Ben Macintyre - Agent Sonya: Moscows Most Daring Wartime Spy

I F YOU HAD VISITED THE quaint English village of Great Rollright in 1945, you might have spotted a thin, dark-haired, and unusually elegant woman emerging from a stone farmhouse called The Firs and climbing onto her bicycle. She had three children and a husband, Len, who worked in the nearby aluminum factory. She was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a faint foreign accent. She baked excellent cakes. Her neighbors in the Cotswolds knew little about her.

They did not know that the woman they called Mrs. Burton was really Colonel Ursula Kuczynski of the Red Army, a dedicated communist, a decorated Soviet military intelligence officer, and a highly trained spy who had conducted espionage operations in China, Poland, and Switzerland, before coming to Britain on Moscows orders. They did not know that her three children each had a different father, nor that Len Burton was also a secret agent. They were unaware that she was a German Jew, a fanatical opponent of Nazism who had spied against the fascists during the Second World War and was now spying on Britain and America in the new Cold War. They did not know that, in the outdoor privy behind The Firs, Mrs. Burton (in reality spelled Beurton) had constructed a powerful radio transmitter tuned to Soviet intelligence headquarters in Moscow. The villagers of Great Rollright did not know that in her last mission of the war Mrs. Burton had infiltrated communist spies into a top secret American operation parachuting anti-Nazi agents into the dying Third Reich. These Good Germans were supposedly spying for America; in reality, they were working for Colonel Kuczynski of Great Rollright.

But Mrs. Burtons most important undercover job was one that would shape the future of the world: she was helping the Soviet Union to build the atom bomb.

For years, Ursula had run a network of communist spies deep inside Britains atomic weapons research program, passing on information to Moscow that would eventually enable Soviet scientists to assemble their own nuclear device. She was fully engaged in village life; her scones were the envy of Great Rollright. But in her parallel, hidden life she was responsible, in part, for maintaining the balance of power between East and West and (she believed) preventing nuclear war by stealing the science of atomic weaponry from one side to give to the other. When she hopped onto her bike with her ration book and carrier bags, Mrs. Burton was going shopping for lethal secrets.

Ursula Kuczynski Burton was a mother, housewife, novelist, expert radio technician, spymaster, courier, saboteur, bomb maker, Cold Warrior, and secret agent, all at the same time.

Her code name was Sonya. This is her story.

O N 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, and 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 workers cap, two weeks short of her seventeenth birthday. This was Ursula Kuczynskis 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.