Agent Sonya Quotes

“By the 1970s, she had come to the realization, in her words, “that what we thought was socialism was fatally flawed.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“To hide inside MI5 for nearly thirty years, while protecting a host of Soviet spies and covering his tracks, would have required a spy of rare intellectual agility. No one would have described Roger Hollis that way. He was a plodding, slightly droopy bureaucrat with the imaginative flair of an omelet.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“Secretly, he began to smuggle the family library out of the country: about two-thirds of the fifty thousand volumes would be saved.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“Poliakova had told them not to answer questions, so when the little man angrily demanded that he identify himself, Foote looked down on the ranting blob of officialdom and told him, slowly and precisely, to “Fuck off.” The little KGB man scribbled in his notebook. The contretemps was sorted out by means of a single phone call and Foote and his minder returned to the flat, but the incident left a permanent misunderstanding: whenever Foote went out for a walk the militiamen cordially greeted him as “Comrade Fuckof.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“Signing off on the daily execution lists, Stalin was heard to remark: “Who is going to remember this riffraff in ten, twenty years’ time? No one.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“Patra was trying to read Hegel’s Science of Logic. This is something no one should ever feel obliged to do.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“Separation from her two-year-old son would leave a permanent scar. Ursula defended that bleak decision for the rest of her life. But she never quite forgave herself.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“As so often in the history of communism, the bloodshed came not from external forces but through vicious infighting.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“Rudi listed his objections to communism: “The exaggerations in the press, the primitive tone of some articles, the boring speeches filled with jargon, the arrogant dismissal of opposing views, the ham-fisted behaviour towards intellectuals, whom you isolate instead of winning over, insulting opponents instead of disarming them with logic and recruiting them.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“a Hungarian girl with a completely unjustified belief in her own genius.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“He revealed nothing about Ursula’s activities and his own work on behalf of Soviet intelligence.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy

“As the war raced to its bloody finale, Ursula was swept up in an exhausting whirlwind of espionage, child-rearing, and housework: on any given day she might be coordinating intelligence gathered from her father, brother, Tom, the chemist, and others in her network, gathering intelligence from the Tool missions, while hanging out the washing, doing the dishes, and struggling to keep the domestic ship afloat at Avenue Cottage.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“clerihew: Fuchs Looks Like an ascetic Theoretic”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“She was passionate, prejudiced, charismatic, narcissistic, reckless, volatile, lovable, hypercritical, emotionally fragile, and uncompromising.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“From time to time there have to be individuals who deliberately take on the burden of guilt because they see the situation clearer than those who have the power.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy

“There are only two ways to interpret Hollis’s behaviour: he was either a traitor or a fool. To hide inside MI5 for nearly thirty years, while protecting a host of Soviet spies and covering his tracks, would have required a spy of rare intellectual agility. No one would have described Roger Hollis that way. He was a plodding, slightly droopy bureaucrat with the imaginative flair of an omelette. Lying is easy. Maintaining a panoply of lies, cover-ups and diversions for years, and remembering them all, is exceptionally difficult. Even Kim Philby, with his preternatural talent for deception, left clues that exposed him in the end. Hollis simply was not equipped with those kinds of skills. The weight of evidence currently suggests that Hollis was not treacherous, but incompetent. He was really quite thick.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy

“And yet, as a Red Army officer, she was heading into a new battle. History was pivoting around her. Before the war, she had spied against fascists and anti-communists, Chinese, Japanese, and German; during the conflict, she had spied against both the Nazis and the Allies; after it, and henceforth, she would be spying against the West, the new enemies in a Cold War. A photograph of the Summertown neighborhood victory party includes a beaming Ursula, happily celebrating Hitler’s downfall. One man is wearing an army uniform. Another raises two fingers in the V for Victory sign. But behind the image of shared relief, triumph, and optimism lay a hidden ideological divergence that would soon erupt in a new conflict. “Everyone hoped for a better world,” she wrote. “But here our visions of the future differed.” — TWO MONTHS LATER, in the remote deserts of New Mexico, scientists of the Manhattan Project detonated the first nuclear device, in a test code-named “Trinity,” releasing a blast equivalent to twenty thousand tons of TNT.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“Ursula had been able to follow the progress of the Tool missions through the information passed on to Henschke by Gould. The Hammer spies had survived, though several of the other recruits had perished. She had made a vital contribution to the liberation of her home city from the curse of Nazism. And, most important of all, she had coordinated a mission to steer a brand-new item of American military technology into Soviet hands. She was helping Russia to build the bomb; she also helped them build the walkie-talkie. Even Len did not know what she had done. Hers was a secret, private celebration.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“paean”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“The call sign from Joan to Eleanor would be “Heinz”; the corresponding call sign from Eleanor to Joan would be “Vic.” Special coded messages on the BBC, in numbers, would indicate to the agents inside Germany when to make transmissions and when and where to expect airdrops: the signal that there was about to be a broadcast of coded information relevant to the Tool missions was a burst of “Rustle of Spring,” the popular solo piano piece written by Norwegian composer Christian Sinding.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“The Joan-Eleanor (J-E) system operated at frequencies above 250 MHz, far higher than the Germans could monitor. This prototype VHF (very high frequency) radio enabled the users to communicate for up to twenty minutes in plain speech, cutting out the need for Morse code, encryption, and the sort of complex radio training Ursula had undergone. The words of the spy on the ground were picked up and taped on a wire recorder by an operator housed in a special oxygen-fed compartment in the fuselage of an adapted high-speed de Havilland Mosquito bomber flying at over twenty-five thousand feet, outside the range of German anti-aircraft artillery. An intelligence officer aboard the circling aircraft could communicate directly with the agent below. As a system of communication from behind enemy lines, the J-E was unprecedented, undetectable by the enemy, easy to use, and so secret that it would not be declassified until 1976.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“Every spymaster’s ambition is to infiltrate a spy into the enemy’s intelligence service. The Soviets had successfully done this in MI6, with Kim Philby, and MI5, with Anthony Blunt. Here was Ursula’s opportunity to plant not just one but several of her own agents inside the American intelligence service, on a top secret mission. On Moscow’s instructions, she compiled a list of reliable German communists in Britain who might be prepared to work as spies for the Americans, but also willing to pass every scrap of information on to the Center. The Faust spies would be agents of American intelligence spying on Nazi Germany, but in reality double agents working for Ursula Kuczynski of the Red Army. In”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“presage”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“June 1943, Stalin passed Molotov a list of twelve questions about the atomic bomb project and demanded swift answers; the Russian foreign minister passed the list to the GRU’s director, Lieutenant General Ivan Ilyichev, who immediately sent a telegram to the London residency, for the attention of Sonya. On June 28, Ursula met Fuchs in Banbury and passed on Stalin’s “twelve urgent requirements.” They were now spying to a shopping list drawn up by the Soviet leader himself. Fuchs duly compiled a complete account of all the intelligence he had furnished to date and everything he knew about the Tube Alloys project, a remarkable testament to his scientific prowess and, if it fell into British hands, the most damning evidence of his guilt.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“America and Britain were working on the bomb together, at astonishing scientific speed and in deepest secrecy. Neither was helping, or informing, its other main ally, the Soviet Union. But Moscow was secretly obtaining that help anyway, through its spies. Not only did Stalin know all about the bomb, but he knew that Britain and America did not know he knew (which is the gold dust of intelligence). And he demanded that his spies find out more.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“Fuchs’s transfer of scientific secrets to the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1943 was one of the most concentrated spy hauls in history, some 570 pages of copied reports, calculations, drawings, formulae and diagrams, the designs for uranium enrichment, a step-by-step guide to the fast-moving development of the atomic weapon. Much of this material was too complex and technical to be coded and sent by radio, and so Ursula passed the documents to Sergei through a “brush contact,” a surreptitious handover imperceptible to a casual observer. If Ursula needed to pass on urgent information, or bulky files, she alerted Aptekar by means of an agreed “signal site”: “I had to travel to London and, at a certain time and in a certain place, drop a small piece of chalk and tread on it.” Two days later she would cycle to the rendezvous site, a side road six miles beyond the junction of the A40 and A34 on the road from Oxford to Cheltenham; Aptekar would drive from London in the military attaché’s car and arrive at the pickup site at an appointed time for a swift handover. At one of these meetings, the Soviet officer presented her with a new Minox camera for making microdots and copying documents, and a small but powerful transmitter measuring just six by eight inches, a sixth of the size of her homemade radio and easier to conceal. She dismantled her own equipment, but kept it in reserve “for emergency use.” Fuchs was privy to the innermost workings of the atomic project and he held nothing back. In the first year, he and Peierls wrote no fewer than eleven reports together, including seminal papers on isotope separation and calculating the destructive power of”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“He may simply have quit in a fit of pique.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“anything said about how useful the material was.” The material was not just useful; it was priceless. In August 1941, another spy for the Soviet Union, the British civil servant John Cairncross, gave his handler a copy of the Maud Committee report outlining the aims of the nuclear weapons program. Fuchs provided the detailed reality of the bomb’s development, step by experimental step: the designs for a diffusion plant, estimates of the critical mass for explosive U-235, the measurement of fission, and the increasing British cooperation with American nuclear scientists. At the end of 1941, Fuchs co-authored two important papers on the separation of the isotopes of U-235”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“blown scheme for assassination, with Len and myself apparently cast for the principal roles.” Beurton was enthusiastic. “What could be easier than to put a time bomb in an attaché case along with our coats and, having had an early lunch, abandon the lot in the hope that the bomb would blow Hitler and his entourage, snugly lunching behind the deal boarding, into eternity?” An alternative method—“assassination in its more traditional character”—would be to shoot Hitler as he passed through the restaurant and hope his inattentive bodyguards were too slow to intervene. The only problem with this second plan was that it was suicidal. Ursula and Beurton shared the conviction that killing Hitler was not only possible, but a moral imperative. “Neither of us believed in the effectiveness of terrorist attacks on individuals,” she wrote. “But there were some people we considered so dangerous and bestial that we were both prepared to break the rules.” Foote was not nearly so keen. He too wanted Hitler dead. He just didn’t want to die himself. Beurton might be a stranger to fear, but Foote was not.”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy

“The snow melted,” wrote Ursula, “and the spring had a fairy tale beauty.” The warmer weather brought a flood of wild daffodils to the hills above the chalet, and no fewer than three spies to the Molehill. Alexander Foote and Len Beurton traveled separately to Switzerland and checked into a Montreux boardinghouse, the Pension Elisabeth, overlooking Bon Port on Lake Geneva. The next day, while the children and Ollo “made their way through a sea of flowers, picking arms full of daffodils,” the three conspirators sat in Ursula’s kitchen and discussed how to murder Hitler. Foote was distinctly alarmed to discover that in the intervening weeks the ambiguous injunction to “keep an eye” on Hitler at the Osteria Bavaria “had”
― Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy