Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy

I made it about 5 chapters into this boring slog before I finally started to give up and skip ahead. The book is first off just incredibly dull. I love history books – but this is just drivel – like someone who read a spy book once while vacationing in East Germany and then decided their write a book themselves. The author clearly loves communism – sure he’ll throw in a tiny comment here or there so he can claim his view is balanced – but he clearly loves communism. Which is good since I’m returning the book and he won’t be mad at losing that money. Even with the love for a system that murdered 100-million people in the last 100 years this was still incredibly dull. F-

The Spy and the Traitor was one of the best books I’ve ever read. I was hoping this would be similar. It was good, but it was so extensive and covered so many years that inevitably there were an incredible amount of contacts/code names/double and triple agents. It was hard to follow at some points. I still enjoyed it but there was more rewinding to re-listen than I usually do.

As always McIntyre writes a sharp biographical and revealing historical account of spies. I love his works! And will be a big fan in a world where spies abound.

This is a shocking dissertation on the ineptitude of British and American counterintelligence from WW2 through the early stages of the Cold War. It also paints a vivid picture of the naïveté of the communists of the 20th century. Even when confronted by the evil of Communism and Socialism they blindly followed this lie to the Gulag and into despair. Great narration and it shows how a young German Jew at the height of persecution almost destroyed the world.

First time author for me. When I got this book I thought it was going to be historical fiction, a spy story of a Soviet spy during World war II. But it was more of a documentary of a real life spy. While it didn\’t have the suspense of a fictional spy novel it was still interesting and educational. When you think of Soviet spies you might first think that most of them were Russian. But when you think it through, especially in listening to this book, you realize that prior to World War II, the communist movement was worldwide. Therefore, the spies could have, and did, come from everywhere. In this case, \’Sonya\’ was a German Jew that came of age in Berlin after World War I and saw the inequities of the Weimar Republic, the poor and disenfranchised, and blamed it on the government and that conceptually communism was the fairest way to go. She became a lifelong die hard communist. Throw Hitler and fascism, Jewish persecution on top of that and you had someone who dedicated their life to right that injustice. This book tells her story and the environment she operated in. It\’s quite the story really.

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