Burke Agent Sonya, MI5 and the Kuczynski Network

Agent Sonya, MI5 and the Kuczynski Network
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7509-9770-6
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 342 Seiten

In 1933, the celebrated German economist Robert Kuczynski and his wife Berta arrived in Britain as refugees from Nazism, followed shortly afterwards by their six children. Jürgen, known to be a leading Communist, was an object of considerable concern to MI5, while Ursula, codenamed Sonya, was a colonel in Russia's Red Army who had spied on the Japanese in Manchuria. MI5 also kept extensive files on their four sisters, Brigitte, Barbara, Sabine and Renate. During the crucial early stages of the Cold War, members of the Kuczynski family proved to be prime Soviet assets as enablers and agents of influence. In Britain, Ursula controlled the spies Klaus Fuchs and Melita Norwood, without whom the Soviet atomic bomb would have been delayed for at least five years. Drawing on newly released files, Agent Sonya, MI5 and the Kuczynski Network reveals the operations of a network at the heart of Soviet intelligence in Britain. Over seventy years of espionage activity the Kuczynskis and their associates gained access to high-ranking officials in the government, civil service and justice system. For the first time, acclaimed historian David Burke tells the whole story of one of the most accomplished spy rings in history.

DAVID BURKE studied for his PhD at the University of Greenwich and the University of Birmingham, including five months in the Soviet Union. He has taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Greenwich, Leeds and Salford. His books include The Spy Who Came in from the Co-op, The Lawn Road Flats and Russia and the British Left.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Burke, David

Leseproben

Introduction

The two greatest British secrets of the Second World War were undoubtedly the atomic bomb programme and the breaking of the German codes at Bletchley Park. Hitherto, much has been written about how the Soviets gained the secrets of the atomic bomb, but very little has been written about the Soviet infiltration of Bletchley Park. At the centre of the Soviet campaign to access Britain’s wartime secrets was a remarkable family of Communist refugees from Nazism, the Kuczynskis. There were eight family members and five marriage partners either directly active, or in supporting roles, working with Russian intelligence: the patriarch and matriarch Robert and Berta, their son Jürgen, and daughters Ursula, Brigitte, Barbara, Sabine and Renate. They were a family whose work for Soviet intelligence would ensure the success of the Russian intelligence offensive against Great Britain for much of the twentieth century. Their respective careers fitted neatly into Soviet intelligence activity in Britain that targeted Left-wing elements and fellow-travellers. This continued long after any ideological solidarity between the Soviet Union and organised labour in Britain had disappeared from the Labour Party’s make-up.

The Kuczynskis were not only a family who spied but also one of the chief channels of leakage of information to the Soviets from a variety of sources. During almost seventy years of intelligence activity the Kuczynski family gained access to high-ranking civil servants in the Board of Trade, Ministry of Information, the British Council, the Ministry of Labour and National Service, the BBC, the Ministry of Power, Ministry of Economic Warfare, the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, RAF Harwell, Members of Parliament and the legal profession; many of their contacts were Communists or fellow-travellers, and at one time they included Arthur Drew, Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for War, who worked closely with a number of prominent politicians, among them Emanuel Shinwell, Sir John Grigg and John Profumo. The Kuczynskis created organic networks: an agent once recruited began recruiting friends from various backgrounds.

One of the most significant spy rings in the early Cold War, the Kuczynski network was targeted on Britain’s emerging atomic bomb programme and Bletchley Park. It was, for a time, based in what was one of London’s most fashionable buildings in leafy Hampstead – the Lawn Road Flats, a haven for spies. No fewer than seven secret agents for Stalin’s Russia lived here in the 1930s and ’40s including an Austrian-Jewish Communist, Arnold Deutsch, the controller of the group of spies known as the Cambridge Five – Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby. Brigitte Kuczynski, code name ‘Joyce’, arrived in Britain from Geneva on 26 March 1934 and moved into the Lawn Road Flats on 4 July 1936. From there she recruited two important British spies, Alexander Foote and Leon Beurton, who were sent to Switzerland to work with Ursula Kuczynski, code name ‘Sonya’.

Ursula Kuczynski had previously worked as a Soviet spy in Manchuria and was an exceptionally adept encrypter, able to use Morse code faster than any other agent on Soviet military intelligence’s books. In London, Jürgen Kuczynski, code name ‘Peter’, another Lawn Road Flats resident, was the vital link between the Kuczynskis and the ‘legal’ resident at the Soviet Embassy, and was on friendly terms with the Soviet Ambassador, Ivan Maisky. An important asset, he collected intelligence on schisms within the Labour Party and introduced his sister Ursula to the émigré physicist Klaus Fuchs, who was then working on the joint Anglo-American bomb project. From 1943, Ursula lived under cover as a rural Oxfordshire housewife and mother, while transmitting nuclear secrets to Moscow from an adapted washing line in her garden in the Cotswold village of Great Rollright. She described how she would walk down country lanes with Fuchs – they would affect to be young lovers – while he handed over atomic formulae. She also controlled the atomic bomb spy Melita Norwood until 1944 when Moscow Centre and Beria’s NKVD1 took over the handling of the atomic bomb spies from Soviet military intelligence, the GRU.2 Following his arrest, Fuchs named Ursula as his controller. MI5, however, got nowhere in their attempts to interview her about her espionage activities, and before the Kuczynski network could be fully unravelled both Ursula and Jürgen had beaten a hasty retreat to East Berlin.

Among Barbara Kuczynski’s acquaintances were Margot Heinemann and Guy Burgess, and through Margot, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean. Barbara’s husband, Duncan Macrae Taylor, a well-connected Lowland Scot, trained as a wireless operator with the RAF and served as an intelligence officer in Cairo before being posted to Bletchley Park. Barbara and Duncan both joined the Labour Party, where they cultivated a number of senior party officials, becoming what one acquaintance of the Taylors called ‘social enablers’. The youngest of the Kuczynski daughters, Renate, code name ‘Katie’, was recruited to Soviet military intelligence in 1939 by her sister Ursula. Working closely with Barbara, she introduced Communist sympathisers and fellow-travellers into the government’s Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park.

How legitimate is spying in defence of a cause? Is it possible to confer the honourable title of anti-Nazi resistance on the Kuczynski family, and have done with it? Or should we condemn the family for its espionage activities on behalf of the Soviet Union that, in the main, targeted Great Britain and the British Empire? As an ideology based on internationalism, Soviet Communism found it relatively easy to recruit outside its borders. Under Stalin’s dictatorship, however, that internationalism turned inwards to promote the defence of one nation state above all others. Those spies still acting in what they believed to be the best interests of internationalism succumbed to the blandishments of Stalinism. A vast array of Communist propagandists and fellow-travellers were prepared to accept the Soviet Union ‘as if it were, in reality, what it was on paper’.3

In 1958, two years after Nikita Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Party Congress of the Soviet Union, the British historian Henry Pelling wrote of his fascination with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), stating that ‘there can be few topics more worthy of exploration than the problem of how it came to pass, that a band of British citizens could sacrifice themselves so completely … to the service of a dictatorship in another country.’4 In the case of the Kuczynskis, that problem was compounded by an added dimension. As German refugees living in Britain they were not merely prepared to spy for the Soviet Union against Germany, but were prepared to spy against the interests of their adopted country. In some respects, they found this quite straightforward owing to their acceptance by British Communists working for the revolutionary overthrow of their own government. This was further enhanced by the anti-imperialist work of the CPGB, which was actively supported by the Kuczynskis. The underground work of Brigitte with the Director of the CPGB’s Colonial Affairs Committee, Michael Carritt, who had at one time served as a British Security and District Officer in the Indian Civil Service, was a good example of this. Ursula’s work with the Communist Party of China, too, was directed against both Japanese and British imperial interests in the Far East. Jürgen’s openly proclaimed support for the Nazi–Soviet pact was largely based on antipathy towards the British Empire and the growing influence of Wall Street in global affairs. Furthermore, when Sabine Kuczynski’s husband, the Communist lawyer Francis Loeffler, defended opponents of the Greek monarchy charged with treason, was he guilty of subversion? The legitimate activities of the Kuczynskis brought them into contact with reformist socialists in the Labour Party, the legal apparatus, government ministries, trade unionists and others in their pursuit of a Stalinist vision of Communism and resistance to Fascism.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of Stasi archives, a more detailed picture has emerged not only of Soviet espionage in Germany, but also of Communist resistance to Hitler in Germany. Communist resistance can be said to have taken place on two levels. Firstly, there was the opposition of rank-and-file Communists who believed that the defeat of Nazism would be followed by the victory of German Communism over capitalism. Secondly, there was an elite group of German intelligence practitioners who believed that German Communism could only be achieved by guaranteeing the security of the Soviet State. This second group included the Kuczynskis and formed the nucleus of the German–Soviet intelligence secret service operating out of Moscow Centre in both Nazi Germany and the UK. Traditional historiography has, hitherto, shied away from the second group while downgrading the first. By doing so historians have created the erroneous impression that there was no serious opposition to Hitler before 1937 and that when it appeared it came ‘almost exclusively from a small minority of churchmen, aristocrats and other conservatives’.5 Such an approach ignores the contribution of those Communists, like the Kuczynskis, to the defeat of Nazism. Many historians prefer to fall back on a crude reductionism that sees the Communist resistance as another form of...