communist party politics continued after the reunification of Ger-
many in 1990. He died in Berlin on 6 August 1997.KUCZYNSKI, URSULA (1907–2000). A spy who transmitted atomic
bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, Ursula Kuczynski was born in
Berlin on 15 May 1907, the daughter of a leading economic statisti-
cian and left-wing sympathizer. Trained as a bookseller, she joined
the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands at the age of 18 and became
a writer for the party newspaper, Die Rote Fahne. During a trip to
Moscow in 1930, she and her architect husband, Rudolf Hamburger,
were persuaded to work undercover in China. The next year, while
employed at the Soviet telegraph office in Shanghai, Kuczynski was
contacted by Richard Sorge, who had established a spy ring there
on behalf of the GRU (Soviet military intelligence). He gave her the
code name sonja and recommended that she return to Moscow for
training in espionage and radio communications.
Following her three-month course at the GRU school, Kuczynski
was assigned to Mukden, Manchuria, to assist Chinese partisans en-
gaged in sabotage operations against the Japanese occupation army.
Separated from her husband, she lived with an Illegaler known as
Ernst. In 1935, the British arrested Hamburger in Shanghai for es-
pionage activity, and fear of her possible exposure led to a new post-
ing in Warsaw, where she was joined by her husband. In addition to
receiving further training in Moscow, she was promoted to the rank
of major and received the Order of the Red Banner in 1938.
Her request for a new mission resulted in an assignment to Swit-
zerland, where the GRU networks had been severely damaged as a
result of Stalin’s purges. Advised not to join any communist party,
she rented a villa above Montreux, living there with her two children.
Working with the Hungarian-born Comintern agent Sándor Radó
(code name dora), she helped lay the foundation for the Lucy spy
ring, which was to produce exceptional wartime intelligence for the
Soviet Union. When she again faced the possibility of exposure, the
GRU decided that placing her in Great Britain had even greater long-
term potential. She was now divorced from Hamburger, and in May
1940, to facilitate her emigration, a marriage was arranged with one
of her Swiss assistants, Leon Beurton, a young naturalized British
citizen of French origin who had fought in the Spanish Civil War.
KUCZYNSKI, URSULA • 251