AGENT SONYA

The rousing tale of the Soviet Union’s most celebrated female spy.

In the span of her long, colorful life, Ursula Kuczynski (1907-2000) rose in the Soviet ranks to the level of colonel and, in her later years, became a novelist and memoirist under the name Ruth Werner. Born to an affluent, left-leaning German Jewish family, she acquired strong communist convictions in her teens. Her career in espionage (code name: Sonya) began in 1930 after she relocated to Shanghai with her first husband, Rudolph Hamburger. In his latest entertaining nonfiction spy thriller, Macintyre tracks Sonya’s numerous audacious exploits during her prolific career. Drawing from her diaries, correspondences, and extensive interviews with her two adult sons, the author crafts a narrative that serves as both an engrossing historical tale and a compassionate portrait of Sonya as a complex woman with distinctly modern sensibilities for her time. Demanding and increasingly risky assignments drove Sonya and her family from Shanghai to Poland, Switzerland, and, eventually, England. Along the way, she became highly skilled at building and operating wireless radio transmitters and also mastered several languages. Her ultimate accomplishment emerged through her correspondence with nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs, transmitting scientific secrets that enabled the Soviets to develop an atomic weapon. Though her conscience was shaken when she eventually grasped the extent of Stalin’s murderous plans, she remained devoted to communist causes. Taking pride in her skills and accomplishments, she was also driven by the thrill of espionage work. “Survival against the odds brings with it an adrenaline high and a sense of destiny from cheating fate,” writes Macintyre, continuing, “as a trained intelligence officer, she would have the opportunity to write her own story in the pages of history. Ursula became a spy for the sake of the proletariat and the revolution; but she also did it for herself, driven by the extraordinary combination of ambition, romance, and adventure that bubbled inside her.”

An absorbing study of a remarkably accomplished 20th-century spy.