The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison
America's First Female Foreign Intelligence Agent
As mysterious as the reasons for Harrison’s release were the conditions she faced one she left Lubyanka. In 1921 she was given just minutes to catch a train headed to Riga. At that time, she left her belongings at Lubyanka. and a Cheka car raced her to the station just as the train was about …
Continue reading "Harrison reveals surprising details of her interrogation"
As Marguerite had feared, no one was sure what had happened to her after she left Chita. Vice Consul Edward Thomas apparently was unable to confirm whether she had been taken from the train at the station outside the city. U.S. officials and news reporters assumed she had been sent to Moscow, but no one …
Continue reading "Harrison wins release under murky circumstances"
Marguerite faced three charges—the old espionage charge, entering the country illegally, and a new spying charge. She was completely cut off from the outside world. Unlike the first imprisonment, when she received aid packages, this time she heard no news, received no letters. Her relatives struggled to persuade U.S. officials to fight for her freedom …
Marguerite wrote two accounts of her second Russian imprisonment. In both, she described being interrogated repeatedly by a man named Roller, who tried to make her confess that she was spying in Siberia. He told her that she would be tried in secret and, if found guilty, she could receive the death sentence. In her …
Continue reading "Was Marguerite really on a secret mission?"
Marguerite Harrison arrived in Moscow on Sunday, December 3, 1922. She was amazed at how much the city had changed since she had last seen it sixteen months earlier. Foreign aid and Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which relaxed some of the more draconian measures of state communism, had made life better. Tramlines were operating, and …
An employee of the local political police tipped off Edward Thomas, the vice consul in Chita, that Marguerite had been taken to a station outside of Chita, but he did not know what had happened to her. While Thomas tried to investigate, her father-in-law, Joseph Ames was seeking answers of his own. The State Department …
Harrison was unexpectedly taken to Novonikolaevsk in Siberia. Despite facing the accusations of espionage, Marguerite Harrison was not treated as an enemy of the state. According to her account, the commandant told her the cells in the prison were crowded and uncomfortable, and so he instead placed her a small room behind his office. A …
Marguerite Harrison had talked herself out of tight situations before, and so she feigned outrage at her arrest and detention in Chita . She argued that it was not her fault the country had fallen to Soviet Russia. Under interrogation by a GPU official named Bogdonov, Marguerite recounted her trip through Asia and insisted she …
The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison 