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
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