More on Agent Sonya

I had completely forgotten that my blog had at least two posts on Agent Sonya way back in 2009.  I know there is a lot of interest in her alleged radio derring-do. 

Here are the two blog posts from 2009: 

https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2009/08/sonya-had-knack.html

https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2009/09/sonyas-rig.html

And here is my 2025 post on Sonya: 

https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2025/04/agent-sonya-did-soviet-spies-really.html

One friend recently mentioned that we have not seen any museum evidence of these kinds of homebrew spy rigs.  If this really was a widespread practice, you would expect to find at least ONE of these rigs in a museum somewhere.   Has anyone seen this kind of thing?  

Here is something more recent about Sonya from the National WWII Museum in New Orleans: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU9-APiIUaQ

The Macintyre interview is really interesting.  A friend told me that he is a very serious writer on the topic of espionage, whose assertions have to be taken seriously.  For our purproses, here are some highllights:

22:18   Sonya goes through Soviet Spy School and is trained on how to build radios.

24:50   In China under Japanese occupation, had bamboo poles supporting antenna over her house! 

25:40  Transferred to Switzerland, "built another radio."

34:18   Transferred to UK, built a "powerful radio transmitter in her loo." 

51:41    Macintyre refers to Sonya as "the only Soviet radio operator in Switzerland." 

So, I still don't know about the claim that Sonya was homebrewing radios.  It does appear that Sonya was building them.  But it also seems like she was more of a radio operator than she was a spy...  Perhaps the Soviets didn't see the same distinction that we do.    Still, it would be nice to find in a museum somewhere at least one example of Sonya-style homebrew radio. 

Macintyre says that "all biography is burglary."  What would autobiography be?