Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy by Ben Macintyre Penguin, 400 pages, £25
Ursula Kuczynski, AKA Sonya, AKA Ursula Burton, AKA Ruth Werner, was a remarkable woman. Ten years old when the Bolsheviks launched their revolution, she was 82 when the Berlin wall was pulled down. Kuczynski attained the rank of colonel in Soviet intelligence, the highest position a female spy held in the Soviet Union. She was an agent runner par excellence, but under the mysticism was a mother of three who frequently had to balance the duties of being a spy with those of running a family.
Kuczynski’s story is reasonably well known. After all, she wrote a memoir and several fictional stories that were quasi-auto- biographical. But Macintyre’s re-telling has the distinct advantage of drawing on numerous recently…
