I listened on Audible and the narrator was excellent but I cant help wonder if the Hardcopy had photos and maps to go with the story. This is my first Ben Macintyre book and I just wished I had purchased a hard copy of this book for my real life book shelf. I found myself conflicted as to why she would risk her children for her beliefs. The lengths she went to for a cause she believed in.

Reading this you just cant help getting caught up in Sonya’s life as a spy. It’s impeccably researched and extremely well written. I really enjoyed this book and couldn’t stop listening. From planning an assassination attempt on Hitler in Switzerland to spying on the Japanese in Manchuria to preventing nuclear war (or so she says) by stealing the science of atomic weaponry from Britain to give to Moscow. A Non fiction story that reads like fictionīorn to a German Jewish family, Ursula Kaczynski was a German communist activist who worked for the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s. With unparalleled access to Sonya’s diaries and correspondence and never-before-seen information on her clandestine activities, Ben Macintyre has written a history of a legendary secret agent, a woman who influenced the course of the Cold War and helped plunge the world into a decades-long standoff between nuclear superpowers.Īn Entertaining and thrilling story of one woman’s life as a spy for the Soviet Union.

Her story reflects the great ideological clash of the twentieth century-between Communism, Fascism, and Western democracy-and casts new light on the spy battles and shifting allegiances of our own times. This true-life spy story is about the woman code-named “Sonya.” Over the course of her career, she was hunted by the Chinese, the Japanese, the Nazis, MI5, MI6, and the FBI-and she evaded them all. Behind the facade of her picturesque life, Burton was a dedicated Communist, a Soviet colonel, and a veteran agent, gathering the scientific secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the bomb.

They didn’t know that her husband was also a spy, or that she was running powerful agents across Europe. They didn’t know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple, unassuming life. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. In 1942, in a quiet village in the leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby.

Operation zigzag book