Female Secret Agents

1

THE PERFECT COVER
FOR THE PERFECT SPY

In May 1907 a daughter was born to economist Robert Kuczynski and his artist wife Berta, who moved shortly afterwards to the pleasantly wooded suburb of Schlachtensee, south-west of Berlin, near the Havel lake. Named Ursula Ruth, this girl attended the prestigious Lycée Français and afterwards served a two-year apprenticeship as a bookseller, which was a respectable profession for the daughter of a middle class intellectual Jewish family. Already at the age of 17, her politics were far left, as were those of her parents. Whereas they hid their sympathies, she did not, joining the Allgemeiner Freier Angestelltenbund, or Union of Free Employees, and the Kommunistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands, which was the German Young Communist League. She was also appointed leader of the Propaganda Section of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD), after which time her political activities took up so much time that her 'day job' with the major publishing house Ullstein Verlag was lost for lack of application.2

With her father Robert and older brother Jürgen - both already working as agents of Soviet military intelligence Glavnoe Razvedyvatelnoe Upravlenie (GRU) - Ursula moved to New York in 1926, using the cover of her father's work as an economist. While there, she seems to have worked in a bookshop for some months before returning to Berlin and marrying Rudolf, or Rolf, Hamburger, who was a qualified architect and also a GRU agent. In July 1930 the couple moved to China, where Rudolf had been offered a job with the Municipal Council of Shanghai, a city then enjoying a construction boom. His salary, augmented by the funds supplied by GRU, enabled them to mix with the prosperous foreigners of the international settlements. The city was a hive of espionage with several high-ranking Comintern agents, including Elise and Arthur Ewert, whose paradoxical brief at the time was to muzzle the Chinese communists because Stalin then wanted Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek as his ally.3 Within a few months of the Hamburgers' arrival, their son, Michael, was born. By that time, Ursula had already been introduced by US journalist and Comintern agent Agnes Smedley to German expat Richard Sorge, a senior agent of GRU, and was using the name of Sonya4 Hamburger, to dissociate herself from her overt political work as Ursula Kuscynski in Germany. For two years - whether or not with Rudolf's knowledge - she and Sorge had an affair under the cover of his training her in espionage techniques. Smedley, too, played an important part in her life, coaching her in journalism for the worldwide communist press.

In late 1933 Sonya was ordered to Moscow for seven months' training in tradecraft, microphotography, Morse code, cryptography and the building, operating and repairing of radio transmitters. During this time, her son was sent to live with his paternal grandparents in Czechoslovakia, so that he did not happen to pick up any Russian words and blurt them out afterwards. She was then posted to Mukden - modern Shenyang - in north-east China, which was an important centre of Japanese expansion. Her official job there was working for an American book publisher, but this was just cover for her activities as a channel between GRU in Moscow and the Chinese partisans fighting the Japanese in Manchuria. Shortly after arriving in Mukden, she became pregnant by a top Soviet agent, cover name 'Ernst', who may have been US diplomat Noel Field.5 In August 1935 she was ordered to leave China after the arrest in Shanghai of Sorge's replacement there. Since the prosecution of communist agents was one of the few areas where the Western police forces in the international settlements collaborated with the Chinese police - the latter using torture routinely - Moscow's fear was that he might disclose details of other agents while undergoing interrogation.

She departed with Rudolf, using his contractual entitlement to home leave, for London, where Sonya's father was living under the cover of lecturing at the London School of Economics, having taken advantage of the influx of Jewish immigrants after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. Also staying with Sonya's parents was her old nursemaid, Olga Muth, who took charge of Michael and Nina, the daughter of Ernst, when Sonya and Rudolf were assigned to Poland by the GRU. In June 1937 Sonya was recalled to Moscow, where so many of her fellow agents had been liquidated in Stalin's purges for real or imagined failings, or simply to keep them from talking about their work. In her case, it was to be invested with the Order of the Red Banner and promoted, which makes it clear that she had already accomplished important clandestine tasks.

The purges had killed off the main players in the GRU network in Switzerland, which Sonya was now appointed to rebuild, settling with Muth and her two children in a mountain village near Montreux in September 1938. It was during this period that Rudolf had had enough of their relationship and was posted at his own request back to China, his place in Sonya's bed being taken by Alexander Foote, a British veteran of the Spanish Civil War, recruited as her clandestine radio operator by Sonya's sister, Brigitte, living in London. When Foote arrived in Switzerland, to take up his GRU duties, life for him and Sonya was very comfortable thanks to money supplied from Moscow, laundered through the Irving Bank in New York and passed on to them by Swiss lawyer Dr Jean Vincent, who had been working for the Comintern in China.6 Although Sonya was regarded as the head of the new Swiss network, she claimed to have been ordered in December 1939 - this was during the phoney war - by her Russian superior Maria Polyakova to hand her network over to Alexander Rado, head of the Lucy network, also called 'the Red Orchestra'. Whatever blow this might have dealt to her professional ego was salved by her sister Brigitte, acting as a GRU talent spotter in London, sending out another British survivor of the International Brigades in Spain named Len Beurton,7 who replaced Foote in her bed and affections from his first night in Switzerland.8

In fact, the apparent demotion was part of a convoluted GRU plot to move Sonya into position for even more important work without the knowledge of any of her current GRU and Comintern comrades. Many loyal Party members all over the world, who had believed they were fighting fascism in all its forms, were deeply disillusioned that the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty signed by Molotov and von Ribbentrop in the previous August had allied the Soviet Union with the most extreme fascist government in Europe. Thousands tore up their Party membership cards. It was therefore quite credible when Sonya began complaining that the Treaty had shattered her belief in Stalin and communism, also that she was afraid Hitler would shortly invade Switzerland and liquidate her and her children, together with all the other Jews in the country. As a result, she said, she wanted out of her clandestine life before it was too late.

The truth was that the GRU was playing a very long-term game, in which she was required for a deep cover operation in Britain, which needed her to obtain British nationality by divorcing Rudolf Hamburger and marrying Foote. Unworried by this order from Moscow, Sonya chose instead to marry Beurton and received a British passport as his wife. The fly in the ointment of this neat arrangement was the nursemaid Muth who, being German, would have been an embarrassment in Britain at war. Distraught at the prospect of losing all contact with the two children whom she loved, Muth headed for the British consul in Montreux to denounce Sonya as a Soviet agent.9 What action he took, if any, is unknown, but the news apparently never reached London.

Travel in Europe was already complicated in late 1940 with many people stranded in countries they wanted to leave, but Sonya was more than equal to this. She and her children managed to reach Lisbon and take a ship for Liverpool, where they arrived in mid-February 1941, leaving Len behind in Switzerland to avoid him being called up in Britain. Playing the part of a distressed Jewish refugee, Sonya was invited to stay in a vicarage near Blenheim Palace, to which much of the British counter-espionage organisation MI5 had been evacuated from bomb-damaged London. It was in Blenheim Palace that her first agent was working, so she rented a bungalow in nearby Kidlington and commenced clandestine radio communications with Moscow. This agent may have been Roger Hollis, later director-general of MI5, who had been a freelance reporter in Shanghai at the same time at Agnes Smedley and was often seen there in her company. Since both were journalists, their association may have been entirely innocent but it is a coincidence that he lived in the same village, less than a mile from Sonia and her father, both of whom lived within easy distance of a dead letter drop in the graveyard of St Sepulchre's cemetery. Hollis was also in charge of an MI5 section charged with watching Soviet and other spies in Britain. When Sonya's deeply encrypted messages were picked up by the Radio Security Service operating under MI5 section MI8c, it was up to Hollis to decide whether or not to use direction-finding vans to track down the transmitter. He decided not to.10

With Sonya's brother, father and sister all working for GRU, Britain thus had accepted as refugees four GRU agents from one family working for the USSR, an ally of the Axis enemy. She bought a bicycle for apparently innocent rides through the countryside in this time of severe petrol rationing; her...