The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison
America's First Female Foreign Intelligence Agent
Hotel Bristol, circa 1910. Marguerite Harrison boarded a train crowded with soldiers and workers and head to Berlin. Along the way, she heard that fighting had erupted in the German capital between the government troops and the Communist-backed Spartacists, and she hurried toward the action. It was night when she arrived at the train station …
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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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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. …
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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 Liberation of Marguerite Harrison 