BOOK REVIEW: Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy
by Ben Macintyre / Crown
Reviewed by Dan Hoffman
Cipher Brief Expert Dan Hoffman is a former CIA Chief of Station with 30 years of government service including high-level positions with the U.S. military, Department of State, and Department of Commerce. Hoffman’s assignments included tours of duty in the former Soviet Union, Europe, and in war zones in the Middle East and South Asia.
REVIEW -- In the summer of 1939, Soviet Military Intelligence Officer Ursula Kuczynski (aka Agent Sonya) was operating clandestine transmitter receivers from her home in Switzerland, while at the same time, running two sources with excellent access in Nazi Germany, and putting the finishing touches on a plan to assassinate Adolf Hitler at a Munich restaurant. This is the thrilling life story of one of the most consequential intelligence officers in history, which Ben Macintyre exquisitely recounts in Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy.
Serving as an “illegal” without the security of diplomatic cover and immunity, Kuczynski outfoxed Chinese, Japanese, Nazi, British, and FBI spy-catchers, while deftly handling high-value sources, including nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs, who changed the course of world events by stealing nuclear secrets on behalf of Stalin’s murderous regime.
A German Jew who marched with communist youth groups in her hometown of Berlin during the Weimar Republic, Kuczynski marked her early years with a spirit of excitement and adventure.
With access to Kuczynski’s personal diaries and correspondence and a keen understanding of the historical context in which she lived and conducted dangerous espionage missions, Macintyre eloquently profiles her ideological commitment to communism and her passion for cloak and dagger spying, which legendary Soviet GRU officer Richard Sorge energized and nurtured in Shanghai.
Macintyre pinpoints Sorge’s critical role in influencing Kuczynski’s personal life and career. Sorge, who would later obtain intelligence alerting Moscow to the Nazi invasion as well as later confirmation that Japan planned no land invasion of the Soviet Union, thereby enabling Stalin to reinforce Stalingrad with troops from the Far East, recognized Kuczynski’s aptitude for spying and recruited her as a safehouse keeper for his clandestine meetings. She delivered messages to members of Sorge’s network and elicited information from German expatriates with whom she socialized but previously detested.
First under Sorge’s tutelage, and later by virtue of her own brilliant, critical thinking, Kuczynski became a substantive expert on the art of spying and the most pressing geopolitical issues as the Soviet Union’s very existence was gravely at risk. She immersed herself in the study of foreign languages and navigated travel through war-torn Europe and Asia with her children during the 1930’s and 40’s. Dedicated to her mission, she returned to work a scant eight hours after giving birth to her third child in 1936.
Kuczynski rose to the rank of colonel and was awarded the prestigious Order of the Red Banner. She skillfully planted her own double agents in an OSS operation behind German enemy lines at the end of the war, thereby netting Moscow Center valuable intelligence on OSS training methods, personnel, communications, and reporting on Germany’s economic ruin.
Macintyre describes in superb detail Soviet espionage tradecraft, including Kuczynski’s Soviet Red Army communications and arduous physical training; her clandestine meetings with sources; and the clandestine communication with the Soviet intelligence officers who supported her with funds and guidance.
Macintyre’s exceptional biography contributes significantly to the scholarship about WWII intelligence operations, but questions linger about Kuczynski’s ethics and morals.
Macintyre lacks details on the extent of Kuczynski’s frustration when she receives word from Moscow Center immediately after the signing of the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact to “cease all activities against Germany.” The reader is left to imagine her inner conflict about ordering her sources to stand down on their plan to kill the Fuhrer and how the war might have turned out so differently if she had defied those orders.
But Kuczynski was a contradiction. As fiercely independent as she was in the conduct of her personal life, with three children from three different fathers, she was resolute about following orders from her chain of command.
Macintyre likewise only touches on the contradiction between Kuczynski’s perception of Soviet communism as a worker’s paradise and the reality of Stalin’s purges, which resulted in the arrests of so many of her friends and colleagues and gross human rights violations including against her own husband Rudi, who spent a decade in a Soviet gulag.
The reader is left wanting a more definitive resolution of Kuczynski’s duality of consciousness. If only Macintyre had the opportunity to interview her before she died two decades ago, he might have learned whether she had any regrets about not finishing the job against Hitler or being a servant of Stalin’s ruthless and bloodthirsty dictatorship. But such is the challenge of historical analysis when existing sources can only answer so many questions, especially the question of whether a Soviet spy par excellence posing as an unassuming housewife, should be remembered most for her Faustian bargain, which had such destructive consequences for her own family and the world.
This book earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.
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