AGENT SONYAMoscows Most Daring Wartime SpyBy Ben Macintyre

We have at last, in Ben Macintyres Agent Sonya, the tale of a fully fleshed-out female spy. Not a femme fatale with a tiny pistol in her purse, Sonya was a spy who loved her kids and was racked by guilt for neglecting them, who had serious babysitter problems, a woman whose heart was broken by Mr. Wrong a woman very much like the rest of us. Except not quite. Macintyre, the author of numerous books on spies and espionage, has found a real-life heroine worthy of his gifts as John le Carrs nonfiction counterpart.

Le Carr, however, could not have invented Ursula Kuczynski, a.k.a. Agent Sonya. For this panoramic account of espionage from Weimar Germany through the Cold War is, above all, a womans story. Macintyre draws on Sonyas own journals, which capture the stressful balancing act of spymaster, mother and lover of several men during the most dangerous decades of the 20th century. Like many supremely successful women, Sonya benefited from men underestimating her.

Her journey began in the lawless streets of Berlin in the 1920s, as Communists and Nazis brawled and the Weimar Republic unraveled. A blow from a policemans rubber truncheon during her first street demonstration set the 16-year-old on the road to revolution. Although born to a prosperous, secular Jewish family from Berlins bourgeois Zehlendorf district, she signed up with the Communists, who seemed to be the only ones prepared to shed blood to fight the Nazis. And once she was seduced by their promise of a workers utopia, Sonya never swerved from the cause.

[ Read an excerpt from Agent Sonya. ]

From Shanghai, where Sonya was caught up in the struggle between Chiang Kai-sheks Nationalists and Mao Zedongs Communists, to Japanese-occupied Manchuria, to the placid Cotswold hamlet where she spent part of the war, Sonya managed to elude German, British and American secret services. It boggles the mind how a woman with so many domestic responsibilities a husband and two children could find time for spy drops and transmitting coded messages. But Sonya was the consummate multitasker, now cooking dinner, now cooking up explosives to blow up railways. Domesticity was the perfect cover.

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The Housewife Who Was a Spy - The New York Times