Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy by Ben Macintyre

Author:Ben Macintyre [Macintyre, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Like many successful marriages, this one was not entirely straightforward. Len sometimes accused his wife of being “dictatorial”—which she could be, particularly in matters of professional espionage. He was never in doubt that he had married his superior officer. She found him thin-skinned and liable to sudden, inexplicable changes of mood. “He fussed over things that I felt were unimportant.” But Ursula provided Len with love, unconditional and absolute, something he had never known. For many years she had lived in danger and courted risk, while constantly accompanied and sometimes paralyzed by fear. What Len gave Ursula, in addition to lifelong loyalty and a marriage certificate, was a by-product of his own, strange character: he lent her some of his own stolid fearlessness.

Richard Sorge had offered glamour and peril. Johann Patra, the working-class seaman, was a creature from another world, jealous and competitive, an irresistibly romantic revolutionary. But Len was neither her boss nor her rival. He needed her as no one had ever needed her before, and loved her in a way that was simple, strong, and unquestioning. Ursula was no longer the headstrong adventure seeker, but a mature undercover agent and trained intelligence officer with two children, a spy network, and a heavy burden of responsibility. She no longer lived for fast motorbikes or political arguments that stretched into the early hours; she needed backup, emotional and professional. She did not want another firebrand or a sparring partner. She wanted a good husband. And she got one.

Ursula applied for a British passport the day after the wedding, and the consul duly wrote to the Passport Office in London, asking whether he should issue one. The reply came back on March 28, 1940: “We have no record on Mrs. Ursula Beurton and only a possible trace of her ex-husband with a communistic smell. On the face of it, I do not see how you can refuse to issue a British passport.”

MI5 thought otherwise.

The British Security Service was by now profoundly suspicious of the Kuczynski family, and concerned to discover that yet another member might be en route to Britain. Fear of the “Red Menace” had intensified with the Nazi-Soviet pact. Both Robert and Jürgen Kuczynski had adopted the party line from Moscow and publicly condemned the war as a conflict between imperialists that communists had no stake in. Robert was described by MI5 as “spreading defeatism” with his “anti-war” attitudes. The family was deeply involved with the Free German League of Culture, which MI5 considered “a communist front organisation.”

At the end of 1939, Jürgen Kuczynski was brought before the Aliens Tribunal, the body set up by the Home Office to rule on which of the seventy thousand German and Austrian “enemy aliens” in Britain should be locked up as potential enemy agents. MI5 submitted evidence that he was a communist (something he did nothing to hide), and on January 20, 1940, Jürgen was interned at Seaton Camp in Devon, a former holiday camp, along with 568 other “Category A” internees, most of them Nazis.

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