America's First Female Foreign Intelligence Agent
Marguerite knew that it was only a matter of time before Mogilevsky would grow dissatisfied with her reports and order her arrest. The time came on on October 20. She had returned to the guesthouse after working late at the Foreign Office and was getting ready for bed around two o’clock in the morning when …
Continue reading "The game ends: Marguerite Harrison is arrested"
Solomon Mogilevsky brought Stan Harding to the same guesthouse where Marguerite Harrison was staying. What transpired next later became an international scandal that would always cast a shadow over Harrison’s career as an intelligence officer. Marguerite later contended that she tried to warn Harding not to come into Russia and that once the British woman …
The evening after the British delegation returned to Moscow from the trip down the Volga, the chief censor met Marguerite Harrison at the Foreign Office in the Metropole Hotel and told her that a friend of hers would be coming to visit. The friend was Stan Harding. Marguerite was shocked. She had not heard from …
In early June, a delegation from Great Britain, including philosopher and writer Bertrand Russell, arrived in Moscow to gather information that might lead to resumption of trade between England and Russia. Mogilevsky told Marguerite she would be with them to keep watch over the delegates. She readily agreed to go, hoping to slip information to …
Continue reading "Harrison accompanies Bertrand Russell into the heartland"
Despite Mogilevsky’s spies, Marguerite managed to take a weekend sojourn from Moscow to a country dacha with Samuel Hopwood, formerly a manager of the Kodak Company, and his daughters. They stayed with a peasant woman, a widow whose son had been killed in the war, near the Moscow River. Marguerite later recalled that they arrived …
Marguerite Harrison had fallen for an old ploy. She naively had thought that she had won the Bolsheviks’ trust by pretending to be a journalist sympathetic to their cause. Instead, they had allowed her access to incriminating information and forced her to acknowledge she was a spy. Mogilevsky was in charge of recruiting international agents …
Continue reading "Seeing double: Harrison pressed into service for the Reds"
Marguerite knew the Reds suspected her, but she tried to tell herself they had no evidence against her. Then one night in early April as she walked from work at the Foreign Office, a soldier stopped her in the street and demanded her name. When she told him, he replied, “You’re arrested.” The soldier led …
Marguerite had been in Moscow a few weeks when a frail-looking man in a sheepskin coat knocked on her door. He was Francis McCullagh, a British intelligence officer who had been left behind at Omsk when British troops retreated from Siberia. After a harrowing, three-week journey, he had arrived in Moscow without documents and was …
Throughout late February and early March 1920, Marguerite Harrison interviewed numerous Soviet officials, including some powerful women. Today is International Women's Day, so it's fitting to acknowledge these female revolutionaries. Among those was Angelica Balabanova, the secretary of the Third International, the organization of Communists from around the world. Balabanova and Harrison had much in …
Today marks an important milestone in the history of U.S. foreign intelligence. On Feb. 21, 1920, Marguerite Harrison, the nation’s first female foreign intelligence officer, arrived in Moscow to take up her mission for the U.S. Military Intelligence Division. Posing as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun and the Associated Press, she set about gathering …
