URSULA LAY AWAKE, WONDERING WHETHER to murder her nanny.
Len was firm. “During the Spanish Civil War he had looked death in the face many times.” Unless Ollo was stopped, she could get them all killed. “Would she go to the Swiss authorities, or would she even go so far as to contact the German fascists?” Espionage is a lethal profession, as Ursula was well aware. “The past had required me to deal with death more than once.” But the idea of “liquidating” Olga Muth, whatever her treachery, was more than she could bear. “We were not terrorists or criminals, neither unfeeling nor cruel.” And Ursula loved her. She recalled Ollo’s kindness to her as a child, her stalwart courage when the Gestapo ransacked Schlachtensee, her quiet discretion, her bravery in taking money to Rosa Thälmann in Nazi Germany. She “had adapted to the illegal atmosphere wonderfully and supported me as a matter of course.” Ursula blamed herself for the appalling situation. “Her fear of losing us arose out of her love for the child and also for me. Ollo deserved my understanding, my patience.” Ollo had risked her life for Ursula. They could not kill her, and she would not give Moscow the opportunity to order her to do so.
In the course of a long, sleepless night, Ursula formed a plan: she would smuggle the children somewhere beyond Ollo’s reach, secretly rent a flat in Geneva, and install the transmitter-receiver there. Then she would fire Olga Muth and send her back to Germany. After that they would explain to Moscow what had happened and await orders. None of this was possible, however, with Ollo under the same roof, observing their every move. Ursula discussed the situation with Alexander Foote, who expressed sympathy for “the faithful old thing,” but agreed “she was a danger to us all…at any moment the faithful retainer might try another denunciation.”
Sensing the stress, the children were fractious. During yet another quarrel with the nanny, Michael called Ollo a “witch.” She slapped him across the face. Ursula exploded. “Right, that’s enough, no one can live with you any more. The endless weeping, your imaginings, you are driving us all crazy. And now you have hit the boy. That’s the end of it.” With extreme reluctance, Ollo agreed to move in with the farmer’s wife until the atmosphere was calmer. As she left the house, she muttered darkly: “I will not let you out of my sight; you can be sure of that.” Early the next morning, a small figure sat hunched on the bench outside the Füssli farmhouse, her binoculars trained on the Molehill. “When one of us came out of the door, she lifted up the field glasses. If I went to the village, she focused them in my direction until I was out of sight.” A few days later, Frau Füssli arrived to muck out the cow barn and took Ursula aside: Ollo had told her that Ursula was a spy. “I don’t know anything about politics,” Frau Füssli said. “But I understand that war and Hitler are disasters. I’m outraged at what she has done and still intends to do.” Ollo was studying the timetable of trains to Germany and planning to go to the German consulate in Geneva. The farmer’s wife promised to alert Ursula the moment Ollo left for the city. Frau Füssli was now spying on Ollo, who was spying on Ursula. And time was running out.
Les Rayons, a boarding school in a remote area above the lake near Gland, agreed to take in Michael and Nina at short notice, with payment in advance. The German owners seemed kind, and Ursula felt sure “they would keep the children for some time if we were arrested.” Then she found a two-room apartment for rent in central Geneva, a place with “cold, mortared walls” far from the “warm, breathing house on the hillside.” The thought of leaving La Taupinière was wrenching. “The mountain landscape had become part of my life. It was my daily joy.”
“I will be lonely,” said Frau Füssli, when Ursula explained she was departing. The farmer’s wife did not need to ask why.
That night they packed and Len took the luggage to the village under cover of darkness, along with the exhumed transmitter. A thick mist blanketed the hill at dawn the next morning as Ursula bundled up the children and they walked down the track to Caux. Len stayed behind, ready to intercept Ollo if she spotted them leaving and attempted to follow. She did not. “The cold autumn fog was kind to us,” wrote Ursula. Parting from the children was agony. “How long are you sending us away for?” asked Michael, at the gates of the children’s home. Nina clung to Ursula and wept. “Would I ever see the children again?” she wondered. The moment took her back, with excruciating clarity, to the time when she had first left Michael in the mountains of Czechoslovakia: “Mummy stay with Misha, please mummy stay with Misha.” Returning to the chalet, Ursula experienced what she called “one of my few moments of despair,” followed by a fresh flash of anger. “All of this, not because of my work—I could be brave if that was the case—but due to a crazy old woman. Because of her we have to leave home, give away the children, interrupt the revolutionary work and perhaps even go to prison.”
The nanny arrived at midday, to find Ursula in the empty hall.
“Where are the children?” she said. “Where is my Nina?”
“They are safe,” Ursula replied. “They are in a place where you cannot reach Nina, even if something happens to me. And it does not matter what happens to me now. Do whatever you intend to do. You must know me well enough to know I am not afraid.”
Ollo’s face turned ashen and she collapsed onto the flagstone floor.
“What will become of you now, Ollo?” Ursula asked gently, as she cradled the older woman’s head in her lap.
“I don’t care about anything,” Ollo sobbed.
“I can give you enough money for half a year.”
“You don’t have that much.”
Ursula explained that she had sold her brooch, the last object of value she possessed.
“May I come with you to the station?” Ollo asked.
“That will only make it more difficult for you.”
“Allow me this last request.”
As Ursula climbed aboard the little train at Caux, Olga Muth wept silently on the platform. “She knew the farewell was final.” Yet another departing train, another love gouged out of Ursula’s life. The carriage pulled away, and the little woman trotted awkwardly alongside, stumbling and mouthing something through her tears. Ursula could not make out her words. Olga Muth, the loyal and loving traitor, was still standing on the platform as the train rumbled around the bend and out of sight.
* * *
—
MOSCOW’S ORDERS WERE BLUNT: get out of Switzerland.
Ollo’s denunciation to the British authorities had compromised the network. Franz Obermanns was still in prison, and at least three people outside the network were aware of her espionage activities; Agent Sonya was now a liability, and the risk of exposure too great. Major Poliakova instructed Ursula to hand over the transmitter to Foote, install him in her place as Radó’s radio operator, and then head for Britain via Vichy France, Spain, and Portugal, taking Len and the children with her.
Sandor Radó considered Ursula’s impending departure to be “near desertion,” but the owlish spy was impressed by her replacement, the Englishman “Jim.” Foote struck Radó as “intelligent and determined” despite his “total lack of political education,” and was clearly “a talented pupil of Sonya’s” and an “outstanding radio operator with an extraordinary capacity for work.” Ursula passed on Moscow’s orders: Foote was to train another radio operator for Radó, construct another transmitter-receiver, and then move to Lausanne. She would be leaving the network in good shape. By the end of 1940, wrote Radó, “I had at my disposal two transmitters and three trained radio operators.”
Len Beurton would be one of those operators, and a most unwilling one. Ursula obtained a visa to pass through Spain without difficulty, but Len’s application was refused. As a former member of the International Brigades, his name appeared on a list of foreigners unwelcome in Franco’s Spain. The Spanish consulate flatly refused to issue a transit visa. He was trapped in Switzerland.
Ursula packed her be
longings into a single suitcase, collected the children from Les Rayons, and took leave of her few friends remaining in Switzerland. “It is even harder to say good-bye to people you love and respect when you know it may be farewell forever,” she reflected. In one of her final messages to the Center, Ursula suggested a method for contacting Soviet intelligence once she reached the United Kingdom: “Wake Arms. Epping 1 & 15. GMT.3.” Translated, this meant: meet at the Wake Arms pub near Epping Forest north of London (an inn once frequented by the highwayman Dick Turpin) on the 1st and 15th of each month, at 3:00 P.M. Greenwich Mean Time. Moscow, however, had a different rendezvous point in mind, a street corner south of Marble Arch in Central London. The Center also sent a new set of codes and call times, which she passed on to Foote.
Ursula was required to inform the British consulate that the United Kingdom was her intended destination. When the consul alerted the immigration authorities in London, a series of alarm bells went off.
Germans entering the United Kingdom were closely monitored, and Ursula ticked just about every suspicious box: the Kuczynski family was already under MI5 surveillance; she had been married to a man with a “communistic smell”; her communist brother, Jürgen, had been interned as a security risk; her father was an antiwar leftist intellectual; her new husband was a suspected subversive who had fought in Spain and visited Germany immediately before the outbreak of war. The marriage to Beurton itself seemed dubious, since “she clearly comes from an entirely different social strata [sic].”
“It looks as though the family is on the move and we should make provision for their arrival,” MI5 concluded. “It seems fairly obvious that this is a marriage of convenience but being British subjects we cannot refuse to let them come. The husband is already on the Black List…and it seems best to get her name on the Black List so that we may keep a close eye on her activities.”
On December 11, 1940, Ursula Beurton was formally designated a potential threat to British society.
At dawn a week later, Len Beurton accompanied her and the children to the bus station in Geneva and stowed their luggage on the roof rack. “Len was left standing at the side of the road” as the bus pulled out, a forlorn figure in the slush. Married for just ten months, they would not see each other again for two years.
On Christmas Eve, the little family finally arrived in Portugal after a hellish journey: twenty-eight hours by bus to Nîmes in southern France; an unexplained six-hour delay; another twelve hours to the Franco-Spanish border; more waiting while papers were checked and luggage searched, on leaving France and arriving in Spain; a night trip north through the Spanish countryside (“bright moonlight, little towns asleep…a few hills, and on our left the Mediterranean”); Barcelona at 3:00 A.M.; a train to Madrid and then finally, at 11:00 P.M. on December 23, a packed train to Lisbon. A friendly Lithuanian couple allowed the children to sleep in their bed, while Ursula stood in a corridor through the night. At midday, the train creaked into Lisbon station. Ursula found a cheap hotel, a doctor for Nina, whose temperature was soaring, and a doll and some wooden bricks for Christmas presents, and collapsed into a hard bed.
Then they waited. People were allocated passage to Britain by ship or plane in order of their importance to the war effort, and Ursula and her children, three more German Jews fleeing Hitler, were somewhere near the bottom of the list. Nina recovered quickly. Ursula tried without success to book Len onto a boat from Marseilles to Britain (circumnavigating Spain). Before leaving Switzerland, she had withdrawn what little money remained in the bank and was already running low on funds. She sent two telegrams and two letters to her parents, who had recently moved out of London to Oxford, but received no reply. In a letter dated January 4 (intercepted by MI5) she wrote: “I am here with the kids in Lisboa after rather a tiring trip. We will have to wait at least three more weeks. I do not know where we will land….I am rather at a loss why I don’t hear from you.”
Finally, Ursula was informed she would be sailing on the SS Avoceta, bound for Liverpool.
MI5 read the passenger list and alerted the immigration authorities in Liverpool: “When she arrives please give us her destination, description and the part of the train on which she is travelling. I will then arrange for her to be picked up.” Before setting foot on British soil, Ursula was being tailed.
On January 14, 1941, the SS Avoceta set sail with a convoy of fourteen merchant ships carrying iron ore, timber, and fruit, with a Royal Navy escort of eight vessels as protection against German submarines. The Avoceta, under the command of the convoy commodore, Admiral Sir Bertram Thesiger, was a seventeen-year-old, slow-moving, three-hundred-foot passenger steamer and a tempting target. U-boat captains referred to this as “the happy time,” die glückliche Zeit, when they were still sinking large amounts of British shipping in the Atlantic, with few losses. For Ursula and the children, the three-week passage, via Gibraltar, was anything but happy, a stark contrast to Ursula’s last sea cruise with Johann Patra aboard the Conte Verde. They were crushed into a tiny cabin, the porthole screwed shut and blacked out. The children were continuously seasick. Ursula’s thoughts were crowded and claustrophobic. Would Len ever get out of Switzerland? What had happened to Rudi? In accordance with the rules, she was forbidden to contact him directly in China, but he had sent frequent letters and postcards to the children. In the spring of 1940 these had abruptly stopped, and she had heard nothing since. His silence was uncharacteristic, and deeply worrying. Ursula did not share her fears with Michael. In Britain, she would be spying inside a country at war with Germany. “What sort of work will the Centre want me to do?” she wondered. “Will I be capable of carrying it out? What if no one turns up?” The weather was foul, with squalling winds and rolling seas. The crew was tense. Bilious, fretful, and bored, Ursula braced for the impact of a German torpedo.
* * *
—
OTTO HAMBURGER WAS ANXIOUS. He had not heard from his brother in almost a year. After setting off for Chungking in the spring of 1940, Rudi had vanished. When Otto opened a suitcase left behind by his brother, he found it was “full of communist material.” He feared the worst. But then, early in 1941, Otto received a telephone call from a German business acquaintance in Shanghai, Dieter Flatow, who suggested they meet on a street corner midway between their offices. Dieter explained that his brother Gerhard had sent a telegram from Chungking written in Rotwelsch (literally “rogues’ jargon”), the semisecret language used by thieves and other covert groups in southern Germany. It read: “H’s Bruder als Späher in Kittchen. Soll weggeputzt werden,” which loosely translates as “H’s [Hamburger’s] brother is in the jug for nosing around [spying]. Faces being rubbed out [liquidated].” The message, meaningless to the Chinese authorities, could not have been clearer to Otto. He immediately called “Rudi’s communist friend,” Johann Patra, who got on the wireless to Moscow.
Relations between the USSR and the Republic of China had warmed since the signing of the Sino-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1937, and Moscow was now providing substantial military aid to China’s Nationalist government in its continuing war with Japan. In January 1941, the relationship further improved with the arrival in Chungking of General Vasily Chuikov as head of the Soviet military mission. The future victor of the Battle of Stalingrad, Chuikov was now the most senior foreign adviser to Chiang Kai-shek and in a position to ask for favors.
Three weeks later, Rudi Hamburger was taken from his cell in Bai Mansion and brought before the investigating magistrate. After nine months of captivity, half-starved, and ravaged by malaria, he looked like a ghost. Instead of being ordered, yet again, to confess, he was informed that he would soon be released and allowed to fly to Russia. “The friends had intervened,” Rudi wrote. His imprisonment in Happy Valley was over.
At the beginning of February, Rudolf Hamburger arrived in Moscow and was taken to a heavily guarded dacha at Kuntsevo outside the city, near Stalin’s personal residence
. The “reception was enthusiastic,” Rudi wrote in a letter to his father, describing his lodgings “in a lovely rest home on a beautiful wooded estate.” Incarceration had done nothing to dim his enthusiasm for espionage; if anything, he was even more determined to excel at a job for which he was so singularly ill-suited. The dacha contained a large library, and after months deprived of intellectual stimulation Rudi gorged himself on the literature of communism. Once a skeptic, Hamburger was now a fully fledged communist believer. “Four men [Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin] have achieved the greatest spiritual development of the last 50 years,” he declared. Despite the unmitigated failure of his first mission, the Center had new plans for him. Rudi would be on the move to Turkey, the great borderland between East and West and, like all neutral countries, an espionage hothouse.
* * *
—
THE SS AVOCETA DOCKED in Liverpool on the afternoon of February 4, 1941, and Ursula and the children disembarked, “very cold and tired,” but relieved to be beyond reach of German submarines. The foreboding she had felt on board was fully justified. A few months later, the captain of the German U-boat U-203 spied the Avoceta through his periscope and fired four torpedoes into her port side. “She staggered like a stumbling horse,” the captain wrote, and then sank swiftly, taking with her 123 passengers and crew, including 32 women and 20 children.
Immigration officer John Pease plucked Ursula out of the line waiting for passport control. The other passengers stared as they were led away. “Nina began to cry.” The questions came fast: “Where is your husband? What are you going to live on? Why did you leave Switzerland?” After two hours, Pease gave the children a penny each, handed Ursula over to Major Taylor of MI5, and typed up his report.
Mrs. Beurton is the subject of individual case No. 186 in Central Security War Black List. She is proceeding to her father, Professor Robert René Kuczynski, 78 Woodstock Road, Oxford.The reason given for leaving Switzerland is that she is afraid to stay any longer owing to her connection with a well-known anti-Nazi family—her father left Germany about eight years ago for the same reason and is now occupying a chair at the London University as an expert on population questions. Mr. Beurton is unable to leave Switzerland as he cannot obtain a Spanish visa.
Agent Sonya Page 23
