Agent Sonya, by Ben Macintyre
Agent Sonya
By Ben Macintyre
Viking £25
At 1.20 on the afternoon of Saturday 13th September 1947, three men knocked on the front door of a pretty, rose-covered farmhouse in the village of Great Rollright in Gloucestershire.
The woman who answered the door was, in the words of one of them, ‘a somewhat unimpressive type with frowsy, unkept hair, perceptibly greying, and of rather untidy appearance’.
She was also one of the Soviet Union’s most accomplished spies. For more than 20 years, Ursula Kuczynski – aka Agent Sonya – had been feeding important information back to her Soviet spymasters. At the time her three visitors – two MI5 officers as well as a Detective Constable Herbert from Chipping Norton police station – came calling, she was busily passing on details of the British nuclear programme from the ‘atom spy’ Klaus Fuchs.
Her game was finally up. Or rather it would have been, save for the astonishing incompetence of Jim Skardon, the senior MI5 officer.
Skardon then had a quite undeserved reputation for being a ‘fabled interrogator’. He would go on to interview Kim Philby on ten occasions and afterwards declare that he was even more sure of Philby’s innocence than he had been before he started. He was similarly convinced of Anthony Blunt’s saintliness after interviewing him 11 times.
But even a dolt like Skardon could see that there was something not quite right about ‘Mrs Burton’, as she was known locally. MI5 had been intercepting her letters for two years and knew perfectly well that she had close contacts with Moscow. Even so, she managed to shimmy out of Skardon’s clutches and decamp to Berlin where, in a twist no one could have foreseen, she reinvented herself as a children’s writer, becoming the East German equivalent of Enid Blyton.
Sooner or later, most writers – especially of non-fiction – find themselves facing an awful, yawning problem: what the hell to write next?
This doesn’t seem to have ever afflicted Ben Macintyre: he keeps them coming with remarkable frequency and equally remarkable consistency. This time he’s unearthed a real humdinger. It’s a story that allows him ample opportunity to display two of his most distinctive traits: an eye for absurdity – on several occasions here, I found myself emitting loud parps of disbelief – and an ability to keep a narrative roaring along at breakneck speed.
Brought up amid the chaos of Weimar Germany, Ursula Kuczynski was a fiercely dogmatic, physically striking girl who, ‘even as a teenager, gave off a powerful sexual allure that many found irresistible’.
She had toyed with the idea of becoming a lumberjack before deciding that espionage offered more exciting career prospects. Like her brother, Jurgen, she was an early convert to communism. Jurgen, a colossal windbag even by Communist standards, would go on to write a 40-volume study of German labour conditions.
It wasn’t until she was in Shanghai with her first husband that Ursula became a Soviet agent. By now, she had given birth to a baby son. As she was as devoted a mother as she was a Communist, her bedtime reading consisted of a mixture of babycare manuals and ecstatic accounts of forced industrialisation.
Having spent much of the war safely cloistered in Switzerland, she came to Britain in 1947. Here, she succumbed to one of the most destabilising things that can happen to a Soviet agent: galloping Anglophilia. Soon she was praising Churchill for his brilliant oratory, baking much-admired Victoria sponges and sending her son to a boarding school in Eastbourne.
But, all the time, the flame of Communist ideology continued to burn bright. Or perhaps it was simply that spying, as Macintyre writes, is an addictive business – ‘The drug of secret power, once tasted, is hard to renounce.’
In her own way, Ursula was as blinkered and credulous as Jim Skardon. She described one of her Soviet spymasters as having a face that radiated ‘pure kindness’. In fact, he was a genocidal maniac who later signed the execution order for 22,000 Polish officers – the notorious Katyn massacre. And while she must have known that Stalin was ordering the mass slaughter of thousands of innocent people, she did nothing – ‘She chose to look the other way.’
All this could easily make her a deeply unappealing subject. But such is Macintyre’s skill that he manages to create a vividly coloured – even sympathetic – portrait of a woman struggling to balance the demands of motherhood with the lure of espionage. Although you may not end up liking Agent Sonya, you may, like me, wish you’d had a chance to sit at her kitchen table, sample her powerful allure and try one of her delicious cakes.