Two days after arriving in Moscow, he was arrested, accused of working for American or British intelligence, and thrown into “investigatory detention,” a euphemism for indefinite imprisonment and interrogation without trial. He had got away from the British too easily. “The circumstances of Hamburger’s release from detention in Iran gave rise to the suspicion that he had been recruited by a foreign intelligence service.” By the perverse logic of communist persecution, Rudi’s protestations of innocence merely confirmed his guilt. “You were bought by our enemies and you came to work for them as a spy,” the interrogator insisted. “Yes, you became a spy…come on, come on, you dirty spy, admit they bought you. You’ve become a spy. Confess.” His request for a lawyer was ignored. “For twenty-four hours you are kept awake, through hunger and stress,” he wrote. “If only you could think of nothing and sleep. The food is dire…hunger is a terrible torture.” His health deteriorated rapidly. In a few months he lost forty-five pounds.
There was no formal trial, merely a verdict: Rudolf Hamburger was a “socially dangerous element” guilty of political crimes under Article 58 of the Penal Code and was sentenced to five years in prison. The Center did not intervene. His ex-wife’s success as a Soviet intelligence officer counted for nothing. “My case as a foreigner is clear: enemy spy. They stamp me as their adversary, as a traitor, this is harder to bear than the prison cell, and the hunger.” Like so many others, he was swallowed into the great maw of the Russian Gulag, another innocent enemy of the people. Rudolf Hamburger’s descent into hell had begun.
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AROUND THE TIME OF Rudi’s arrest, Ursula Beurton was promoted to the rank of colonel, the only woman to rise so high in Soviet military intelligence. She was not informed of the promotion. The relationship between the spy and her spymasters, like all espionage relationships, operated on a “need to know” basis: Moscow decided that Sonya did not need to know what rank she had attained, nor that the father of her firstborn child was now a prisoner of the regime she served.
“Mrs. Burton” of Avenue Cottage, Summertown, spent the winter of 1942 cycling around Oxford on her new bike, collecting wartime rations, caring for her children and husband, following the progress of the war. She was polite, modest, and innocuous, another ordinary housewife, making do, digging for victory in the back garden vegetable patch. As she waited for her baby, she sewed a new seat cover for her bike, “daisies on a green background.” She was on good terms with her neighbors and occasionally took tea with Sissie Laski in the main house. Nina attended nursery school in Summertown and joined the Girl Guides. Ursula’s German accent eroded further. She was developing a genuine affinity for the British, admiring their stolid faith in the certainty of eventual victory. Like all ideologues, she saw the war through the prism of her own politics: “The British people were sympathetic to the Soviet Union.”
Ursula’s four sisters would each marry Englishmen and settle in Britain. Berta pined for her former life in Germany, but accepted that Britain was now their permanent home. Ursula’s beloved Aunt Alice, Robert’s sister, and her husband, the gynecologist Georg Dorpalen, clung on in Berlin to the end. On September 22, 1942, Alice wrote to her beloved German housekeeper, Gertrud: “Now it is time to say goodbye and to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the friendship and helpfulness that you have shown us in difficult times….My husband is wonderfully calm, and we are ready to face our grave fate. If only we survive it.” Three days later the Dorpalens were rounded up and shipped to Theresienstadt concentration camp, where they were murdered. Ursula admired Uncle Georg’s courage, but could not help wondering: “Was it also brave that when Hitler came to power he did not follow my father’s advice, but remained in his German homeland, which he loved?”
Despite a growing patriotism for her adoptive country, Ursula spied on Britain without protest or doubt. Len, increasingly impatient for his call-up papers, was prepared to fight for Britain while spying for the Soviet Union. They saw no conflict of interest. The party and the revolution came first, and by defending communism Ursula believed she was helping Britain, regardless of whether Britain wished to be so helped. Years later she insisted: “We would have refuted any suggestion that we, or the [British] comrades working with us, were betraying Britain.” She might not regard herself as a traitor to her adopted country, but that is how most Britons would have seen her; and there is something in her defensive tone that reflects her own discomfort. As always, she made friends easily. But she was deceiving every single one. Ursula believed it was possible to be both a Soviet spy and a British loyalist. MI5 did not agree.
Mrs. Burton of Avenue Cottage drank tea with the neighbors, joined in their complaints about the shortages, and agreed that the war must soon be over. Nina drew an enormous Union Jack and put it in the window. Michael and his friends staged mock battles, in which the British always “defeated the Hun.” Ursula put a little money into the National Savings Movement to help fund the war effort.
Colonel Kuczynski of the Red Army, meanwhile, was running the largest network of spies in Britain: her sex, motherhood, pregnancy, and apparently humdrum domestic life together formed the perfect camouflage. Men simply did not believe a housewife making breakfast from powdered egg, packing her children off to school, and then cycling into the countryside could possibly be capable of important espionage. Ursula ruthlessly exploited the natural advantage of her gender.
Only a woman could have seen through Ursula’s disguise. The counterintelligence section of MI5 contained only one woman.
And she was on Ursula’s trail.
MISS MILICENT BAGOT WAS THE sort of Englishwoman who strikes fear into the hearts of foreigners, children, and bank managers, and tends to be described as “formidable”—code for unmarried, humorless, and slightly terrifying. One of the few women in MI5, and the first to achieve senior rank, she was highly intelligent, dedicated, professional, and, when the occasion demanded, blisteringly rude. She wore austere spectacles and did not suffer fools gladly. Indeed, fools were seldom left in doubt about what they were. The daughter of a London solicitor, Bagot was educated by a French governess until the age of twelve, then at Putney High School before reading Classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. In 1929, at the age of twenty-two, she joined Scotland Yard Special Branch as a temporary clerk in the countersubversion section. When that division transferred to MI5 in 1931, Bagot went with it, beginning a lifelong career in the Security Service. She lived with her nanny in Putney. She wore a hat indoors. At 4:45 every Tuesday afternoon, whether or not there was a war on, she left the office to sing in the Bach Choir (she sang alto, and frequently fortissimo). “A stickler for procedure and a difficult colleague with robust opinions” was the verdict of one colleague. “She was exacting and demanding and did not dissemble when faced with those less intellectually gifted than herself.” Around the office Bagot was known as “Millie,” but never, ever within earshot. The renegade MI5 officer Peter Wright wrote: “She was slightly touched, but with an extraordinary memory for facts and files.” Her colleagues might run for cover when Milicent was coming down the corridor in full voice, but none doubted her abilities. Even the FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, no admirer of either MI5 or women, wrote her a personal letter of appreciation. Though wholly different in character, she was Ursula’s opposite and double: highly trained, devoted to her job, undaunted by men, and as firm in her anti-communist beliefs as Ursula was committed to communism. Bagot would eventually achieve literary immortality as the model for Connie Sachs, the eccentric and obsessive spinster in the novels of John le Carré.
No one in Britain knew more about the internal threat of communism than Milicent Bagot.
In 1941, MI5 formed “F Division” specifically to counter subversive activity. The anti-communist section, F2c, was theoretically run by a veteran officer, Hugh Shillito, but his was merely “a vague supervisory role because it was thought better to
have a man nominally in charge.” There was little question that Milicent wore the trousers in the communist-hunting unit. “Miss Bagot is a really outstanding character. She has been working on the Communist problem for over twenty years and has a positively encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject….[She is] the most valuable member of the whole division.” That glowing appraisal came from the overall chief of F Division and Bagot’s immediate boss: Roger Hollis, the former tobacco company executive who had been knocking around communist circles in Shanghai at the same time as Ursula in the 1920s. The contrasting roles played by Milicent Bagot and Roger Hollis in the Sonya case would give rise to one of the longest and most damaging conspiracy theories in British history.
Milicent Bagot began tracking the Kuczynski family from the moment they arrived in Britain. She vigorously opposed Jürgen Kuczynski’s release from internment. “We have a great deal of information about this man indicating that he is taking an active part in anti-British propaganda but we are finding some difficulty in convincing the Home Office,” she wrote to MI6. The F Division files described Jürgen as “an extreme communist and fanatically pro-Stalin. One of Moscow’s most brilliant and dangerous propagandists. It is claimed that he is an illegal in contact with the Soviet Secret Service.” When Ursula Kuczynski applied for a British passport, it was Bagot who pointed out there were existing files on both her and her father, and that the marriage to Len Beurton was almost certainly a scam to obtain British citizenship. She alerted the Oxford police when the Kuczynskis settled in Oxford in 1941 and reexamined the letters Ursula sent to her family from Switzerland between 1938 and 1941, which had been intercepted and photographed.
Milicent, it was said, “could smell a rat at twenty paces,” and in the Kuczynskis she had picked up the scent of an entire nest. Bagot had Ursula Beurton firmly in her sights, but it was Len, as the male of the household and therefore by assumption the greater threat, who initially attracted more suspicion.
Just a few weeks after the Beurtons moved into Avenue Cottage, a policeman knocked on the door and politely invited Len to come to London on “any day that is convenient” for a meeting with “security officers.” Len was unworried. Having assisted British intelligence in Geneva, he was expecting some sort of approach, and perhaps even a job offer. An MI5 officer, Desmond Vesey, and Arnold Baker of MI6 were waiting in Room 055 of the War Office (where MI5 held external meetings), when Len arrived on September 18, 1942. “There are several odd aspects to Beurton’s story,” MI5 noted: Ursula’s assertion that her husband had been convalescing in Switzerland when he himself made no mention of ever having had tuberculosis; his claim to have inherited a large amount of money, in cash, from French relatives; his antipathy toward people in authority; and his “shifty manner.” The two officers peppered him with questions, but after several hours Len was told he could return home. “On the whole Beurton made a good impression,” wrote Vesey.
Milicent Bagot and her stalkers were not about to leave it there. The next day, a warrant was obtained to intercept the Beurtons’ letters, on the grounds that “this man has recently returned from Switzerland where he is thought to have been in contact with agents of a foreign power,” Hugh Shillito, Bagot’s nominal boss and de facto deputy, wrote. “To my mind the story suggests many interesting possibilities. Beurton may have been engaged in espionage on behalf of the USSR against Germany from Switzerland. It is known that the Russians used the International Brigades as recruiting grounds for secret agents.”
MI5 sent a memo to the Oxford security officer: “Please arrange for the police to make discreet inquiries…whether Beurton travels, when and where, what friends he has and how he is occupying his time.” The police duly reported back that “the house is rather isolated and they appear to have little contact with neighbours…they appear to be living quite comfortably, paying 4 ½ guineas a week in rent”—a considerable sum given that neither had jobs, or any other known source of income. Detective Inspector Arthur Rolf of the Thames Valley Police did, however, spot one conspicuous feature of Avenue Cottage: “They have rather a large wireless set and recently had a special pole erected for use for the aerial.” That vital piece of information was passed to MI5 in January 1943, at a time when Ursula was running Klaus Fuchs at full tilt and transmitting to Moscow at least twice a week. Moreover, according to a senior officer of the Radio Security Service, the interceptors had identified an illegal radio transmitter operating somewhere in the Oxford area. A memo in the Beurtons’ MI5 file baldly states: “The most interesting point appears to be [their] possession of a large wireless set, and you may think this is worthy of further inquiry.”
But Roger Hollis, the head of F Section and Milicent Bagot’s immediate superior, did not think the radio mast merited investigation. Nor did he follow up the other clues that life at Avenue Cottage was not what it seemed. Hollis similarly failed, or declined, to investigate Klaus Fuchs. Time after time, what now appear to be obvious leads that should have led straight to Ursula were left by Hollis to wither on the vine.
The theory that Roger Hollis was a Soviet spy, recruited in Shanghai by Richard Sorge and implanted inside British intelligence, first emerged publicly in 1981 and has been running ever since, refusing to die despite repeated official denials. After joining MI5 in 1938, Hollis was steadily promoted, eventually becoming director general in 1956, a post he held until his retirement nine years later. His accusers claim that Hollis’s seniority enabled him to protect numerous Soviet spies in Britain, including Ursula, who deliberately fueled the conspiracy theory. In later life, she denied knowing Hollis from Shanghai but wondered: “Was it possible that there was someone at MI5 who was, at the same time, working for the Soviet Union and had protected us?” To this day, MI5 flatly rejects that possibility, its website insisting the allegations against Hollis “were investigated and found to be groundless.”
But the pattern of Hollis’s actions—or more accurately inaction—with respect to Ursula Beurton, Jürgen Kuczynski, and Klaus Fuchs is strange, to say the least. In 1940, when Milicent Bagot was campaigning to keep Jürgen interned, Hollis stated that he “didn’t believe for a moment that Kuczynski is an OGPU [Soviet intelligence] agent,” a view endorsed by the head of MI5 on the basis that Hollis “knows Kuczynski personally.” (The nature of this personal connection has never been established.) According to the writer and journalist Chapman Pincher (Hollis’s indefatigable accuser), when the American embassy asked MI5 to draw up a list of foreign communists in the United Kingdom, the Kuczynskis were omitted. Hollis was similarly unwilling to pursue Fuchs. “Miss Bagot seems to have highlighted the Fuchs case at once,” writes Fuchs’s latest biographer, but Hollis was “singularly relaxed” about the potential threat he posed. It may be no coincidence that Hollis was a friend of Neville Laski, in whose cottage Ursula was living with a large radio antenna over her head.
Paul Monk, heir to the late Chapman Pincher as chief prosecutor in the saga, writes that as head of F Section Hollis consistently stymied efforts by Bagot’s section to investigate Ursula Beurton, her husband, family, and principal agent, Klaus Fuchs: “Bagot had been on SONIA’s [sic] trail as far back as early 1940….It was Hollis who squelched her suggestions that SONIA be treated with suspicion and kept under surveillance….Bagot was suspicious of SONIA’s movements, given her known background, but was waved aside by Hollis.”
There are only two ways to interpret Hollis’s behavior: he was either a traitor or a fool. To hide inside MI5 for nearly thirty years, while protecting a host of Soviet spies and covering his tracks, would have required a spy of rare intellectual agility. No one would have described Roger Hollis that way. He was a plodding, slightly droopy bureaucrat with the imaginative flair of an omelet. Lying is easy. Maintaining a panoply of lies, cover-ups, and diversions for years, and remembering them all, is exceptionally difficult. Even Kim Philby, with his preternatural talent for deception, left clues that exposed him in the end. Hollis simpl
y was not equipped with those kinds of skills. The weight of evidence currently suggests that Hollis was not treacherous, but incompetent. He was really quite thick.
In Ursula’s MI5 file is a note, written by Hollis in response to an FBI inquiry, which perfectly encapsulates his attitude: “Mrs. Burton appears to devote her time to her children and domestic affairs…she has not come to notice in any political connection.” Like so many others, Hollis could not see Ursula for what she really was, because she was a woman.
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IN CANADA ON AUGUST 19, 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt signed the Quebec Agreement, a secret arrangement to collaborate on building the atom bomb. The United States and Britain also agreed not to use the technology against each other or a third party without mutual agreement, and not to tell Stalin what they were doing. This vast industrial project would require the construction of nuclear reactors, diffusion plants, and a massive injection of American funds and expertise. British scientists would take part in the Manhattan Project, but as junior partners. To maintain security and keep the project beyond the reach of German bombers, the program would shift to the United States—and Klaus Fuchs would move with it. Central to the Anglo-American arrangement was a decision to keep all aspects of the atomic bomb project secret from the Soviet Union—further evidence that while the Allies might be on the same side, they were on very different historical paths.
Some claim that Moscow learned about the secret Quebec Agreement from Ursula, just sixteen days later. The Russian intelligence writer Vladimir Lota, citing sources “off limits to other researchers,” writes: “On 4 September, U. Kuczynski reported to the Center information on the outcomes of the conference in Quebec.”
The Quebec Agreement was a closely guarded secret, and how Ursula obtained it (if she did) remains a mystery. Fuchs almost certainly did not know about it. Perhaps this molten lump of weapons-grade intelligence came via Jürgen or Robert Kuczynski, through one of their British political contacts. But it is equally possible that the assertion Ursula passed on this information is false, concocted long after the event as propaganda to show her and the GRU in the best possible light. Ursula herself made no claim to have passed on the substance of the Quebec Agreement on September 4. But soon after that date, eight months pregnant, Ursula struggled to London in a rainstorm to meet Sergei (probably Barkovsky). “He brought a special message from the Director, praising me for a report I had sent,” she wrote. “The Director had said: ‘If we had five Sonyas in England, the war would be over sooner.’ ” It is possible that the praise (lavish by GRU standards) may have been in response to a report from Ursula informing Moscow that Britain and the United States were now formally working together to build the bomb, behind the back of the Soviet Union.
Agent Sonya Page 28
