A mother of three living in an Oxfordshire cottage. A colonel in Soviet military intelligence — a rank no other woman in GRU history has held.

Her code name was Sonya. Recruited in Shanghai by Richard Sorge, she ran agents across Berlin, Shanghai, Manchuria, Poland, Switzerland and England for two decades — and was never caught.

In 1941 her brother Jürgen introduced physicist Klaus Fuchs to Soviet intelligence. Fuchs worked the implosion lens design at Los Alamos — exactly what Moscow needed. He supplied it; Sonya's network carried it.

The head of the GRU told her London contact: "If we had five Sonyas in England, the war would end sooner."MI5 interviewed her twice in 1947 — and showed almost no interest in Fuchs. When he confessed on January 27, 1950, she was already warned. She packed one suitcase, woke two of her three children, and fled to Berlin.

She was never arrested. Never tried. She died peacefully in Berlin in 2000.

Chapters:

00:00 Meet Sonya
00:46 Early Years
02:06 Becoming a Spy
04:37 The Spy Housewife
07:05 Klaus Fuchs
09:03 Atomic Secrets
11:33 Fooling MI5
13:43 Sonya Escapes
16:33 The Verdict
18:28 Sonya’s Legacy
20:56 Next Time

📁 Reconstructed from declassified files, court records, memoirs, and the official record.
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I Don't See the Branches, I See the Leaves by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...

Source: http://chriszabriskie.com/dtv/

Artist: http://chriszabriskie.com/