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 in- deed 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 assis- tant and friend of Margaret Sanger and a friend of Emma Goldman. Like Goldman, Smedley was a fervent advocate of a socialist society to replace capi- talism, 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 for- eign correspondent and was the author of best-selling books (an autobio- graphical 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- Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 9, No. 4, Fall 2007, pp. 106–114 © 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 106 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2007.9.4.106 by guest on 29 September 2021 Clandestine Agent 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 thor- ough 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 accusa- tions 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. 107 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2007.9.4.106 by guest on 29 September 2021 Eckstein 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 in- ternational 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 work- ing 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 it- self, 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 extraordi- narily close (p. 199). Thus the difference between Smedley’s controller Mirov- Abramov and her later controller Sorge (who certainly was a senior GRU 108 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws.2007.9.4.106 by guest on 29 September 2021 Clandestine Agent 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 gen- eral’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 mil- itary 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.