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 popular image of a life in espionage is one of permanent excitement and intoxicating glamour. Good-looking men and women exchange information in hotel bars and casinos, chase adversaries in fast cars and jet off to exotic locations. Even in the drabber world of John le Carré’s fiction, the spying game appears heady and alluring. Yet, as Daria Santini shows in her biography of the Soviet agent Edith Tudor Hart, the realities of undercover work are, in the main, simultaneously dull and anxiety-inducing.
Edith Suschitzky was born in a working-class district of Vienna on 28 August 1908. Her parents, Wilhelm and Adele Suschitzky, were socialists who had renounced their Jewish faith. Along with his brother Philip, Wilhelm owned and ran the largest socialist bookshop in Austria. Persecuted by the authorities – along with the publishing house they founded – it was here, on the streets of Vienna, and at the Montessori nursery at which she trained, that Edith developed her life-long commitment to socialism.
Around 1925, she met Arnold Deutsch, a fiercely intelligent, charismatic PhD graduate of Czech origin. A committed communist, it was Deutsch who introduced Edith to the murky world of espionage. He may, Santini speculates, have also given her a camera. Either way, it was from this period that her double-life as a radical photographer and revolutionary activist dates.
In 1930, Edith moved to London, where she resumed an affair with a medical student and fellow-comrade, Alexander Tudor-Hart. When she attended a communist rally in Trafalgar Square in October of that year, she was spotted by the security services, identified as a ‘potentially dangerous extremist’ and deported. She was back in London in the summer of 1933, having married Tudor-Hart in Vienna. And it was here, in the capital of capitalism, that her greatest claim to fame took place: in the spring of 1934 she recruited the most notorious spy in British history.
The exact circumstances of Kim Philby’s recruitment by Soviet intelligence is still unclear. What is not in doubt is that Arnold Deutsch arrived in London in April 1934, tasked with establishing a network of agents that could penetrate the highest echelons of Whitehall; that Edith agreed to become a ‘cultivation officer’ for Deutsch; and that Edith was friends with Philby’s Austrian wife, Litzi Friedmann, whom she had converted 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 institutions and becoming a spy.’
Later, Edith recruited the Oxford postgraduate Arthur Wynn and passed secrets relating to Britain’s wartime atomic research (obtained through 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, also 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 but photography. Having learnt her art at the Bauhaus (the revolutionary design school founded by Walter Gropius), she worked as a photographer for TASS (the Soviet news agency) in Vienna before earning her keep as a children’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 is her photographs of everyday, working-class life that show true originality. Neither ‘mere propaganda’ nor ‘simply faithful depictions of proletarian lives’, according to Santini, they display a ‘bold visual approach that make them memorable and compelling’. Her subjects included London’s Caledonian Market – ‘The trading place of the poorest… utterly colourless and devoid of any romance’, in the words of the article that accompanied her photographs – queues of Viennese unemployed, and the miners of the Rhondda Valley in South Wales.
Santini has been assiduous in going through the extant material, particularly Edith’s MI5 files, but the paucity of documents (Edith kept only a few letters) makes her subject a tricky one. Phrases such as ‘it is possible’, ‘highly likely’, ‘difficult to determine’ and ‘one can only imagine’ litter the text. Yet two features of Edith’s story emerge with forlorn clarity. The first is the utter incompetence of Britain’s security services. Having identified Edith as a potential subversive in 1930, MI5 kept her under near-constant surveillance from 1934 onwards yet failed to discover her links to the Comintern or other Soviet agents operating in Britain. It was not until 1947 that she was questioned by the authorities and not until 1964, following the confession of Anthony Blunt, that her role in the recruitment of the ‘Cambridge Five’ was finally revealed.
Even more apparent is the sadness that pervaded her life. Her father committed suicide. Her husband (Tudor-Hart) left her, after which she dropped the hyphen from her surname. Her son was schizophrenic. Her aunt and uncle were murdered at Auschwitz. She suffered from increasing ill-health and (not without reason, given MI5’s obvious surveillance) a persecution complex. Her friends faded away and her lovers abandoned her. She died of cancer on 12 May 1973. She never confessed.
Santini makes a strong case for her subject’s importance 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 is her still 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.’
