Ben Macintyre has done it again; produced a jaw-dropping book about 20th-century espionage. Sonya, born Ursula Kuczynski, lived a long life in service to the causes of anti-fascism and communism, starting 10 years before the Russian Revolution and extending decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Her travels and accomplishments would be unbelievable as fiction. As history, they are flat-out amazing in themselves and even more so because she did it all while being a loving wife and mother.

Born into an intellectual German Jewish family, she was keenly aware of the growing power of the Nazis. Much of it she viewed from afar, though, because she and her architect husband were living in Shanghai, where he was working. Appalled by the state of the Chinese working class and the growth of fascism, Ursula was soon recruited to spy for Soviet military intelligence, working with famed agent Richard Sorge.

Always willing to obey the orders of Moscow Centre, Ursula moved from Shanghai to Poland to Switzerland to England, shedding husbands/partners along the way, but accruing children. Her hair-raising escapes from danger are mostly attributable to her wiliness, but as Macintyre makes clear, there’s a little secret sauce in there too. And that’s sexism. Ursula was so outgoing, so charming, so at ease with all kinds of people (even Nazis), and so housewifely, that nobody ever seemed to think she could possibly be a Soviet spy, no matter what the evidence—and it reached the point where there was plenty.

Macintyre is particularly scathing about British intelligence’s failure to figure out that Ursula was involved (and how!) in the smuggling of nuclear bomb secrets to the USSR. She was a handler for Klaus Fuchs, the physicist who handed over copies of all the nuclear bomb work he was involved in. Interestingly, it was only their one high-level female employee who was suspicious of Ursula from the moment she arrived in England—and even before.

While I was astonished by Ursula’s story, so much of the time I was reading I kept thinking about her three children. Her eldest, Michael, had moved from Shanghai to Manchuria to Poland to Switzerland by the time he was 10 years old, and knew four languages. When she had to flee England after the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, her children were suddenly wrenched from their comfortable English village life to East Berlin. Just imagine that.

If you’ve read Ben Macintyre books before, you won’t need any encouragement to read this one. But if you haven’t, this is as good a book as any to start with, especially if you have an interest in reading about women in espionage.

Mother, Lover, Spy

Agent Sonya is the story of Ursula Kuczynski. Sonya grew up in a home of communist sympathizers. She embraced communism at an early age becoming a spy for the Soviet Union.

She spied for the Soviet Union in Switzerland, Shanghai China, and the United Kingdom. Married more than once, having lovers and children by 3 men, she often struggled with being a mother and a spy. She used her marriage and her children in her spy work. She often hid items for her spy activities in a baby carriage, a grocery basket, and once a teddy bear was used as a hiding place.

The book tells Sonya’s story, but it also tells the stories of each person mentioned in the book. It has much historical and technical information as well as the stories of each person mentioned. The book did bog down for me in May places, it was a bit tedious at times. I did enjoy Sonya’s story, not so much all the other stories in between. The technical information was over my head and not interesting to me.

I read the book to the end because I wanted to find out what happened to Sonya. I did appreciate the concluding remarks at the end telling how each of the main characters ended up.

Thanks to Ben Macintyre, Crown Publishing, and NetGalley for allowing me to read an advanced copy of the book in return for an honest review.