Ben Macintyre has made non-fiction stories of spies and spying into his own genre, and he tells his tales brilliantly. He has written about Oleg Gordievsky, Kim Philby and others whose names resonate in the annals of espionage, and here he turns to Ursula Kuczynski, alias Agent Sonya.
Hers is certainly not a well-known name. But Macintyre unfolds the story of the German Jew, who grew up in an intellectual family in Berlin between the wars, became a Red Army colonel who would in turn spy on the Nazis, the Japanese, Britain and America, all the while living a seemingly harmless life as a wife, mother and lover. And who was never officially unmasked.
Ursula became a Communist as an adolescent, and when she and her first husband moved to Shanghai in the 1930s – where everyone spied, spying on other spies, she was recruited by her then lover to spy for the Russians. After all, who would suspect a young mother who wanted an aerial on her roof for better radio reception? Throughout her career, in China, Manchuria, Switzerland and Britain, she was torn between motherhood and her secret life, wracked by guilt when she had to leave her children behind. But spying is addictive.
Hers was a curiously incestuous world of spies, husbands and lovers who often played interchangeable roles. But when she married again, this time to get a British passport, MI5 were already interested in her family who had ended up in Britain as refugees from Hitler. Macintyre details the extraordinary incompetence of spies, spymasters and spycatchers as Ursula became a wartime housewife, dealing with three children (from three different fathers), rationing and shortages while at the same time, handling Klaus Fuchs, the nuclear scientist who gave the British and American secrets of the atom bomb to Russia. She was lucky, but a lot less incompetent than many.
It was one thing to spy for Russia when the country was one of the Allies, but once the Cold War began, it was a different story. Eventually, with MI5 closing in, Ursula skipped to East Germany, where she lived until her death at 93, having had a successful second career as an author – known as “East Germany’s Enid Blyton.”
It is an extraordinary story, told with wit and gripping pace, as it leaves you scratching your head over the shenanigans of the secret world. Published by Penguin Random House. ISBN 978-0-241-40851-3- Margaret von Klemperer
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