The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison
America's First Female Foreign Intelligence Agent
Soldiers from the 115th Infantry Division. Courtesy of portraitsofwar.com. Marguerite Harrison’s mission for the Military Intelligence Division had the full support of her editors at the Baltimore Sun, who provided cover for her operation. Harrison traveled with newspaper credentials to France under the pretext that she would write feature stories and show a movie the …
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Marguerite sailed on the SS Espagne, which departed New York on Dec. 5, 1918, bound for France. Marguerite sailed from New York on December 5, 1918, aboard the French ocean liner Espagne, but even before she arrived in France, she was reminded that this was no holiday excursion. The ship struck an underwater mine in …
Continue reading "Harrison arrives in Paris, where she meets Van Deman"
Albert Ritchie Marguerite Harrison struggled to explain her decision to become a spy. She later recalled she was seized with restlessness and a desire to witness events unfolding in Europe at the end of World War I. Some historians have described her as a distraught widow who joined the intelligence service to forget her grief. …
Continue reading "Did a love affair spark Harrison’s espionage career?"
Marguerite Harrison with husband, Tom, and son, Tommy. Courtesy of Nancy Harrison. “I’m a terrible mother,” Marguerite Harrison kept telling herself. Why else would a 39-year-old widow leave her 16-year-old son in the care of her servants and in-laws to travel halfway across the world to spy for the U.S. Army? She told Tommy that …
Dec. 2, 1918---The signing of the armistice treaty and a flu outbreak in Baltimore were temporary setbacks to Marguerite Harrison’s quest to become a spy. With the end of fighting in Europe, Marguerite feared she had lost her chance to become a spy. But Military Intelligence Division Director Marlborough Churchill had other ideas. He wanted …
A week after writing to Marlborough Churchill to express her interest in becoming an Army spy, Marguerite Harrison met Col. Walter Martin in the lobby of the Emerson Hotel in downtown Baltimore for an interview. She impressed Martin by speaking German so fluently that he wondered where she had learned it. She laughed off his …
Sept. 21, 1918-- World War I was nearing its end when Marguerite Harrison, a 39-year-old music and theater reviewer for the Baltimore Sun, wrote to Military Intelligence Division Director Marlborough Churchill asking for a job with the spy service. "Employment as a special foreign agent is the only work that would justify me in giving …
The uneasy relationship between the American news media and American spy agencies can be traced to the early twentieth century, when the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division dispatched agents posing as journalists to Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution. This article explores three of those cases from 1920-21: Baltimore news reporter Marguerite Harrison, who was America’s …
Continue reading "Journalist spies lifted veil on Soviet Russia, 1920-21"
The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison 