Hello everyone welcome back to the history hit warfare podcast I'm your host James Rogers and in this episode first broadcast on Dan Snow's history here we have the international best-selling author and Cold War spy historian Ben McIntyre.

Ben reveals the details on Cold War spy Ursula Kaczynski, who posed as Mrs Burton.

She was planted in the UK by the Soviets,

all in an attempt to gather intelligence

on Britain and America's atomic developments.

A true super spy, and an amazing history.

Enjoy. Hello Ben McIntyre, welcome back on the podcast. It's a delight to be here thank you

Dan. Ben every time I see you ask the same question where do you find these

amazing stories how do you get this pipeline? Accident usually, I mean in honesty good luck.

I mean I got so lucky with this one with Agent Sonia.

It's a story I knew vaguely she appears on the margins of some of the other spy stories but partly I think because she's a woman she's never been written about properly as as you know

the espionage of the last century between the middle of the last century was utterly dominated by men and the history of that time has

mostly been written by men and so as a woman that was sort of in a way it was her greatest

disguise being a wife and a mother meant that my five the FBI that Gestapo they all overlooked her but also means she's been

slightly overlooked by history and I came across her by accident I was researching a completely

different story in fact a story of the OSS operation

an American operation at the end of the war to parachute anti-Nazi Germans from Britain

into the dying third Reich and they were recruiting Germans among the

exiled community in London. But what they didn't know was that those recruits were actually

being pre-recruuted by this shadowy woman agent.

The Americans believe they were spying for them.

In fact, they were spying for the Soviet Union.

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