Agent Sonya Read online

  “This not undangerous mission,” Ursula wrote later, with ringing understatement, “was best undertaken by women.” The two foreign females were stared at but left alone, as they wandered through the burned-out and looted Chinese neighborhoods. “Japanese soldiers are prowling everywhere,” Ursula reported. “Whole streets are empty except for a few corpses and the only sound to be heard in the deathly hush is the rumbling of heavy armoured Japanese military vehicles….The poor were left with their gutted houses, millions of unemployed and their dead.” Ursula and Isa visited wounded Chinese soldiers in the hospital, gauged the morale of the troops, and assessed the impact of the Japanese attack. Sorge was “amazed” by the quality of the information gathered by his women spies, now operating more like war correspondents reporting from the front line. “I was also able to give Richard an accurate picture of the mood among Europeans,” she later wrote. The fighting ended after a few weeks with a cease-fire brokered by the League of Nations, but not before Ursula had witnessed a sight that shook her soul.

  “I found a dead baby in the street,” she wrote. Ursula picked up the tiny corpse. “Its nappies were still wet.” The child was around the same age as Michael. Here, with appalling clarity, was a measure of what was at stake. She might frame the Japanese action in political terms—“a clear and brutal lesson in the methods of capitalism”—but it was also a warning of the pitiless world she now inhabited. If Ursula was caught and executed, the next dead child lying in the street might be her own.

  Rudi was appalled by the Japanese attack, and furious. “It is an outrageous and shocking thing to invade a weak country,” he wrote to his parents. “What we are witnessing here is military aggression conducted solely for economic interests.” Rudi was beginning to think and sound like Ursula. “This period contributed fundamentally to Rudi becoming a communist,” she later wrote. Her husband was turning toward revolution. He was also trying to save their marriage. His conversion to communism was a desperate act of love. But it was too late. Rudi was caring and sweet, but in his deep-brown eyes Ursula now saw only a lifetime of conventional marriage. Richard Sorge had shown her another world of excitement, commitment, and danger. With Rudi she was comfortable and content. But with Sorge, tearing along on the back of a motorcycle, in furtive conclave or secret assignation, she was alive.

  Agnes Smedley was working on a series of short stories set in China, while using her journalistic cover to pass information between Sorge, the Comintern, the CCP, and the Center. Sorge “made her a member of the Comintern headquarters staff.” But the British were harassing her “like ferocious dogs,” she said, and her behavior was increasingly erratic. Readers of the Frankfurter Zeitung complained that her reporting was “one-sided.” The newspaper also received an intelligence report, probably British, claiming she had attended a meeting in a theater with a “group of young Chinese communists whom she caroused drunkenly with and offered herself sexually to.” As a finale, it was alleged, she had appeared “stark naked on the platform, wearing only a red hat, and had sung the Internationale.” The German newspaper was liberal, but not that liberal. Agnes was sacked.

  In the summer of 1932, Agnes and Ursula took a working holiday together in the mountains of Kuling, in Jiangxi Province, just outside the communist-controlled area. As ever, the political and personal merged. The trip was an opportunity to escape the summer heat of Shanghai and rebuild their friendship, while conducting some light espionage. The CCP provided a holiday bungalow. Since Mao’s forces were encamped in the nearby mountains, Agnes would conduct “interviews with the Chinese Soviets and their defenders, the Chinese Red Army,” report some of what she discovered as journalism, and pass any secret information she gleaned back to Moscow.

  The five-day boat journey up the Yangtze was “followed by a bone-shaking bus to the foot of the mountain [and] another three hours up steep paths in a swaying sedan chair.” Initially, their relationship seemed to regain its former warmth. “Agnes and I go for long walks every afternoon,” Ursula wrote, “with beautiful views down the Yangtze Valley and towards the Hubei mountain ranges, where the Reds are.”

  On the day Ursula wrote this letter to her parents, the Noulenses (their real names still unknown to the authorities) went on trial in Jiangsu High Court, accused of “financing Communist bandits, directing subversive activities, arms trading with the Communists, and conspiring to overthrow the republic of China.” A few days earlier, Sorge met two couriers sent from Moscow, each of whom handed over $20,000 with which to bribe the Chinese judicial authorities.

  In Kuling, Ursula and Agnes received word that the Noulenses had gone on a hunger strike. As they sat down to lunch, Agnes announced theatrically that out of solidarity she too would eat nothing until the accused couple were released.

  “That will not help the Noulenses,” Ursula responded tartly.

  Without a word, Agnes rose and stalked out of the room. Ursula picked up Michael and went for a stroll.

  When she returned to the bungalow, a letter was waiting on the table.

  “I cannot stay under these circumstances, and have returned to Shanghai,” Agnes had written. “You are too preoccupied with your own personal happiness and your family. Private matters play too great a role in your life. You do not have what it takes to make a real revolutionary.”

  Ursula was deeply wounded. “Agnes surely knew me well enough to know that I was ready to take any risk. Must I exhibit my emotions in order to prove them? How could such a close friendship be damaged like this? Where had Agnes got these ideas about me?” In reality, Agnes’s diatribe was more personal than political: she was jealous of Ursula’s relationship with Sorge and her friendship with Isa, envious of her baby, and angry that she had refused to step back from espionage by agreeing with her suggestion to adopt little Jimmy.

  Ursula remained in Kuling, brooding on the ruptured friendship. “It was a heavy blow.” Word arrived that the Noulenses had been condemned to death, but the sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Ursula credited Sorge with saving their lives by bribing the judge. She picked over the accusations leveled by a woman whose ideas and friendship meant so much to her. “Perhaps Agnes was right. I enjoyed life and could take enormous pleasure in everyday things. Did I perhaps attach too much importance to them? Every breath my son took was like magic to me, and I was determined to have more children, although I did not think my marriage would survive its present conflicts.”

  Soon the hurt gave way to anger. Agnes had misjudged her. She was perfectly capable of separating personal life from political duty. She would prove to Agnes, and the world, that despite the demands of motherhood she had exactly what it took to make a real revolutionary.

  Back in Shanghai, she described the argument with Agnes to Sorge. He changed the subject. “Richard seemed to regard it as a quarrel about some matter of special concern to women, and showed no desire to get involved.” A veteran womanizer, Sorge knew better than to get caught up in a fight between two of his conquests. (While Agnes and Ursula had been falling out, he had seduced “a beautiful Chinese girl,” from whom he obtained the blueprints of a Chinese military arsenal.) Ursula and Agnes still met up from time to time, but the friendship was gone, and both knew it.

  Smedley had inducted Ursula into the world of communist espionage; the American woman’s fierce spirit of rebellion had inspired her. But, after two years of undercover work, Ursula was maturing into something the volatile, egotistical Agnes would never be: a professional, dedicated, and increasingly self-confident spy. “I was constantly aware of the possibility that I might be arrested, and so I hardened myself physically to improve my resistance. I didn’t smoke, or drink alcohol. That way I would not suffer if I were suddenly deprived of them.” Agent Sonya was growing into her role.

  One morning in December, Ursula answered the telephone and heard the familiar voice of the Polish photographer Grisha Herzberg. “Come to my apartment this aft
ernoon. Richard wants to meet you there.” This was a prearranged signal to stand ready for a possible meeting. “I had hardly ever been to Grisha’s home and, as I understood it, I was only to come if he phoned again.” Ursula waited an hour for the backup call. When none came, she went shopping.

  Seated around the Hamburgers’ dining table that evening were Fritz Kuck, a teacher and keen Nazi, and two brothers, Ernst and Helmut Wilhelm, one an architect and the other an academic, and their wives. The dinner party was excruciating, the guests “tongue-tied and boring,” and the opportunities for useful intelligence gathering negligible. Kuck was laboriously showing slides of his expeditions into the interior and Ursula had gone into a trance of tedium, when the telephone rang in the next room.

  She picked up the receiver. The moment would remain frozen in memory. A framed photograph of her childhood home in Schlachtensee stood on the table by the telephone. The murmur of conversation was audible from the dining room.

  “I waited two hours for you this afternoon,” said Richard Sorge. “I wanted to say goodbye.”

  Ursula felt the room lurch. She sat down heavily in the chair.

  “Are you still there?” Sorge’s voice came faintly from the receiver, hanging limp in her hand.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m here.”

  Sorge hastily explained that he was leaving the next day. He had been recalled to Moscow. There was, he said, no cause for alarm, but he would not be returning to China. The Center wanted him elsewhere.

  “I want to thank you for always looking after me so well, and all the others. This is only a beginning for you. Much more lies ahead. You must keep a stiff upper lip”—he used the antique English phrase—“you must promise me that. But for now—all the best, the very best, and goodbye.” The line went dead.

  Ursula could not move. She stared blankly at the wall. Grisha had forgotten to make the second telephone call, a simple error of tradecraft. “I could not grasp that Richard had simply gone. Never again would he sit in this chair to talk to me, to listen to me, to advise me, to laugh with me.” He had departed, and she had not even found the words to say farewell.

  “What had I been thinking of? Had I only just realized how much he meant to me?”

  Ursula never saw Richard Sorge again. Perhaps their romantic relationship was already over, but for Ursula it never really ended.

  Ursula returned to her dreary dinner guests. No one noticed that her heart was broken.

  * * *

  —

  WITH SORGE GONE, HER FRIENDSHIP with Agnes Smedley over, and her marriage to Rudi in a state of quiet crisis, Ursula succumbed to a bout of homesickness. Karl Rimm took over the reins from Sorge. He was an efficient spymaster, whose chubby frame and dozy manner belied a “revolutionary’s strength and passion.” But he had none of his predecessor’s panache. She yearned for Sorge. Without him, Shanghai seemed drained of its glamour and color. “We now have a longing for another home,” she wrote to her parents. “I feel an immense sympathy for the Chinese people. I already feel a quarter Asian. If I leave this country I know I will always long for it.” Restless, she made plans to return to Germany in the spring and introduce Michael to the rest of his family. The hot, damp climate was affecting the baby’s lungs, and the German doctor had advised her to take him on holiday in Europe. Some time apart from Rudi would be good for them both.

  The news from Germany, however, was appalling.

  Nazi Party membership was soaring, and the violence between fascists and communists reaching a climax. On January 30, 1933, Hitler was sworn in as chancellor, unleashing a campaign of violence and terror more brutal than anything seen so far. A month later, following the Reichstag fire, Hitler suspended civil liberties on the pretext of averting a communist putsch and then set about creating a “ruthless confrontation” with the KPD. The Nazis rounded up thousands of communists, closed down the party headquarters, and banned demonstrations. Most of the KPD leaders were arrested, though some escaped into Soviet exile. The once-powerful organization Ursula had joined was driven underground, its surviving members harried and terrorized. The Enabling Act, passed in March, gave Hitler the power to rule by decree. The Nazi dictatorship had begun, and tremors from the political earthquake reverberated to China. The Zeitgeist bookshop closed abruptly, as funds from Germany dried up. Even Ursula’s optimism wobbled. “It was impossible for me to understand how the German working class could permit the fascists to take power,” she wrote.

  In Germany, many still misread the writing on the wall. The Central Jewish German Organization declared that “nobody would dare touch our constitutional rights.” Robert Kuczynski was not so sure. He had never been a communist, but as a prominent Jewish left-wing academic he was a marked man. Jürgen Kuczynski was in even greater danger. After returning from the United States with Marguerite he had joined the KPD in 1930. Since then he had written for various communist publications, and even visited the Soviet Union with an official KPD delegation. On February 27, while walking toward the Rote Fahne offices, he bumped into a friend who told him the Gestapo was raiding the newspaper at that very moment. Jürgen turned on his heel, avoiding arrest and almost certain death, by a matter of minutes.

  “We are aghast at the developments in Germany,” Ursula wrote home. “Only some of what is happening finds its way into the newspapers here. A heavy heart robs me of words, but we beg you to write as much as you feel able.”

  In March, a posse of black-uniformed Gestapo agents banged on the gates of the Schlachtensee villa and demanded to speak to Robert Kuczynski. Olga Muth told them he was out. The Gestapo vowed to return. Robert immediately went into hiding, first at the home of friends, then in a mental asylum. Ursula’s parents-in-law, Max and Else Hamburger, owned a holiday chalet in Grenzbauden, a picturesque village just across the Riesengebirge mountain range dividing German Silesia from Czechoslovakia. The Hamburgers had already taken refuge there, and agreed to shelter Robert until he could find a way to go onward to Britain or America, where he had friends in the academic community. In April, he escaped across the border into Czechoslovakia. Displaying what he described as “an almost blind loyalty in the leadership,” Jürgen remained in Germany, joined the communist underground, and continued to write, at excruciating length, for a variety of secret party publications. Even Ernst Thälmann, the KPD leader now in hiding, found Jürgen’s prolixity a little wearing: “Too much ‘cyclical crises’ and not enough broken lavatory seats,” he told the young statistician. Berta put down her paintbrushes, and never picked them up again. She and her younger daughters hunkered down in the old family house and waited.

  Ursula knew that returning to Berlin would be suicidal, with her father a wanted man, anti-Semitism spreading through Germany like a rampant virus, and her comrades arrested, dead, or on the run. Her name was on the Gestapo’s list of communist subversives. Refugees from Nazi violence were already pouring into Shanghai. Her journey home would have to be postponed. “The swastika is fluttering over the consulate here,” Ursula told her mother and sisters.

  While the Gestapo was hunting for Robert and Jürgen Kuczynski, the indefatigable Tom Givens of the Shanghai Municipal Police was closing in on the Soviet spy ring. Based on the “confessions” of captured communists, the Irish detective had drawn up a list of foreigners suspected of being Soviet spies. Richard Sorge was on it. So was Agnes Smedley. Soon after Sorge’s departure for Moscow, Agnes also made tracks for the Soviet Union.

  And so did Ursula.

  GENERAL YAN KARLOVICH BERZIN, CHIEF of the Fourth Department of the Red Army, was pleased with Richard Sorge. The spy code-named “Ramsay” had done all, and more, that was asked of him: he had built up an effective web of agents, successfully navigated the fallout from the Noulens affair, and survived three years in Shanghai unscathed, save for a broken leg.

  General Berzin knew all about survival.

  The son of
a Latvian farmer, Berzin had led a revolutionary partisan detachment against czarist troops and escaped twice from Siberian prison camps before joining the Red Army. During Lenin’s Red Terror, he instigated the systematic shooting of hostages as an effective method of subjugation, and in 1920 he was appointed to head the Fourth Department, the first Soviet military intelligence bureau. Berzin was charming, articulate, ambitious, and astonishingly brutal, a brilliant organizer with the eyes of a wolf and a glacial smile who had established a vast global network of “illegal” spies, working undercover, in every major capital of the world. The Fourth Department demanded total fidelity, which it frequently repaid with extreme disloyalty: if an officer or agent made a mistake, if a network was compromised, the spies were on their own; for anyone suspected of treachery, the punishment was swift and lethal. The “cold-bloodedness of the Centre” set it apart, according to one former agent. “It was entirely ruthless. With no sense of honour, obligation or decency towards its servants. They were used as long as they were of any value, and then cast aside with no compunction and no compensation.”

  Berzin personally debriefed Sorge in his office at 19 Bolshoi Znamensky Lane, the Center’s innocuous two-story headquarters a few hundred yards from the Kremlin, listening attentively as Agent Ramsay described the subagents in his Shanghai network: Japanese journalist Hotsumi Ozaki, Chinese academic Chen Hansheng, and red-haired radical Irene Wiedemeyer. Agnes Smedley had done “excellent work,” Sorge reported. Then there was the German housewife Ursula Hamburger, an agent displaying particular promise. Manfred Stern had also reported positively on Sorge’s recruit. Berzin liked the sound of Agent Sonya.