Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy Hardcover – September 15, 2020

I am an uncritical fan of Ben MacIntyre but this book reflects a certain modern liberal zeitgeist .Sonya was for decades in the service of a regime and an ideology of unimaginable evil--one which we were forced to look the other way in WW2. Can one imagine any author or any publisher coming within a mile of any book which detailed with some sympathy the life of a Nazi spy? Well yes Hitler was bad but these Nazi idealists were trying to create a "new kind of man". She contributed to the deaths and enslavement of millions of people by working to support Stalinism. Much later she regrets. Yes Stalin was bad but she did not return her medals or seriously make amends, living out her final years in East Germany, for God's sake! Her abetting of Klaus Fuchs is actually indirectly excused by MacIntyre as somehow preventing war by evening up the East/West power balance! Fuchs got 13 years, the Rosenbergs got the chair. Western Liberals seem constitutionally unable to get beyond:Russia was a nightmare but somehow their Western dupes had their hearts in the right place. NB:Notice that Trump is always Hitler, never Stalin.

When I see Ben Macintyre's name on a new book I buy it and start reading it right away, certain in the knowledge that I will be enjoying a well written, well researched, fascinating chronicle of modern espionage. Agent Sonya is a worthy successor to such brilliant Macintyre works as The Spy and the Traitor and A Spy Among Friends, with a critical difference: the major protagonist is female.Ursula Kuczynski was a member of a prominent and wealthy German Jewish family active in Berlin's intellectual and artistic circles. In her childhood she lived through Germany's defeat in World War I, and as a teenager she witnessed the mounting tensions and rising anti-Semitism that led to the fall of the Weimar Republic and its replacement with Hitler's Third Reich. Like many in her generation Ursula became a Communist, not so much for ideological reasons as because she saw the Soviet Union as the strongest enemy of Fascism. Helped by her family's left-wing connections, Ursula journeyed to the Soviet Union, was recruited as a spy by Stalin's many-tentacled intelligence services, and spent years in Shanghai, Mukden, Moscow, Switzerland, and eventually rural England on various espionage assignments using the code name Sonya. Along the way she had a passionate affair with another Soviet spy, Richard Sorge, married or lived with three different men by whom she had three children, and jumped from one hair raising adventure to another. Her sex was an asset, since the Soviet and other intelligence services with whom she dealt were all highly male chauvinistic, and she was able to fly under the radar for many years, seeming to be nothing more than a nice normal wife and mother. Her most important contribution to the Soviet espionage effort was her connection with the physicist Klaus Fuchs, who passed an enormous amount of information on British and American efforts to build an atomic bomb through her to the Kremlin. Eventually, after Fuchs was exposed and arrested, Ursula and her family escaped to East Germany, where she lived for most of the rest of her life.Ursula's story seems too incredible even for the pages of a Fleming or Deighton spy thriller, but it all really happened, making Macintyre's extensively documented tale just as riveting as any James Bond adventure. If after reading Agent Sonya you are hungry for more such tales, I can recommend any of Macintyre's books, most especially A Spy Among Friends, which is about Kim Philby, another Soviet spy with whom Ursula had an indirect connection.

I've been a big fan of the author's previous works but this is about a cold hearted woman who was willing to abandon her children when duty called. And most of her "duty" seemed to involve trivial and pointless information gathering. I also didn't understood the obsession to spread communism in a distant country and work for some really awful people in the misguided belief that they were more important that her own family. She comes across as a zealot without a worthwhile cause.

RJ Newhouse's Reviews > Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime SpyAgent Sonya by Ben MacintyreAgent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spyby Ben Macintyre12518301RJ Newhouse's reviewFeb 26, 2021 · editit was amazingUrsula Kuczynski, known by her code name as Agent Sonya, was a dedicated believer in communism from a young age growing up in Germany. Venturing to Shanghai,associating with the communist group there, she was taken aback by the poverty and filth she saw and believed communism and Mao would solve this. Although married, she had an affair with a leading agent there, then later, married a second man and had three children all with different fathers. She had to balance taking care of them with her work as a spy for Russia, knowing that she was putting them in danger but choosing to continue with her work regardless.She learned the spying game in classes in Russia, importantly how to make radios for transmitting information.She was sent to different countries in Europe to recruit others who would then submit information to her to send by code back to the Soviet Union. She was one of the lucky ones to survive Stalin's purge of thousands and became a colonel in the Russian army.She played the part of just a housewife but was always on the watch lists of Nationalist China, England, the FBI, and Nazi Germany. Believing that the West, esp. the US should not have military and scientific advantage over Russia, she not only was the go between for Kim Philby and other English traitors with the beginnings of atomic secrets, but was THE contact of the brilliant physicist , Klaus Fuchs who was one of the developers of the US atomic bomb.Active throughout the Cold War, she "retired" in East Germany, appalled to learn of Stalin's butchery that had killed so many of her friends, and wrote books that were best sellers. She came to think that socialism,Russian style was fatally flawed but maintained her lifelong beliefs and values. She died in 2000, age 93, and after death , was awarded by Putin as a super agent of military intelligence

Apparently The Times newspaper called this latest book by Ben Macintyre “His best book yet”. I’m afraid I don’t agree. I’ve read several of Macintyre’s previous “real life” spy stories, and he generally does a good job of grabbing your interest and pulling you along. But although this one is certainly interesting and informative in parts, I found that other parts of it dragged on too much. In particular, the detailed accounts of Agent Sonya’s personal life and relationships told me more than I really wanted to know.In this book, I actually found the political background more interesting than the main espionage aspects of the history. In this political respect, the book tells the sad story of a woman’s descent from praiseworthy idealism to her becoming a spy, and an apologist, for Stalin’s tyrannical regime in Russia.Like the more famous Kim Philby, Ursula Kuczynski (Agent Sonya) was motivated by political principles. She genuinely believed that by spying for the USSR she was advancing the cause of a fairer and more peaceful world. Like many others in the 1920s and 1930s she could see that capitalism was a system based on exploitation and inequality, a system which was dragging the world into economic crisis and war, and a system which was giving birth to the monstrosity of fascism. (We see similar developments today.)It is understandable that in the early 1920s “Sonya” should be inspired by Russia. The 1917 Russian Revolution, led by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, had been a genuine workers’ revolution, with working people exercising power through the “soviets” (elected workers’ councils). She also saw that the communists were the most determined opponents of fascism.But by the late 1920s, before Kuczynski started to spy for the Russian GRU, the gains and democracy of the revolution had been destroyed by Stalin and the bureaucratic ruling class that had usurped power and turned Russia into a state capitalist tyranny.Sonya’s tragedy is that she dedicated her life to a totalitarian state which called itself socialist, but which was just as exploitative a system as the one in the West. Perhaps there was some excuse at first for her being unaware of the true nature of the USSR, but she stuck loyally by the Stalinist regime even when its crimes could not be ignored, right through Stalin’s purges and mass murder, and right up until the eventual collapse of the state capitalist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe. (China’s, Cuba’s and North Korea’s state capitalist rulers still falsely claim to be “communist”.)Genuine Marxists had long been advocating the slogan of “Neither Washington Nor Moscow But International Socialism”, and pointing out that “The Free World is not really free and the Communist World is not really communist”. But there was none of that for Kuczynski: she remained a loyal Stalinist.

My Grandparents are mentioned within this book. Sadly the some of the facts relating to them are incorrect. The family were unaware of them being written about. Which is a shame as the author could of gained the correct information. Growing up hearing stories of the spy they once shared a house with.

Ben Macintyre seems to follow the storyline of Ruth Kuczinskis memoirs rather closely and somewhat uncritically. When they were published in the East German dictatorship, they were so obviously a tool of communist propaganda, designed to glorify the exploits of the author. (The so-called complete edition published in 2006 in Berlin is in this respect little better than the Stasi-approved version of 1977)By sticking to the main story of Kuczinski's life as it was outlined in "Sonjas Report", Macintyre wastes too much space on the Chinese adventures of this diehard communist compared to her activities in England, where her basic actions - apart from being the operator of an illegal radio - seem to have been bicycling across Oxfordshire. The suspicions against Roger Hollis are treated rather summarily, but that is hardly surprising since MI5 is generally - with few exceptions- presented as a bunch of bungling incompetents.There are almost a hundred files the Kuczinskis in the Stasi archives in Berlin. Surely it should have been possible to present a fuller picture of "Sonjas" life in East Germany after she returned in 1950.All in all this book presents a far too positive picture of this diehard Stalinist, who remained one until well after the wall had been torn down.

This is a monumental work. I find it impossible to imagine the hours and hours of work which went into the completing the book. Testament to the scale of the effort involved is the length of the bibliography and the long list of acknowledged helpers. Despite it's length and unending attention to detail the book does not drag. The fact that the central character dominates the script is a bonus, not a disappointment. Ursula emerges as a quite remarkable woman whose upbringing in pre - war privileged Berlin Jewish society never blinds her to the horrors of fascism and drives her to almost lifelong support for the ideals of communism. Her life is truly remarkable and Macintyre does not spare any of the details. Lover, mother, soldier spy does summarise the content, and that sequence is not coincidental. The background character sketches of Britain's famous spies - Philby etc - add focus to the story and I almost laughed at the blundering incompetence of Britain's spy catchers. A marvellous read, and a story I will long remember.

Agent Sonya....... From planning an assassination attempt on Hitler in Switzerland, to spying on the Japanese in Manchuria, to preventing nuclear war (or so she believed) by stealing the science of atomic weaponry from Britain to give to Moscow, Ursula Kuczynski Burton conducted some of the most dangerous espionage operations of the twentieth century.Born to a German Jewish family, as Ursula grew, so did the Nazis' power. A fanatical opponent of the fascism that ravaged her homeland, she was drawn to communism as a young woman, motivated by the promise of a fair and peaceful society. She eventually became a spymaster, saboteur, bomb-maker and secret agent.In Agent Sonya, Britain's most acclaimed historian vividly reveals the fascinating tale of a life that would change the course of history.Classic Ben Macintyre - a gripping ride, based on meticulous research.A Book that took six days to read, why?Well this book is filled with detail, names, stories, places, spies, that it took an enormous about of concentration, re-reading to understand all the many different p0werful characters from the past, each spies back story, dates, times.A four star as I have to deeply respect the enormous research and time it takes to write a book like this, heavy going, oh yes, difficult to keep us with sometimes, yes, but filled with so many stories, spies.You read this and think " Who works for who", who's good who's bad, what right and what's wrong.Three for the book, four for the research.His best book is about a spy in Jersey ! Where I live.