Agent Sonya

July 13, 2020
Macintyre (The Spy and the Traitor) recounts the life and career of Soviet intelligence officer Ursula Kuczynski (1907–2000) in this fascinating history. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Germany, Kuczynski was an active communist by the time she was 17. In 1930, she married a young German architect and moved with him to Shanghai, where she was recruited by (and became the lover of) infamous Red Army intelligence agent Richard Sorge, who gave her the code name Sonya and made her a “trusted lieutenant” in his spy network. After further training in the Soviet Union and divorce from her husband, Kuczynski liaised with communist partisans in Manchuria, providing material assistance and sending regular radio messages to Moscow. She also managed operations in Poland and Switzerland before arriving in England in 1941, where she transmitted atomic secrets to the Soviet Union from Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. Upon Fuchs’s capture, Kuczynski fled to East Germany, but soon grew disillusioned with Stalin’s paranoid brand of communism. After a 20-year career, she became one of the few Soviet agents allowed to leave the spy game alive. Macintyre’s richly detailed account, though a bit ponderous at times, shines a new light on two of WWII’s most notorious spy rings. Espionage fans will be thrilled. Agent: Jonny Geller, Curtis Brown.

July 15, 2020
The rousing tale of the Soviet Union's most celebrated female spy. In the span of her long, colorful life, Ursula Kuczynski (1907-2000) rose in the Soviet ranks to the level of colonel and, in her later years, became a novelist and memoirist under the name Ruth Werner. Born to an affluent, left-leaning German Jewish family, she acquired strong communist convictions in her teens. Her career in espionage (code name: Sonya) began in 1930 after she relocated to Shanghai with her first husband, Rudolph Hamburger. In his latest entertaining nonfiction spy thriller, Macintyre tracks Sonya's numerous audacious exploits during her prolific career. Drawing from her diaries, correspondences, and extensive interviews with her two adult sons, the author crafts a narrative that serves as both an engrossing historical tale and a compassionate portrait of Sonya as a complex woman with distinctly modern sensibilities for her time. Demanding and increasingly risky assignments drove Sonya and her family from Shanghai to Poland, Switzerland, and, eventually, England. Along the way, she became highly skilled at building and operating wireless radio transmitters and also mastered several languages. Her ultimate accomplishment emerged through her correspondence with nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs, transmitting scientific secrets that enabled the Soviets to develop an atomic weapon. Though her conscience was shaken when she eventually grasped the extent of Stalin's murderous plans, she remained devoted to communist causes. Taking pride in her skills and accomplishments, she was also driven by the thrill of espionage work. "Survival against the odds brings with it an adrenaline high and a sense of destiny from cheating fate," writes Macintyre, continuing, "as a trained intelligence officer, she would have the opportunity to write her own story in the pages of history. Ursula became a spy for the sake of the proletariat and the revolution; but she also did it for herself, driven by the extraordinary combination of ambition, romance, and adventure that bubbled inside her." An absorbing study of a remarkably accomplished 20th-century spy.

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Starred review from September 1, 2020
English village housewife Ursula Burton seemed no different from her neighbors. But this woman who kept a neat garden, baked scones for the local school, and biked country lanes was in fact a highly trained Soviet spy, one of the most dangerous. Principal contact for a number of Soviet agents, she handled Klaus Fuchs, who passed detailed plans of atomic and thermonuclear bombs to Stalin, radically upending post-WWII diplomacy and setting off the Cold War. Born into a prosperous German Jewish family, Ursula Kuczynski became fanatically anti-Nazi and a dedicated communist. After spending time in America, in Shanghai she was part of an expatriate group that included Agnes Smedley, journalist and firm supporter of both Indian and Chinese communist revolutionaries. Ursula, married to an architect, had several affairs, including with Richard Sorge, often considered a model for James Bond. Eventually Ursula ended up in England, where she eluded British intelligence services for years. Macintyre (The Spy and the Traitor, 2018) tells this convoluted, multi-layered story with the sensibilities of a novelist, making every character uniquely compelling while keeping suspense high and the narrative charging ever forward. In this must-read for fans of spy novels, truth becomes more exciting and astonishing than fiction.Women in Focus: The 19th in 2020(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from September 1, 2020

Macintyre (writer-at-large, The Times of London) portrays the life of the astonishingly unexpected woman at the center of a 20th-century true spy story. Ursula Kusczynski, born in Berlin in 1907, was a dedicated Jewish Communist. That alone would have placed her in the middle of the tumultuous 20th-century history of Germany. As Macintyre explains, Kusczynski also was a spy for the Soviet Union: running agents, building radios, and transmitting coded messages in China, Poland, Switzerland, and England before, during, and after World War II. All the while her neighbors thought she was an everyday housewife raising three children. She even survived "retiring" from the KGB, and went on to have a successful career, using a pseudonym, as an East German novelist. Using prodigious research from MI5 and Bundesarchiv files, along with family documents and the cooperation of her children, Macintyre has written an insightful portrait of an amazing life. VERDICT This fast-paced historical account reads like a novel, with surprising twists and turns, and will thrill readers until the very last page. Readers who enjoy the writings of Neal Bascomb or Candice Millard, and fans of historical fiction will relish this book.--Laurie Unger Skinner, Highland Park P.L., IL

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