Len Beurton

Leon Charles Beurton (19 February 1914 – 29 October 1997) was an English Communist who worked as an agent for the Soviet intelligence services (Main Intelligence Directorate / Гла́вное разве́дывательное управле́ние).

Many details of his activity remain uncertain, but it is known that he became, on 23 February 1940, the second husband of his co-worker Ursula Kuczynski, whose own public profile in English language sources is relatively well rehearsed thanks to her espionage work involving Klaus Fuchs. However, the father abandoned his wife soon after Leon's birth. Leon was adopted by a family called Fenton, which was another name that he would sometimes use.

By or during 1940 he became the chief cipher expert in the Alexander "Sándor" Radó spy network, and he is thought to have been a key figure in the mysterious "Red Three" spy-ring (sometimes identified in US and UK sources as the "Lucy" or "Red chapel" group).

On 23 February 1940 Leon Beurton married, as her second husband, Ursula Kuczynski. She was instructed to divorce her first husband, Rudolf Hamburger, and marry one of her English co-agents in order to obtain a British passport: Foote had declined the honour, and Moscow assured Kuczynski that if she married the younger man she could divorce Beurton once she had her British passport. As matters turned out, however, the marriage would last more than fifty years. In December 1940 Mrs. Beurton relocated from Switzerland to Britain, where on 8 September 1943 Ruth Beurton (as the neighbours knew her) German refugees from Nazi persecution who had both died in England in 1947. She took the children with her, but left Len behind because, as she explained, he had a broken leg. Nevertheless, he joined his wife in Berlin a few months later, in July 1950: their Oxfordshire home was "sold up". In November 1950 Klaus Fuchs, under interrogation by the British Intelligence Services, identified Ursula Beurton as his contact with the Soviets. The information seeped into the public domain more gradually, at least till the later 1970s when Ursula started publishing her memoirs.

From the end of 1950 till his death in 1997 Leon Beurton lived with his wife in the German Democratic Republic and its successor state, working for some years with the ADN news agency. During his final years he was stricken with Parkinson's disease. He became blind, lame, deaf, and increasingly frail and dependent for his day to day survival on his wife who had, in the meantime, retired from espionage and reinvented herself as a successful author.