A Woman Named Edith: Émigré, Photographer, Secret Agent – The Extraordinary Life of Edith Tudor Hart, Daria Santini, Yale University Press, £25
Thanks to Ian Fleming, the favored picture of a life in espionage is one of everlasting pleasure and intoxicating glamour. Good-looking women and men trade data in lodge bars and casinos, chase adversaries in quick automobiles and jet off to unique places. Even within the drabber world of John le Carré’s fiction, the spying sport seems heady and alluring. Yet, as Daria Santini reveals in her biography of the Soviet agent Edith Tudor Hart, the realities of undercover work are, in the principle, concurrently boring and anxiety-inducing.
Edith Suschitzky was born in a working-class district of Vienna on 28 August 1908. Her mother and father, Wilhelm and Adele Suschitzky, have been socialists who had renounced their Jewish religion. Along together with his brother Philip, Wilhelm owned and ran the most important socialist bookshop in Austria. Persecuted by the authorities – together with the publishing home they based – it was right here, on the streets of Vienna, and on the Montessori nursery at which she skilled, that Edith developed her life-long dedication to socialism.
Around 1925, she met Arnold Deutsch, a fiercely clever, charismatic PhD graduate of Czech origin. A dedicated communist, it was Deutsch who launched Edith to the murky world of espionage. He could, Santini speculates, have additionally given her a digicam. Either method, it was from this era that her double-life as a radical photographer and revolutionary activist dates.
In 1930, Edith moved to London, the place she resumed an affair with a medical scholar and fellow-comrade, Alexander Tudor-Hart. When she attended a communist rally in Trafalgar Square in October of that yr, she was noticed by the safety providers, recognized as a ‘potentially dangerous extremist’ and deported. She was again in London in the summertime of 1933, having married Tudor-Hart in Vienna. And it was right here, within the capital of capitalism, that her biggest declare to fame happened: within the spring of 1934 she recruited the most notorious spy in British history.
The precise circumstances of Kim Philby’s recruitment by Soviet intelligence continues to be unclear. What isn’t doubtful is that Arnold Deutsch arrived in London in April 1934, tasked with establishing a community of brokers that might penetrate the very best echelons of Whitehall; that Edith agreed to turn into a ‘cultivation officer’ for Deutsch; and that Edith was mates with Philby’s Austrian spouse, Litzi Friedmann, whom she had transformed to communism in Vienna. ‘Edith, spotting in the upper middle-class Englishman with an exemplary education and a promising career a precious recruit, acted quickly’, Santini recounts, ‘asking Deutsch to speed up the process by contacting Moscow for approval before Philby could join the [Communist] Party, a move that would have hampered his chances of penetrating Britain’s establishments and changing into a spy.’
Later, Edith recruited the Oxford postgraduate Arthur Wynn and handed secrets and techniques regarding Britain’s wartime atomic analysis (obtained via the émigré scientist Berti Broda) to Moscow. As Santini writes: ‘Women were crucial to Soviet illegal operations abroad. Being less likely to be suspected than men, they were routinely given minor – yet nonetheless vital – intelligence duties such as collecting money and liaising between the illegals [Soviet intelligence handlers] and their spies.’
Vital? Perhaps. But, as Santini acknowledges, additionally mundane. The Soviets entrusted Edith with ‘delicate undercover tasks, but she was rarely at the forefront of their operations’. Indeed, most of Edith’s time was spent not on espionage however pictures. Having learnt her artwork on the Bauhaus (the revolutionary design college based by Walter Gropius), she labored as a photographer for TASS (the Soviet information company) in Vienna earlier than incomes her maintain as a youngsters’s portrait photographer in London. Indeed, as Deutsch reported to Moscow, ‘One has to be very cautious when arranging to meet her because she is one of the most well-known children’s photographers in Britain.’
Yet it’s her pictures of on a regular basis, working-class life that present true originality. Neither ‘mere propaganda’ nor ‘simply faithful depictions of proletarian lives’, in keeping with Santini, they show a ‘bold visual approach that make them memorable and compelling’. Her topics included London’s Caledonian Market – ‘The trading place of the poorest… utterly colourless and devoid of any romance’, within the phrases of the article that accompanied her pictures – queues of Viennese unemployed, and the miners of the Rhondda Valley in South Wales.
Santini has been assiduous in going via the extant materials, notably Edith’s MI5 information, however the paucity of paperwork (Edith saved just a few letters) makes her topic a difficult one. Phrases resembling ‘it is possible’, ‘highly likely’, ‘difficult to determine’ and ‘one can only imagine’ litter the textual content. Yet two options of Edith’s story emerge with forlorn readability. The first is the utter incompetence of Britain’s safety providers. Having recognized Edith as a possible subversive in 1930, MI5 saved her beneath near-constant surveillance from 1934 onwards but failed to find her hyperlinks to the Comintern or different Soviet brokers working in Britain. It was not till 1947 that she was questioned by the authorities and never till 1964, following the confession of Anthony Blunt, that her function within the recruitment of the ‘Cambridge Five’ was lastly revealed.
Even extra obvious is the unhappiness that pervaded her life. Her father dedicated suicide. Her husband (Tudor-Hart) left her, after which she dropped the hyphen from her surname. Her son was schizophrenic. Her aunt and uncle have been murdered at Auschwitz. She suffered from growing ill-health and (not with out cause, given MI5’s apparent surveillance) a persecution complicated. Her mates pale away and her lovers deserted her. She died of most cancers on 12 May 1973. She by no means confessed.
Santini makes a robust case for her topic’s significance as a photographer; a view supported by a 2013 exhibition of her work in Edinburgh and Vienna, entitled In the Shadow of Tyranny. Yet it’s her nonetheless largely mysterious life as a spy that fascinates. As an MI5 case officer put it after one of her many interrogations: ‘If it was Edith who introduced Lizy [Philby] to espionage she was indeed the first link in this extraordinary chain.’
