BEURTON, URSULA• 51cement their marriage, which was under strain, primarily because of
political differences. ‘‘I could not talk to him about the people who
were closest to me or the work on which my life was centered.’’
Hamburger was deliberately excluded from Beurton’s clandestine ac-
tivities and had no idea that Sorge used their house to store secret
information. Only later did he convert to Communism, by which time
Beurton had left him. In the meantime, she spent six months in Mos-
cow undergoing a GRU training course, returning to meet Ham-
burger in Prague and returning to China via Trieste in April 1934.
They settled in Nukden and then in June 1935 moved to Peking,
where she became pregnant by Ernst, a GRU agent with whom she
had trained in Moscow.
Beurton returned to Moscow with Micha late in 1935, and after a
brief stopover, continued her journey via Leningrad to London where
she was reunited with her family. She then moved with Hamburger
to Warsaw, where daughter Janina was born in April 1936. After a
mission to Danzig, Beurton was recalled to Moscow to receive fur-
ther training, the Order of the Red Banner, and a new assignment in
Switzerland. In October 1938 Beurton was living in the village of
Caux, above Montreux, with her two children, supervising a network
of agents that included members of the International Labor Organiza-
tion of the League of Nations in Geneva and workers at the I. G. Far-
ben plant in Frankfurt. However, her passport was false and in 1939
she divorced Hamburger, who had been ordered back to China, and
married a young English veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Len Beur-
ton, in order to acquire British citizenship.
In December 1940 Ursula and her children made their way to En-
gland, via Barcelona, Madrid, and Lisbon, and rented a house in Ox-
ford where, in late 1942, she was joined briefly by Len before he was
called up for service in the Coldstream Guards. While in England she
acted as a GRU case officer for Norwood, who supplied atomic se-
crets from the British Non-Ferrous Metals Association, and for
Fuchs, a role that led toMI5’s interest in her in August 1947. Al-
though on the one occasion Beurton was interviewed she denied any
connection with espionage, she fled to East Germany in February
1950, the day before Fuchs appeared at the Old Bailey. In her retire-
ment, she lived in East Berlin, an unapologetic Communist, devoted
to Len and their son Peter, who was born in September 1943. Her