Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre
Ben Macintyre possesses a consummate skill at exposing the history behind the history. Reporting the often unpalatable truths behind the legends that arise or are deliberately created after the fact, he remains even-handed. Though his books read like thrillers, they are grounded in facts and dates, as well as letters and interviews from his primary sources: the real people he portrays so clearly.
Like his previous spy biographies, Ben Macintyre’s latest page turner is based on thorough research. The author is liberal with quotations from the main players, and the manuscript was read by Sonya’s eldest son shortly before he died.
During the thirties, WWII and the Cold War the spying game imposed rigid rules and hierarchies. Yet in her dealings with both Russians and British, the remarkable Agent Sonya exempted herself from many of these expectations. A German from a family of Jewish intellectuals and a youthful communist agitator, she left Germany for New York as Hitler rose to power. For two decades, she spied with impunity for the Soviet Union, rising through the ranks to become — heretofore unthinkable for a woman — a twice-decorated military hero.
Sonya was also twice a wife and the mother of three children, all with different fathers. Simultaneously, she recruited spies, organizing and undertaking missions in China, Poland, Switzerland, and the UK, where she operated from a tiny Oxfordshire village, long suspected but never caught. After the early years in Europe when a German nanny cared for the first two children, she settled at last into a remote house with an outdoor privy and gave birth to her third child. There, between doing housework and childcare, she routinely peddled her bike to a rendezvous to receive nuclear secrets, which she passed on by radio to the Moscow Centre. Payment for herself and her recruits came in the form of a bundle of cash left in an agreed-on “dead drop,” the last of these being, unbelievably, a hollow tree.
Spying is an intricate game of imagination and fiction, and secrecy and danger can be addictive. Once ingrained, the habit of using cover, cutouts, and legends can be very hard to break. As Sonya (real name Ursula) discovered in East Berlin after the war, “everyone was spied on, and she was no exception.”
Macintyre comments that “in many ways, Ursula’s life had been a fiction.” Thus it is appropriate that she eventually becomes a bestselling author. Under the pseudonym Ruth Werner, she acquired the reputation as “East Germany’s Enid Blyton.” Writing books that are largely autobiographical, she disguised the identities of people she knew and labelled her stories as fiction. She proved to be "a natural thriller writer, in life and on paper.” Sonya’s Report, published in English in 1991 by Chatto and Windus, is her own take on her life story.
The astonishing failure of MI5 to catch Sonya had much to do with the prevailing sex and class hierarchies and the hidebound bureaucratic mindset that privileges comfort and reputation over hard work. Millicent Bagot was onto Sonya for years; yet her male colleagues overruled her objections to granting Sonya/Ursula British citizenship. After neglecting to place her under watch in her village home, the secret service eventually compounded the error by sending a spectacularly incompetent self-styled “spy catcher” to interview her. He tipped his hand immediately, and Sonya relaxed, realizing she’d be safe if she admitted nothing. The “firm’s” eventual embarrassment over this series of bungles was so great that a later MI5 chief tried to shore up its reputation by going on record with a fictitious date.
“The profession of Soviet spy is not an easy one to resign from.” It was well understood that those leaving were either “old, disgraced or dead,” and anyone attempting to back out “was considered a potential traitor.” Remarkably, after twenty years of service, the GRU allowed Ursula “to leave its ranks in a way that no other officer would have been permitted to do.” Though Stalin’s power was “founded on abject obedience,” Sonya’s release from spying “without recrimination, reprisal, or regret” proved just how exceptional she was.
Interviewed at age 88, Sonya’s eldest son Michael recalled how he’d lived in six countries by the age of ten. Though he acknowledged his mother’s admirable idealism, his reflections hint at the enormous human cost human cost of placing political loyalty above all other considerations. Michael claimed to believe his mother loved her children. Yet after three marriages and three divorces, he reflected that he’d never learned to trust. The thought of what might have happened to him if his mother had been caught when he was a small boy haunted him for life.
His siblings’ comments are also instructive. “I do not think my mother had us children as cover for her spy work,” said his sister Nina, the wording of her sentence expressing her doubt. Peter, the youngest. resented how his mother always grilled him to learn “a little more than I wanted to tell,“ and commented that Nina told her everything and Michael nothing.
This book alludes to themes portrayed in Macintyre’s fascinating portrait of Kim Philby. Both reveal the power of one’s historic time and place to impinge on individual lives. Both books bear witness to the consequences of imaginative failures in those who wield great power — Eastern and Western alike. Comfortable bureaucrats in positions whose power seems secure may not trouble themselves to envision how people outside their milieu can and do operate from utterly different sets of socio-cultural rules and motivations. The characters in the book reveal the danger of holding rigid beliefs and refusing to entertain anything that calls in question the political dogma some individuals cling to, even when faced with strong evidence to the contrary.
The author’s descriptions of the lives of Sonya’s children also point to the consequences of our early childhoods on our later lives. As a lonely or traumatized child enters adulthood, the doomed quest for parental love can all too easily be sublimated into fanatical devotion to a political cause where belonging seems assured. Sonya herself felt closer to her nanny than her mother. Ironically, after years of devoted care for Sonja’s children, the old woman betrayed her in the end.