Ursula Kuczynski, alias Ruth Werner, alias Agent Sonya, was a Red Army officer and an expert in radio communication, a saboteur, a first-rate spy and a successful writer. She achieved all of these things while raising a family, which was both a perfect alibi and a fateful trap. If her story is not well-known, it is because until now it has not been written about.
Historian Ben Macintyre, the author of several books on the shadowy world of espionage and who has recently published the Spanish-language edition of his 2020 book
Agent Sonya: Moscowâs Most Daring Wartime Spy, explains over the phone from the UK: âToday people talk a lot about how to balance work and family life, but in Ursula Kuczynskiâs case it took place on a completely different level. Her work was lethal. If she failed, she would die and her family as well. She had a remarkable capacity for compartmentalizing, something that all great spies are able to do, but she admitted that if it had come down to a conflict between her family and the revolution, she would have chosen the revolution. In many ways she was a fanatical communist. That she was a woman was her best disguise, but it is also the reason we didnât know anything about her.â