Ursula Kuczynski

Ursula Kuczynski (15 May 1907 – 7 July 2000), also known as Ruth Werner, Ursula Beurton and Ursula Hamburger, was a German Communist activist who spied for the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s, most famously as the handler of nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs.

Ursula Maria Kuczynski was born in Schöneberg, Berlin, Prussia, German Empire on 15 May 1907, the second of the six children of the economist and demographer Robert René Kuczynski and his wife Berta Kuczynski ( Gradenwitz), a painter.

The family was a secular Jewish one.

Ursula had four younger sisters: Brigitte (born 1910), Barbara (born 1913), Sabine (born 1919) and Renate (born 1923), and an older brother, Jürgen (born 1904) would later become a historian-economist with a controversial relationship of his own with the espionage community.

The children were academically gifted, and the household was prosperous, employing a cook, a gardener, two household servants and a nanny.

Ursula grew up in a small villa on the Schlachtensee lake in the Zehlendorf borough in the southwest of Berlin.

When she was eleven she landed a screen role in The House of Three Girls (1918), the cinema version of Das Dreimäderlhaus.

She attended the Lyzeum (secondary school) in Zehlendorf and then, between 1924 and 1926, undertook an apprenticeship as a book dealer.

She had already, in 1924, joined the left-leaning Free Employees league (AfA-Bund), and 1924 was also the year in which she joined the Young Communists (KJVD) and Germany's Red Aid (Rote Hilfe).

In May 1926, the month of her nineteenth birthday, Ursula Kuczynski joined the Communist Party of Germany.

In 1926/27 she attended a librarianship academy while working at a lending library.

She then took a job at Ullstein Verlag, a large Berlin publishing house.

However, she lost this job in 1928 after participating in a May-Day Demonstration and/or on account of her Communist Party membership.

Between December 1928 and August 1929 she worked in a New York book shop before returning to Berlin where she married her first husband, Rudolf Hamburger, an architect and fellow member of the Communist Party.

It was also at this time that she set up the Marxist Workers' Library (MAB) in Berlin.

She headed up the MAB between August 1929 and June 1930.

Sources concerned with her espionage work in the 1930s/40s sometimes use the cover name originally suggested to her in Shanghai by her fellow intelligence operative Richard Sorge: "Sonja", "Sonja Schultz" or, after she moved to Britain, "Sonya".

With her husband she relocated, in July 1930, to Shanghai where a frenetic construction boom afforded ample opportunities for Hamburger's architectural work.

Sources are vague as to whether the Hamburgers were already working for the GRU before they left Germany for China, but in any case it was after the meeting with Sorge that between 1930 and 1935 "Sonja" (the cover name by which Kuczynski was known in The Service) operated a Russian spy ring under Sorge's direction.

It was here that the couple's son, the Shakespeare scholar Maik Hamburger, was born in February 1931.

After they had been in Shanghai for a little more than four months she was introduced by the US journalist Agnes Smedley to another German expatriate, Richard Sorge, an active agent of the Soviet Intelligence Directorate (GRU) posing as a journalist.

In Autumn 1931 she had to send her son Maik to live with her husband's parents (now relocated from Germany to Czechoslovakia) when she was sent to Moscow where she undertook a seven-month training session before returning to China.

There had been a concern that if baby Michael had accompanied her to Moscow he might inadvertently have blown her cover later by blurting out words in Russian.

It was also during this period that she mastered various practical aspects of spy-craft.

This included radio operator skills that were much prized in the world of espionage: she learned to build and operate a radio receiver, becoming an exceptionally capable and accurate user of Morse code.

Between March and December 1934 she was based in Shenyang in Manchuria which had been under Japanese military occupation since 1931.

Here she met the GRU's chief agent who was working under the name "Ernst".

She would remain based in China till 1935.

The GRU was nevertheless concerned that the affair with Ernst might lead to the unmasking of both agents, and she was recalled with Rudolf to Moscow in August 1935.

In September 1935 they were both posted to Poland where, apart from at least one more lengthy visit to Moscow, they would remain till Autumn 1938.

Sonja and Ernst had a romance which would result in the birth of her daughter Janina in April 1936.

Her husband Rudolf Hamburger generously acknowledged "Nina" as though she were his own daughter.

The couple lived mostly in the Polish capital Warsaw during this time and carried out espionage to assist underground Polish communists, apart from a three-month mission in the Free City of Danzig in 1936.

In the meantime it would later transpire that in 1937 the Soviets awarded her the Order of the Red Banner for her espionage work in China.

Without ever wearing a uniform, she now held the rank of colonel in the Soviet military.

Between Autumn 1938 and December 1940, as agent "Sonja Schultz", she was based, still with her husband Rudolf Hamburger, in Switzerland where she was one of the so-called "red three", together with Sándor Radó: her duties included working as a specialist radio operator, applying technical skills acquired during her Moscow visits earlier in the decade.

The codes she used to send information to Moscow from her little house in Caux, a three-hour walk up into the mountains above Montreux, have never been deciphered.

In Switzerland, which was where her marriage with Rudolf Hamburger finally broke apart, she collaborated with the Lucy spy ring and was involved in recruiting agents to be infiltrated into Germany.

After the Nazi take-over of Danzig in Autumn 1939 she also set up a resistance group in the formerly free city.

She moved to East Germany in 1950 when Fuchs was unmasked, and published a series of books related to her espionage activities, including her bestselling autobiography, Sonjas Rapport.