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IN JUNE 1940, SOON after the Fall of France, Ursula received a message from Moscow instructing her to contact “Albert,” a comrade in Geneva, and put a series of questions to him: “Does your office still function? What is your financial position? Can you get messages to the Centre via Italy? Do you require a transmitter?” The inference was clear, and most surprising: there must be another Soviet spy ring operating in Switzerland, run by this mysterious Albert. As instructed, she pushed a note through the mailbox of 13 Rue de Lausanne, arranging to return in a few days’ time.
The man who opened the door was “thickset, verging on the plump, with dark hair, dark eyes, and a melancholy air.” With his round glasses, heavy-rimmed eyes, and mournful expression, he resembled a corpulent and slightly depressed owl. “Greetings from Mr. Weber,” said Ursula. The man nodded in recognition of the password, led her to an office “full of books and maps, the desk strewn with papers and journals,” and cleared a space for her to sit down. Ursula wondered if he might be some sort of academic. The owl took in his visitor, “a tall, slender, almost fragile-looking woman in a closely-fitting woollen dress. I put her age at about thirty-five. Her movements were smooth, and a trifle languid.”
“My codename is Sonya,” said Ursula with a smile. They spoke German. “The director told me to get in touch with you. I was given your name and address and instructions to call on you and find out how things stand with your group. I’m supposed to report back to the director. You’ll undoubtedly be receiving further instructions through me.”
“Albert” was Alexander “Sandor” Radó, a Jewish Hungarian communist and an “obsessive cartographic scientist” by profession. He was also chief of a Soviet spy network that would become known as the Rote Drei (Red Three), the lynchpin in the wider anti-Nazi espionage ring that Himmler’s spy hunters dubbed the Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra). A former commissar in the Hungarian Red Army, Radó had studied mapmaking in Berlin, run an anti-Nazi propaganda service in Austria, and fled to Paris in 1933, where he was listed by the Nazis as “Public Enemy Number 1.” He was recruited by the Fourth Department in Moscow in 1935 and given the almost inconceivably stupid code name “Dora,” a simple anagram of Rado. By 1940, the rotund and unassuming Hungarian geographer was running a cartographic agency in Geneva named Geopress, supplying maps to European newspapers. He was also the Soviet rezident (the Russian term for spy chief) in Switzerland with the rank of major general, conducting the most important section of the Red Orchestra: a web of spies in Italy, Spain, and Switzerland, and, most important, inside Nazi Germany. Radó typed his reports, used microphotography to shrink them to “microdots” the size of a period, and pasted them into books, which he sent, via courier, to Paris, where they were enlarged, enciphered, and transmitted to Moscow by the French branch of Soviet military intelligence. The Nazi occupation of northern France had blocked this avenue of communication. As Radó put it: “I was head of an intelligence group, there was a war on, and we had no contact.”
“Important information is lying idle,” he told Ursula. In theory active espionage against Germany had been suspended under the Nazi-Soviet pact, but Radó’s team was continuing to collect critical military intelligence. “Geopress is a sound cover organization and the local authorities suspect nothing,” Radó told Ursula. “We are still receiving information regularly but it is simply piling up because I have no means of passing it on to the Center. We need a transmitter, trained radio operators, and a flat or house to operate from. We need a code, and transmission and reception times. There are plenty of problems, as you can see, and they all need solving as a matter of urgency.”
Radó wrote, “I knew precious little about Sonya. I had no idea where she lived, or whom she worked with, or what type of intelligence she collected. The rules of conspiracy forbade me to ask her. Our two groups—Sonya’s and mine—operated independently and in complete isolation until circumstances forced us to contact each other.”
Ursula hauled her radio out of the hole in the woods. Radó wrote out his reports in plain text, on tissue paper, and then drew a white cross in chalk on a street corner in Geneva. Ursula monitored the signal site, before picking up the package from a “dead-letter box,” or “dead-drop site,” spy jargon for a secure place to leave messages: a small cavity under the railings in the hallway of the apartment opposite. She then folded the tissue paper inside a large flashlight, which Len had adapted by taking out one of the two batteries, rewiring it, and installing a lower-wattage bulb: the flashlight still worked, a little dimly, while concealing several sheets of tissue. Back at La Taupinière, she enciphered the reports, transmitted them overnight to Moscow, deciphered the replies, and delivered them back to Radó at another dead-letter box in Geneva.
Radó’s output was prodigious; Ursula felt useful again. “With so much work to do, I would have felt happy if other worries had been fewer,” she wrote.
Switzerland was effectively isolated from the rest of Europe, its economy deteriorating under the threat of German invasion. The Swiss government warned that if a single German soldier crossed the border, the army would destroy the country’s industrial infrastructure and retreat to the mountains to fight a guerrilla war. Radó wrote: “The bitter joke made the rounds that Switzerland was now the world’s largest prison. Hitler and Mussolini had completely cut off four million people. Only a narrow corridor near Geneva remained open to traffic through to Pétain’s unoccupied zone [and] it was expected that even the corridor through to Vichy France—and hence via Spain or Portugal to England or the United States—would one day be closed.”
Ursula’s other worries were closer to home. Olga Muth’s behavior was becoming increasingly erratic. She refused to be separated from little Nina, barely spoke to Len, and bickered incessantly with Michael. Ursula wrote to her parents: “If anyone says something nice about Misha, Ollo immediately contradicts them and begins to talk about Nina.” One afternoon, Ursula was idly chatting in the kitchen with her elderly friend Lillian Jakobi, while Ollo sat silently sewing in the corner. Lillian had just obtained a visa for Britain, where her son was already a refugee. She would soon be getting out of Switzerland and urged Ursula to do the same: “You are sitting in a mousetrap that will close when the Nazis come. Don’t think they’ll respect your papers. You have to leave for the sake of the children. In England you are ten times safer, despite the war.”
At that moment Ollo jumped to her feet with a cry and ran upstairs, sobbing. Ursula found her lying on her bed, shaking and pale, staring at the ceiling.
“What’s the matter, are you sick?”
“I am not sick, but I understand everything,” she replied.
“What are you talking about?”
Ollo sat up and slapped the edge of the bed.
“You have taken me for a fool, but I won’t let you. Don’t act so innocent. You planned everything and thought I wouldn’t notice until it was too late. But you were wrong!”
“I still don’t know what you mean,” said Ursula, amazed by the outburst.
“You know perfectly well: you wanted the new passport to get out of here with the children. You want to go with them and Len to England and leave me here alone, without Nina, because as a German I can’t go with them. That’s the thanks I get!”
Ursula calmly insisted she was not planning to leave Switzerland, and Ollo’s hysteria slowly subsided. But the nanny’s fears were not unfounded: if the Germans invaded, her family would flee with their British passports, and she would be left behind. War could drive a brutal wedge between Ollo and Ursula, and they both knew it. A few days later, Ollo took Ursula aside, tearfully declared “she could not live without Nina,” and made a proposition. “Why don’t you go to England, and leave Nina with me, wouldn’t that be better? I won’t need any money. I will work my fingers to the bone and the child would lack nothing. Do you really want to expose Nina to Ge
rman bombs in England? Do you want to be responsible for dragging the little one into that danger? When times calm down, I will bring the child to you.” From Ollo’s perspective, the idea seemed entirely logical. Ursula was busy with her espionage and her new husband. She might read to her children and take them for long walks and skiing expeditions, but in Ollo’s eyes she was as deficient a parent as her mother had been. It was Ollo who combed the nits from Nina’s hair, shared her private toddler language, and soothed her to sleep with German lullabies. Nine-year-old Misha was rejecting her, but Nina was still her baby and she would not be parted from her.
Suddenly, Ursula was very scared. Adored Ollo, her family’s rock for so many years, was trying to take away her child.
Ursula did not even address this outrageous suggestion. Instead, she changed the subject. “Why not take a holiday?” she said. “I’ll find you a nice place, and in a few weeks you can come back.”
Ollo snapped: “No. I won’t be forced to leave here. I am not going to let you out of my sight. You can be sure of that.”
The Molehill now crackled with tension. Ollo stopped eating, wept copiously, and barely spoke, exuding a “silent bitterness.” At night, she locked the door to the room she still shared with Nina, fearful that Ursula might take the baby while she slept and steal away in the night. She obtained a pair of binoculars (“Where did she get them?” Ursula wondered), and whenever she was not working she perched on the hillside above the house, watching them. “When I talked to Len alone, she tried to listen at the door.” The spy was being spied upon. Ollo began to steam open Ursula’s letters.
One afternoon, Ursula returned from Geneva after collecting a fresh batch of Radó’s reports from the dead-drop site, to find a letter from her parents. Even if the envelope had not been so clumsily resealed, Ollo’s thunderous expression would have revealed that she had read the contents. The letter was an entreaty, urging Ursula to leave Switzerland. “If you stay there until Hitler invades the country, death is certain. If the work of your husband, whom we do not know, keeps you there, then at least send us the children. But if he understands the situation, he will see to it that you come here too.” For Ollo, the letter was confirmation: she was about to be deserted and deprived of “her” child.
The next day, Olga Muth put on her hat and announced she was going to the hairdresser. Instead, she went at once to the British consulate in Montreux. Angry and determined, Ollo had framed a plot of her own: she would prevent Ursula from leaving with Nina by revealing to the British that her employer was a communist spy.
Ursula later depicted this as the work of an unhinged mind, but by Ollo’s own lights her plan was perfectly rational. She had loved each successive child of the Kuczynski family, but her attachment to Nina carried an additional element of desperation, the infatuation of an aging, childless, terrified woman at the mercy of international events she barely understood. Ollo saw herself as the victim of a cruel betrayal. She had given everything to the family, and now Ursula had contrived an escape plan that excluded her. She would tell the British government that the newly minted Mrs. Leon Beurton was a spy who had married solely for the purposes of obtaining British citizenship. The king of England would then withdraw Ursula’s passport, and they could all happily remain in Switzerland. After she had explained everything to the British, she would have her hair done and then visit Lillian. That was Ollo’s scheme. It did not work out.
Olga Muth spoke only a few words of English. The official at the British consulate had French, almost no German, and very little time to spare. With so many people seeking refuge in Britain, the consulate was bombarded with requests, inquiries, “rumours and denunciations,” some realistic, many frantic, and some simply mad. Ollo gave the official her name and address and then launched into a deafening torrent of what she thought was English, but was really German with odd shards of English thrown in. Like many people unable to speak a foreign language, Ollo believed that volume would compensate for a limited vocabulary. “Her ravings in broken English were so incoherent,” Foote later wrote, that when she paused for breath, the official stood up and asked her, very courteously, to go away. He then “added her name to the list of lunatics who pestered the consulate daily.”
Frustrated and surprised by this setback, Ollo confided in her hairdresser (as people, bizarrely, often do) and asked him which branch of Swiss officialdom she should go to in order to denounce her employer. The coiffeur, an anti-Nazi to his roots, wanted nothing to do with the business. He was also, she felt, “deliberately rough” with her hair. Ollo needed an English speaker who would explain the situation to the British on her behalf.
She arrived at the door to Lillian Jakobi’s flat “agitated and confused,” her hair in a mess. Lillian insisted she lie down and take some valerian drops, a natural remedy for anxiety.
“You must help me,” Ollo repeated. “You must come with me. You know that I cannot live without Nina. Please, come with me, right now.”
Lillian was baffled. Ollo continued to rant.
“I have known for ages they want to leave Switzerland, even though they act as if that isn’t the case. They are evil people. They lied to me and want to abandon me. But I am not giving up Nina.”
Ollo described how she had already tried to tell the British authorities that Ursula and Len were “communists who secretly ran a radio station at night so that England wouldn’t let them in and they’d have to stay here.” But for some reason “she had not been properly understood.” That was why Lillian must “accompany her to the consulate and explain everything again properly.”
Lillian was stunned to learn that Ursula was a spy, but horrified by Ollo’s treachery in revealing this to the authorities.
“For God’s sake, what have you done? They could be arrested at any moment.”
The nanny’s response was chilling: “Then I will have the child,” she said and burst into tears.
Ollo had come to the wrong person. Lillian stood over the woman bawling on her sofa and delivered a ferocious rebuke.
“When your mind is clear, you will never be happy again. You will suffer forever from the terrible guilt you have burdened yourself with. Don’t you realize what a betrayal you are committing? No decent person will forgive you if you plunge this family into misery. I regard your condition as an illness and want to help you. Of course I had no idea they were secret communists, but I tell you honestly, I can only admire that.”
She told Ollo to go home and say nothing about the day’s events to Ursula, who was due to come shopping in Montreux the next day.
The moment Ursula alighted from the train, Lillian steered her into a nearby park: “Something terrible has happened.”
Ursula was astonished, livid, and very frightened. Who else had Ollo confided in? Would the hairdresser go to the police? Ollo knew nothing about Radó, so the network was probably safe for the moment. But she certainly knew the identity and whereabouts of Alexander Foote. Even Rudi, wherever he was, would be in danger if Ollo told the Nazis what she knew.
Ursula had evaded the Chinese secret police and the British authorities in Shanghai, the Japanese Kempeitai, the Swiss and Polish security services, MI5, and the Gestapo. No one had ever betrayed her: not Shushin, under torture, nor Tumanyan, and none of Stalin’s other victims. Even Rudi had kept her secrets safe. But she now faced disaster after being denounced by a woman she had known and loved since the age of three.
“Everything that we had laboriously and illegally built up was now threatened with collapse. We had to act immediately.”
Suddenly another terrible thought seized her. Ollo had arrived home late the previous evening, looking tired and anxious. She had gone straight to bed and was not up when Ursula left the Molehill that morning. Len would be out walking in the hills. “What was to stop Ollo from leaving the country with Nina?” She might already be on her way to Germany. “I had to get back im
mediately.” Ursula caught a taxi to Caux, something she had never done before, and ran the last mile uphill to the chalet, her head spinning with terrible fears. If Ollo had taken the baby, she would have to inform the police, but if they intercepted her before the border, she would tell them everything. Yet again, her espionage and her family stood in direct conflict. “If the police found out, our work would be over, and that was exactly what could not be allowed to happen. But I had a duty to do everything I could to ensure that my daughter was not taken away from me, and placed in the hands of the Nazis, perhaps forever.” Panting, she rounded the path above the woods and there, across the meadow, she saw Nina and Michael playing happily in the sun. “My knees went soft. I lay down in the grass, looked up at the sky and stayed there until my breathing calmed down.”
That night, when the house was still, she told Len what had happened. They dismantled the radio, carried it though the darkness to the hole in the woods, and then crawled back into bed, “wet, dirty and tired.”
The next morning, they sat on the bench outside the house, drinking coffee in the cool sunshine while the children played tag. Ollo was still in her room. “The meadows were full of autumn flowers. Nina squeaked with pleasure, and Michael laughed.”
Len turned to Ursula. “She has already spoken to too many people. We have to do something before she turns you and the others over to the police and kidnaps Nina,” he said. “You will have to kill her.”
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