Agent Sonya

by Ben MacIntyre

  On the same day as Hitler’s tearful breakdown, Lindner and Ruh approached a Red Army tank unit rolling into Neukölln, explained that they were Soviet military intelligence agents, and were brought before one Captain Martov.

  Lindner and Ruh later described how Martov had refused to believe their story and, after finding OSS codebooks in their knapsacks, threatened to have them arrested and shot as enemy agents. When they were finally handed over to the U.S. Sixty-ninth Infantry Division near Leipzig, they claimed to have spent two months in Soviet captivity. This was certainly untrue. In Stalin’s army only a madman would have failed to investigate their claim to be GRU agents, and a very swift inquiry would have established that Lindner and Ruh were telling the truth. Far more likely, having given the special GRU identifying password supplied by Ursula, they were taken to intelligence headquarters and fully debriefed on every aspect of their mission, notably the J-E system.

  Within days of the Soviet occupation of Berlin, a Red Army officer appeared at Walli Schmidt’s home in Wartenberg: together they exhumed Joan from the hole between the plum tree and chicken coop. With bureaucratic punctiliousness, the officer presented Walli with a receipt for one-half of a revolutionary new communications system. The Center sent a coded message to Agent Sonya in Britain indicating that the pickup had been completed.

  On May 2, 1945, the commander of Berlin’s defense force surrendered unconditionally to General Vasily Chuikov, the same soldier who, as Soviet defense attaché in Chungking in 1941, had helped to spring Rudi Hamburger from a Chinese prison. The war in Europe was over.

  Lindner and Ruh were the lucky ones in the Tool story. The A-26 on the Chisel mission into the Ruhr Valley crashed on the night of March 19 near the town of Schwege, killing everyone on board. Werner Fischer (Buzzsaw) successfully landed near Leipzig on April 7, on a mission to report on German troop movements and conditions inside British POW camps, including Colditz. He was immediately surrounded by Red Army soldiers who had advanced deeper into southern Germany than the OSS realized. Fischer was carrying false papers identifying him as Ernst Lauterbach, a Gestapo special agent. He protested he was a German communist on an intelligence mission. The disbelieving soldiers shot him on the spot and threw his body in a ditch. Apart from Hammer, the only other mission to achieve its objectives was Pickaxe, whose two spies landed in Landshut, near Munich. According to Bill Casey, “the agents funnelled massive amounts of information about rail and road traffic, communications centres and troop movements, to waiting Mosquitoes during no fewer than nine Joan-Eleanor reports.”

  Lindner and Ruh, following GRU instructions, explained to the Americans that they were keen to return to Britain and continue working for American intelligence. An OSS officer, Henry Sutton, however, subjected them to a debriefing that was “pointed and not entirely amicable.” Their “eagerness to return to Britain” struck him as “not quite right.” These men were probably communists and had spent a considerable period in Soviet hands before being released. “How could Sutton be sure that they had not become double agents?” Gould might not be concerned about their politics, but Sutton most certainly was: “Because of the political background of these men there is serious doubt as to whether they could fit into our post-war German operations.” As the Second World War ended and the Cold War began, tolerance of communism was turning to deep suspicion, expedient wartime alliance giving way to mounting postwar antagonism.

  Even so, the Hammer agents were discharged in August 1945, with a paean of gratitude from the OSS “for the heroic and extremely valuable work that you did for us. During hostilities, you behaved coolly and efficiently and displayed remarkable ability in exploiting every means for fulfilling your difficult task. The successful completion of your mission was of very great value to the armed forces of the Allies and contributed greatly to the defeat of the enemy.” The OSS also patted itself firmly on the back: “Contact with the agent teams by means of the J–E equipment was established and maintained successfully at a critical time in the assault on Germany. Vital information was obtained as to conditions in Berlin, the disposition of troops in the Berlin area and remaining targets for bombing…extremely valuable intelligence was obtained.”

  News of the fall of Berlin was greeted with unconstrained joy throughout Britain, and nowhere more than in Avenue Cottage, Oxford.

  Ursula had been able to follow the progress of the Tool missions through the information passed on to Henschke by Gould. The Hammer spies had survived, though several of the other recruits had perished. She had made a vital contribution to the liberation of her home city from the curse of Nazism. And, most important of all, she had coordinated a mission to steer a brand-new item of American military technology into Soviet hands. She was helping Russia to build the bomb; she also helped them build the walkie-talkie. Even Len did not know what she had done. Hers was a secret, private celebration.

  The Laskis organized a street party for VE (Victory in Europe) Day on May 8. “Tables stood end to end along the road,” wrote Ursula. The residents pooled their meager rations to bake victory cakes. There were toasts with lemonade and beer, and the street was decked with homemade bunting. Ursula had never felt closer to her British neighbors, or more in tune with the national mood. She made a large Victoria sponge, which Nina decorated in red, white, and blue. “I shared everyone’s joy.”

  And yet, as a Red Army officer, she was heading into a new battle. History was pivoting around her. Before the war, she had spied against fascists and anti-communists, Chinese, Japanese, and German; during the conflict, she had spied against both the Nazis and the Allies; after it, and henceforth, she would be spying against the West, the new enemies in a Cold War. A photograph of the Summertown neighborhood victory party includes a beaming Ursula, happily celebrating Hitler’s downfall. One man is wearing an army uniform. Another raises two fingers in the V for Victory sign. But behind the image of shared relief, triumph, and optimism lay a hidden ideological divergence that would soon erupt in a new conflict. “Everyone hoped for a better world,” she wrote. “But here our visions of the future differed.”

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  TWO MONTHS LATER, in the remote deserts of New Mexico, scientists of the Manhattan Project detonated the first nuclear device, in a test code-named “Trinity,” releasing a blast equivalent to twenty thousand tons of TNT. Among the scientists who watched the great mushroom cloud erupt into the dawn sky was Klaus Fuchs, one of the principal architects of the most powerful weapon yet devised by man. In August 1944, he had moved to the heart of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, described by one scientist as “the campus of a huge university whose faculty members were many of the most outstanding scientists in the western world, assembled to work out how to beat Hitler in the race to build an atomic bomb.” In the Theoretical Physics Division, he worked under Hans Bethe, who considered Fuchs “one of the most valuable men in my division” and “one of the best theoretical physicists we had.”

  Through Harry Gold of the KGB, Fuchs had passed on every scrap of scientific intelligence to Moscow: they met in Queens, beside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Fuchs told Gold not only of the progress toward uranium and plutonium “atomic” bombs, but also of the accelerating research into the even more potent hydrogen bomb. In June 1945, Gold was waiting on a bench in downtown Santa Fe when Fuchs drove up in his “dilapidated old two-seater” and handed over a complete description of the plutonium bomb that would be tested in the desert a few weeks later. The Soviets were delighted to receive “the virtual blueprint for the Trinity device.”

  At the Potsdam Conference on July 24, President Truman informed Stalin that America had built “a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Stalin seemed unsurprised—which was itself unsurprising, because he already knew all about it.

  Two weeks later, the U.S. air force dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiros
hima, and then a second on Nagasaki. The war in the Pacific was over and the Cold War was starting in earnest.

  For four years, Ursula’s neighbors and friends in Britain had been her allies; across the rigid battle lines of the new conflict, they were now her enemies.

  GREAT ROLLRIGHT IS A PICTURESQUE rural hamlet surrounded by farmland in the heart of the north Oxfordshire Cotswolds. In 1945, it had an eighteenth-century pub, the Unicorn, a post office, a medieval church, and a population of 243 people, mostly agricultural families who had lived there for generations. The trains of the Banbury and Cheltenham line stopped at Rollright Halt twice a day. Great Rollright is a grand name for a village that was anything but: it was charming, remote, and exceedingly quiet. A week after VE Day, Ursula and the children moved into “The Firs,” a house of honey-colored Cotswold stone on the edge of the village with four bedrooms, two sheds, and an outside privy. The house was without electricity, telephone, or hot water. It was drafty in May and frigid in December. But roses grew in profusion around the door and “the gentle Cotswold hills” rolled away from the back door. Ursula loved it on sight.

  Of all the places she had lived and spied, from China to Poland to Switzerland, this house, “250 years old, with its thick wooden beams and low ceilings, the yard and barn and wild garden,” was the closest to her heart. It was, she wrote, “our first real home.” Avenue Cottage was too small for her growing children. Here there was ample space, the rent was low, and a large locked cellar was ideal for concealing illegal radio equipment. The neighbors were friendly and incurious. Michael returned from Eastbourne during the holidays; Nina, smart in her new school uniform, took the bus to the County Grammar School in Chipping Norton; Peter attended the village nursery school run by the vicar’s wife. Ursula planted out a vegetable patch, built a hencoop in the garden, and eventually installed a young pig. A stray cat moved in and stayed. Nina christened her Penny.

  As in many English villages, life in Great Rollright revolved around the pub, the twelfth-century church, the cricket club, local gossip, the harvest, and the annual fête. The family was welcomed without fanfare and swiftly absorbed. Befriended by a local farmer’s wife, a Mrs. Malton, Ursula began to put down roots. She remained a staunch Marxist atheist, but the family seldom missed church. Eight-year-old Nina embraced Anglicanism with childish zeal. “During the sermon I sat at the front and listened carefully and believed every word.” She decided to become a nun. Then changed her mind and decided to be a fighter pilot. The bell ringers at St. Andrew’s frequently came for tea after Sunday service. Ursula’s baked scones were really very good. As she had with Frau Füssli in Switzerland, Ursula spent long hours sitting by the kitchen fire discussing the minutiae of rural life with Mrs. Malton: the chickens, the weather, the children. She bought some secondhand furniture and hung the Chinese paintings she had brought from Shanghai. “It was strange how well the silk scrolls suited the old farmhouse.” She took the children on a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon. “The children were each allowed four fizzy drinks, three ice creams, and two complete inspections of Woolworths.” Ursula insisted they also visit the house where Shakespeare was born.

  In the very heart of England, Ursula was becoming English, but without her English husband. Len’s application to transfer from the RAF to the army was suddenly granted, and to his surprise Beurton was enlisted in the Coldstream Guards (“the most feudal of all British Regiments,” Ursula wryly noted). He was posted to Germany and would not be discharged for another twenty-one months. MI5 warned Beurton’s commanding officer to keep an eye on him: “His record is a strange one, and it is possible that he is, or has been, a Soviet agent….[It is] undesirable that he should be employed as an interpreter in Germany or any location where he is likely to be in contact with Russians.” Len had spent most of the previous year in RAF barracks. Now he was in a foreign country. “I was very much on my own,” wrote Ursula. “But I had my work.”

  Melita Norwood’s secrets from the British Non-Ferrous Metals Association flowed unchecked. Jürgen, demobilized from the Strategic Bombing Survey, was preparing to return to East Berlin, where communists would forge the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in East Germany under Soviet control. But he and his father remained usefully plugged into British political life. James, the RAF officer, supplied tidbits of technical information. The transmitter was in constant use. None of the villagers noticed the odd hours kept by Mrs. Burton, though her daughter did: “We children had to do daily chores in the house and in the garden. We came home from school each day at 4 p.m. Often at this time of day my mother was asleep. Other mothers didn’t take a nap in the afternoons and I thought: she sends me into the garden to do some weeding while she takes a nap!” Toni Ruh, the former Hammer spy, found work with a defense contractor on his return to Britain. Early in 1946 he passed on, via Erich Henschke, a prototype aircraft part, “a special instrument for shooting in fighter planes.” Ursula stashed the object in Peter’s carriage, wheeled it to the woods near Great Rollright, and buried it. To her embarrassment, when she went to retrieve it, she could no longer recall the spot—her first mistake in twenty years of espionage. But in all other respects she was a model spy. Her radio was working well, as was the system for contacting and passing on information to the GRU; the payments from Red Army intelligence were regular and sufficient; Ursula’s espionage network was running smoothly.

  And then it abruptly stopped.

  In the autumn of 1946, Ursula went to London for a routine rendezvous with the latest Sergei. The GRU officer did not turn up. Initially she was unconcerned. “We had a special arrangement to cope with loss of contact.” A few miles west of Great Rollright, the Banbury and Cheltenham Direct Railway passed over the road running between Banbury and Oxford. Beyond the first crossroads after the crossing stood a line of trees; the fourth on the left had a hollow root. That was the dead-drop site where, if a rendezvous was missed, messages and money would be left for Ursula on a specific day of the month. A week after the missed rendezvous, Ursula cycled under the railway bridge, parked her bike, and, having checked no one was watching, reached into the hole. The dead-letter box was empty. It was bare the next month too. And the next. Had the network been compromised? Under the rules, if Moscow severed communication then she should not attempt to reestablish it by radio until instructed to do so. After two months without a word, Ursula was seriously worried, running low on money, and restless. “I had lived for this work for years, and now my days were empty.” Every month, fearful that someone might spot the pattern of her movements, she cycled to an open stretch of road and felt inside an empty tree root. The Center had broken off contact completely. “There must have been a good reason,” she told herself.

  There was indeed a reason, but it was not a good one.

  The GRU, the mighty military intelligence-gathering machine of the Soviet Union, had got the wrong tree.

  Instead of leaving messages under the fourth plane tree after the crossroads, the GRU courier was depositing the cache in the fourth tree after the underpass—which, by unhappy coincidence, was also hollow at the root. In one of those human mistakes that are as common in espionage as every other profession, the GRU had cocked it up. But the Center was as baffled as Ursula. “For reasons unknown Sonya did not remove the money from the dead drop in the agreed upon period of time and we took the money back,” a report noted. As far as the Center was concerned, it was Agent Sonya who had broken contact, which could mean only one thing: the British Security Service must be closing in on her. Which it was.

  Ursula’s past was returning to haunt her along three distinct routes, and through three different men—Rudi Hamburger, Alexander Foote, and Klaus Fuchs: her ex-husband, her former collaborator, and her best spy.

  On March 25, 1946, the U.S. legal attaché and FBI representative in London, John Cimperman, sent a letter to Roger Hollis of MI5: “Please refer to previous correspondence on Rudolf Albert Hamburger, confessed S
oviet Agent whose whereabouts has not been established since he left Iran on May 22, 1943. I would appreciate your making arrangements to interview Ursula Hamburger Beurton, the former wife of Hamburger, for the purposes of ascertaining Rudolf’s present whereabouts.” The FBI was actively investigating anyone with communist links. Rudi’s brother Victor, now at the University of Chicago, was therefore a suspicious person.

  The Americans were suddenly interested in the Soviet spy and his ex-wife.

  Rudi Hamburger’s present location was as far removed as it is possible to imagine from the gently undulating Cotswolds: he was in Karaganda Labor Camp, a huge Gulag covering fourteen thousand square miles of the Kazakhstan steppes. Here an army of inmates slaved in fifty coal mines, in a landscape so inhospitable that the camp barely needed its machine gun–toting guards. Anyone attempting to escape swiftly died in the frozen wilderness.

  “Every morning, it seems inconceivable to me how I got here,” Rudi wrote.

  Hamburger’s purgatory had started in Saratova Labor Camp on the Volga, five hundred miles south of Moscow, at the beginning of a five-year sentence for “political crimes.”

  “That’s what I have become,” he wrote. “A traitor, a terrorist, a public enemy.” Saratova was a timber extraction camp, a penal colony powered by slave labor and the closest thing the Stalinist state could devise to a half-living hell. The inmates wore identical prison garb of jerkin and quilted black cotton cap, a uniform intended to enforce conformity and insufficient to keep out the biting cold. Their diet consisted of coarse black bread and watery soup: “Particles of carrot, fish skeletons, bones and disgusting fish heads that stare at you, with dead eyes.” After six months of captivity, Rudi weighed under 110 pounds. When he dared to look in a mirror he saw a “grey-shining skull, the pale, emaciated face of a prematurely aged man.” There were no books, newspapers, or radio, and no communication with anyone on the outside. Rudi’s fellow convicts included professional criminals running an internal tyranny of fear, violence, and extortion, but also political prisoners like himself, the “Fifty-Eighters,” “socially dangerous elements” convicted under Article 58: students who had dared to demand freedom of expression, a couple who criticized the war that had taken their only son, a man who picked up and kept a Nazi propaganda leaflet dropped from a German plane.