Agent Sonya in Shanghai & Manchukuo

Posted: May 6th, 2021 | No Comments »

I won’t say too much about Ben Macintyre’s Agent Sonya as it’s been reviewed everywhere. I don ‘t think the Old Shanghai Hand or China Hand will find much to argue with on his details and his descriptions of Shanghai and Mukden (Shenyang) are all excellent. One word of warning – read the book, don’t listen to the audio book which Macintyre reads himself – it’s the most mangled Chinese ever and completely unlistenable to anyone familiar with the language.

One thing i was particularly happy to see in the book was Macintyre drawing the linkages between Agnes Smedley, Sonya and the former head of Mi5, then a lowly tobacco company employee, Roger Hollis. I think (see the essay in my book Destination Shanghai) that if you look even casually at Hollis’s time in 1920s Shanghai it’s clear he was recruited by Soviet Intelligence and that, to me anyway, indicates he was probably ‘the fifth man’ alongside the Cambridge spies. Macintyre doesn’t quite go that far, but he leans in that direction. The smoking gun that can prove Hollis was a Soviet spy remains to be found – presumably somewhere in Moscow.

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