‘Flirting With Danger’ Review: Heiress Undercover

In April 1920 a Baltimore heiress was arrested in Russia, accused of being a secret agent. Marguerite Harrison (1879-1967), whose wedding trousseau had numbered 40 outfits, now wore lice-infested clothes and a pair of men’s shoes. Imprisoned without trial, she would spend 10 months in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka jail, including time in solitary confinement.

The daughter of a shipping magnate, Marguerite had grown up with all the trappings of her class: tutors, governesses, piano lessons, debutante balls and annual trips to Europe. She could have led a pleasant if uneventful life,punctuated by garden parties, games of bridge and nights at the opera. Instead, driven by an insatiable thirst for adventure and an almost pathological attraction to danger, she became a spy. She was perfect for the job: beautiful, charming, intelligent, fluent in French and German, with an exceptionally good memory.

Her mother, Elizabeth, had hoped that Marguerite would marry a landed European aristocrat; those dreams were dashed when Marguerite fell in love with Tom Harrison, a man Elizabeth despised. Tom came from a prominent but penniless Baltimore family. The couple married in 1901 and had a son the next year. After Tom died of a brain tumor in 1915, Marguerite went to work at the Baltimore Sun as a society reporter, then as a cultural critic. When America joined World War I in 1917, she wrote patriotic stories to boost support. But she felt restless working in the newsroom and wanted to go to the front. In the fall of 1918, she volunteered to join Military Intelligence, using the newspaper as a cover.

The war ended in November, so she was sent to Paris to attend the peace talks. She proved to be a clever, politically astute reporter and, with her considerable social connections, a valuable intelligence officer. She was prescient about the effect the harsh armistice terms would have on Germany. She took mental notes and filed reports to Military Intelligence, dropping them off with contact agents in hotels or using a cipher book to send cables of coded messages.

In “Flirting With Danger: The Mysterious Life of Marguerite Harrison, Socialite Spy,” Janet Wallach presents a compelling story that pulsates with the energy of a thriller. She describes how Harrison, the first American woman to get into Germany after the armistice, found the country in shock. There were clashes between the Communist-leaning Spartacists and the right-wing Freikorps, a paramilitary group of former soldiers. Count Harry Kessler, a former German ambassador to Poland, summed up the situation: “The German people, starved and dying by the hundred thousand, were reeling deliriously between blank despair, frenzied revelry and Revolution. Berlin had become a nightmare, a carnival of jazz bands and rattling machine guns.” Harrison narrowly escaped being shot by crossfire in the street.

By her own admission, Harrison “was not a Marxist or even a Socialist.” Yet she wondered, Ms. Wallach tells us, whether the Bolsheviks “could provide some answers to the great unrest in the world.” Her great desire was to visit Russia. A visa was refused. Undaunted, in February 1920 she slipped across Poland’s eastern border. In Moscow, the head of the foreign office seemed to accept her credentials as a journalist. He surprised her by saying he was glad about Prohibition in America. He believed that workers, unable to go to saloons and drink, would “flock to political meetings” instead, spreading the popularity of communism. Two months after that friendly encounter, Harrison was arrested. Thanks to a mole in the U.S. intelligence service, the Russians had known about her for some time. To obtain her release, she agreed to remain in Moscow as a double agent.

Here the story gets murky. How much damage she inflicted is impossible to assess, but several of Harrison’s acquaintances blamed her for their subsequent arrests. Nevertheless, before long, Harrison was back in the Lubyanka.

Ms. Wallach, whose previous books include “Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell” (1996) and “The Richest Woman in America: Hetty Green in the Gilded Age” (2012), relies heavily on Harrison’s autobiography, “There’s Always Tomorrow” (1935), and other books to tell her story. Harrison recounts her Russian experience in “Marooned in Moscow” (1921), an oddly dispassionate memoir. “The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison” (2020), a biography by Elizabeth Atwood, a former editor at the Baltimore Sun, is at times dubious of Harrison’s accounts, noting that after she left Russia, she whitewashed her prison experiences.

Harrison was very much at home with the Russians, whether they were Communists or Czarists. “The unflappable newswoman who suppressed her feelings and admitted she ‘felt afraid to form close ties,’ even with her young son, found the Russians’ exuberance irresistible,” Ms. Wallach writes. Among other things, Harrison loved their generosity and their “Oriental sense of hospitality.”

The Russian fiasco did not erode Harrison’s self-confidence or her enthusiasm for danger. In 1923 she set off on a 46-day trek to make “Grass,” a documentary about the remote Bakhtiari tribe in present-day Iran. Each year about 5,000 Bakhtiaris and their 50,000 animals would make a procession through the treacherous mountain passes of southwest Persia in search of green pastures. Harrison stars in the film, directed by her friend Merian Cooper, who would later make “King Kong.” But “Grass” was a cover for an espionage mission. The Bakhtiari controlled land that had large reserves of oil.

Despite the occasional cliché and at times cloying prose (during her wedding, Harrison is said to have eyes that were “dancing like soft clouds in a dazzling sky”), Ms. Wallach tells a good story. Harrison’s adventures over seven years—trips to the Baltics, China, Japan, Manchuria, Turkey and across Siberia—make for exciting reading. However, the woman herself proves elusive. Why was she driven to undertake such risks? She wasn’t a zealot and doesn’t seem to have had any strong political beliefs. So what motivated her? She is opaque, well used to hiding things. As Ms. Wallach writes, “spies have their own truths.”

Ms. Hodgson is the author of “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: My Adventures in Life and Food.”