Agent Sonya Read online

  A week after Michael’s missed birthday, Ursula was summoned to the Center on Bolshoi Znamensky Lane. A major commended her progress and then abruptly informed her: “You are soon going to be sent away—to Mukden in Manchuria.”

  The region of northeast China and Inner Mongolia known as Manchuria had been invaded by the Japanese in 1931, who renamed it Manchukuo and installed a pro-Japanese puppet government. The Japanese occupiers were battling widespread Chinese resistance from citizen militias, peasant brotherhoods, bandit gangs, and partisan armies with names like the Big Swords and Red Spear Societies. The most vigorous insurgency was being mounted by the communist underground network, backed by the Soviet Union—which regarded expansion of Japanese power into China as a threat. Ursula’s task in the city of Mukden (now Shenyang) would be to liaise with the communist partisans, provide them with material assistance, and transmit military and other intelligence to Moscow by radio. “The political situation in Manchuria was very interesting,” she later wrote with studied nonchalance. “And Mukden was a focal point.” It was also spectacularly dangerous. The authorities in Shanghai had rooted out thousands of communist rebels, but the Japanese Kempeitai, or secret military police, was in a different league: brutal, racist, and extremely efficient. This was an important mission, a mark of how high she had risen in the estimation of her spy bosses, but it was also one she might not survive. Ursula was now a captain in the Red Army, though no one informed her of the promotion, or told her she held any rank at all.

  “I accepted this surprising task without hesitation,” she later wrote. The major’s next statement, however, pulled her up short.

  “You won’t be working there alone, a comrade with overall responsibility for the mission will go with you. It’s important, for him, that you already know China. I would prefer to send you there as a married couple.”

  She was momentarily speechless.

  “Don’t look so shocked, Ernst is a good comrade, twenty-nine years old, and you’ll get on well together.”

  “That’s out of the question,” she protested. “In Shanghai Rudi and I are well known, and people from Shanghai frequently go to Mukden. I’m officially taking home leave in Europe, so I can’t suddenly turn up with a false passport as someone else’s wife. It’s completely unrealistic, unless I get a divorce from Rudi, and that would take time.”

  She was not ready for divorce. In addition, she was not sure she liked the idea of a fake marriage.

  “What if we don’t get on? We are going to be bound together for a long time in clandestine isolation.”

  The major grinned: “The work is vital. Wait until you meet him.”

  The following day she was briefed on the Manchurian mission by Colonel Gaik Lazarevich Tumanyan, the head of the Asian section. Tumanyan was an Armenian from Georgia “with a long, slender face, dark curly hair and dark eyes,” a veteran Bolshevik who had risen up through the Red Army ranks despite his kind soul and gentle nature. “Tums” had spent several years working undercover in China and knew exactly how much he was asking of Ursula. “I soon realized that I was dealing with an intelligent person, an expert in his field, who had trust in me,” she wrote.

  Tumanyan greeted her with a broad smile: “The marriage idea has been abandoned,” he said, “regrettable as this might be for the comrade concerned.” His laughter was infectious.

  The colonel explained that she should return to Shanghai to see Rudi. She had told him they would be parted for six months; she had already been away for seven. Once there, she should arrange a suitable job in Mukden as cover and then travel on to Manchuria with her new colleague. Ernst was a seaman from a working-class background, he told her, and an experienced radio technician.

  Ursula had one more question. “Tell me, does he know that I have a son? Has anyone thought about the baby?”

  Tumanyan smiled again: “You had better tell him about that yourself.”

  A few days later Ursula spotted a child’s fur hat in a shop window and immediately bought it. “In Manchuria they have cold winters and this little hat could fit the boy. I imagined him wearing it over his blond hair, blue eyes and soft skin.”

  Later the same day, she found herself in a bare and unheated room in the Center, awaiting the comrade who would be her new partner in espionage. She wondered if it was the cold or the anxiety that made her teeth chatter.

  Finally a man entered, tall and slim, with the broad shoulders of someone used to hard work. “We shook hands fleetingly. I felt my fingers, cold in his warm hand and took in his blond hair and large furrowed forehead, too big for his face, the strong, prominent cheekbones, blue-greenish eyes with sharply etched and narrow lids.”

  For a moment they appraised each other.

  “You are shivering,” he said. “Are you cold?”

  “Before I could answer, he had taken off his coat and hung it around my shoulders. The coat reached almost to the floor and was very heavy, but inside I felt lighter.”

  Ernst’s real name was Johann Patra. A thirty-four-year-old sailor from the port city of Klaipėda, he was Lithuanian by birth, German in speech and manner, and communist by adamant conviction. Highly intelligent but wholly uneducated, he spoke German, Lithuanian, Russian, and English, but struggled to read in any language. In the late 1920s, the young seaman had been talent-spotted by a Bulgarian officer in Soviet intelligence and began doing odd jobs for the Comintern, acting as a courier as he sailed between Hamburg, Riga, and other ports. In 1932, he was brought to Moscow to be trained, first in sabotage and then radio operations.

  Ursula’s first conversation with her new boss was exceptionally awkward. Patra spoke in monosyllables, demanding to know if she could operate an illegal transmitter. “It soon became clear that he knew more about radio operating than I did.”

  They were still standing up.

  After another long silence he said: “That hat there you’re screwing up in your hands is a bit small for you, isn’t it? I don’t think it would fit you at all.”

  “It’s not for me, it’s for my son.”

  Patra stared in surprise. “You have a son?”

  “Yes. Michael is three years old and I’m taking him with me. Have you got any problems with that?”

  She had already made up her mind: “I would not allow us to be split up again unless I were involved in a revolution or the armed struggle of the partisans. If he refused to accept the boy, I would not go.” She had even prepared a speech: “If you think that a child would affect my independence and my ability to work, that as a mother I would be less likely to withstand the dangers, then we must talk with the boss and see if he can find you a different colleague.”

  She waited.

  Suddenly Patra smiled for the first time.

  “Why would I object to your son?” he said. “After all, the revolution needs a younger generation.”

  Ursula felt a flood of relief.

  A week later, Ursula was ushered into the presence of General Yan Berzin himself, “clean-shaven, bright-eyed and youthful in appearance, but grey-haired, gruff and all business.” Berzin told her to meet Patra in Prague, then collect her son and go south to Trieste on the Adriatic coast. He handed her a pair of tickets for an Italian liner sailing to Shanghai. When she encountered Patra on board, it must appear to be for the first time. They should pretend to have an affair, and then head to Manchuria together. “If not marriage, at least pretend you belong together,” Ursula was told. “That’s the best way for you to make your situation in Mukden seem believable. He’ll be registered as a businessman and you will have to support him in that role.”

  Here was a cover story that might have come from Ursula’s own pen: an unplanned meeting, an impulsive shipboard romance, and an elopement.

  ON A CRYSTAL-COLD MARCH MORNING in 1934, Ursula left the Blue Star Hotel in Prague and set off to meet Johann Patra. Beside the Vlta
va River, she wrote, “the bare branches of the trees were coated in frost, misty clouds lay over the river and drifted upwards into the blue where they became transparent, broken like a very fragile veil.” Ursula’s excitement was tempered by a grinding anxiety. The following day she would be collecting Michael from his grandparents after a seven-month separation. Would he remember her? Then there was Patra, her senior officer, her new partner, handsome but unreadable. “What if, with the best will in the world, we are not suited to each other?” Ursula was not always easy to live with, and she knew it. “Even some good people get on my nerves to such an extent that I can’t stand another hour with them, particularly humourless people, and those who are boring and thick-skinned. On the other hand, it may be that others find I get on their nerves.” The first meeting with Patra, when he had draped his coat around her, had contained a peculiar undercurrent, a flicker of tension. Perhaps he was doubtful about working with a woman. “He needs to know that he’s got a tough mate, who will do her share of the work whatever happens,” she reflected. But had she put him off by being too “outspoken and hard-nosed”?

  She spotted Patra sitting in the corner of the café near the market, oddly conspicuous with his wide shoulders and shock of fair hair. He was hunched in concentration over a newspaper, a finger tracing the words on the page.

  As they rehearsed the details of the mission, Patra seemed as taciturn as before. But then, suddenly, he brightened. “Let’s go to the cinema.” This was not part of the plan. But he was the senior officer and, besides, she had seen posters for a French film she wanted to see, La Maternelle, showing at a nearby basement cinema. As they settled into their seats and the movie began to roll, Ursula realized that she had chosen the wrong sort of film. La Maternelle (Children of Montmartre in its international version) is set in an orphanage and tells the story of an abandoned child longing for a mother’s love. For Ursula, emotionally fragile after the long separation from her own son, the drama was too much. Ten minutes into the first reel, she began to weep. “Tears were streaming down my face. I was powerless to stop them. I cursed myself for my own weakness. I gripped the arms of the chair tightly, but the tears poured down.”

  Mortified at what Patra must be thinking, she whispered: “I’m not usually like this.”

  He put a consoling arm across her shoulders: “I’m glad you’re like this.”

  That evening, over supper, Johann opened up. Her eyes still swollen from crying, Ursula felt her emotions well up again as he described his own hardscrabble childhood. His father, a fisherman, had spent his wages on drink and frequently beat his wife and children. His mother, “stalwart and patient,” had sacrificed happiness to bring up four children, of whom he was the eldest. “I never forgot the respect with which he spoke about his mother,” she wrote. Patra recalled how his father had returned home one night, raging with drink. The fifteen-year-old boy had interposed himself to protect his mother, but he was no match for the older man, an experienced fighter. The fisherman beat his son to a pulp and threw him out of the house. Patra immediately signed on as a cabin boy on a merchant ship and never returned to Klaipėda. Over the next five years he worked first as a stoker, then a radio operator. He was introduced to communism by a shipmate. Gradually, word by painful word, he waded through the writings of Marx and Lenin. “While his mates played cards, went ashore, or relaxed between watches, he struggled with the foreign words and long complicated sentences he did not understand.” For Ursula, surrounded by books and ideas, communism had come effortlessly. For Patra, it had been almost impossibly difficult. “There probably never was an easy way for Johann,” she reflected. At the end of the evening, the Lithuanian sailor walked her back to the Blue Star, shook hands formally, and disappeared into the night.

  The next day, as the train chugged toward Grenzbauden, Ursula’s excitement and apprehension rose in tandem. “Every minute brought me nearer to my son.”

  Inevitably, the longed-for reunion was a disappointment. A three-year-old child understands when he has been abandoned. “A strange boy stood before me and I was strange to him too,” she wrote. “My son did not even want to greet me. He ran to his grandmother and hid behind her skirts.” For three days Michael refused to speak to her. When he did, he addressed her furiously in the Chinese pidgin English that was still his first language: “Me thinkee Grenzbauden-side much more nice than Shanghai-side, but me want she Mummi and Daddy by and by come too and stay plenty time topside-house which belong Grossmutti.” Ursula felt a fresh stab of guilt. The boy wanted his mother and father back, here, in the hills of Czechoslovakia.

  Finally she had to drag the screaming child out of the house and into a waiting car. To make matters worse, he had caught whooping cough. Every few minutes he “emitted a hacking cough, and his face turned blue.” As the train rolled south to Trieste she wondered: “Will my puny sparrow die?”

  The next morning they climbed up the gangplank of the SS Conte Verde. The great ocean liner was the pride of the Lloyd Triestino Line, accommodating 640 passengers in three classes. On their first day at sea, Ursula spotted Patra across the saloon. He was traveling as a privately wealthy businessman, with a cover job as representative of the Rheinmetall typewriter company. They avoided eye contact. The three-week voyage would take them south through the Adriatic and Mediterranean to Cairo, then via the Suez Canal to Bombay, Colombo, Singapore, and finally Shanghai. For the first few days on board, the sickly Michael was confined to their second-class cabin. In his feverish state, the little boy was “seized by sheer panic, imagining that the steamer could sink and he and his mother would drown.” Ursula held him tightly, his damp little body shaking. The child remained wary, but slowly their relationship improved, along with his health. After they had read the illustrated book of children’s verse for the thirtieth time, she decided cabin fever was more of a danger than whooping cough and brought him up on deck, though she carefully kept him away from any other children to prevent infection.

  The Conte Verde was a floating palace, built in the Dalmuir shipyards in Glasgow, 180 meters long with a crew of four hundred. Four years after Ursula’s voyage, the mighty ship began ferrying a different sort of passenger: between 1938 and 1940, as the Nazi persecution gathered pace, the ships of the Lloyd Triestino Line would transport seventeen thousand Jewish refugees to the safety of Shanghai.

  The liner was passing through the Suez Canal when Michael dropped his ball, which bounced off down the deck. A passenger trapped it with his foot before it rolled into the water, and brought it back. Johann Patra raised his hat and introduced himself to the boy’s mother as Ernst Schmidt, of the Rheinmetall typewriter company. Ursula was wearing a pretty blue sleeveless dress she had bought in Prague. They pretended to fall into conversation. That night they dined together. And the next. If the other travelers noticed that the elegant young German woman seemed to be getting on remarkably well with the rich businessman, that was hardly exceptional aboard the SS Conte Verde. “Affairs on board ship were as normal as they are in spa towns,” Ursula wrote.

  As they steamed south, the weather grew balmy. In the evenings, when Michael was asleep, they strolled the decks, deep in conversation. During the day, they splashed in the swimming pool, played cards, or lay in deck chairs.

  “You are a good mother,” Johann reassured Ursula.

  Back in Czechoslovakia they had agreed not to discuss the mission on board, but Patra swiftly broke his own rule. Ursula had memorized the transmitting code to be used in Manchuria. “Have you remembered it?” asked Patra after breakfast one morning. She nodded, and recited the code. He asked the same question the next day. At the third time of asking, she snapped: “Stop it. You can rely on me.” He shot back, in an undertone, “No. I don’t know you well enough, and I am responsible for this mission.”

  An hour later she saw Patra and Michael happily building a bridge out of wooden blocks, and her irritation evaporated.

&nbs
p; “In the evenings we would spend several hours on the deck under the starry sky leaning on the railing and just looking out at the sea, without saying anything or talking quietly about the very different lives we had led, but which had led us to the same world outlook.” She told him about her own childhood, her three years in China, and her recruitment by Richard Sorge. He described his life at sea and his continuing struggle to understand the literature of revolution. He asked her about Rudi.

  “Of course, you don’t have to answer me,” he added.

  “He is a good man, we grew apart. Yes, he was my first lover….How old was I then?”

  “I didn’t ask you that.”

  “No, no it’s not a secret, I was eighteen…and, no, there is no one else on the horizon.”

  Patra had not asked her that either.

  “The long voyage with its warm days and clear nights, the sun and the star-dusted sky created an irresistible atmosphere,” she wrote. “When we stood leaning over the ship’s rail looking down into the water, whispering or silent, I was no longer quite so sure about wanting our relationship to continue on a purely ‘comradely’ basis.” Patra seemed to dote on her son. His rare, swift smile was breath-stopping.

  Ironically, given their shared commitment to class war, they were sharply divided by class. “His tastes were garish, and his manners were not those of a businessman,” Ursula observed. People traveling in first class, she pointed out crisply, did not stick half-smoked cigarettes behind their ears. “I don’t care about such little things, but it’s part of the cover story that you should act like a bourgeois businessman.” His failure to adapt was endangering them all. Enraged, Johann stalked off, saying he would sit somewhere else so as not to “embarrass” her.