Mention female spies, and most people think of Mata Hari. But
during the Roaring Twenties, Marguerite Harrison and Stan Harding
were the cause celebre: two beautiful, accomplished women whose
names were splashed across newspapers around the world. Almost a
century later, it is easy to understand the fascination with these
two remarkable women. Marguerite was a highly respectable and
recently widowed American journalist and socialite from Baltimore;
Stan was a runaway, a bohemian artist and dancer of British
heritage who left her wealthy, religious family to make a life for
herself in the expatriate community in Florence. The two women were
very different, yet both were strong-willed, independent and highly
ambitious women unafraid of taking risks. And both, as the Great
War ended and Central Europe dissolved into violent chaos, were
looking for adventure. Their paths first crossed in war-ravaged
Berlin during the Armistice and the the Spartacist Uprising in
1919. Fellow travellers, they became friends and, the evidence
suggests, lovers. Dodging bullets and interviewing colourful
characters in war-torn Europe led these intrepid women, separately,
to Bolshevik Russia, a country closed to outsiders since the
October Revolution of 1917. Their fateful meeting had repercussions
that spanned three decades, involving heads of state and
politicians in Britain, the United States and Soviet Russia. The
Lady is a Spy tells their forgotten story: that of two women who,
far in advance of their time, worked as foreign correspondents, who
operated as spies in dangerous shadowlands of international
politics, and who were both imprisoned in Lubyanka, one of the most
desperate places on earth. Their lives are reconstructed through
numerous primary sources, not only the poems, diaries and letters
of their friends and lovers, but also government documents
(including newly declassified US State Department papers) that
reveal the truth about their espionage careers and - in one case -
evidence of a shocking betrayal.
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