Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre - review: more fact than fiction

When Ben Macintyre’s name is on the cover you know you are in for a thrilling ride, says Julian Glover

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Julian Glover @julian_glover17 September 2020

When Ben Macintyre’s name is on the cover you know you are in for a thrilling ride. He’s a master at unearthing the daring and deceits hidden deep in that extraordinary half century in which Britain fought first Nazi Germany and then the cold war. His world exists in a half-light of men in Burberry Macs and Trilby hats, of Cambridge spies and suburban disguises, of an era in which it was possible to believe in a murderous cause so strongly that you were willing to betray your country for it. But in Agent Sonya, he has pulled off his most remarkable trick: he leaves us admiring, and even cheering for, the woman at the heart of his story, someone who not only wanted to destroy our democracy but helped Russia get a nuclear bomb.

She is the strongest character of all in Macintyre’s bestselling series of wartime tales. Extraordinary, brave, clever and lucky, she lived a life which will surely soon be a film. Weimar Berlin. Munich, as Hitler dines in his favourite restaurant. Shanghai as the Japanese troops advanced. Moscow at the height of Stalin’s purges. Switzerland, a lonely bastion of peace and freedom in 1940s Europe (the Swiss police turn out, unexpectedly, to be the most decent people in the whole book). Blitzed Britain as it worked on a nuclear bomb. Attlee’s age of Austerity, where Soviet messengers hid notes for agents in rural Oxfordshire. East Berlin.

And through it all the steady determination of Ursula Kuczynski to fight fascism and back the communist cause. She was a believer whose faith never seemed to wobble, even as Europe was torn apart and remade around her. She was a liar, too. Unfaithful to the extent she divorced a husband without him knowing, and left him to rot in a Soviet Gulag. A mother whose obvious love for her children did not stop her putting them second to spying. A woman of brilliance in an age when men did not think women could be brilliant, which helped her escape the notice of dimwitted MI6 stuffed shirts who never worked out that the housewife in Oxfordshire was really the greatest agent of them all.

Aspects of her story have been told before - not least by Sonya herself who survived to write her memoirs and even return to Britain to promote them. She seems not to have thanked the country she betrayed for treating her better than Stalin’s goons ever treated anyone they suspected of treachery. She never seems to have noticed either that the cause she backed echoed the Nazis in its barbarity. But the point of this book is not to judge. Macintyre simply carries us along as Sonya outwits them all.

I raced through the pages to keep up with the plot. But this really is fact not fiction, made all the more gripping by the photographs that have survived from almost every part of Sonya’s career. Along the way she meets the real-life model for the shady character who nearly catches Tintin when the cartoon reporter visits Shanghai; she is also nearly caught by a brainy MI5 spy who was the template for Connie Sachs in John le Carre’s Karla trilogy. Stalin read her reports in person. She fooled them all. Now, thanks to Macintyre’s tale, we know how she did it.

Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy by Ben Macintyre (Viking, £25), buy it here.

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