welcome to the national world war ii museum virtually. i am here physically. my name is jeremy collins the director of the symposium. today we are bringing this program to you with a hurricane a couple hours away from hitting so i want to let the audience members know we want to bring this program to you heck or high water. if we have any interruptions i want to apologize before hand for the difficulties with the

storm, but now it is my pleasure to get the program started by passing it on to the museums senior historian and the executive director of the institute for the study of democracy doctor rob who will be leading today's conversation. >> thanks, jeremy and welcome to everyone from beautiful new orleans louisiana. quite literally in the path of the storm perhaps a few hours from now on the eye of the hurricane. we hope everything goes smoothly. new orleans gets a lot of the latter but we hope we do not get any today. having said that, we are excited about today's program. every now and then in my line of work you get to interview an author whose line of work you feel like you've read the published but with this particular author that might be difficult. a writer for the times uk and

best-selling author of numerous books the supply and the traitor among the great big trail what a great book that is. i will just tell the audience you really dish this up in the style. let me begin by asking the kind of standard question when i get a good author on the screen and this is without asking why write

this book, why now? is there was something about the moment that suggests this woman, she is ursula but is better known as agent sonya. >> guest: the story of anna oss tail end of the war when they began to parachute to sabotage the operations as it was falling apart and this is from london and the back of the story was a woman providing the names and addresses of the

candidates. i've never were written through a woman's perspective anymore or a committed communist. both of my stories come from the other end, and i started and her story is quite extraordinary because he has many of you will know this is a very male-dominated world and espionage.

trained to the pitch that she was trained and that is unique in my experience. i couldn't find a single other woman that had written so high without any intelligence let alone so it was time to tell her story and in a way it had been hidden for far too long

[inaudible] tell us more about ursula tell us about this german intellectual, intellectual left of the left ism. >> it is to understand unless the republican germany between the war the party was extremely

powerful and of the background he came from a very intellectual family and they were very well off. she partly is the result of her experiences seeing the poverty and the degradation and her families left-leaning. they were most when the project seemed to be coming apart in her

hands in that movement in the world history working for a brutal regime the extent to which we could certainly discuss. but she certainly had doubts and it's a wonderful way to explore that the story but it all starts in germany in the 1920s.

she had not seen what the soviet union was or could even imagine what it might be and gets all the soviet union and ideology

that went with it [inaudible] may be a yearning for something many idealistic young people have thoughts and often the phrase we use is we outgrow that

there is a wonderful photograph i think about sitting in a treaty absorbed in a book. that is the way she was but yet as you say ended up espousing the violent revolution. she was ready from a very young age that makes it interesting for the first half she was a

heroism and then victory on the other side of the fence and to me that is fascinating we had experienced america as a love-hate relationship and elements she deeply admired and others that she despised it was

an intoxicating place. a huge melting pot very rich on the one hand and massive poverty on the other side with shots fired. most of the people in the story have the most extraordinary he was already a communist spy and

had been recruited by the intelligence. brutal repression at the time of the government and recruited the first of all the most formidable spy but could be substantiated and he was the key soviet agent

in shanghai. it was one of her greatest and she was told by the party to leave him so she can pretend to be the wife of another man and they pretend to be a family. what she saw as her duty to the cause and her responsibilities as a wife and a mother and a

homemaker and throughout her life, these two sides of her life were in constant tension and even in old age she continued to wonder whether she had been a good spy and a bad mother and the reality was that it required her to put her family second and she struggled with that her family would have been wiped out as well so she was putting everybody at risk. she would say i'm never going to give up my family again unless the revolution requires it so she would have done it. we've done that in the 21st

century. that is the whole notion anybody would put the cause before her family so essential to the call. she interrogates herself on the subject was i a bad mother, did i look out for them well enough and it leaves a legacy when her children found out and they didn't find out until they were themselves middle-age it was

different from the woman that brought her up and that had a long-term effect on the children. >> you met the children as you begin your discussion today. you said you probably couldn't have done it without them. could you talk to them on this very sensitive point? >> [inaudible] who was the third recruiter and great love. there's a bit of a double

standard, live the lives of male spies and this sort of scenario but i did interview and only one of them the older i remember vividly a conversation i said how [inaudible] i never really knew how to trust anybody. i found that poignant nearing the end of his life and i was very touched. he said he only got three

quarters and i now feel i know my mother a little better and that is very powerful secrets or toxic and difficult to give it up and i'm fascinated by that. people are damaged by these kind of stories. >> it might even be said the

moments you are living at the current times. to remember the lie that you told. covering the [inaudible] with the building of the atomic

bomb. eventually helping against the sabotage of japanese and you told a great story about the year owning on nitrate purchase that is part of the crucial ingredient. >> but also in the sabotage was

an excellent bomb maker and they were running warfare against the main. and to find the material for the bombs you couldn't just buy into one shop because the nationalist would have picked you up and she tells the story through another hardware store and she asked for i think 10 pounds of ammonium nitrate with an enormous amount

and then he wielded back. who knows what those bombs were used for. the ability i appreciate width of the ammonium nitrate going back building the bombs it is an astonishing story and that ability to care for your child. >> but it's impossible to understand the degree of payroll that she was in climbed onto the

roof and erected hirono to use the radio at the end and how she got away with it is extraordinary. i would like to turn to the activities. ursula, the wartime spy activity you've referred to one but i wonder if you can talk us through it to lead the most interrupting portrayals of the entire book. >> she is redeployed to switzerland, sent to switzerland

just before the war breaks out with the task of running to the right to extract as much military information as she can. she set herself up in the swiss mountains, beautiful place and begin running the most important communications network with moscow. from inside of the rights it was of huge importance she came very

close to assassinating hitler before coming there to escape the nazis persecution and she sent them to the right before the outbreak of the war and one of them discovered it was hitler's favorite. he immediately said that's an opportunity. they would build a bomb, put in a briefcase [inaudible] and it was weeks away from being put into action. it had a better chance of acting

at the moment when nazi germany struck an alliance on the pack not to attack each other and after it was agreed. have a bite of ravioli in a little vegetable off to the side. i have been reading my whole life. but this is one that i meant that seems to be the closest to fruition and one that i never heard about before. >> i hadn't until i came across a ditch.

moscow was extremely enthusiastic about it. the secondary point this kind of devils alliance was a blow to us when she begins to realize that actually the cause she was following [inaudible] >> there's a moment in 1984 in which the alliance goes from being an ally and the opposite to get on board and orwell kind of named that moment. >> i'm quite sure he was thinking specifically of this act when he wrote that.

it was a terrible moment because the invasion of the soviet union by the troops in 1942 but for along period she was basically put out to dry and it was a terrible moment because it was suddenly. >> i think the audience would like to know a bit more about operation amber. so before i turn this over to you, they decided to parachute to the very end every one of the agents is a communist from the

friends of the ideologically like-minded individuals. is there any idea every single one of these is a communist, do they suspect that ursula herself was a communist? >> they never did have contact with ursula. they had a middleman to kind of distance themselves from and as you say they believed they were sending their own spies and they were incredibly brave with the technology of the time. they believed they were sending their own but what they didn't realize is they were working for moscow. of course at this point moscow they are still so i'm just helping the cause they would run

under ronald reagan so they did say at one point have we really investigated the background of these people they were mostly former trade unionists who had been prosecuted and had gone into exile in britain to the news that they were left leaning and unionized and what they didn't know is they were all guiding and signed up this was a

way they could communicate in real time with airplanes flying overhead. it was a revolutionary piece of technology and the fight parachuted into berlin and passed over the technology to the soviet union with an incredible piece of technology. and with the atomic weapon how important was ursula to the social development of the nuclear weapon?

>> to rejoin the family and to become the single most important soviet military intelligence agent in the country with a colonel icolonel in the red armo she lives in a tiny beautiful, quiet case where she now has three children and in fact the back garden she built a very powerful radio transmitter with the secret because ursula was running suit which was the most important network inside of the british atomic weapons program so on the countryside she was actually often going to meet.

this was a german physicist who believed that it was unfair they were developing an atomic weapon in the lines with moscow but not sharing it with the soviet union. it was a very simple but he was handing over the crown jewels, something like 570 pages of documents related to the blueprints for how to build an atomic weapon which believe it or not it was a hollow tree when

they moved the manhattan project and handed them over to another controller and when to the astonishment of the west and consternation of washington that was largely down the most crucial figure in that as well. >> absolutely, the ramifications continue still.

they managed all great sides of the atlantic. they were quite advanced in this. would they have done it so fast, absolutely convinced they wouldn't but we can debate forever what the long-term implications of that were both stealing it from one side and giving it to the other, they created a battle of power and balance. there were voices within it was developed and had been used on the soviet union.

america first was the only atomic power in the world i'm not sure how comfortable that would have been to live. i characterize this as a political progress and sometimes you are rooting for her when she is spying on the japanese with the germans and find yourself turned around and she considers

murdering her lifelong nanny and found out too much about the activity did she say the same or the circumstance around her did it change? >> a bit of both. she remained committed and had serious doubts about it. and between how private emotional and personal and political and secret life because as you say it had come

across and she tried to betray [inaudible] she had a gun and knew how to use it but we often look at it and expect it and somehow history isn't like that to write

a book that is somehow explained how we are all trying to explain what communism woul was like to experience through the life right to its chaotic end. i recommend the book to every single person listening and every person out there in the blog sphere. i will take an opportunity to take a couple questions for myself. thank you very much. we have richard ramsey who would

like to know, and i think that this is a good question. has russia acknowledged or done anything to deny her activities if you can tell us something about that. she reinvented herself as someone else and wrote her own memoir presented to the party and said you can't possibly publish this. then she was able to publish the

propaganda. what was in the pages of this book so it wasn't only in her lifetime and at the beginning back they had absolutely no idea and another was published. after her death no less emerged to say she was a hero into the soviet union. they have to have begun to celebrate her and the book is going to be published which is a huge surprise to me but this one

is going to come out and i will be fascinated to see with the perception of it is. she's much more complicated so they have acknowledged which may come eventually. >> richard ramsey has another good question. what was like life after the war. and she gives up the spy trade.

they are a very difficult club to lead and get into but even harder to get out of. they didn't spy on her, she was suspected and survived all of that and completely reinvented herself as someone else and became better and adopted a pen name and began to write novels for children's fiction and was highly successful and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. she's sold so many copies as she does with inventing and

reinventing but ideologically the scales began to fall. there were several events that took place one was in retirement from espionage, the invasion from hungary and the soviet union was even more repressive and one of the terrible moments was the discovery where she found out the sheer scales of the carnage. but it makes someone queasy reading it but she says i didn't do this for stardom. i did this for idea, for a cause and in the '90s even she said i still believe in that cause, so it's interesting.

like many old communists, she looked back and said it is not the fault of communism, it is the fault of the people that have tried to bring it about in the wrong way. people know the idea. you can't make an outlet without breaking up and talking about the lives of two or 3 million purges. sonya was able to come to the realization leader in life. >> i think she was and she felt deeply troubled by what she lived through and the fact she is survived she often asked herself how and why she had been

spared those were the absolute targets but it's fascinating not only did she denounce no one else but she was denounced herself and that is the currency if you like give it the survival by saying i've bee ivan over thy brother-in-law or my family. she never did and i think that in a way that is a tribute to the character. she had loyalty among friends and colleagues. >> we have a question from facebook from catherine bell. of all of the supplies you've written about, what is the most clever, what is your most

favorite my favorite is still the proper crook recruited and highly trained and immediately swapped with a tremendously bad [inaudible] but a wonderful character and it kind of set me off in a way only the story can. who is the cleverest?

tim filby was pretty good at this. i mean,, we were talking earlier about remembering the compound lives and remembering to coin the phrase nobody did it better than filby. i mean,, he was really good at it. but then there was the greatest that would have to be probably ursula. .. >> we have a question how much

did intelligence provided contribute to the red army victory at the battle? you said ursula's intel was really valuable is that the operation in the field? and to talk about materially impacted. >> it's a really good question and inside germany materially altered in the battlefield and i'm not really expert on that but to gather information transmitting information so her job is in the headlines or the importance as part of the

career she was the only radio operator and she knew the value of what she was sending she didn't see it at that point to be role also able on the buildup of military fortitude and was stolen and tended to disbelieve with an extraordinary person. and then richard will end up in japan gave a warning and

this is one of the greatest examples of that when there were these british spies before and during and after the war that the analysts believe one of the greatest in history and then that interesting battle there. >> another question, how word you describe the children? >> it is fascinating really. but the to send sons one in his eighties one in his early nineties.

and i approached with some trepidation. and then they were both left with the communist party they were both on the left. and then the british to turn up and say and they were understandably initially very suspicious i got to meet both of them. they were generous and very in the end turned out to be

wonderful sources that you would always want we would love to see what you write but it is up to you and i know that happens from experience and happens very rarely in this world. was descendents want to control and have their family for what has happened. and to tell the stories eventually not very willingly but then began to talk about it but actually it wasn't quite way that it happened and to their credit they say it's our family and our mother.

but that's not the way it happened then that's not the way it happened. they were incredibly generous. >> thank you for that. now another question a little more pointed to the face so she'll political ideas was she paid? >> interesting. i never came across a spy who said i'm doing this for a higher calling but also never come across a spy they have all sorts of reasons to spy for material gain but that is the reality that was paid

performance they did compromise. they didn't do it for money but out of believe. that's what wheels the wheels of the operation. and then paid enough to keep going and more time for ten. and at one point they stop paying her. wasn't an accident or than they put in the wrong tree but she never profited question she did not do it for material gain but did use the money and undoubtedly did make her rich certainly not.

>> one last question what happened to other members of the asked tended family? what happened to him? >> but her immediate family got out of nazi germany just in time. i mean ransacked several times from the gestapo. they were five girls they ran and got out some had artie moved to britain and he became british. and even to where i'm talking to you from but in fact before

they went back to east germany, he also was a paid serbian agent. and then with that very important information he was gathering as part of the survey. and in those two eldest siblings ended up in east germany and became with that mad and difficult of the authorities and then very tragic almost all the rest of the extended family and those

that came from the heart. >> we have come to the end of our together and fortunately. i love this book and i know the readers will love it to. and that the lady living next door agent sonja is out now and i could not an urgent review were strongly enough to get a copy and read it. thank you for spending time with us today. >> a great pleasure thank you for having me on today.