The discrepancies between a biography about a decorated Soviet agent and the authenticated facts of her life illustrate the inherent difficulties and ethical dilemmas of researching intelligence history. Kitty Harris was among the few women named in the KGB’s official history because of her role as double-agent Donald MacLean’s controller and in running couriers from Mexico to Los Alamos in the late 1940s. Harris’ biographer, the former KGB agent Igor Damaskin, presents an example of a source who is an unreliable narrator that demands trust in his interpretations, rather than in the printed sources and spoken testimony that he cites as indeterminate. This paper explores the difficulties of constructing scholarly literary journalism or history in the field of intelligence when interview sources and official records may prove less reliable and more susceptible to bias than others.
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