Agent Sonya Read online

  Ursula’s instructions were to meet a partisan contact identified as “Li,” at a cemetery on the outskirts of the city, an hour after sunset. She had always feared the darkness. “It was a burden for me, because in our work many things took place during the night hours.” Two drunks passed, swaying and singing. A man sidled up and stared. She waited for the identifying code word, but his expression suggested he was not there for espionage. She ran and hid behind a gravestone. She waited an hour beyond the appointed time and then she returned to the welcome brightness of the hotel. She went back to the cemetery the next night, as instructed, but there was still no sign of the partisan. “Why hadn’t he come? Had he been arrested?” Disconsolate, she caught the train back to Mukden.

  At the Yamato Hotel, Johann was so engrossed with feeding the boy supper he did not notice Ursula entering the dining room. “He had put Misha onto a chair seat raised by a pillow, and tied a napkin around him, very carefully, so that his neck hair did not get caught in the knot. He tasted the soup, to make sure it wasn’t too hot, and put the spoon up to Misha’s mouth. He wiped some liquid off the boy’s chin, completely absorbed in his work.”

  She felt an upwelling of love.

  Only when she was standing behind him did Johann turn his head.

  “I am so relieved,” he said quietly.

  “Oh, Johann, what am I going to do with you?” She put her arms around his neck. “He held me tight for a long time.”

  But later, when she told him of the failed rendezvous, Johann’s temper flashed again. “You have a wonderful talent for messing up your opportunities,” he snapped. The same was true of him. They slept apart again that night.

  A backup meeting with Li was scheduled for a week later. This time Johann insisted on going to Harbin himself. To her own annoyance, Ursula felt her anxiety rise as the hour for his return approached, then passed. “Strange how quickly you get used to a person,” she reflected. She paced the room, unable to read. “Had he been arrested? Had they tortured Li until he couldn’t take any more and told them the location of the meeting?”

  At midnight, Johann finally slipped into the room, looking drained. Li had not turned up.

  He climbed into bed beside her. Relief brought a surge of passion that she no longer tried to resist.

  “Everything else was good that night,” she wrote.

  An alternative rendezvous was in the city of Fushun, thirty miles east, to be used in case the first failed. Ursula packed up her book supplies, sold a grand total of five books in Fushan, but returned elated. The partisan contact had appeared exactly on time, “a tall, quiet northern Chinese with economical gestures” who explained, using simple Chinese, fragments of pidgin English, and pencil sketches, that he was the leader of an underground communist unit consisting of workers, farmers, teachers, students, and street traders. “Right, right, very good,” he said, repeatedly. Li, he explained, had “taken fright.” The man gave his name as “Chu” and explained that he urgently needed explosives for a planned attack on the South Manchurian railway line.

  “Our work can finally begin,” Ursula reflected back at the hotel, as she sewed the notes from the meeting into the hem of her petticoat.

  Two major hurdles remained: they needed transformers to power the transmitter-receiver, and a safe place from which to transmit. The Japanese were on the lookout for illegal wireless transmissions. Erecting an aerial on top of the hotel would have been dangerous, and probably impossible. Ursula set off to find a permanent base that could serve as a transmitting station.

  Patra, meanwhile, scoured every radio shop in Mukden without finding usable transformers. Reluctantly, he boarded the train back to Shanghai: he would have to buy them in the city and then work out how to smuggle the bulky metal objects back across the border. Ursula told him to consult Rudi, insisting that, despite the strangeness of the situation, her husband was completely trustworthy.

  Japanese officials had requisitioned most of the available property in Mukden, but a few large houses had been abandoned by fleeing Chinese generals. One of these, a luxury villa behind high walls that had once belonged to a relative of the Manchurian warlord General Zhang Xueliang, stood next door to Mukden’s German Club. Ursula took one look at the place and decided it was ostentatious, bleak, and way beyond their budget, but tucked in the corner of the grounds she spotted a smaller stone building. The servant explained, with a snigger, that this had been purpose-built for the owner’s mistress. A tunnel led to it from the garden of the main house, providing the amorous general with swift and secret access to his concubine. The little building lacked running water and had only a wood-burning stove for heat, but otherwise it was ideal, with three small wood-paneled rooms on the raised first floor, a basement kitchen, an enormous bed for the general and his mistress, and a built-in escape tunnel. No one could see into the rooms from the outside, and proximity to the German Club was oddly satisfying: she would be fighting fascism next door to a building flying the swastika. For the first time in over a year, Ursula had a home, a nest: “It was a pleasure to roll out a straw mat, hang up a picture, buy a vase.”

  In Shanghai, Johann bought two heavy transformers eight inches long: the Japanese border guards would have to be blind to miss them. Rudi came up with a solution. They bought a heavy wing-backed chair with thick upholstery, “an ugly green-brown monster,” and had it delivered to Avenue Joffre. Johann and Rudi turned the chair on its back, pulled out the tacks holding the sacking in place, and tied the two transformers to the internal springs with wire and cord. Then they pushed in the padding and tacked back the sacking. “Nothing was visible, and the extra weight in the armchair was imperceptible.” The chair was then sent to Mukden as rail freight. Rudi was probably still unaware of the blossoming relationship between his wife and her superior officer; and if he knew, he was too civilized to make a fuss. Ursula’s husband and her lover had completed their first joint mission, combining the spycraft of one with the soft-furnishings expertise of the other.

  Back in Mukden, Ursula showed Johann around the new house.

  “Perhaps our bedroom should be here in front,” he said. “Then Misha next door, and the third could be our living room with the transmitter…why are you looking at me like that?”

  She frowned. “I didn’t know you thought we were moving in together.”

  “I took that for granted now that everything is clear and good between us. Everybody knows you’re with me.”

  Ursula was adamant. Cohabitation was not in the cards.

  “I will rejoice at every minute you are with me, and that will be most of the time, day and night.”

  “Then why not the whole time?”

  “Because I have a different rhythm of life, and you demand that I should be completely incorporated into yours. Sometimes I need to be alone.”

  Ursula was falling in love with Johann: for his protective tenderness, his love of Misha, and his revolutionary zeal. But he was also irascible and domineering, an old-fashioned chauvinist who “granted men more opportunities than women” and found her independence an affront to his dignity.

  In a towering huff, Johann moved into the spare room of a German businessman. But Ursula was sure her insistence on maintaining a separate home was right; like many touchy, assertive men, Patra’s ego needed managing and massaging. “Gradually I overcame the offence. I showed him my love without reservation and I amazed myself by how tame, compliant and patient I became in all matters of work. But without the hours I had to myself I probably could not have managed it.”

  The ugly green chair duly arrived at Mukden station. When Ursula and Johann carried it into the house and turned it upside down, they saw “with horror” that one of the transformers was hanging halfway out: the jolting journey had snapped the wire, and the sharp edge had worn through the sacking. A single frayed cord held it in place. “A few more movements and the transformer would h
ave fallen out, and even the most incompetent Japanese railway employee would have spotted it.”

  Johann set to work assembling the radio, a Hartley transmitter-receiver with a three-point system. He was a skilled technician, with nimble fingers, infinite patience, and phenomenal powers of concentration. “He never looked at his watch, and never took a break.” Finally the set was assembled: a cumbersome, homemade monster of a machine with heavy rectifier and transformers, large valves, and coils shaped by winding thick copper wire around an empty beer bottle. The radio parts were hidden in the bottom of an old camphorwood clothes trunk, concealed under a false internal shelf built by Johann, with folded blankets laid over the top. The hiding place would not evade an intensive search, but it would keep the equipment from the prying eyes of the servants. She placed a feather under the lid. If it was opened, she would know. The final task was to erect a Fuchs aerial over the roof: to a casual observer this might “look no different from a reception antenna” for an ordinary radio, but if they were spotted putting it up, this would attract unwanted attention. It would have to be done at night. She told Johann to leave it to her.

  Ursula waited until Michael was sound asleep. Then she climbed onto the roof, through a hatch in the attic, with two long bamboo poles, pliers, a rope, and a roll of antennae wire in a knapsack. She tied the first pole to one chimney, with the wire running through a hole in the top, as if through a bamboo needle. Then she shuffled along the apex of the roof with the other bamboo, similarly threaded, with the wire passing between, lashed that to the opposite chimney and looped the end securely around the base. “Treetops and roofs were visible in faint contours.” Momentarily unbalanced, she “leaned against the chimney, which seemed comforting in its thickness.” But then she made the mistake of “looking down into the endless obscure darkness.” Suddenly she was terrified. “Coward,” she told herself. “Scaredy-cat. There’s no reason to fall at all, except in your imagination.”

  Then Michael began to scream. “Usually the boy slept deeply. Now he screamed without pause.”

  She shuffled fast back along the roof, flung the rucksack through the hatch, and dived in after it. The child’s cries would surely wake the neighbors. Michael was sitting up in bed, sobbing. “I have fizzy water in my fingers,” he wailed. The boy had pins and needles from sleeping on his arm: “Another argument against professional revolutionaries having children,” she reflected ruefully and let out an involuntary giggle. She rubbed Michael’s little hand and stroked the child’s head until his breathing grew regular again.

  Then she climbed back onto the roof.

  The next night, the radio was ready for testing. By prearrangement, they would transmit only at night, at different times and on one of only two agreed wavelengths, to the Red Army receiving station in Vladivostok, code-named “Wiesbaden.” Ursula sat at the desk, Johann linked up the batteries, and she tapped out a short coded message with nervous fingers. A few moments later, the acknowledgment came through, a faint patter of Morse code from distant Russia, a signal from the Center. “We smiled happily at each other.”

  The Red Army was not alone in listening out for Ursula’s messages. Day and night, Japanese surveillance planes throbbed back and forth overhead, scouring the airwaves: if two of these picked up the signal simultaneously, they could pinpoint the location of the wireless. And if that happened, the Japanese secret police would pounce, and, quite soon, Ursula would be dead.

  A NAZI MOVED IN NEXT DOOR.

  Ursula had been living in the cottage less than a month when a new tenant took up residence in the main house on the estate. As a neighbor, Hans von Schlewitz was alarming in every respect: a German aristocrat, an arms-dealer, and a Nazi with senior contacts in the Japanese administration. He was also fat and drunk. Ursula was ready to loathe him on sight, and to quit the property at the first sign of danger.

  Von Schlewitz turned out to be charming, gentle, and ironic, living proof that political and class enemies can be rather funny and very useful. An old-fashioned monarchist of ancient bloodline, von Schlewitz regarded Hitler as an oik and hated the Nazi Party, which he had joined strictly out of commercial expediency. He was potbellied, bald, convivial, canny, and very amusing, “a great story teller and full of wit.” He walked with a limp, the legacy of shrapnel picked up at Verdun. “Thirty pieces of steel are in there,” he liked to say, slapping his enormous thigh. He worked closely with the Japanese military in Manchuria and was exceptionally talkative, especially when plastered, which was often. “If you meet me somewhere and find I have had too much to drink,” he told her, “do me a favour and take me home.”

  Von Schlewitz and Ursula became instant friends. “I so much prefer conversing with you than with the German philistines here,” he said. He missed his own family back in Germany and took a shine to little Misha, encouraging him to slalom on his tricycle around the chairs in his vast dining room. He flirted extravagantly, more out of chivalry than intent, with the intelligent Jewish woman who lived in the garden cottage, and she flirted back.

  Johann Patra, the Aryan typewriter salesman, was still welcomed by the other expatriate Germans, but there were unpleasant rumblings about his “Semitic girlfriend.” Ursula forced herself to accompany him or von Schlewitz to the club and put up with the snide asides. The Japanese would be less suspicious of someone who consorted with Nazis. When von Schlewitz heard that Ursula had been subjected to racist remarks, he puffed up like a cockerel. “If any German here touches so much as a hair on your head, tell me immediately.” So far from posing a threat, the new neighbor was a blessing in heavy disguise: if the Japanese came for her, they would have to go through von Schlewitz.

  The attentions of the older man sparked Johann into a fit of jealousy.

  “How old is this fascist?”

  “In his mid-fifties, I think.”

  “He seems to impress you a lot.”

  She told him not to be ridiculous, pointing out that von Schlewitz was old enough to be her father. “He would never try anything on with me.”

  “You like to talk to that Nazi alcoholic, giggle over his compliments. If he knew what you were doing, he would shoot you. You should poison him instead of being nice to him.”

  “Johann, don’t be so simple. We are not here to poison any Nazis. We have to get along with our fellow Germans. You do too, as part of our cover story.”

  In truth, Ursula thoroughly enjoyed her flirtation with von Schlewitz, who was excellent company, good cover, and a handy source of military information. She was not the first spy to use sexual chemistry as a tool of espionage.

  Ursula’s existence in Mukden was a bizarre mixture of danger and domesticity: a home life with Johann and Michael, a social life hobnobbing with fascists, and a third, hidden life as a Red Army officer coordinating communist paramilitary operations. “Every meeting with the partisans involved risk,” she later wrote. “If our support for the partisans was discovered, we could expect the death penalty. How did we live with the dangers? Relatively calmly. If you are constantly in danger, there are only two possibilities: get used to it, or go crazy. We got used to it.”

  Ursula went shopping for bombs for Chu. The sabotage instructors at Sparrow had taught her how to mix explosives from ordinary household products, including ammonium nitrate, sulfur, hydrochloric acid, sugar, aluminum, and permanganate. These ingredients could all be sourced in Mukden but buying them together, or in bulk, would attract attention. At a downtown hardware shop, she asked for ten pounds of ammonium nitrate, the white crystal used as garden fertilizer, which forms an explosive when mixed with aluminum powder or fuel oil. Misunderstanding her Chinese pronunciation, the shopkeeper returned with a hundredweight sack. She wheeled away her bonanza in the baby carriage, Michael perched atop the makings for a hundred-pound bomb. Johann constructed timers and fuses. Chu came to the house to pick up the explosives. “Right, right, very good.” He beamed.
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br />   The communist sabotage campaign intensified, with attacks on guard posts, Japanese-run factories, military convoys, and above all the railway system so vital to the Manchurian economy. Prearranged signals indicated whether an operation had been successful. “Only when I see the forked incision on the fourth tree on the right hand side of the first crossroad on White Moon Street, do I feel the burden taken off my shoulders,” wrote Ursula. The Japanese-controlled press reported few details, but the repeated denunciations of “terrorists” and the savagery of Japanese countermeasures showed how effectively the underground war was being waged. “Last month anti-Japanese groups carried out 650 attacks in the Mukden province alone,” she wrote to her family in July 1934.

  Ursula did not reveal her own role in those attacks. She did not, in fact, tell her parents very much at all. They knew only that their intrepid and wayward eldest daughter had left her husband in Shanghai and was working as an itinerant bookseller in northern China. “I am busy from morn till night,” she said, truthfully, before adding, a little less honestly: “On no account must you worry about me. There is absolutely no need to. I live exactly the life I want to live and am very satisfied. Don’t worry, somewhere along the line this vagabond life must cease.” She did not say that it might well end in a Japanese execution cell. She signed herself “your erring but contented daughter.” She made no mention of Johann Patra.

  Robert and Berta Kuczynski were now virtual vagabonds themselves.

  Many Jews were slow to appreciate the virulence of Nazi anti-Semitism. But attacks on Jews and Jewish property in Berlin were escalating. Jews would soon be excluded from military service, Jewish actors banned from the stage, and Jewish students prevented from taking exams in medicine, pharmacy, and the law. The concentration camp system expanded rapidly. Elisabeth Naef, Agnes Smedley’s brilliant Jewish psychoanalyst, wrote a brief note—“Ich kann nicht mehr” (“I have had enough”)—and committed suicide. From Britain, Robert wrote to his sister Alice, urging her and her husband, Georg Dorpalen, to get out of Germany with their four children. Uncle Georg flatly refused, pointing out that he was a decorated war hero and a celebrated Jewish doctor. He would “remain in his homeland, which he loved.”