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

My Amazon Review of David Downing's "The Dark Clouds Shining"

The Revolution Disappoints

In this final volume of the Jack McColl/Caitlin Hanley series we pick up the action in 1921, three years after they split up in Russia. McColl is sprung from jail by MI-6 (foreign intelligence) and returns to Russia to foil a MI-5 (domestic intelligence including India) plot to assassinate Gandhi. Of course he meets up with his old flame Caitlin who is working in the Women’s Bureau run by Alexandra Kollontai, a real person. Although working very hard for the revolution, Caitlin is increasingly demoralized by the course the Russian Revolution has taken. The thrill of a radically new society is turning into a police state with an omnipresent bureaucracy. This is not what she fought the revolution for.

The assassins which include McColl and Hanley’s old nemesis Aiden Brady are also disillusioned. Their goal is to kill the “Menshevik” Gandhi and with that end a Russo-British trade deal that would torpedo Lenin’s New Economic Program. Yes, the plot is a bit contorted. Along the way we meet the detective and Chekist Yuri Komarov, a well- drawn character, who is both a cynic and a supporter of the revolution. He is not a real person, but we do meet Yacov Peters, the real number two in the Cheka.

McColl and Hanley venture from Moscow to Tashkent and then on to India. In India we meet a Sherlock Holmes-like detective who adds spice to the story. At times the book is plodding, but it ends with suspense and high drama.

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/RVSXFM1AXX5I3/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Max Hastings' "The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939-1945"

Sigint, Humint and the Focus of the NKVD

Journalist/historian Max Hastings has written an encyclopedic history (640 pages in the print edition) of the secret war being fought by all sides during World War II. It is too much for the average reader, but that being said one comes away with the view that signals intelligence (sigint) was far superior to human intelligence (humint) over the course of the war with the notable exception of the role of the Soviet NKVD and its military counterpart the GRU.

The heroes of the book are the quirky academics, most notably Alan Turing, at Bletchley Park in breaking the German enigma code and America’s unsung hero Joseph Rochefort who by the dint of intense effort, broke the Japanese naval code. What Bletchley did was to enable the British navy to locate German submarine traffic, a fete that was instrumental to winning the Battle of the Atlantic. Similarly Rochefort code breaking enabled America’s surprise attack at the Battle of Midway which changed the course of the war in the Pacific. It also enabled to ambush Admiral Yamamoto in flight over the South Pacific. Sigint also broke the Japanese diplomatic code which enabled the Allies to listen in on the correspondence of the Japanese ambassador to Berlin on his transcripts to Tokyo enabling the allies to understand Hitler’s war strategy after 1943.

On the other hand the Soviet Union relied very successfully on humint. They had Richard Sorge working in the German embassy in Tokyo who supplied them with more than enough information to warn them about the pending German invasion. It was no avail, because Stalin refused to believe it. This highlights a fundamental problem with intelligence gathering; it has to be believed and it is vulnerable false information. Stalin also benefitted from his spies in Europe operating under the umbrella of “the Red Orchestra” or the “Rote Kapelle”. His agents there also warned him of the pending German invasion.

Unlike the other allied powers, Stalin spied on his allies, the UK and the U.S. The notorious Cambridge Five located in MI-5, MI-6 and the foreign office tipped him off on allied strategy. Thus at every summit meeting he knew the Roosevelt/Churchill positions going in greatly strengthening his hand. His spying on the U.S. penetrated the nuclear program thereby giving him the greatest intelligence coup of World War II and perhaps of all time. Stalin before anyone else understood that nuclear weapons were a game changer. Hastings portrayal of his agents and agent handlers in the U.S. is especially acute.

One of the key lessons that Hastings draws is that intelligence has no meaning unless the users of the information have forces on the ground to influence events. Thus knowing the position of German submarines is of no value unless you have destroyers ready to take them out.

Hastings also discusses the roles of both German and Japanese intelligence. The Germans were good early in the war, not so good later. And Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr does not come off as a great spymaster. Similarly, the same goes for Major General William Donovan of the American OSS. However he does give credit for the research and analysis section of the OSS in its understanding of the German economic capabilities.

Hastings has written a long book and this review does not give true justice to it. I recommend it for those interested in the craft of intelligence and its role in World War II.  

The full amazon URL is:

 https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R39NJDEVT0ZONK/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B01415T0LE

My Amazon Review of David Downing's, "Jack of Spies"

Having read all six of David Downing’s “station series” about Germany in World War II, I was looking forward to his new series on World War I. Unfortunately I was disappointed. Simply put his lead characters, Jack McColl and Caitlin Hanley, lack the depth of John Russell and Effie Koenen. Perhaps it’s the times. The world of 1913-14 had yet to experience the horror of the trenches, the ideological struggles of the 1920s and 30s, the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler. It was a simpler time.

Downing’s protagonists are Jack McColl, an automobile salesman initially freelancing as an intelligence agent before moving on to that line of work full time and his romantic interest Caitlin Henry, a very attractive proto-feminist working as a journalist. Jack’s spying takes him to the German concession of Tsingtao, China, San Francisco, New York, Mexico during the U.S. occupation of Veracruz, Dublin and London. Quite a full itinerary, but he is far from operating on the high political level of Sidney Reilly, the “Ace of Spies”. It is more the day-to day stuff dealing with naval deployments, arms shipments and IRA terrorism. Through it all McColl and Henry find the time to frequently end up in bed.

There are appearances of the founding fathers of British Intelligence. We meet McColl’s boss, George Smith-Cumming the head of the Special Intelligence Service responsible for foreign activities, now MI-6, and Vernon Kell the domestic intelligence chief of the Secret Intelligence Bureau, now MI-5.

There is a lot of good stuff in this book and it is worth the read, but I only hope that in future volumes Downing will improve his character development under the strains of The Great War.

The Amazon URL is:  http://www.amazon.com/review/R60CA1I0970MX