A strange honeymoon began. “Peking is heaven,” she wrote to her parents. Gradually they relaxed, slowly discovering a “way to enjoy every hour of those rare days free of danger.” The pain in her jaw eased, and the sickness she had felt before leaving Mukden subsided. She began to sleep again. They took Michael to the lake in the Summer Palace, climbed in the hills, wandered the city streets, and read books. Johann was sweetly attentive, the Russian doll a mere memory. “There were no sharp words,” she wrote. “Johann was happy because we were living together. I think of that August in Peking as a time bathed in warm light.”
After four weeks, they reassembled the radio. Johann was asleep when the message came through from Moscow, an abrupt command that made her heart jolt. “Sonya come to Shanghai with your luggage. Ernst remain in position and await new co-worker.” From Shanghai, the message continued, she would be going to Moscow for further instructions and then on to Europe to see her family. After five years with the Shanghai Municipal Council, Rudi and his family were eligible for home leave. Ursula knew that she would not be coming back to China: her mission was over.
Ursula sat on the bed looking down at the sleeping Johann. “The furrowed forehead, the high cheekbones, the narrow nose, the restless, nervous mouth, the hands. I let the tears run.” It was the third time she had wept over him. First in a Prague cinema, then in a forest outside Mukden, and now in Peking, while he slept, and she silently said farewell.
“That means goodbye forever,” he said the next morning, when she relayed Moscow’s orders. Then he brightened. “Our people are not inhuman, we’ll be allowed to stay together. As soon as I get away from here we’ll get married.”
Ursula said nothing.
Johann accompanied them to the station, stowed the luggage, hugged Michael, and then stood, a little awkwardly, on the platform outside the compartment window. “I’ll write to you again when I leave China,” he said. “Definitely.”
The doors slammed and the train whistle blew. Johann did not wave. Then he turned and walked away.
She had not told him she was pregnant.
* * *
—
COLONEL TUMANYAN, URSULA’S SENIOR OFFICER, greeted her warmly at the office in Bolshoi Znamensky Lane and offered congratulations on her work in Mukden, and what had turned out to be a narrow escape from Shanghai. In May 1935, Inspector Tom Givens of the Shanghai Municipal Police had arrested another high-ranking Soviet spy. “Joseph Walden” claimed to be a penniless writer, but was in reality Colonel Yakov Grigoryevich Bronin of Soviet military intelligence. In Bronin’s apartment, police found evidence that his typewriter had been purchased by one Ursula Hamburger. Rudi was interviewed, and gave Special Branch “a convincing but untrue account of the typewriter’s disposal.” Givens was getting far too close for comfort. Ursula caught the next boat out of Shanghai, knowing she would not be coming back.
But the Fourth Department already had a new mission in mind: “Will you go to Poland? With Rudi?” Tumanyan asked. The right-wing Polish government had driven the Communist Party underground, and the comrades there were in dire need of an expert radio operator. Since Rudi was now willing to work for Soviet intelligence and she vouched for his commitment, they could operate as a team, coordinating the Polish communist cells, gathering military intelligence, and reporting back to Moscow. Rudi’s job as an architect would provide cover. Though still head of the Asia section, Tumanyan would continue as her handler. Colonel Tums was still unaware of the state of Ursula’s marriage. She did not tell her commanding officer she was pregnant with Johann Patra’s child. “From his point of view this was a logical, humane proposal.”
From Ursula’s perspective, however, the proposition was anything but straightforward. Obtaining an abortion in China was comparatively easy, but from the moment she discovered she was pregnant, her mind was made up. “I yearned for a second child and now that it was on the way I wanted to keep it.”
The pregnancy created an extraordinary situation. Before leaving Shanghai, she had told Rudi she was pregnant by Patra; stunned, he urged her to have an abortion. When she wrote to inform Johann, he too tried to persuade her to terminate the pregnancy. Bizarrely, letters passed back and forth between Patra in Peking and Hamburger in Shanghai, discussing what she should do. “I said nothing while the two of them bargained over my future.” She was keeping the child, and that was that. Finally, Rudi did the decent thing, as he always did, and “declared that he could not leave me on my own in this condition.” He would follow wherever Moscow deployed her; he would continue to be her husband, in appearance if not reality, and a father to Michael; they would conceal from the world, the Center, and their own families that the child she was carrying was not his. Once the baby was born, she could decide her own future, with or without him. Patra’s reaction to this plan was also noble, in its way: “If I can’t be with you, then there is no one better than Rudi, and I shall feel much calmer if you are with him.”
Tumanyan’s suggestion of a joint mission cast this unconventional arrangement in a very different light. Rudi and Ursula would be living and working together. Hamburger was a good father, a skilled architect, and a kind man, but he was likely, she feared, to make a pretty hopeless spy. “His charm and perfect courtesy made him popular everywhere, especially with women, and opened many doors,” but on the other hand, “he was in many respects naïve, and soft-hearted.” Meanwhile, danger had become part of her daily life. As she had discovered, espionage involved not only risk, but also sacrifice, loss, and pain. She was pregnant with another man’s child. She still loved Patra, though she knew there was little chance they could ever be a couple again. Was it fair to “expect Rudi and me to share a life together under present circumstances”?
Ursula told Tumanyan she would accept the assignment, take Michael to Britain to see her family, and then travel on to Warsaw. Rudi would come to Moscow separately to discuss the mission with Tumanyan. He could then decide for himself whether to follow her to Poland. If he chose not to, she would go alone. “I was not afraid to carry out the necessary work on my own.” Before leaving Moscow she was introduced to a Bulgarian intelligence officer named Stoyan Vladov (real name Nikola Popvassilev Zidarov), who would be her main contact in Poland.
The entire Kuczynski family, accompanied by the faithful Ollo, was assembled on the dockside at Hay’s Wharf in Gravesend when the SS Co-Operatzia from Leningrad pulled in on October 21, 1935. Ursula had not seen her father or siblings for more than five years.
Jürgen was now also in Britain. Ursula’s older brother had clung on in Germany until the last minute, toiling for the communist underground, hoping the German working class would come to its senses and overthrow Hitler. Early in 1935 he even visited the Soviet Union, where he met numerous communist notables including Karl Radek, whose writings Ursula had read in Shanghai after the birth of her son. At thirty, Jürgen was seen by the Kremlin as a man of the future: Radek reported that Stalin himself had asked whether the young Kuczynski would be aided or hindered by being made a member of the Soviet Academy of Science. Jürgen sensibly turned down an honor which, if the Nazis found out, would give them yet another excuse to kill him. He returned to Berlin, as he put it, “completely convinced that I would soon be able to welcome my comrades back to Germany.” That conviction was fantasy, and the reality was brought home when Jürgen was instructed to smuggle the KPD’s remaining funds out of Germany and deposit the money in a Dutch bank. The Nazis were picking off his friends and political allies. Berta sent letters, beseeching him to come to Britain before it was too late. On September 15, 1935, following the annual Nuremberg rally, the Reichstag passed the “Reich Citizenship Law,” rendering Jews ineligible for German citizenship. Aliens in their own country, with hope of a communist resurgence vanishing and Germany’s anti-Semitic hysteria intensifying, Jürgen and Marguerite emerged from hiding and fled. Three days after reaching London, he contacted th
e British Communist Party.
The family was reunited, but under circumstances far removed from their old life: packed into a poky, three-room flat in North London. Their first full family gathering since 1929 was boisterous and loud, but suffused with sadness. “We all yearned for the house where we grew up, and for the landscape to which we belonged.” When Ursula’s parents and siblings learned she was expecting a second child, they assumed the father was Rudi. “There was no need to lie,” she wrote later—an interesting way to excuse what she knew was a “detestable deception.”
After the family gathering, she took Jürgen aside and told him the truth. The siblings were as close, and competitive, as ever. She explained that she had had an affair in China, though she did not say with whom, and that Rudi had not fathered the child inside her, and knew it. He told her she was “impossible,” but promised not to tell anyone else. Jürgen might be unable to shut up on paper, but he was a good secret keeper, and she trusted him completely.
The Kuczynski children had all, to differing degrees, absorbed left-wing views. Brigitte, the next in age to Ursula, was already a member of the Communist Party. Expelled from Heidelberg University for slapping a student leader of the Hitler Youth, she fled to Britain in September 1935. Even the youngest, Renate, “proudly called herself a communist.” The political sympathies of the refugees did not pass unnoticed.
MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, first opened a file on Jürgen back in 1928, when he began writing for communist newspapers. Robert, the paterfamilias now teaching demography at the LSE and conducting research for the government, was also suspected of Bolshevik sympathies. MI5, the Security Service, was taking a close interest in this family of German leftists newly implanted in the United Kingdom. Over the coming years, the British intelligence services would amass no fewer than ninety-four files on the Kuczynskis. The British immigration authorities noted Ursula’s arrival from Leningrad, a first blip on MI5’s radar.
Rudi landed in Britain a few weeks later. His meeting with Colonel Tumanyan in Moscow had not been entirely satisfactory. “My wish had been to take on independent [intelligence] work in the future, and to receive appropriate training for the purpose. This wish was not fulfilled, but I received promises.” His decision to work for Soviet intelligence was a political choice, but also personal. Rudi still loved Ursula and “clung to the vain hope that they could be reconciled.” He was not about to relinquish his son. Tumanyan instructed Rudi to accompany Ursula to Poland and provide her with assistance.
They set off in January 1936, with an important addition to the party. Olga Muth begged Ursula to take her too. Renate was nearly in her teens, too old for a nanny. In Poland, Ollo could look after Michael and help care for the new baby when it arrived. Ursula readily accepted. She had known Olga Muth since the age of three. “There was always a special bond between Ollo and me,” Ursula wrote.
Poland was in turmoil. Józef Piłsudski, the country’s autocratic, right-wing leader since 1926, had just died, leaving a government that was fiercely anti-Soviet and determined to root out communism, which had been forced largely underground. Polish anti-Semitism was on the rise. The Poles were attempting to negotiate a deal with Hitler to launch a joint attack on the Soviet Union. It was a bad time to be a communist spy in Poland or, from a different perspective, a very good one.
The Hamburgers rented a house in the Warsaw suburb of Anin, and Rudi found work with the help of two Polish architects. Ursula began learning Polish and building a transmitter-receiver, the first she had constructed alone, and hid it inside a wooden gramophone case from which she removed the innards. One night, she “first pressed the key under a dim light in our flat.” Two minutes later, the response from Russia came back, with perfect clarity.
A senior officer in the Fourth Department, the Bulgarian Stoyan Vladov, had already established a network of Polish informants, code-named “Mont Blanc.” A former musician in a cinema orchestra, Vladov had joined the Communist Party in 1914, served five years in prison for gunrunning, undergone military and intelligence training in Moscow, and was now working on a large horticultural farm, growing roses, spying for the Red Army, and supporting the Polish communists. Once a month, Ursula met him in Kraków to gather his intelligence haul, and then returned to Warsaw to pass it on to Moscow. “I was supposed to advise him,” she wrote. Vladov neither wanted nor needed advice.
Ursula grew bored. After the excitement and danger of China, her existence seemed almost mundane: she was either commuting back and forth to take dictation from Vladov or stuck in the apartment coding, transmitting, and preparing for the birth of her second child. Rudi’s espionage was even more limited. Occasionally he manned the transmitter, or carried out “general repairs and maintenance,” but the Center balked at giving him greater responsibility. “On several occasions he insisted on transmitting his own messages, asking when he would be able to come to Moscow for intelligence training in order to be able to undertake intelligence work on his own account.” The response from Moscow was “invariably dismissive.” Rudi emphatically wanted to be a spy, but the Red Army, as yet, did not want him.
Nor did Ursula. “Rudi and I got on in a comradely way and there were no quarrels,” but the relationship was as cold as the Polish winter. At the time little Michael felt only an “intense happiness that the family was together again”; much later he wondered how his father had endured “the mental burden of this masquerade.” A husband in name only, Rudi made no pretense that the impending birth gave him pleasure. Ursula’s thoughts were often with Johann Patra, wondering where he was, whether he was safe: “He won’t be able to cope alone,” she reflected. “He’ll do something stupid.” But as the months passed she found their separation easier to bear. They were fundamentally incompatible. Johann “needed a completely different sort of woman as a permanent companion; one who accepted him without criticism, without questioning or discussion.” At the start of their relationship, she had been his subordinate; she was now his equal, perhaps even his superior in the eyes of the Center. Stubborn and old-fashioned, he would never have been able to accept that imbalance. Yet with Johann’s child growing inside her, she felt his absence like a permanent, dull ache. Catching sight of her pregnant profile reflected in a shop window, Ursula thought: “How sad it was that my child was not being joyfully awaited by two people.”
In truth, it was. Devoted Olga Muth, now fifty-five years old, was in her element preparing for the new arrival, looking after Michael, and discreetly supporting the family’s espionage operations. Ollo was fully aware that her employers were spies working against the fascists, and she approved, without ever saying so. She knew that, late at night, the mistress of the house, the girl she still called Whirl, sent radio messages on an illegal transmitter hidden inside a gramophone with a record of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture on the turntable. The collaboration between the two women was unspoken, based on personal loyalty more than politics, and not once overtly discussed. “I never mentioned the nature of my work,” Ursula wrote. “And Ollo did not ask about it.” Olga Muth was a nursemaid; but she was also an assistant spy.
On April 27, 1936, in a clinic in suburban Warsaw, Ursula gave birth to a healthy girl. She named her Janina, or Nina for short. Eight hours later, she was back at the apartment, “sitting next to a shaded lamp at her illegal transmitter” and tapping out a message that began: “Please excuse my delay, but I have just given birth to a daughter.”
Writing to her parents, she was more effusive: “What bliss it is to arrive home and find a little crib complete with occupant standing in front of our house in the woods….Ollo is a wonderful help and crazy about Janina. Rudi is very busy.”
Nina was six months old when the Center instructed Ursula to move to Danzig (now Gdansk) to support the embattled communist underground there. Rudi would continue to work in Warsaw to ensure the renewal of their residence permits. The Baltic port of Danzig was
a “Free City,” an autonomous city-state wedged between Poland and Germany and theoretically independent of both. In reality it was anything but free: the majority of inhabitants were German, its government was dominated by Nazis, and by 1936 there was a mounting campaign to absorb Danzig into the Third Reich. Ursula arrived in a city undergoing intensive Nazification: “The swastika hung from official buildings, portraits of Hitler decorated the walls of public offices, Poles were terrorized, Jews intimidated, persecuted and arrested.” Karl Hoffman, a young communist with a “delicate face” and a racking cough from tuberculosis, had established a small resistance cell, sabotaging the U-boats under construction in Danzig’s shipyards and laying plans to disable traffic lights to impede the expected Nazi invasion. Ursula was their link to Moscow.
Ursula, Ollo, Michael, and Nina moved into a sunny apartment in a modern block in the Oliwa district. During the day, Ursula went shopping with her baby in a carriage and collected reports from Hoffman’s spies; in the evenings, when everyone else had gone to bed, she would take the transmitter-receiver out of the gramophone and pass messages back and forth to Moscow. As the mother of two small children, she no longer needed a cover job.
Michael tried to make friends with the local children. One day he asked his mother, “What does ‘not welcome’ mean?” She told him it meant “forbidden.” The little boy persisted: “What is Jewish?” She tried to change the subject. Michael made up a chant: “Smoking forbidden, Jews forbidden, noise forbidden.” She told him to be quiet. He changed his chant: “Spitting allowed, Jews allowed, singing allowed…” She slapped him, for the first and only time in her life. Tears welling, Michael ran from the room. Ursula was devastated by what she had done. The strain was getting to her. “What will happen to my children if I am caught?” she wondered. She tried to console herself with the thought that “they both have blond hair and blue eyes; that will protect them from any brutality.” She knew it wasn’t true.
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