Sonya dances
Oct. 7th, 2024 05:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI’ve decided that in the final few months of the year I’m going to read one Ben MacIntyre book each month, ending 2024 with a slew of spy shenanigans before I embark upon my Year of Erics/Year of Boat Books. To that end, and with some library shenanigans, I checked out and read Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy, a biography of the life and work of Ursula Kuczynski Hamburger Beurton, codenamed Agent Sonya.
Ursula was born in Germany to a left-leaning Jewish family and grew up in the tumultuous days of the Wiemar Republic, where she got involved with the KPD, got beat up by cops, and became a dedicated antifascist. After doing some light troublemaking as a teenager she married a young architect named Rudi Hamburger and sold left-wing books out of a wheelbarrow. Rudi was then hired by a British firm to do architecture in the “international” enclaves in Shanghai, and Ursula went with him. There, she was bored stupid, hanging about with vapidly racist socialites and not being quite able to figure out how to do anything useful about the shocking poverty in China. In Shanghai she eventually befriends a vivacious American writer named Agnes Smedley, through whom she is recruited as a spy for the Soviet Union, with Richard Sorge as her handler. At first her job is mainly to provide a discreet place for other spies to have meetings. Eventually, however, the skinny young housewife is recruited for increasingly complicated and dangerous missions. She goes to a spy training school in Russia for the better part of a year, leaving her two-year-old son with his grandparents; then does a stint in Manchuria doing illegal radio transmissions in support of anti-Japanese forces. Upon leaving Shanghai–and her first husband–she is set up in Switzerland, along with nearly every other spy in the world, to keep an eye on Nazi Germany, where she does more radio transmissions and runs two agents out of the German interior, one of whom would become her second husband. As World War Two swing into full gear, Ursula and her second husband make it to the UK, where most of Ursula’s family has also fled. Here she continues her career as a spymaster, working to keep the Soviet Union apprised of things its allies weren’t sharing with it, including atomic research being conducted by fellow German expatriate Karl Fuchs. She inserted Soviet spies into a series of dangerous OSS missions into the German interior in the final days of the Reich, mainly for the purpose of allowing the USSR to get its hands on American walkie-talkie technology–the German labor organizers in exile that she recruited for this job were fully in sync with their American handlers as far as the actual mission itself went. In her years in the UK, Ursula comes under mild suspicion from British intelligence forces occasionally, but her domestic ordinariness causes the MI5 men to repeatedly clear her. Only Milicent Bagot–a Trunchbull-like figure and apparently MI5’s only competent Communist-hunter–really suspected her, but Bagot got the same treatment from the MI5 patriarchs and her warnings were ignored (and when she crossed streams and requested information from MI6, she would get the polite brush-off from Kim Philby, for entirely different reasons).
Like the other Ben MacIntyre books I’ve read–Operation Mincemeat and A Spy Among Friends–this was compulsively readable, exciting, reasonably sympathetic to the Communists given that the author seems to be a pretty mainstream liberal, full of amusing anecdotes and little digs at just about everybody. Thus far, MacIntyre’s books are not really works of political theory, but they are great looks into the real people behind all sorts of crazy mid-20th-century events, including putting these people into their cultural and political contexts. I found this book to be overall very sympathetic to Ursula Buerton, despite a bit of ribbing about ideologically rigid, dogmatic Marxists. It was also very sympathetic to her beleaguered first husband, who was cursed with the name Rudi Hamburger and whose fortunes only got worse from there. Hamburger was initially more of a progressive left-liberal type and did not want to join the KPD because they were ideologically rigid and gave “boring speeches full of jargon,” which is maybe not a very solid argument against the workability of a political philosophy but is very much a fair charge against many Communist parties. The fascist takeover of Germany, and finding out his wife was a spy, jointly served to push him into the arms of the Comintern, where he eagerly threw himself into spy work in a failed attempt to save his marriage and also a failed attempt to become a good spy. Hamburger ended up being tortured in a Japanese jail in China and then later spent several years in a Soviet gulag after his incompetence at spywork was suspected to be deliberate and he was jailed as a political subversive. And through all this hardship he was still cheerfully named Rudi Hamburger, poor man.
Overall, this book was super fun, I read it in basically 24 hours, and I’m excited for my hold on Prisoners of the Castle to come in.
Ursula was born in Germany to a left-leaning Jewish family and grew up in the tumultuous days of the Wiemar Republic, where she got involved with the KPD, got beat up by cops, and became a dedicated antifascist. After doing some light troublemaking as a teenager she married a young architect named Rudi Hamburger and sold left-wing books out of a wheelbarrow. Rudi was then hired by a British firm to do architecture in the “international” enclaves in Shanghai, and Ursula went with him. There, she was bored stupid, hanging about with vapidly racist socialites and not being quite able to figure out how to do anything useful about the shocking poverty in China. In Shanghai she eventually befriends a vivacious American writer named Agnes Smedley, through whom she is recruited as a spy for the Soviet Union, with Richard Sorge as her handler. At first her job is mainly to provide a discreet place for other spies to have meetings. Eventually, however, the skinny young housewife is recruited for increasingly complicated and dangerous missions. She goes to a spy training school in Russia for the better part of a year, leaving her two-year-old son with his grandparents; then does a stint in Manchuria doing illegal radio transmissions in support of anti-Japanese forces. Upon leaving Shanghai–and her first husband–she is set up in Switzerland, along with nearly every other spy in the world, to keep an eye on Nazi Germany, where she does more radio transmissions and runs two agents out of the German interior, one of whom would become her second husband. As World War Two swing into full gear, Ursula and her second husband make it to the UK, where most of Ursula’s family has also fled. Here she continues her career as a spymaster, working to keep the Soviet Union apprised of things its allies weren’t sharing with it, including atomic research being conducted by fellow German expatriate Karl Fuchs. She inserted Soviet spies into a series of dangerous OSS missions into the German interior in the final days of the Reich, mainly for the purpose of allowing the USSR to get its hands on American walkie-talkie technology–the German labor organizers in exile that she recruited for this job were fully in sync with their American handlers as far as the actual mission itself went. In her years in the UK, Ursula comes under mild suspicion from British intelligence forces occasionally, but her domestic ordinariness causes the MI5 men to repeatedly clear her. Only Milicent Bagot–a Trunchbull-like figure and apparently MI5’s only competent Communist-hunter–really suspected her, but Bagot got the same treatment from the MI5 patriarchs and her warnings were ignored (and when she crossed streams and requested information from MI6, she would get the polite brush-off from Kim Philby, for entirely different reasons).
Like the other Ben MacIntyre books I’ve read–Operation Mincemeat and A Spy Among Friends–this was compulsively readable, exciting, reasonably sympathetic to the Communists given that the author seems to be a pretty mainstream liberal, full of amusing anecdotes and little digs at just about everybody. Thus far, MacIntyre’s books are not really works of political theory, but they are great looks into the real people behind all sorts of crazy mid-20th-century events, including putting these people into their cultural and political contexts. I found this book to be overall very sympathetic to Ursula Buerton, despite a bit of ribbing about ideologically rigid, dogmatic Marxists. It was also very sympathetic to her beleaguered first husband, who was cursed with the name Rudi Hamburger and whose fortunes only got worse from there. Hamburger was initially more of a progressive left-liberal type and did not want to join the KPD because they were ideologically rigid and gave “boring speeches full of jargon,” which is maybe not a very solid argument against the workability of a political philosophy but is very much a fair charge against many Communist parties. The fascist takeover of Germany, and finding out his wife was a spy, jointly served to push him into the arms of the Comintern, where he eagerly threw himself into spy work in a failed attempt to save his marriage and also a failed attempt to become a good spy. Hamburger ended up being tortured in a Japanese jail in China and then later spent several years in a Soviet gulag after his incompetence at spywork was suspected to be deliberate and he was jailed as a political subversive. And through all this hardship he was still cheerfully named Rudi Hamburger, poor man.
Overall, this book was super fun, I read it in basically 24 hours, and I’m excited for my hold on Prisoners of the Castle to come in.