Clandestine Agent the Real Agnes Smedley

CEclanksteindestine Agent

Review Essay Clandestine Agent The Real Agnes Smedley

✣ Arthur M. Eckstein

Ruth Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. x ϩ 483 pp. Agnes Smedley (1892–1950) was one of several American radical women in the 1920s and 1930s who made a signiªcant impact on American (and indeed world) culture and politics. Other ªgures on the list include Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood (she was British by birth), and Emma Goldman, the socialist activist and writer. Agnes Smedley was an assistant and friend of Margaret Sanger and a friend of Emma Goldman. Like Goldman, Smedley was a fervent advocate of a socialist society to replace capitalism, and she worked hard to bring it about. Smedley was also an ardent supporter of the destruction of European (and American) empires in what we now call the Third World. She was ªrst drawn to the Indian independence movement against Britain, but her ªnal and overwhelming love was China, where she was an extraordinarily effective propagandist for the Communist revolution led by Mao Zedong. In addition, Smedley was a cultural radical: She cut her hair short, wore men’s clothing, fervently advocated and practiced “free love,” and—unusual for a woman of that time—had an independent career as a journalist and foreign correspondent and was the author of best-selling books (an autobiographical novel and several books on the Maoist revolution in China). Finally, Smedley became a hero in some circles as a supposed victim of “Cold War McCarthyism.” In the late 1940s she was accused both by General Douglas MacArthur and by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) of having been a spy for the Soviet Union and of having been one of the people who (through her propaganda against the Chinese Nationalist gov-

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ernment and in favor of Mao) had helped the West to “lose China.” Smedley, who had suffered for decades with heart disease, died of a heart attack in Great Britain in 1950 while under subpoena from HUAC. Smedley always vehemently denied that she was ever a political agent of inºuence or spy for the Soviet Union, and she persuaded many prominent friends to vouch for her, including Harold Ickes, the former cabinet ofªcial in the Roosevelt administration; Roger Baldwin, the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU); and Katherine Anne Porter, the well-known novelist. In light of Smedley’s emancipated lifestyle, fervent left-wing beliefs, and eventual alleged victimization by the “McCarthyite” right, she quickly became a hero to American “second wave” feminists starting in the 1970s. New editions of her work were republished throughout the 1970s by The Feminist Press. In 1988 the University of California Press published the ªrst thorough biography of Smedley: Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical, by Janice MacKinnon and Stephen MacKinnon. The aca- demic authors of that biography depicted Smedley as an independent Ameri- can radical woman. They emphasized her public criticism of Soviet policies in the late 1930s and, in a single sentence, brusquely dismissed accusations that she was linked to Soviet espionage agencies and to Soviet clandestine activities in Asia. In a positive review of the book, the noted commentator on Asian af- fairs Orville Schell also contemptuously dismissed accusations of Smedley’s complicity in Soviet espionage, describing them as “absurd.”1 Over the past twenty years, as the attention of feminists has shifted else- where and the rapid growth of capitalism in the People’s Republic of China has ended the country’s attraction as Smedley’s ideal “alternative society,” in- terest in Smedley has declined. Only one of her novels, Woman of Earth (1929), remains readily available to readers. In this new and even more thorough biography of Smedley, Ruth Price originally intended to correct what she felt was this injustice. A declared partisan of the left and former press sec- retary for the activist politician Bella Abzug, Price speciªcally thought she would be able to demonstrate once and for all that the Cold War accusations regarding Smedley’s ties to Soviet espionage were McCarthyite smears. But like several other researchers who set out to exonerate victims of the McCarthy period—Allen Weinstein on Alger Hiss, Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton on the Rosenbergs—Price discovered that the truth was far different from what she expected, and far more disturbing. Price was helped to this un-

1. See Orville Schell, “Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical,” The Nation, 19 December 1987, p. 762. In the 1980s even as thoughtful a historian as William L. O’Neill produced a sympathetic depiction of Smedley and characterized her as at most “a fellow traveler” with the Chinese Communists (and not with the USSR). See William L. O’Neill, A Better World: The Great Schism: Sta- linism and the American Intellectuals (New York, 1982), pp. 129, 186–188.

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comfortable truth by the good luck of doing most of her research during the period of glasnost (ofªcial openness) in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s and during the relatively liberal period in China before the 1989 crackdown near Tiananmen Square. These circumstances allowed her access to documents and witnesses (now very elderly, of course) that had pre- viously been off-limits. Price is an honest and extremely diligent researcher as well as an excellent writer (her narrative of Smedley’s career in China in 1928–1941 is enthrall- ing). Although her leftist colleagues disapproved of her decision to publish her unexpected discoveries about Smedley (p. 9), Price herself did not hesitate to present what she learned. She found not only that much of the material in Smedley’s best-selling autobiographical novel was false (such as Smedley’s er- roneous claim that she grew up poor among oppressed Colorado mine- workers), but also that Smedley was—though always hugely energetic—an unstable, emotionally fragile, and often difªcult and deceptive person, con- stantly attracted to men who sexually and emotionally abused her (such as the Indian revolutionary Virendranath Chattopadhyaya in Berlin in the 1920s) and in that sense hardly a feminist prototype. Most important, however, was the discovery that Smedley, despite her continual vehement denials and the denials of her inºuential friends, really was a long-term secret Soviet agent and espionage operative. Although Smedley never formally joined any Com- munist Party—primarily for security reasons—she worked secretly as a Soviet agent (the second-most important Soviet agent in China) from 1928 until 1936. Moreover, from 1930 until 1934 she was the most important aide and lieutenant (as well as the lover) of one of the most famous of all Soviet spies: Richard Sorge. Smedley worked primarily for the International Liaison De- partment (OMS), the little-known intelligence branch of the Communist In- ternational (Comintern), which was the coordinating organization of the international Communist movement. By 1930, Smedley was also working for the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of the Soviet General Staff, the So- viet military intelligence agency. That is, she, an American citizen, was working directly for the Soviet Union of Josif Stalin. As Price makes clear, the distinction between working for the intelligence service of the Comintern and working for Soviet military intelligence was of little concrete signiªcance. The OMS, like the Communist International itself, was headquartered in Moscow and was dominated by the Soviet Union. Jakob Mirov-Abramov, the deputy chief of the OMS who personally recruited Smedley in 1928 for underground work in China, was probably himself a GRU ofªcer. At the least, Mirov-Abramov’s ties to the GRU were extraordinarily close (p. 199). Thus the difference between Smedley’s controller Mirov- Abramov and her later controller Sorge (who certainly was a senior GRU

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ofªcer) was slight. The intelligence services of the USSR were multiple yet in- tertwined. One is reminded of the famous scene in the ªlm The Manchurian Candidate (1962): “One chief Communist interrogator was dressed in a general’s uniform, yet his assistants all wore civilian clothes,” remembers the vic- timized Sergeant Raymond Shaw (played by Laurence Harvey). “The other chief investigator was dressed in civilian clothes, yet his assistants all wore military uniforms.”2 Smedley’s work in South China in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when her association with the GRU was strongest, was especially important because Moscow believed (with some reason) that a revolutionary war in South China was about to occur, that the war would be large and important, and that the region might well become the forefront of the Communist world struggle. Smedley’s cover was as a newspaper correspondent, mostly for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung but also for The New Republic and The Nation. In actual- ity, according to Price, her apartment was a letter-drop, a document-drop, a courier safe-house, and a center for the photo-developing of microªlmed cop- ies of secret material and for radio transmission of information back to the USSR. Her American citizenship provided her special protection from the Guomindang Nationalist government headed by Jiang Jièshí (Chiang Kai- shek), which is why she had been recruited for China by Mirov-Abramov in the ªrst place (see pp. 160–161). As she provided the GRU with intelligence on U.S. business and governmental interests and intentions in central and southern China (pp. 199, 214), her newspaper reporting graphically depicted the corruption and brutality of the Guomindang regime and the horrendous living conditions among the South China peasantry and industrial workers. By contrast, she emphasized what she viewed as the broad popular support for Mao Zedong’s Communists. No doubt her accounts of living conditions were accurate and were certainly heartfelt and vividly written, but they were also in perfect line with Soviet policy, which was to undermine the Guomindang and replace it with a Communist revolutionary regime. The attempted South China revolution in the summer of 1930 was in fact launched with Moscow’s advice and was carried out in Bolshevik style. If it had succeeded, Smedley would have been a participant in—and even a minor facilitator of—a world- changing event, which is what the Soviet authorities intended. Smedley’s activities were all part of a coordinated effort by the Soviet Union to foment revolution in South China. When Mao’s uprising failed to ignite either the peasantry or the urban in-

2. How Price connected the OMS operative Mirov-Abramov to Smedley when for half a century the link was missed by everyone—including the FBI—because of an FBI error in transcribing the testi- mony of the crucial witness Louis Gibarti, a former high-ranking Comintern ofªcial, is a wonderful example of historical detective work (pp. 6–8).

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dustrial masses and instead was crushed by the Guomindang army, Smedley was shifted north from Canton to Shanghai, where her home was again a center for Soviet intelligence and propaganda operations (pp. 208–209). In addition to organizing various “front groups” that advocated good causes (but were actually controlled by secret Communist Party members), Smedley during her Shanghai period was Sorge’s chief assistant and conªdante and the single most successful recruiter of agents for Sorge’s large-scale espionage network (p. 214). In this period she also wrote two books on the Communist revolutionaries, praising their Spartan lifestyle and incorruptibility, the wide and deep support they supposedly enjoyed among the Chinese masses, and their purported democratic instincts. These books were effective works of propaganda, both around the world and within China itself in Chinese trans- lation (Smedley herself never learned Chinese well). The Soviet government went out of its way to maintain Smedley’s cover as an “independent journalist” by periodically arranging to have her reports from China criticized in the Soviet press as insufªciently Marxist in analysis (pp. 206–207). This was indeed a fair accusation inasmuch as Smedley’s reac- tions to scenes and events were always vividly emotional rather than coolly analytic—hence the extraordinarily power of her writing. Although she was always driven by a fervent desire for what she thought of as social justice and a people’s revolution, and although she was an extremely hard-working and energetic agent of the OMS and the GRU (despite her heart condition), she lacked party discipline. This would eventually get her into trouble in Moscow. The distancing from Moscow and Soviet intelligence occurred only grad- ually. Sorge was transferred by the GRU to Japan in the spring of 1934 (and it was in Japan, of course, that he did his greatest work), severing Smedley’s direct link with Soviet military intelligence. From that point on, Smedley’s secret work consisted primarily of organizing her pro-Communist “front groups” of various sorts. In the summer of 1936 the OMS itself became one of the chief victims of Stalin’s ªrst major purge. Even Smedley’s recruiter, Mirov-Abramov, disappeared forever into the gulag (p. 273). Always impelled by her own intense enthusiasms and instincts, Smedley had often failed to en- gage in minimum security precautions as she went about her secret tasks (even after she was reprimanded by her Soviet case ofªcers). Now, with the arrest of Mirov-Abramov, she had lost her main protector. After eight years of exhaust- ing work in building up a large Soviet espionage network in China, she was dropped from the Soviet espionage services in the summer of 1936 (p. 279). But if the ties with Moscow—and hence with the Communist Party of the USA, which in 1934–1936 had been secretly paying her way in China (p. 263)—were now broken, her longstanding connections to the Chinese Communist movement itself remained intact. If anything, those ties became

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even stronger as Mao began to emphasize peasant concerns over urban issues and to reduce direct Soviet inºuence in the Chinese revolution (p. 274). By December 1936, Smedley was overtly attacking Soviet policy in radio broad- casts, but this had nothing to do with any objection she had to Stalinist tyranny. On the contrary, she believed the Soviet Union was not radical enough. (In particular, she objected to the Soviet demand that the Chinese Commu- nist Party make peace with the Guomindang regime in order to form a united front in the face of Japanese aggression.) By 1937, Smedley was a resident at Mao’s base in Yenan in northwest China, writing a laudatory biography of Chu De, the commander-in-chief of the Chinese Red Army, to whom she was greatly attracted. During that time she proudly wore a Red Army uniform (see photographs on pp. 307, 310, 339). Nonetheless, Smedley’s free sexual mores always made her an uncomfortable presence at Yenan, which was a highly puritanical place. The wives of the Chinese Communist leaders were especially hostile to and suspicious of her. They distrusted her habit of teaching dancing to their husbands and were out- raged by her role as a go-between for Mao’s adulterous affair with the beauti- ful left-wing actress Lilly Wu, a dalliance that broke up his ªrst marriage (pp. 313–316). The wives arranged for Smedley to be sent away from Yenan to a front-line dance troupe (pp. 317–318). From this period on, Smedley produced some ªne frontline reporting from the Chinese side during the Sino-Japanese War that began with the Japa- nese invasion of China in 1937. Her sympathies were of course focused on the Communists, but her heart (and her medical help) went out even to wounded Guomindang soldiers. She was now working ostensibly as a foreign correspondent for The Manchester Guardian (and some of her dispatches ap- peared in The New York Times as well). The British journalist Freda Utley, who met Smedley in southern China in 1938, illustrates the contradiction at the heart of Smedley’s life. Utley believed that Smedley consistently violated her journalistic duty to be truthful and objective, and she accused Smedley of consciously and ruthlessly misleading the public in her newspaper dispatches by downplaying the rigid Marxist-Leninist ideology of the Chinese Commu- nists and presenting them merely as peasant reformers. At the same time Utley deeply admired Smedley for her sincere concern for individual human beings and their tragedies, for her warm heart, and for her emotionally generous nature (pp. 329–330). Smedley as a person undoubtedly did have a generous heart and im- pulses, and a sincere concern for the downtrodden, but these qualities were balanced by an enormous ability to hate and by an emotionalism that occa- sionally spun out of control. At times she threatened people with her re- volver—or else threatened to commit suicide—unless she got her way

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(p. 277). Her consistently inappropriate behavior and inability to follow rules made her an uncomfortable espionage agent for the Soviet Union and an uncomfortable ally for the Chinese Communists. Some of this behavior seems admirable and freedom-loving; but some of it suggests an emotionally unstable personality. Most disturbing for Ruth Price, however, is Smedley’s habitual deceptiveness. It is not just that her eight years as a secret agent of the OMS and the GRU are missing from her autobiographical works about her experi- ences in China. Those books were for public consumption and were written to inºuence opinion-makers around the world (especially in the United States), and therefore Smedley knew what to omit. Far worse for Price is Smedley’s conscious manipulation and exploitation of her inºuential friends in America to protect herself from what were legitimate accusations of espionage. This manipulation of her friends came to the fore on two occasions. The ªrst was during World War I, when Smedley was still in her twenties. As a stu- dent at the University of California at Berkeley, she had become captivated by India’s struggle for independence from Britain. In 1917 and 1918, Smedley was involved in a plot by the Imperial German government to use Indian ex- iles in the United States and Mexico to foment a rebellion against Britain in India. The goal of the operation as seen by the German General Staff was to weaken the British war effort in Europe and the Middle East. Smedley in those years was a paid secret agent of the German Imperial government (pp. 64–65)—at a time when the United States, like Britain, was at war with Germany. She was arrested in March 1918 when U.S. naval intelligence ofªcials discovered the plot, but the charges brought against her fell far short of her true involvement (the prosecutors did not know, for instance, that she was receiving payment from the German government). Meanwhile, Smedley waged a supremely successful public relations campaign on her own behalf, convincing many inºuential American “progressives” (including Margaret Sanger, Norman Thomas, and Roger Baldwin) to risk their own reputations by protesting her innocence and to fund a legal effort that was eventually successful all the way to the Supreme Court. In November 1919—at the very time of the ªrst Red Scare and the Palmer Raids—indictments in both San Francisco and New York against Smedley and the others in her circle were dismissed because of technicalities. Yet insofar as her efforts to help India escape from the British had been frustrated and she had even been jailed for a time, the experience left Smedley deeply embittered about the American justice sys- tem (pp. 68–86).3

3. Price herself ªnds it disturbing that although Smedley came to reject the United States as a savage tyranny on the grounds that it was, along with Great Britain, the leading “capitalist-imperialist” state

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Smedley was led to Communism via the increasing involvement of her Indian revolutionaries with the new Soviet Union (pp. 75–93), but her successful deception and exploitation of her friends in 1918–1919 cannot be dismissed as a mere youthful indiscretion. She engaged in the same deceptive conduct in the late 1940s, when she was legitimately accused by Douglas MacArthur and HUAC of having been a secret Soviet agent in China. Now a mature and experienced woman in her 50s, she again convinced inºuential friends (once again including Roger Baldwin of the ACLU) that the accusations against her were merely Red-baiting smears. She again prevailed on them to risk their reputations by ªercely protesting her innocence. Smedley’s friend Emma Goldman later lamented that Agnes’s conversion and commit- ment to Communism “killed all other feelings in her, as it does to everyone” (p. 170). Ruthlessness is certainly on evidence here. But Smedley’s manipulation of innocent friends in order to protect herself from the consequences of her own radical action—in the service of the greater cause (“sacriªcing the part for the whole,” as she put it)—actually antedated her Communist phase. Finally, the intensity of Smedley’s ability to hate is striking. Here is part of her last will and testament:

Under no condition shall any American claim my body or any of my personal Possessions. ...Should I die, it will be with a curse on American Fascism, as rep- resented by the American government, the American Congress, and all the armed forces and ofªcial representatives of America on my lips. Those are evil vicious forces, and any person, American or otherwise, who serves such evil forces or is connected with them, is evil. For this reason I beg of you to keep all such persons from me even after I am dead. (p. 412)

Price wants to argue that Smedley was not really anti-American and that Smedley’s espionage and propaganda work for various foreign powers was not aimed at the United States per se (see esp. p. 214). But in fact Smedley’s ªrst foray into espionage and revolution was in the paid service of a state, Imperial Germany, with which the United States was at war—an action that amounts to treason. Although Smedley undoubtedly would have argued that she was merely acting on behalf of revolutionary India against unjust and oppressive British rule (she ªercely hated the British as well as the United States), she in fact was part of a German plan, paid for by Germany, to weaken Britain’s war effort and thus the effort of all the allies against Germany, including the United States. To be sure, Smedley’s main espionage career took place only in China and was not aimed primarily at the United States. Nonetheless, she did

(see p. 214), the three beneªciaries of her clandestine services were the German Empire of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Stalin-era Soviet Union, and the Chinese Communist regime led by Mao Zedong— entities with oceans of blood on their hands.

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not hesitate to contravene American interests in China and to convey intelligence to the Soviet Union about U.S. business and government goals in China. She engaged in this espionage even while energetically soliciting from the U.S. consulates in China the special protection afforded her by virtue of her American citizenship (see pp. 205–207). The hypocrisy of this is stunning unless one remembers that her status as an important Soviet intelligence operative did not inhibit her from giving a sworn afªdavit to the U.S. consulates in China claiming that she had no ties to the Comintern (p. 206). Price believes with Freda Utley that ultimately Smedley’s heart was in the right place, on the side of the oppressed and the poverty-stricken. But to use post- modern jargon, Agnes Smedley in the end did “transcend the nationalist meta-narrative”—at least as far as the United States was concerned. She is buried in Beijing.

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