Ursula was buying groceries in Summertown when she went into labor. At 3:00 P.M. she gave birth to a boy, three weeks prematurely, in Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary. By 5:00 P.M., she was sitting up in bed, writing to her mother: “At 12:45 I was still out shopping. And now the baby is already two hours old. So you can see what an easy time I had.” Len was at another rendezvous with Soviet intelligence in London and arrived at the clinic late that evening. For several minutes he contemplated the tiny infant in Ursula’s arms and then said: “I have never seen you so happy. You look like two Sonyas.”
Peter Beurton was born on September 8, 1943. A few days earlier his mother may have passed a secret to the Soviet Union that started the Cold War; his father had spent the day at an illegal meeting with their Russian spy handler, and on seeing the mother of his child a few hours after the birth, he addressed her by her code name. Within hours, his mother was back at work, conducting espionage as usual.
In all other respects, Peter’s birth was perfectly normal.
* * *
—
KLAUS FUCHS WAS AMONG the seventeen British-based scientists selected to join the Manhattan Project. He had been involved in Britain’s atomic weapons research from the start, and Peierls insisted on taking along his gifted colleague. Before the scientists could leave for America, General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, demanded “assurances that all have been properly cleared.” A routine background check on Fuchs concluded he was “gentlemanly, inoffensive and a typical scholar…so absorbed in research work as to have little time for political matters.” Hollis himself waved through the paperwork for Fuchs to become a British citizen in July 1942—“no objection is seen to this application.” As a naturalized British citizen, Fuchs was now legally entitled to an exit permit and a nonimmigrant visa for the United States. The only objection was raised by the indefatigable Milicent Bagot, who wrote a terse note complaining that she had not been informed that Fuchs was now British: “We knew his naturalization was under consideration but [not that] it was a fait accompli.”
It fell to Ursula Beurton to ensure that in America Fuchs would be able to continue providing Moscow with a stream of atomic secrets, now from the heart of the Manhattan Project. Fuchs would initially be working at Columbia University in New York, and Ursula was instructed by the Center to identify a meeting point in the city and provide Fuchs with a set of signals, timings, and a password to facilitate contact with Soviet intelligence. Ursula reached back into the memories of her youth for a rendezvous spot: she chose the Henry Street Settlement, the immigrant hostel run by Lillian Wald where she had lived in 1928 as a twenty-one-year-old bookseller.
As the day of Fuchs’s sailing approached, the Center sent a message: “Sonya. I have received your telegram about the departure of Otto to America. The locations and conditions of the meeting in New York are clear. Give Otto our thanks for helping us and give him £50 as a gift. Tell him that we think that his work with us in a new place will be as fruitful as in England.”
Fuchs would continue spying with barely a pause: but in a different country, with a new handler, and for a different branch of Soviet intelligence.
Rivalry between Russia’s civilian and military spies was, and remains, intense. The NKVD had evolved into the NKGB and would soon become the KGB, the largest and most feared intelligence bureaucracy in the world, part espionage-gathering machine, part security service, part secret police. In theory, military espionage was exclusively the responsibility of the GRU; in reality, the KGB under Vsevolod Merkulov, a member of Stalin’s “Georgian mafia,” recognized no limits to its power. Merkulov was one of the earliest Cold Warriors, with a particular antipathy for capitalist Britain. “Sooner or later there will be a clash between the Communist Bear and the Western Bulldog,” he declared. “The time will come when we will water our Soviet horses in the Thames!”
The KGB was running an extensive spy network in the United Kingdom, and in 1943 it identified Fuchs as a potential target for recruitment, only to be informed that he had been a GRU agent for almost two years. The KGB did not like playing second fiddle to its military counterpart and in August 1943, four months after Merkulov was appointed, it launched a power grab. The “atom spies” working for the GRU were transferred, wholesale, to the KGB. Enormos, the operation to penetrate the Manhattan Project, was under Merkulov’s control. Though he did not know it, Fuchs was now a KGB spy.
On February 5, 1944, Klaus Fuchs stood on the corner opposite the Henry Street Settlement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, holding a green book in one hand and a tennis ball in the other, exactly as Sonya had instructed. At 4:00 P.M. on the dot, a stocky man appeared, wearing a pair of gloves and holding a second pair in his left hand. After a minute he crossed the road, approached Fuchs, and asked: “Can you tell me the way to Chinatown?”
“I think Chinatown closes at 5 o’clock,” Fuchs replied on cue.
The man introduced himself as “Raymond.” His real name was Harry Gold, and he was a chemist, a communist, and a Soviet spy, Ursula’s successor on the other side of the Atlantic. They walked to the subway and caught a train uptown, and then a cab to Manny Wolf’s restaurant on Third Avenue. Gold later reported to the KGB: “He is about 5 foot 10 inches, thin, pale complexioned and at first was very reserved in manner…he obviously has worked with our people before, and he is fully aware of what he is doing.” Ursula’s choice of meeting place was “ideal,” Gold wrote, and “beautifully deserted,” a spot where “no one would think anything of two people walking towards one another and making conversation”—even if one was holding a tennis ball and the other had four gloves.
So began the next phase of Fuchs’s espionage odyssey, during which he would witness the first atom bomb test in the New Mexico desert and pass the secret of its construction to Moscow. Before handing him over to the KGB, the Center made an assessment of the case: “During his time with the Red Army Intelligence Service, Fuchs transferred important materials containing theoretical calculations on the splitting of the uranium atom and the creation of an atomic bomb….Total received from Fuchs for the period 1941–1943: more than 570 sheets of valuable materials.”
Fuchs was out of Ursula’s hands. But he was not out of her life. The German scientist had learned little about the “girl from Banbury” during their collaboration, but what he knew was enough to destroy her. The atom spy was Colonel Sonya’s greatest triumph and potentially her nemesis, an unexploded bomb with a delayed fuse.
IN LATE JUNE 1944, URSULA received a message from Jürgen, asking her to come to London urgently. As brother and sister strolled across Hampstead Heath, Jürgen explained that he had just received an unexpected visit from a young American intelligence officer, who had asked for help recruiting spies to be parachuted into Nazi Germany. The Americans were specifically looking for exiled Germans living in London who were opposed to Hitler and might be willing to carry out intelligence-gathering operations inside the Third Reich on behalf of the Americans. “Do you know anyone like that?” the earnest young American had asked. Jürgen certainly did know several such people. And so did his sister. On her return to Oxford, Ursula dashed off a message to the Center.
Lieutenant Joseph Gould of the U.S. Army was a publicist for the motion picture industry, a union organizer, and a new recruit to America’s military intelligence service. A brash twenty-nine-year-old New Yorker, he was enthusiastic, patriotic, and imaginative to a fault, with a highly developed sense of the dramatic. Gould was a director of his own unfolding spy movie. His intelligence reports read like Hollywood film scripts.
When America joined the war, Gould enlisted in the U.S. Army’s intelligence branch and was dispatched to Britain immediately after D-Day with a specific mission in mind.
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the CIA, had been formed in 1942 to coordinate military espionage behind enemy lines. Within the OSS was the Secre
t Intelligence Unit, and inside that was the Labor Branch, dedicated to using Europe’s secret underground union organizations for intelligence gathering. Hitler had tried to smash the German labor movement, yet some organized labor groups had survived, a core of clandestine resistance to fascism. As the Allies closed in on the Third Reich from east and west, American intelligence was hungry for strategic information on the Reich’s military and industrial production. Workers were in a unique position to provide it. “We can take advantage of the hatred of Hitler by members of the European labour movement,” wrote Arthur Goldberg, the New York lawyer and future Supreme Court justice who headed the Labor Branch. Thousands of persecuted German trade unionists had fled abroad, and many had settled in Britain. If some of these anti-Nazi exiles could be smuggled back into Germany as spies, they could establish contact with the dissident labor groups, a ready-made espionage network, and gain access to vital intelligence about German defenses, industrial and military production, politics, and civilian morale.
Thus was born the OSS plan code-named “Faust”: a team of “good” Germans would be recruited and trained in the United Kingdom, equipped with the latest communications technology, and then parachuted into Germany, where they could blend in, link up with the workers’ movements, and begin transmitting intelligence that would set the stage for the last act of the war. Finding people prepared to parachute blind into Hitler’s Germany “without reception committees, safehouses, or friends” would not be easy, but, with his trade union expertise and bubbling energy, Joe Gould was the man to try.
Gould arrived in London on June 13, 1944, and set to work recruiting the cast for Faust. On an inspired hunch, he took himself off to a secondhand bookshop specializing in foreign books on New Bond Street, a known hangout for émigrés. The owner, Morris Abbey, “took an immediate liking” to the “round faced, bespectacled young army lieutenant” who entered his shop and declared—as if requesting a set of rare books—that he was collecting anti-Nazi Germans. The bookseller told Gould that one of his regular customers was a leader of the expatriate German community and a founding member of the Free German League of Culture, an offshoot of the anti-fascist Free Germany Movement—the loose affiliation of exiles united in opposition to Hitler. Abbey gave him the telephone number of Dr. Jürgen Kuczynski. A few days later Gould found himself taking tea in Hampstead with a “lean man in early middle age” and explaining that he was “looking for agents capable of undertaking delicate and highly hazardous missions inside Germany.” As soon as the excitable young American left, Jürgen contacted his sister.
In German legend, Faust is a man prepared to give up his soul in his quest for earthly knowledge. Faust gets his wish, by making a pact with the devil.
Every spymaster’s ambition is to infiltrate a spy into the enemy’s intelligence service. The Soviets had successfully done this in MI6, with Kim Philby, and MI5, with Anthony Blunt. Here was Ursula’s opportunity to plant not just one but several of her own agents inside the American intelligence service, on a top secret mission. On Moscow’s instructions, she compiled a list of reliable German communists in Britain who might be prepared to work as spies for the Americans, but also willing to pass every scrap of information on to the Center. The Faust spies would be agents of American intelligence spying on Nazi Germany, but in reality double agents working for Ursula Kuczynski of the Red Army.
In spy jargon, a “cutout” is an intermediary who stands between a spy and his handler, ensuring that if an agent is apprehended he cannot identify his controller and compromise the whole network. Moscow warned Ursula to be “on her guard” and find someone to act as liaison between her and the Faust spies. She turned to an old acquaintance, Erich Henschke, the comrade who had helped her set up the Marxist Workers’ Lending Library in 1929, selling communist literature from a Berlin basement fragrant with pigeon guano. Chased out of Germany by the Gestapo, Henschke had undergone military training in the Soviet Union and then volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Henschke was always a bruiser and a rigid party disciplinarian; along with his gun he carried a large megaphone, through which he exhorted his fellow communists into battle. In 1939, he was admitted to Britain with a false French identity card and an assumed name, “Karl Kastro.” He was now working in the Wall’s Ice Cream factory in Acton, and performing clerical work for the International Brigade Association. Ursula found Henschke “a slow thinker who found it difficult to reach decisions,” but he was “conscientious and reliable” and knew everyone in the German community. Henschke was the ideal cutout.
Ursula instructed her brother to introduce Henschke to Gould. They got on famously, and the young New Yorker immediately offered Karl Kastro a job: a monthly salary of £5 in exchange for help in enrolling agents for Operation Faust.
Ursula handed Henschke a list of thirty potential recruits, mostly former German trade unionists who had fled to Britain via Czechoslovakia. She had already passed the names to Moscow for approval, along with biographies and photographs. “I did not take a single step without consulting the Centre,” she wrote.
In August 1944, in a Hampstead pub, Gould held his first meeting with four Germans who would form the nucleus of the Faust operation. Paul Lindner was a thirty-three-year-old lathe operator from Berlin and an organizer of the German Metalworkers’ Union, whose good looks were marred by a scarred face and a set of broken teeth, the legacy of a savage beating at Nazi hands. Lindner had escaped to Czechoslovakia with the Gestapo in pursuit and in 1939 made his way to Britain, where he met and married an Englishwoman and settled in London. Lindner’s close friend was Anton “Toni” Ruh, a lithographer who had churned out anti-Nazi leaflets and fake passports for escaping Jews from his illegal Berlin printworks until he too was forced to flee and make his way to London via the Czech underground. Kurt Gruber was a coal miner from the Ruhr Valley; Adolph Buchholz, a metalworker from Spandau-Berlin. Each of these men had been active in the union movement and the anti-fascist resistance. They were all die-hard communists, handpicked by Ursula. Henschke had explained that while they would be working for the Americans, their ultimate masters were in Moscow. As Ursula put it: “The comrades knew that this had been approved by the Soviet Union.”
The Germans, “uncomfortable in inexpensive suits and neckties,” listened attentively as Gould explained that he was looking for men to parachute into different parts of Germany and send back information to American intelligence on conditions inside the Reich. “He inquired about their backgrounds, what cities they knew, where they might have contacts, who would shelter them.” Under a formal employment contract from the U.S. government, each volunteer would receive $331 a month through an account at Chase National Bank. Their families would be paid compensation if they did not return. The Germans nodded keenly, finished their drinks, and asked for a little time “to think about these things and to talk with others of their group.” A few days later Henschke told Gould the men were ready to volunteer; he did not say that the order to do so came directly from Ursula and the GRU. From the other candidates, Gould selected three more volunteers. The operation was split into five distinct missions, and, with the whimsy common in intelligence nomenclature, each was given a themed code name: “Hammer,” “Chisel,” “Pickaxe,” “Mallet,” and “Buzzsaw.” These were dubbed, collectively, the “Tool” missions.
The new recruits did not reveal that they were all members of the KPD. How far Gould was aware of their politics remains unclear. He surely knew the men in his tool kit were left-wingers, but equally certainly he did not know they were secretly working for Moscow. Lindner later speculated that Gould might have been a communist sympathizer: “One could guess that he is an American comrade,” he wrote. But Gould was not a communist. He was not interested in the politics of his recruits. These “Free Germans” clearly had the necessary pluck and union connections to play the parts allotted to them, and that was enough for Joe Gould.
Preparations fo
r the Tool missions began at once. At Ringway Airfield near Manchester the Germans underwent intensive parachute training. At a secret spy school in Ruislip, they were issued with false names, identities, and cover stories, and put through rigorous physical training; they learned to shoot and how to kill soundlessly with a knife. Each recruit would be dropped as close as possible to his hometown, the better to blend in. Civilian clothing commandeered from newly arrived German refugees was stored in a warehouse on Brook Street; here the men selected their costumes for the forthcoming performance. “The common denominator was that all the goods—the suits, shirts, ties, hats, belt buckles, cufflinks, tiepins, shoelaces—had been manufactured in Germany.” A single British label could mean death. German-made luggage, cigarettes, razors, toothpaste, and spectacles were bought in neutral Sweden and shipped to London in the State Department’s diplomatic bag. The master forger of the OSS, Bob Work, a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, turned out a set of fake German passports, travel permits, and identity papers indistinguishable from the real things. The men had not seen Germany for years, so they were quietly inserted into German prisoner-of-war camps to learn about conditions inside the country and get a feel for living among their fellow countrymen again. What they learned there was disturbing: most of the German POWs clung tenaciously to the belief that Hitler would eventually triumph, though some thought he should have waited until victory before exterminating the Jews because the genocide had “brought the Jews of the USA and England into the frontline against us.” The training at Ruislip followed a rigid schedule: “Tactics school on Mondays, how to deal with SS patrols Wednesdays, cartographical studies Fridays…”
Agent Sonya Page 29
