The Jewish Housewife Who Became a Soviet Nuclear Super-spy
Ursula Kuczynski was a full-time mother until a meeting in Shanghai transformed her into ‘Sonya.’ Her biographer describes the Jewish KGB spy's career, which climaxed with the theft of American atomic secrets
In
1935, the spy “Sonya,” whose real name was Ursula Maria Kuczynski,
found herself in an almost impossible situation. On the eve of embarking
on a new mission on behalf of the Soviet Union, she discovered that she
was pregnant, the result of an affair with her commander in the
communist underground in China. She told her husband, who was also the
father of her first child, about her pregnancy. He urged her to have an
abortion, a solution seconded by the lover.
When
she refused, the two – husband and lover – corresponded behind her back
to figure out how they could get her to terminate the pregnancy.
“Sonya” did not accede to their importuning and gave birth to a
daughter, a half-sister to her firstborn. Later she had another son, the
fruit of an affair with a third man.
She
was a full-time mother who insisted on combining her dangerous and
exceptional occupation with raising children – two seemingly clashing
worlds. However, she soon discovered, as did her handlers, that what
looked initially to be a disadvantage was actually the opposite. The
cover story of a homemaker who takes no interest in politics helped her
to conceal her true occupation and to rebuff potential suspicions.
“Infants provided a good legalization,” she said.
With
the publication of the Hebrew translation of “Agent Sonya” (published
originally in English last year), her biographer, Ben Macintyre, a
historian who has written previous best sellers in the espionage field,
tells Haaretz about this extraordinary figure. “There are many women
spies in history, but… I know of no other woman who
successfully combined the role of informant, courier and senior officer,
all at the same time,” he notes.
In
the book you underscore that she was “mother, wife and spy.” I imagine
that we would be less impressed by this description if, for example, it
was attached to the protagonist of your previous book, “The Spy and the
Traitor,” which is about Oleg Gordievsky, the senior Russian spy who
worked as a double agent for the British secret service. We wouldn’t
talk about his being a “father, husband and spy,” would we?
Macintyre:
“We have to see Sonya’s life in the context of the times she lived in,
when the emphasis on motherhood was very different from
today’s approach. On the other hand, those attitudes linger, and many
would still criticize her for supposedly neglecting her parental duties,
in a way that would never be applied had she been a man.”
While
researching the book, Macintyre located Kuczynski’s children. Each of
them had a story that was connected to a different chapter in the
tempestuous biography of the this devoted communist agent, a Jew who
spied on the Axis fascists during World War II and on Britain and the
United States during the Cold War. Along with the information they
supplied him, he perused letters, diaries, memoirs she and other players
in the drama wrote, and also probed files of the German Federal
Archives, of the Stasi (the East German secret police) and of MI5 in
Britain. The result is a story which, were it not supported by footnotes
and photographs, might well be assumed to be fiction.
Seekers
of information about Ursula Kuczynski on Google in Hebrew will have a
hard time, even 21 years after her death. Besides her secret activities,
this is due also to the multiple names she went by – including Ursula
Hamburger, Ursula Beurton and a totally fictitious name, Ruth Werner,
under which she wrote children’s books later in life. Even the survey of
Israel’s Intelligence Heritage Center on Soviet espionage in Britain
and Germany barely mentions her.
At
the height of her activity, “Sonya,” who reached the rank of colonel in
the Red Army, ran a network of communist spies in the heart of
Britain’s nuclear research program and transmitted to Moscow information
that helped Soviet scientists build a nuclear weapon.
Left-wing who’s who
She
was born in 1907, in Berlin, the second of six children in an affluent,
socially connected Jewish family that was identified with left-wing
circles. Her father was the acclaimed economist and demographer Robert
Kuczynski, a pioneer in the use of statistical data to shape social
policy. Among her parents’ acquaintances were many left-wing
intellectuals, such as Karl Liebknecht, among the founders of the
Spartacus League, who was assassinated with his colleague, Rosa
Luxemburg, in 1919; the acclaimed artist Kathe Kollwitz; painter Max
Lieberman; the industrialist Walter Rathenau, who would become the only
Jewish foreign minister in Germany’s history; and Albert Einstein.
Did her Jewish origin exert any influence in her life?
Her
sex, motherhood, pregnancy and humdrum domestic life together formed
the perfect camouflage. Men simply did not believe that a housewife
could be a genuine spy. Macintyre
“She
was not a particularly observant Jew, but the destruction of the
German-Jewish community, the Holocaust, the murder of many members of
her family, all played a key role in her hatred of Nazism and her
determination to spy for the Soviet Union.”
At
the age of 16, during the fraught period of the Weimar Republic, she
took part for the first time in a Communist Party demonstration. “The
bruising from the policeman’s truncheon eventually faded; her outrage
never did,” Macintyre writes. In 1926, when she was 19, she officially
joined the German Communist Party. Four years later, someone pressed the
gas pedal on the route of her life – which from then on moved
incessantly between continents, countries and a host of cities, under
assumed identities and alongside different men – and all in the service
of ideology.
The
first stop was China, in 1930, when she accompanied her husband, Rudolf
Hamburger, a Jewish architect who was hired to design
municipal-government buildings in Shanghai. While her husband was
occupied at the drafting table, Kuczynski was caught up in the maelstrom
involving, on one side, the nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, and
on the other the communists under Mao Zedong. The communists were aided
by the Soviet Union, which viewed China as an important goal of the
world revolution. Ursula joined the communists out of certainty in the
justice of the path of the oppressed Chinese proletariat, who under the
leadership of the communists, she believed, would topple the capitalist
and imperialist order.
The
woman who introduced her into the world of espionage was a well-known
American writer living in Shanghai, Agnes Smedley, who had been
recruited as a spy in the service of communism under the guise of being a
German journalist. Macintyre describes her as a “bundle of
contradictions,” noting, among other paradoxes, that “she was bisexual,
but believed homosexuality a curable perversion” and that she ostensibly
disdained men and believed that women had been “enslaved by the
institution of marriage – but “loved many men and was married twice.”
When
the two women met, introduced by a mutual acquaintance, “Smedley was
already an important cog in the machinery of Soviet espionage,”
assisting the Chinese communists, Macintyre notes. Kuczynski found her
charming, and it’s possible that “their relationship may have gone
beyond friendship” to become romantic and passionate.
Smedley
introduced Kuczynski to her lover, Richard Sorge, the senior Soviet spy
in Shanghai at the time. According to Macintyre, he was James Bond-like
not only in his looks, his taste in alcoholic beverages and his skirt
chasing, but also in his skills and courage. The encounter between the
lover of the American writer and the enthusiastic Jewish communist paved
the way for her to become a spy herself. Within a short time the women
were sharing not only the lover – she too was captivated by Sorge – but
also the art of espionage. In messages he sent to Moscow, he referred to
her by the code name he chose for her: “Sonya.”
She
took part in espionage operations in China, Poland and Switzerland, and
finally, the crowning glory, in Britain. She lived a double life. By
day she was a young homemaker, raising her son and disinterested in
politics. “None of our acquaintances would in their wildest dreams have
imagined that I, as the mother of a small child, would jeopardize my
family and everything we had created in China by contact with
communists,” she said.
“Her
sex, motherhood, pregnancy and apparently humdrum domestic life
together formed the perfect camouflage,” Macintyre writes. “Men simply
did not believe that a housewife making breakfast from powdered egg,
packing her children off to school and then cycling into the
countryside” could be a genuine spy.
She
wasn't a particularly observant Jew, but the Holocaust, the murder of
many members of her family, played a key role in her hatred of Nazism
and her determination to spy for the Soviet Union. Macintyre
She
thrived wherever she went, blind to the crimes that were being
committed in her name and under the auspices of the ideology she
believed in, from which her relatives and friends suffered. One of the
victims was her first husband and father of her firstborn child,
Hamburger, who was arrested for no reason in Moscow in 1943, and spent a
decade in the gulag.
In
1937 she was secretly awarded the Order of the Red Banner, the highest
Soviet military medal of that period. “The Red Army applauded long and
loud, maybe because I was the only woman,” she noted long afterward. She
was later awarded the medal a second time.
Five
years later, in 1942, at the height of World War II, Sonya entered the
hall of fame of communist espionage. The event in question took place in
a café opposite a railway station in Birmingham, England, her new place
of residence. Kuczynski received a thick bag containing 85 pages of
classified documents related to the British nuclear project. The person
who gave her the bag was Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist who had fled
from the Nazis to Britain. Like her, he was an avowed communist, and
like her he too spied for the Soviet Union for ideological reasons. “The
USSR should also have its own bomb,” he explained.
The
first meeting between the two made Fuchs one of the most important
sources supplying information to Ursula. “Fuchs’ transfer of scientific
secrets to the Soviet Union… was one of the most concentrated spy hauls
in history,” Macintyre writes, noting that the haul consisted of 570
pages of reports, calculations, drawings, formulae and diagrams relating
to the development of nuclear weapons.
Some
of the material was too technically complex to be codable and
transmittable by radio. In those cases Kuczynski passed it on using a
method of quick contact – a swift transmission of documents from person
to person, which even a trained observer would not notice.
According
to a report of Soviet military intelligence, Macintyre writes, Fuchs
succeeded in making “plasticine impressions” of keys in the Birmingham
nuclear research center, which enabled him to acquire many secret
documents from his colleagues’ safes.
Fuchs’
code name in Soviet military intelligence attested to the importance
that was attached to him: “Enormo[u]s.” Fuchs’ request that the
information he was passing on should go straight to Stalin was carried
out. In June 1943, for example, Stalin forwarded to Foreign Minister
Molotov 12 questions about the atomic bomb project and demanded
immediate replies. The Foreign Ministry passed on the list to the head
of military intelligence, who transmitted it directly to Sonya. Fuchs
delivered the goods again, writing a richly detailed report.
Subsequently
Fuchs joined the Manhattan Project – the American effort to manufacture
the world’s first atomic bomb. There, across the ocean, he witnessed
the first detonation of a nuclear device, on July 16, 1945, in the New
Mexico desert. Four years later, the Soviets detonated an almost
identical bomb, ending Washington’s monopoly on nuclear weapons. Fuchs
was one of those who brought this about and was accordingly termed “the
greatest spy of the nuclear era.”
Macintyre
quotes the East German spymaster Markus Wolf as noting that Fuchs had
“made the greatest single contribution to Moscow’s ability to build an
atom bomb [and] changed the world’s balance of power by breaking
America’s nuclear monopoly.” A number of spies worked with him, all of
whom have by now been named; the last of them, Oscar Seborer, an
electrical engineer who worked at Los Alamos (and a Jew), was revealed
only two years ago.
Another
success attributed to Ursula was the infiltration of Soviet spies into
an American espionage operation in Nazi Germany. According to a plan
devised by the OSS (forerunner of the CIA) in 1944, a group of anti-Nazi
Germans were to be recruited in Britain, trained in and equipped with
advanced communications media, and parachuted into Germany in order to
send to the United States information about developments within the
Reich.
Kuczynski
was able to recruit some of the candidates, who harbored communist
views, to whom it was explained that although they would be working for
the Americans, their true masters were in Moscow, and all their activity
was being done with the approval of the Soviet Union. The idea was for
the parachutists to transmit to the Soviet Union information about the
American technology they were using.
Macintyre
relates that the technological highlight of the operation was the first
use of a mobile manual radio device, which enabled ground-to-air
communication. The “gizmo,” which would later be known as a
“walkie-talkie,” was, the author writes, “a predecessor of the mobile
telephone.”
Sonya’s
career in espionage might have continued until the lifting of the Iron
Curtain, had it not been aborted in 1950, when Fuchs’ espionage
activities were discovered by the Americans and the British. After his
arrest, Sonya fled to East Germany, where she resettled in Berlin, her
birthplace.
She
abandoned spying and made a living as the author of children’s books.
She died in Berlin in 2000, aged 93. A few weeks after her death,
Russian President Vladimir Putin declared her “a super-agent of military
intelligence.” According to Macintyre, the communist influence over her
grew more temperate with time, but never completely faded.
Why did she not go on serving the Soviet Union afterward, from her safe haven in East Germany?
“She was exhausted, and I think she yearned for a different sort of life, one that was not suffused with secrecy.”
|