The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison
America's First Female Foreign Intelligence Agent
While Marguerite Harrison was in Asia, British journalist Stan Harding began a public campaign for justice. She gave interview to British newspapers accusing Marguerite of betraying her to the Bolshevik authorities. She blamed not only Cheka, but Marguerite and the American intelligence services for the suffering she had endured in Soviet prisons and she demanded …
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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 …
Merian C. Cooper in Poland Marguerite Harrison reached Poland just in time for the winter holidays. Conditions were harsh. Five years of war had left Warsaw in shambles. Poland, which had emerged from the remnants of three empires, struggled to gain a foothold in the new European order. War had broken out with Russia as …
Although her mission was to reach Russia, Marguerite Harrison filed reports to the Military Intelligence Division while she was traveling. On the voyage to London aboard the White Star Line’s RMS Adriatic, she encountered Julius F. Hecker, a Russian-American Y.M.C.A. worker who lived in Lausanne, Switzerland. He told her that he had been in the …
Robert Collins Getting into Russia was a complicated matter. The Bolsheviks had stopped allowing most Western journalists into the country as they sought to solidify their power in the midst of a bloody civil war and a blockade was wreaking havoc on the economy. The United States did not have diplomatic relations with Russia, so …
Marlborough Churchill’s decision to send Marguerite Harrison to Russia is testament to the confidence America’s intelligence service directors had in her. Tommy Harrison was co-captain of the football team in Gilman when his mother pulled him out of school to take him with her to Switzerland. Photo courtesy of Gilman School. In the autumn 1919, …
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Marguerite Harrison returned to the United States the summer of 1919 went back to work at the Baltimore Sun while she waited for Military Intelligence Division officials to decide on her next assignment. Her superiors had been so impressed with her work, they fought over where she should go next. Colonel Edward Davis, who ran …
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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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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 …
The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison 