2025/059: Agent Sonya: Mother, Lover, Soldier, Spy — Ben MacIntyre

2025/059: Agent Sonya: Mother, Lover, Soldier, Spy — Ben MacIntyre

Mrs Burton of Avenue Cottage drank tea with the neighbours, joined in their complaints about the shortages and agreed that the war must soon be over... Colonel Kuczynski of the Red Army, meanwhile, was running the largest network of spies in Britain: her sex, motherhood, pregnancy and apparently humdrum domestic life together formed the perfect camouflage. Men simply did not believe a housewife making breakfast from powdered egg, packing her children off to school and then cycling into the countryside could possibly be capable of important espionage. [loc. 4269]

Another of MacIntyre's entertaining biographies of 20th century spies, this is the story of Ursula Kuczynski, a German Jew and communist who spied for the Soviet Union before and during WW2, and was instrumental in the USSR's acquisition of 'the science of atomic weaponry'.( Read more... )