Ursula did not like the direction this conversation was taking and brusquely put a stop to it. “I am still alive. My work may not be discovered, and even if they do arrest me they may not hand me over.”
Olga Muth had intended to be reassuring. But her words carried a peculiar chill. The nanny had already framed a plan, should Ursula die, for adopting and raising the children herself, back in Nazi Germany.
ON AUGUST 23, 1939, THE foreign ministers of Germany and the Soviet Union signed a diplomatic agreement in Moscow—and Ursula’s political universe imploded. Under the deal agreed by Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, hitherto sworn enemies, pledged not to attack each other. In a secret protocol attached to the nonaggression pact, they simultaneously agreed to carve up, into German and Soviet spheres of influence, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. This was power politics at its most cynical, a calculation by both sides that, for the moment, they had more to gain from nonbelligerence than conflict. Hitler privately believed that war with the Soviet Union was “inevitable,” and he would make it so. But the führer, whom Ursula had so recently plotted to assassinate with the full approval of the Red Army, was no longer the enemy.
The day after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Ursula received a radio message from Major Vera Poliakova at the Center: “Cease all activities against Germany. Pull all agents out and break all contact with any remaining resident agents.”
Ursula was shocked to the core. Without warning, Moscow had suspended offensive operations against the regime that had forced her family into exile, destroyed the German Communist Party, and begun the systematic slaughter of her fellow Jews. She had fought fascism all her adult life, in Germany, China, Manchuria, Poland, and now Switzerland; she had repeatedly risked her life for the Soviet Union; and now communism, the cause she loved, was in league with Nazism, the creed of racist violence and death she detested.
Ursula had never experienced such a crisis of political conscience. Stalin’s purges had exposed the brutality at the core of the regime, but she had told herself this was the result of individual “mistakes.” The Nazi-Soviet pact was a betrayal. For months, rumors had been circulating in Geneva that Germany and Moscow were in secret talks, but Ursula had dismissed this as “journalistic gossip.” Throughout the trials of her early life she had been sustained by a belief that the party, directed by Moscow, was infallible. In time, Ursula would parrot the myth that the nonaggression pact had been a necessary, temporary truce, stymieing a Western capitalist plot to lure Nazi Germany and the USSR into a war of mutual destruction. In truth, like most intelligent communists of the time, she knew Hitler represented the polar opposite of everything she believed in; and Stalin had chosen, for reasons of expediency, to make peace with him. She was devastated, deeply disillusioned, and she was not alone. The Nazi-Soviet pact was greeted with dismay by communist parties worldwide, and with horror by Jews everywhere. It surprised Germany’s allies, including Japan, and galvanized her enemies: two days later, Britain entered a treaty with France in defense of Poland. A day after that, the Swiss army was mobilized in anticipation of a German invasion. Caux, usually bustling with summer visitors, became a ghost town as the last tourists fled.
She might have been heartbroken at Moscow’s pact with the devil, but Ursula remained a disciplined Red Army officer. Alexander Foote was in Geneva when the news broke. Ursula told him to stay where he was and get word to Len Beurton to leave Germany immediately and join them in Switzerland. She knew better than to defy Moscow, but she hinted at her misery in a message to the Center requesting a transfer from Switzerland to the United States. The stern message came back: “No more agents were needed in America.” Sonya should remain at her post, await orders, and spend the time usefully training Foote and Beurton to operate a shortwave radio.
On September 1, Germany invaded Poland. The Free City of Danzig was incorporated into the Reich, and much of its communist underground wiped out overnight. Karl Hoffman, the delicate and tubercular leader of the group Ursula had worked with, was summarily murdered and his network liquidated.
Len was in Bavaria when he received Foote’s telegram instructing him to “get out of Germany as fast as he could.” Beurton crossed the border into Switzerland on September 3, 1939.
That day, Britain declared war on Germany.
Foote and Beurton checked into the Pension Elisabeth—they were the only guests—and the little spy trio hunkered down in the Swiss mountains. From the Center came an ominous silence. “During the first week of a Europe at war, we received no kind of instruction,” wrote Foote. Hitherto Ursula had not specified the source of their orders, but now that they were no longer fighting fascism she owed her subagents a fuller explanation: Ursula told them her real name, described her work in China and Poland, and explained that she was an officer in the Red Army. The order to cease spying on Germany came directly from Moscow. Foote was wryly amused that all the preparatory work for assassinating Hitler had been “completely wasted,” but he was not unduly perturbed to discover that he was an employee of Soviet military intelligence. Ursula tried to seem unruffled by the dramatic change of Soviet policy, but they could tell she was disgusted and distraught.
“The Russian-German pact,” wrote Foote, hit her “like a thunderbolt out of the clear sky. Its effect on Sonya was shattering. She had always regarded the party line as being firmly and steadfastly directed against Fascism. At one blow, all this was changed and she, as a good party member, had now to regard the Nazis as her friends and the democracies as her potential foes. It was really too much for her.”
So began a strange period of limbo. A few days after the outbreak of war, Ursula wrote to her parents in Britain: “Now it has happened, I can hardly believe it. Strange, how the sunsets are still as beautiful and peaceful as ever. It is lonely here.” Every day, the two men walked up to La Taupinière for wireless tuition. Foote spent his afternoons sunbathing and his evenings in Geneva’s bars and restaurants, courting the sister of the Romanian foreign minister. Ursula and Len took long walks in the countryside. Slowly the younger Englishman opened up, describing his abandonment as a child, his conversion to radical politics, and his experiences in Spain. Len’s strange life had made him “oversensitive and introverted,” she reflected, but there was also something special about this “shy, quiet man, intelligent, brave, and with high morals.” He frequently stayed for supper, and played with the children before returning to the boardinghouse.
“Moscow was leaving us severely alone,” wrote Foote. “Our usefulness to them was past for the moment, and the Red Army was content to allow the network to remain fallow until the time should come to revive it. Moscow had clipped our espionage wings.” Ursula was going through the motions, supplying the Center with bland monthly reports on the political situation but, as Foote observed, “her heart was not in the work.” That disillusionment was compounded when the Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939, an act of nakedly aggressive territorial expansion. Franz Obermanns, Ursula’s number two, was equally disenchanted. “Shocked and bewildered, we talked for hours,” she wrote. The Swiss had taken to carrying out spot checks on foreigners. During one of her conversations with Obermanns a policeman appeared, without warning, at the front door, panting from the exertion of the climb to La Taupinière. Ursula pretended the young man with the scarred face was one of her suitors (local gossips had noticed that men frequently called on the attractive single woman on the hillside), and the policeman departed satisfied, having inspected Obermanns’s false papers and noted down the name, Eriki Noki.
The Nazi-Soviet pact theoretically precluded active espionage operations, but it did not prevent the Gestapo from continuing to hunt down communist spies and subversives both inside Germany and beyond her borders. Moscow maintained its support for what remained of the communist movement in Germany. In late October, Ursula was instructed to ar
range collection of a large sum of money from a courier in Geneva and then transfer it across the border into Germany for Rosa Thälmann, wife of the imprisoned KPD leader, Ernst Thälmann. This was all very admirable as a “gesture of international solidarity,” but Ursula, Obermanns, and the two Englishmen could not enter Germany without facing immediate arrest. She wondered whether to attempt the journey using Olga Muth’s German passport. “If things turned out badly, she could say that I had stolen it from her.” But no amount of disguise could make Ursula six inches shorter, age her by twenty-five years, and turn her eyes from brown to green. Ollo agreed to make the trip herself. No one would suspect the gray-haired nanny of being a communist money mule, and she could pretend she was visiting the military orphanage where she had grown up. Ollo’s principal concern was Nina. “I’m an old woman, what can happen even if it turns out badly? But the separation from my child, I wouldn’t survive that.”
At twelve o’clock the following Sunday afternoon, Alexander Foote waited for the cash courier outside the entrance to Geneva’s botanical gardens. As instructed, he wore a dark-blue felt hat, and held a furled umbrella in the crook of his right arm, a pair of leather gloves in his right hand, and a copy of the Picture Post in his left. The handover took less than a minute. Back at La Taupinière, Ursula prized off the back of her old clothes brush, folded the money tightly inside, and sealed it up with glue. Ollo, “innocent, small and mouse-grey,” set off for Germany. If the Nazis discovered what she was up to, she would not be coming back.
Rosa Thälmann was initially suspicious of Nazi entrapment when an unknown woman appeared at her apartment door. But, once inside, Ollo convinced her that the money would provide “material aid to the starving families” of other victims of Nazism. The next day, in a Berlin park, Ollo handed over the clothes brush in a bag. The two women hugged and briefly wept. “I will never forget this,” said Rosa.
“Everything’s fine,” Ollo called out, as she trotted back up the path to the Molehill. Ursula was relieved to see her, and profoundly grateful. But as the nanny swept up the three-year-old girl and held her tightly, Ursula could not help noticing “she only had eyes for Nina.”
Switzerland, once a safe haven, was becoming a cage. The hunt for illegal radios intensified, and foreigners were subjected to increased Swiss surveillance. Himmler’s spy hunters stepped up their pursuit. “As far as I could tell, I was not under observation,” Ursula wrote. But whenever she turned on the transmitter she wondered if this would be the last time. The Swiss banking authorities clamped down on foreign transactions, and the money from Moscow dried up. Ursula was now supporting not only her family and Ollo, but also Foote, Beurton, and Obermanns. The Center promised to send more money. None arrived.
An officer of the Swiss security service appeared one morning, unannounced and inquisitive. Ursula parried his questions and then demanded: “Why does neutral, democratic Switzerland distrust Germans persecuted by Hitler, instead of concentrating on German Nazis, of whom there are more than enough in this country?” The officer replied sadly: “I would be a hundred times happier to do just that.” The visit was unsettling. Len Beurton dug a hole in the woods and laid a board covered with earth and leaves over the top, a hiding place for the transmitter in an emergency.
Alexander Foote was fond of Ursula, but somewhat taken aback when she asked him to marry her.
Her reasons could not have been less romantic. When her German passport expired, she would be legally unprotected, save for a fake Bolivian document. But as the wife of an Englishman, she would be eligible for British citizenship and could apply to the consulate in Geneva for a British passport. Then, if the Nazis invaded Switzerland, she could flee to London and join the rest of her family.
The Center had approved the plan, and Foote accepted Ursula’s marriage proposal. “Numerous mariages blancs [unconsummated marriages of convenience] were taking place in Switzerland at the time purely for the purpose of acquiring legal papers,” he wrote. Ursula assured him that “a divorce would be possible at any time.” The only problem was that she was still married to Rudi, who was somewhere in China. Foote was an opportunist, but he drew the line at bigamy. Again, the solution was brutally simple: Foote filled out a formal witness declaration for the Swiss divorce courts, stating that Rudolf Hamburger (present whereabouts unknown) had committed “adultery with one of Sonya’s sisters in a London hotel.” Rudi had done no such thing, but it is probable that Foote himself had, with Brigitte. Years later, Foote “made no bones at all about the perjury he had committed in the Swiss courts,” but the subterfuge would come back to haunt Ursula. On October 26, 1939, Ursula’s marriage was terminated on the grounds of Rudolf Hamburger’s adultery. Seldom has a divorce ruling been more unjust.
In early December, Franz Obermanns failed to turn up for a scheduled meeting in Zurich; nor did he appear at a backup rendezvous a week later. Ursula, seriously alarmed, broke every rule by telephoning his apartment in Fribourg. A voice she did not recognize said he no longer lived there.
It is a mystery why the Swiss police took so long to spot something fishy about Eriki Noki, a man with a distinctive facial scar traveling on a Finnish passport issued in Canada, who spoke neither Finnish nor English. A raid on his apartment uncovered a “litter of wireless parts,” and Obermanns was arrested. Ursula knew that somewhere in the police files was a report that “Enoki” had been seen at La Taupinière. That night, she and Len extracted the radio from the cupboard, wrapped the individual parts against the damp, and buried them in the woods. Henceforth each contact with Moscow required digging up and reassembling the radio. There was no more transmitting in bed.
The police swiftly established Obermanns’s real identity, and when the Gestapo discovered the convicted communist agitator was in Swiss custody, they issued an immediate extradition demand. This was rejected, on the basis that he was already being investigated by the Swiss authorities for alleged passport violations. The unlucky spy got lucky; Obermanns would spend the rest of the war in a relatively comfortable Swiss internment camp. “The whole affair shook Sonya severely,” wrote Foote.
Meanwhile, Foote and Beurton were getting on each other’s nerves. Apart from their shared experiences in Spain, they had little in common: Beurton was serious and sober, whereas Foote frequently behaved as if he was on some secret holiday, growing fat, literally and metaphorically, while Europe burned. Len complained that his partner was “an egoist, who set too much store by pleasure.” Foote was also fickle. A few weeks after the divorce came through, he told Ursula he had a “confession” to make: he had gone to Spain to avoid marrying a woman he had impregnated in England. If he married Ursula “this affair would be stirred up again,” so he was backing out. This was both highly inconvenient and ideologically troubling. If it was true, then Foote had fought in Spain for ignoble reasons rather than political commitment. And if it was a lie, he was trying to wriggle out of a direct command from the Red Army.
But Foote had an alternative suggestion. “Would you consider marrying Len instead?”
Ursula was happy with Plan B. Indeed, rather happier. Marriage to either Englishman was a passport to a passport, but she liked Len more. She put the idea to Beurton, reassuring him that the marriage was strictly pro forma. “You can trust me to divorce you as soon as you want.”
Len retorted sharply. “I understand the meaning of a ‘paper marriage’ perfectly well,” he snapped. But he agreed nonetheless.
Ursula was struck by Len’s “unaccustomed belligerence.” His sensitivity over the bogus marriage touched her. From that moment, their friendship took on a slightly different hue. At first, she could not put her finger on it. He was strange, this withdrawn young Englishman, but there was something appealing about his combination of shyness and courage, tenderness and toughness. The Swiss might be watching them. The Germans might invade. The Gestapo, if they found them, could kill them all. But the tension and dange
r barely seemed to touch him. At one point he even suggested that he volunteer to spy for the Germans, “in order to double cross them,” an idea as brave as it was impractical. She was moved by Len’s deepening relationship with Michael and his “cautious way of empathizing with the boy.”
Olga Muth was shocked to discover Ursula was now engaged to Len Beurton.
“I thought you were only working with him,” she protested. “And now he’s going to live here?”
Ursula put a hand on the nanny’s shoulder. “He is a good man. He has bonded with the children. This marriage is really very important because it finally gives me a useful passport.”
“Are we going to be free of the worry that they will catch you and dump you over the border?”
Ursula nodded.
“Then that’s the only reason you’re marrying him—a sham marriage?”
Ursula nodded again, a little less convincingly. “The passport plays a part…”
Ollo sighed crossly and launched into a diatribe, as if ticking off a little girl. “That’s typical of you. First you had a man, and there couldn’t have been a better one. Then suddenly you claim that you have grown apart from Rudi and bury yourself with the little one in the furthest corner of China. We were all shocked. Your mother and I had the same suspicion: there was something political behind it. The next thing we heard, you’re having a child. We never even got to see the father, and now—another man!”
Ursula was shaken. Ollo had always been blunt, and fond of Rudi. But there was something more to her beloved nanny’s reaction, something darker and more dangerous. Olga Muth was not just angry; she seemed scared.
Agent Sonya Page 20
