As of last week, the only thing I knew about Agnes Smedley was that The Feminist Press had reissued her most famous book and that the poet Robert Lowell had objected that she – a known communist sympathizer – was allowed to stay at Yaddo – the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs.

Getting to know her a little better has been one of the side benefits of Ben Macintyre’s pageturner Agent Sonya.

Agent Sonya – aka Ursula Kuczynski – was born into an intellectual and prosperous Jewish family in Berlin 1907.  Radicalized by the political ferment of the Weimar Republic she became a communist, committed to the utopian ideal of a proletarian revolution.

Shanghai

In 1930, Ursula – now Mrs Hamburger – moved to Shanghai where her architect husband had been offered a job.

Shanghai between the wars was:

glamorous and seedy, shiny and grotty … home to a teeming international throng of beggars, millionaires, prostitutes, fortune-tellers, gamblers, journalists, gangsters, aristocrats, warlords, artists, pimps, bankers, smugglers and spies.

Part colony, part Chinese city, it was home to 50,000 foreigners surrounded by almost three million Chinese, most living in abject squalor. The international community included British, Americans, French, Germans, Portuguese, Indians, White Russians, Japanese and others, some of them penniless refugees, others new-minted plutocrats of staggering wealth.

It was a place where spying and intrigue were a way of life.

While the ex-pats lived lives of bourgeois luxury and glamor, a seething and bloody political battle raged between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists. In the city, the Nationalists had the upper hand and the slaughter was brutal. This was not a healthy time to be a communist in Shanghai.

Ursula settled into the domestic life of the ex-pat community. And then she met Agnes Smedley. 

Over tea at the luxurious Cathay Hotel they forged a friendship that led to Ursula’s recruitment as a Soviet agent. Smedley had been recruited the previous year in Berlin.

Ursula was five months pregnant, and unaware of her new friend’s covert activities. She did not know that Agnes’s handbag contained a loaded pistol. She knew only that she had found a sister of the heart.

That friendship was destined to falter, but for the next two decades, Ursula/ Sonya was a very effective Soviet operative who led an astonishing set of double lives. Her dedication to the communist cause did not even waver even as many in her network of friends and contacts were murdered during the Stalinist purges.

Macintyre’s account of Sonya is gripping. If you’ve been drawn into the spy world of John le Carré, read this. It has all the narrative style of a good novel with the benefits of careful and detailed research.

Macintyre’s Sonya is an emotionally complex portrait of a highly successful espionage agent, a devoted mother, a dedicated communist idealist, and the kind of person who would be fun to have as a neighbor. 

The Spy Who Came in From the Co-op

Some of the intriguing minor characters in book include Milicent Bagot – the lone MI5 expert who suspected Sonya. It is believed that John le Carré based his Soviet analyst Connie Sachs on Bagot.  In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Smiley visits the retired Sachs in Oxford and pours Scotch into her teacup to get the memories to flow.

Another is the woman dubbed as “the spy who came in from the Co-op” because of her suburban housewife ordinariness. This is Melita Norwood who worked at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association as a secretary and supplied nuclear secrets that were passed along to the Soviets. Her story was made into a novel by Jenny Rooney that then became the 2018 film Red Joan with Judi Dench in the lead.

But all that aside – it is the character and personality of Ursula/ Sonya that Macintyre truly brings into focus.

Her intelligence career was extraordinary and in addition to Shanghai, she operated in Manchuria (smuggling radio parts in her child’s teddy bear), Poland, Danzig, and Switzerland. In Switzerland, she married Len Buerton which meant she could obtain a British passport. As Switzerland became encircled and the Nazis swept across Europe, Ursula left for England where her parents and siblings were refugees. Again, she set up shop to serve the cause.   

After her brother recruited the atom scientist Klaus Fuchs she became the conduit, first meeting him in a cafe across from the Snow Hill station in Birmingham. By then she was living in Oxfordshire – giving birth to her third child, sending the other two off to school, making friends with the neighbors, baking scones, and funneling secrets to the Soviets.

After Klaus Fuchs was arrested in 1950, Ursula knew that MI5 was closing in and that it was just a matter of time. She left for East Germany with her two youngest children, her oldest was at university in Aberdeen. In the decades that followed she received many accolades from the Soviets and became a successful novelist – re-working some of the episodes of her life into bestsellers under the pen name Ruth Werner. She died in 2000.

Agnes Smedley returned to America in 1941 and was an advocate for China and the revolution.

She was accused of being a communist spy and she was followed by the FBI. Feeling the pressure, she left to live in England where she died after surgery for an ulcer in 1950.

Her ashes were buried a year later at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing.

I’ve started reading Daughter of Earth. It’s pretty grim stuff. Don’t know how far I will get. What amazing lives!