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In 1942, in a quiet village in the leafy Cotswolds, an unassuming woman lived in a small cottage with her children and machinist husband, Len. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple life.
Her neighbours had no idea that Burton was in fact a dedicated communist and Soviet Colonel who had conducted espionage operations in China, Poland, and Switzerland. They did not know that Burton kept a powerful radio transmitter connected to Moscow in the outhouse or that Len too was a spy. And they certainly did not know that Burton frequently biked across the countryside to rendezvous with Klaus Fuchs, the nuclear physicist working on Britain's top-secret atomic-weapons program—also her best agent.
Macintyre's latest true-life spy story is a masterpiece about the woman code-named "Sonya," one of the most important female spies in history. Hunted by the Chinese, Japanese, Nazis, MI5, MI6, and FBI, she evaded all and survived the brutal Soviet purges that left her friends and colleagues dead. Her story reflects the great ideological clash of the twentieth century, between communism, fascism, and Western democracy, casting new light on the spy battles and shifting allegiances of our own times. With unprecedented access to Sonya's papers and intelligence files, Macintyre conjures a thrilling secret history of a landmark agent, a true original who altered the course of the Cold War and helped plunge the world into a nuclear standoff that would last for decades.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 15, 2020 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780771001956
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780771001956
- File size: 45582 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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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.
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