CBR17 Bingo: Borders – Marguerite crosses the borders of many countries during her work as a journalist and spy, but also crossed the boundaries that constrained women in this era in both her work and her personal life.
After being widowed young, Marguerite Harrison plunged into work as a journalist, but her charm and her adventurous spirit leads her into a more covert role as a spy.
My understanding of the history of American spycraft is mostly limited to the hijinks of the OSS during World War II, and the understanding that the era before was dominated by an old boys’ club, so I was very interested to learn about Marguerite Harrison, whose observations about newly defeated Germany and newly communist Russia pointed the way to the issues that grew into World War II.
Though the book touches briefly on Harrison’s life before and after this period, it mostly focuses on the decade and a half directly after World War I in which she was a spy and world traveler, visiting among other countries Germany, Russia, Japan, and the newly established Turkey. The author does a great job of showing the risks that Harrison took, the rugged places in which she traveled and worked, and . I especially enjoyed the sections about her time in the Russian prison, and the making of the film Grass, which follows the Bakhtiari tribe on their near impossible yearly migration to better pastures.
However, there are holes in this book that you could drive a train through. Part of the difficulty, as indeed the author states, is that Harrison’s career as a spy was shadowed and scantly documented, so there’s not much to draw on past Harrison’s discreet public and private writings. However, I wish we’d learned more about her methods – often Harrison manages to meet top governmental officials and cozy up the various movers and shakers in the countries she visits to the point that she can draw unguarded confidences of great interest to the United States, but we do not get a good sense of how she does this.
We also don’t learn about how it is Harrison came to be discovered as a spy by the Russians, nor what happened to those she so haphazardly informed on her when they tried to turn her into a double agent. The thread regarding Stan Harding, who was a major thorn in Harrison’s side and spitefully kept trying to blow her cover, also remains unresolved – and the author does not particularly investigate her claims about whether Harrison really did betray her. There are a lot of grey areas left disappointingly unexplored.