Living outside Oxford, she built an espionage network that in-
cluded her father and her older brother, Jürgen Kuczynski. While
her father maintained ties to highly placed Labour Party officials, her
brother was engaged by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. Other
spies under her purview were Erich Henschke, a double agent in the
U.S. Office of Strategic Services, and Melita Norwood (code name
hola), an employee of the government’s atomic research project
Tube Alloys and the longest serving known Soviet agent in Britain.
Most significant of all, however, was her relationship with Klaus
Fuchs, who was also working at the atomic research facility in Bir-
mingham. She encouraged him to continue his activity as part of the
team of British physicists designated for the Manhattan project in
the United States. On his return to Britain in 1945, their relationship
resumed, and more details of the British atomic bomb project soon
found their way to Moscow.
In 1947, Allan Foote, a British communist and former associate
from her clandestine work in Switzerland, broke with the party and
gave her name to MI5. Despite a brief interrogation, nothing came
of the matter. When Igor Gouzenko defected in Canada, however,
the GRU broke off communications with Kuczynski, because he
was in a position to link her to Fuchs. After Fuchs was arrested and
confessed in January 1950, she decided to leave the country. On the
eve of Fuchs’s trial, she and her two children departed on a “vaca-
tion” for East Berlin and were later joined by her husband. The gov-
ernment of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) offered her a
position in the press affairs office, while the Soviet Union bestowed
the honorary rank of colonel in the Red Army and a second Order
of the Red Banner. Kuczynski left her government position in 1956
and embarked on a prolific literary career under the nom de plume
Ruth Werner (worldwide sales of her works totaled approximately
one million). Her autobiography, Sonjas Rapport (Sonia’s Report),
appeared in 1977, but no mention was made of Klaus Fuchs or her
first husband, who had apparently died in the Gulag. “We wanted to
help the people in the Soviet Union in their efforts to prevent war,”
she asserted in a later afterword, “and when war broke out against
German fascism, to win it.” Following the reunification of Germany,
which she adamantly opposed, Kuczynski became an advisor to the
communist successor party. She died in Berlin on 7 July 2000.252 • KUCZYNSKI, URSULA