Werner, Ruth

(1907–2000)

   One of the GRU’s most famous illegals, Ruth Werner was born Ursula Kuczynski into a middle-class German family in Berlin and was a committed communist from her teens. After recruitment into military intelligence, she served as a GRU illegal in Manchuria, Shanghai, Poland, and Switzerland. (In Shanghai, she was Richard Sorge’s lover.) During World War II, Werner served as an illegal in England. The GRU selected a husband for her, a British subject, so that she would obtain British citizenship. Werner’s brother, Juergen Kuczynski, was also an important GRU asset; he helped Soviet intelligence mold the German exile community in London during the war.

   While in England, Werner acted as Klaus Fuchs’s case officer, transmitting information about the Anglo-American nuclear weapons program to Moscow. In 1950, following Fuchs’s arrest, Werner fled to East Germany, where she was resettled. A decorated Red Army colonel, Werner held a prestigious job in her native Germany, wrote several semi-autobiographical novels, and raised three children. She remained a communist even after the collapse of the East German regime. At the time of her death, she was an active member of the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the communist party.