Agent Sonya Page 6

  A pattern for clandestine meetings was swiftly established. Richard Sorge would arrange a time to come to the house when Rudi and the Woidts were out. He always arrived first, followed, at staggered intervals, by his “guests,” usually Chinese, occasionally European, and never identified by name. After a few hours, they would leave again, at different times. Ursula asked no questions. She did not tell Agnes when a meeting was planned. If the servants or neighbors noticed that the same handsome gentleman paid frequent afternoon calls on the lady lodger in the upstairs apartment, they said nothing. This was 1930s Shanghai.

  Ursula knew Richard Sorge was a Soviet spy, but not what sort, or the true nature of the regime they served. The cause of revolution and the military interests of the USSR were indistinguishable in her mind: whatever benefited Moscow also advanced the march of communism. “I knew that my activities served the comrades of the country in which I lived. If this practical solidarity was an initiative of the Soviet Union—so much the better.”

  Ursula trusted Sorge, yet she was reserved in his presence, and not just because she knew he was Agnes’s lover. He lingered awkwardly for a few minutes after each meeting, clearly wanting to chat. Beneath the charm, she detected “a sadness within him.” “There were days when—in contrast to his usual vitality, his humour and his irony—he was withdrawn and depressed.” She tried to appear businesslike. “The desire not to appear inquisitive made me diffident in talking to Richard.” Sorge was unsettled by Ursula’s manner. On one occasion, as he loitered in the hall, hat in hand, she said: “It’s time you left.” He looked hurt. “So, I’m being thrown out?” Sorge was not used to women telling him to go away.

  Happy, prosperous, and elated at the prospect of fatherhood, Rudi was wholly unaware that his wife was now part of a Soviet spy ring, and that their home was being used as an espionage rendezvous. He doted on his pregnant young wife (“Rudi calls me his lemon tree,” she told her mother, “because I flower and fruit at the same time”). He was enjoying expatriate life, designing costumes for the annual festival at the German club and producing a play with the amateur dramatics society. The work at the Shanghai Municipal Council was plentiful and absorbing: he drew up plans for a nurses’ home and then an incineration plant, followed by a girls’ school and a prison. Agnes Smedley asked him to design the interior decoration of her new apartment on the Route de Grouchy in the French Concession. On the side, he set up a business, the Modern Home, building chic Art Deco furniture for the foreign residents of Shanghai.

  Rudi was pleased to make the acquaintance of Ursula’s new friends, Richard Johnson (as he knew him) and Agnes Smedley, though he sensed that their politics were well to the left of his. He still rejected communism. A cultured, left-leaning, upper-middle-class liberal, he was as determined in his moderation as she was fierce in her radicalism. “I realize how rotten and corrupt the capitalist system is,” he told her.

  I am for freedom and the equality of all races. I am interested in and admire Russia, even if I reject some of the things that happen there. You know that communism is the right thing for you. With me it’s different. Except for what I suffer as a Jew, I live in harmony with my environment. German humanism, bourgeois culture and art mean a lot to me. Even if I condemn much of capitalism, and see it falling apart, I am a pacifist. I hate destruction, I shy away from it. I love to preserve. I just can’t accept a world view in its entirety, I have to think it through piece by piece, and retain the freedom to decide what aspects I can accept and which I reject.

  During dinner one night Ursula remarked, with false nonchalance, that she would like to work for the Chinese communist underground. Rudi was aghast and uncharacteristically angry. “I am trying to establish myself in a new country,” he snapped. “I am responsible for the child we are expecting. If it comes to it, you will not be able to bear the cruelty and brutality communists are subjected to. You don’t seem to have any idea what the child you are carrying will really mean to you.” They had been lovers for three years, husband and wife for one. Rudi found her vitality and certainty both attractive and profoundly alarming. His anger reflected a creeping awareness that something beyond his control was coming between them. Ursula resolved that she could not and would not reveal the truth about her covert activities to her husband, whose levelheaded caution had no place in her new world. Ursula was committed to communism, but also increasingly addicted to danger, the romance of risk, the addictive drug of secrecy. “I took part in the resistance struggle, yet my most intimate companion warned me against the idea and stood on the side-lines.”

  The deception inside their marriage had begun.

  Ursula was living a double life: one with Rudi, as the wife of a colonial official, dull, dutiful, and comfortable; the other with Sorge, Smedley, and their communist collaborators, a thrilling existence of secret meetings, comradeship, and intellectual stimulation. She often visited the novelist Ding Ling, whose short story “Miss Sophia’s Diary” had caused a sensation three years earlier with its radical depiction of a young Chinese girl who rejects the stifling conformity of her upbringing. Like Smedley’s Daughter of Earth, the story was painfully autobiographical, written at a time when Ding Ling was “miserable, drinking heavily, dispirited by the national tragedy of political counter-revolution, and exhausted by her impoverished, often squalid life in boarding-house rooms.” She was on the government blacklist of dangerous subversives, as was her shy and unworldly husband, the poet Hu Yepin.

  Ursula was no longer lonely. She wrote to her family: “As for friends—quite apart, and above all the rest for me—there is Agnes.” She helped Smedley translate her articles into German for the Frankfurter Zeitung. The two women watched Buster Keaton films together, and Agnes introduced her to the more exotic forms of Chinese food: squid, snail meat, shark fin. “It doesn’t taste too bad,” Ursula reported. “But you have to summon up your courage.”

  Friendship with Agnes Smedley was stimulating, but demanding. The older woman’s mood swings were abrupt and violent. When drunk, Smedley tended to dance wildly, often in public places. Sometimes she lay in bed for days. “Agnes had outstanding qualities,” Ursula later wrote. “At the same time she was emotionally unstable. While she was frequently full of fun, infecting everyone with her sense of humour, more often she was depressed and subject to a melancholia which affected her health. If she felt lonely, I went to see her. If she felt depressed, she would ring me at three in the morning and I would get up to be with her.” Occasionally, they argued. Agnes was scathing about marriage, men, and motherhood. If Ursula challenged her, the older woman responded with rising fury, before storming out. “A few hours later she would telephone as though nothing had happened and I would be glad that we were friends again.” When Agnes was depressed, Ursula moved in with her, leaving Rudi to fend for himself: “I have been sleeping at her flat,” she wrote. “She feels better when someone is there at night.”

  For Ursula these were days of extraordinary excitement, eager anticipation as the birth drew near, and considerable peril. The KMT government intensified its communist eradication campaign, aided by Shanghai’s criminal underworld. In a secret deal, the generalissimo appointed Du Yuesheng—“Big-Eared Du,” boss of the Green Gang and controller of the city’s opium trade—as “Chief Communist suppression agent for Shanghai.” The Chinese Public Security Bureau (PSB) ruthlessly hunted down communists, foreign as well as Chinese, often with the help of the British and French authorities, eschewing due process in favor of torture, intimidation, and murder. One woman communist, a rare survivor, described what happened when she was detained at the PSB barracks at Longhua. First she was beaten, methodically and wordlessly, by two guards. Then they performed on her “the tiger’s bench,” a variety of torture in which the ligaments under the knee are pulled apart until the victim passes out. “This place is the high command for massacring people,” she wrote. “They have the power to kill anyone they wish, so o
ftentimes we can hear the shooting as prisoners are executed not far away.”

  As an American, Agnes had some legal protection and could appeal to the U.S. consul for help if the Chinese arrested her. But, as German citizens, Ursula and Sorge enjoyed no extraterritorial legal rights. The fascist consul general, Heinrich von Collenberg-Bödigheim, would be the last person to come to the assistance of two communist spies. If they were caught, they’d be at the mercy of the Chinese secret police.

  Inspector Patrick T. Givens, known as Tom, was the International Settlement’s chief spycatcher, for the British administration also saw communism as a dangerous threat. A “charming Irishman from Tipperary,” with a military moustache and a good line in dirty jokes, Givens had joined the Shanghai Municipal Police back in 1907, rising to become the chief of Special Branch, the police unit responsible for security and intelligence. Givens’s job was to track down communists within his jurisdiction and turn them over to the Chinese. On his retirement in 1936, he would receive a medal of honor and a commendation from the Shanghai mayor noting that “in the course of his duties in securing evidence against communists, he frequently worked in close cooperation with the PSB.” As one commentator noted, Givens was an executioner at one remove: “Hounding down communists and suspected ‘reds’ and bringing them to justice in the vast majority of cases has meant death.”

  Givens was caricatured as Shanghai’s police chief “J. M. Dawson” in the Tintin comic book The Blue Lotus, where he is depicted by Hergé as a greedy and corrupt arms dealer. Dawson attempts to have Tintin beaten up by prison guards, pointing out that the boy reporter has no papers permitting him to be in the International Settlement. He then tries to kill Tintin by planting a bomb on his plane.

  In fact, the jovial Inspector Givens was incorruptible and implacable. He knew there were communist subversives operating on his bailiwick, backed by foreign agitators and bankrolled by the Soviet Union, and he intended to root them out.

  On January 17, 1931, Givens received a tip-off that thirty-six communists, including five young leaders of the League of Left-Wing Writers, were holding a meeting in the Eastern Hotel. Special Branch swooped in, arrested the lot, and handed them over to the PSB. Among those detained was Hu Yepin, the gentle poet married to Ding Ling. News of the arrests spread swiftly through the communist underground. Not until many years later did it emerge that Special Branch had probably been tipped off by Wang Ming, the new leader of the CCP, who regarded the league as a cover for “dissenting comrades” and wanted them liquidated. As so often in the history of communism, the bloodshed came not from external forces but through vicious infighting. Ding Ling was frantic, but powerless to lobby for her husband’s release. On February 7, 1931, twenty-three of the arrested communists, including three women, were executed at PSB headquarters at Longhua. Hu Yepin was said to have been buried alive.

  Ursula had little time to mourn, or worry whether Hu, under torture, had identified her or other members of the group. Five days after the executions, her water broke and she was rushed to the Paulun German Hospital in the International Settlement. She arrived groaning in pain, which prompted the midwife, “a Nazi type,” to wag her finger and offer an anti-Semitic admonishment: “You should be strong, like a good German woman.” On February 12, 1931, Ursula gave birth to a boy: he was named Michael, after Michael Gold, the American Marxist she had met in New York three years earlier.

  “I am in heaven over this child and then again appalled by how I have succumbed to him,” she wrote to Jürgen a few days after giving birth. “I think only of the child, and everything else only in relation to the child.” When Misha, as she called him, was eleven days old, she wrote home again, and this time only half the letter concerned baby matters, while the rest was about the new Soviet five-year plan and the writings of the communist leader Karl Radek. At night she read Infant Feeding and Care but also, “for balance,” Boris Pilnyak’s novel The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea, a paean of praise to forced industrialization in Soviet Russia. The tension between the twin demands of politics and parenthood began the day Ursula became a mother, and continued for the rest of her life.

  Rudi was instantly besotted with his son. The new parents proudly presented Michael to their friends. Agnes was supportive, but Ursula noticed the “sadness” in her childless friend. “I sacrificed my children for the struggle,” Agnes remarked pointedly. Arthur Gimson, the commissioner of public works, sent over some congratulatory compost. Chen Hansheng brought traditional Chinese birth gifts and “took a great interest” in the baby.

  One of the first visitors was Richard Sorge. Again, Ursula felt the conflicting pull of clandestine work and her maternal instincts, “partly embarrassed to be involved in such private matters as having babies, and partly proud of my little son.” Sorge brought flowers. “I led him to the baby’s crib,” Ursula wrote. “He bent over and gently pulled back the quilt with his hand. For a long time he looked at the infant in silence.” From Sorge’s ruthlessly pragmatic perspective, little Misha was a complication, but potentially an asset. He was ideal cover. Who could possibly suspect that a first-time mother with a newborn baby might also be a spy?

  ON APRIL 1, 1931, RUDI and Ursula Hamburger moved into their own home on a boulevard lined with plane trees running through the heart of the French Concession. Number 1464 Avenue Joffre was a detached two-story villa, rented from a British company and set back from the road behind a wide garden.

  After nine months in Shanghai they were keen to put down roots. The Woidts’ apartment was too small for a growing family. “In the hot season, with small rooms directly below the roof, it’s not the right place for a child,” she told her mother. But Ursula had another reason for moving house. With two or three secret meetings taking place every week, Sorge needed a more secure venue. Marianne Woidt sometimes returned home unexpectedly, and had once bumped into him on the doorstep. The comings and goings might already have attracted attention.

  As a secret rendezvous, the new house on Avenue Joffre was ideal. The servants (cook, houseboy, and nanny, or amah) were housed in separate quarters across a small courtyard. “We have an open view, with no other buildings to block it,” Ursula wrote. Anyone coming up the front path would be spotted long before they reached the front door. “Our new home is completely wonderful. Rudi has done a great job with the interior design, and everything is very tasteful. The gardens have beautiful lawns, flowers and a few tall, old trees. It is the first time we have ever lived on our own, and we enjoy it immensely.” Rudi knew nothing of the real criteria on which his new home had been selected.

  The meetings started up again immediately, following the same deliberately unpredictable pattern. Ursula would inconspicuously stand guard in the main room or, if the weather was warm, in the garden, nursing her baby and keeping a watchful eye on the front gate, while upstairs Sorge gathered in earnest conclave with men (and very occasionally women) whose names she never knew.

  Ursula’s letters home gave no hint of her clandestine life. Instead, she vividly described her daily existence, the sights and sounds of Shanghai, and her adored baby. “Michael’s hair is still red, his mouth is similar to that of his grandfather, his eyes grow brighter every day, but his nose is still very Christian for the time being. He often greets us with his fist raised as if he is already a Red Front Fighter. But don’t worry, since he cannot yet speak he has not yet expressed his political beliefs.” Occasionally she described the murderous anti-communist violence sweeping China. In some areas entire families were wiped out. Ursula was fully aware that she could become the next victim. With a baby to care for, the stakes seemed, suddenly, immeasurably higher. She later wrote: “I had to be constantly on the lookout in case anybody was watching the house or, for that matter, me. Before and after meetings with the comrades, I kept a discreet watch on the streets.”

  “The White Terror is ghastly out here,” Agnes Smedley wrote to the American writer
Upton Sinclair. In the four years of bloodletting that followed the initial Shanghai Massacre, at least three hundred thousand people perished. Suspected communists were rounded up by the hundreds, or simply abducted and murdered by Du’s gangsters. “Only a few returned from the prisons,” wrote Ursula. “Most never even reached that far: they were shot, beaten to death, buried alive or beheaded. In provincial cities their heads were impaled on posts near the city gates to intimidate the people…the foreign powers, of course, strongly support Chiang Kai-shek in his large-scale Red suppression campaign. I’ve seen photographs, which are horrific, and genuine.” But the communists themselves were also capable of astonishing brutality, particularly toward any of their own suspected of treachery.

  Gu Shunzhang was a former professional magician, an experienced assassin, and head of the Communist Red Brigade, the so-called Dog Killer Squad, responsible for hunting down party traitors and murdering KMT secret policemen. In April 1931, the PSB arrested Gu, who agreed to cooperate in exchange for his life. “A living dictionary” of party membership, he revealed the identities of countless communists, most of whom were rounded up and executed. Surviving party leaders went into hiding in the various Shanghai safe houses. But not before they had exacted vengeance. On the orders of Zhou Enlai, the most senior communist left in Shanghai, who would go on to become the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, thirty members of Gu’s family were kidnapped, murdered, and then buried in a garden in the French Concession, not far from Ursula’s new home. Only his twelve-year-old son was spared.