Inside the GRU, Foote’s disappearance sparked consternation and recrimination. Major Poliakova was sacked instantly, and then disappeared. All Foote’s intelligence contacts, most important Ursula, were now compromised. The Center had already severed contact with her accidentally. Now the disconnection was intentional. Sonya was on her own.
Ursula waited for MI5 to turn up. She did not have to wait long.
Milicent Bagot’s long-held suspicions were confirmed: Ursula Beurton was, or had been, a Soviet spy. She went back over the letters Ursula had sent to her family from Switzerland. One, written to her sister-in-law Marguerite in 1940, looked, on closer examination, distinctly dubious. “Except knitting (which is not my strong side) one is not allowed to do much here,” Ursula had written. “But reading an appeal for getting ready for blood transmission, I replied. They examined me and found that I have very useful blood, and it can serve all different blood groups.” Bagot suspected the letter contained a secret message: “blood transmission” was code for “radio transmissions,” and the reference to “different groups” was interpreted as a hidden clue that Ursula was training others as radio operators. MI5 concluded: “Cryptic passages appear to refer to secret political activities.”
A subject of hitherto tepid interest to Bagot’s bosses was suddenly white-hot. The case was taken out of Milicent’s hands, and Sir Percy Sillitoe, the new director general of MI5 and a former police chief, took over. Letters to and from The Firs were intercepted and closely scrutinized; the telephones of Ursula’s siblings were tapped; Ursula’s bank statements were combed for evidence of suspicious money movements. Len was now working as a machine fitter at the Northern Aluminium Company in Banbury, where MI5 had an informant, a former policeman named Richard Kerley. When Len was at his workstation, Kerley opened Len’s briefcase in the staff cloakroom and reported that it contained “various kinds of books and leaflets of communist propaganda.” Discreet local inquiries revealed nothing out of the ordinary in her behavior, and some in MI5 wondered how Ursula could possibly have time to spy since “her hands are fairly full with domestic duties.”
It was impossible to put The Firs under direct surveillance, since any stranger turning up in a remote village like Great Rollright would have been spotted at once. The local policeman was told to keep a special watch on the Beurtons, and the chief constable of the Oxfordshire County Constabulary, Lieutenant Colonel Herman Rutherford, was secretly briefed on the case: “We hope through the medium of your observation and our investigation to find out some more about their activities so that we can determine whether or not they are engaged in espionage at the present time.” Colonel Rutherford “expressed great interest” in the case. This was an understatement. Rutherford was wildly overexcited. The prospect of digging a communist spy out of Great Rollright was simply thrilling, and the chief constable wanted to arrest her in person.
There was no time to waste. “Ursula, if not already regarded by the Russians as ‘blown,’ will undoubtedly be so when Foote’s defection to the British is known,” MI5 warned. “The possibility cannot be excluded that she came here with a mission.” She should be questioned at once, “preferably before the Russians have had time to inform her of Foote’s fate.”
The best person for the job was Milicent Bagot. Instead, the case was handed over to William “Jim” Skardon, former police inspector, head of the surveillance squad known as the “Watchers,” and the country’s “foremost exponent” of cross-examination. Skardon read Ursula’s file with relish: soon MI5’s grand inquisitor would be bending his steps to Great Rollright to break her.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1947, Ursula’s parents came to stay at The Firs. She did not tell them of her fears. Berta was pale and weak. One night, at 2:00 A.M., Ursula heard groans coming from their bedroom. “Mother was having a heart attack.” Through the thin walls Ursula heard her cry out: “Oh my little boy.” “She was thinking of Jürgen, her eldest, whom she had loved most of all her children.” Great Rollright’s only public telephone, on the village green, was out of order. Ursula pedaled fast through the darkness to Chipping Norton and woke the doctor, who drove her back in his car. “It was too late.” Ursula’s relationship with her mother had always been confrontational, but her death was a profound blow. Berta was buried in the churchyard at Great Rollright. After forty-five years of marriage, in good times and bad, Robert Kuczynski was devastated. Ursula persuaded him to remain at The Firs.
A few weeks later a letter arrived from Victor Hamburger. “I have a bit of good news: Rudi is alive.” Victor had received a postcard from one Maria Jablonska, a Polish woman from Danzig recently released from the Gulag. “I have returned home from Russia and I am happy to be able to tell you that your brother Rudolf is alive. He is very homesick after his family and mostly after Misha please write by return of postcard and I will give you more details.” Victor’s letter continued: “You can imagine how happy we all are…of course we must give up almost all hope of seeing him again in the next few years.” Ursula debated whether to tell Michael that his father was a prisoner in Russia. “She told me in a very roundabout way, but said he was ‘in exile,’ ” Michael remembered. “She did not say where.”
MI5 read the letter with interest and passed word to John Cimperman of the FBI that Hamburger was alive and incarcerated in a Russian labor camp. Colonel Joe Spencer, the British security officer who had interrogated Rudi in Tehran before handing him over to the Soviets, was also informed: “It appears the kind Russian reception which he told you he expected was not forthcoming, and he still has five years to serve in his concentration camp.”
Ursula was comforted by the news, but it brought fresh uncertainties: What cruelties had poor Rudi suffered? How much longer would he remain a prisoner of the Soviet Union? Would he ever see their son again?
As summer waned, Ursula mourned her mother, feared for Rudi, yearned for some supportive signal from the Center, pondered Foote’s secret message, and waited for the knock on the door that would herald the arrival of MI5’s bloodhounds.
It came at exactly 1:20 on the afternoon of Saturday, September 13, 1947.
Ursula opened the door to find a policeman on the doorstep flanked by two men in civilian clothes. The policeman removed his helmet and announced himself as “Detective Constable Herbert of Chipping Norton police station.” His companions were introduced as “Mr. Saville” (Michael Serpell of MI5) and “Mr. Sneddon”—in reality Jim Skardon, MI5’s fabled interrogator.
“These gentlemen would like to talk to you, Mrs. Burton. May we come in?”
Robert Kuczynski was reading a magazine in the sitting room. He rose and “gracefully bowed himself out.” After showing Ursula his police badge, Detective Herbert also departed. The two men perched awkwardly on the settee. Ursula took in her uninvited guests.
Serpell, an “expert in communist subversion,” was acutely embarrassed to be interrogating a housewife in her apron. Skardon, however, might have been dressed for the part of spycatcher in chief: he wore a gray mackintosh and trilby, along with a thin, unpersuasive moustache and a faintly sardonic expression—disguise for the fact that he had very little idea what he was doing. “A dapper, pipe-smoking former policeman, Skardon had a high opinion of his own abilities,” according to one colleague, which he strongly encouraged others to share. He did not like women and refused to allow female officers to take part in surveillance operations since this might expose their male colleagues to “extramarital temptations.” He was ponderous, punctilious, polite, and, as chief watcher, startlingly unobservant. “He epitomized, in his manner, the world of sensible middle-class values—tea in the afternoons and lace curtains,” a cast of mind that was to prove highly ineffective against hard-boiled Soviet spies. He would interview Kim Philby ten times, and declared himself more convinced of his innocence at the end than he had been at the start. He interviewed Anthony Blunt on eleven occasions over a thirteen-year period and
cleared him every time, fooled by Blunt’s “upper class bluster.” He also exonerated John Cairncross, another of the Cambridge Five, and Edith Tudor-Hart, who had first recommended Philby to the KGB. For a celebrated spycatcher, he was remarkably bad at catching spies.
Skardon’s first mistake was to underestimate his quarry. “Mrs. Beurton is a somewhat unimpressive type with frowsy unkempt hair, perceptibly greying, and of rather untidy appearance.” His second error was to reveal his hand. “You were a Russian agent for a long time, until the Finnish war disillusioned you,” Skardon declared. “Without pausing for breath,” he went on: “We know that you haven’t been active in England and we haven’t come to arrest you.”
At a stroke, Skardon had exposed the weakness of MI5’s position. Ursula’s espionage in Switzerland had been aimed at Germany; she could only be held to account if she had spied in Britain, against Britain or her allies, and Skardon had just revealed he had not a scrap of evidence she had done so.
“This ‘psychological’ attempt to take me by surprise was so funny and inept, and so far from throwing me off balance, that I almost burst out laughing.”
“Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked. “Shall I fetch my husband?”
Ursula called Len in from the garden and put the kettle on, knowing she already had the upper hand. If she simply stonewalled, then Mr. Sneddon would have nothing to go on; and nothing was exactly what she intended to give him.
Len entered the sitting room. “Beurton looks uncommonly young even for his 33 years,” Skardon wrote. “But he was completely overshadowed by his wife who quite dominates the household.”
Once tea was served, Skardon resumed. “I went straight into the attack and told Mrs. Beurton we had a vast amount of information in our possession and we required her cooperation to help clear up ambiguities.” The evidence, he hinted darkly, came from a “leakage from the Russian Intelligence Service.”
Ursula smiled sweetly. “I do not think I can cooperate. I do not intend to tell lies, and therefore prefer not to answer questions.”
Skardon had never come across a woman like this before. He liked them tidy and meek. “It is fair to say right away by the stand that she took she tacitly admitted that she had worked for the Soviet Intelligence in the past. The manner in which she did so was a credit to her earlier training, for every possible piece of cajolery, artifice and guile that could be was employed, without any success whatsoever.”
Skardon pressed on. “We know you became disillusioned with communism after the invasion of Finland by the Soviet Union. We know you are a loyal British subject and would not engage in any blameworthy enterprise here. You have nothing to fear. We know you have not been guilty of anything in this country. Since you have recognized the real worth of communism, why not cooperate and tell us about your time in Switzerland?”
Again, Ursula deflected him.
“I confirmed my loyalty, but said that did not oblige me to talk about my life before I became a British citizen. I replied that while I had experienced disappointments, I could not describe myself as anti-communist. Besides, I was of the opinion that there was no contradiction between being a loyal British citizen and holding left-wing views.”
Skardon was frustrated. It is impossible to demonstrate that you are a champion interrogator if someone refuses to answer your questions. “She made no denial whatever, repeatedly sheltering behind the rock of ‘non-cooperation.’ ”
Skardon turned his attention, “somewhat sourly,” to Len: “We know about your close acquaintance with Allan [sic] Foote.”
“Footie?” said Len, as if half recalling a name from the distant past. “Oh yes. What is he doing these days?”
Skardon’s thinly genial manner was evaporating fast. Ursula offered more tea, and asked if she might be excused for a few minutes as she was baking a cake for a children’s party to celebrate Peter’s fourth birthday.
Left alone with what they perceived to be “the weaker vessel,” Skardon and Serpell went to work on Len. “We broke into Beurton’s taciturnity, but in spite of every inducement we did no more than elicit from him that he met Mrs. Beurton in Brighton in 1936.” Len claimed he had bumped into her again “quite by chance” in Switzerland, “as one meets people in the Prix-Unis [sic].”
Skardon was now properly peeved. “After a longish interval Mrs. Beurton returned, still in an uncooperative frame of mind. We used every conceivable argument with her [but] she said that even to explain why she was not cooperative would be to deal with the past, and she preferred to say nothing rather than to mislead.”
Skardon told Ursula that her “loyalty to her former employers” would not be reciprocated; she replied that “her loyalties were to ideals rather than people.” He warned that some of her family might “come under suspicion” if she did not come clean; she “preserved a Slav-like indifference.”
After nearly three hours of fruitless jousting over the teacups, Skardon rose and stiffly announced that they would return the next day “in the hope that upon consideration she would change her attitude.”
She did not.
“Once more, all the advantages of cooperation and, by inference, the dangers of reticence, were detailed to her, but she remained adamant.”
Only once did her guard slip. Foote had candidly admitted to committing perjury in the Swiss courts, by falsely testifying that Rudi Hamburger had committed adultery with Brigitte in a London hotel in order to secure Ursula’s divorce. Skardon wrote: “Mr. Serpell very skilfully worried Mrs. Beurton by using the word ‘divorce’ repeatedly.” Ursula and Len exchanged surreptitious glances. “There is no doubt that this dissolution of her marriage is a weak chink in her armour, but the papers appear to be in order, and there seems little justification for an all-out attempt to invalidate the Beurton–Hamburger marriage and throw her back to German nationality.”
The second day of interrogation ended like the first, in stalemate.
As they left, Serpell attempted some small talk, admiring Ursula’s roses blooming over the front door. “It is beautiful here. I shouldn’t mind living like this.”
Ursula grinned. “That could be arranged. I am letting rooms.”
Skardon wrote up an irritable report of the interrogation.
We got little positive information. There is reason to believe that Mrs. Beurton gave up her agency for the Russians on ideological grounds when they behaved so badly, from an anti-fascist point of view, at the beginning of the war. She is quite clearly fanatically anti-fascist and agreed to some extent that she was disappointed with the Russian policy of 1939/40, commenting that many people lose faith in Governments, but retain their political beliefs. There is one gleam of light in this rather abject failure to make Mrs. Beurton talk. She agreed that if for any reason she changed her mind she would communicate with us through Detective Herbert at Chipping Norton. There is just a chance, though remote, that she may take this opportunity. The good the interview can have done may be to strengthen the desire of the Beurtons to have nothing more to do with intelligence work. We are reasonably satisfied that they are not at present engaged in espionage, and there is no reason to suppose that they have been for some time.
Sir Percy Sillitoe wrote to Colonel Rutherford of the Oxfordshire police, dashing his hopes of a dramatic arrest. “The interrogation was disappointing, no fresh light being thrown on the lives of these people…there is no reason to suspect them of present or even recent espionage activities, although both are communists.”
MI5 believed the fiction that Ursula had given up spying back in 1940. To catch her, Skardon would need hard evidence that she had spied in Britain, and he did not have any. Yet.
Ursula was more rattled by the encounter with MI5 than she showed. Robert Kuczynski was also deeply worried, and suffering from the cancer that would kill him within a few months; he rushed back to London to tell Brigitte w
hat had happened. News that Ursula had been interrogated flew round the family. Jürgen had already moved back to Berlin, and he now wrote urging Ursula to come and join him in building the new communist state of East Germany. “Try as soon as possible to come and visit us. You must see the situation for yourself and then decide about everything and make your plans accordingly.”
Ursula was tempted by Jürgen’s suggestion. The unpleasant Mr. Sneddon had been seen off, but for how long? Len was miserable, bored by his job at the aluminum factory and hardly sleeping. The artillery fire he had been exposed to in Spain had left him with raging headaches. “His depressions became more frequent. He withdrew into silence for days on end.” Though she continued to check the dead-drop site, there seemed no hope of the GRU reestablishing contact. “My life had run aground.”
But at precisely the moment when she began to imagine a new existence, Ursula’s past reappeared in the distinctive shape of the woman who had first brought her into the world of espionage. By chance she discovered that Agnes Smedley was in Britain, living just a few miles away in Oxford.
Smedley’s restless and angry campaign on behalf of international communism was coming to an end. In 1941, she had returned to the United States and taken up residence in the Yaddo writers’ colony in upstate New York to write a biography of the Chinese Red Army general Zhu De, while continuing to work, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, as “the principal apologist for communist China.” The FBI was watching. She was forced out of Yaddo in 1948. A few months later a U.S. Army intelligence report identified her as a key figure in Richard Sorge’s spy ring, unleashing a slew of front-page headlines around the country: “Army Says Soviet Spies Got Tokyo War Secrets; Accuses Woman Writer.” She threatened to sue—a dangerous tactic, given that she was guilty. The McCarthyite communist hunters were in full cry. She embraced her own martyrdom: “The reptile press burned another witch at the stake.” Agnes’s health had been undermined by her years in the Chinese war zones, and while her heart was ready for another fight, her mind and body were not. She booked a one-way passage to England and took refuge in the Oxford home of her friend Margaret Sloss.
Agent Sonya Page 34
