In April 1942, Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, compiled a file of intelligence reports (the majority emanating from the United Kingdom) describing this new superweapon and handed it to the minister for the chemical industry with an order from Stalin to determine what action should be taken. The scientists advised that the Soviet Union commence its own atomic-bomb-building program as soon as possible. By the end of the year, the State Defense Committee had authorized the establishment of a laboratory to develop a uranium bomb under Igor Kurchatov, head of nuclear physics at the Leningrad Physicotechnical Institute. In February 1943, Soviet atomic bomb scientists set to work in earnest on a problem that had already been partly solved for them thanks to the flood of secret material flowing from Klaus Fuchs and Ursula Kuczynski.
Britain’s discoveries in atomic science were also passing to the United States, more legally and formally, but no less secretly. Back in October 1941, President Roosevelt had sent a message to Winston Churchill suggesting they correspond on atomic research. America’s entry into the war two months later gave fresh impetus to the collaboration. But it rapidly became clear that America was pulling ahead in the race to develop the bomb, and the center of gravity (and financial investment) in atomic weapons research was shifting across the Atlantic. America’s Manhattan Project, with Britain and Canada as junior partners, would eventually swallow Tube Alloys, employ 130,000 people, and build the world’s first nuclear weapon.
America and Britain were working on the bomb together, at astonishing scientific speed and in deepest secrecy. Neither was helping, or informing, its other main ally, the Soviet Union. But Moscow was secretly obtaining that help anyway, through its spies. Not only did Stalin know all about the bomb, but he knew that Britain and America did not know he knew (which is the gold dust of intelligence). And he demanded that his spies find out more.
In the autumn of 1942, Ursula, Len, and the children moved yet again, into a property belonging to one of Britain’s most senior legal figures, a pillar of Anglo-Jewry and the very last person who might be suspected of housing a Soviet spy in his back garden. Judge Neville Laski, recently retired as president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, lived in a large Regency mansion in Summertown, the leafy northern suburb of Oxford. Laski was a firm patriot. After Munich he had declared: “Above all, British Jews’ primary obligation is their stern and unswerving allegiance to their citizenship.” Laski’s brother, Harold, was a left-wing political theorist, professor of politics at the LSE, and a friend of Robert Kuczynski’s. When Neville Laski and his wife, Phina, known as Sissie, heard that Ursula’s lease in Kidlington was about to expire, they offered to let her rent “Avenue Cottage,” a charming four-room coach house behind the main building with a spiral staircase and its own entrance at 50a George Street (now Middle Way). “It was a funny little old house,” wrote Ursula, “with a grassy patch for a back yard and a lot of old sheds.”
The day she moved in, Ursula paid a late-morning visit to Mrs. Laski and found Sissie still lying in bed “in a lace-trimmed nightgown, taking breakfast from a silver tray, just like rich people in the films.” Rather abashed by this spectacle, Ursula asked her new landlady for permission to “erect an aerial leading from our roof to one of her stables.” Mrs. Laski graciously consented without the faintest suspicion that the aerial was anything other than “a normal one for any radio receiver.” Ursula and Len hid the miniature transmitter in a cavity behind a moss-covered stone in the garden wall.
Klaus Fuchs was Ursula’s most important source of secrets, but he was not the only one. In the course of a year, the Sonya network expanded to include at least a dozen spies, providing a wealth of intelligence: military, political, and scientific. Melita Norwood quietly copied every document of importance from the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, which was playing a growing role in nuclear research; Jürgen and Robert Kuczynski tirelessly hoovered up information and gossip; Hans Kahle submitted reports at least once a month. In 1942, Ursula recruited a new British agent, an officer in the technical department of the RAF “willing to provide the USSR with constructive support against Hitler,” by providing details of military aircraft development, including the trigger mechanism used to release the thousand-pound bombs carried by the Lancaster bomber. She code-named him “James.” “He got hold of exact data for us, weights and dimensions, load-bearing capacity, special characteristics, and even contrived to let me have blueprints of machines that had not yet flown.” A former welder and communist sympathizer, James declined payment, and “did not consider himself to be a ‘spy,’ ” though that is indubitably what he was.
All of this intelligence had to be marshaled into reports, coded, and sent to Moscow. By the end of 1942, Ursula was transmitting two or three times a week. Little Michael wondered why his mother often slept in the afternoons: she was frequently exhausted from working through much of the night.
The Radio Security Service was set up at the start of the war to detect “illicit transmissions” within the United Kingdom. It was primarily aimed at uncovering Nazi agents sending radio messages to Germany, but by 1943 the “Secret Listeners” were also intercepting “considerable bundles of Russian traffic.” The raw intercepted Morse code was sent to Bletchley Park for decoding. Unlike the Germans with their breakable Enigma code, Soviet intelligence used a system of “one-time pads” thought to be unbreakable. British intelligence might not be able to read Soviet radio traffic, but it was determined to stop it: whenever an illegal radio was detected, radio detection vans equipped with sophisticated direction-finding equipment were sent to comb the suspected area.
“We had to count on my transmitter being discovered at some point,” wrote Ursula. On Moscow’s orders, Ursula and Len trained up a new radio operator, “Tom,” a fitter at the Cowley car factory, who could take over in an emergency. Tom was a communist who believed he was directly helping the anti-fascist cause by aiding the Soviet Union, Britain’s ally.
That attitude was not uncommon in wartime Britain, particularly among the informal networks of communist sympathizers. Len proved an effective spy recruiter. “My past as an International Brigader had positive aspects,” he wrote. “It opened doors in progressive and liberal circles. The people’s basic anti-fascist sentiments, strengthened by Goering’s terror bombing and the enormous admiration earned by the Soviet Union in fighting alone, facilitated our task. In making contact a careful judgement of character was always essential.” One of those he recruited was “an old acquaintance” who had fought alongside him in Spain. Ursula later tried to disguise this man’s identity by describing him vaguely as a “chemist.”
Len’s recruit was probably the eccentric Marxist scientist J. B. S. Haldane, professor of biometry at University College, London, who had gone to Spain three times during the civil war to assist the Republican cause, where he befriended Len Beurton. In 1941, Haldane was in the Royal Navy’s top-secret underwater-research establishment at Gosport. “Apart from information on tank-landing operations, he supplied us with an important instrument that was used in submarine radar,” wrote Ursula. On receipt of this object, she hurried to London with a piece of chalk in her pocket. Two days later Sergei was waiting at the rendezvous site west of Oxford when Ursula arrived on her old bicycle with an important piece of experimental military hardware in her pannier. She wrote: “At that time radar was quite new and the Centre was very interested in it.”
Returning from a trip to London, Ursula found Len beaming and the children still awake in a state of high excitement. They told her to close her eyes and then led her to the Morrison air-raid shelter in the garden: there, decorated with flags, was a brand-new bicycle. The old one, Len declared, was a “danger to life and limb,” whereas the new bicycle would be useful for getting “to various illegal meeting places.” Len was not a demonstrative man. Ursula was touched by a gift that was part love token, part espionage tool.
In the early spri
ng of 1943, with war raging and her espionage network running at full tilt, Ursula discovered, to her delight, that she was pregnant again at the age of thirty-six. Len had taken some persuading that they should have a baby, pointing out that he could be called up for military service at any point and have to leave her to care for three young children and a burgeoning spy network alone. But Ursula was adamant. “I wanted a child from him [and] when, at the end of 1942, the encirclement of the German army began at Stalingrad, foreshadowing victory…I began to insist.” What better way to celebrate Russian victory than a third child? Besides, “infants provided a good legalization.” The more children she had, the less anyone would suspect her. As with all the major decisions of her life, the professional, the political, and the personal intertwined.
Ursula did not inform the Center that she was having another child. As a hard-driving, male-run bureaucracy employing few women, the GRU had no provision for maternity leave, and even if it had, Ursula would have turned it down. As the baby grew inside her, so did her workload.
Under pressure from Stalin, the Center was now sweating its prime asset in earnest. According to one GRU report, Fuchs was able to make plasticine impressions of various keys at the Birmingham research center, which were then passed, via Ursula, to Vladimir Barkovsky, head of scientific and technical intelligence in the London residency. “With the help of duplicate keys, made by Barkovsky personally, [Fuchs] was able to get a lot of secret documents, both from his safe and from his colleagues’ safes.” Barkovsky had taken over from Aptekar as the new “Sergei,” liaising between Ursula and the “legal” spooks in the Soviet embassy: he reported to Moscow that Fuchs (now code-named “Rest,” and later “Charles”) “works for us with joy, but…rejects the slightest hint of a financial reward.” Sometimes the flood of intelligence from Fuchs was almost too much for Ursula to cope with. At one of their meetings, he presented her with “a thick book of blueprints” more than one hundred pages long. “Forward it quickly,” he told her, necessitating another dash to London, another chalk mark, and another rendezvous in a lonely country road.
In June 1943, Stalin passed Molotov a list of twelve questions about the atomic bomb project and demanded swift answers; the Russian foreign minister passed the list to the GRU’s director, Lieutenant General Ivan Ilyichev, who immediately sent a telegram to the London residency, for the attention of Sonya. On June 28, Ursula met Fuchs in Banbury and passed on Stalin’s “twelve urgent requirements.” They were now spying to a shopping list drawn up by the Soviet leader himself. Fuchs duly compiled a complete account of all the intelligence he had furnished to date and everything he knew about the Tube Alloys project, a remarkable testament to his scientific prowess and, if it fell into British hands, the most damning evidence of his guilt.
* * *
—
SOME 3,500 MILES AWAY in Tehran, Rudolf Hamburger was pursuing the role of spy with just as much vigor as his ex-wife, and exactly none of her success. His incompetence might have been comical had it not ultimately proved tragic, with an impact on Ursula’s life that neither could have predicted. Hamburger’s mission in Iran had started well. Having obtained a job designing a new building for the Persian Finance Ministry, Rudi doggedly set about gathering information on the road and rail infrastructure built by British and Americans to keep the Soviet armies of the Eastern Front supplied. Ever suspicious of his allies, Stalin demanded that his spies find out if the accumulation of British and American forces so close to the Soviet border might presage more malign intentions. “My task,” wrote Rudi, “was to monitor all these plans and movements, to establish the numbers of troops and the nature of the military forces which were being concentrated under the guise of ‘transport deployments,’ especially in the south of the country where the oil fields are.” Moscow Center supplied him with a bulky radio transmitter in an aluminum case, which he hid, suspended by a rope, inside the disused chimney of his rented apartment. For more than a year, the architect-spy supplied a trickle of low-grade intelligence, much of it garnered from locals employed by the Allies. In the dry climate of Tehran, the bouts of malaria he had contracted in a Chinese prison recurred less frequently. He even saved some money, which he sent to Ursula via an American bank. A letter from Rudi arrived at Avenue Cottage just before Christmas 1942, after a tortuous journey through the wartime postal system. Eleven-year-old Michael was excited, imagining the day when his father would fulfill his promise to return. “I kept expecting him to appear, as he had before. I really loved him.”
Rudi Hamburger’s life in Tehran was lonely but exotic and, between architecture and espionage, extremely busy. His communism reflected the zeal of the convert. He was almost happy. Then, as usual, it all went wrong.
Ruhollah Karubian was an Armenian Iranian working as private secretary and translator for the American superintendent of the railways service. One afternoon, over tea, Hamburger bluntly asked Karubian to sell him secret information, declaring that “he was Russian and wanted to find out all he could about British troops and military installations.” Rudi offered to “pay handsomely…for anything affecting American foreign policy in the Middle East.” Karubian immediately relayed this startlingly unsubtle approach to his boss, who informed American military security. A microphone was installed in Karubian’s sitting room, and the next time Hamburger came to tea a stenographer with earphones was hiding in the adjoining bedroom, taking notes. As instructed by American intelligence, Karubian feigned interest in Hamburger’s offer and asked for details. “Hamburger persistently refused to disclose the names of the people for whom he was working.” He did, however, offer a lecture on international politics: “Hitler must be beaten, but that shall never stop our work. You see, Karubian, today England, America and Russia are allies, but after the war is over they may be enemies again. My group wants every bit of information they can get. We want to make the new order complete after the war. We must know the answer to all the allies’ motives.” That was enough for the eavesdroppers. On April 19, Rudolf Hamburger was arrested by American military police. A search of his apartment uncovered $2,000 in traveler’s checks and a false Honduran passport, but not the radio in the chimney. “Hamburger admitted he had been caught red-handed and was willing to accept the consequences, but he would not give his associates away.” After a week in American detention, he was handed over to the British authorities in Iran.
Colonel Joe Spencer of the Defence Security Office knew he had a spy on his hands, but what sort of spy was unclear. Hamburger was clearly “very intelligent and easy to deal with,” but the German architect “refused point blank to answer questions” and seemed “entirely unworried by threats and harsh questioning.” Spencer left him to stew.
Rudi Hamburger was too honest a man, and too hopeless a spy, to retain his secrets for long. Deprived of reading matter and company, he grew depressed, then talkative. Spencer, in the time-honored manner of clever jailers, provided him with magazines, cigarettes, and congenial company. As the weeks passed, Rudi dropped ever-heavier hints. “He maintained that he was not working against the Allies but was merely collecting information for his ‘Group,’ the particulars of which he resolutely refused to disclose. He was quite confident that his ‘Group’ would ultimately intervene on his behalf. He hoped his Group would give him a good job as an architectural engineer, otherwise he would return to China.”
Finally, in August, he admitted he was working for “an ally.”
Spencer laughed: “There are twenty-five United Nations and you can’t expect me to go around and ask them all.”
“I’ll give you a hint,” said Hamburger. “What other ally beside the British and Americans is interested in transport in Persia?”
The next day, after four months in detention, Rudi came clean: “He admitted that he had for long been a professional agent of the Russians and would remain one. His task, he alleged, was to collect political information about allied intentions
especially from army officers. He admitted he had bungled the interview with Karubian.” Rudi suggested Spencer put in a phone call to the Soviet authorities to check out his story. “But promise not to say I made this suggestion, as my whole future depends on it.”
Spencer contacted the Soviet military attaché, who confirmed, three days later, that “Hamburger was working for the Russians and asked for him to be handed over.”
As far as Colonel Spencer was concerned, the affair was closed. “We handed him back to the Russians at dead of night on a lonely road surrounded by all the mystery of the most dramatic spy film. This was a simple case—the apprehension through ignorance of an Allied agent and his straightforward disposal.” Rudi also believed the future would be straightforward. “Hamburger seemed quite confident that when he was handed over to the Russians they would do nothing to him. He said he would go on working as an agent, but probably elsewhere.”
The British and Americans now had an extremely fat file on Rudi Hamburger, and proof that Ursula Kuczynski’s first husband was a self-confessed Soviet spy. Ursula and Rudi might be divorced and thousands of miles apart, but their stories, and their fates, were still inextricably linked. As a spy, he posed little threat, except to his ex-wife.
Rudolf Hamburger was flown to Moscow at the end of August, convinced that he would receive, if not a hero’s welcome, then at least a friendly, commiserating pat on the back and a new assignment. As before, when “the friends” had sprung him from a Chinese prison, the Center would probably send him on another comfortable rest cure, before redeploying him. After all, he “had demonstrated a remarkable degree of persistence, commitment and loyalty over the years.” Rudi thought he might well be promoted.
He could not have been more mistaken.
Viewed through the lens of Soviet paranoia, Rudolf Hamburger was not just inept, but highly suspect.
Agent Sonya Page 27
