Agent Sonya

by Ben MacIntyre

  Now it was Major Taylor’s turn to grill Ursula. She had been trained to withstand interrogation, and politely answered his questions, one after another. But Taylor was also good at his job, and something about Mrs. Beurton did not ring true. “She was very vague as to her movements, and it was impossible to check up on her statements owing to the recent issue of her passport.” Ursula told him she had met Len Beurton in Switzerland, where he was “recovering from tuberculosis,” but when Taylor pressed her to describe exactly how and when they had met, she said she was “not sure”—an odd thing for a newlywed to forget. “She either could not or would not give even approximate dates….She went on to say that Beurton has now recovered from his tuberculosis and had hoped to return with her to England.” What was Len doing in Germany immediately before the outbreak of war? Her answer—“an unsuccessful attempt to secure money belonging to her which still remained there”—sounded like a lie. After two hours, Taylor told her she was free to go. Then he sent an urgent message to MI5 headquarters: “You may wish to cause Mrs. Ursula Beurton to be kept under observation.”

  Ursula checked into a cheap hotel. A few hours later they were woken by air-raid sirens and ushered into the cellar with other hotel guests as the Luftwaffe bombs rained down on Liverpool’s docks.

  They were homeless, virtually penniless, and under bombardment in a country at war. Her first husband had disappeared. Her second was trapped in Switzerland. Her nanny was in Nazi Germany, probably even now divulging her secrets to the Gestapo. But at least Ursula was no longer living in daily fear of capture, deportation to Germany, and the death camps. As the train trundled southward in the rain through the quiet English countryside, Ursula could feel the accumulated stress and fear begin to ebb. The Nazi spy hunters could not follow her here.

  But the British ones could.

  MOSCOW HAD CHOSEN A PARTICULARLY inappropriate place for a rendezvous—smack in the middle of London’s red-light district.

  Loitering in Shepherd Market in the deepening dusk, Ursula felt painfully conspicuous. From time to time, a man sidled up from the shadows, and she would wave him away. The regular prostitutes were becoming suspicious of this soberly dressed woman who seemed determined to hang around, turning down good customers and undermining business.

  Ursula’s instructions were precise: at 7:15 P.M. on the first day of the month, she should make her way to this street corner east of Hyde Park, where she would be contacted by a military intelligence officer from the Soviet embassy. If he failed to appear, she should return on the fifteenth. Every fortnight, for three months, she caught the train from Oxford and waited among the whores, pimps, and drunks. The officer never appeared. One evening as she made her way through the blackout, the air-raid sirens sounded, and she was herded off the street into an Underground station, where thousands of Londoners were following instructions to keep calm and carry on. “They unpack their supper, their Thermos flasks of tea, the knitting and the newspapers,” Ursula wrote.

  The city was battered but unbowed. “Yesterday I wandered through London,” she wrote to Len. “The debris of the great department stores bothers me less than a little home in ruins, a line of washing still hanging over the kitchen stove.” Instead of cowing the city’s inhabitants, the Blitz was having the reverse effect: “They hated Hitler and fascism,” wrote Ursula. “The whole country rose to defend itself.” For the first time she felt proud to be newly British, but frustrated: the battle against fascism was raging, and she was a spectator. She purchased parts for a transmitter, increasingly sure she would never have the opportunity to use it. Something must have happened in Moscow. Her spying career, it seemed, was over. “Little hope remained that anyone from the Centre would meet me.”

  Like so many refugee families in wartime Britain, the Kuczynskis were dispersed, distracted, and insolvent. With so many fleeing the Blitz to cities outside London, rental accommodation in Oxford was scarce: one landlady insisted she play cards and pray with her every evening; another threw her out after a few days, unable to endure Ursula’s “foreign countenance.” Over the next four months, she and the children moved four times. The Oxfordshire police tracked her movements and reported back to MI5: “She is now living at 97 Kingston Road with her sister,” noted Detective Constable Charles Jevons. “The only people who visit her are her father and his wife. Kuczynski, I am informed, holds strong communist views.” Robert Kuczynski had retired from the LSE at the statutory age of sixty-five. Despite his academic eminence, he had little paid work. “He is much too proud to be a good job-hunter,” wrote Ursula. Jürgen, Marguerite, and their two small children were crammed into a flat in Hampstead, surviving on whatever he could earn from writing and giving lectures. Jürgen’s welcome to his younger sister was distinctly tepid. Alexander Foote later claimed: “Jürgen was angry about Sonia’s [sic] return to the UK…because her presence there as a Russian agent might compromise the rest of the Kuczynski family in their political work.” Without employment or a permanent home, with few possessions, no husband to provide for the family, and no money coming in from the Center, she faced penury. “I was down to the last of my savings,” she wrote. “I did not reveal these worries to my family. None of them had much to spare.” Finally, in April 1941, she found a furnished bungalow for rent at 134 Oxford Road in the village of Kidlington, five miles outside Oxford. MI5 was intercepting her letters. They did not, however, spot the pattern of her trips to London, and the way she lingered on a dubious street corner before returning to Oxford.

  For the first time in her life, Ursula began to sink into depression. Her letters to Len were freighted with loneliness and longing. “There are so many small things I want you to share. I haven’t found any friends yet. This morning I raced off with the pram to fetch a sack of coal. That means our first bath in weeks.” Len was continuing to work as a radio operator for Sandor Radó’s Rote Drei, but without enthusiasm. The Spanish still refused to issue a transit visa, and he was trapped in Switzerland indefinitely. “How much I counted on your coming,” she wrote. “In a hundred ways—‘We must do this walk together,’ ‘We must discuss this book.’…Now I shall have to get used to the fact that such things are not for us.” She put on her best clothes, alone, for a man she had known as a husband for only a few months. “I am wearing a new dress; the first that you do not know. Red with little white polka dots on it, white belt and white collar.” She wondered if he would ever see her wearing it.

  In late May, she traipsed once more to Shepherd Market and waited disconsolately on the street corner, ignoring the hostile looks of the prostitutes. “I had all but given up hope.” Then she saw him, “a tough looking man—thickset and balding, with big nose and big ears—who could clearly take care of himself in a fight.” He was watching her intensely. “The man approached me, not the first in this accursed street, but this time he was the one I wanted.”

  Nikolai Vladimirovitch Aptekar, a thirty-two-year-old former tractor driver from Odessa, worked as chauffeur and secretary to the air attaché at the Soviet embassy. He was also an officer in the Red Army operating under the code name “Iris” and a key member of the large Soviet military intelligence presence in London. As it did throughout the world, Moscow ran two distinct species of spy in the United Kingdom: “legals,” intelligence officers like Aptekar working under diplomatic cover out of the embassy, and “illegals,” such as Ursula, living as ordinary civilians and therefore without diplomatic protection. Aptekar had graduated from the aviation school in Leningrad and served as an engineer in the RAF Bomber Command, before being seconded to military intelligence and sent to Britain. He might look like a prizefighter, but Aptekar was a formidable intelligence officer, with a good grasp of English and a firm grounding in spycraft and military technology.

  Aptekar whispered the code word. Ursula responded with another. They immediately parted and walked in opposite directions. Ursula’s spirits soared. “I glided down the street a
nd along two more as if on wings to the place where we were to talk.”

  “Call me Sergei,” said Aptekar, a few minutes later, in the cover of a shop doorway. She never knew his real name. He conveyed “greetings and congratulations from the Centre,” handed over an envelope containing “enough money to allay all my financial worries,” and apologized because a car accident had prevented him from coming sooner. “The Centre needs news,” he said. Britain was not an enemy of the Soviet Union, but neither was she yet an ally. Moscow was hungry for information. “What contacts can you make? In the military? In political circles? You are to set up a new information network. When can you have a transmitter working?”

  She told Aptekar that she could have her radio up and running within twenty-four hours.

  Ursula was back in the game.

  No sooner did she reestablish radio contact with Moscow than events more than a thousand miles away on the western borders of the Soviet Union transformed the war, and Ursula’s role in it.

  On June 22, 1941, Germany attacked Russia. Operation Barbarossa was the largest invasion in the history of warfare, some three million German troops advancing along an eighteen-hundred-mile front. This was Hitler’s war of extermination, the long-planned operation to liquidate the Jewish and Slavic populations of the western Soviet Union, create Lebensraum (living space) for the German population, and destroy Bolshevism. “We only have to kick the door in and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down,” declared the führer. Millions of dead and four years of brutal fighting would eventually prove him disastrously wrong. Soviet spies, including Richard Sorge in Tokyo and Sandor Radó in Switzerland, had sent warnings of the coming invasion, but Stalin refused to believe them, convinced that as long as Germany remained locked in battle with Britain, Hitler would never open up a two-front war by attacking Russia. His underlings were too terrified to tell him the truth.

  For Ursula, her family, her husband, ex-husband, former lovers, and fellow spies, the outbreak of war on the Eastern Front changed everything. Britain and the Soviet Union were now allies, joined within six months by the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Nazi-Soviet pact, anathema to so many communists, was smashed overnight.

  Ursula was both appalled and elated. The German armies advanced with a series of swift victories, occupying swaths of Soviet territory; it appeared that Moscow would fall, and communism itself might perish. Ursula described herself as “shattered” by news of the surprise attack. But she was also relieved, no longer burdened by the pretense of supporting Stalin’s cynical pact with Hitler. Moscow had made contact at the exact moment her espionage could once again be devoted to destroying Nazism. She was now a combatant, no mere observer, and fighting alongside the British.

  On the day of Operation Barbarossa, Winston Churchill gave one of the most stirring speeches of the war, broadcast live on the BBC, vowing to fight Hitler on land, air, and sea “until, with God’s help, we have rid the earth of his shadow.” Britain now stood shoulder to shoulder with America and the Soviet Union: “The Russian danger is our danger and the danger of the United States just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe.”

  Crouched over her radio, Ursula listened, rapt, to Churchill’s towering oratory and pronounced it “brilliant.” “Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union made a powerful impact on Britain,” she wrote.

  For several days after Operation Barbarossa, Moscow failed to respond to her messages. When she finally established radio contact, Ursula found the Center avid for intelligence about Britain. What were the politicians and generals really thinking? How sincere were Churchill’s words? Would Britain support Russia? Robert Kuczynski, with his wide range of well-connected friends and acquaintances, was uniquely placed to answer such questions. Many of the left-wing economists and Labour politicians he knew were directly involved in the war effort. Ursula chose this moment to recruit her father as a Soviet agent. The professor agreed to supply whatever information he could glean, in the knowledge that she would somehow pass it on to Moscow; he did not know his daughter was an intelligence officer of the Red Army. Robert Kuczynski reported that “Britain’s leading politicians and soldiers were counting on the Soviet Union’s defeat within three months.”

  With the end of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Jürgen Kuczynski switched his position overnight, no longer attacking the war as an imperialist ploy but stoutly defending it as a moral imperative. MI5 observed his change of heart with approval, noting that the communist firebrand had stopped “spreading defeatist propaganda among refugees” and was now “advocating cooperation with the Allied war effort and active help to the USSR.” Jürgen also passed on to Ursula everything he could gather that might be of interest or use to Moscow. Although never formally recruited by Soviet military intelligence, Jürgen Kuczynski now had his own code name, “Karo.” Radio messages to Moscow from the London rezidentura (the intelligence section within a Soviet embassy), intercepted in 1941 and decrypted long after the war, show the high esteem in which he was held by Major General Ivan Andreevich Sklyarov, the chief of military intelligence in London: “I unhesitatingly recommend Jürgen Kuczynski. He is a brilliant scholar, a Jew, and an economist of deep Marxist conviction. I know him to be perfectly reliable. He knows not only Germany but the continent and England and would be more valuable and trustworthy for us than anyone I know….He is tall, slender, dark, ugly, very brilliant and very stable politically.” Unlike their father, Jürgen knew exactly where the intelligence he passed to Ursula was going.

  Sonya’s network, beginning with members of her own family, would gradually expand into a wide web of informants providing, consciously or unconsciously, a range of information useful to Moscow: economic, political, technical, and military. At dinner parties in Hampstead, Britain’s left-wing intellectuals freely exchanged gossip and secrets, unaware that, via one Kuczynski or another, it was all being funneled back to Moscow through Ursula’s wireless. One “fertile source of information” was Hans Kahle, a German communist and former fighter in the International Brigades who, as military correspondent for the American magazines Time and Fortune, had access to highly useful information.

  A report from the London rezidentura to Moscow, sent on July 31, 1941, and partially decrypted in the 1960s, noted: “IRIS had a meeting with SONIA [sic] on 30 July.” The note indicates she was sending daily messages to Moscow at hourly intervals during the night and passing on additional intelligence using microphotographs, the size of periods, attached to letters and sent to safe houses in neutral Spain or Portugal for collection by Soviet intelligence. The Center was paying her £58 a month, backdated to her arrival in Liverpool, a substantial sum in wartime Britain. Years later, MI5 was still puzzling over the identity of Iris: “Probably the English Christian name IRIS used as a cover-name for a woman. The Russian word IRIS means either the flower, or a kind of toffee; the word seems an unlikely choice as a cover name.” Iris was, of course, Nikolai Aptekar, the burly Soviet intelligence officer, who would have been amused to be mistaken for a woman, or named after a toffee or a flower.

  Every fortnight, Sonya caught the train to London to meet “Sergei,” never at the same place twice, never for longer than fifteen minutes, and usually in the darkness she had always feared. “In that blacked-out city, without street lamps or even the glimmer of window light, I was afraid. There was hardly a soul on the streets and anybody who did pass by was invisible. I stood in the pitch dark, expecting somebody to grab my face or throat at any minute. Whenever I heard gentle footsteps, I would hold my breath in fear and be relieved if they belonged to ‘our man.’ ”

  MI5 continued to watch the Kuczynskis. A memo from February 1941 recorded that “various sources” had reported Jürgen Kuczynski was in direct contact with Soviet intelligence. But the Anglo-Soviet alliance had shifted MI5’s focus: with the Russians o
n the side of the Allies, the Security Service was less concerned with monitoring communist subversives than catching Nazi agents. The surveillance of the Kuczynskis dwindled, and then almost ceased. In fact, there were no Nazi spies active in Britain: thanks to the code breakers at Bletchley Park, every single one was intercepted and either executed or turned. But there were Soviet spies aplenty: the Cambridge Five—Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, and John Cairncross, all men in positions of authority in the British establishment—and one unobtrusive refugee housewife in Oxfordshire, Agent Sonya, the eyes and ears of Soviet military intelligence in Britain.

  Ursula saw no contradiction in supporting Russia’s allies and spying on them. And nor did her first husband.

  Rudi Hamburger’s new orders were to travel to Turkey overland via Iran, but as so often in the career of this hapless spy, the plan did not work out. He had got as far as Tehran when Operation Barbarossa redrew the map of war. He could not get a Turkish visa. In August 1941, the British and Soviets launched a joint invasion of Iran to secure the oil fields against seizure by the Germans. Tehran, hitherto a sideshow in the war, was suddenly a place of vital strategic importance, particularly after the Americans arrived to help build the transport infrastructure needed to maintain the flow of fuel and other supplies to Soviet troops on the Eastern Front. Hamburger wrote: “I received instructions to give up trying to get a visa for Turkey and to concentrate on tasks in Iran”—monitoring troop movements, arms shipments, and the military activities of the British and Americans. Hamburger settled down in the Iranian capital and began spying on the Soviet Union’s allies, with characteristic ineptitude.