The chance arrest of a minor agent in his network brought an end to Sorge’s amazing run of luck. He was arrested, and tortured into a confession. The Japanese offered to swap him for one of their spies held by Russia, but Moscow disavowed him, denying he was a Soviet agent. It was said that Stalin did not want his rejection of Sorge’s accurate warnings to get out. In Russia, Sorge’s wife, Katya, was arrested on suspicion of being a German spy and sent to the Gulag, where she perished. His most important informant, the Japanese journalist Hotsumi Ozaki, was also arrested.
After two years in Sugamo, Sorge was finally convicted of espionage and sentenced to hang. The Japanese prosecutor who had argued for the death penalty declared: “I have never met anyone as great as he was.”
Sorge was hanged on November 7, 1944. His last words, delivered in fluent Japanese with his hands and feet bound and the noose already around his neck, were “The Red Army!”—“The International Communist Party!”—“The Soviet Communist Party!”
During his long and brutal interrogation, Sorge had told the Japanese much that was true about his espionage career, and some that was not.
The great spy was repeatedly cross-examined about his Shanghai network in the 1920s, including its female spies. Sorge was unaware quite how successful Ursula had become, but he knew that if she was still alive she would be spying against the Axis powers, and in danger. “Women are absolutely unfit for espionage work,” he told his captors. “They have no understanding of political or other affairs and are a very poor source of information.” This was, of course, the opposite of the truth. Sorge’s network had included numerous women, Ursula foremost among them. He lied to the Japanese interrogators to divert attention from his protégée spy and fellow intelligence officer, in order to shield her.
Sorge, most faithless of lovers, was loyal to the end, in his way.
* * *
—
JOE GOULD SPENT CHRISTMAS DAY at Lindner’s house with the other Tool spies. Everyone got drunk and sang German carols. Gould’s son later described this as a moment of “mutual respect between a Jewish US Army officer and his seven German recruits who shared a common goal.” Except that, as the Second World War merged into the Cold War, they were already on different sides.
A few weeks later, Gould asked Erich Henschke to accompany him on a trip to Paris. The liberated French capital was now home to the Free Germany Committee and Gould was keen, with Henschke’s help, to gather “addresses of anti-fascists in Germany” that could be used as safe houses by the spies. Together they visited the Free Germany headquarters, as well as a group called Amicale des Volontaires de l’Espagne Républicaine (Friends of the Spanish Republican Volunteers). “He brought back all the addresses they needed,” unaware that his list of reliable anti-Nazi contacts in Germany had been preapproved by the Center. Red Army intelligence was not just watching the Tool missions; it was running them at one remove, through Ursula and Henschke.
And Milicent Bagot was watching them.
Soon after Henschke returned to London, Bagot sent a memo to the head of Soviet operations at MI6, detailing her suspicions about Karl Kastro and asking for help in finding out more about the people this known communist had met in Paris, particularly the International Brigades veterans. “Have you any information about this French organization please?” Bagot wrote to Kim Philby.
By 1945, Philby had been a Soviet agent for ten years and an MI6 officer for five. Efficient and helpful, he had risen swiftly in British intelligence, while passing on reams of highly damaging information to his KGB handlers. He was exceptionally skilled at throwing a wrench, imperceptibly, into the works of any operation that might threaten communist or Soviet interests. Philby’s response to Bagot’s inquiry, on February 22, 1945, was perfectly unhelpful: “At present we have no information about the Amicale des Volontaires de l’Espagne Républicaine.”
The last opportunity to uncover the Soviet penetration of the Tool missions had been missed.
A week later, Hammer was under way.
HITHERTO URSULA HAD ALWAYS FOUGHT fascism on foreign soil. The nearest she had come to an operation inside Nazi Germany was the aborted assassination of Hitler. Now, as the war entered its finale, her spies were heading into the heart of the Reich.
At 9:00 P.M. on March 1, 1945, Joe Gould and the Hammer agents arrived at RAF Watton in Norfolk. Paul Lindner and Toni Ruh carried knapsacks containing 14,000 Reichsmarks, ration stamps, food concentrates, gas masks, invisible ink, and two diamonds, as well as coffee and fourteen hundred American cigarettes for barter on the black market. In their pockets were Bob Work’s expertly forged papers identifying them as Ewald Engelke, of Frankfurt, and Anton Vesely, a German-speaking Czech, both skilled defense workers excused from military service. In Lindner’s wallet was a fake Nazi Party membership card. Each man also carried a .32 pistol to defend himself against capture, and a poison capsule if that failed.
Unbeknownst to Gould, they also brought memorized instructions from Colonel Ursula Kuczynski: precise orders on how, where, and when they could establish contact with Soviet intelligence in Germany. The GRU was also planning to put penetration agents into bomb-battered Berlin, and the war was moving so fast that Soviet forces might reach the capital within weeks. Through Henschke, Ursula issued each of the agents with a special password, identifying them as Soviet intelligence agents. Once contact was established with Soviet forces, they should “no longer follow any further commands from the OSS and instead only obey instructions received from the Red Army for the remainder of the Hammer Mission.”
On the airfield stood an American A-26, a lightweight bomber with the bomb bay adapted to accommodate the two parachutists. Gould was nervous: “Only the most courageous and highly skilled hands could bring the Hammer Mission safely and accurately to its pinpoint, 47 kilometres away from Berlin, seven hundred feet over the ground.” In the airfield hut, the two agents pulled canvas jumpsuits over their civilian clothes and strapped on parachutes. Gould handed them his flask of brandy; the Germans each took a long pull.
Gould was troubled “by the sensation that he was living through a movie scenario.” Both men had wives and young children, and “the drama of the moment seemed to be at their expense.” Even so, his account of the ensuing scene is cinematic in the extreme.
It was raining lightly, and through the dark ground-haze the only distinctly visible object was the high, huge, squarish tail of the A-26 fifty yards away. Paul and Toni smoked, the men talking to them quietly. Three minutes before midnight, Commander Simpson opened the door and gave the signal. In a moment we were standing in the propeller blast of the A-26, now poised and roaring on the runway. We saw the reddish light shining out of her bomb bay as we walked, leaning against the blast, to the plane. We moved to the doors and hoisted Paul and Toni to their seats. There was too much sound for talking, and it was not the time. We reached up from the runway to shake hands with them. Now the night was absolutely clear. Suddenly we saw the A-26 begin to move, and then she was racing down the runway. She was almost out of sight before we saw her rise, climb quickly, and bank off to the north-east.
The pilot, Lieutenant Robert Walker, came in low over Germany, at a steady speed of 300 mph. “He flew her on her side, twisted her, banked her through to confuse the enemy radar.” At 2:05 A.M. the plane reached the drop point at Alt-Friesack, northwest of Berlin. The visibility was good, with patchy clouds and a bright moon. Walker opened the bomb bay, the dispatcher, Mishko Derr, tapped the two parachutists on the back, and Paul Lindner and Toni Ruh jumped into the darkness.
The two German spies landed in a field and buried their jumpsuits, parachutes, weapons, and the Joan transceiver. Two decades earlier, Ursula had sat in a nearby hayloft with a group of young communists imagining what a communist-ruled Germany would be like. By 6:30 A.M. they were jolting along in a train to Berlin, just two more weary wartime commuters. Dawn was bre
aking when they reached the city. Freeda Lindner was still asleep when her son tapped gently on the front window of his childhood home in the suburb of Neukölln, southwest of the city center. She had not seen Paul since his escape from Germany in 1935 with the Gestapo in pursuit. “I knew you would come home to fight the Nazis one day,” she said.
The next day, moving through the shattered city from one air-raid shelter to another, Ursula’s spies began to collect information: bomb damage, defenses, ammunition storage depots, troop deployments, civilian morale, and, above all, Germany’s capacity to maintain its industry, military and commercial, under the most ferocious bombardment the world had ever seen. Allied bombs had reduced great swaths of Berlin to ash and rubble. The Red Army was poised, thirty-five miles east of the city, for the final assault on Hitler’s capital. And yet the city was still functioning, a dead man walking, devastated but dogged. In his bunker, Hitler continued to issue orders for the defense of Berlin, as the thousand-year Reich plunged to oblivion in a final orgy of blood. Goebbels’s propagandists still daubed the walls: “Every German will defend his capital. We shall stop the Red hordes at the walls of our Berlin.” Lindner and Ruh were amazed to discover that roughly two-thirds of Berlin’s industry was still operative; the railway network was working; the electricity still flowed. The two spies drank it all in like undercover tourists. A week after landing, they returned to the drop point to retrieve their guns and communications equipment. Then they settled down in Frau Lindner’s parlor to listen to the BBC and await the strains of Sinding’s “Rustle of Spring.”
* * *
—
BACK IN OXFORD, URSULA waited for word, her anxiety rising steadily. Like all spymasters, she felt a sense of almost parental responsibility for the men she had recruited, briefed through Henschke, and then dispatched into mortal danger. Sergei had promised to alert her if the spies established contact with the Red Army in Berlin. Every week, she called Henschke from the phone box in Summertown to ask if Gould had received any information on the fate of the men. There was no news. The BBC supplied only the most general information about the march on Berlin. To try to distract herself, Ursula wrote long letters to Len, describing the minutiae of their daily lives: Peter’s expanding vocabulary and strong English accent; Nina’s fascination with animals; Michael’s academic progress at Eastbourne. She sewed a new dress for Nina. “One of the good things about sewing,” she reflected, “is that you can think while you are doing it.” Her thoughts constantly swirled back to an image of two men, floating down into the inferno of Berlin.
* * *
—
ON MARCH 11, HIGH ABOVE the German capital, radio operator Lieutenant Calhoun Ancrum of the U.S. air force prepared his Eleanor for her first conversation with Joan. Before climbing into the cramped compartment inside the Mosquito PR XVI bomber, Ancrum had enjoyed a nongaseous meal of steak, toast, sliced tomatoes, and grapefruit. At twenty-five thousand feet, an attack of wind could cause agonizing cramps. The Tool missions left nothing to chance—including the digestive systems of the flying crew. Demolition charges were strapped to the equipment. If the plane was forced to ditch inside Germany, the technology would be destroyed. Joan-Eleanor could not be allowed to fall into enemy hands. At 9:00 P.M. Ancrum switched on the transceiver.
“Is that you, Heinz?”
From six miles below, Paul Lindner’s voice floated up from a wheat field outside Berlin.
“Is that you, Vic?”
“Can you hear me, Heinz?”
“I can’t hear you, Vic…”
The exchange did not live up to the significance of the moment, but the crackling conversation over VHF radio represented a technological triumph: for the first time, the Western Allies could speak directly to their spies deep inside Nazi Germany. Over the next six weeks, at intervals dictated by the coded BBC messages, the Hammer agents described what they had seen and uncovered, much of it gleaned from the underground trade union resistance networks: Berlin’s defenses, the road and rail systems, troop movements, and the location of still-functioning munitions plants, including a large tank factory—a shopping list of juicy bombing targets. On March 29 they reported that the huge Klingenberg power plant was still operational. In a nighttime reconnaissance of a rail yard on the outskirts, they counted twenty-six freight and eighteen passenger trains, sitting ducks for the Allied bombers.
Back at OSS headquarters in London, Bill Casey was jubilant. The Hammer team had made “a big breakthrough…including important air-target data on a still functioning power plant that kept key factories running, as well as detail on the importance of a Berlin transportation net and key spots where Allied bombs could disrupt it.” The Soviet armies were advancing quickly, and the spies scrambled to furnish any information that might degrade Berlin’s defenses ahead of the final assault. Lindner turned up at the rendezvous point appointed by Ursula, expecting to meet the promised GRU agent sent in advance of the approaching Soviet troops, but no one appeared.
* * *
—
MICHAEL CAME HOME FOR the Easter holidays. Ursula was Jewish, German, and atheist, but at her son’s insistence she agreed to cook the children a traditional English Easter lunch, or as near as wartime rationing permitted: some scrag end of mutton scrounged from the butcher, potatoes and cabbage from the patch she had dug in the Laskis’ back garden. With the meal cooking under Michael’s vigilant eye, she walked into Summertown and, as she did every Sunday, put in a call to Erich Henschke. The tone of his voice revealed what had happened before he even uttered the code phrase she had been waiting for. The Hammer spies were in and had made contact. That meant the Joan-Eleanor system might soon be in Soviet hands. Her spies were safe, or as safe as they could be in a city under siege.
Easter lunch was a most joyful affair at Avenue Cottage that year. Michael ate six hot cross buns.
That same Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, Lindner and Ruh made their way to a remote area northwest of Berlin, to collect a scheduled airdrop of food and other supplies. Around the city, German troops were digging in for a last-ditch defense: ragtag Wehrmacht units, Waffen-SS, but also old men and teenage boys of the Hitler Youth. Suddenly the spies found themselves in the midst of SS Panzer Division Hermann Goering, as it clanked northward for the final battle. A young lieutenant on a motorbike, officious and suspicious, demanded their papers. Lindner produced the forgeries identifying them as Ewald Engelke and Anton Vesely, and explained that they were returning to the city to join the loyal defenders. The skeptical officer told them to empty their rucksacks. The Joan transceiver was at the bottom of Ruh’s bag, hidden beneath dirty clothes. Laboriously, as slowly as possible, he began to empty it, sock by sock, muttering in Czech. Paul shrugged, and made a remark about this “dumb Czech who didn’t understand German.” Inside his coat pocket, Lindner slipped the safety catch off his .32. Exasperated by the delay, the lieutenant waved them on—a decision that saved their lives and probably his own. “I would have gladly shot him,” Paul Lindner later remarked.
On April 16, with the city encircled, the Soviets launched the final offensive. The forces of the Western Allies had dropped out of the race for Berlin. It had already been agreed that the city would be divided into four zones of occupation once the fighting was over, and General Eisenhower decided to leave the glory of capturing Hitler’s capital to the Soviets. The Allied air bombardment ceased when Soviet troops entered the city and the Red Army artillery took over the shelling, pouring more explosive onto Berlin than the total tonnage of bombs already dropped by the Western Allies.
The Battle of Berlin was reaching a climax. On April 21, while attempting to make contact using the Joan-Eleanor equipment, the Hammer spies were almost overrun by Soviet forces sweeping in from the south, pushing the German defenders back, street by street. The following day, another message on the BBC instructed Lindner to cross into Soviet-held territory, while Ruh remained in Berlin. Thousand
s of Berliners were attempting to flee the city and being pushed back; Lindner was unable to break through the defensive perimeter.
The same afternoon saw one of the last battles of the Second World War, as the Germans attempted to defend Treptow in the southeast against a ferocious Soviet assault. Lindner, Ruh, and Lindner’s father were caught up in the fighting and joined the attack on the German lines using abandoned weapons. Soviet troops, mistaking them for die-hard loyalists, opened fire on the trio, before realizing these were anti-Nazi partisans. Soviet troops were pouring into Berlin, and a vengeful campaign of rape, murder, and destruction was under way. The Hammer mission was over, at least in its American form.
That night, Lindner and Ruh made their way through the ravaged city to the Wartenberg district, and an address supplied by Henschke a month earlier. Walli Schmidt had been a member of the Young Communist League alongside Ursula and they had kept in touch over the years. Ursula knew her to be a committed party member. In February, Walli had received a message via the workers’ underground network instructing her to stand by. It was 3:00 A.M. when Ruh (who had also known Schmidt in the 1920s) knocked gently on her door. Walli opened it a crack, and Ruh whispered the code word: “Sonya.” On Walli’s dark and deserted allotment behind the house, between a plum tree and the chicken coop, they carefully buried the Joan transceiver.
One of the final messages from the OSS instructed Lindner and Ruh to establish the “whereabouts of Hitler,” with a view to killing the führer himself in a surgical bombing strike. There was no need. On April 22, after being told that his orders for a counterattack had not been fulfilled, Hitler suffered almost total nervous collapse. A week later, with Soviet forces just five hundred yards from the Führerbunker, he shot himself.
Agent Sonya Page 31
