Agent Sonya

by Ben MacIntyre

  Ursula longed to see Agnes again, but feared doing so might lead MI5 to her old friend. “An irresponsible visit from me might have jeopardized her politically. In any case, I did not know how she might have changed over the years. How should I approach her?” They might both be under MI5 surveillance. If she was spotted making contact with an accused Soviet spy, that would only reinforce their suspicions. Should she take the risk of linking up with Agnes, with all that this might entail, or avoid contact with her oldest friend, her first mentor? Once again, her heart pulled Ursula one way, and her spycraft another. Back in China, at the moment their relationship ruptured, Smedley had accused Ursula of putting personal issues ahead of her commitment to the cause. Her decision now proved that the reverse was true: she decided she must not, and would not, try to reestablish contact with the woman who had recruited her. Agnes Smedley had ceased spying years earlier, but Ursula had not: that gulf was unbridgeable.

  Other voices floated back from her past, impossibly distant now. From Shanghai, Johann Patra sent beseeching letters in fractured English, urging Ursula to write to the German emigrant relief organization in China supporting his claim to be a refugee from Nazism who should be repatriated to Germany. The GRU had severed contact with him too, and the rule against contact between spies no longer applied. He was working as a mechanic, earning barely enough to avoid starvation.

  “Foreigners are leaving China for various countries: North and South America, Australia, Russia, Europe etc. The UNRRA [United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration] would finance my trip to another country if I wish to go. What do you think of this? After all, your advice is important! If I were to go to another country, to South or Central America say, I might possibly earn more money, and I should be able to help you. I have also learned to think in practical terms. You are really more tied to Europe than I am.” Patra explained that he had married a German woman named Luisa and they had adopted a child. “Can you think of it that I have a wife and child? You could never understand that. You thought that I am more of stone. I like him just as if he would be mine….I gave him the name Peter. The economic and political situation here is very bad, and the time for drastic changes will have to come. I should very much like to see you. I am so proud of you. You are happy in important matters.” She wrote to the emigrant organization as Patra requested, but heard nothing back.

  Robert Kuczynski died on November 25, 1947, and was buried alongside Berta in Great Rollright. The obituaries lauded a pioneering statistician. There was no mention anywhere of his secret work, through his daughter, for the USSR. Ursula was plunged into deep mourning. “We had known what to expect for some time, but all the same his death has been a great shock,” she wrote to Jürgen. “Father was marvellous, right to the end.” Ursula had adored and revered her father, proved herself a political force in his eyes, and recruited him into the secret world. His death severed yet another link with Britain. The appeal of a new life back in her homeland was growing. She was still only forty years old, young enough to start again. Jürgen, now living in the Soviet sector of Berlin, was pressing: “Come and visit us….Once and for all give up the empty life you are living and you will easily have your choice of political work over here.” Jürgen knew his letters would be read by MI5: “political work” was a euphemism for spying. She replied: “Apart from making a home for my husband and children, my life seems fairly useless….Writing? How much I would love to do that….I must make Len’s evening meal. He is just coming off the late shift.”

  East Germany, occupied and administered by Soviet forces, was being fashioned into the German Democratic Republic, surrounding but not including West Berlin. A state run by German communists, and a slavish satellite of Moscow, the GDR would become a place of strict ideological conformity enforced by an all-seeing secret police force, the Stasi. But in 1948 it represented a beacon of hope for German communists. In the eyes of people like Jürgen, the “Socialist Workers’ and Peasants’ state” would be a Marxist-Leninist paradise, and he intended to be part of it. He urged Ursula to come too: there would be plenty of opportunities in the new Germany for faithful communist spies.

  Still she hesitated. Len spoke poor German. The children were now completely English. “They loved Great Rollright.” That summer, she and Len took the children to Butlin’s holiday camp on the south coast. Nina described this quintessentially British postwar holiday as the “loveliest experience” she had known in her short life. “During the whole day there were loudspeaker announcements, every evening there were dances, there were roundabouts and swings. The highpoint was the beauty contest. Lovely legs and a pretty face—that was all you needed. After this visit I had a new dream—I wanted to marry Mr. Butlin, become rich and be able to take my holiday every year in such a camp.” Peter made his older sister cry by telling her, “You’ll be lucky to marry a rag-and-bone man.” Nina was an ardent royalist, collecting every newspaper cutting about the royal family and pasting them into a large scrapbook. She particularly admired Princess Elizabeth. “When I was told to fetch a large cabbage from the garden, I screamed: ‘The princess doesn’t have to do such work in the garden.’ ” Little Peter collected Dinky toys, the miniature vehicles made from zinc alloy. Michael had won a scholarship to read philosophy at Aberdeen University. Could Ursula really remove her British children from the place they saw as home? How would they all adapt to life under communism? She had not been lying to Skardon when she spoke of her “disappointments” with communism. Tearing herself away from Britain to a land she had last seen twenty years before seemed like madness. Great Rollright soothed her. “If I felt low, I would just wander to a favourite spot nearby where I had a view across the fields and hills.”

  In 1948, she applied for a temporary visa to enter Berlin, but was told visas were still available only to visitors on official business. Jürgen came up with an alternative plan: he would be traveling to Czechoslovakia early the next year on academic business and suggested they meet there instead. The orphaned Ursula felt an urgent need to see her older brother, lay out her troubles, and get some “good advice.” She flew to Prague on January 18, 1949. MI5 alerted the MI6 station chief in the city that she was on her way: “Ursula Beurton was an active espionage character in Switzerland during the war…let me know if she comes to your notice in Czechoslovakia.” The reunion was a disappointment. Jürgen was busy with self-important meetings and could spare her just an hour of his time. He was all business. “Jürgen never had any time for soul-baring or displays of emotion.” Ursula should return to Berlin, he insisted, but obtain Moscow’s approval first. “It would be very difficult for you to stay in Germany without the Centre’s agreement.” Jürgen never broke the habit of telling his sisters what to do. Against espionage rules, she wrote a letter to the director of the GRU, noting that she had not heard from the Center for two years, describing the dead-drop site beyond the first crossroads after the railway crossing near Great Rollright, and requesting permission to come to Germany. She signed the letter “Sonya,” sealed it inside an envelope addressed to the military attaché, and then, having ensured she was not being followed, delivered it by hand to the Soviet embassy in Prague. Then she returned to England and waited.

  The Cold War battle lines were redrawn with grim clarity on August 29, 1949, when the Soviet Union conducted its first secret nuclear weapons test in Kazakhstan. U.S. weather reconnaissance aircraft picked up the radioactive debris, and, on September 23, President Truman announced: “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.” Soviet atomic scientists had achieved remarkable results thanks to their spies inside the Manhattan Project, chief among them Klaus Fuchs. Ursula read of the bomb test and felt a surge of pride. The Soviet bomb was virtually a copy of the American one. In the United States the successful test was code-named “Joe-1” in jocular reference to Stalin, but the intelligence community was shocked by the swift progress of the Soviet atom
ic weapons program. The CIA had estimated the Russians would not develop the bomb before 1953 at the earliest; MI6’s estimate was even longer. Overnight, America’s assumed nuclear monopoly had evaporated. Pressure to develop the hydrogen bomb increased. Hawks in the U.S. administration, including General Curtis “Old Iron Pants” LeMay of the U.S. Air Force, had urged hitting the Soviets with atomic bombs before they built their own, to ensure American global hegemony. Now any attack would invite an equally devastating response: the fragile, terrifying era of mutually assured destruction was under way. Spies like Ursula Beurton and Klaus Fuchs claimed to be safeguarding military equilibrium by stealing nuclear secrets from one side to give to the other. They believed they were making the world safer, while making communism stronger.

  Inside MI5, the Ursula Beurton case remained open. Every few months, a desultory discussion took place about whether to send investigators back to The Firs. “Ursula Beurton should be re-interrogated,” wrote Colonel James Robertson of the counterespionage branch. “I believe individuals of this type ought to be interrogated repeatedly until it is established beyond doubt that nothing more can be extracted from them.” But Skardon was disinclined to bother: “I have given considerable thought to the possibility of re-interrogating Ursula Beurton…nothing has arisen recently to make such an effort likely to be more productive, and as it is impossible to assume a successful outcome, I do not feel disposed to reopen the matter.” It was agreed that the best thing to do about Mrs. Beurton was nothing at all: “She has been once interrogated with no result and is a very tough nut.”

  The winter of 1949 was bitterly cold. Len skidded off his motorbike and badly broke an arm and a leg. The doctor said he would be off work for at least eight months. The aluminum factory took the opportunity to sack him. Her small legacy from her father was running out. Len sunk deeper into depression. Nina’s pet mouse froze to death on the windowsill of The Firs. The water pipes burst. Bored, baffled by the GRU’s continued silence, uncertain of the future, Ursula found her espionage career was in deep freeze.

  One morning in late January, more out of habit than hope, Ursula cycled yet again to the dead-drop site. The road was icy and treacherous as she followed the familiar route, under the railway and past the crossroads. She leaned her bike against the fourth tree and reached into the root. Her hand closed around a small package. With freezing fingers she tore it open: cash and a letter from the Center granting permission for her to go to Germany. After three years, Sonya had come in from the cold.

  Ursula was keen to see her homeland again, but not certain she wished to live there. Michael, now nearly nineteen years old, was in his second year of university in Scotland. Even if Len agreed to leave, he could not travel with his leg in a cast. She made unhurried preparations for a holiday in Berlin. Visa restrictions had now been relaxed and she was told there would be little problem obtaining the necessary permit. There was no hurry. She had evaded the Chinese and Japanese secret police, the Swiss security service, and the Gestapo. There was little to fear from the plodding Mr. Sneddon and his sad moustache. MI5 clearly knew nothing of her recent espionage.

  On February 3, 1950, Ursula picked up the newspaper from the doorstep of The Firs and felt a lurch of “shock and sorrow” as she read the front-page headline: “German Atomic Scientist Arrested.” Klaus Fuchs, the scientist who gave Russia the bomb, had been caught.

  Four years earlier, Fuchs had returned from the United States to take up a post as head of theoretical physics at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in Oxfordshire, where scientists were designing a nuclear reactor to produce energy for civilian use. A second, secret agenda was the production of plutonium for making atomic weapons independently of the United States. Fuchs was a pivotal member of the team.

  As a GRU officer, Ursula was unaware of his return, for Fuchs was now a KGB asset. For a time he eschewed spying, but after a year back in Britain he received instructions to meet a KGB contact, Alexander Feklisov, in the Nag’s Head pub in Wood Green, North London, carrying a copy of the Tribune. The contact, holding a red book, would bring over a beer and say: “Stout is not so good, I prefer lager.” To which Fuchs should reply: “I think Guinness is best.”

  From then on, every few months, Fuchs met Feklisov at various London pubs. Over Guinness and lager, he handed over a fresh trove of secret scientific intelligence: Britain’s atomic bomb planning, the construction of experimental reactors, pages of notes on plutonium production, and precise calculations of the nuclear tests that would enable Soviet scientists to assess the Western nuclear stockpile. He also described key features of the hydrogen bomb being developed in the United States—information that prompted the Soviet Union to work on its own “super-bomb.”

  Fuchs’s KGB handlers went overboard with the spycraft. If he needed an emergency rendezvous, for example, he was required to throw a copy of the soft porn magazine Men Only over a garden wall in Kew on the corner of Stanmore and Kew Roads, between the third and fourth trees, and write a message on the tenth page, then place a chalk mark on the fence on the north side of Holmesdale Road opposite a tree at the eastern end of the road, which would indicate to the occupier of the house on Stanmore Road that there was something for him in the garden. It would have been easier to memorize the formulae for plutonium production.

  Fuchs had been scrupulous in following the rules. He made no mistakes. Another routine MI5 review of his record uncovered nothing incriminating.

  Fuchs was brought down because a breakthrough by American cryptographers allowed the decoding, at least partially, of thousands of wartime messages sent by the KGB and GRU. The spy hunters could peer back into the past. The historical wireless traffic, code-named “Venona,” revealed that the Soviets had deployed a senior mole inside the Manhattan Project, and by July 1949, the month before the first Soviet bomb test, British and American investigators had concluded that the spy must be Klaus Fuchs. The Venona traffic was too secret to be revealed in court. Tapping Fuchs’s phone, intercepting his letters, and intense surveillance produced nothing. The only way to get a conviction would be to extract a confession. MI5 sent in Jim Skardon.

  By this time Fuchs had been a spy for eight years, and the strain was telling. He had come to admire Britain greatly. At exactly the moment MI5 picked up the scent, he broke off contact with his Soviet handler.

  On December 21, 1949, Skardon confronted Fuchs in his office at Harwell. He used the same blunt approach he had attempted with Ursula. “I am in possession of precise information which shows you have been guilty of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union.” Fuchs thought for a moment and replied ambiguously: “I don’t think so…perhaps you will tell me what the evidence is?” Since the MI5 sleuth was not privy to Venona, Skardon could not. After four hours, the interrogator had got nowhere, and was uncertain of Fuchs’s guilt. After a second interview, he decided he was innocent. A third was inconclusive. Skardon was maintaining his unfailing capacity to miss the spy under his very nose.

  But on January 23, 1950, Fuchs asked Mr. Sneddon to come to his home in Harwell.

  “He was obviously under considerable mental stress,” Skardon wrote. “I suggested that he should unburden his mind and clear his conscience by telling me the full story.” Fuchs demurred, and instead of pressing home his advantage Skardon suggested they break off and have lunch in a pub. “During the meal he seemed to be resolving the matter and to be considerably abstracted.” By the time they got back to the house, Fuchs had made up his mind. “He said that he had decided it would be in his best interests to answer my questions.” This breakthrough would later be cited as evidence of Skardon’s genius as an interrogator. In fact, Fuchs simply decided to tell all with no further prompting. Indeed, Skardon was astonished when Fuchs confessed that he had spent the previous eight years spying for the Soviet Union, “passing information relating to atomic energy at irregular but frequent meetings.”

 
Three days later, Fuchs signed a ten-page confession in Room 055 of the War Office. Like Fuchs’s espionage, his decision to confess was framed as an act of principle, with an echo from his father’s pulpit: “There are certain standards of moral behaviour which are in you and that you cannot disregard….I still believe in communism. But not as it is practised in Russia today.”

  Fuchs naïvely believed that, having got the truth off his chest, he would be allowed to continue working at Harwell. He was shocked to be taken into custody.

  The arrest of Klaus Fuchs made the front pages of every newspaper in Britain, including Ursula’s Oxford Times. She felt a chill of pure fear as she continued reading: the German scientist had passed atomic secrets to Moscow by “meeting a foreign woman with black hair in Banbury.” Even the inept Mr. Sneddon, surely, could not miss so obvious a clue.

  Ursula was now in greater danger than at any time since Olga Muth’s betrayal. In urgent conclave with Len, she discussed the implications of Fuchs’s arrest. Since Detective Constable Herbert of Chipping Norton had not yet turned up with an arrest warrant, Fuchs had probably not revealed her name. Perhaps he did not know it. “I had never been in his home nor he in mine,” she wrote. “I had never spent the night in Birmingham where he worked, so that no hotel registration could be found.” Fuchs may not have betrayed her yet, but he had plainly divulged some details of their meetings, and under oath in a courtroom he would surely reveal more. In the meantime, MI5 would be assembling clues. “I expected my arrest any day.” The Fuchs trial was due to open on February 28. Mr. Sneddon would be coming for her very soon. But getting out of Britain would not be easy.