Ursula Kuczynski
Ursula Kuczynski, also known as Ruth Werner, Ursula Beurton and Ursula Hamburger, was a German Communist activist who spied for the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s, most famously as the handler of nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs. She moved to East Germany in 1950 when Fuchs was unmasked, and published a series of books related to her espionage activities, including her bestselling autobiography, Sonjas Rapport.
Sources concerned with her espionage work in the 1930s/40s sometimes use the cover name originally suggested to her in Shanghai by her fellow intelligence operative and lover Richard Sorge: "Sonja", "Sonja Schultz" or, after she moved to Britain, "Sonya".
Life
Early years
Ursula Maria Kuczynski was born in Schöneberg, Berlin, Prussia, German Empire on 15 May 1907, the second of the six children of the economist and demographer Robert René Kuczynski and his wife Berta Kuczynski, a painter. The family was a secular Jewish one. Ursula had four younger sisters: Brigitte, Barbara, Sabine and Renate, and an older brother, Jürgen, who would later become a historian-economist with a controversial relationship of his own with the espionage community.The children were academically gifted, and the household was prosperous, employing a cook, a gardener, two household servants and a nanny, Olga Muth. Ursula grew up in a small villa on the Schlachtensee lake in the Zehlendorf borough in the southwest of Berlin. When she was eleven she landed a screen role in The House of Three Girls, the cinema version of Das Dreimäderlhaus.
Ursula attended the Lyzeum in Zehlendorf and then, between 1924 and 1926, undertook an apprenticeship as a book dealer. She had already, in 1924, joined the left-leaning Free Employees league, and 1924 was also the year in which she joined the Young Communists and Germany's Red Aid. In May 1926, the month of her nineteenth birthday, Ursula Kuczynski joined the Communist Party of Germany.
Librarianship, marriage and politics
In 1926 and 1927, she attended a librarianship academy while working at a lending library. She then took a job at Ullstein Verlag, a large Berlin publishing house. However, she lost this job in 1928 after participating in a May-Day Demonstration and/or on account of her Communist Party membership. Between December 1928 and August 1929 she worked in a New York book shop before returning to Berlin where she married Rudolf Hamburger, an architect and fellow member of the Communist Party. It was also at this time that she set up the Marxist Workers' Library in Berlin. She headed up the MAB between August 1929 and June 1930.Espionage
China
With her husband, Ursula relocated, in July 1930, to Shanghai, where a frenetic construction boom afforded ample opportunities for Hamburger's architectural work. She would remain based in China till 1935. It was here that the couple's son, the Shakespeare scholar Maik Hamburger, was born in February 1931. After they had been in Shanghai for a little more than four months she was introduced by the American journalist Agnes Smedley, to another German expatriate, Richard Sorge, an agent of the Fourth Department of the Red Army, responsible for military intelligence, posing as a journalist. "Sonja" operated a Russian spy ring under Sorge's direction. In Shanghai, she also met Roger Hollis, who later became the director of MI5, and Manfred Stern, who had run a spy network in the United States and was now a military advisor to the Chinese Communist Party.In Fall 1931, Ursula sent her son Michael to live with her husband's parents while she went to Moscow, where she undertook a seven-month training session before returning to China. There had been a concern that if baby Michael had accompanied her to Moscow he might inadvertently have blown her cover later by blurting out words in Russian. It was also during this period that she was trained in various practical aspects of spy-craft. This included radio operator skills that were much prized in the world of espionage: she learned to build and operate a radio receiver, becoming an exceptionally capable and accurate user of Morse code. For her next assignment, she was teamed up with Johann Patra, codenamed "Ernst".
Between March and December 1934, they were based in Shenyang in Manchuria which had been under Japanese military occupation since the Mukden Incident in 1931. In April 1935, one of their agents was arrested by the Japanese, and they were ordered to relocate to Peking. The following month, the Shanghai Municipal Police Special Branch arrested Yakov Grigoryevich Bronin, Sorge's successor in China. When his apartment was searched, evidence was found that his typewriter had been purchased by Ursula. As a result, her husband Rudolf was questioned by the Special Branch. The Fourth Department decided to redeploy Rudolf and Ursula to Poland. En route, she visited her family in England, where they had fled after the Nazi Party's rise to power. While stationed in Manchuria, Ursula and Patra had a romance that resulted in the birth of her daughter Janina in April 1936. Her husband Rudolf generously acknowledged "Nina" as though she were his own daughter.
Poland
In September 1935, they were both posted to Poland where, apart from at least one more lengthy visit to Moscow, they would remain till Autumn 1938. The couple lived mostly in the Polish capital Warsaw during this time and carried out espionage to assist underground Polish communists, apart when Ursula carried out a from a three-month mission in the Free City of Danzig. in 1936. In a ceremony in Moscow on 15 June 1937, Mikhail Kalinin presented her with the Order of the Red Banner for her espionage work in China. This was the time of the Great Purge and while she was in Moscow, many of her associates were imprisoned and executed.She was now a major in the Red Army, despite never having worn a uniform.Switzerland
Between Autumn 1938 and December 1940, as agent "Sonja Schultz", Ursula was based in Switzerland, where she was one of the Red Three network, with Sándor Radó. Her duties included working as a specialist radio operator, applying technical skills acquired during her Moscow visits earlier in the decade. The codes she used to send information to Moscow from her house in Caux, a three-hour walk up into the mountains above Montreux, have never been deciphered. In Switzerland, she collaborated with the Lucy spy ring and was involved in recruiting agents to be infiltrated into Germany. She also ran her own ring, with agents that included Alexander Foote and Len Beurton.England
Ursula's marriage to Rudolf Hamburger finally ended after he paid her a brief visit in Switzerland to say farewell before returning to China with Johann Patra. She obtained a divorce on the spurious grounds that Hamburger had committed adultery with one of her sisters, on 26 October 1939, and married Len Buerton on 23 February 1940, Defender of the Fatherland Day. One motive for this was to obtain a British passport to enable her to escape from Switzerland, which was now all but surrounded by fascist Germany and Italy. She applied for the passport on the day after the wedding. Betrayed by their nanny, Olga Muth, Ursula handed over her radio transmitter to Foote, and left Switzerland in December 1940. Buerton had to remain behind; as a former member of the International Brigades, he was refused permission to transit Spain. Travelling via Vichy France and Spain, Ursula and the children reached Portugal on Christmas Day. On 14 January 1941, they boarded the, which reached Liverpool on 4 February. Beurton did not join them in the UK until 30 July 1942, having obtained a fake British passport from MI6 in return for information about Radó's spy ring.Her second son was born in the late summer of 1943. They had settled in north Oxford, but soon moved on to the first of a succession of nearby villages, settling initially in Glympton, and then in Kidlington. In May 1945, the Beurtons relocated again, to a larger house in the north Oxfordshire village of Great Rollright where they remained until 1950, becoming so integrated into the village community that both her parents, who were frequent visitors in Oxfordshire even after the war ended, and who both died in 1947, are buried in the Great Rollright churchyard. In each Oxfordshire property in which she lived, Ursula installed a radio receiver and transmitter, which during the Second World War was illegal.
Living in Oxfordshire placed them conveniently close to her parents who had emigrated to London after 1933, and were then living with friends in Oxford because of the air raids in London. The Beurtons' Oxfordshire village homes were close to Blenheim Palace, where a large part of the MI5 had been relocated at the start of the Second World War, and the UK's Atomic Research Centre at Harwell, which was established in 1947. From 1942, she worked as a courier for the USSR's "Atomic spies", Klaus Fuchs and Melita Norwood. Ursula thus hastened the development of the Soviet atomic bomb, successfully tested in 1949. She was the GRU handler for an officer of the Royal Air Force and J. B. S. Haldane, a British specialist in submarine radar. She was also able to pass to her Soviet employers information from her brother, her father, and other exiled Germans in England. It was her brother Jürgen Kuczynski, an internationally respected economist, who originally recruited Fuchs to spy for the Soviets, and supplied her with reports from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey.
Together with, she worked on infiltrating German Communist exiles into the US Office of Strategic Services. By Autumn 1944, the Americans were at this time preparing "Operation Hammer" for parachuting UK-based German exiles into Germany. Ursula was able to ensure that a substantial number of the OSS agents parachuted into Germany were reliable communists, able and willing to make inside intelligence available not merely to the OSS, but also to Moscow.
Many years later Ursula recalled that she was twice visited by MI5 representatives in 1947, and asked about her links with Soviet intelligence, which she refused to discuss. Her communist sympathies were no secret, but British suspicions were insufficiently supported by evidence to justify her arrest. Her visitors were unaware of or unconcerned by her periodic, and apparently casual, meetings with Fuchs in Nethercote, Banbury or on country cycle rides. At that time the British intelligence services seem to have been disinclined to follow up their concerns. Two years later detonation of the first Soviet atomic bomb refocused priorities within MI5, however. Fuchs was arrested towards the end of 1949; in January 1950 he was put on trial and confessed that he was a spy. The day before his trial started, fearing that she was about to be unmasked, Ursula left England. In March 1950, after two decades away from the city of her birth, she returned to Berlin. Meanwhile, Fuchs finally identified her as his Soviet contact in November 1950. The espionage-related aspects of her friendship with Melita Norwood only began to emerge in 1999.