Agent Sonya Page 4

  Such socialites were class enemies, but Ursula was dazzled nonetheless, and fascinated. Their lives and interests could not have been further from her own, yet she made friends easily, studying each of these new people as another story, and writing pen-portraits in her letters and diaries. “We went to a very fine cocktail party given by Mrs. Chester Fritz: she has a fabulous apartment, turban-like hats, and earrings the size of tennis balls, noble curved eyebrows and so many friends who are artists and intellectuals.” In another letter she wrote: “We went to the Ungern-Sternbergs for cocktails. Both are highly intelligent and super-sophisticates.” Rosie and Bernardine took her shopping for clothes, and vied to dress their young protégée in the latest fashions.

  But the glitter of expatriate life soon palled, and after just a few weeks in Shanghai’s superficial social spin Ursula was ravenous for intellectual stimulation. In one letter she wrote: “The women are like little lapdogs. They have neither professions nor household duties, nor do they show any interest in scientific or cultural affairs. They don’t even bother with their children. The men are a little better because at least they have a job, and do a little work.” Tea with Bernardine Szold-Fritz and Rosie Gräfenberg became a chore: “It’s always the same. First a bit of gossip over bridge and mah-jong, then yesterday’s dog-racing or the latest film…the other day we played miniature golf, very popular in Shanghai.” Most of her fellow Germans were uninterested in the China beyond their enclave and ferociously racist toward the Chinese. Ursula kept her political views securely hidden. In the Concordia and the Rotary Club, and around the Kattwinkels’ swimming pool, Hitler was spoken of with admiration, the coming man.

  As wife of the Municipal Council’s new architect, Ursula was expected to play hostess to Rudi’s British colleagues. The most important of these was Arthur Gimson, the commissioner of public works responsible for the settlement’s roads, bridges, drainage, sewers, and new buildings. A pillar of the Engineering Society of China, a war veteran, and a spectacular bore, Gimson was the proud author of Foundations of the Szechuan Road Bridge with Some Reference to the Bearing Value of Piles, the definitive work on the subject. Ursula described him as “a crazy bachelor” who sent her bags of garden fertilizer as thank-you presents. Then there was Charles Henry Stableford, head of the planning department, who was building a new concrete abattoir, later described by The Architectural Review as “an Art Deco masterpiece and one of the earliest attempts at combining stunning animals with stunning architecture.” Ursula could not get excited by the bearing values of piles or the merits of poured concrete in the butchery-building business. Hosting dinners for Rudi’s British colleagues was like wading through social glue.

  Bernardine, with her dreadful parties and ludicrous outfits, the stultifying Gimson and his compost, the complacent, racist bores at the club: these people did not drive Ursula to outright rebellion, but they helped.

  While the expats danced and dallied, below the surface of Shanghai society a brutal, semisecret spy war was under way. For in addition to commerce, narcotics, and vice, the city was the espionage capital of the East. Foreigners needed no passport or visa; they came and went without residence permits and were often subject only to the laws of their own countries. Like criminals, spies slipped anonymously from one jurisdiction to another. They usually maintained contact with the outside world using shortwave radios, and so many were in operation that tracking down the illegal transmitters was all but impossible. Agents of China’s Nationalist government spied on homegrown and foreign communists. The underground communists spied on the government and on one another. The Soviet Union deployed an army of secret agents and informers throughout the city. The British, with American help, spied on everyone, all the time.

  The central espionage battle in Shanghai pitted the ruling Nationalists under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek against the Chinese communists, backed by the Soviet Union—combatants in a civil war that would continue, intermittently, for the next two decades. In 1923, Sun Yat-sen, founding father of the Chinese Republic and leader of the Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT), had forged an alliance with the Soviet Union. A team of Soviet officials, led by the Bolshevik revolutionary Mikhail Borodin, arrived in Canton to dispense advice, money, and military aid. But after four years the fragile pact between the KMT and the CCP fell apart and the forces of Chiang Kai-shek, Sun’s successor, launched a merciless purge of communists. Borodin and his advisers were kicked out.

  No one knows exactly how many perished in the “White Terror” unleashed by Chiang’s forces and their gangster allies. The killers did not keep count, but an estimated three hundred thousand people were hunted down and murdered. The bloodletting was particularly horrendous in Shanghai. Otto Braun, a Soviet agent active in the city, wrote: “Chiang Kai-shek’s henchmen, supported by the international police, were combing the textile factories by day and the Chinese quarter by night in search of communists. Those who were caught faced a horrible choice: become traitors or be killed….This systematic extermination campaign forced the communists into deepest secrecy.”

  The Soviet Union saw China as the cradle for the next phase of world revolution, and to achieve that end Moscow now turned to espionage, on a grand scale, in support of the persecuted Chinese communists.

  Soviet spies in Shanghai came in a bewildering array of guises, representing various branches of Soviet intelligence and government, sometimes collaborating but frequently overlapping and occasionally competing.

  The Communist International, or Comintern, founded in 1919 to foster revolution worldwide under Moscow’s guidance, was used as a front for espionage in China. Its Liaison Section, the OMS, collected and disseminated secret intelligence, smuggled weapons, transferred funds and instructions, and ran multiple underground communist networks. The Comintern had a “Far Eastern Bureau” with an annual budget of $55,000 in gold, Reichsmarks, yen, and Mexican dollars, to spend on fomenting communist revolution in China, Japan, the Philippines, and British Malaya.

  Then there was Stalin’s civilian intelligence service, the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB), which maintained its own network in Shanghai to collect political and economic secrets, assassinate Moscow’s enemies, and prevent potential counterrevolution from taking root in China.

  But the most important Soviet spy network in Shanghai was run by the military intelligence service, formally the “Fourth Department of the General Staff of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army.” (In 1942, Stalin changed its name to the Main Intelligence Directorate, Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, or GRU, the name by which it is still known.) Highly disciplined, obsessively secretive, and entirely ruthless, the Fourth Department’s role was to defend the Soviet Union and protect the revolution by gathering, buying, or stealing military secrets. Its Moscow headquarters was known, simply, as the “Center.”

  Since the Shanghai Massacre, these spies worked as undercover “illegals” rather than accredited diplomats, posing as journalists, businessmen, or teachers. Rivalry among the different Soviet spy organizations would eventually erupt in internecine carnage. But as far as the Chinese Nationalist government was concerned, the Russian spies were all the same: communist seditionists sent to stir up trouble who should be extirpated in the same way as native Chinese revolutionaries.

  Ursula never doubted that the communists would eventually emerge victorious from the terrible secret war being fought in Shanghai. As an obedient Marxist, she saw history as preordained: the oppressed Chinese proletariat would inevitably rise up and, under communist leadership, overthrow the capitalist order, sweeping away the bourgeois classes and their imperialist backers. Even so, Chinese communism seemed alien and unfathomable. In Berlin, she had been part of a mighty movement; here she was a bystander to events she only dimly understood. “Apart from the heat, the tedium and my problems with adjusting to Shanghai ‘society,’ I was tormented by not making immediate contact with the Chinese people. I foun
d the dirt, the poverty and the cruelty repugnant. I asked myself if I was only a communist in theory.” Like many born to privilege, she wondered if she had the stomach for the grimy, morally contradictory, and frequently violent reality of revolution. Could one be a revolutionary and still enjoy good things, like new clothes? Ought she to wear only the hair shirt of communist orthodoxy? She discussed politics with no one except Rudi, who was working too hard at the Shanghai Municipal Council to pay much attention.

  Homesick, she wandered around Jessfield Park, which reminded her of the Tiergarten in Berlin. As always when her spirits dipped, she preferred to be alone. The Shanghai summer was stifling. “The pavement began to melt again yesterday, so that it stuck to my shoes in long black strips, and the cars left deep ruts in the road.” She lay limply on her bed in the Woidts’ spacious top-floor apartment. Life as the wife of a colonial official, she reflected, was an exercise in sloth. “You can’t do a thing, because it’s all done by the boy, the cook and the coolie.” Waiting for the next cocktail party, the next round of mini-golf, she became listless, too exhausted even to read. She put her lethargy down to the climate. “The heat saps all your energy…one perspires incredibly, not in drops but in rivulets.” Finally she went to see a doctor, who told her she was five months pregnant.

  Ursula and Rudi were overjoyed. But she was determined not to spend the next four months merely gestating and being pampered by servants. “I had to find an occupation.”

  Opportunity appeared in the tubby and bumptious shape of the journalist Plaut, Far East correspondent of the Wolff Telegraphic Bureau and boss of the Transocean Kuomin Telegraph Agency, a semiofficial Chinese news agency that pumped out pro-Nationalist propaganda. “Plaut is urgently looking for a clever secretary, so I went to his office and asked if I could help him a little, which he was very delighted with. Of course I said that I was expecting a child, he said I could come and go when I wanted.”

  Plaut put Ursula to work organizing his press cuttings. “I read everything and learnt a lot,” she wrote. A Shanghai resident for two decades, Plaut was an authority on Chinese politics and frequently delivered long disquisitions on the subject, peppered with the names of important people he knew. “He often interrupts my work in order to tell me interesting things,” wrote Ursula. “Plaut was full of his own self-importance but he really was one of the leading experts on Asia, and on China in particular.”

  One afternoon, midway through yet another interminable lecture, Plaut dropped a name that made Ursula sit up with a jolt: Agnes Smedley.

  The American writer was in Shanghai, it seemed, working as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, one of the biggest German newspapers. Ursula described the deep impression that Smedley’s novel had made on her, telling Plaut she was “keen to make her acquaintance but felt inhibited about approaching someone so outstanding.” With a flourish, Plaut picked up the telephone, dialed a number, and handed over the receiver. Agnes Smedley was on the line. The two women arranged to meet the next day in the café of the Cathay Hotel.

  Smedley asked Ursula how she would recognize her.

  “I’m twenty-three years old, one metre seventy tall, jet black hair and a big nose,” said Ursula.

  Agnes Smedley laughed, a big booming guffaw. “Well, I’m thirty-four years old, middling height, nondescript.”

  The newly built Cathay Hotel was a grand capitalist citadel and statement of Western commercial clout, eleven stories high, with a green pyramidal tower and Tudor paneling. A few months earlier, while staying at the hotel, Noël Coward had written the first draft of Private Lives. The most luxurious hotel east of Suez, the Cathay was an unlikely setting for a rendezvous between America’s foremost radical woman writer and a young German communist, but the date was apt: November 13, the thirteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Both women carried bunches of red roses to mark the occasion: Ursula intended to arrange hers in the Woidts’ sitting room as a discreet avowal of her sympathies; Smedley was planning to present her bouquet to the correspondent of TASS, the Soviet news agency, in a more overt commemoration of the anniversary. The floral coincidence was a good omen.

  Smedley was far from nondescript (she had also misrepresented her age; she was thirty-eight). With her short-cropped hair and masculine clothing, she cut a distinctive figure, in deliberate contrast to the overdressed women expatriates. “Agnes looks like an intelligent, working-class woman,” Ursula wrote in an excited letter to her parents. “Dressed simply, thinnish brown hair, very lively large grey-green eyes, face in no sense pretty, but well-formed. When she smoothes back her hair, you can see the enormous sweep of her brow.”

  Ursula had never met anyone like this before; but then, there was no one quite like Agnes Smedley.

  The two women bonded over English tea served in bone china. Ursula’s hopes and anxieties tumbled out in a chaotic rush. She spoke of her loneliness and boredom, the distressing scenes of poverty she witnessed daily, her alienation from the other Europeans. “I talked freely about my political views for the first time since arriving in Shanghai.” She described her upbringing in Germany, her decision to join the party, and how much Daughter of Earth had meant to her. She spoke of Rudi: his kindness and calmness, but also his political apathy, his stolid rejection of communism. Smedley listened intently, smoking and nodding. When Ursula had finished, Agnes related the story of her own life, a tale even more extraordinary in reality than the fictional version published a year earlier.

  Smedley was born in 1892 in a two-room cabin without electricity or running water, and then raised in a hardscrabble Colorado coal town. Her part-Cherokee father was a sometime cattle broker, cowboy, traveling herbalist, and coal teamster, an alcoholic drifter with “the soul and imagination of a vagabond”; her mother was an abused depressive; her aunt a part-time prostitute. As a child she witnessed the Colorado Labor Wars, bloody pitched battles between striking miners and the hired enforcers brought in by the coal companies. When her mother died at the age of forty, her father “fell to his knees and wept dramatically, then rifled her old tin trunk. With the forty dollars he found hidden between the quilt patches, he went to the saloon and got drunk with the boys.” Her education was gleaned from whatever she could find to read, “from trashy romances to a ghastly book on law and one called Behaviorist Psychology,” a sparse selection far removed from the great library available to the young Ursula. Agnes wrote poetry, told fortunes using apple seeds, and learned to ride, shoot, and throw the lasso. She adopted the Navajo name Ayahoo, and espoused a ferocious form of feminism. If anyone dared suggest “that a woman’s intellect or capacity to build was inferior to that of a man…she jumped out of her seat like a wounded lioness and almost clawed him red in the face.”

  After stints as a laundry worker, teacher, and traveling saleswoman, Agnes drifted to California, where she mixed with left-wing bohemians. Her politics grew more radical. Smedley never espoused a coherent philosophy, for hers was the politics of anger, a scattergun rage against the capitalists, mine owners, imperialists, and colonizers who kept the poor, the nonwhite, and the working class enslaved. She had no time for political theory: “Who cares if I read all that trash? I know who the enemy is, and that’s enough.”

  In California she encountered the circle of Indian nationalists demanding independence from imperial Britain, and embraced her first cause. With the First World War raging, she became deeply implicated in the so-called Hindu-German Conspiracy, Germany’s secret campaign to undermine the British Empire by bankrolling and arming the Indian independence movement. In March 1918, she was arrested under the Espionage Act, imprisoned for two months, and finally released despite being, in the words of her biographer, “guilty as hell.” She moved to Berlin, met, married, and then left the Indian communist revolutionary Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, known as Chatto, and continued to conspire with the Indian rebels. She witnessed the human degradation of Weimar with horror and d
eclared the Soviet Union to be “the grandest, most inspiring place on earth.”

  Agnes was several times larger than life, but even her closest friends found her quite trying. As one remarked, she saw the world as “a harsh morality play in which ‘good’ was pitted against ‘wicked,’ ” and seldom dismounted from “the glorious white charger of her imagination.” She was in her teens when she had her first nervous breakdown. She suffered what she called “insane spells,” and began a course of psychoanalysis with a German Jewish analyst named Elisabeth Naef, a former student of Sigmund Freud in Vienna. Dr. Naef persuaded Agnes to write down her experiences in fictional form. The result was Daughter of Earth, with its angry, ambitious heroine, socially alienated and yearning for self-expression. Critics sang the book’s praise. Michael Gold, in The New Masses, described it as “bitterly, beautifully drawn from the fiber of life.” By the time the plaudits began to land, Agnes was already in Shanghai. She arrived in the city in May 1929, ready to charge into battle on behalf of the oppressed Chinese masses.

  Agnes Smedley was an extraordinary bundle of contradictions. She was bisexual, but believed homosexuality a curable perversion. She professed to disdain men and insisted women had been “enslaved by the institution of marriage.” Yet she loved many men and married twice: she treated her first husband abominably, and was physically and emotionally abused by her second. She considered sex degrading, but was an enthusiastic advocate, and energetic exponent, of free love. “Out here I’ve had chances to sleep with all colours and shapes,” she wrote to a friend, shortly before meeting Ursula. “One French gunrunner, short and round and bumpy; one fifty-year-old monarchist German who believes in the dominating role of the penis in influencing women; one high Chinese official whose actions I’m ashamed to describe, one round left-wing Kuomintang man who was soft and slobbery.”