Agent Sonya

by Ben MacIntyre

  Obtaining a German visa would take at least ten days if MI5 did not block it. She told the two younger children they were going on holiday. In Aberdeen, Michael was unaware that his mother was preparing to defect to East Germany. Len would have to stay behind and join them when his leg healed, if he was not in prison.

  A year earlier, to bring in some extra cash, Ursula had started letting the spare room to a young couple, Geoffrey and Madeleine Greathead. Geoffrey was a farmworker, while Madeleine worked as a cleaner in the home of the local squire. Mrs. Greathead was a cheerful presence in the house, but extremely inquisitive. That February, she noticed Ursula seemed particularly “harassed” and had burned a large pile of papers in the yard. “We were never allowed into the cellar. She would ask me if I minded looking after the children when she went to London, which she did quite often.” Madeleine loved to gossip. “We began to feel suspicious. We would talk about our suspicions, but folk would look at you as if it was all made up.” Madeleine liked Ursula—“she showed me how to make ice cream and sponge cakes”—but she sensed there was something strange afoot and decided to keep an eye on her landlady and find out what she was up to. Ursula had spent the previous twenty years on the alert for signs of surveillance; she immediately realized that Madeleine’s questions were more than idle curiosity. Once again, she was living with a spy under her own roof.

  She bought three air tickets to Hamburg. In four large American kit bags, she packed clothes and supplies for herself and the children. Her arrangements recalled the moment, twenty years earlier, when she had assembled an escape kit for herself and baby Michael in Shanghai, and awaited a signal from Richard Sorge to flee for the communist-held Chinese interior. Her nerves stretched to the snapping point, she scanned the fields of Great Rollright for signs of MI5’s watchers.

  Skardon, meanwhile, was slowly and methodically grilling Fuchs in his cell in Brixton Prison. The extent of his espionage in both the United Kingdom and the United States shocked intelligence chiefs on both sides of the Atlantic. Fuchs did not deny giving the Soviet Union the atomic bomb. But, like Foote before him, he did not tell MI5 everything. On February 8, two days before Fuchs was formally arraigned on charges of violating the Official Secrets Act, Skardon laid out dozens of photographs of “individuals who had been known to have been or suspected of being engaged in intelligence activities” in the United Kingdom, and asked Fuchs if he could identify any of them. One was a photo of Ursula Beurton. Fuchs put several pictures to one side, murmuring that “the face seemed familiar.” But he skipped over the photo of Ursula. As he did over those of Jürgen Kuczynski and Hans Kahle. Six days later, Skardon was back, pressing Fuchs for more details of his Soviet handlers. “The second contact,” Skardon duly recorded, “was a woman whom FUCHS met in a country lane near Banbury, Oxfordshire….This woman was in his opinion an alien, although she spoke good English, this being the language in which his espionage transactions were carried out. He has described her as a short, unprepossessing woman in her middle 30s. Although Fuchs has been shown a large number of possible photographs, he has been unable to identify any of them as that of the woman in question.”

  MI5’s failure to make the obvious connection to Ursula Beurton was, with hindsight, a counterintelligence blunder of historic proportions. Fuchs had admitted meeting a foreign, female Soviet spy in Banbury; a few months earlier, Jim Skardon had interrogated a foreign, female Soviet spy just ten miles away in Great Rollright. Indeed, there was only one foreign, female Soviet spy on MI5’s radar. And yet it concluded: “Without further information it seems improbable that this contact will be identified.”

  On February 18, Ursula’s application for a permit to “visit friends” in Germany was returned by the Home Office stamped “No Objection.” The first major hurdle had been cleared. But her name was on the MI5 watch list. Sooner or later, a very loud alarm bell would sound inside the Security Service, a notice would be sent to all airports, and the door would slam shut. How long that might take was a matter of guesswork. The wheels of British bureaucracy tend to turn slowly, or at least unpredictably. Village gossip, by contrast, can travel with almost magical speed. The children were talking openly about the “holiday” they were taking—in the middle of school term. What kind of housewife goes abroad leaving her husband to fend for himself with a broken leg? Four big kit bags seemed a lot of luggage for a woman and two small children going on a short vacation. Word of the strange goings-on at The Firs might already have reached the lounge bar of The Unicorn. From there it could travel, almost instantly, to the ears of Detective Constable Herbert.

  Madeleine Greathead was taking a close interest in Ursula’s travel plans and asking a lot of questions. Ursula resolved to divert the lodger’s attention and use her to spread some disinformation. “One day Ursula asked me if I could help her with some pressing as she was returning to Germany the next day to claim her father’s estate.” With the nosy lodger out of the way attending to a mountain of washing and ironing, Ursula made her final preparations. She extracted the transmitter from the cellar, wrapped it in sacking, and buried it in the undergrowth. Today, somewhere in Great Rollright woods, lies a rusting homemade shortwave radio, a spy’s buried legacy. Then she carefully packed up the few mementos she would take with her: the Chinese prints from Shanghai, a postcard from Switzerland, and a framed photograph of Richard Sorge. Finally she climbed on her bicycle and rode toward Banbury, performing the usual countersurveillance routine, doubling back twice to ensure she was not being followed. At the hollow tree root beyond the crossing, she inserted a message for the GRU, explaining that she was quitting her post and slipping away to Berlin. Then Agent Sonya cycled home for the last time.

  The following afternoon, Len loaded the kit bags into the boot of the Chipping Norton taxi. Ursula embraced him tightly, wondering, once more, if she would ever see him again. “Farewell or goodbye—we did not know which it would be.” Nina and Peter were fizzing with excitement at the prospect of riding on an airplane. They hugged Mrs. Greathead and Penny the cat, climbed into the backseat, and waved to Len through the back window until he disappeared from view.

  As she waited on the hard benches in the departure lounge of London airport (now Heathrow), the children happily playing poker dice at her feet, Ursula stared rigidly at the doors, a bubble of anxiety steadily rising in her stomach. At any moment the police must surely burst in and arrest her. The trial of Klaus Fuchs would begin the next day, and he had probably already identified the “girl from Banbury.” Even now Detective Constable Herbert, alerted by the suspicious Mrs. Greathead, might be picking up the telephone to MI5. Britain had adopted her, and now she was fleeing the land she had come to love. The next few minutes would decide whether she disappeared to a country she no longer knew or spent the next decade or more in a British prison, condemned as a notorious communist spy. She resolved to say nothing if she was arrested, admit nothing. She would maintain the discipline of a trained Soviet intelligence officer. Colonel Kuczynski would not crack. But what would Michael do when his mother’s face was splashed across every newspaper? If she and Len were convicted, what would become of the children?

  She scanned the crowd for a man in a trilby, flanked by policemen, approaching with a smile of triumph beneath his weak moustache.

  But Mr. Sneddon never appeared.

  The air hostess welcomed them aboard, more concerned with a group of inebriated Italian football fans than the innocuous woman holding tight to the hands of her two chattering children. From the window seat, Ursula gazed out on the rain-spattered runway, where a military plane was taxiing for takeoff. Instinctively, she memorized its markings. Then the door closed on England for the last time.

  On February 27, 1950, Ursula and her children flew to Germany. She would not return for another forty years.

  ON MARCH 1, 1950, AFTER a trial lasting ninety minutes, Klaus Fuchs was found guilty of “communicating information to a p
otential enemy” and given the maximum sentence of fourteen years. Jim Skardon visited him in HM Prison Stafford a few months later and handed over a photograph of a woman with “a very untidy mop of hair.” (Ursula’s unladylike scruffiness never ceased to irk him.) “In placing the photograph of Ursula Beurton before Fuchs I said to him: ‘This is a photograph which I have already shown to you earlier.’ And he immediately said: ‘That is the woman at Banbury.’ He has no doubt that she is the contact but is unable to say why he failed to identify her when the photograph was placed before him on the previous occasion.” Ursula was beyond Mr. Sneddon’s grasp.

  The spy hunters refused to believe she had gone. MI5 chief Sir Percy Sillitoe wrote to Colonel Rutherford of the Oxford Police: “I am anxious to establish the present whereabouts of Ursula Beurton….She intended to visit friends in Berlin, and it is of course possible that she has not returned.” Detective Herbert of Chipping Norton reported that The Firs now stood empty, all the furniture had been sold, and Len Beurton had disappeared. To add to MI5’s discomfort, confirmation of Ursula’s escape came from the FBI. John Cimperman wrote an angry note to John Marriott: “Some time ago you were asked to have her interviewed [but] it was not deemed desirable. Information has now been received to the effect that Ursula Beurton has left England to return to Germany.” Far too late, MI5 instructed border control to intercept Ursula if she entered or left Britain. “Subject is an active communist and is connected with persons engaged in espionage on behalf of a foreign power; black hair, brown eyes; last known location: Berlin; Occupation: Housewife.”

  Embarrassed by its failure to seize Ursula in time, MI5 later propagated a myth that she had “bolted back to Germany in 1947.” Dick White, the head of MI5, told his biographer that she had fled two days after the interview with Skardon (knowing full well she had remained in the United Kingdom for another two and a half years).

  The East Berlin that Ursula returned to in February 1950 was a city mutilated by war, with piles of rubble in the streets and the blackened hulks of burned-out buildings. There were no hotel rooms available. After just a few days, the children were asking to return to Great Rollright and wondering where Len was. Nina missed Penny the cat. Peter wanted his Dinky toys. Jürgen had informed the Soviet authorities of Ursula’s arrival; he told her to be patient. She moved into a cold one-room apartment with her children and waited for the Center to make contact. “I lived in isolation.” She enrolled the children in the nearest school. Speaking little German, they were teased mercilessly. During the long days, she wandered the city and pondered all that had happened to her. After the intense drama of the escape from Britain, it was as if she had arrived in a gray half-world, populated by people who had managed to survive, and nothing more. Jürgen was far too busy to help her settle in. There was little to eat and nothing to do. Yet for the first time in two decades she did not feel stalked. She had no radio transmitter to hide, no agents to contact, no need to conceal her politics. Ursula experienced a sensation she had never known before, and at first did not recognize: she felt a sort of peace.

  Finally, in May, word came via Jürgen that the Center was sending an emissary. A GRU officer she did not know arrived at her door in civilian clothes and announced, rather stiffly, that he was taking her out for a “festive meal.” The officer was friendly, but formal. He congratulated her on her work in China, Poland, Switzerland, and Britain, and apologized for the confusion over the dead-drop site in Oxfordshire that had interrupted contact for so long. The world was changing fast, he explained. Comrade Stalin had warned that the capitalist West was building nuclear weapons for an attack on the Soviet Union. War was looming on the Korean peninsula. The GRU would play a vital role in the coming conflict, and there was important work to be done. When would Ursula be ready to resume her work for Soviet military intelligence?

  Ursula pushed away her plate, took a deep breath, and explained that she no longer wished to be a spy.

  The man from Moscow was speechless.

  Looking back, Ursula could not pinpoint the moment she decided to renounce espionage. Perhaps it was Fuchs’s arrest, or during the long months when the Center had left her adrift. Or perhaps it was the moment she fled Britain. Over the last four months in Berlin, lonely but unafraid, she had tasted tranquility, the calm that comes from laying down arms, an armistice of the soul. The GRU officer tried to change her mind, but she was adamant. “I wanted to live as a citizen. I told him that nothing had altered in my commitment to the Soviet Union and the work I had done, but that my nerves and powers of concentration were no longer as good as they had been. I felt that twenty years were enough.”

  The profession of Soviet spy is not an easy one to resign from. The GRU was a difficult club to join, and an even harder one to leave. Intelligence officers tended to depart the service when they were old, disgraced, or dead. Early retirement was not in the contract, and anyone attempting to quit was considered a potential traitor. Twenty years earlier, Sorge had darkly warned Ursula what would happen to her if she ever tried to back out. She had taken many risks for the Red Army, but the bravest of all was her determination to quit it.

  Ursula had made up her mind. “I stood by my decision.”

  And the Center let her go. Just as she had survived the purges unscathed, so the GRU allowed her to leave its ranks in a way that no other officer would have been permitted to do. Stalin’s power was founded on abject obedience, but Ursula, as in so much else, was an exception to the rule. It was a mark of her prestige that she walked away from the spying business without recrimination, reprisal, or regret.

  Ursula was given a job putting out propaganda for the Press Department of the East German government. She wrote daily press releases and edited the fortnightly Bulletin against American Imperialism. Her boss was Gerhart Eisler, the ideological enforcer who had spied on her during her initial recruitment in Shanghai and insisted she should wear a hat.

  Once again, the children adapted to a wholly new life. Nina abandoned her obsession with the British royal family and joined the Free German Youth. Peter swiftly exchanged his rural-accented English for Berlin slang. As soon as his leg healed, Len Beurton flew to Berlin, arriving in June 1950. MI5 did not try to stop him. He was employed by the East German state news service. After leaving Aberdeen a year later, Michael, an idealistic young socialist, also settled in communist East Germany. The family was reunited.

  East Germany was a surveillance state, where citizens were encouraged, bribed, or forced to spy on one another. The Ministry of State Security, or Stasi, was one of the most efficient and repressive secret police forces in history, with a vast network of informers. Everyone was spied upon, and Ursula was no exception.

  The initial Stasi reports on Ursula were positive, noting that she had “spent twenty years abroad carrying out confidential work for the Party.” Her character was described as “modest and self-effacing…she is open, honest and reliable.” But like everyone returning from the West, particularly Jews and anyone implicated in intelligence, an odor of suspicion hung over her. “Everyone who had been in exile in a capitalist country was deemed untrustworthy,” she wrote. The Stasi demanded to know about her interrogation by MI5, the recruitment of Alexander Foote, and, oddly, Marie Ginsberg, the secretary at the League of Nations in Geneva who had helped her obtain a fake passport. Ginsberg was suspected of links to a “US–Zionist espionage organization.” The Stasi noted disapprovingly that Ursula “comes from a bourgeois family background.” She was summoned to testify before the Central Party Control Commission. A confidential Stasi report described her as too independent-minded: “She has still not overcome all her petit-bourgeois tendencies, among which an individualist attitude is revealed.” Ursula had made a career out of evading surveillance, and she chafed at the unremitting scrutiny of the state. She even wrote to Erich Mielke, the fearsome Stasi chief, protesting that her neighbors were being quizzed about her political reliability. �
��At one of the houses, the parents were not at home, so they asked the 18-year-old daughter to pass judgment on my trustworthiness and behaviour.” She told Mielke: “Tell your officers to refrain from such snooping.” She received an apology. But the surveillance continued.

  In December 1950, MI6 contemplated “abducting the Beurtons from the eastern part of the city with the help of the CIA.” The tentative plan passed through the hands of Kim Philby, who once again alerted Moscow, enabling the Soviets to “initiate appropriate defensive measures.” With anti-Semitic spy hysteria rising in East Germany, British intelligence spotted another opportunity. If the regime carried out a purge of Jewish communists, then Ursula Beurton and Jürgen Kuczynski would be targets. MI5 came up with a plan to try to recruit them, or at least persuade both to redefect to the United Kingdom. On January 23, 1953, Colonel Robertson sent a note to MI6 suggesting that Ursula and Jürgen be offered a deal: safe haven in Britain and immunity from prosecution in exchange for their cooperation. “These persons are likely to possess valuable information about Russian espionage, and it is worth going to considerable lengths to get them, and with them their information….We recognize that however alarmed these people may be by the uncertainty of their future under communist regimes this might be outweighed by fear of legal or other punitive action on the part of the British authorities…do whatever possible to let it become known to them that they have no fears on that particular score.” It is unclear whether this offer was made, or how Ursula and Jürgen responded to it, since MI6 files remain closed.

  In late 1953, Ursula was officially reprimanded for leaving confidential documents on her desk instead of locking them in a safe. For someone who had hidden world-changing secrets for decades, there was rich irony in being told she had committed a “gross breach of trust” by leaving out an innocuous press release. She resigned, moved briefly to a post in the Foreign Ministry, and then stopped working for the state altogether.