Thursday, October 29, 2020

My Amazon Review of Ben Macintyre's "Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy"

Housewife by Day, Spy by Night

 

I gave a rave review to Ben Macintyre’s “The Spy and the Traitor” two years ago and trust me, I was not disappointed with his “Agent Sonya.”  (  See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2018/10/my-amazon-review-of-ben-macintyres-spy.html) Macintyre tells the story of young Weimar Berlin communist who grew up in an upper middle class household who would go on to become one of the Soviet Union’s greatest spies rising to the rank of colonel in the GRU and the posthumous recipient of an award from none other than Vladimir Putin himself.  

 

Macintyre traces Sonya’s (born Ursula Kuczynski) career from street fights with the Nazis in Berlin to following her architect husband to Shanghai, Manchuria and Chunking and then on to Sparrow school (GRU training) in Moscow to Warsaw to Geneva and then to England.  Along the way she gives birth to three children from three separate fathers two of whom she was married to.

 

She is recruited initially by the feminist author and spy Agnes Smedley in Shanghai, but she does not become fully involved until she meets and has an affair with the super spy Richard Sorge  who would go on to become Moscow’s man in Tokyo. (See: shulmaven.blogspot.com/2020/01/my-amazon-review-of-owen-matthews.html )In Chunking she meets the then Soviet military attaché General Vasily Chuikov who would go on to lead the invasion of Berlin in 1945.   

 

In Geneva, now with two children, Sonya sets up a spy ring to penetrate Germany. In fact, her two British spies come upon a Munich restaurant frequented by Hitler. They plot to assassinate Hitler but with the German invasion of Poland they must flee Germany before anything can be done.  One incident in Geneva really stands out is that eight hours after the birth of her second child, she is sending coded short-wave transmissions to Russia. Sonya faced a crisis of confidence with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which put a halt on her spying on the hated Nazis. Nevertheless, she ultimately sticks with the GRU likely because she was addicted to risk.

 

Sonya makes her bones in England where she controls the noted atomic spy Klaus Fuchs. From as early as 1940 Sonya is transmitting secrets from Britain’s Tube Alloys atomic program. Fuchs would stay in England until 1943 when the Brits join America’s atomic program in Los Alamos. Sonya sets up the transfer of Fuchs to the KGB operation in America that is running the Rosenberg spy ring. Fuchs’ contact was Harry Gold.

 

All the while Sonya is running Fuchs, she lives the life of normal housewife with three children in the English countryside. By day she takes care of the kids and bakes cakes and scones. By night and with occasional trips to London and bicycle rides to dead drops she is a spy. She is so successful that when the OSS decides to parachute German nationals to spy on Germany, they are all under her indirect control.

 

To be sure Britain’s MI-5 was aware of her, but they could not believe that the mild-mannered housewife was a spy. But then again this was the same MI-5 that missed the notorious Cambridge Five, one of who was Kim Philby who at times aided Sonya.

 

There is much more to the story than what I have discussed above. There is Sonya’s interactions with her father, brother and her three lovers and I have left out how and where she ends up. Macintyre has written a truly engrossing story that reads like a novel.

For the full Amazon review see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R8KA5Y59P69S8/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv




No comments:

Post a Comment