Ursula accompanied him to the station at Montreux. Rudi had been her first love. They had been partners, in marriage, ideology, and espionage, since she was eighteen years old. She no longer loved him, but his departure was yet another severance. She had already lost so many people she loved: Sorge and Patra, her friends Agnes, Shushin, and Grisha, and countless other colleagues and comrades, friends and family, destroyed by Stalin or Hitler. Her life seemed to have been measured out in painful railway station partings and dockside departures. Loyal and stubborn, Rudi was one of the few people she trusted wholly, and now he was leaving too. She “stood on the platform and watched the little blue mountain train until it had disappeared round the bend.”
* * *
—
LEN BEURTON WAS SURPRISED to find himself outside the Uniprix shop in the Swiss town of Vevey on Lake Geneva, at exactly 11:50 on January 15, 1939, holding an apple in his left hand and a folded newspaper under his right arm, and scanning the crowd for a woman carrying a net bag of oranges. The weeks since his return from Spain had been full of surprises: a message from his former commander asking him to call a number in Hampstead, then the meeting with a posh woman “with a slight foreign accent” who gave him money, told him to go to Switzerland, and made him memorize all the complex arrangements involving fruit, newspapers, and peculiar passwords. He had felt reassured when Mrs. Lewis mentioned Alexander Foote, his former comrade in arms. If Footie was involved, it was probably some kind of “international swindle.” It all sounded pretty dodgy. But Len didn’t mind. He quite liked dodgy, and he certainly wasn’t scared. Len didn’t really understand fear.
Ursula observed the handsome young Englishman from a nearby doorway. “He was twenty-five years old, with thick brown hair, eyebrows that met and clear hazel eyes. He was lean and athletic, strong and muscular.” Len turned, saw her watching him, and smiled.
“Do you like ice cream?” she asked.
“No, whisky,” he replied.
As they walked around Vevey, Ursula explained that Len had been recommended for “dangerous work in Germany, a continuation of his fight on Spanish soil.” When she warned that the job could be extremely dangerous, “his face lit up.” Len should return to Britain, she said, and then head for Frankfurt, home of the industrial giant I. G. Farben, a vital cog in the German war machine. There he should begin teaching himself German. He must tell no one where he was going. Once settled in Frankfurt, Len should contact his old friend Alexander Foote in Munich and await instructions. The young man asked no questions. He did not want to know what organization he was working for, nor how long he would have to stay in Germany. He displayed no trace of anxiety, or even hesitation. He simply put the money she gave him in his pocket, shook Ursula’s hand warmly without quite meeting her eye, and walked away, grinning.
Ursula was intrigued by this young Englishman, seven years her junior. “Half shy, half aggressive, he gave the impression of boyish immaturity.” He struck her as “a nice, modest young man” but “extremely sensitive.”
Len Beurton could not stop thinking about the woman he now knew as Sonya.
I was twenty-five, and my experience of falling in love had been limited to boyhood worship of distant film stars. That may explain why my instantaneous reaction to Sonya has left the recollection of what was said at our first meeting somewhat cloudy. I suspect she thought I had not quite recovered from the bombing in Spain. Of course, she could not know that she was the bomb.
Len fell for Ursula the instant he saw her standing on the pavement outside a Swiss supermarket, holding a bag of oranges.
Until this moment, Leon Charles Beurton (pronounced “Burton,” and often spelled that way) had experienced nothing remotely resembling love. Len’s life started in Barking in 1914, three weeks into his parents’ shotgun marriage. His French-born father was a hotel waiter who joined the French army on the outbreak of war and was killed within weeks of arriving at the front. Florence Beurton paid for her six-year-old son to be fostered by a widowed railway clerk named Thomas Fenton. “I’ll come back in the school holidays,” she told him. “Every morning he woke up with the fresh conviction that his mother would definitely come today.” Len never saw his mother again. Fenton had two sons already and ignored his foster son. “There was no affection. It was a purely commercial transaction,” Len later wrote. At the age of fourteen, he ran away from home and found work as an agricultural laborer, then as a mechanic and truck driver in London. On weekends he learned to shoot at the Territorial Army gym, and during his lunch hour he boxed at the Blackfriars boxing ring. “Many of the most colourful boxers were Jewish,” he later wrote. “To make good, a Jewish boy had to be twice as tough as the non-Jewish fighters. I developed a natural respect for them. This laid the foundations for my outraged contempt when Hitler’s anti-Semitism became official doctrine.”
At eighteen, he found work in a quarry on the island of Jersey, where he was befriended by an Irish American former seaman called Moriarty. A burly giant, mild in manner and fierce in politics, Moriarty introduced Len to the radical writings of Jack London, and the legend of Joe Hill, the American labor activist executed in 1915. “Moriarty taught me much more than how to cut granite with a seven-pound hammer. The revolution entered my life.” Together, they listened to Radio Moscow. “We watched the rise of fascism and together firmly believed that the German working class would settle accounts with Hitler. We followed events in Spain and decided that the only place for an anti-fascist was in the International Brigades.”
Beurton joined the British Battalion in Spain in January 1937 and three weeks later, on February 12, he went into action on the Jarama front. Many years later, he wrote up his memories of the action at “Suicide Hill,” one of the bloodiest of the civil war, in which Nationalist forces sought to dislodge the Republican and international troops defending the road to Madrid.
That morning, the dawn came up cold, clear and bright. The world seemed young, and we too, as the battalion, 600 strong, climbed up to the ridge above the Jarama. By nightfall we were no more than 300. On the morning of 13th, we numbered 225. On the 14th, we were 140. That historic 14th broke the back of the Fascist offensive. The lifeline of the Madrid–Valencia road had been saved. The battalion buried its dead. From the British working class none ever died with greater honour. We held that front for four months. “Solidarity and Unity,” Old Moriarty had said, “are the two most beautiful words in the revolutionary’s lexicon.” The Jarama proved how right he was.
The battalion was the first family Beurton had ever known, and within a month of being adopted by it three-quarters were dead.
Len was, understandably, an insecure man, oversensitive and quick to complain. He was happiest on his own, behind the lines, wandering the Spanish countryside during lulls in the fighting. But he had one very remarkable quality: he was immune to fear. He was not brave, exactly, but he was nerveless at moments when others were terrified. An American psychologist interviewed him at the height of the fighting and declared “he had never met anyone so completely devoid of physical fear.” In February 1937, Beurton was driving a truck from the battalion cookhouse with Captain George Nathan in the passenger seat when the vehicle took a direct hit from an artillery shell. Beurton emerged from the wreckage not only unscathed, but weirdly cheerful. He lost two more trucks to strafing, without registering a whiff of anxiety. “My nervous system, I had discovered, operated efficiently under stress,” he wrote.
In April 1939, Len Beurton caught the train from Frankfurt to Munich and rang the doorbell of number 2 Elisabethstrasse. Foote was delighted (and not very surprised) to discover that the “new comrade” Sonya had referred to was his old friend Len. He suggested they have lunch at the Osteria Bavaria, in order, as he put it, to “have a look at Hitler.” Sure enough, the Englishmen had scarcely sat down when they were told to put out their cigarettes as the fanatically antismoking führer was abou
t to arrive. “We didn’t have to give the salute because we were British subjects, but we stood up like the rest.” Two women were also waiting for the führer’s arrival: one was Unity Mitford, Hitler’s British acolyte, and the other was his mistress, Eva Braun. “They clearly couldn’t stand each other,” Len observed. Hitler greeted his two female guests, bowing and kissing each by the hand, and then processed through the restaurant to loud applause. At that moment Len reached into the inside pocket of his jacket. He was searching for his cigarette case, but to Foote the movement looked “as though he was going to draw a revolver.” He was horrified. “There must have been a fair sprinkling of trigger-happy Gestapo agents” among Hitler’s entourage who would open fire at any hint of an assassination attempt. “Nothing whatever happened.” The führer’s goons stood around looking bored as Len pulled out his cigarettes, and Hitler disappeared into the back parlor. Foote breathed again, reflecting: “It’s a wonder no-one tries to bump him off considering the lack of precautions taken on these informal occasions.”
Sonya had told Foote and Beurton to identify sabotage opportunities inside Nazi Germany, some target that might be dramatically destroyed in a way that would impede German rearmament and attract the attention of the international press. Len believed he had already found the ideal objective. His friendly landlord took him to see the Graf Zeppelin, the mighty passenger-carrying, hydrogen-filled airship. In 1936, Goebbels sent the zeppelin on a tour of Germany, dropping propaganda leaflets and blaring loud martial music. The great flying machine had been decommissioned and was now on display in a huge hangar at Frankfurt airport, a proud symbol of German scientific prowess, military might, and national pride. Len suggested they blow it up.
Foote told him “not to be ridiculous,” but the more they discussed it, the more feasible a sabotage operation seemed. Beurton insisted: “It would be perfectly easy to put a time bomb with a slow fuse in a cigarette packet under one of the seats and let it and the hydrogen in the envelope do the rest.” He returned for another look, carefully inspecting the cushions and curtains, and the “impregnated canvas skin.” If an incendiary device was planted in the gondola, the whole airship would go up like a giant firework.
At the next rendezvous with Ursula in Vevey, Foote outlined the plan. Sonya was “extremely excited” and explained that an effective bomb could be constructed from sugar, aluminum powder, and charcoal. “A moderately accurate time fuse was not difficult to make,” giving the saboteurs ample time to escape before it went off. She invited Foote to come to the house the next morning “so that we could try out the mixture in peace and quiet”—an odd way to describe detonating a homemade bomb. Foote was pleased by the invitation to Sonya’s home. “I felt it was a step forward in my initiation into the network.” In the lean-to shed abutting La Taupinière, they mixed the bomb and inserted a time fuse. “The whole thing fitted inside a cigarette packet.” Then they placed the incendiary device under a sofa cushion and took cover inside the house. “The only result was a large quantity of black smoke and an unholy stink.” If it could not set fire to a cotton cushion, the bomb was extremely unlikely to ignite the thick leather upholstery of the zeppelin.
Over dinner, they agreed that the plan was probably unfeasible. The conversation turned to Foote’s life in Munich. He told her how he had taken to eating at the Osteria Bavaria, where Hitler frequently lunched with his dozy bodyguards. “It would be easy to put a bomb in a suitcase beneath the coats and hats which hung on the partition wall separating Hitler from the main restaurant,” he idly observed. Sonya’s response stunned him.
“What an excellent idea.”
“Just fancy,” he later observed. “She expected me to assassinate Hitler.”
Foote returned to Munich, and Ursula immediately sent a message to Moscow reporting that Agent Jim had “presented an opportunity for coming close to Hitler and assassinating him.” The response came back: “The director is extremely interested in the report on Hitler”; Foote should “check up on his movements and habits.”
“The snow melted,” wrote Ursula, “and the spring had a fairy tale beauty.” The warmer weather brought a flood of wild daffodils to the hills above the chalet, and no fewer than three spies to the Molehill. Alexander Foote and Len Beurton traveled separately to Switzerland and checked into a Montreux boardinghouse, the Pension Elisabeth, overlooking Bon Port on Lake Geneva. The next day, while the children and Ollo “made their way through a sea of flowers, picking arms full of daffodils,” the three conspirators sat in Ursula’s kitchen and discussed how to murder Hitler.
Foote was distinctly alarmed to discover that in the intervening weeks the ambiguous injunction to “keep an eye” on Hitler at the Osteria Bavaria “had burgeoned in the eyes of the Kremlin into a full-blown scheme for assassination, with Len and myself apparently cast for the principal roles.” Beurton was enthusiastic. “What could be easier than to put a time bomb in an attaché case along with our coats and, having had an early lunch, abandon the lot in the hope that the bomb would blow Hitler and his entourage, snugly lunching behind the deal boarding, into eternity?” An alternative method—“assassination in its more traditional character”—would be to shoot Hitler as he passed through the restaurant and hope his inattentive bodyguards were too slow to intervene. The only problem with this second plan was that it was suicidal. Ursula and Beurton shared the conviction that killing Hitler was not only possible, but a moral imperative. “Neither of us believed in the effectiveness of terrorist attacks on individuals,” she wrote. “But there were some people we considered so dangerous and bestial that we were both prepared to break the rules.” Foote was not nearly so keen. He too wanted Hitler dead. He just didn’t want to die himself. Beurton might be a stranger to fear, but Foote was not.
The next day they practiced assembling bombs, and Ursula gave her accomplices an initial lesson in wireless technology. How very different were these two Englishmen, Ursula reflected. Len was “intelligent, well-read and a keen observer” but he “did not possess Jim’s self-assured poise.” Foote was “resourceful and shrewd” with “a talent for organization,” but she also detected a “tendency towards cynicism” and a taste for the high life: he seemed to be having rather too good a time in Germany. Beurton liked to wander alone in the mountains, whereas Foote was happiest in the fleshpots of Geneva. “I preferred the sensitive Len,” she wrote. “Who loved nature and took an interest in my children.”
Franz Obermanns, the deputy Ursula had been introduced to in Moscow, arrived in Switzerland several months later than expected. During training, the young German communist had set off a bomb prematurely and gashed his chin with flying glass. The Center insisted he would be too conspicuous in Switzerland with a face swathed in bandages, so he had delayed his departure until the wound healed. Ursula met him in Bern and instructed him to find lodgings in Fribourg in western Switzerland, build a transmitter, watch for any signs of surveillance, and await developments. Obermanns did not inspire confidence: he was enthusiastic enough, but still had a vivid red scar on his face—“not exactly an advantage in secret work.” He seemed clumsy.
By the summer of 1939, Ursula had two working transmitter-receivers, two agents embedded in Germany, a willing assistant in Obermanns, and a plan to blow up the führer. To finance operations, Moscow transferred funds into a London bank account, disguising the origin, which she withdrew as required. The Center was pleased: Major Sonya’s Swiss network was running like clockwork, and war was on the horizon.
In March, German troops had occupied Prague, the same month that Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany. Franco’s Nationalists were supreme in Spain. “Would it be Switzerland’s turn next?” Ursula wondered. Foreigners were already fleeing the country, fearful of a Nazi invasion. The Nazis had two separate intelligence organizations operating in Switzerland: the Abwehr (military intelligence) and Heinrich Himmler’s powerful Reich Security Main Office, or RSHA, which comb
ined the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS intelligence service. German spy hunters were combing Switzerland for enemies of the Reich. “Geneva was swarming with secret agents from many countries, and the Gestapo men came in droves,” wrote Ursula. Her German passport, issued in Shanghai in 1935, would expire in May 1940, and as a Jew stripped of citizenship she was ineligible for a new one. Without a passport and residence permit she was liable to be deported, tantamount to a death sentence. Horrific accounts of what was happening to Jews in Germany were already circulating in Geneva. Marie Ginsberg, the librarian at the League of Nations, was a Polish Jew active in the underground network smuggling Jews out of Germany on false passports. She offered to help: for 2,000 Swiss francs, a Bolivian diplomat in Bern could provide Ursula with a Bolivian passport. It was some protection, but not much. What Ursula needed was legal citizenship of another country and a genuine passport to get her out of Switzerland in a hurry if the Nazis marched in.
Olga Muth returned from the village one afternoon bearing a worrying rumor: “Jews with expired passports would be put over the German border.”
Ursula downplayed the danger. “There are many people without passports, and the deportations can only be isolated cases.”
Ollo was unconvinced. “If they find out anything about your work, it will be your turn. You know what will happen to you under Hitler. You won’t survive.”
But then the German nanny brightened. “I promise you one thing. I will keep the children with me, even if I have to hide them. When they send me back to Germany, I will take them with me. With their blue eyes and blond hair they won’t attract attention. I can earn enough for the three of us. You won’t need to worry about them. They’ll have a good time with me.”
Agent Sonya Page 19
