Agent Sonya Read online

  On a beautiful summer morning, when Michael was almost six months old, Ursula received a telephone call from Richard Sorge, not to arrange another meeting, but with an altogether different proposition.

  “Would you like to go for a ride on my motorbike?”

  Sorge was waiting for Ursula on the city outskirts, astride an enormous black Zündapp flat-twin K500 motorcycle. He showed her how to put her feet onto the footrests and told her to hold on. Then they roared off, at breathtaking speed. Sorge was a fantastically reckless driver. Soon they were beyond the city limits and flying through the Chinese countryside, past paddy fields and villages, Ursula’s arms tightly wrapped around Sorge. “Thrilled by his breakneck driving, I urged him to go faster and faster.” Sorge accelerated, and the motorbike seemed to take off. Ursula was in a state of petrified ecstasy.

  “When we stopped,” she later wrote, “I was a changed person. I laughed and romped about and talked non-stop.” Her anxieties seemed to evaporate. “Shanghai’s detested social life was forgotten, as were the constant pressures to conform to etiquette, the responsibilities of clandestine activities, and the unnecessary worries about my son….I was no longer afraid.” Many years later, she reflected: “Perhaps he had only arranged this ride to test my physical courage. If, however, he had been seeking a way to establish better contact between us, he had gone about it the right way. After this ride, I no longer felt inhibited.”

  Sorge understood the seductive power of a fast motorbike. Ursula shared his love of risk. He was undoubtedly testing her, though in a way that was more emotional than physical. Exactly when Ursula Hamburger and Richard Sorge became lovers is still a matter of debate. Years later, when quizzed about her relationship with Sorge, Ursula replied obliquely: “I was not a nun.” Most sources suggest that their relationship ceased to be platonic soon after this exhilarating motorbike ride, and quite possibly somewhere in the Chinese countryside outside Shanghai that very afternoon.

  A housewife-spy, Ursula had hitherto stood on the periphery of Sorge’s network, keeper of a safe house, a discreet enabler who asked no questions. “I hardly knew what was going on in my own home.” With their newfound intimacy she joined Sorge’s inner circle, a trusted lieutenant in the conspiracy, a partner and confidante. “Our conversations were more meaningful,” she wrote. Sorge described his childhood in Baku, his horrific wartime experiences, and his conviction that only communism could defeat the scourge of fascism. He told her of a daughter in Russia he had never seen, by a wife he had never mentioned before. There was no “sensational moment” when Sorge revealed who he was working for, but over the coming months it became clear to Ursula that her lover was the mastermind of an extensive intelligence operation coordinated and financed by the Soviet Red Army, of which she was now an integral part. Now, when the meetings in Avenue Joffre ended, she did not send Sorge away.

  Sorge introduced her to the other members of his network. His chief shortwave radio operator, Max Clausen, was a former seaman in the German navy who had built a tiny 7.5-watt transmitter, small enough to be hidden in a cupboard but sufficiently powerful to reach the Soviet receiving station in Vladivostok. Clausen’s deputy was Josef “Sepp” Weingarten, nicknamed “Sober,” because he was usually drunk. “Flaxen-haired, rosy-cheeked, good natured” and remarkably incompetent, Weingarten had married a White Russian exile, but had not got around to telling her he was a communist spy, and lived in terror that she might find out. The group’s photographer, responsible for copying documents onto miniature film, was a twenty-five-year-old Pole from Łódź named Hirsch Herzberg who went by the alias “Grigor Stronsky,” or Grisha. Ursula was struck by his distinctive appearance and grave manner: “He had dark, wavy hair with a side parting, his forehead shone as if it were polished, his eyes were dark above his bold cheekbones.” As cover, Herzberg ran a camera shop, for which Rudi did the interior design, unaware of its ulterior purpose. Grisha Herzberg became a regular visitor to Avenue Joffre, as Ursula’s social and secret lives entwined. Ursula plunged into another chapter of the story, making little notes on this fresh cast of characters. That spring Herzberg took a photograph of her, drinking coffee from a bowl, peering over the rim. Handing her the developed print, the Polish photographer remarked: “Very well caught—just like you. Could be called ‘Portrait of a Pirate.’ ” Ursula’s expression, at once mischievous and debonair, is the look of a communist corsair.

  Then there was Isa. Ursula was instantly drawn to Irene Wiedemeyer (sometimes Weitemeyer), a German Jew from Berlin with “freckles on her very fair skin, hazy blue eyes and unruly red hair” who ran the Zeitgeist bookshop near Soochow Creek. “There is a friend I must tell you about,” Ursula wrote home. “A young girl arrived here one day, without kith or kin but with boxes full of books….She is 23 years old. Plucky don’t you think?”

  The Zeitgeist was not just a bookshop, and “Isa” Wiedemeyer was more than just a gutsy bookseller. A German Communist Party member from her teenage years, Wiedemeyer had married a Chinese communist, studied at the Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow in 1926, left her husband when he became a Trotskyite, lost her baby daughter to meningitis, and wound up in Shanghai. Her bookshop was a branch of the Zeitgeist Buchhandlung group of Berlin, a chain of shops funded by the Comintern. The store was used as a dead-drop site and rendezvous point by the Comintern, Sorge’s Fourth Department group, the NKVD, and all the other branches of Soviet intelligence operating in Shanghai. “Messages and information were conveyed to agents there on sheets of paper slipped between the pages of designated books.” General Charles Willoughby, the American military intelligence chief, later described the Zeitgeist bookshop as “a recruiting station for the 4th Bureau of the Red Army.” Soviet and other foreign communists literally tripped over one another in Frau Wiedemeyer’s shop, which measured just eighteen feet by twelve.

  The two women became instant soulmates and co-conspirators. “She was like a sister to me,” wrote Ursula.

  Ursula had found a new, secret family. “The comrades became my dearest friends,” she later wrote. “I felt the same protectiveness towards them as I felt towards my little son…just as my child’s smallest sounds would wake me in the middle of the night, so I was on my guard for the slightest incident or irregularity in the vicinity of my comrades.” Sorge began to use her to pass messages between members of his group, a “cutout” in spy jargon, often via the bookshop. He handed over handwritten notes of information he had secretly gathered on military or economic topics, and she typed them up. Too long to be sent by wireless, these documents, sometimes hundreds of pages long, were sent to Moscow on Soviet ships.

  As doorkeeper for Sorge’s meetings, she developed a nodding acquaintance with some of his agents, including “a frail young Chinese girl with short hair, a pale complexion and slightly protruding teeth,” the daughter of a KMT general with access to useful military information. Two of the callers at Avenue Joffre were government officials, polite young men working for the Institute of Social Sciences. She knew them only as Chen and Wang. They offered to teach her Mandarin. Sorge agreed that language lessons would be good cover for Chen and Wang’s frequent visits to the house. A natural linguist, Ursula took delight in deconstructing the complex language. Even the name “Hamburger,” she told her mother, could be broken down into its constituent parts: “Han-bu-ga: Han = a famous Chinese surname; Bu = fine artist; Ga = good character. Therefore: ‘a first-class artist with good character from the family Han.’ Doesn’t that fit Rudi? And then Ursula: Ussu la = ‘pure as an orchid,’ which doesn’t fit me at all.”

  One day Sorge lugged a suitcase filled with documents into the house and asked Ursula to keep it somewhere safe. She hid it in the built-in cupboard behind a heavy mothproof chest containing winter clothes. Ursula was now the keeper of records for the Sorge network, as well as printed communist propaganda and other incriminating material. A few weeks later, Sorge returned with a heavy locked trun
k and two Chinese porters to carry it upstairs. She stashed it alongside the suitcase.

  The expatriates whose company Ursula had once found so tiresome were now valuable sources of information. At Sorge’s instigation she began to pay more attention to the gossip at the Concordia, around the Kattwinkels’ swimming pool, and at Bernardine Szold-Fritz’s tea parties. Constantin von Ungern-Sternberg and Karl Seebohm could be surprisingly indiscreet when discussing the business affairs of their employers, Siemens and I. G. Farben, German companies supplying military technology to the Chinese government. She listened closely to the long political lectures delivered by the journalist Plaut, who never suspected she was “ruthlessly squeezing everything out of him.” Even the consul general, Heinrich von Collenberg-Bödigheim, enjoyed chatting with the attractive young wife of the municipal architect. “I did not have to torment myself by adopting the guise of a Nazi,” she wrote. Instead she played the part of a curious, innocuous, and rather bored young housewife who liked to shop, without a political thought in her pretty head. Sorge encouraged her to make her own assessments of the information she gathered. “Facts were not enough for Richard. If I was too brief, he would say ‘and what do you think of that?’ ” When she came back with a fuller report, he would congratulate her: “Good, a proper analysis.” Almost unaware she was being trained, the tradecraft was seeping into her: the outward appearance and the hidden inner life, filtering out extraneous material, constant vigilance, and habits of deception. “Clandestine conduct became second nature,” she wrote.

  On any given evening, gathered around the Hamburgers’ dinner table might be Gimson from the Municipal Council, Plaut of the Transocean Kuomin Telegraph Agency, Rosie Gräfenberg, owner of the first G-spot, journalists, military officers and businesspeople from the club, Agnes Smedley, and Professor Chen Hansheng from the university. Lubricated by Rudi’s wine, the guests chatted freely, most of them unaware that some of the company were spies, notably the hostess. Richard Sorge was a frequent dinner guest. Rudi liked the hard-living German journalist with the fund of risqué anecdotes and the big motorbike. As she entertained her dinner party guests, Ursula could feel Sorge’s eyes on her across the table, an erotic complicity running invisibly between them. “I liked watching Richard listen to me, and I could tell by his expression whether something was important to him or not.” According to Sorge’s biographer, “the table talk reported by Ursula began appearing regularly in his cables to the Centre.”

  In his messages to Moscow, Sorge allocated Ursula a code name: “Sonya.”

  Sonya is a Russian name, of course, but it also means “dormouse,” an affectionate term for a sleepy person. Sorge was offering a sly compliment to Ursula’s ability to hide in plain sight: a “sleeper” in intelligence jargon is a long-term, deep-cover agent. But in 1930s Shanghai the “Sonyas” were also the Russian hookers who lined the North Sichuan Road, and “whose stock phrase was ‘my Prince, ples, you buy little Sonya small bottle vine?’ ” There was a song, popular in Shanghai’s nightclubs: “When Sonya is dancing to a Russian song, you can’t help falling in love with her. There is no more beautiful woman than she. In her blood runs the Volga, vodka and the Caucasus. Even Vladimir is crazy about her, sets aside a glass of vodka, just to see Sonya.”

  The code name carried a significance only Sorge and Ursula understood.

  Like many spies, Ursula was becoming intoxicated by the thrill of her own duality, the entwining of danger and domesticity, living one life in public and another in deepest secrecy. “None of our acquaintances would in their wildest dreams have imagined that I, as the mother of a small child, would jeopardize my family and everything we had created for ourselves in China by contact with communists.” Yet the thought of what might happen was invading her own dreams. In one of her nightmares, the police broke down the door, found incriminating evidence, and seized her child. Ursula would wake shaking, bathed in sweat. She knew she was putting her family into ever deeper jeopardy. That knowledge was not enough to stop her.

  Spying is highly stressful. So are bringing up a child, running a household in a foreign country, and concealing an extramarital affair. The demands on Ursula required both a genius for compartmentalizing the different areas of her life and an intense psychological stamina, as she juggled her rival commitments to husband and lover, bourgeois social engagements and communist subversion, her baby and her ideology. “Underground work cut deeply into my personal life,” she wrote. “Rudi was as good and considerate as ever, but I could not talk to him about the people who were closest to me or the work on which my life centred.” Under the twin pressures of espionage and infidelity, her marriage was falling apart.

  Rudolf Hamburger was gentle and trusting, but he was not a fool. He must have noticed that his wife was spending more and more time with her left-wing friends, the red-haired Isa, the somber Grisha. She urged him to invite officials to dinner. Did Ursula’s sudden enthusiasm for socializing with people she had previously detested strike him as odd? Did he wonder why Johnson, the good-looking German journalist with the English name, was a fixture at almost every dinner party they hosted? Did he suspect that his wife might be otherwise engaged on her afternoons, while he worked at the office in downtown Shanghai? Most cuckolds are, often unknowingly, complicit. Did he refuse to see what he did not want to see?

  Agnes Smedley certainly did know what was going on between Ursula and Sorge, and she was not happy. Agnes was an advocate of free love, so long as the freedom was hers. The romantic aspect of her relationship with “Sorgie” had already ended—as she had predicted it would—but the discovery that her young protégée was now her ex-lover’s lover did not fit in with her plans. “When word of the affair reached Agnes, she took it badly.” In private she was still affectionate toward Ursula, but when others were present, Sorge in particular, she made snide remarks and took every opportunity to put her down. She mocked Ursula’s interest in clothes, cookery, and entertaining. Clausen, the radio operator, decided Agnes was a “hysterical, conceited woman.” Sorge’s switch of partners added a new and unpredictable element to an already combustible sexual and political mix.

  One afternoon, Sorge arrived at the house accompanied by a large man with “a round, almost bald head, small eyes and a sudden, friendly smile.” They were joined by two Chinese men Ursula had never seen before. Half an hour later, she entered the upstairs room with a tea tray and found the four men holding revolvers. “There were also weapons lying in the open trunk and spread out on the carpet”: rifles, handguns, machine guns, and ammunition. “The two Chinese comrades were learning how to take the weapons apart and reassemble them.” Sorge ushered her out of the room, but he had doubtless intended her to see the cache of weaponry. Here was further proof of her importance. There was enough evidence in her bedroom cupboard to get them all killed. She was now not only Sorge’s lover, confidante, courier, secretary, secret agent, and archivist, but also custodian of the group’s arsenal. “I was of greater use than I had realized,” she wrote. And in even greater danger.

  Toward the end of June, Sorge appeared at the house without warning, sweaty and anxious; two porters were waiting at the gate. “You need to pack a suitcase for you and Michael,” he told her. “You may have to leave Shanghai suddenly and go into hiding with comrades in the interior.” Sorge gave her the address of a safe house where she and the baby could hide and await exfiltration to the Jiangxi Soviet. There was no suggestion that Rudi would be going too. Sorge promised to telephone, with a prearranged signal, if the moment came to flee. The porters hauled the trunk and suitcase containing weapons and documents downstairs, and Sorge hurried away. With trembling hands, Ursula immediately packed a small case with diapers, baby clothes, sterilized water, powdered milk, and a change of clothing. Waiting for the telephone to ring, she tried to reassure herself that since “Richard knew of a specific danger and an opportunity to escape had been provided, the situation was no more precar
ious than before.” At night she lay awake alongside Rudi, rigid with tension and awash with adrenaline, waiting for the signal to bolt. While the nurse played with Michael in the garden, she stayed in the house, never more than a few feet from the telephone. Soldiers often describe experiencing a jolt of pure excitement when they come under fire. Ursula was very frightened. She was also elated. Facing death, she had never felt more intensely alive.

  Ursula knew the cause of the crisis without having to ask: the network had been compromised.

  A few days earlier, on June 15, 1931, the Shanghai Municipal Police had arrested Professor Hilaire Noulens and his wife, Gertrude, at their home on Sichuan Road.

  Noulens went by a baffling array of names, nationalities, and occupations, all of them false. He variously identified himself as Paul Christian, Xavier Alois Beuret, Paul Ruegg, Donat Boulanger, Charles Alison, Philippe Louis de Backer, Samuel Herssens, Ferdinand Vandercruyssen, Richard Robinson-Rubens, and Dr. W. O’Neil. He claimed, at different times, to be Belgian, Swiss, and Canadian, a professor of French and German, a wallpaperer, a laborer, a mechanic, and a pacifist trades union organizer. Not to be outdone, Madame Noulens sometimes used the names Sophie Louise Herbert (née Lorent) or Marie Motte. Noulens was a small, sharp-eyed, and “extremely nervous” man in his late thirties, “forever moving about and switching from one to another of his three languages apparently without noticing.”

  While Inspector Tom Givens might be unsure exactly who this twitchy little man was, he quickly established what he was: an important Soviet spy. The trail had started with the arrest in Singapore of a “suspicious Frenchman,” Joseph Ducroux, a known Comintern courier traveling under the alias Serge LeFranc. On a scrap of paper, Ducroux had scribbled a telegraphic address—“Hilonoul Shanghai”—belonging to the mysterious Noulens. Givens kept the couple under surveillance for a week and then launched a “lightning raid” in the middle of the night. A key in Noulens’s jacket pocket opened an apartment on Nanking Road, where police found three steel boxes containing hundreds of documents, many in double-encrypted code. A copy of The Three Principles by Sun Yat-sen on the bookshelf was found to contain the key to the code. When decrypted, the cache turned out to be an encyclopedia of Soviet espionage in Shanghai, including contacts with the CCP. Payroll records revealed “the names of couriers and agents throughout the region” and communist spies in every corner of the city, including, to Givens’s astonishment, inside the police force itself.