The enigmatic Agent Sonya: a housewife by day, a fearsome Soviet spy by night

Ursula kuczynski, a.k.a Ruth werner, a.k.a Agent Sonya was an officer of the Red Army, radio communications expert, saboteur, world-class spy and best-selling writer. He did it all by raising his family, a situation that was his perfect alibi and also a death trap. If his story is not known, it is because so far it has not been told. Historian Ben macintyre, which has just been published in Spain Agent Sonya (Critic), reflects on the phone from somewhere in Britain: “Today there is a lot of talk about how to balance work and family, but the case of Ursula Kuczynski has happened on a whole different scale. His job was deadly. If he failed he would die and so would his family. She had a great ability to compartmentalize, which good spies do, but she recognized that if it had resulted in conflict between her family and the revolution, she would have chosen the revolution. In many ways it was a communist fanatic. Being a woman was her big disguise, but also the reason why we didn’t know anything about her ”.

The second of six children from a wealthy Jewish family, Kuczynski (Berlin 1907-2000) matured in Germany where the battle between the extreme right and the left was fought. At the age of 19, he joined the German Communist Party and pledged never to give up. In 1930, she escaped growing pressure from the Nazi militias and moved to the troubled city of Shanghai with her first husband, the architect. Rudi Burger. There he met spy Richard Sorge, with whom he had a brief and intense romance and of whom he would always have a photo with him. He gave her her nom de guerre and hooked her into this existence of secrets and loyalties. When he was imprisoned in Japan after one of the most impressive careers in spy history, he never revealed Ursula’s identity. “All spies are convinced that they are working for the highest ideals, but it is always much more complicated than that. Espionage is complex and addicting. The secret is a very powerful medicine. Once you are part of this elite it is very difficult to leave him and she was also very ambitious. Obviously, if you work for the Soviets, there is a practical element: if you leave it, they will probably kill you, ”comments the author of Spy and traitor.

What sets her apart from any other spy that I have met is that she is a professional. He chose intelligence work as a career, as a vocation

Macintyre (Oxford, 1963) is one of the great storytellers of espionage history, but he admits that he has never encountered such a case. “What sets her apart from any other spy I’ve met is that she’s a professional. He chose intelligence work as a career, as a vocation. Most of the female spies worked for men in subsidiary missions or as informants. There are really very few who have become officers and I do not know of any who have been a colonel in the Red Army. And no one has come so far in any intelligence service, ”he summarizes. Extremely adept at erasing her tracks, Sonya during her long career escaped the Gestapo, the Chinese Nationalist Police, the Japanese Kempeitai and, during her stay in England as a refugee during World War II, also against the counter- British espionage. “The reports from MI5 are very funny. The men systematically put her down and repeatedly failed to identify this woman who looked after their children, who wore an apron and who was baking a birthday cake when they went to interrogate her, along with someone who could be the perfect spy. And she exploited that advantage as much as she could, ”said Macintyre, amused. In defense of MI5, it must be said that despite the “incompetence and chauvinism” of many of its members, Agent Milicent Bagot repeatedly insisted that Ursula and the rest of her family living there (especially his father and brother) were Communist spies. She was right, but she was a woman and no one was paying her attention.

Kuczynski, however, had a more formidable enemy: his own employers. Agent Sonya survived the Stalinist terror that wiped out much of the Soviet espionage – including several of her friends and colleagues – a party of denunciation and macabre assassination which led to the arrest of 1, 5 million people and running over 680,000 in two years. . Macintyre believes there were two reasons for this: his tremendous ability to build loyalty – “it’s an essential part of the spy’s job, getting others to trust you and convincing them that their future depends on their loyalty to you. you ”- and the most extraordinary luck. “He fought where many others perished. For many reasons, he had a good chance of ending up with a bullet in the neck in the Lubyanka cellars. “

Among the countless achievements of Sonya in Switzerland, China, Manchuria occupied by Japan or Great Britain, her handling of the betrayal of Klaus Otto Fuchs, highly regarded physicist, member of the Manhattan Project and Communist spy, stands out. Reflecting the commitment of his double life, Kuczynski had his third child in 1943, a few days after sending from his home in the English countryside to Moscow the last part of the 570 pages with the essential information of the British nuclear program, a success espionage that advanced the Soviet project by several years, balanced forces and gave way to the Cold War.

In 1950, MI5 acknowledged that Kuczynski had set up a network of agents in its territory, but they played down the effects of his infiltration. They still won’t admit that “this woman so busy with domestic affairs” and avid of long bike rides (whom she used to meet her informants) was the great spy she seemed to be. Kuczynski had already returned to her native Germany, to enjoy what she saw as a communist paradise and live with her second husband, Len, and their three children. Apart from espionage, from 1956 she became a famous writer under the name of Ruth Werner. In 1969 he was awarded the second red flag of the Soviet Union. He had doubts, fears, he lived a life of suffering and loss, dedicated to a cause, but he never regretted what he had done.

“Ursula’s children idolized her, didn’t trust her at all and wondered how well they knew her,” Macintyre sums up in Agent Sonya. Peter, Michael and Nina were the result of three different relationships, they always felt loved and loved, but they ignored their mother’s job for part of their lives. Like the rest of the world, who only now knows who may be the best spy in history.

THE COUNTRY