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Ben Macintyre

Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy Hardcover – September 15, 2020

by Ben Macintyre (Author)

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The “master storyteller” (San Francisco Chronicle) behind the New York Times bestseller The Spy and the Traitor uncovers the true story behind one of the Cold War’s most intrepid spies.

“[An] immensely exciting, fast-moving account.”—The Washington Post

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Foreign Affairs • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal

In 1942, in a quiet village in the leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple, unassuming life. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her.

They didn’t know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. They didn’t know that her husband was also a spy, or that she was running powerful agents across Europe. Behind the facade of her picturesque life, Burton was a dedicated Communist, a Soviet colonel, and a veteran agent, gathering the scientific secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the bomb.

This true-life spy story is a masterpiece about the woman code-named “Sonya.” Over the course of her career, she was hunted by the Chinese, the Japanese, the Nazis, MI5, MI6, and the FBI—and she evaded them all. Her story reflects the great ideological clash of the twentieth century—between Communism, Fascism, and Western democracy—and casts new light on the spy battles and shifting allegiances of our own times.

With unparalleled access to Sonya’s diaries and correspondence and never-before-seen information on her clandestine activities, Ben Macintyre has conjured a page-turning history of a legendary secret agent, a woman who influenced the course of the Cold War and helped plunge the world into a decades-long standoff between nuclear superpowers.

Print length

400 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Crown
Publication date

September 15, 2020
Dimensions

6.46 x 1.37 x 9.68 inches
ISBN-10

0593136306
ISBN-13

978-0593136300
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“[Ben] Macintyre at once exalts and subverts the myths of spy craft.”—The New Yorker

“Macintyre is fastidious about tradecraft details. . . . [He] has become the preeminent popular chronicler of British intelligence history because he understands the essence of the business.”—David Ignatius, The Washington Post

“Macintyre writes with novelistic flair.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Macintyre is a superb writer, with an eye for the telling detail as fine as any novelist’s.”—The Dallas Morning News

“Macintyre is one of the most gifted espionage writers around.”—Annie Jacobsen, author of Area 51 and Operation Paperclip

“Macintyre writes with the diligence and insight of a journalist, and the panache of a born storyteller.”—John Banville, The Guardian (UK)

“With Macintyre in charge, you’re virtually guaranteed a history book that reads like a spy novel.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“A scrupulous and insightful writer—a master historian.”—Alan Furst, author of Mission to Paris

“Macintyre is a master at leading the reader down some very tortuous paths while ensuring they never lose their bearings.”—Evening Standard (UK)

“Macintyre . . . has that enviable gift, the inability to write a dull sentence.”—The Spectator (UK)

About the Author

Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times (U.K.) and the bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor, A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Whirl

On May 1, 1924, a Berlin policeman smashed his rubber truncheon into the back of a sixteen-year-old girl, and helped to forge a revolutionary.

For several hours, thousands of Berliners had been trooping through the city streets in the May Day parade, the annual celebration of the working classes. Their number included many communists, including a large youth delegation. These wore red carnations, carried placards declaring “Hands Off Soviet Russia,” and sang communist songs: “We are the Blacksmiths of the Red Future / Our Spirit is Strong / We Hammer out the Keys to Happiness.” The government had banned political demonstrations, and police lined the streets, watching sullenly. A handful of fascist brownshirts gathered on a corner to jeer. Scuffles broke out. A bottle sailed through the air. The communists sang louder.

At the head of the communist youth group marched a slim girl wearing a worker’s cap, two weeks short of her seventeenth birthday. This was Ursula Kuczynski’s first street demonstration, and her eyes shone with excitement as she waved her placard and belted out the anthem: “Auf, auf, zum Kampf,” rise up, rise up for the struggle. They called her “Whirl,” and, as she strode along and sang, Ursula performed a little dance of pure joy.

The parade was turning onto Mittelstrasse when the police charged. She remembered a “squeal of car brakes that drowned out the singing, screams, police whistles and shouts of protest. Young people were thrown to the ground, and dragged into trucks.” In the tumult, Ursula was sent sprawling on the pavement. She looked up to find a burly policeman towering over her. There were sweat patches under the arms of his green uniform. The man grinned, raised his truncheon, and brought it down with all his force into the small of her back.

Her first sensation was one of fury, followed by the most acute pain she had ever experienced. “It hurt so much I couldn’t breathe properly.” A young communist friend named Gabo Lewin dragged her into a doorway. “It’s all right, Whirl,” he said, as he rubbed her back where the baton had struck. “You will get through this.” Ursula’s group had dispersed. Some were under arrest. But several thousand more marchers were approaching up the wide street. Gabo pulled Ursula to her feet and handed her one of the fallen placards. “I continued with the demonstration,” she later wrote, “not knowing yet that it was a decision for life.”

Ursula’s mother was furious when her daughter staggered home that night, her clothes torn, a livid black bruise spreading across her back.

Berta Kuczynski demanded to know what Ursula was doing, “roaming the streets arm in arm with a band of drunken teenagers and yelling at the top of her voice.”

“We weren’t drunk and we weren’t yelling,” Ursula retorted.

“Who are these teenagers?” Berta demanded. “What do you mean by hanging around with these kinds of people?”

“ ‘These kinds of people’ are the local branch of the young communists. I’m a member.”

Berta sent Ursula straight to her father’s study.

“I respect every person’s right to his or her opinion,” Robert Kuczynski told his daughter. “But a seventeen-year-old girl is not mature enough to commit herself politically. I therefore ask you emphatically to return the membership card and delay your decision a few years.”

Ursula had her answer ready. “If seventeen-year-olds are old enough to work and be exploited, then they are also old enough to fight against exploitation . . . and that’s exactly why I have become a communist.”

Robert Kuczynski was a communist sympathizer, and he rather admired his daughter’s spirit, but Ursula was clearly going to be a handful. The Kuczynskis might support the struggle of the working classes, but that did not mean they wanted their daughter mixing with them.

This political radicalism was just a passing fad, Robert told Ursula. “In five years you’ll laugh about the whole thing.”

She shot back: “In five years I want to be a doubly good communist.”

The Kuczynski family was rich, influential, contented, and, like every other Jewish household in Berlin, utterly unaware that within a few years their world would be swept away by war, revolution, and systematic genocide. In 1924, Berlin contained 160,000 Jews, roughly a third of Germany’s Jewish population.

Robert René Kuczynski (a name hard to spell but easy to pronounce: ko-chin-ski) was Germany’s most distinguished demographic statistician, a pioneer in using numerical data to frame social policies. His method for calculating population statistics—the “Kuczynski rate”—is still in use today. Robert’s father, a successful banker and president of the Berlin Stock Exchange, bequeathed to his son a passion for books and the money to indulge it. A gentle, fussy scholar, the proud descendant of “six generations of intellectuals,” Kuczynski owned the largest private library in Germany.

In 1903, Robert married Berta Gradenwitz, another product of the German Jewish commercial intelligentsia, the daughter of a property developer. Berta was an artist, clever and indolent. Ursula’s earliest memories of her mother were composed of colors and textures: “Everything shimmering brown and gold. The velvet, her hair, her eyes.” Berta was not a talented painter but no one had told her, and so she happily daubed away, devoted to her husband but delegating the tiresome day-to-day business of childcare to servants. Cosmopolitan and secular, the Kuczynskis considered themselves German first and Jewish a distant second. They often spoke English or French at home.

The Kuczynskis knew everyone who was anyone in Berlin’s left-wing intellectual circles: the Marxist leader Karl Liebknecht, the artists Käthe Kollwitz and Max Liebermann, and Walther Rathenau, the German industrialist and future foreign minister. Albert Einstein was one of Robert’s closest friends. On any given evening, a cluster of artists, writers, scientists, politicians, and intellectuals, Jew and gentile alike, gathered around the Kuczynski dining table. Precisely where Robert stood in Germany’s bewildering political kaleidoscope was both debatable and variable. His views ranged from left of center to far left, but Robert was slightly too elevated a figure, in his own mind, to be tied down by mere party labels. As Rathenau waspishly observed: “Kuczynski always forms a one-man party and then situates himself on its left wing.” For sixteen years he held the post of director of the Statistical Office in the borough of Berlin-Schöneberg, a light burden that left plenty of time for producing academic papers, writing articles for left-wing newspapers, and participating in socially progressive campaigns, notably to improve living conditions in Berlin’s slums (which he may or may not have visited).

Ursula Maria was the second of Robert and Berta’s six children. The first, born three years before her in 1904, was Jürgen, the only boy of the brood. Four sisters would follow Ursula: Brigitte (1910), Barbara (1913), Sabine (1919), and Renate (1923). Brigitte was Ursula’s favorite sister, the closest to her in age and politics. There was never any doubt that the male child stood foremost in rank: Jürgen was precocious, clever, highly opinionated, spoiled rotten, and relentlessly patronizing to his younger sisters. He was Ursula’s confidant and unstated rival. Describing him as “the best and cleverest person I know,” she adored and resented Jürgen in equal measure.

In 1913, on the eve of the First World War, the Kuczynskis moved into a large villa on Schlachtensee lake in the exclusive Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf, on the edge of the Grunewald forest. The property, still standing today, was built on land bequeathed by Berta’s father. Its spacious grounds swept down to the water, with an orchard, woodland, and a hen coop. An extension was added to accommodate Robert’s library. The Kuczynskis employed a cook, a gardener, two more house servants, and, most important, a nanny.

Olga Muth, known as Ollo, was more than just a member of the family. She was its bedrock, providing dull, daily stability, strict rules, and limitless affection. The daughter of a sailor in the kaiser’s fleet, Ollo had been orphaned at the age of six and brought up in a Prussian military orphanage, a place of indescribable brutality that left her with a damaged soul, a large heart, and a firm sense of discipline. A bustling, energetic, sharp-tongued woman, Ollo was thirty in 1911 when she began work as a nursemaid in the Kuczynski household.

Ollo understood children far better than Berta, and had perfected techniques for reminding her of this: the nanny waged a quiet war against Frau Kuczynski, punctuated by furious rows during which she usually stormed out, always to return. Ursula was Ollo’s favorite. The girl feared the dark, and while the dinner parties were in full swing downstairs, Muth’s gentle lullabies soothed her to sleep. Years later, Ursula came to realize that Ollo’s love was partly motivated by a “partisanship with me against mother, in that silent, jealous struggle.”

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown; 1st edition (September 15, 2020)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593136306
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593136300
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.55 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.46 x 1.37 x 9.68 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #118,805 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #170 in Espionage True Accounts
- #198 in Communism & Socialism (Books)
- #236 in Intelligence & Espionage History

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Ben Macintyre

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Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times of London and the bestselling author of A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.

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Myra J Burge

VERY engaging story.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 6, 2022

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We listen to books on CD when driving long distances. This one is long - 14 discs. You won't be bored.

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Leading Behind The Scenes

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 28, 2020

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When I see Ben Macintyre's name on a new book I buy it and start reading it right away, certain in the knowledge that I will be enjoying a well written, well researched, fascinating chronicle of modern espionage. Agent Sonya is a worthy successor to such brilliant Macintyre works as The Spy and the Traitor and A Spy Among Friends, with a critical difference: the major protagonist is female.

Ursula Kuczynski was a member of a prominent and wealthy German Jewish family active in Berlin's intellectual and artistic circles. In her childhood she lived through Germany's defeat in World War I, and as a teenager she witnessed the mounting tensions and rising anti-Semitism that led to the fall of the Weimar Republic and its replacement with Hitler's Third Reich. Like many in her generation Ursula became a Communist, not so much for ideological reasons as because she saw the Soviet Union as the strongest enemy of Fascism. Helped by her family's left-wing connections, Ursula journeyed to the Soviet Union, was recruited as a spy by Stalin's many-tentacled intelligence services, and spent years in Shanghai, Mukden, Moscow, Switzerland, and eventually rural England on various espionage assignments using the code name Sonya. Along the way she had a passionate affair with another Soviet spy, Richard Sorge, married or lived with three different men by whom she had three children, and jumped from one hair raising adventure to another. Her sex was an asset, since the Soviet and other intelligence services with whom she dealt were all highly male chauvinistic, and she was able to fly under the radar for many years, seeming to be nothing more than a nice normal wife and mother. Her most important contribution to the Soviet espionage effort was her connection with the physicist Klaus Fuchs, who passed an enormous amount of information on British and American efforts to build an atomic bomb through her to the Kremlin. Eventually, after Fuchs was exposed and arrested, Ursula and her family escaped to East Germany, where she lived for most of the rest of her life.

Ursula's story seems too incredible even for the pages of a Fleming or Deighton spy thriller, but it all really happened, making Macintyre's extensively documented tale just as riveting as any James Bond adventure. If after reading Agent Sonya you are hungry for more such tales, I can recommend any of Macintyre's books, most especially A Spy Among Friends, which is about Kim Philby, another Soviet spy with whom Ursula had an indirect connection.

27 people found this helpful

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Distantecho

Another triumph for Mr Macintyre

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 9, 2021

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I have read most of Macintyre’s books and they are all gripping.

I found Agent Sonya a little more difficult to get into but once I did it did not disappoint. I have read reviews that have criticized the book for its subject matter. How can we relate to a Soviet spy? How can we feel anything for someone who worked for Stalin against the West? I think that is an over simplification.

I tried to put myself in the shoes of Ursula Maria Kuczynski, a young German Jew horrified at the rise of fascism in Europe in the 20’s and 30’s. Like Ursula I would like to think that I would do all I could to resist and to fight. The natural vehicle for Ursula to travel in to conduct that fight was the communist party and she joined in 1926, just as Hitler was rising to prominence.

European communists fought fascism in Spain, Germany, the Far East and Eastern Europe and were a major part of the French resistance. Ursula becomes a committed communist (and anti fascist) and an accomplished asset as we follow her from Germany to China and thereafter to Switzerland and finally to the UK.

This is where the story becomes a little muddy for many. Yes, Ursula spied for Stalin, a man as despotic and evil as Hitler. But at that time Churchill and Roosevelt were working with the Soviet leader and we were allies.

Ursula spied against the Nazi’s for the Soviets while in the UK but she also helped to infiltrate communist spies into the US atomic weapons program. In doing so she helped the Soviets to develop their own atomic bomb. Obviously this puts her beyond the pale for many people but the world was a different place 60 and 70 years ago. Who knows, without Ursula maybe we would not have had a world where both sides of the Cold War had the means to totally annihilate the other? Maybe in that scenario, without the promise of “mutually assured destruction”, a Nixon or a Reagan or, heaven forbid, a Trump may have been tempted to wipe out half the planet. We’ll never know.

A great read, chock full of exceptionally interesting characters like Agnes Smedley, Richard Sorge and Sandro Rado and another triumph for Mr Macintyre.

One person found this helpful

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Master Model Builder

Dark spy secrets Revealed!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 7, 2022

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Amazing how people are selected and trained as spies. Had no idea the various schemes used to get past even the most observant of security. Takes a special person to deal with such a life!

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Phil Webster

Stalin's "Agent Sonya"

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 28, 2020

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Apparently The Times newspaper called this latest book by Ben Macintyre “His best book yet”. I’m afraid I don’t agree. I’ve read several of Macintyre’s previous “real life” spy stories, and he generally does a good job of grabbing your interest and pulling you along. But although this one is certainly interesting and informative in parts, I found that other parts of it dragged on too much. In particular, the detailed accounts of Agent Sonya’s personal life and relationships told me more than I really wanted to know.

In this book, I actually found the political background more interesting than the main espionage aspects of the history. In this political respect, the book tells the sad story of a woman’s descent from praiseworthy idealism to her becoming a spy, and an apologist, for Stalin’s tyrannical regime in Russia.

Like the more famous Kim Philby, Ursula Kuczynski (Agent Sonya) was motivated by political principles. She genuinely believed that by spying for the USSR she was advancing the cause of a fairer and more peaceful world. Like many others in the 1920s and 1930s she could see that capitalism was a system based on exploitation and inequality, a system which was dragging the world into economic crisis and war, and a system which was giving birth to the monstrosity of fascism. (We see similar developments today.)

It is understandable that in the early 1920s “Sonya” should be inspired by Russia. The 1917 Russian Revolution, led by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, had been a genuine workers’ revolution, with working people exercising power through the “soviets” (elected workers’ councils). She also saw that the communists were the most determined opponents of fascism.

But by the late 1920s, before Kuczynski started to spy for the Russian GRU, the gains and democracy of the revolution had been destroyed by Stalin and the bureaucratic ruling class that had usurped power and turned Russia into a state capitalist tyranny.

Sonya’s tragedy is that she dedicated her life to a totalitarian state which called itself socialist, but which was just as exploitative a system as the one in the West. Perhaps there was some excuse at first for her being unaware of the true nature of the USSR, but she stuck loyally by the Stalinist regime even when its crimes could not be ignored, right through Stalin’s purges and mass murder, and right up until the eventual collapse of the state capitalist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe. (China’s, Cuba’s and North Korea’s state capitalist rulers still falsely claim to be “communist”.)

Genuine Marxists had long been advocating the slogan of “Neither Washington Nor Moscow But International Socialism”, and pointing out that “The Free World is not really free and the Communist World is not really communist”. But there was none of that for Kuczynski: she remained a loyal Stalinist.

75 people found this helpful

Grays

Easy reading.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 27, 2020

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My Grandparents are mentioned within this book. Sadly the some of the facts relating to them are incorrect. The family were unaware of them being written about. Which is a shame as the author could of gained the correct information. Growing up hearing stories of the spy they once shared a house with.

37 people found this helpful

Lector noruego

Very little new material.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 6, 2020

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Ben Macintyre seems to follow the storyline of Ruth Kuczinskis memoirs rather closely and somewhat uncritically. When they were published in the East German dictatorship, they were so obviously a tool of communist propaganda, designed to glorify the exploits of the author. (The so-called complete edition published in 2006 in Berlin is in this respect little better than the Stasi-approved version of 1977)
By sticking to the main story of Kuczinski's life as it was outlined in "Sonjas Report", Macintyre wastes too much space on the Chinese adventures of this diehard communist compared to her activities in England, where her basic actions - apart from being the operator of an illegal radio - seem to have been bicycling across Oxfordshire. The suspicions against Roger Hollis are treated rather summarily, but that is hardly surprising since MI5 is generally - with few exceptions- presented as a bunch of bungling incompetents.
There are almost a hundred files the Kuczinskis in the Stasi archives in Berlin. Surely it should have been possible to present a fuller picture of "Sonjas" life in East Germany after she returned in 1950.
All in all this book presents a far too positive picture of this diehard Stalinist, who remained one until well after the wall had been torn down.

26 people found this helpful

millhall

The life of a zealot.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 19, 2020

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This is a monumental work. I find it impossible to imagine the hours and hours of work which went into the completing the book. Testament to the scale of the effort involved is the length of the bibliography and the long list of acknowledged helpers. Despite it's length and unending attention to detail the book does not drag. The fact that the central character dominates the script is a bonus, not a disappointment. Ursula emerges as a quite remarkable woman whose upbringing in pre - war privileged Berlin Jewish society never blinds her to the horrors of fascism and drives her to almost lifelong support for the ideals of communism. Her life is truly remarkable and Macintyre does not spare any of the details. Lover, mother, soldier spy does summarise the content, and that sequence is not coincidental. The background character sketches of Britain's famous spies - Philby etc - add focus to the story and I almost laughed at the blundering incompetence of Britain's spy catchers. A marvellous read, and a story I will long remember.

14 people found this helpful

healthysean

Fantastic Research But Heavy Going

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 15, 2021

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Agent Sonya....... From planning an assassination attempt on Hitler in Switzerland, to spying on the Japanese in Manchuria, to preventing nuclear war (or so she believed) by stealing the science of atomic weaponry from Britain to give to Moscow, Ursula Kuczynski Burton conducted some of the most dangerous espionage operations of the twentieth century.

Born to a German Jewish family, as Ursula grew, so did the Nazis' power. A fanatical opponent of the fascism that ravaged her homeland, she was drawn to communism as a young woman, motivated by the promise of a fair and peaceful society. She eventually became a spymaster, saboteur, bomb-maker and secret agent.

In Agent Sonya, Britain's most acclaimed historian vividly reveals the fascinating tale of a life that would change the course of history.

Classic Ben Macintyre - a gripping ride, based on meticulous research.

A Book that took six days to read, why?

Well this book is filled with detail, names, stories, places, spies, that it took an enormous about of concentration, re-reading to understand all the many different p0werful characters from the past, each spies back story, dates, times.

A four star as I have to deeply respect the enormous research and time it takes to write a book like this, heavy going, oh yes, difficult to keep us with sometimes, yes, but filled with so many stories, spies.

You read this and think " Who works for who", who's good who's bad, what right and what's wrong.

Three for the book, four for the research.

His best book is about a spy in Jersey ! Where I live.

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