I wanted to apologize beforehand for the technical difficulties from the storm but now its my pleasure to get this program started high passing it on to the Museum Samuel jones Senior Historian and dr. Robert citina wholl be leading todays conversation. Senate thanks jeremy and welcomes everyone from beautiful new orleans louisiana. Quite literally in the path of the storm quite literally a few hours from now and eye of the hurricane so we hope everything goes smoothly and i like would jeremy said heck or high water. We hope we dont get any today. Having said that im really excited about todays program. Every now and then in my line of work you get to interview an author that you feel like youve. Every word they have published in this particular authors case that might be difficult but some six as a writer at large for the times and the bestselling up of numerous books this the spy and the traitor and operation mincemeat doublecrossed operation mincemeat a book that many of our audience have already. Is written and presented these documentaries of his work. Hes a star in the field. I guess i would say espionage history and Ben Macintyre welcomto the National Wolf or two ecm. Thank you for iiting me. I wish i could be there in person at what am i favorite cities. Thank you for having me. You are a master of this topic and in operation sonya i will tell our audience you really dish it up in style. Let me begin by asking you the standard question when i get it good author and my screen and i never like let them go without asking them. Why this book . Why this topic and why now . Is there something about the moment we are in the suggested this amazing woman. She she is better known in her professional life as agent sonya. Why this book . Yes so often with these stories it was really accidental. I was researching a completely different story which always intrigued me which is the story of a poet in the cia at the tail end of the war when he began to parachute into the collapsing reich for sabotage operations and just as the enemy was falling apart. And the scavenger recruit by the germans but the back of the story was a woman. She wasnt identified any of the papers but the names and addresses. What the americans and they didnt know all of these people were diehard communists and they were being recruited by agent sonya ursula kachinsky and that was my starting point but it began wondering and then again began to scroll back in time and found this remarkable character who goes back even earlier and why now . Because for me it was something of a challenge. I have never written about somebody who was a committed communist. Most of my stories come from the other end of the pedestal and i thought it was time really and her story is quite extraordinary because as many people know this is a very maledominated world the world of espionage. Their women spies but a woman Intelligence Officer who was trained to the pitch that she was trained to the point where she was a colonel in the red army i didnt no, couldnt find a single other woman who had risen so far in so high within any service let alone that system so i was trying to tell that story and in the way her story has been hidden for far too long he could she was a one. It was her most profound disguise and its how she ruthlessly ruthlessly used her gender to hide what she was really up to but also she tended to shy away from women subjects. I wouldnt have been able to tell the story havent not had the incredible fortune of being able to interview her surviving children and two of her sons who very generously opened the family archives and allowed me access to all of her papers all of her diaries and letters and said even though barry m. And ive live the kind of life and wanted to live i felt she was with me in some way kind of guiding me through the story and instead of trying to didnt relook wise for her in some way i had her voice with me and that was a great comfort in a way. Tell us more about ursula. She was a good communist she claims and 17 she was in a leftwing rally in berlin. How had she gotten to this point . Tell us about her family life a german intellectual and a cultural circle around her are whos who of leftism in the early 20th century. Tell us about ursula the young woman. Its a always important understand the person at ursula became among the greater the chaos and germany between the wars and extraordinary period when Economic Disaster was looming and fascism was on the rise on the right and extreme leftism in the form of the German Communist Party was extremely powerful in germany. There were many people and in a way germans were the background. She came from an intellectual academic family and they were very welloff but they left in the life of her linen they knew everybody from einstein and everybody who was anybody on the left there and as a result of her experience as a teenager she had seen the appalling poverty and the appalling degradation and the contrast and her familys leftist meaning. She joined the communist party at the age of 17 out of conviction despite her parents objection and she never really wavered. When she did waiver there were moments in her life when the whole communist party is becoming a part of her hand. And the way her equivocations are part of the story but because she was very young when the bolsheviks revolution took place in very old when the berlin wall came down her life in some ways spans the whole of communism. It was away it seemed seemed to me the exploring that Extraordinary Events and movement in World History in the 20th century for good and for evil. She ended up working for brutal ruthless stalinist regime and the extent to which he knew about that we can certainly discuss but i caught her wavering from times to times. She said she had doubts and as a way to explore that story. All starts in germany in the 1920s when his first she was concerned it was a perfectly respectable intellectual position at that point. As far she was concerned the only people standing up for the fascists were the communists so for her in a way it was a migration to the left. Im fasnated by one of her phrases would be writing the book and of course a difficult thing to say at the time. The soviet union is the future. Course today when they we live in an era where the soviet union is and of course she had never been to the soviet unit that point. She had not seen what the soviet unit was or could even imagine what the soviet union evolved into but for many idealistic young people in the world and not disturb me dont forget that germany was considered to be the crucible of the next revolution. Many people in germany and outside believed the next revolution was going to take place in germany. That was quite a widespread belief. And yes she saw all the ideology that went with the. She sob that is the future and cheap comes to that there most of her life. Im trying to think of the word, shes a bookish character. Her world is the publishing may you reach you or did book stores and more than one occasion so seems to me you started with an idea and it will be earning for something. How did she get into the action and . All of a sudden she had been shot high and i dont want to give away the beautiful deep to let this book to the raiders but how did she make that transition. Many idealistic young people have done it in the freezer uses cocoa we outgrow that but not her. She grew into it as an action oriented figure. Shes a contrast. She is as you say a very gentle bookish, she wrote very early on she wrote poems and short stories. She lives in a house in berlin that contains the largest private library in germany. You couldnt get mh more bookish than that. At the age of i think 14 sitting in a tree basalt the book. Thats the way she was by that that yet as you said she ended up in the revoluti. She got it done. She was ready at a very young age to go to war on behf of that was because she was single at the brownshirts were doing in the rise of the essay ithe brutality that she was sitting onhe far right. The one thi that makes it interesting for the first half of h life she isattling fascism possibly uerside. During the war with the soviet union of written and an american ally tri to beat this defeat nazism and then of crse history pivots around her in some ways. And in the cold war shes fing against the west. She has no change in the trajectory of her belief but from our perspective she suddenly on the other side of the fence. To me thats fascinating. Again as in so much of life its accidental. She went to shanghailthough she did spend a brief period in america in new rk. She word in the bookshop in upper manhattano she had the experience of americans srted a lovehate relationship with the state. There were evidence of americans she deeplydmired and others that she defied. She was a very talented young chitect and she was offered a job in shanghai for the british council. She was only 24 by the time she got to shanghai and its an intoxicating place. It was a huge melting pot of different races verrich on one hand and a mercantile cter in massive chinese population on the other side. She witnessed it firsthand was shot via. It was a meeting wita long forgotten history of the fastening man called agnes smedley. Most of the people the story ve the most extraordinary names. Thats what led you to this topic. She was at that point a successful leftwing novelist. She wrote a highly successful novel and by the time she met agnes in shanghai she was already communist spy. She had already been recruited to the soviet military intelligence and she recruited ursula. She was a communist and she longed to do something. In the context of the times shanghaied was the birthplace of the Chinese Communist party but the Chinese Communist party was undergoing a brutal repression at the hands of the Chiang Kaishek known as the white care. It was a brutal repression Something Like 300,000 people were killed in the course of that attempt to extricate the communist party and ursula was recruited first of all by smedley who was described no less as being the most formidable spy in history. He was the key soviet agent in shanghai and the soviets were bankrolling the communist underground and ursula lasorda brought into it. Im trying to think of a way you put it when you said heard domesticity was one of her greatest assets. All spies have to leave a doublife. She has a husband and a child by him. Some point shes told by the party to leave him so she can put 10 to b the wife of another man and they pretend to be a family. I think of lenin who once said, is have no priva life. You do whatever the party tells you to. Is that about right . Not quite because one of the things that i find so fascinating about ursula is between what she saw as her ideological duty and her responsibility as a wife a mother a homemaker. Throughout her le these two sides of her life were in constant tension and even in old age she began to wonder whether she had been good spy and a bad mother. The reality was the cause required her to put her family second and she struggled wit that greatly. She always put them second and she put them in mortal jeopardy. Theres no doubt that we will get into the story lat but when she was operating in europe not only would she have bn murdered by the gestapo but her family would have been wed out as well. She was putting everybody at risk. She was writing about this whe she said, she said i never givep my family again and ive never take this risk unless the revolution requires it of me. So she would have done it. We find that in the 21st century that whole notion that anyby would put her cause before her family is just terrifying against humanity but bear in mind its possible understa here because not a question that we wouldsk of male spies. Cynically would never asked that question come youre right. We would never say hes a great fher. Thats not a distinction we would ke a she did. Time and again she herself on the subject it was a bad mother, and did i do enoughnd of course it leaves legacy. When her family had children and nds out what she had done and they didnt find out there in mind until they were themsels of middleage. They had no idea that their mother had been a spy. The dcovery that should lead this doublelife and she had been some completely different from the woman that brought them up that had longterm effect on the children. You met the children as you begin your discussion and they were of extreme help to you in writing this book and he said he probably couldnt have done it without them. Did you talk to them on this very sensitive point . She had three children b three different men at three different times of her life in all three of the fathers of her children were hurt so agents. They were brutal communist spies themselves one of whom was. She did say at one point to be fair to ursula. Her first great love again theres a bit of an old standard here. We love our spies and the mail spies that live the lives of james bond but she was a woman way ahead of her time but i d interview the two surviving children. One of them is still alive in the old one michael died in his 90s and remember vividly a conversation i had with the most charming and lovely man and waed to discover that her moth had all the secrets and he said it was a rlly moving moment said look i been married and dirced three times. He said perhaps the problem is its because of where i came from. I ner knew how to trust anybody. I found that really very poignant from an old man nearing the end of his life. Another thing he said which again i was very tohed by he said look readi the book he said i now feel i know my mother a little better. Secrets are addictive. In the secret world of difficult to give it up but secrets are very bad for you. Secrets do things and ive written 12 books aut spies and im fascinated by that world. These stories dont have a simple blackandhite moral conclusion. Ople are damaged by these kinds of stories and by what happens to them and the children of ursula arno exception. Having. A number of your works spies the story rarely comes to a happy ending in the sense that you are a hero in your ride up into the sunset and thats precisely what doesnt happen. You tell lies your whole life and i wonder if its difficult to remember which lie you were living at the current time. Its a even seto tell o lie but its very difficult to tell compact lies and remember thlie he told afford it has a denaturing effect. Spying is such a strange professional really because given how much ive written about ituite often doesnt make that much difference. Quite often one side knows what the otheride is doing it all balances out but very occasionally in history and many of your friends wil notice operation mincemeat is a good example. The deceptions that cover the enormous thes another one in ursula is one of the very one that did affect the course of history and we will come to that in the moments but her intelligence on the blding of the atomic bomb materially affected world htory and that makes her again quite exceptional. Give a ment in this book were ursula kachinsky codenamed operaon sonya comes from a very gentile boor upper middle class background cultured and educated and shes actually helping a communist and manchuriaelping them build toms for aess sabotage against the japanese. Yohave a great story in their about a Ammonium Nitrate explosive. One of the many things that ursula trained and when she went to a special sky spy school she was trained in a radio technician work and how to build a radio but also sabotaging bombmaking bridget was an expert bombmaker and one of the things she had to do in japanese occupied manchuria a situation where the japanese move into manchuria and the communist underground was causing warfare against them in ursula was there main agent sending money back and forth. Theres this moment in shes always buying material for the bombs would you couldnt go to one shop and buy a raking in needed because the japanese secret Intelligence Service would have picked you out in the second. She had to go shopping and she tells the story about how she is at another hot Hardware Store to buy Ammonium Nitrate for building bombs. Her chinese was so bad just for 10 pounds of Ammonium Nitrate the shop owner gave her an enormous one hundredweight sack of Ammonium Nitrate. She put the baby on top and will back up again and realized she wouldnt have to go shopping for a while so it kept the bomb makers saying who knows what this bomb was used for . The Chinese Party underground did enormous damage to the networks of the japanese. Maybe she had quite an impact on history. You are looking at the authors ability to write a good tease and the baby on top of the stack of Ammonium Nitrate going back to sabotage the mill and building a bomb. Its an astonishing story and ving into rosa wasaring for your child and buying explosives at the same time. Is imposble to estimate the degree of peril she was mpeg Japanese Secret Police were brutal and highly efficient and they wer all over this. They wer seeking out communist unrground but there are extraordinary photographs in ursulas collectio in a house that she lived in. Toook at it carefully conceived it to of them climb ov the roof and direcd her own aerial use a radio transmitter within you can see the poll that she latched at the end of this little house. How she got away with it that and how the japanesfailed to spot it is extraordinary. She was incredibly lucky. We are the National WorldWar Ii Museum and fst sonyas wartime spying which ones do you think were most significant quakes you have already referred to him but i wonder if he can talk us throh this a bit. It is for the audience the mt of the book and to me some the most interesting portrayals of the entire book. She is redloyed to switzerland. She i sent to switzerland just before the war breaks out in their running agents into the reich. She had to recruit people and sends them and to extract as much infortion as they can and she ended up she goes for radio transmitter and sets herself up with this digital chalet in the swiss mountains in a beautiful place. She has her twohildren with another child by another man and she began runni really the most important Communication Network with moscow. Therwere lots of spy operating uses and she recrui