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Learn more- Female spies from Mata Hari to the Bond girls, are frequently portrayed as vamps whose greatest talent is luring unsuspecting male agents into bed to squeeze them for classified information. Recently uncovered files from the intelligence archives of the former Soviet Union reveal that women not only played an active part in operations but were among its most effective spies. The reality of these extraordinary agents who have worked behind the scenes at their trade has remained the most secret chapter of intelligence history.
Among the most skilled and powerful agents of the Cold War was Kitty Harris, an uneducated Jewish émigré from Winnipeg who joined the Canadian trade union movement in her teens, ran favours for the mob, was married to Earl Browder, head of the American Communist Party and a bigamist, became a courier in China in 1927 and later, the lover of Donald Maclean, the British Foreign Office diplomat turned Soviet spy. She lived in Paris under the occupation as the alleged wife of the Soviet ambassador, worked with the Atomic spies passing on information about the Manhattan project and lived in Mexico when Trotsky was assassinated. She spoke several languages, had a retentive memory, immense courage and could repeat reports verbatim.
Between 1935-1946, Harris ran Soviet agents in London, Berlin, Mexico and Los Alamos. Kitty spent much of 1941 in Los Angeles and New York, running agents who were close to members of scientist Robert Oppenheimer's family who had Communist sympathies, including a grocery store owner and a dentist. As a master of disguises and identities with iron-clad nerves, Kitty Harris ensured that she was never caught. She also survived Stalin's purges of the 1930's when 20,000 KGB agents were liquidated. Her controllers knew that she could be utterly trusted because of her complete devotion to their cause. She moved among the intellectual elite of Europe and North America who devoted their lives to their political beliefs, making huge personal sacrifices, often to disastrous consequences.
Wheelwright Ink has been given exclusive access to new documents, including her personal diaries, about Kitty's life and work. Our consultant Igor Damaskin, a retired senior office of the KGB's First Chief Directorate who served under cover in the United States, has provided material for our film from the archives of the former Soviet Intelligence Services. His discoveries about the scale of Kitty Harris' international operations reveal the important part that female agents played throughout the Cold War. Kitty Harris is among others whose lives can finally emerge from the shadows and whose achievements recognised. The Russian intelligence services are currently considering ways in which Kitty Harris' Cold War contribution can be publicly recognised. In 2003 a memorial may be erected in her memory in a cemetery at Nizhny Novgorod, a place which had previously been a state secret.
Kitty Harris' story intersects with the most influential members of the American Communist Party at the height of its powers in the 1920s. But she was also involved with central figures in Soviet intelligence such as Klaus Fuchs, the German physicist who passed information about the development of the atomic bomb onto the Soviets; Donald Maclean, the British diplomat and double agent who was Harris' lover and colleague; the American writer Agnes Smedly and Richard Sorge, the Soviet agent who was beheaded in Japan. Her encounters will all of these people provide huge scope for using news reels, contemporary propaganda and government information films, newspaper headlines and still photographs from the period.
Kitty lived her life on the edge, a consummate professional who always knew who was tailing her and how to get rid of them. Her work took her to war-torn Europe where, as a Jewish woman, she risked her life to work against Fascism. The intensity of her life brought her into contact with some of the most powerful men within Soviet intelligence. But Harris, like many female spies, paid a high price for her zealous commitment to Communism and to her career as an agent. After her recruitment to Soviet intelligence she lived undercover or on the run; she had only a handful of visits with her family, had few friendships for fear of revealing her identity, and never had children.
When her health began to fail in the late 1940s because of the cumulative stress of her working life, she moved to the Soviet Union where she led a lonely and isolated existence. In the 1950s, she was arrested as a 'socially dangerous element', endured seven interrogations and was detained at the Gorky Psychiatric Prison Hospital for more than a year. As she wrote in her diary during this bleak period, 'the only thing I know is that I am terribly lonely. My life is in pieces (who will take responsibility for my sufferings? Who will answer for the fact that in thirty years I have only seen my family three times? Just why have I had to go through this hell?'
Kitty Harris reveals how and why a young Winnipeg woman from a hard working Jewish immigrant family became caught up in the maelstrom of international politics and was involved in some of the biggest spy stories of the century. It also enables us to reveal how Canadian intelligence services worked in an international arena during this vital period. Like many other North Americans who joined the Communists and worked for Soviet intelligence, she devoted her life to a cause and to a government that neither recognized nor celebrated her achievements.
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