Agent Sonya

by Ben MacIntyre

  Word that Frau Hamburger had become engaged to the younger of the two Englishmen spread swiftly through Caux, as such news does in small communities. Though she did not know the strange subtext to the engagement, Frau Füssli, the farmer’s wife, was delighted for Ursula, as was Lillian Jakobi, the elderly Jewish woman who had become a close friend.

  The betrothed couple took to the slopes. Ursula was now an accomplished downhill skier, but Len was a dangerous combination of intensely enthusiastic, barely competent, and completely fearless. One afternoon, they caught the little train to Rochers-de-Naye, 6,700 feet above sea level. The view over the valley was spectacular. They skied down fast. In Len’s case, far too fast: he lost control on a steep slope, slammed into a wall of ice, and broke both his skis. They trudged home on foot through the deep snow, holding on to each other to avoid sliding. Beurton laughed happily all the way down. Ursula wrote: “It dawned on me how much I liked Len.” There was no romantic epiphany, no sudden tumble into love, just the slow realization that, although she had told Len he could divorce her whenever he wanted, she rather hoped he never would.

  Beurton had never experienced a home life before. “Becoming part of our family, feeling warmth and care in a cheerful, harmonious atmosphere, was a decisive experience. We were comrades bound to one another through work and danger. We shared the same opinions about books and people. Every day we consciously enjoyed the beauties of the landscape. Len’s understanding for the children was quite amazing.”

  They chose a politically auspicious date for their wedding: February 23, the anniversary of the founding of the Red Army, later known as “Defender of the Fatherland Day.” The ceremony was so low-key as to be barely audible: two paper rings from the Uniprix in Vevey and some swift paperwork in the registry office at Geneva, with the porter and clerk as witnesses. Then Mr. and Mrs. Leon Beurton went back home to La Taupinière for a pancake lunch cooked by Ollo.

  There is, of course, no record of when this arranged marriage ceased to be merely convenient, pro forma, and white. But it is entirely possible that it was consummated (and Len lost his virginity) that very evening, in the Molehill, exactly twenty-two years after the birth of the Red Army.

  Ursula Kuczynski accidentally fell in love with Len Beurton, and by the most circuitous route. The fourth, and enduring, love of her life came about as the result of an illegal spy plot and a sham marriage.

  Later they debated the precise moment their love affair had started.

  “When did you realize that you liked me?” she asked him.

  “In novels they would say ‘love at first sight.’ At our first illegal meeting in Vevey, outside Uniprix.”

  “As early as that? I never had the slightest idea!”

  “I didn’t let on to myself for a long time,” said Len.

  But Ursula had also fallen for Len earlier than she admitted. In a letter to her mother, written soon after their engagement, she explained that she intended to marry this Englishman, seven years her junior. “I love him,” she added.

  Many years later, Len wrote an assessment of Ursula, as a wife, an intelligence officer, and a revolutionary.

  Style, elegance, restraint, modesty and the initiative to carry the fight to the enemy, coupled with stability under stress. You may well say it is immodest to talk about one’s boss and wife in such terms. Sonja [the German form of Sonya] was equipped with a command of the techniques of diversion, manufacture and use of explosives, theory and practice of radio communications and the ability to teach others. She never made demands that she would not make on herself. Her dedication to the destruction of Fascism was absolute. But she remained feminine and was the most devoted of mothers.

  Like many successful marriages, this one was not entirely straightforward. Len sometimes accused his wife of being “dictatorial”—which she could be, particularly in matters of professional espionage. He was never in doubt that he had married his superior officer. She found him thin-skinned and liable to sudden, inexplicable changes of mood. “He fussed over things that I felt were unimportant.” But Ursula provided Len with love, unconditional and absolute, something he had never known. For many years she had lived in danger and courted risk, while constantly accompanied and sometimes paralyzed by fear. What Len gave Ursula, in addition to lifelong loyalty and a marriage certificate, was a by-product of his own, strange character: he lent her some of his own stolid fearlessness.

  Richard Sorge had offered glamour and peril. Johann Patra, the working-class seaman, was a creature from another world, jealous and competitive, an irresistibly romantic revolutionary. But Len was neither her boss nor her rival. He needed her as no one had ever needed her before, and loved her in a way that was simple, strong, and unquestioning. Ursula was no longer the headstrong adventure seeker, but a mature undercover agent and trained intelligence officer with two children, a spy network, and a heavy burden of responsibility. She no longer lived for fast motorbikes or political arguments that stretched into the early hours; she needed backup, emotional and professional. She did not want another firebrand or a sparring partner. She wanted a good husband. And she got one.

  Ursula applied for a British passport the day after the wedding, and the consul duly wrote to the Passport Office in London, asking whether he should issue one. The reply came back on March 28, 1940: “We have no record on Mrs. Ursula Beurton and only a possible trace of her ex-husband with a communistic smell. On the face of it, I do not see how you can refuse to issue a British passport.”

  MI5 thought otherwise.

  The British Security Service was by now profoundly suspicious of the Kuczynski family, and concerned to discover that yet another member might be en route to Britain. Fear of the “Red Menace” had intensified with the Nazi-Soviet pact. Both Robert and Jürgen Kuczynski had adopted the party line from Moscow and publicly condemned the war as a conflict between imperialists that communists had no stake in. Robert was described by MI5 as “spreading defeatism” with his “anti-war” attitudes. The family was deeply involved with the Free German League of Culture, which MI5 considered “a communist front organisation.”

  At the end of 1939, Jürgen Kuczynski was brought before the Aliens Tribunal, the body set up by the Home Office to rule on which of the seventy thousand German and Austrian “enemy aliens” in Britain should be locked up as potential enemy agents. MI5 submitted evidence that he was a communist (something he did nothing to hide), and on January 20, 1940, Jürgen was interned at Seaton Camp in Devon, a former holiday camp, along with 568 other “Category A” internees, most of them Nazis. Robert was designated “Category C” and remained at liberty, to MI5’s annoyance: “Everyone knows, as the judge does, that he is a real Communist and professes everywhere his aversion against this Imperialistic War.” MI5 was equally suspicious of Len Beurton, but as yet uncertain whether his sympathies lay with communism or Nazism. “Beurton is known to have been sufficiently interested in Germany to have bought a German Grammar and German readers, and was said to be in Germany in September 1939.” He was placed on the Central Security War Black List as a possible subversive.

  Jürgen Kuczynski’s internment led to a tussle between MI5, which wanted him locked up, and the Home Office, which saw no reason to detain him. Numerous well-connected friends weighed in to demand Jürgen’s release, insisting (wrongly) that he was completely innocent. Labour’s leader, Clement Attlee, even raised the issue of Kuczynski’s continued internment in the House of Commons. Lilian Bowes Lyon, the queen’s cousin, wrote to Marguerite, sympathizing over her husband’s incarceration. Sir Alexander Maxwell, permanent under-secretary of state at the Home Office, pointed out that being a communist was “not in itself a reason for internment” and insisted that “unless MI5 have some information beyond what appears in these files, Kuczynski ought to be released.” Jürgen was freed on April 19, 1940, with a glowing commendation from the camp commandant, who described him as “a very a
ble man intellectually, and a thoroughly good sort.” MI5 was furious. It still had no idea just how deeply Jürgen was involved with Soviet intelligence, but nonetheless considered him to be “a very dangerous person,” whose sister should not be granted citizenship.

  MI5 tried to jam the brakes on Ursula’s passport application. “We have now received further information with regard to Mrs. Ursula Beurton, and are strongly of the opinion that she should not be issued with a British passport.” The reply came back: “We can do little now, as we authorized the issue of a passport on 24th of April.”

  Ursula collected the “precious document” from the consulate at 41 Quai Wilson in Geneva. Just in time, she had acquired the means to flee Switzerland if the Nazis attacked, as they fully intended to do.

  A week after Ursula became a British citizen, Hitler launched his Blitzkrieg: activated by the code name “Danzig,” German troops poured westward and north in an unstoppable armored tide. Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg were overrun. On June 14, the Nazis occupied Paris, leaving only the southern “Free Zone” of France under Pétain’s Vichy regime. German planning for the invasion of Switzerland started on the day France surrendered. Publicly, Hitler declared that “at all times, whatever happens, we will respect the inviolability and neutrality of Switzerland.” Privately, he prepared to incorporate the country into the greater Reich, regarding the Swiss as a “misbegotten branch of our Volk” and “a pimple on the face of Europe.”

  As Ursula put it, “Switzerland was encircled by the fascists; only a single narrow passage through France remained open.”

  Foote later claimed that Ursula and Len were too preoccupied with each other to pay much attention to international events. This was not true, but they were certainly “acting like a honeymoon couple,” wandering the Swiss Alps hand in hand, picking daffodils. “It was perfectly obvious that this was anything but a marriage of convenience,” wrote Foote, who found their blooming love affair quite amusing. Olga Muth did not. She had been assured that this marriage was one of expediency, whereas it was plainly a reality. She brooded furiously. Ollo felt a fierce residual loyalty to Rudi, who had no idea that his wife had obtained a divorce, a new husband, a new name, and a new nationality.

  But then, Rudolf Hamburger was hardly in a position to do anything about the situation, since he was being tortured in a Chinese jail.

  EMILY HAHN, THE NEW YORKER correspondent in China, was taking cover in the bomb shelter of the Press Hostel in Chungking when military police burst in and arrested one of her fellow guests. The man pulled a gun and was disarmed after a brief struggle, but not before he had attempted to swallow a piece of paper. He was tied up and led away. “It was just like the movies,” Hahn wrote.

  “Mickey” Hahn had seen plenty of drama in her thirty-five years: a cigar-smoking adventurer from St. Louis, Missouri, she had lived with a pygmy tribe, driven across America dressed as a man in a Ford Model T, and walked alone from one side of Central Africa to the other. She arrived in Shanghai at around the time Ursula left, and became notorious for smoking opium and attending dinner parties with “Mr. Mills,” a pet gibbon she dressed in a diaper and tailor-made dinner jacket. She was befriended by Agnes Smedley, who used Hahn’s Shanghai address as a “mail drop” for letters she did not want intercepted by the police. After the outbreak of war between Japan and China in 1937, Hahn moved with a posse of fellow journalists to Chungking, the wartime capital of the Chinese government under Chiang Kai-shek. The city was being pummeled by Japanese bombers. At the sound of the sirens, the international clientele of the Chungking Press Hostel, many still in their nightwear, crammed into a shelter constructed inside a cave in the garden. Here Chinese waiters served snacks and cocktails as incendiary bombs rained down. It was during one of these gatherings that Emily Hahn witnessed the calamitous end to Rudolf Hamburger’s first, short-lived spy mission.

  It had all started so promisingly. On April 20, 1939, Rudi and Johann Patra boarded the Katori Maru in Marseilles. The boat was packed with Jews fleeing Europe and bound for Shanghai, “one of the few places in the world still open to them,” as Hamburger wrote. In Shanghai, he rented a small house, while Patra took a room in the home of a wealthy Chinese family. Most of the people he and Ursula had known in the 1930s had gone, but two members of Rudi’s immediate family were now resident in the city: his younger brother, Otto, a businessman, and his widowed father, Max. There was little architectural work to be found, and so he passed his days receiving instruction from Patra on operating radios and making explosives. They got on well. Ursula was seldom discussed. Hamburger was eager to begin work as a spy, but Moscow was still in no hurry to deploy him. Finally, after twiddling his thumbs for almost a year, he was dispatched to Chungking, in southwest China, with vague orders to recruit expatriate communists as informants. Patra built him a shortwave wireless concealed inside an ordinary commercial radio and told him to “keep in touch.” He sailed to Hong Kong and then flew on to Chungking on March 9, 1940.

  In the arrivals halls, Chinese police examined his luggage and confiscated the radio, telling Hamburger he could collect it in two days’ time. A more capable spy would have fled immediately. Instead, Hamburger did as he was told. When the radio was duly returned to him “without comment,” he wondered how the “incompetent” Chinese had failed to spot the illegal transmitter concealed inside. Rather later, he realized that “they knew very well that it was an espionage-grade receiving-transmitting device and were now alerted.”

  International crises attract a peculiar congregation, and journalists, writers, entrepreneurs, and spies flocked to the Chungking Press Hostel. Hamburger was surprised to bump into Agnes Smedley, whose friendship had played such a pivotal role in Ursula’s life and, by association, his. Agnes was continuing her quixotic crusade on behalf of Chinese communism, marching with the Red Army, interviewing its leaders (including Mao), writing thinly veiled propaganda for Western newspapers, and spending more time on the front line of the Chinese war than any other correspondent, male or female. She inspired devotion and irritation wherever she went. When she turned up at the Chungking Press Hostel, following another nervous breakdown and more than a year in the war zone, she was suffering from malnutrition, malaria, hives, liver damage, and possibly typhus. Her toenails and teeth were falling out, but she remained a distinctive figure, as Hahn described her, “incongruous in a peach-coloured satin nightgown.” Rudi knew Agnes was a spy, but Smedley was almost certainly unaware that her old friend’s husband was now in the espionage game himself.

  Keen to start spying, Rudi Hamburger went shopping for additional radio parts. All such purchases were closely monitored by Chinese intelligence. General Dai Li, the “Himmler of China,” ran the “National Investigation and Statistics Bureau,” a secret police force dedicated to rooting out spies. Rudi was a sitting duck.

  Emily Hahn had spotted the “soi-disant German refugee” on arrival at the hotel, but made a point of avoiding the beret-wearing architect, “taking him to be one of those heavily Teutonic artists from Munich…he looked the part to perfection.” On the night of April 21, 1940, the hotel guests were milling around the shelter “shivering and yawning” as they waited for the air raid to end, when the squad of Chinese soldiers burst in. As he was seized, Rudi “protested he had nothing to hide,” but then somewhat undermined his assertion of innocence by brandishing a revolver, which he had no idea how to use.

  Hahn could not believe her eyes:

  He chewed up a paper and tried to swallow it. It had a code on it, exactly like the movies. Everybody was badly shaken by the scene. Hitherto we had accepted him as a perfectly pukka refugee….He didn’t seem surprised at the arrest, or even very indignant. “Let me get dressed, will you?” he said. The soldiers tied his hands with rope, and then marched him out past all of us, standing there in our pyjamas in a row, our mouths hanging open. He didn’t look at any of us. We heard
all sorts of other stories afterward, the most reasonable of which was that he hadn’t been spying for the Nazis but for the Chinese Reds.

  A search of Rudi’s hotel room revealed the transmitter and other incriminating items. After a night locked in a wooden shed inside the police compound, the interrogations started: “Angry questions were asked—which country or organization did I belong to?—but to no avail.” Rudi Hamburger might be a hopeless spy (“his naivety made him totally unusable for conspiratorial activities,” as his son put it), but he was preternaturally stubborn. He refused to answer questions. “After eight days they resorted to torture. My arms were tied behind my back and I was pulled up with a kind of pulley system on the arms about two feet above the ground.” He was left dangling, as the sinews in his shoulders slowly stretched and cracked. “I found myself hanging in a rather painful position,” Rudi wrote, with typical understatement.

  After four weeks of interrogation, he was driven twelve miles up the Jialing River to Bai Mansion, a large country house in the Geleshan region, a delightful valley rolling out beneath a range of pine-wooded hills. The mansion was a concentration camp and torture center for political prisoners, “surrounded with electric fences and guarded by armed patrols that shot intruders on sight.” The locals called it “Happy Valley.”

  The mansion held around fifty male inmates. Hamburger was the only foreigner. His cellmate was Wong Pin Fong, a young man who spoke English and claimed to have been arrested for taking part in an illegal street protest. He had evidently been placed alongside Hamburger to find out who he was working for. Rudi treated the stool pigeon with extreme caution, but Wong reached his own, accurate conclusion: “In reality you must be a member of the American or Soviet secret services,” he declared. For fifteen minutes every day, Hamburger was allowed to see the view from the front of the mansion through a barred window—thirty miles of lush, rolling landscape—before he was locked up again, an ingenious form of mental torture to accompany the physical variety. Every six weeks he was brought before an official and told to confess. Like every other prisoner, he contracted malaria. On a dwindling prison diet of rice, he began to waste away, physically and psychologically. “How long can they hold me?” he wondered. “Months? Years? The country is at war, and in war, everything is possible.”