Enemies and espionage.

Written by TR Johns

Who would have imagined that when a wealthy Argentinian businessman, Kamel Amin Thaabet, made a gift of eucalyptus trees to the Syrian army on the Golan Heights, providing shade for soldiers, he was in fact an Israeli spy working for Mossad. He had infiltrated into the Syrian political and military hierarchy before eventually being uncovered and executed in 1965. Several years later during the Six-Day War those same trees provided the Israelis with markers, identifying the Syrian dug-outs and contributing to them being routed in a matter of days!

Enemies are a fact of life, they come from within and without, they are visible and invisible, operating in all domains of life. Whilst further articles will follow, for now, what about spies?

Who would have thought that the housewife and mother of three, in the village of Great Rollright, north of Oxford, in 1944, was in fact a decorated Red Army officer and accomplished Soviet spy. Not only was Ursula Burton (Beurton) skilled at baking sponges for village events, but she was also the conduit for vast amounts of classified information regarding Britain and America’s atomic weapons’ programme. Through Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist officially assigned to Tube Alloys and the Manhattan Project, some 570 pages of drawings, formulae and reports flowed to Moscow, under the codename ‘Enormos’, directly to Stalin’s desk![i]

In the West, we have romanicised espionage, through the blockbusters of 007 and media’s countless under-cover heroes and heroines. Spying, however, is as old as time and it tends to involve a dark world of duplicity and deceit. Ian Fleming described one of Ursula’s contemporaries, Richard Sorge, as ‘the most formidable spy in history’. She was his lover and co-worker in Shanghai. A fellow German communist, he resembled a James Bond figure indeed, in looks, appetite for alcohol and his incessant womanising. They both became past masters in the tradecraft of espionage, projecting an outward appearance distinct from a hidden inner life. They learned to live in constant danger, used sexual chemistry as a tool and had the ability to compartmentalise their different lives (eg. motherhood and Moscow).

Ursula Kuczynski Burton, or ‘Agent Sonya’ (‘dormouse’), completely eluded British intelligence, even though they knew of her presence and held a remarkable 94 files on her wider left-wing family! The prejudices of the day meant that her sex, motherhood, pregnancy and humdrum domestic life, offered perfect camouflage. The men of M15 & M16 simply believed her incapable of important espionage. An unobtrusive German Jewish refugee, who had arrived from Switzerland in 1941, she ruthlessly exploited the natural advantages of her gender.

Spying is highly addictive, imbibing the romance of risk, adventure, and the drug of secret power. It requires audacity and a charmed sense of destiny, cheating fate and surviving against the odds. For Ursula, constant vigilance and habits of deception, even with her first husband, became second nature. Sorge was a compulsive liar, ambitious, oozing dangerous charisma, and enthused with a deep loyalty to his cause and colleagues. Both were utterly focused and filtered out extraneous material. 

Expert radio technician, spymaster, courier, saboteur and bomb maker, Agent Sonya had cut her teeth in Manchuria (Japanese occupied). 1930s’ China was seen as the cradle for the next phase of the communist revolution. She lived with false names, constantly evolving identities, and cover stories. In 1936, after rigorous training, she was moved to Poland. She somehow survived Stalin’s ‘Great Purge’, was promoted to major and sent to Switzerland, as War broke out. Its neutrality made it a hotbed of international espionage, where she precariously gathered and relayed information on the military build-up inside the Third Reich. 

Since early childhood, Ursula had a rich imagination exploring alternative realities, with herself at the centre of each drama. It served her well as a secret agent, with protocols for secret meetings and handovers, which required imagination and a willingness to transport herself and others, from the real to a counterfeit world. The gift never left her, as she retired from spying to become a prolific writer!

Ursula’s life spanned the whole of communism, aged 10 at the Bolshevik Revolution, and dying in July 2000, aged 93. She was proclaimed a ‘super-agent of military intelligence’ by President Putin and posthumously awarded the Order of Friendship of Peoples.

Her ability to avoid detection highlights an important point. Whilst the achievements of the Bletchley Park codebreakers, in WW2, had rid Britain of active Nazi spies, Russian undercover agents abounded, not least the infamous Cambridge Five. As a highly effective network, they were the eyes and ears of a large Soviet military intelligence presence in London. Despite Britain’s best efforts their clandestine activities went unnoticed, or at least unexposed.

Under-cover agents and spy networks are plentiful the world over, for political, economic and security reasons. Their sophistication and reach have been extended and challenged, as M16 reminds us, by new thechnologies, the digital age and more open borders. It is far from a level playing field, contrasting the open landscapes of liberal democracies and far tighter controls of autocracies. Surveillance, intelligence gathering, disinformation and cyber-attacks are all on the rise, as geopolitical tensions mount.

Agent Sonya was in that small fifth column league of spies who have changed the course of history, dedicated to a cause, using multiple names, numerous roles, and many disguises. Her type, undoubtedly, remains at large today.

References

[i] Agent Sonya - Ben MacIntyre. 2021 Penguin