Dan Snow's History Hit - Soviet Spy in the Cotswolds with Ben Macintyre

Episode Date: December 20, 2020

Ben Macintyre joined me on the podcast to talk about Ursula Kuczynski, one of the greatest spies of the 20th Century.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit. Days away now, maybe even hours away from releasing The Winter Truce,

our most ambitious TV production, actually, and podcast ever. Wherever you're listening to this, we've got two parts on the Christmas Truce, British and German historians talking about that remarkable moment in the Christmas of 1914, when many units on both sides took a break from the industrial slaughter, hung out, smoked, drank, maybe a little kick around, and just fraternised. We've got a huge drama dot coming in the next 24 hours on History Hit TV, and we've got the podcast coming right here. You can get historyhit.tv, the world's best history channel, if you go to that website and then use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, special for podcasters. No one else gets this. You get a month for free if you use POD1, and then you get your second month, which is one dollar, one euro, one pound. Sweet. Anyway,

equally exciting is the subject of today's podcast. Ben McIntyre has been on this podcast many times before. He's a phenomenon, really. His books are just time after time. He just writes these fantastic books about espionage. Second World War, Cold War. He's a brilliant researcher, a brilliant writer. And as you know, because you've been on the podcast and the TV channel before, just a lovely guy, totally lovely guy. We're talking at this time about one of the most successful Soviet spies in history, Agent Sonia, Ursula Kaczynski.

It turned out she was one of the great super spies of the world, passing on atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. I mean, this is an amazing story. It's going to blow your mind. Sit down, pour yourself a stiff drink, and just enjoy this brilliant podcast with Ben McIntyre. If you want to come and watch these podcasts broadcast live, you could be there. Amazing. What about that? you could be there live around the uk cities go to historyhit.com slash tour it's all happening next year it's going to be so fun no more social distancing full of vaccine we're going to be hepped up we'll be full of vaccine and we're gonna have a good time in the meantime everyone here is ben mcintyre

hello ben mcinty. Welcome back on the podcast. It's a delight to be here. Thank you, Dan. Ben, every time I see you, I ask the same question. Where do you find these amazing stories? How do you get this pipeline? Accident, usually. I mean, in honesty, good luck. I mean, I got so lucky with this one with Agent Sonia. It's a story I knew vaguely.

She appears on the margins of some of the other spy stories. But partly, I think, because she's a woman, she's never been written about properly. As you know, the espionage of the last century, particularly the middle of the last century, was utterly dominated by men. And the history of that time has mostly been written by men. And so as a woman, that was sort of, in a way, it was her greatest disguise. So as a woman, that was sort of, in a way, it was her greatest disguise. Being a wife and a mother meant that MI5, the FBI, the Gestapo, they all overlooked her. But it also means she's been slightly overlooked by history.

And I came across her by accident. I was researching a completely different story. In fact, a story of an OSS operation, an American operation at the end of the war to parachute anti-Nazi Germans from Britain into the dying Third Reich. And they were recruiting Germans among the exiled community in London. But what they didn't know was that those recruits were actually being pre-recruited by this shadowy woman agent. The Americans believed they were spying for them. In fact, they were spying for the Soviet Union. And the recruiter in that case was Ursula, Ursula Kaczynski. And once I kind of found out about her, I then began to research her earlier life and found this amazing story that took one all the way back to Shanghai in the 1920s, and then to Japanese-occupied Manchuria and Poland

and Switzerland, and then finally Britain. And it was just an amazing sort of opening up, but I couldn't have done it really without two things. One is the declassification of MI5 files in Britain, which started many years ago now, nearly 20 years ago now, but it's now a sort of systematic operation by MI5 to declassify everything after 50 years if they can. And there are 79 different files on the Kaczynski family. They were tracked very closely in Britain. So that was hugely useful and I couldn't have done it without that. And then it was the cooperation of the family, the Kaczynski family. They were tracked very closely in Britain. So that was hugely useful. And I couldn't have done it without that. And then it was the cooperation of the family. The two surviving children of Ursula Kaczynski were amazingly helpful and simply threw open their family archive and said, help yourself. And in there, there were letters and diaries and

thousands of photographs and this unpublished material, lots of sort of books that she had written but had never published and also books that she had written and published. And the combination of those two was really the sort of bedrock of the research on this one. Why has she been overlooked? She ruthlessly exploited her gender. And I mean that in the best possible way. But she worked out very, very early on that it was a brilliant camouflage that time and again, men investigating simply couldn't believe. And she said this quite explicitly, that a wife and mother could possibly be a top level intelligence officer. And that is also what sets her apart, I think, is that there are many women spies in history. There are women agents from, you know,

and informants from Mata Hari onwards, in fact, long before Mata Hari. And we are all familiar with the SOE heroines of the Second World War. What makes Ursula different, I think, is that she is a trained intelligence officer. She's a professional. She decided to do this as a career. And she rose through the ranks of the Red Army Intelligence Unit. There is no equivalent figure in any intelligence service that I've come across who rose to become a colonel within the organisation itself. And that really does set her apart, I think. What about before she became a spy? What was her journey into espionage? Her journey is a remarkable one. It's impossible

to understand someone like Ursula Kaczynski unless you appreciate that she grew up in the chaos of the Weimar years between the war in Germany, when the fascists were on the march, the economy was collapsing and exploding, inflation was throwing people into poverty overnight. And if it was someone like Ursula who came from a sophisticated, highly intellectual, Jewish, upper middle class background. Communism was the logical place to go. Communism was the one force, from Ursula's point of view, that was standing up to Hitler. So there's the ideological underpinning. But the movement to espionage is much more personal in her case. It comes from two individuals, really, whom she encountered in Shanghai. One was a

novelist, a woman novelist, an American called Agnes Smedley, who had been really a very well-known radical feminist writer in the 1920s, but who was recruited by Soviet intelligence in Berlin. She was also a sort of communist, although she never joined the party. And it was Agnes who passed Ursula on to a man called Richard Sorge, who was described by Ian Fleming as being the most formidable spy in history. And he was he was extraordinary. He, too, was an officer in the Red Army Intelligence Service. seduced her and they became lovers and collaborators and it's the combination I think of ideological affinity and romantic and emotional attachment that really kind of brought Ursula into the game Richard Sorge she had other lovers she had three children by three different men but Richard Sorge really was the love of her life I think and she kept a photograph of him until her dying day.

They worked very hard, didn't they? I mean, she went out to the Far East initially. Well, she was extremely good at this game. I mean, she was not only was she, you know, absolutely tough as nails and dedicated to the cause, she was a brilliant radio technician. I mean, she was trained in how to assemble a shortwave radio parts, almost from pieces of equipment you'd find in a kitchen. I mean, she was quite brilliant at that sort of stuff. And they worked, as you say, extremely hard. And it was dangerous stuff. I mean, after the Shanghai period, she went to Moscow and was trained there. And then she was sent to Japanese occupied Manchuria to help the communist underground there that was battling the Japanese occupiers. And if she'd been caught, she would undoubtedly have been executed, as would her

family. So the stakes for her could not have been higher. And then again, in Switzerland, where she was running a spy ring inside Nazi Germany, had she been found, she would undoubtedly have been deported and murdered. So yes, I mean, she was astonishingly industrious and dedicated and while bringing up a family. And I guess that is also, in some ways, the kind of emotional core of this story, because Ursula's struggle in a way throughout her life, revealed in her private writings, was her desire and her attempts to balance what she saw as her ideological duty as a Red Army officer and a dedicated communist, with her responsibilities as a wife, and particularly as a mother. You know, she was a dedicated mother, but yet she sort of knew, and she once sort of half admitted this, that if it came to the crunch, she would have put the revolution ahead of her family.

And even to her dying day, she felt a residual guilt about this. She wrote right towards the end of her life, she said, I don't know whether I've been a good spy, but a bad mother. I mean, this is what is fascinating about her life, really, is that she was very young when the Bolshevik revolution took place and very old when the Berlin Wall came down. So her life in lots of ways encompasses the whole of communism in all its grand horror and from its ideological purity, the beginning to its chaotic and sclerotic explosion at the end. So she's the whole thing. And she went through huge doubts in that in the course of that time there were moments when she began to feel that she was on the wrong side particularly during the stalinist purges although she didn't discover about those until the 50s and was deeply

shocked when she found out the truth the invasion of hungary the the crushing of the prague spring in 1968 these were terrible moments for her but But she clung to communism. And she consistently argued that what she had done had not been done for Stalin and his bunch of crooks, but had been done for the sake of an idea. But that said, it's pretty clear that in the very end of her life, she was deeply disillusioned. She realized that this grand experiment had failed and the truths that she had clung to all her life were in large part lies. And that she died a disillusioned woman. Did the Soviets use her differently because she was a woman? Was it very gendered? Were they, you know, expecting her to allure powerful men, for example?

Well, she was, she was extremely attractive, Ursula. She wasn't classically beautiful in any way, but she had a kind of galvanic effect on both men and women. So she had a kind of seductive air. She didn't really, she wasn't a kind of seductress. And in fact, the honey trap, I think, is really a myth. I've only ever come across one example, and even that one I didn't really believe.

So I don't think that happens. But she was perfectly happy and brilliant at using her gender and her sex to get information, not by seducing people, but simply by appearing to be an ordinary German housewife and listening very intently. And of course, people were only too happy to talk to this charming young woman who posed no threat at all. So in that way, she did. Whether the Red Army bosses realized that was what she was doing. I mean, she was quite economical with the reality with her with her bosses in Moscow. She didn't tell them everything. For example, every time she got pregnant, she didn't tell them until the baby was born, because, you know, there wasn't really a sort of maternity leave system for Soviet military intelligence.

because there wasn't really a sort of maternity leave system for Soviet military intelligence. So she just carried on. And I think her bosses there were extremely surprised at how good she was at it. I don't think in the initial period they thought that she would be half as effective as she was. By the time she arrived in Britain, she really was the most senior Soviet operative on British soil.

I feel I need to ask about Mr. Hamburger. How do you feel about this? Do you know about it? Well, Rudi Hamburger was her first husband, Rudolf Hamburger. He was another German Jew from Berlin, a young architect. And it was because of him that she went to Shanghai. He got a job. They got married very young. He got a job working as an architect for the Shanghai Municipal Council. He wasn't a communist, but he was kind of brought into the communist fold by Ursula. It was one of her characteristics was that she was a great sort of missionary for the cause. And eventually, even though their marriage was collapsing and coming apart, they had the first child, Michael, together,

but really it didn't work. He was determined to become a spy. And the tragedy of it is that he knew what Ursula was doing. And he offered himself as a spy to her bosses, even though the marriage was effectively over. And with some reluctance, they recruited him. And the reluctance was simply because although Rudy was a very good architect, he was absolutely hopeless spy. He simply didn't know how to do it and couldn't cover his tracks properly. And with tragic consequences, because they had long broken up, and he was trained in Moscow, as she had been, and then he was sent to Iran by Soviet military intelligence, where he was arrested, in fact, through competence on his part, by the Americans and the British. And the Brits sent him back to Moscow, because at that point point he was, you know,

he was in, Moscow was in alliance with Britain and America during the war. So he was sent back to Moscow. He thought he would get a hero's welcome when he returned. On the contrary, in Stalin's paranoid world, anyone who had been in contact of any sort with Western intelligence was suspect

and he was thrown into the gulag where he remained for 10 years. Rudy's account of his thrown into the gulag where he remained for 10 years. Rudy's account of his time in the gulag is utterly chilling. It's a brilliant piece of writing and another sort of vital part of this story, really, because Rudy's story is sort of, in a way, the most shocking example of the cost that is associated with this kind of business. I mean, we think of spy stories as being sort of heroic, black and white, you know, the heroes win and the villains always lose.

Life's not like that. And espionage definitely isn't like that. And Rudy was one of many victims in this story, but people get chewed up by espionage. Nobody really comes out unscathed. And that goes for the people around Ursula. I mean, she suffered to some extent, but certainly her children and her husbands and her lovers,

nobody came out of this unmarked. And Rudy suffered most of all. Land a Viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.

podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. So how on earth did she end up in Oxfordshire? Well, she was in Switzerland running the spy ring and she was, amazingly, the nanny,

her family nanny was about to betray them and she had to escape to Britain. By this point she'd married a British sub-agent of hers, a communist called Len Burton which meant that she therefore had a British passport. The rest of her family had already taken refuge in Britain from the Nazi persecution and so she arrived in Oxfordshire, set up shop, re-established contact with Soviet intelligence through the Soviet embassy. So she had a kind of controller operating there under diplomatic cover. And she began spying again. She built herself a very powerful radio transmitter, which she installed in the privy in the back garden of her home in rural Oxfordshire. And she set about gathering intelligence.

Oxfordshire. And she set about gathering intelligence, most importantly, secrets about the building of the British atomic weapon, the top secret tube alloys project during the war, which was the Anglo American project to build the atomic weapon without informing the Soviet Union, even though they were an alliance, which was sort of maintained later was the reason why she'd done it and she had an astonishing level of access most importantly Klaus Fuchs a character some of your listeners will certainly know about who was the most important of the atomic spies another German refugee who was handing huge quantities of information over to Ursula she would meet him in the countryside around Oxfordshire and he was was handing over, and I'm not exaggerating, the blueprints of how to build an atomic weapon. In fact, there was so much of it that Ursula couldn't send it all by radio. So she had to use a dead drop site to pass these physical blueprints over. The Soviet Union made a

calculation of just how much Klaus Fuchs had sent through. And in the end, it was something like 570 different documents were supplied. The A to Z of where British science had got to in building the atomic weapon. So if you'd been in the tiny village of Great Rollwright in 1944, you might have seen Mrs. Burton on her bicycle, you know, cycling around the countryside with her three children and her husband Len. And she famously baked excellent scones and attended the local fete and went to church every Sunday. But in reality, that was Colonel Ursula Kaczynski of the Red Army. And when the Soviet Union detonated its own test bomb in 1949, that was in part, in large part, down to Mrs. Burton of Great Roll Ride. How was she introduced to Klaus Fuchs, the Soviet spy who handed so many atomic secrets over?

Well, they were actually introduced through Ursula's brother, Jürgen, who was a fellow communist. He was also a Soviet agent. He was one of Ursula's sub-agents. And yes, Klaus Fuchs, who was an extremely prodigiously talented physicist, a German Jew, a secret communist, met Jürgen Kaczynski in the kind of leftist German circles. And Jürgen passed him on to Ursula, knowing that Ursula was the main, the most important Soviet spy in Britain. And they met, first of all, they met in Birmingham railway station, in a cafe opposite Birmingham railway station, where Fuchs began handing over vast swathes of material from what was codenamed the Tube Alloys Project, which was Britain's atomic bomb building project,

authorised in top secrecy by Churchill. Now Fuchs's motives are fascinating really because in a way he was terribly naive. He just believed that it was not fair that now that Ribbentrop pack was over and Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union now that Britain and America and the Soviet Union were allies against Germany, it didn't seem fair to him that Britain was producing a bomb but not sharing the secret with the Soviet Union. It was simply that straightforward for him. And he began to hand over what amounted in the end to one of the largest spy halls in history.

570 pages of blueprints, documents, formulae. I mean, it was so complicated what he was handing over. Ursula had initially no real idea of what she had here. It was much too complicated to be able to send by radio. So she would pass it through a dead drop site, which was a hollow tree, not far from Great Rollwright, her village home, which was three trees down from the railway crossing, was the dead drop site. And she would leave this material there and her Soviet contact from the Soviet embassy would drive out and pick it up.

Or else she would meet him at various different rendezvous sites around Oxford or in London. And it amounted to, really, it was the plan of how to build the bomb. Of all the atomic spies, Klaus Fuchs is really by far the most important. Presumably the same sexism that's responsible for her kind of partial eradication from history is also to blame for her being totally overlooked by Britain's counter-espionage team. This sort of harmless country housewife biking around up country lanes. In order, I think, to see through Ursula's disguise,

it would have taken a woman really to see what was going on here. And there was one woman inside the anti-communist section of MI5, and she went by the unimprovable name of Millicent Bagot. Now, Millicent Bagot was the model, believe it or not, for Connie Sachs in the John le Carre novels. David Cornwell actually knew her quite well and she was an unmarried, formidable, highly intelligent, hard-driving, one of those women who wore a hat indoors at all times and sang with the Bach choir and you didn't meddle with Millicent. Bagot had spotted pretty early on

that the Kaczynskis were a dangerous group. The whole family, actually. I mean, believe it or not, there are 71 MI5 files on the Kaczynskis in all. And in particular, Bagot believed that Ursula was up to no good. And she was forever nudging her bosses and trying to persuade them that really they ought to look more deeply into the Kaczynski plan. and trying to persuade them that really they ought to look more deeply into the Kaczynski plan. One of the longest running conspiracy theories, which is whether Ursula was protected by someone inside MI5. I mean, she very wickedly herself dropped hints that she felt a protective hand had been held over her. And Millicent Bagot's boss in F section of MI5 was Roger Hollis.

Now, Roger Hollis, as some of your listeners will know, would go on to become Director General of MI5. He was also in Shanghai in 1929 at the precise moment that Ursula and Richard Sorge were setting up their spy rings. So there is a long-running theory that in fact Ursula and other communist and Soviet spies operating in Britain were protected by Roger Hollis. Now, I've been through the evidence on this very closely. And it seems to me, there really only, I mean, it is undoubtedly true that Hollis dropped the ball on every occasion when he had the opportunity to run with it. Whenever there was, I mean, there was even a report from a local policeman who said interestingly enough there is a very large aerial

on top of the Burton's house you know would this merit further investigation and the word came back from Roger Hollis no I don't think we need to do that so there are two ways of interpreting this the first is that Roger Hollis was a traitor at working secretly with the Soviets the second is that he was simply massively incompetent and my instinct errs towards the latter for two reasons, really. One is that, you know, if Hollis had been this super spy, he would have managed to cover his trail brilliantly for 20 years. He would have had to remember a vast panoply of lies. He would have had to have been absolutely brilliant. No one ever accused Rogerllis of being brilliant

he was he was applauding quite slow bureaucratic i mean he was a bit of an omelette really old old hollis so there's that reason and the other reason i think is a more political one if there had been this super spy at the heart of british intelligence for all those years i think we can be pretty sure that vladimir put Putin would have told us about him by now and they would have they would have a huge archive in the GRU archives that would reveal that he had been this thing we've not heard a single peep no tame Russian historian has been fed into the archives and told to tell the story of Roger Hollis super spy which suggests to me that he just that is not what he was but they dropped the ball they did not see Ursula even when it became really clear with hindsight that that something was going on they

were picking up radio transmissions from the Cotswolds but again they suspected Len Burton her husband because he was a man and a known communist but they never really got a got a laid a glove on Ursula and when the net really did close I mean when Klaus Fuchs was arrested when Fuchs himself who protected Ursula to some extent he never gave her name but he gave enough hints that it to anybody it became clear that something was going on they did send an MI5 officer, two of them in fact, to interview Ursula in her little rose-covered cottage in the Cotswolds. But they really suspected Len and not Ursula. And they emerged from this interview saying, well, she was cooking a birthday cake for her son and she was wearing an apron. We really don't think it can be her because she's a woman.

Can't believe she died as late as 2000. We could have met her. She lived an astonishingly long time. And she had, by that point, completely reinvented herself as someone else. She was no longer Ursula Kaczynski or even Ursula Burton. She was now Ruth Werner. She had become a highly successful children's novelist. She became, it was often said,

the Enid Blyton of East Germany. She sold thousands of copies and nobody had a clue that, in fact, she had been Colonel Ursula Kaczynski of the Red Army, not until she produced The Truth in about 1977. Are the archives there? You know, are we going to suddenly find out who she was running? They are definitely there and And they have not been opened up. I mean, one or two Russian historians have had access to some of them. But there is clearly more. Now, whether there were very many more, I'm not quite sure. You know, I think the main ones, Fuchs and Melita Norwood and so on, have probably been identified by now. But no,

there is clearly more there. And maybe one of the responses to this book will be that they'll open them up a bit more. I mean, we know that Putin is very keen to celebrate his successes and downgrade his failures. So was Ursula a success? Depends on which side of the lens you're looking at it from. I mean, her line, and this perhaps, you know, is something to take away is, you know know she always argued that by handing the bomb to the soviets she had made the world a safer place or she had helped to do so that she had kind of helped to create that fragile balance of power the mutually assured destruction that meant that we were not dominated by one nuclear superpower but there was an option and you know

did that make us safe well that's what if history but i mean if you look back and think gosh you know america first we look at america first today and see what we have what would america first if it had been america first the first and only superpower in 1945 unchallenged global hegemony i i wonder if we would have wanted to live in that sort of world so it's a a bit ex post facto, but there is a strong argument there that this, you know, she did us all a service. Ben McIntyre, the book is called? Agent Sonia, Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Oh, thank you, Dan. Well, it's been a great pleasure as ever. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for having me. Hi, everyone. Thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour. Head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars

and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age

and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.