Ursula Kuczynski (Agent Sonya), 1936.via Peter Beurton
My recent blog post about the intrepid Soviet hams who homebrewed versions of the UW3DI SSB transceiver led to a comment about early Soviet era overseas intel officers who -- supposedly -- homebrewed their own transmitters and perhaps receivers.
Here is a New York Times review of the book that mentions the homebrewing by spies:
Here's the Wiki page on Sonya:
Tony Percy took a look at the homebrew claims:
Percy seems quite well informed about radio and about how believable Sonya's claims about her radio activities were. He uses the Morse acronym QRP, talks about Maximum Useable Frequency, discusses antennas and the relative difficulty of building a receiver. He also talks about the need for crystal controlled transmitters if the QRP transmitter was to have any hope of reaching Moscow Center. In sum, he thinks the reports of Sonya's radio derring-do are just nonsense.
I agree with Tony Percy. I just think it would be impossible to take a newcomer, show them how to scratch-build a radio, send them to a foreign country, have them buy the needed parts, expect them to build the rig and the antenna... oh and learn to use the Morse Code along the way. I just don't think that is possible.
Is Tony Percy a ham? What do you folks think about the plausibility of the claims about Sonya's radio prowess?
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It's an interesting point, a few Eastern European and as far as Ukraine QSO's I have had lately were using HB CW rigs.It isn't all that often, but still happens.
ReplyDeleteWhat is surprising to them is to hear an American Ham using 100% HB. Comments like "Really...really??"
Maybe the valiant efforts Soldersmoke will change that perception!
73!
A friend pointed me towards this blog.
ReplyDeleteI am not a ham, but I did read up a lot, and I was well guided by Dr. Brian Austin, who is an expert.
I believe that Sonya did have the skills to build and deploy a wireless (she was trained in Moscow and had operated in China), but I was more astonished that she, an obvious foreigner in wartime Britain, could have walked into stores and bought the parts required for assembling a set, and then broadcast without being detected. Moreover, she didn’t need to, as she could have passed Fuchs’s information to her brother, who had access to the Soviet Embassy.
Readers may wish to inspect my review of Ben Macintyre’s book, at https://coldspur.com/special-bulletin-review-of-agent-sonya/.
As the original commenter who mentioned “Agent Sonya” I was quite interested to read Tony Percy’s article and follow-up comment here. It does seem likely that Macintyre has exaggerated her accomplishments but I’m wondering, at least for the radio aspect, if the truth is somewhere in the middle. Perhaps in the late ‘30s the Soviets did train radio operators to build transmitters as a backup if a clandestine rig couldn’t be provided but that this was rarely necessary. I think that the crystals could be easily concealed in an agents luggage and carried with. Wouldn’t shortwave receivers and associated antennas be common for expats living in China or Manchuria? Clandestine receivers were built and used in allied POW camps and even Japanese civilian interment camps in China. As far as reliable comms with QRP power, I agree, UK to Soviet stations sounds challenging and unnecessary with an embassy nearby. However, one of her first postings was Mukden, Manchuria with comms to Vladivostok, that’s less than 400 miles. Which seems reasonable at 5W. According to Macintyre, it was her fellow agent who built the rig. In his telling, the trickiest part was obtaining power transformers which they sourced in Shanghai and had them shipped hidden in a chair.
ReplyDeleteBut it seems unlikely that all of these things (building rigs and transmitting regularly) were done by her at all of postings.
I find it hard to believe that they trained people sufficiently to make them effective radio builders. I don't think this ever happened on the Allied side -- here we see agents parachuting into Nazi occupied territories with already built "para-set" transceivers. I don't know of any "homebrew" spy sets that have survived. And having recently coached several hundred licensed radio amateurs in the construction of basic radio receivers, I can assure you that this is not as easy as it seems. Even if SW broadcast receivers were available, modifying these sets for Morse Code reception would be tricky (you would need to add a beat frequency oscillator). At one point we paraphrased John F. Kennedy: "We choose to do these things not because they are easy... But because we THOUGHT they would be easy." It is just not easy. Failure and capture is more likely. They would have been foolish to even try this. Thanks to Tony Percy and others for the comments here.
ReplyDeleteI, for one, believe. I'll admit up front, I didn't have time to read the entire linked post. The following assumes that the issue was Sonya being able to build a transmitter in 1939 for use from Switzerland to Moscow. The short version? It should have been the picture of simplicity. (There's lots of pictorial evidence I should have up in a blog post soon.)
ReplyDeleteAs an aside and a bit of a bona fides, we routinely QSO from San Francisco to Texas and beyond. That's the same distance as Switzerland to Moscow.
I grew up in a small town in New Mexico that had radio books for kids from the first half of the 20th century. The number of times I cursed the impossible to find "B battery"! That battery obsession inspires my belief that Sonya coulda done it though.
I looked up one of the books of the ilk that populated the Hobbs, NM library: the 1936 Radio Handbook. That informs everything below.
Let's start addressing Sonya's supposed issues till I run out of time.
The power supply:
Simple. Two B batteries for the plate current for a 6A6.
The transmitter:
The book contains an article on a one tube CW transmitter that outputs 10 Watts.
The crystal:
I don't have time to look up the historic perspective, but assuming crystals existed for household radios of the 1930s, this seems like absolutely no big deal. (And I did take the time to leaf through the 1936 radio handbook and it wasn't a bit deal as it turns out.) As a kid in the '70s, our hardware stores had tubes and crystals of all sorts for repairing household electronics.
I don't think the exact frequency is of any huge importance. The author seems a bit put out by the four decimal places. When we run Project TouCans, we start out at a frequency of 14.0575 MHZ, not because that level of precision is important, simply because that's the number. As we operate, we drift down to a stable frequency of 14.0573 MHz. If I write the frequency as 14057.4 kHz, we're down to a single digit of precision which might seem far less impressive, but would still be the same number.
The antenna:
Actually, the antenna set up sounds fine. The post's author seems to have intense feelings about banana plugs. We've used them for antenna connectors on Project TouCans. They work fine. Oh, and guess what? One of the ads in the 1936 handbook was for a crystal holder with??? You guessed it, banana plugs!
Morse code:
She needn't have learned all of Morse code, she was sending groups of five numbers. If you're going to learn Morse code with dots and dashes (the worst, yet most seemingly obvious way), the numeric digits are the easiest to make a system for.
Wood and metal working:
I mean, my radios are housed in a pineapple can. I realize these would have been tube rigs, but I still believe they could have operated without a case. Most of the rigs on soldersmoke podcast episodes of late have been mentioned as not having cases. And, oh! The transmitter in the handbook is pictured mounted to a board.
The recieve side of things:
First, who needs a receiver? She needs to find out once that the transmitter works. After that, it can be send and forget.
But let's play the game though and say she had to have a receiver. I turned on the Utah SDR, switched over to AM and listened to CW this morning. Sure enough, the strongest signals were clicks not tones. A series of clicks would communicate 'Listening' as well as anything else. Also? We're spies! Do we really have to use CW because we're being sent CW? Can we just pulse a tone three times?
Bill, I think she coulda done it :)