Agent Sonya

by Ben MacIntyre

  After five months in Moscow, the day before she was due to return to Poland, Ursula was granted an audience with the new director of the Fourth Department, Semyon Gendin, a decorated soldier and NKVD officer, the replacement for Berzin’s replacement. He commended her work, instructed her to return to Poland, and asked her to pass on a message of thanks to Rudi. A few months later Gendin followed his predecessors to the execution cells.

  The purges would eventually burn themselves out, leaving a permanent, unhealed scar on the Soviet psyche. Ursula’s loyalty was undimmed, but it now came with an admixture of fear. A worm of doubt had lodged in her soul. Henceforth, she would never know whether a summons to Moscow was to receive a medal or a bullet.

  Back in Poland, reunited with her children, Ursula was happy to plunge back into domestic life, at least for a while. Her letters home were filled with the details of raising children, having her hair done, Ollo’s affection for baby Nina and her squabbles with Michael, the struggle to renew their residence permits. With Rudi she shared parental responsibility and espionage duties, but nothing else. They moved into a new home in Zakopane, a resort town at the base of the Tatra Mountains.

  Michael would look back on this time with painful nostalgia in a series of interlocking childhood memories: learning to whistle, climbing trees, and making cardboard houses with cellophane windows with his father. He recalled his mother: “The warm brown eyes, the slightly tousled black hair, the laughing mouth under the prominent nose.” What the seven-year-old Michael remembered as a “dream of paradise” was really the dying moments of a marriage.

  Every two weeks she made radio contact with Moscow, passing messages back and forth from the Bulgarian florist and spymaster, Stoyan Vladov. In Moscow she had been taught to blow up bridges and run undercover agents; back in Poland, she was little more than a secret postman.

  Elsewhere in the world, her fellow communists were fighting furiously as the Nazi threat escalated and Europe lurched toward war. Johann Patra was returning to China to run a new network of agents and saboteurs against the Japanese. In Spain, the Republicans were in retreat. In Berlin, the last vestiges of Ursula’s old life were being destroyed. By mid-1938, more than 250,000 Jews had fled Germany and Austria, while hundreds of thousands more were attempting to escape. The remnants of the communist underground prepared for armed resistance. In England, Jürgen was churning out anti-fascist tracts, and swiftly emerging as the de facto leader of the German émigré communists in Britain.

  Ursula watched these events unfold with horror and frustration. “I felt I was not accomplishing much in Poland.” She needed another adventure. In 1938, she requested permission to come to Moscow once more. By now, none of her friends and German comrades remained. She told Comrade Hadshi she was ready for a new challenge.

  The Center had also concluded that Agent Sonya was being underused. It was agreed that her next mission should be in neutral Switzerland, the country with the world’s highest per capita quotient of spies and a prime target of Soviet espionage. Ursula’s father had contacts at the League of Nations in Geneva who might prove useful. Rudi could probably get work there as an architect. Switzerland was already providing sanctuary for thousands of fleeing Germans; one more family of Jewish refugees would easily blend in.

  At her final briefing, Colonel Mamsurov informed Ursula that she had been promoted to major, which came as a shock since she had been unaware of holding any formal military rank. “I did not know how to salute, let alone march.” She was flattered nonetheless. “I was proud to be a soldier of the Red Army.” Before leaving Moscow, she was introduced to a young German named Franz Obermanns. Five years her junior, Obermanns was a former waiter and a member of the communist resistance in Berlin who had been arrested by the Gestapo before escaping to fight in Spain with the Thirteenth International Brigade. Mamsurov explained that the young man had completed his radio training and would be following Ursula to Switzerland, where he would act as her junior officer and assistant. Obermanns was enthusiastic, brave, and quite stupid. He would travel on a false Finnish passport, under the name “Eriki Noki”—an odd choice of cover since Obermanns had never been to Finland, knew nothing of the country, and spoke not a single word of Finnish.

  Switzerland, peaceful land of cowbells and cuckoo clocks, has the oldest policy of military neutrality in the world, having successfully avoided involvement in any war since 1815. This made it ideal for spying, and exceptionally unsafe. Sandwiched between Nazi Germany and Austria, fascist Italy and democratic France, it was a hotbed of international espionage. The Germans, British, French, Soviets, and Americans all ran competing spy networks in the country, using Switzerland as a base to launch operations into enemy territory. The undercover war in Shanghai had been brutal but haphazard; in Manchuria, Ursula had dodged the murderously proficient Kempeitai; in Poland and Danzig, she was a courier to the communist underground. But in Switzerland the game was different. The country was riddled with espionage, an international hunting ground for spies of every stamp. Everyone spied on everyone else, and the Swiss security service spied, politely but insistently, on all the other spies.

  The Soviet Union, fearful and distrustful of Hitler, needed information on the military buildup inside the Reich, and neutral Switzerland, sharing a 225-mile border with Nazi Germany, was the ideal place from which to gather such intelligence. Ursula was ordered to travel to Switzerland via Britain, settle somewhere near Geneva, construct an illegal radio transmitter-receiver, make contact with the preexisting Soviet intelligence networks, and establish a reliable wireless link with Moscow using a memorized set of cyphers. At the same time, the Center instructed her to recruit her own team of agents to be infiltrated into Germany to gather military information and conduct sabotage operations. For the first time, Ursula would be directly targeting Hitler’s regime: she could hardly wait.

  The Nazis had plenty of their own spies in Switzerland, and a number of informants inside Swiss intelligence. The police had developed a highly efficient system for detecting illegal wireless sets, and the Swiss government was strictly neutral and uniformly severe when it came to espionage: anyone caught spying, of whatever nationality or political allegiance, faced arrest and deportation. If Ursula was sent back to Germany she would be killed. Unless, of course, the Gestapo or its agents found out what she was up to and opted to murder her in Switzerland instead.

  Before leaving Moscow, Ursula made a suggestion: might she find recruits in London on her way to Switzerland and send them into Germany as undercover agents? Numerous British communists had volunteered to fight in Spain in the International Brigade, and among the survivors might be some willing to continue the battle against fascism by being inserted into Germany as penetration spies. Britons still enjoyed a certain status in Germany, and despite the rising enmity between the two nations, Ursula pointed out, “it was not unusual for the odd, well-to-do Englishman” to turn up there on holiday, even in 1938. This was the first time she had taken the initiative and framed a plan of her own. She was no longer merely obeying orders. Ursula was making the transition from spy to spymaster. The Center agreed: while visiting her family in London she should try to enlist “one or two comrades who had given proof of their courage and reliability in the course of the Spanish Civil War,” and then start for Geneva. She should avoid contact with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Colonel Mamsurov finally handed over a sheet of paper and told her to sign it: “a statement that admitted the right of the Centre to have her shot if she disclosed her cypher to a third party without authorization.” It was not a legal document, but a warning.

  In Shanghai she had worked under Sorge; in Mukden, she had spied alongside Patra; in Poland, Rudi had been her designated aide. She would be taking off for Switzerland as a solo spy. She and Rudi had “come to realize that we could no longer live together.” For the last two years their partnership had survived only on joint parenting and a shared
ideology, but now the marriage was finally over, without rancor. Rudi announced he would be returning to Shanghai, where he wished to resume his architectural practice and begin working independently for Soviet military intelligence. He intended to pass the summer in America, spending time with his brother Victor (now professor of embryology at Washington University in St. Louis), and then complete a course in radio technology in Paris to ensure he was ready to take up full-time spying back in China. Mamsurov agreed, somewhat reluctantly: Rudi’s plans for his future espionage career were more ambitious than anything Moscow had in mind.

  Ursula’s German passport was carefully doctored by the forgers of the Fourth Department, with blank pages stitched in “to replace the pages which had contained visas, stamps etc. of her sojourn in the Far East.” It appeared to show she had spent the last two years in Germany. On June 10, 1938, she arrived in Britain, yet another Jewish refugee, indistinguishable from the flood seeking safety. She told the immigration authorities she intended to stay with her parents for about three months, and signed a formal undertaking to leave by September 20: “I understand that should I overstay the period allowed, steps will be taken to compel me to return to Germany, notwithstanding any pleas to the contrary.” Despite the popular myth, Britain did not open its arms to all German Jews, especially communist ones.

  The Kuczynskis were still living in Hampstead. Brigitte had married a Scottish communist, Anthony Lewis, and moved into the Isokon building two doors from her parents in Lawn Road—a modernist block of flats that would become infamous as home to a suspiciously large number of communist spies. Jürgen took up residence in nearby Upper Park Road. The British left had embraced these distinguished German Jewish intellectual refugees with enthusiasm. Indeed, as one historian puts it, “the Kuczynskis’ list of friends and acquaintances reads almost like a Who’s Who of British left-wing political, academic and literary life of the period”: writers such as Cecil Day Lewis, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Rosamond Lehmann, Rose Macaulay, John Strachey, and Stephen Spender; the publisher Victor Gollancz; Labour politicians Aneurin Bevan and Tom Driberg; the historian Arnold Toynbee; and many more. Jürgen even became friendly with Sylvia Pankhurst, the suffragette campaigner, and Lilian Bowes Lyon, the then queen’s first cousin. It was quite hard to attend a Hampstead dinner party in 1938 without bumping into a Kuczynski.

  Jürgen was the standard-bearer of German anti-fascism in Britain, chief among the swelling community of exiled German communists. He toured the country giving lectures, raised funds for refugees, held scores of meetings, nurtured contacts on the British left, and wrote, unstoppably: pamphlets, histories, reports, propaganda leaflets. He started work on his History of Labour Conditions, which he would continue to expand for the rest of his life. When not scribbling, he was soliciting funds for Freedom Radio 29.8, an anti-Nazi station broadcasting to Germany, for which Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Mann wrote scripts, and helping to found the Free German League of Culture, a “German, anti–National Socialist, anti-fascist, non-party refugee organization with the aim of nurturing German culture.” Jürgen Kuczynski was inexhaustible, and completely exhausting.

  Secretly, Jürgen was also writing political and economic reports for the Soviet Union, which were couriered back to Moscow via the Soviet embassy. A frequent visitor to Jürgen’s home was the Soviet press attaché, Anatoli Gromov (real name Gorski), in reality the chief of Soviet intelligence in Britain, code-named “Vadim.” He flattered Jürgen, telling him his reports were valued in Moscow for their “ice-cold logic.” Between his arrival in Britain and the Fall of France, Jürgen made trips to Paris “whenever the laws of conspiracy allowed,” to take orders and pass information to the Comintern and the exiled KPD leaders.

  Jürgen Kuczynski was a committed communist secretly sending intelligence to Stalin. He knew his sister was involved in Soviet espionage, though he did not know the extent. He believed it his comradely duty to pass valuable information to the Soviet Union. Whether that made him a spy was a matter of perspective.

  The British secret services did not know quite what to make of the Kuczynskis. They were committed opponents of Nazism, to be sure, but they were also Germans, communists, and Jews, which made them triply suspect in the eyes of MI5, an organization with its fair share of anti-Semites. MI5 knew about Jürgen’s communist activities and his trips to Paris, but nothing of his contacts with Soviet intelligence. The LSE professor Robert Kuczynski was considered more dubious than his son. Brigitte was known to be an active member of the CPGB (North London branch). The family was being watched, but as war with Germany drew closer, MI5 was more concerned with digging out Nazi spies than a handful of communist sympathizers in leafy Hampstead.

  Ursula immediately set to work. At Moscow’s suggestion, she contacted Fred Uhlman, a German poet, lawyer, painter, communist, and Spanish Civil War veteran, and asked him if any of his British former comrades in the International Brigades might be willing to undertake “illegal, dangerous work inside Germany.” Uhlman passed on the inquiry to Douglas Springhall, a fellow International Brigader, who in turn contacted Fred Copeman, former leader of the British Battalion. Copeman recommended a young volunteer who had just returned to Britain.

  Alexander Allan Foote is one of the most important, but also one of the most enduringly mysterious, figures in modern espionage history.

  The son of a poultry farmer from Yorkshire, Foote was thirty-two, with receding fair hair swept back from a wide forehead and sharp blue eyes. He left school at sixteen to work in a garage before becoming a coal merchant and then, as he put it, a “restless sales manager” for a chicken feed business. He did not share his father’s “single-minded passion for chicken farming.” Foote was a strange mixture of parts: pleasure-loving, adventurous, opportunistic, and charming. While still a teenager he attended communist discussion groups, but it was the outbreak of the Spanish conflict in 1936 that provided him with a handy, albeit shallow, political philosophy. “The Civil War seemed to show everything up in black and white,” he wrote. The Spanish Nationalists and their fascist allies were trying to destroy democracy, and the Republicans were defending it with the help of the Soviet Union. “It all seemed as simple as that.” He did not join the Communist Party, but described himself as “a bit of a Bolshie.”

  Foote joined the RAF in 1935, but on December 23, 1936, “on the point of being thrown out,” he deserted from Gosport barracks, bolted to London, and then embarked for Spain with several hundred other idealistic British volunteer fighters, most of whom would not return. Foote’s motives were only partly political: he had got a girl pregnant, and decided the risk in Spain was less than that posed by her enraged father. The British Battalion, part of the Sixth International Brigade, assembled in Catalonia, consisting of British, Irish, and colonial citizens, a handful of Swedes, and a slightly baffled Ethiopian. Most were communists of one shade or another. Sergeant Foote was appointed transport officer. He remained in Spain for two years and ended up as batman to Copeman, a former Royal Navy heavyweight boxer. As battalion commander, Copeman left something to be desired; he was described by one of his men as “more or less insane, giving completely inconsequential orders to everybody in sight, and offering to bash their faces in if they did not comply.” Nonetheless Copeman saw in Foote something more than just another angry young man looking to die for a cause. In the autumn of 1938, Foote was allowed to return to the United Kingdom to attend the Fifteenth Communist Congress in Birmingham Town Hall, which he found very boring. Soon afterward, Foote was invited to dinner with Copeman and his wife, Kitty, at their home in Lewisham.

  “Springhall has asked me to recommend someone for an assignment,” said Copeman, who had recently been invalided home from Spain after being shot in the face and neck. “We think that you might fit the bill. I know nothing about the assignment save that it will be abroad, and very dangerous.” Foote immediately accepted despite, as he put it, having “no
notion of whom I would be working for or for what purpose.” Copeman scribbled down an address in Hampstead.

  By this point Ursula had already departed for Switzerland, leaving Dover on September 24, 1938. So when Foote knocked on the green door in Lawn Road it was not Ursula who opened it, but Brigitte, now anglicized to Mrs. Bridget Lewis. Ursula’s younger sister had become an accessory to Soviet espionage, and she knew precisely what to do if and when a man named Alexander Foote appeared.

  Foote sat, a little nervously, in a chintz-covered armchair, while a “respectable housewife with a slight foreign accent” grilled him over tea and biscuits. “The whole atmosphere of the flat was one of complete middle-class respectability.” After ten minutes the interview was over. “I was dealt with by the lady of the house as briskly and impersonally as she would have engaged a housemaid.”

  “You will proceed to Geneva,” said Brigitte, handing him a £10 note. “There you will be contacted and further instructions will be given to you.”

  Her next words might have come straight from the pages of a second-rate spy novel.

  “On Thursday next week, you must be waiting outside the General Post Office in Geneva at exactly midday. You must wear a white scarf and carry a leather belt in your right hand. At noon, you will be approached by a woman carrying a string shopping bag containing a green parcel. She will say, in English: ‘Where did you buy that belt?’ You will reply: ‘I bought it in an ironmonger’s shop in Paris.’ You will then ask her where you can buy an orange like hers, and she will reply: ‘You can have it for an English penny.’ ”

  URSULA WAS LIVING IN A Swiss picture postcard. The little farmhouse in the mountains above Lake Geneva, near the village of Caux-sur-Montreux, was surrounded by some of the most majestic scenery in the world. “Before us the meadows descended to the forest, and the forest to the valley, where the lake and the ribbon of the Rhône sparkled,” she wrote. The Alps rose magnificently in the distance, and behind the house lush pastures led up to a pine-covered ridge beneath the summit at Rochers-de-Naye. The nearest neighbors were the farmer and his wife, a quarter of a mile distant. A narrow path led to the village of Caux, from which a winding road ran down to Montreux on the lake. At night, from the cowshed at the back of the building, came the sounds of gentle bovine breathing. In the evenings, Ursula played Lotto with Michael while Nina combed her doll’s hair and Ollo sewed and sang. As the sun went down, Ursula stood by the open window, breathing in the serenity. “The air was cool. I had known many countries, cities, villages, apartments, hotels, boarding houses; never before and never since have I lived in such a wonderful landscape.” The farmhouse had been advertised in the window of a Geneva rental agency: it felt like a refuge from a world falling apart.