 Hello, and welcome to our latest future tense conversation on agent Sonia, the most consequential spy in the history of technology. We have a question mark there, but it's really, this is really going to be a fun one. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Andres Martinez. I'm the editorial director of future tense. I'm also a professor of practice at our Arizona State University, Cronkite School of Journalism, a picture which is behind me. Future tense is actually a partnership between ASU, New America and Slate magazine, and we explore the impact of technology on society. You can follow us at Twitter at future tense now. And we've been having a lot of these conversations every Wednesday we have a great one next week where we launch a new interplanetary podcast that Slate is doing in conjunction with our School of Space Exploration at Arizona State. Today is a real privilege and, and it's it's sort of indulging my my huge fandom for Ben McIntyre's books, and a great excuse to to reconnect with our good friend Liza Mundy. So, Ben McIntyre, as many of you and all of you probably know, has been on this amazing pace we were talking about this earlier of churning out these incredible spy histories over the last few years and each with each one of which, I think goes to say that that history can be more riveting than fiction. I was barely getting over my stress about the fate of, you know, the Soviet Gordievsky KGB agent who needed to be exfiltrated from Moscow during at the height of the Cold War this amazing when along came Agent Sanya so the Ben McIntyre has written many of these books, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and the spy and the traitor was the previous one to Agent Sanya, which again, I think came out a couple of years ago. So I am in awe of Ben's productivity, but also the way in which his books. You know that you can read them almost as kind of thrillers in terms of the pacing and the suspense of the story, but they're also telling, you know, big history with capital B, capital H, in terms of the Cold War, you know, whatever the setting is, Agent Sanya kind of spans the early days of Weimar, Germany, World War II, Cold War, and it's history that's very well told, meticulously researched, in addition to really honing in on the sort of intimate ethical dilemmas that people have to make an extraordinary circumstances, sort of reminiscent of like John Le Carré at his best so kudos to you Ben. As a lot of us in our future tense community, all of us are really into thinking about how to use leverage storytelling to convey big ideas and to get at sort of core issues that the challenges that we share and I think your books do that in addition to being just highly entertaining. Liza Mundy of course is a was the author of Code Girls, The Untold Story of the American Women, Code Breakers of World War II, which was also the subject of a great future tense event back when we would do these in person. Liza was a very accomplished journalist at the Washington Post and is working on a project that is exploring similar subject matter to Ben's book but I don't want to, that's just a, I'll leave that for her to to expand upon. And of course Liza is a great member of the New America community as a senior fellow. Now, before handing off the moderating baton to Liza. I do want to say that there's this, there's an interesting sort of parochial connection that one of our you know future tense is this collaboration between Arizona State University, Slate the magazine and New America, the think tank here in Arizona, Arizona State University plays a role, and we haven't talked about this man but plays a role in the, an important role in the story, someone indirectly in the sense that Agnes Smetley, who is a fascinating character in this in this book and I had run, run across her in some books about Richard Sorge, who might come up in this conversation. Agnes was a novelist and this great journalist and free spirit who was an important figure in Shanghai in the 1930s. And she is a graduate of Tempe Normal, which was the name of Arizona State University, back in those days, Arizona State University, which we now know as the largest public university in the country and, and asterisk I have to add we're in the most university, or again trouble with my bosses but you know we started off as a territorial teaching Institute for you know, for what for prospective teachers it was a normal college and Agnes Smetley was here in the 1910s her and and for those of you who have read the book, it is agent Sonia, you know Ursula Kaczynski's encounter with Agnes Smetley in Shanghai in the 1930s that, you know, but for that encounter, I'm not sure, you know then has a book, I mean maybe he does but, but there's a there's a historically significant moment and Agnes's life was independent of Sonia, hugely interesting and was the subject of her biographer Stephen McKinnon is a emeritus professor in our, in our history faculty, he wrote Agnes Smetley the life and times of American radical, he co wrote it with with his wife Janice, and the Smetley collection is here at Arizona State University. So just as a prerogative for like the, the home crowd. I did want to mention that intriguing connection that our university has with the story. So thank you all for watching this and then I don't usually gush about our speakers the way I have today but huge fan my high school son and I listened to your your previous book on a on a road trip that we took across the country. And he enjoyed it last summer, and he enjoyed it greatly too. So thank you for doing this for us. And Liza as always I'm excited to to listen to you. Moderate this conversation. Thank you. Thanks so much Andres. And I'll continue to shower them with praise but eventually we'll let them actually talk and just, I hope that if you haven't already read his book, I hope that you will order it and read it because it is absolutely fantastic you can see all my comments at the top here. So it's an honor to share this digital podium with you Ben. And, and one of the things I really appreciate a part of the many things I appreciate about your book is the, the subhead is mosque agent it's agent Sonya Moscow's most daring wartime spy. And so your publisher didn't feel the need to qualify by saying most daring wartime female spy, and gave her, you know, sort of full place as, as the most daring spy. So, so thanks for that. But gender is threaded throughout this book in the most wonderful way the way in which, ironically enough, being a woman served her very well both in her spying and in her successful attempts to evade being found out and and arrested. And so we will talk about spying and technology and we'll also necessarily talk about gender, which is just absolutely wonderful. And what I, what I also so much love about this topic is those of us who talk about women and stem as I do sometimes sometimes talking to you and girls to get them excited about women and stem. We talk about the fact that usually when we talk about this we mean women's contributions to the development of technology to developing it or, you know, form forming technology in some way and, and a lot of our modern stem technology did the origins can be traced, particularly to World War Two, when we were developing computers we were calculating ballistics and trajectories, developing nuclear weapons radar, so much technology came out of World War and because the men were all fighting women were called in to the burgeoning beginning stem sector to help develop early computers or break codes. And we're starting to understand this I think in the United States, recognition, more and more recognition for Admiral Grace Hopper who was designing computers for the Navy women software programmers who were who were programming the computers for the Army's ENIAC project, and then of course hidden figures, the black female mathematicians some of whom came in during the war and then after we're during the Cold War so we're getting a sense more and more of women's contributions to the making development of technology. But espionage was also a field that expanded during World War Two this global war this, you know, taking place on all continents the need for new secret agents and so this is another sector where women were invited in the OSS in the United States the SOE in England and so it was another sector of opportunity, a window of opportunity for women. So, what we don't talk about is women's role in the passing of technological secrets, which is what agent Sonya was so instrumental in doing and sort of in sharing technologies between allies as well as enemy nations so for those who haven't read the book and I know this is a tall order could you just briefly tell us who agent Sonya was, and then talk about first her own use of technology was she particularly gifted at the sort of technologies that spies necessarily had to employ before and during the war. Well, with pleasure. Thank you for that lovely introduction both of you, how kind of you and it's delightful to be here or to be virtually here. Women's spy, it's a terribly interesting subject, there have been women's spies throughout history, I mean from Matahari onwards, and indeed long before Matahari the most famous sort of woman spy and I make the claim in this book that the Ursula was the most influential the most strategically important woman spy of the century and that is quite a claim, but I think one has to make a distinction because the women's spies that we know about and the ones that we tend to write about are very often agents, that they don't, they tend to be people who are employed often by men to do specific tasks to carry messages to gather information to code break. Ursula is different in this respect in that she was a trained intelligence officer. She wasn't someone who was just recruited and walking for a particular job, she embraced intelligence she embraced espionage as a career choice. And she stuck with it for more than a decade so for her it wasn't, she wasn't a kind of, she wasn't someone who was being used by men, she was actually perfectly the equivalent of any other man in her service. And, and she rose incredibly high she became a colonel in the Red Army Intelligence Service now I don't know of a woman who reached that elevated rank in any intelligence service. I mean let alone the Soviets who were not famous for their equal opportunities policies, I mean, but I don't know of any service where that happens so it does make her, I think absolutely unique and that is a reflection both of her own skill, and of the status and quality of the intelligence she was gathering. So just to give you a quick run through of who she was and what she did. And Ursula Kaczynski was born in, in Berlin, before the First World War. She, and she grew up in Weimar Germany she grew up in that chaotic period between the wars of great economic dislocation and fantastic political upheaval when the right was on the march the brown shirts and the fascist were were beginning to take power, and she was combated on the left, most radically by the Communist Party. Now, Ursula came from a prosperous, intellectual, well to do Jewish family brought up in Schlappen say, very sort of comfortable and nice suburb of Berlin. And nobody did that her world was about to be blown apart by the Nazis, but women of her, and men women of her class and her position, many of them did what Ursula did which was to embrace communism. She became a communist at the age of 17, and she never looked back. Now we look at that sort of choice through the Prism of the Cold War, and we think she ended up on the wrong side of history, which is arguably true. But in order to understand someone like Ursula, you have to realize that from her perspective, the only way of dealing with fascism, the only way to oppose the Nazi brown shirts was communism. They were the only people who were taking it from the streets. And so she was a convicted, convinced communist from her earliest, earliest, earliest at all. She became a spy by accident, really, as most spies do, in fact, she, she went to Shanghai with her husband, who was an architect called Rudolf Hamburg, he was a, he was a socialist, but he wasn't a communist. She was constantly trying to convert him and turn him into one, and indeed succeeded, but that's another story. But so she arrived in Shanghai where her husband was working as architect, and there she was terribly bored, she found the whole thing incredibly dull and she lived the life of a, of a sort of colonial wife giving tea parties and playing mini-golf and generally fine and healthy, two tea years for work. And then she met Agnes Smedley, who Anders mentioned at the top of the program. Now Agnes Smedley was at that point extremely well known actually, I mean he'd written a highly successful novel called Daughter of Earth. She was a radical feminist, very much ahead of her time. And she met Ursula, and what Ursula didn't know and what nobody else knew was that in fact Agnes had also been recruited as a Soviet intelligence agent in Berlin in the 1920s. She was a paid up spy. And it was through Agnes that Ursula was refused to another critical figure, a man called Richard Sorge, who was described by Ian Fleming as being the most formidable spy in history. Quite a claim actually, but actually not that far from the truth. Sorge was an extraordinary man and he was the head, he was only the chief Soviet spy in Shanghai in China at that point. Now, what was happening in Shanghai was a brutal undercover war was taking place between the underground communist movement and the nationalist government of China and the Soviets were bankrolling and providing weapons to the communist insurgents. And Sorge first of all recruited Ursula and then seduced her. And although she was married and she just had her first baby they had a torrid love affair. And in a way, it was one of the defining moments of her life because the intermingling really of the emotional and romantic on one hand, and the ideological and political on the other. I don't think Ursula ever completely untangled them. And she remained, she really loved Richard Sorge, even though their love affair was very brief. And she was recruited into Red Army intelligence service. So the intelligence gathering arm of the Red Army, and she began as a courier under Sorge, but she very rapidly ascended through the ranks their love affair and he lasted less than a year in fact. And Sorge was then redeployed in fact to Japan where he would carry out unbelievable feats of FBI, before being hanged by the Japanese, but Ursula was then summoned to Moscow and trained as a proper intelligence gathering agent and she attended. So this gets us onto the technical aspect here. So it was taken to a special spy school outside Moscow called Code Edge Sparrow. It was actually known as the eighth sport directory. But actually it was the technological center for training spies. So there are two, there are really intelligence there are two different sorts of intelligence there's signals intelligence, and there's human intelligence. Now signals intelligence is code breaking. It's obviously very dominant these days it is about emails and text messages and so on. In war it was really about wireless messages and in Ursula's case, it was about radio technology about learning about using shortwave radio. And she became extraordinarily good at it. I mean, it's no exaggeration that say she could build a shortwave radio out of the stuff you could buy in a hardware store. I mean, it was very dangerous to do if you had to buy different hardware stores who didn't get caught. But she was really good at it. I mean, and then again that sets her apart the whole technological aspect of intelligence technology generally during before the war and during the war was dominated by men. Absolutely dominated. And as far as I can work out she's the only graduate of the Sparrow school that went on to use this stuff. And I'll explain perhaps a little later how she did it. But so from Moscow she was deployed back to China to Japanese occupied Manchuria, where her task was to liaise with the Communist partisans who were battling the Japanese occupiers of China. It was incredibly dangerous. I mean, had she been caught, she would undoubtedly have been executed. She would have been tortured and then she would have been executed. As with the whole of her family. So the stakes really couldn't be higher. She had another love affair when she was in Manchuria with her colleague and immediate boss in Soviet intelligence, a man called Johann Petra. She had another baby by him. She would have three children by three different men. Hers was a fascinatingly advanced attitude to relationships. And from I'm scooting over the story here because I don't want to hold everything up. But so from Japanese occupied Manchuria she then moves to Poland on the eve of Nazi invasion where she's running the Communist cells always using her radio to send messages back to Moscow. And there she moves to Switzerland and Switzerland in many ways is the is one of the high points of her career because she built a sub radio transmitter and she began to run all the agents that were operating inside Nazi Germany on behalf of the Soviet Union. She was producing a stunning amount of material. And then she ended up in London. Well, first of all in London and then in the Oxfordshire countryside her family, her Jewish family had fled from from Nazi Germany. Most of them would be wiped out the ones that remain there but her immediate family got to London. She joined them. And then she ended up living in a tiny village in the Cotswolds in the rural Cotswolds in the little cottage with her now three children. To all intents and purposes she was Mrs Burton, a perfectly ordinary refugee housewife, going to church every Sunday. So, so you can be innocuous. What nobody, none of her neighbors knew was that in the privy in the outside Lou in the back garden she had built a very powerful radio transmitter. And with that, she was communicating with Moscow, and she was providing Moscow with the blueprints for the atomic weapon, which takes us on to the other technological aspect of that story. But the high point of her in his career is when she's in a position in her tiny, tiny shed in the back garden to provide and it's no exaggeration to say that she really was providing more or less chapter on verse chapter of verse on on how to build the atomic bomb. So, thank you for that. That was just, I would still say to people read the book, because that's a wonderful thumbnail of her incredible life. So, to talk about her own radio transmitting. She not only had to build these radios out of whatever parts she could find in whatever foreign country she happened to be living in and hide them and and then then bring them out and sometimes reassemble them and and she had to communicate using Morse code and she had to make a little, you know, dot dot dot. So to talk about these, you know, she wasn't the only obviously person who was transmitting by wireless radio from from very dangerous locations but she wasn't the only woman who was doing that. And this and this was a very dangerous. This was this was particularly dangerous work because of the way in which these signals could be intercepted right. And that was constantly a possibility. I mean, for example, when she was in Venturia in the city of Mukden, she actually built her radio transmitter. She hid it in a sort of chest in the house but she had to get an aerial out in order to use it properly. And she had, she had this extraordinary description of climbing onto the roof one night with her baby asleep downstairs and trying to erect on a bamboo pole what was known as a Fuchs area run between the two gables. I mean, ironically, the building was right next door to the German club which was stuck with Nazi and Japanese sympathizers. I mean, it was incredibly dangerous. I have a photograph actually of the building and you can see the bamboo radio transmitter it's in the book you can you can see the aerial she put up. I mean to us these days, it seems a very rustic form of technology. And then it was the highest of high technology, but it was vulnerable. I mean, there there were two ways that there were radio interception bands, but there were also Japanese were running aeroplanes to try and triangulate the position. And she had a foreign spied operating in Manchuria, and Ursula knew the stakes I mean she knew how close it was. It was even more dangerous really I'm Switzerland was pretty dangerous because the Gestapo were riddling. There were lots of Soviet and British and American spies operating in Switzerland, but in, but in the Cotswolds, particularly in in Oxfordshire, MI5 the security service of Great Britain had radio detection bands, which were circling the country for precisely this purpose. They were actually mostly looking for what they felt with the dangers of Nazi or German sympathizers, sending messages to Berlin, but they're also perfectly well aware that Soviet spies were doing it too. And at one point, they got very, very close to Ursula, they detected that there was a signal coming from somewhere in the vicinity of this lots of jubilee. And they went to, in fact they got as close as sort of knocking on Ursula's door but the point that you addressed earlier, the fact that she was a woman gave her really perfect camouflage. I'm sure we'll come back to this again but there are wonderful, I mean they're hilarious with hindsight, but the memos inside the MI5 files, in which they say, and I'm not exaggerating, it can't be Mrs Burton, she can't be a spy because she's far too busy with her domestic duties. And Ursula knew this, Ursula was perfectly able to manipulate and to ruthlessly exploit her gender, as her greatest disguise, so I'm sure we'll come back to that in a moment, but yes I mean her technical skills were formidable really. But there's always an intelligence, and you know this very well Liza, it's really always the interplay between human intelligence and signals intelligence, you can't have one without the other. In the end it also comes down, I mean while you have to be proficient at sending messages and to hiding your own and to disguising your own messages. And also a lot of intelligence boils down to relations between human beings and it often boils down to looking someone in the eye, and trying to work out whether you can trust them. I mean that's an absolute, that was certainly central to the way that Ursula operated. You know I'm so glad you brought that up, there were several places in the book where I noted in the margins that the combination of human to human intelligence skills and SIGINT or other technical skills. When she's meeting for the first time with Klaus Fuchs who is going to pass these extraordinary atomic secrets to the Soviet Union and he's nervous, you say in the book, and when he meets her. She, she reassures him through her presence and I don't know at that point if it's gender or if it's just her innate human skills at appearing trustworthy upon a very first meeting. And similarly, when she's passing the secrets these incredibly, you know, cutting edge is equally cliche I mean these globally significant technologies. She's using brush passes and you know the sort of classic human trade craft on the street you just got to have human instincts for who's around you this combination of hide the highest tech, and just the most fundamental human qualities, some of which are gender related and some of which are probably just innate but it's it's the moments when those two come together are just riveting, but right. No, she put Fuchs it is it seems like in their first meeting. Well, Fuchs is absolutely the sort of key figure in this part of her story I mean. Fuchs was another German refugee he was a prodigiously talented physicist he was also a secret communist so they have that in common. And he like Ursula felt that since Britain and America and the Soviet Union were allied in the war. It was unfair simply unfair that the Brits and the Americans were jointly and secretly developing this weapon without telling the Soviet Union, it was almost that simple that their attitude to it. But you're actually right and it's the combination of the human sort of human ability to read people with this technical ability and the Soviets did an assessment of the Fuchs case after the after the war and they worked out. 590 different documents were handed over by him in the course of this this period. Really, they were the blueprints on how they was it was really a sort of day by day account of what was happening what was codenamed the tube alloys project because Fuchs have been brought into that I mean he was an absolute central figure in the development of the atomic bomb, but all the time he was feeding it to Ursula. Ursula was clever enough to know her own limits as a scientist, she didn't, she never claimed to understand what all this stuff was, and some of it was far too technical for her even to send on the Moscow Tapper. So as you said she had to resort to what seemed to us like incredibly old fashioned spy techniques for leaving these messages for her Soviet handbag who could then scoop them up, put them in the diplomatic bag and get them sent to Moscow. But human intelligence, like signals intelligence like all technology goes wrong sometimes it just doesn't work sometimes. And there's a moment one of the moments I like most in this book was that Ursula's dead drop site now dead drop site is where you leave a message for another spy, where they can pick them up at a different time So there is no human contact necessary so it's a it's a simple way to end the dead letter box and Ursula's dead drop site was the hollow root of a tree, believe it or not, three screens from a crossroads after an underpass just outside the village. There was a period when she was leaving, this was slightly after the first period when she was leaving messages for her Soviet handbag, and they weren't being picked up and she couldn't work out what was going on and she assumed that something must have gone wrong that they've been betrayed or if you've been exposed. And for nearly a year it went silent but but in fact, there was no it was it was as always with these stories it was cock up more than conspiracy and the Red Army intelligence services vast and extraordinary well funded intelligence the Red Army intelligence community had got the wrong tree, they simply managed to pick the wrong tree by coaxing there was another hollowed tree and a different crossroads, so it's one of those moments when everything seems so perfectly planned, and then it all falls apart, but so the title aspects and the human aspects in twining this story the way that I find those very satisfying. So let's do talk specifically about how being a woman did help her with her spying and then also help her elude capture, even as she experienced the agonies of being a working parent, separations from her children, her beloved children, and all the guilt that comes with having to go away for training and leaving her son with his grandparents, and there's so many times in the book where any working mother, any working parent, there's the scene where she's lying awake wondering if she should murder her nanny. Yeah, she doesn't. Well, I shouldn't say that, but yes, in a strange way, that was one of the central internal struggles of Ursula's life, and she's she's extraordinarily honest in assessing her own internal conflict, because throughout her life, there was a battle going on within Ursula between what she saw as her ideological duty, her political commitment to the cause, which was absolute, and her human responsibility as a mother and a wife and the creator of a sort of domestic world. She had three children, she, as you say, adored them, but the conflict between them was intense, and we talk about a work-life balance today, particularly for women. In Ursula's case, the work-life balance is particularly extraordinary, because the work is potentially lethal. I mean, it's not just that she's not just going out to work in an office as we all may do. She's going out to work knowing that if she gets caught, she's dead, and so are her family. I mean, if the Gestapo had found them in Switzerland and deported them back to Germany, they would all have perished in the death camps. And so the stakes couldn't be higher. And Ursula, from the end of her life, I won't say she tortured herself with this, but she certainly, even in her 90s, she was writing, I worry, have I been a good spy, but a bad mother? And for her children, I mean, one of the broader facts of this story is that, and I've something I've discovered over the years from writing about this area of life, that secrets are addictive and secrets are toxic, and spies become addicted to their own secrecy. And that has a damaging effect, not only on individuals, but on the wider people that they interact with. And for her children, I think, the discovery, and they were middle-aged before they discovered this, that their mother had been someone completely different from the person they thought she was, that she had been a secret keeper. And into his 90s, her son, Michael, who I got to know very well, he died last year, alas, at a great age. In his 90s, he said to me, I never knew whether I really knew my mother. And so secrets have an effect. They can have a long-term damaging effect. But that said, Ursula's role, if you like, her cover as a wife and a mother, served her extraordinarily well. And she knew it. She knew that the more children she had, and she said this, this is in a way quite chilly, she said, the more children I have, the less likely they are to get me. And indeed, her children knew that too. And you can imagine what that would be like. I mean, her daughter said, I don't think my mother had us as part of her spy story. But the mere fact that her daughter was even considering that possibility was to me a sign that it had certainly crossed her mind. So you've got an extraordinary conflict going on in someone here. But Ursula got away with it. I mean, the astonishing thing is that the Chinese secret police, the Japanese secret police, the Gestapo, the FBI, F5 and MI6, none of them got onto her. And that is in large part because she was a woman. In the book I write, it would probably have taken a woman to spot, to see through Ursula's disguise. And by happy serendipity, there was one woman in MI5, a one senior officer in MI5, a woman who went by the unimprovable name of Millicent Baggett. Now, Millicent Baggett was exactly what he would want Millicent Baggett to be. She was a formidable unmarried lady of very strong opinions who did not take full lightly and didn't tolerate any nonsense from men. And Millicent Baggett was in the anti-Soviet communist hunting section of MI5. And she was repeatedly saying to her male bosses and colleagues, there's something about Mrs. Burton, there's something about Ursula Kaczynski that doesn't smell right. We need to get on to her, we need to look into her, we need to sort of find out what. And she was ignored. Like many women in male dominated world, she was sort of patting on the head and told her, not to worry, to mind her own business. But Millicent Baggett, she may have not won that round, but she did achieve a kind of literary immortality because she was actually a model for Connie Sacks in John McCarray's fiction. David Cornwall, to give him his real name, worked with Millicent Baggett in MI5, knew her quite well and was like most of her colleagues, absolutely terrified of her. And so she did achieve immortality in that respect. Do you know, did she come out of, Millicent, did she come out of World War II or was, did she predate, was she brought on even before? She was actually brought on before, she was actually in special branch of that, which is the Metropolitan Police's Special Branch Division, which we sort of, in a way, cross it over partly in intelligence. And then before the war, in fact, but she was, she was rare. I mean, there were very, very few. I mean, I know them personally quite well now and I would say you can probably count on one hand. The number of officers, there were plenty of secretaries. Right. I mean, that was, that was the way it worked. But as you said at the top of the program, this was at war, as in so many areas of life, was an opportunity for supremely talented women to get ahead and be treated as equals. What I've always felt about the Ursula story is that in a way, the reason we don't know about or haven't known about her up until this point is that historians have also tended to overlook her because she was a woman. I think it's, I think, I think that ingrained sense of kind of the inequality of the genders. Really, historians have a responsibility for it too. And we are hearing more and more about the, and we're not sort of turning them into heroines. Ursula is not a kind of plastic female James Bond with a pistol in her purse. He's not, you know, she's a much more interesting and complicated character than that. But yet she is someone who was able to, to deal with men as equals. I don't think Ursula would ever have described herself as a feminist. It's quite interesting, even though Agnes Smedley certainly was. I think Ursula never really thought about it that way. I think she just believed that she was perfectly capable of doing whatever a man could do. But she wasn't terribly interested in the role of women in wider society. She wasn't sort of campaigning in that way. She was just doing something that she turned out to be incredibly good at. Yes. And in terms of, that's, that's just extraordinary. And I do think Agnes Smedley is representative of sort of the women of the 1920s and 30s who the suffragist generation, the sort of the flapper, the new woman, that kind of brief window of emancipation that happened at the beginning of the 20th century. Agnes seemed to me to come out of that era. You know, they gave us Amelia Earhart and some of the other famous kind of dashing women. But just to, that's just an aside, one of the other things that struck me when you were talking about Millicent Bagot and her male colleagues and superiors who were onto Ursula but couldn't quite nail her. And I was struck by how Millicent, she was sort of in charge of her bureau, but they gave her a male boss just because it was thought that she couldn't actually be the boss, even though she was the brains of the operation. And even she, I think it's fair to say, but certainly her male colleagues and superiors, when they would look at Ursula's household, they would look at her, they would focus on her male partner. And so in a way, her spy activities were not only endangering her children at times in her family, but the man, whatever male partner she had at the time, also came up with her extra suspicion. There's a great irony there because they certainly suspected her husband, Len, who had a history of communism, who was a Brit, who was a man. And of course, what they didn't know was that Len was actually her recruit, that Len was under, under Lee. I mean, he was under her command. She had recruited him back during the war. She then married him in order to get a passport. She then accidentally fell in love with him and stayed married to him. And it was a very happy marriage. They stayed married for 50 years. But what a MI5 never, I mean, they were totally focused on Len Burton, who was actually by far the minor figure in this story. I mean, Len was lovely, but he was actually pretty hopeless. He wasn't very good. But Ursula knew this, and there was a wonderful moment when the final time that MI5 came to interview the Burton's in their cottage, they knocked on the door. And Ursula answered it wearing a kind of an apron. And she was doing some baking in the back for a Christmas birthday cake for her son. And the first thing she said to the MI5 officers was, oh, shall I, shall I go and get my husband? Which was brilliant. And they sort of said, oh, yes, madam, you should probably do that. And they were, to give them their credit, I mean, these old-fashioned British intelligence officers with sort of droopy moustaches, were just cripplingly embarrassed to be interviewing a wife and mother as a potential spy, because it just didn't compute for them. But they did, they kind of got onto her in the end, but she got away nonetheless. I won't give that away for the readers. But she was very canny. She knew how to run the story, the cover story better than they were ever going to get through, I think. Right. And these, I have to say, I mean, hapless, the word that you use also, her first husband, Rudy, Hamburger is just a tragic figure. But God, these, honestly, these men who partner with her in these extraordinary situations, it's just, it's hard to know how to think about it. They just keep making one mistake after another. I mean, she's obviously, they fall, all these men fall for her and agree to these extraordinary conditions sort of for living with her that. I mean, she had an extraordinary lure, she wasn't promiscuous. No, well. And she wasn't a seductress. You don't have this idea of a kind of honey trap, female. She wasn't a honey trap, yeah. But she was much more, she fell in love when she fell in love. And she fell in love absolutely. But she wasn't promiscuous. And yet, you're right, the men were that in her lives were never up to her grade, really. That was, that was part of the problem, I think, is she, she was always a much more powerful personality than they were. And Rudy, her first husband is actually, it's an incredibly tragic story. I mean, it's a really tricky part with Ursula. He converted to communism, and then decided that he wanted to be a spy. And it was really his way of kind of keeping in with her. But the problem was he was absolutely useless at it. He couldn't do it. And he kept getting caught. And the poor man didn't in fact end up in the, in the Soviet gulag. I mean, his story is, is a terrible one. Yes. But it's again, and there's a top side to Ursula. I mean, that's the other element of her personality that I think is, is both alluring and in some ways rather chilling. I mean, she's a great combination of parts Ursula. She's not a simple one-dimensional black and white heroine at all. And I, you know, she made some terrible mistakes. And she ended up on the wrong side of history. But she had a kind of toughness, a kind of determination that I think came from having witnessed some of the worst parts of 20th century history. She was tough as only that kind of brutal world could make a person. And so she's a great combination of tenderness and toughness. And I think that makes her, makes her very remarkable, I think. Yes, absolutely. And what you, what you said is she, she never did play that classic. When, when people think of women and espionage, they often do think of the honey trap, I think, which is, I mean, you just, just, you, you can define that better than I can, probably, but, but she really would never was that for all of her elicit affairs and things like that. She was, she didn't play that, what people think of as the kind of traditional role for a woman, right? No, I mean, the honey trap is the classic sort of woman who secuted a man into bed and then extract secrets from them in the form of pillow talk. Yeah. That's, that was not her way. She was not about using her, her feminine attractiveness to get men to tell her things. But, but more it was that she was playing the part of a slightly dotty housewife in Shanghai, saying to the German ambassador, oh, I think I, you know, how many guns do you think you're going to be, you know, it was sort of, she was sort of playing the sort of, the naive fit me like. Right. Yeah, but, but I did a seductress who wasn't, right? But she knew that she had an electric effect on, on, on women as well as men. I mean, it may well be that she and Agnes Smedley or lovers, Agnes Smedley was certainly bisexual and their, their relationship was highly charged and highly, the way they wrote to each other was semi erotic. It's very interesting. So who knows? Who knows? I mean, it's not clear, but it was a time really of sexual liberation to an Ursula without sort of formalizing it as a political statement, was under no illusions about whether or not she was, you know, she was quite happy in a way to live this life that was, you know, even the Stasi, even the East German secret police, when they discovered that she had three children by three different men and she wanted to write about it as a prudish organization. They said, no, you can't possibly do that. You know, that it's, you know, we need you to be a pure heroine of the Soviet Union. So she's complicated. Oh, so complicated. And just as you say, she, well, she doesn't typically work as a honey trap. The time that, that did strike me where she employed some flirtatious skills, survival skills is when she's literally living next to a Nazi. She's living next to that big Nazi and has to sort of jolly him up. And so she flirted with him a little bit, just to put him off her scent, because I think that that's another case where she's got an aerial coming out of her house or something. And so that that struck me as impressive. Yeah. Yeah. And she sort of knew what she was doing. And amusingly enough, the Nazi who lived next door, I think he also knew what was going on, but he was rather smitten by Ursula. And so he, you know, again, it's that interplay, I think, of the human with the political that I've always found fascinating. And Ursula of Life asks, in a way more insistently than any book I've ever written actually, I think it asks, what would you do? What would you as an individual have done in these circumstances? Would you, you know, and to do that, you have to kind of understand that the context of Ursula's life, you know, that where her communism came from, we think of communism, obviously these days, we think of it as being a failed idea that went disastrously wrong, and cause untold human misery. She didn't know that at the time that she was a communism. And her life in a way, and I'm not trying to make anything for her, you know, she served a brutal, filestine, repressive regime. But as she said in later life, I didn't do it for Stalin. I mean, where she discovered the extent of Stalin's crime, she was horrified when she discovered how many of her friends and colleagues had been wiped out by it. She was furious. But yet she stuck to the idea. And in a way, that's what makes her life so extraordinary. She was very young when the Bolshevik Revolution took place. And she was very old when the Berlin Wall came down. So her life spans the whole of communism, from its sort of, as it were, crystal ideological beginnings to its chaotic, neurotic collapse in the area we all know. And so in a way, her story is the story of communism, all its complexity and confusion and brutality. And I think she knew that. She died, in many ways, I think, a disappointed woman. I think she knew that many of the truths that she had stuck to all her life had, in fact, been lost, which again gives her kind of perspective on her life. And I think it's unique, actually. And I'm looking at questions that have been submitted by listeners. And I would encourage anybody listening to go ahead and submit a question, please. And there was a question about the purges and her knowledge of the purges, because it didn't completely come as a surprise to her late in life. She did sort of see what was happening, right? It's the one question that I would love to have asked, first of all, myself. I mean, the journalist in me would love to have sat down with her and said, how much did you really know about the purges? Now, the purges were the terrible, Stalinist, murderous, paranoid moments in 37 and 38, when hundreds of thousands of people were wiped out, particularly spies, particularly foreigners, particularly Jews. You know, so she was herself a major target. And one by one, and she was in Moscow, but for part of this period, one by one, her friends and colleagues were picked off. Now, subsequently, she wrote about it. She claimed she didn't really know what was going on, that no one really knew what was going on, that she was horrified when she discovered. But actually, it's the period of her life that I find most queasy to write about. Because I think she did something that is probably more human than that. I think she, like everybody, she knew it was incredibly dangerous. She knew that there was this terrible, murderous sort of assault going on with people that she knew, and she just didn't want to see it. She closed her eyes, she turned her back, and she got out of Moscow as fast as she could because she knew she was not going to survive herself. That she did survive is one of the great mysteries of this story. I mean, I think it is probably down to her ability to invoke, to inspire a certain sort of loyalty. And just simple luck, she got incredibly lucky. But it was a crisis for her, and it would continue to be a kind of psychological wound for her into late, late life. Even in her 90s, she was wrestling with the idea that she had served a murderous tyrant who had killed many, many of her friends. Now, she made accommodation with that. She made accommodation with that for the sake of the idea that she still believed was a good one. And she went to her death bed, a communist. Was she wrong? Yes, she was wrong. But you can't really judge history like that. History is not a question of right and wrong and black and white. Most of history, I believe, is painted in gray in shades of moral gray. And if we try to impose a kind of moral straight back into the past, we are misunderstanding what human experience is about. All you can try to do with these stories is to put people into their context and try to see it as they saw it. You have to agree with it, but you have to be able to see through their eyes. And again, as I say, it raises the question, what would you do? I wonder if you and I, Lisa, had been young people in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and fashion had been on the rise, we might well have become communists. Sure. Whether we would have stuck to communism throughout Stalin's era, that's another whole question. But those are the questions that animate me and I think that make history important and interesting. One of the questions that was submitted was, is there anything about Ursula that still nags at you? Anything that you, and I think you've just given your answer, but is there anything else? Yes. I mean, there are other moments when I question, Ursula painted herself in later life as a pure driven product of belief, of ideology. She looked at her choices and framed them as if they were the logical result of conviction, which Spides often do actually. I mean, I've never come across a spy who didn't believe they were serving a higher cause, a good one. But actually, most spies are motivated by all sorts of different feelings and instincts, including hubris and ambition and love of adventure, love of danger in Ursula's case. Those were all part of her story. I'd love to have sat down with her and there are other moments. For example, when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany forged the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop pack before the Soviets came into the war, the non-aggression pack between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, that was a terrible moment for Ursula because the cause that she had espoused all her adult life was anti-fascism. She became a communist to destroy people like him. Indeed, she at one point framed up an assassination plot to kill him that very nearly happened. And then this moment came when out of the grimeist kind of real policy, the people that she believed in were suddenly in bed with the people that she despised. And that was another crisis for her. And yet, in her own story, she rather smooths over it because she's writing for a East German communist audience. She doesn't really address that issue, but we know from others that it was again, it was a moment of profound doubt for her. She presented herself as a pure driven communist. And again, I would love to have interrogated her a bit harder on that. At the moment, and we know in later life, there were others, the Hungarian uprising crushed in 1956, the Prague Spring destroyed by the Soviet tanks in 1968. I know from her sons that these were for her moments of real internal ideological crisis. But again, in the official record, you can't quite get her to admit what was really going on inside her soul. And so there are moments that I would like to just press her a bit harder. Well, I'll just say, though, your your ability to to get access to her writings and her letters. And I mean, I think you come as close as it is possible for an historian, a biographer to come to talk about her internal life and her thoughts and her evolution. Well, I was very lucky, Liza. I mean, the truth is, I got hugely lucky. I couldn't have written this book without the cooperation of her two surviving sons who were both brought up in East Germany. One of them was a communist, you know, and so this Western figure arrived saying, I'm going to write the story of your mother's life. They looked at me initially and understandably with considerable suspicion. But over time, they said, look, we've got these letters, we've got these diaries, we've got these unpublished manuscripts that our mother wrote. Help yourself. And it's very rare to find that to find it to find a family. They all preserve the mythology of their of their ancestors, particularly of their parents. And they were they were absolutely wonderful about it. They just said, help yourself, write whatever you want. And so I also had, but I was also very lucky in the sense that Ursula became in later life, much later life. She reinvented herself as a novelist. She wrote a number of highly successful books for young adults. They sold in the hundreds of thousands. And they are, they're described or were described as fiction. But the reality is that they're not really fiction, they're memoir. They were Ursula's ways of getting around the study centre. And so again, in discussion with her sons, they said, look, this isn't really, this isn't fiction. This is memoir. And you may treat this as Ursula's beliefs and feelings and her thoughts. So I was able, I was just incredibly lucky. I was able to excavate what Ursula was thinking and feeling at key points of her life. So it was a fascinating experience because, you know, I took on a book like this with some trepidation for two reasons very one is that Ursula was a communist. I'm not a communist. So, you know, being in the company of a communist for three years, I took on with some, you know, communists can be quite didactic. They can be quite finger-witty and tough. Actually, I found her incredibly good company. And also she's a woman and I, you know, to ventriloquize, for a man to ventriloquize a woman at the moment, if that's the right word to interpret. It's a tricky thing to do in the kind of world we're in at the moment. But because I had access to these extraordinary unpublished manuscripts and her memoirs, I always felt that Ursula was somehow in a way there with me. So that I could, I could say what she was feeling without, without certainly doing any violation of the truth, but knowing that I wasn't in some way echoing her own psychology and her own psyche in some way. Well, can I just say I don't believe in luck in those instances. It's your human skills at helping, they understood that they were working with a biographer that, who merited the handing over of these records. So just make that, it wasn't, it wasn't. Any more than, you know, her survival was luck. But let's just, I can't resist asking you in terms of the end of her life and her survival skills and gender and the way, the role that gender played and people's assumptions about women played in her survival. Talk about the moment when Richard Sorge is being asked about her as he is going to be hanged. Yes, this is one of those really extraordinary moments in her story. I mean, Richard Sorge was really the love of her life. I mean, she married twice. She had three children by three different men. But Sorge's was the photograph that she took with her for the rest of her life. He was hanging on the wall in the room where she died. So he was there with her. Even though their love affair was very brief, but Sorge was captured by the Japanese. I mean, having pulled off astonishing feats during the war. I mean, he even managed to warn Stalin of Operation Barbarossa of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. He had acted as the highest echelons of Japanese imperial and political world. But he was eventually captured as the most spies are, and he was betrayed and he was caught. And he was asked about women intelligence spies, you know, when he was being interrogated. And he was, as you say, convicted of actually hanging in a Tokyo prison. And it's very interesting because he said, women's spies are hopeless. I'm paraphrasing because I can't remember the exact words he was using, but he said, you know, I've never used women's spies. I've always felt that they really, you know, they were no use. And of course, that was completely untrue of him. I mean, not only had he recruited others, he recruited other women. But at that moment was Sorge covering for Ursula. He was, you know, to the death, he was not going to expose her. And so he was laying a false trail, knowing that no one was, you know, that it was a way of covering up because he had no idea how senior she'd become. But he didn't know that she was given the Soviet intelligence service. He knew that the Japanese knew that he'd been in contact with in Shanghai. He also knew that they knew that she'd been in Japanese occupied Manchuria and so he deliberately was almost the last act he made was to point them off the trail. I found that extraordinarily moving. I don't know if Ursula ever knew it. I don't know if she knew that because those interrogation records had not been released, I think, at the time that Ursula died, she was 93. But even so, I think they were released in the early 2000s. So I don't know if she ever knew that his last act was to kind of protect her before the hangman took him away. Well, I salute your research skills, you know, that you got her letters and that depth of understanding of her as well as those interrogation records. And it's so research in this terrain is so difficult. Getting people spies generally don't write things down and governments don't want to hand over these records often and that you were able to get both, you know, her inner thoughts and moments like that is just. Well, again, I think it's, I mean, you're right, spies don't usually write about what's happened. And when they do, they tend to kind of bend the truth slightly. I mean, half the fun about writing about spies is trying to work out where the truth lies, just to speak from what they pretend the truth was. So you've always got to kind of aim off a bit. But in a funny way, when you do have the intelligence files, when you do have first person accounts, when you do have letters and diaries, you can, it's possible in the espionage world, I hope, to write a book that feels like fiction, that has as much detail as a novel would. And yet it's all true. And so, you know, I never make anything up. And if I say the sky was blue and there were core flowers in the fields, that's because I've got a witness saying that what was there. And sometimes, as I say, very lucky, you have enough material to be able to tell a story where the narrative moves along in a way that feels almost novel-like and yet is true. And I think it's no accident in a way that Ursula became a novelist in her later life, that so many spies have ended up as novelists. John McHarrie is a very good example. Some say it's Morm even, you know, Ian Fleming, John Buck, and they were all, John Graham Green, they were all spies before they became novelists. Because I think there isn't such a big jump between being a spy and being a novelist. They're both in a way about imagination. They're both about creating an artificial and believable world and trying to lure other people into it. And so, I think, I've always found fascinating the interplay between espionage, intelligence, and fiction and writing of fiction. Well, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure. And we're a little bit over time, so I think I should wrap it up. I also just wanted to say hello from Stephen McKinnon, who is Agnes Medley's biographer and wasn't able to submit questions but wanted to congratulate you on your wonderful book. And next I want to read his biography of Agnes Medley. This is just so wonderful. Thank you so much for writing the book. And thank you so much for the time that you've given all of us. I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed it. Thank you so much, Lisa. Thank you very much for having me.