy the writings of Neal Bascomb or Candice Millard, and fans of historical fiction will relish this book.--Laurie Unger Skinner, Highland Park P.L., IL

Excerpts

Chapter 1 Whirl On May 1, 1924, a Berlin policeman smashed his rubber truncheon into the back of a sixteen-year-old girl, and helped to forge a revolutionary. For several hours, thousands of Berliners had been trooping through the city streets in the May Day parade, the annual celebration of the working classes. Their number included many communists, including a large youth delegation. These wore red carnations, carried placards declaring "Hands Off Soviet Russia," and sang communist songs: "We are the Blacksmiths of the Red Future / Our Spirit is Strong / We Hammer out the Keys to Happiness." The government had banned political demonstrations, and police lined the streets, watching sullenly. A handful of fascist brownshirts gathered on a corner to jeer. Scuffles broke out. A bottle sailed through the air. The communists sang louder. At the head of the communist youth group marched a slim girl wearing a worker's cap, two weeks short of her seventeenth birthday. This was Ursula Kuczynski's first street demonstration, and her eyes shone with excitement as she waved her placard and belted out the anthem: "Auf, auf, zum Kampf," rise up, rise up for the struggle. They called her "Whirl," and, as she strode along and sang, Ursula performed a little dance of pure joy. The parade was turning onto Mittelstrasse when the police charged. She remembered a "squeal of car brakes that drowned out the singing, screams, police whistles and shouts of protest. Young people were thrown to the ground, and dragged into trucks." In the tumult, Ursula was sent sprawling on the pavement. She looked up to find a burly policeman towering over her. There were sweat patches under the arms of his green uniform. The man grinned, raised his truncheon, and brought it down with all his force into the small of her back. Her first sensation was one of fury, followed by the most acute pain she had ever experienced. "It hurt so much I couldn't breathe properly." A young communist friend named Gabo Lewin dragged her into a doorway. "It's all right, Whirl," he said, as he rubbed her back where the baton had struck. "You will get through this." Ursula's group had dispersed. Some were under arrest. But several thousand more marchers were approaching up the wide street. Gabo pulled Ursula to her feet and handed her one of the fallen placards. "I continued with the demonstration," she later wrote, "not knowing yet that it was a decision for life." Ursula's mother was furious when her daughter staggered home that night, her clothes torn, a livid black bruise spreading across her back. Berta Kuczynski demanded to know what Ursula was doing, "roaming the streets arm in arm with a band of drunken teenagers and yelling at the top of her voice." "We weren't drunk and we weren't yelling," Ursula retorted. "Who are these teenagers?" Berta demanded. "What do you mean by hanging around with these kinds of people?" " 'These kinds of people' are the local branch of the young communists. I'm a member." Berta sent Ursula straight to her father's study. "I respect every person's right to his or her opinion," Robert Kuczynski told his daughter. "But a seventeen-year-old girl is not mature enough to commit herself politically. I therefore ask you emphatically to return the membership card and delay your decision a few years." Ursula had her answer ready. "If seventeen-year-olds are old enough to work and be exploited, then they are also old enough to fight against exploitation . . . and that's exactly why I have become a communist." Robert Kuczynski was a communist sympathizer, and he rather admired his daughter's spirit, but Ursula was clearly going to be a handful. The Kuczynskis might support the struggle of the working classes, but that did not mean they wanted their daughter mixing with them. This political radicalism was just a passing fad, Robert told Ursula. "In five years you'll laugh about the whole thing." She shot back: "In five years I want to be a doubly good communist." The Kuczynski family was rich, influential, contented, and, like every other Jewish household in Berlin, utterly unaware that within a few years their world would be swept away by war, revolution, and systematic genocide. In 1924, Berlin contained 160,000 Jews, roughly a third of Germany's Jewish population. Robert René Kuczynski (a name hard to spell but easy to pronounce: ko-chin-ski) was Germany's most distinguished demographic statistician, a pioneer in using numerical data to frame social policies. His method for calculating population statistics--the "Kuczynski rate"--is still in use today. Robert's father, a successful banker and president of the Berlin Stock Exchange, bequeathed to his son a passion for books and the money to indulge it. A gentle, fussy scholar, the proud descendant of "six generations of intellectuals," Kuczynski owned the largest private library in Germany. In 1903, Robert married Berta Gradenwitz, another product of the German Jewish commercial intelligentsia, the daughter of a property developer. Berta was an artist, clever and indolent. Ursula's earliest memories of her mother were composed of colors and textures: "Everything shimmering brown and gold. The velvet, her hair, her eyes." Berta was not a talented painter but no one had told her, and so she happily daubed away, devoted to her husband but delegating the tiresome day-to-day business of childcare to servants. Cosmopolitan and secular, the Kuczynskis considered themselves German first and Jewish a distant second. They often spoke English or French at home. The Kuczynskis knew everyone who was anyone in Berlin's left-wing intellectual circles: the Marxist leader Karl Liebknecht, the artists Käthe Kollwitz and Max Liebermann, and Walther Rathenau, the German industrialist and future foreign minister. Albert Einstein was one of Robert's closest friends. On any given evening, a cluster of artists, writers, scientists, politicians, and intellectuals, Jew and gentile alike, gathered around the Kuczynski dining table. Precisely where Robert stood in Germany's bewildering political kaleidoscope was both debatable and variable. His views ranged from left of center to far left, but Robert was slightly too elevated a figure, in his own mind, to be tied down by mere party labels. As Rathenau waspishly observed: "Kuczynski always forms a one-man party and then situates himself on its left wing." For sixteen years he held the post of director of the Statistical Office in the borough of Berlin-Schöneberg, a light burden that left plenty of time for producing academic papers, writing articles for left-wing newspapers, and participating in socially progressive campaigns, notably to improve living conditions in Berlin's slums (which he may or may not have visited). Ursula Maria was the second of Robert and Berta's six children. The first, born three years before her in 1904, was Jürgen, the only boy of the brood. Four sisters would follow Ursula: Brigitte (1910), Barbara (1913), Sabine (1919), and Renate (1923). Brigitte was Ursula's favorite sister, the closest to her in age and politics. There was never any doubt that the male child stood foremost in rank: Jürgen was precocious, clever, highly opinionated, spoiled rotten, and relentlessly patronizing to his younger sisters. He was Ursula's confidant and unstated rival. Describing him as "the best and cleverest person I know," she adored and resented Jürgen in equal measure. In 1913, on the eve of the First World War, the Kuczynskis moved into a large villa on Schlachtensee lake in the exclusive Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf, on the edge of the Grunewald forest. The property, still standing today, was built on land bequeathed by Berta's father. Its spacious grounds swept down to the water, with an orchard, woodland, and a hen coop. An extension was added to accommodate Robert's library. The Kuczynskis employed a cook, a gardener, two more house servants, and, most important, a nanny. Olga Muth, known as Ollo, was more than just a member of the family. She was its bedrock, providing dull, daily stability, strict rules, and limitless affection. The daughter of a sailor in the kaiser's fleet, Ollo had been orphaned at the age of six and brought up in a Prussian military orphanage, a place of indescribable brutality that left her with a damaged soul, a large heart, and a firm sense of discipline. A bustling, energetic, sharp-tongued woman, Ollo was thirty in 1911 when she began work as a nursemaid in the Kuczynski household. Ollo understood children far better than Berta, and had perfected techniques for reminding her of this: the nanny waged a quiet war against Frau Kuczynski, punctuated by furious rows during which she usually stormed out, always to return. Ursula was Ollo's favorite. The girl feared the dark, and while the dinner parties were in full swing downstairs, Muth's gentle lullabies soothed her to sleep. Years later, Ursula came to realize that Ollo's love was partly motivated by a "partisanship with me against mother, in that silent, jealous struggle." Excerpted from Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy by Ben Macintyre All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.