Ben Macintyre - Agent Sonya (2020) ENG

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. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple, unassuming life. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her.

They didn&;t know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. They didn&;t know that her husband was also a spy, or that she was running powerful agents across Europe. 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.

This true-life spy story is a masterpiece 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. 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.