Spy story

 

‘Agent Sonya’ Review: Lover, Mother, Soviet Spy

Though little known to the broader world, Ursula Kuczynski, born in 1907 into a wealthy, cultured Jewish family in Berlin, was one of the most successful spies of the 20th century. She worked for the GRU—Soviet Military Intelligence—in China, Eastern Europe, Switzerland and, most damagingly, Britain. Beginning in the early 1930s as the provider of a safe house for spies to meet, she was soon trained as a radio operator, courier and liaison between communist underground activists and Moscow. Eventually she ran her own network of Soviet spies in Nazi Germany and, after war broke out, in Britain. There she served as a courier for Klaus Fuchs, the émigré physicist who later worked at Los Alamos and betrayed its secrets to the Soviet Union.

Kuczynski—whose code name was “Sonya”—never endured prison or torture or the other gruesome fates that befell many of her comrades, though she was pursued by the security services of the Chinese Nationalists, the Japanese, the Nazis and various British governments. She spent most of her 20-odd years as a spy living in fairly comfortable surroundings with her children, posing as a middle-class foreigner and friendly neighbor.