Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Intelligence

Washington and Moscow as a military attaché. He was recruited in

1948 and for the next 15 years provided important intelligence to the

GRU. He was arrested in 1964 and sentenced to life imprisonment

but was released in 1974. Winnerstrom’s motivation in serving

Moscow was personal. He resented the fact that he had not been pro-

moted to general officer. Aware of his anger, his GRU handlers re-

ferred to him as “General” and informed him that he held the rank of

major general in the GRU.

WERNER, RUTH (1907–2000).One of the GRU’s most famous ille-

gals, Ruth Werner was born Ursula Kuczynski into a middle-class

German family in Berlin and was a committed communist from her

teens. After recruitment into military intelligence, she served as a

GRU illegal in Manchuria, Shanghai, Poland, and Switzerland. (In

Shanghai, she was Richard Sorge’s lover.) During World War II,

Werner served as an illegal in England. The GRU selected a husband

for her, a British subject, so that she would obtain British citizenship.

Werner’s brother, Juergen Kuczynski, was also an important GRU as-

set; he helped Soviet intelligence mold the German exilecommunity

in London during the war.

While in England, Werner acted as Klaus Fuchs’s case officer,

transmitting information about the Anglo-American nuclear weapons

program to Moscow. In 1950, following Fuchs’s arrest, Werner fled

to East Germany, where she was resettled. A decorated Red Army

colonel, Werner held a prestigious job in her native Germany, wrote

several semi-autobiographical novels, and raised three children. She

remained a communist even after the collapse of the East German

regime. At the time of her death, she was an active member of the

Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the communist party.

WHITE, HARRY DEXTER (1895–1948). The most senior Ameri-

can civil servant to cooperate with Soviet intelligence, White was

one of the most brilliant economists of his age. As a senior official

in the Treasury Department, White helped establish American fi-

nancial policy during the last years of World War II. He and John

Maynard Keynes were the architects of the historic Bretton Woods

Conference in 1944, and he was the first chief of the International

Monetary Fund. The evidence from former communists such as

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