Brief encounter
Michael Vestey
0 dd things can happen when you enter an English country pub. There I was, having lunch in my local in the next village, the Benett Arms at Semley, when a friend arrived with a house guest from New Zealand, It turned out that he broadcast on Maori Radio and was in Britain making programmes about what some still call the Mother Country. In no time at all I heard myself agreeing to be interviewed and duly was. I hope, when it goes out, Maoris aren't too baffled by my thoughts on the BBC and British culture. It was certainly a first for me.
It set me thinking, though, about the subject of a fascinating programme I'd heard on Radio Four last Thursday, Codename Sonia. It had nothing to do with Maoris but was about arguably the most important woman spy in history, the German-born Ursula Kuczynski. Her Soviet codename was Sonia and she spied for the Russians from the 1930s to the late Forties, passing British and American atomic secrets to Moscow. The programme was narrated by her son, Michael Hamburger, an expert on Shakespeare. Although himself a democratic socialist who campaigned for more freedom in East Germany, he was clearly struggling to reconcile his filial loyalty with a distaste for what she had done. He avoided overt criticism of her, saying, 'For us, she was a courageous communist.'
I see his difficulty. He trotted out the usual excuses for that generation of spies: a reaction against poverty, the rise of Hitler and the desire for a better world for all. What she actually became was a woman prepared to betray the values of democratic Western societies to help repressive communist regimes which murdered their own peoples, blighting the greater part of the 20th century. I must say, though, Ham
burger and his producer Rosie Goldsmith, knew how to tell a story.
His mother lived quietly in the Cotswolds with her second husband, a former antiFranco fighter called Len Burton, and her three children, in a house called The Firs. Her children were her cover. During the night she would secretly transmit her information to Moscow, the unsuspecting children wondering why she had to sleep in the afternoon. Military intelligence in Moscow, the GRU, gave her the mission to meet Klaus Fuchs, who was working on the creation of the atomic bomb. She cycled over to Banbury to see him, unwittingly passing on the way the headquarters of MI5 then housed at Blenheim Palace. 'I didn't know it was the atomic bomb,' she said in an interview years later.
According to the espionage writer Harry Chapman Pincher, she came to the attention of MI5, who sent two agents to the house where she made them cups of tea. Pincher described the episode as a pantomime as she was never even questioned about Fuchs. It was only when he was arrested and tried in 1950 that she fled the country and returned to what had become East Germany, Hamburger said lamely that his mother hadn't taken anything away from Britain, she passed those secrets not to make the Soviet Union more powerful but merely to secure a balance of power; she felt that for one country to have the atomic bomb would be extremely dangerous for world peace. This is self-justifying nonsense, of course, but it was certainly a view shared by many intellectuals of the Left, Iraq's useful idiots in the West believe something similar today.
Back in East Germany where people were being shot dead trying to escape their paradise she became a state heroine, feted by that other nasty piece of work, Markus Wolf, the head of intelligence. She was an inspiration to young spies, speaking to them about her experiences and supporting a system that urged people to spy on their families and neighbours. As another writer about espionage put it, 'Behind the old lace was a vast amount of arsenic.' According to Hamburger, after the Berlin Wall came down she made a speech in which she acknowledged the communist party had gone wrong and had become too autocratic. Oh, so that's what it was? Hamburger said she became depressed at the destruction of her life's work but she still died peacefully at the age of 93 two years ago.
During my interview with Maori Radio I was asked why I had a particular admira tion for the United States. I said that despite its imperfections and faults, which are common to many other Western countries, it was the American love of democracy and freedom that attracted me to it. And that is why talking to Maoris on the other side of the world led me to reflect that if the Sonias of this world had triumphed there would have been no such delightful encounter in an English country pub.
Previous page
