A spy, indeed.

The Lives of Agnes Smedley, by Ruth Price (Oxford, 498 pp., $35)

NOW almost forgotten, the journalist and activist Agnes Smedley (1892-1950) was a member of the pantheon of early-20th-century American radicals and feminists. Along with her friends Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger, Smedley was in the front ranks of those promoting birth control and women's rights, but she is best known for her activism in behalf of the Chinese Communist cause. Her 1929 autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth, became popular again in the 1970s, when the women's-history movement was getting under way.

The author of this new and thorough biography of Smedley, Ruth Price, has been investigating her subject for 15 years. Using new sources obtained in archives in Russia, China, Britain, and America, Price reveals that Smedley was quite different from "the invincible rebel of [my initial] romantic imaginings." In Smedley's novel, she described herself as the dirt-poor daughter of a Colorado coal miner. In truth, her father was a ne'er-do-well who--as deputy sheriff--brutalized the miners. Far from poverty-stricken, her family was raised to the middle class by her father's work for the detested coal companies. (The family lost its money later, after her father descended into alcoholism.) Agnes Smedley moved to Berkeley, Calif., where she engaged in anti-colonialist activism with the revolutionary wing of India's nationalist movement. She moved to New York in 1917, and worked for a time with Margaret Sanger on birth control; then left for Germany in 1920. She went on to China as a journalist in 1928, eventually living in the caves of Yenan--where she befriended Mao Tse-tung--and traveling with the Red Army.

Smedley may have been, in Price's words, a "rebel in the largest and finest sense of the word," but she also was precisely what her most fervent enemies accused her of being: a Soviet spy. Price writes that the Left all along has viewed Smedley as an "unblemished heroine, the tragic victim of a McCarthyite smear." Indeed, Price herself started her book certain that the charges were false, and emanated from people who were scared of Smedley's "unbroken, independent spirit"; to Price, Smedley was an admirable figure, one to be resurrected as an inspiration for today's left-wing feminist movement. But being honest, and having carried out prodigious and unsparing research, Price found, "against [her own] wishes," that she had "succeeded in proving what [Smedley's] worst enemies failed to accomplish in half a century of trying": that Smedley was a major Soviet spy, a "master of deception, a skillful poseur" who got naifs to defend her as an "innocent victim of wartime hysteria."

Naturally, Price found that her "colleagues on the left wanted nothing to do with [this] discovery," namely, that "a martyr of the McCarthy era" had "actually engaged in espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union." The taboo against admitting the truth survived the end of the Cold War. It is to Price's lasting credit that while she identifies herself as a woman of the Left, she stands by the truth instead of seeking to bend it to fit a preconceived ideology.

The story Price tells is compelling. Smedley's abusive relationship in Berlin with her lover, the Indian revolutionary Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, sent her into deep fits of depression, and psychosomatic medical conditions that completely immobilized her. In despair about her health and sanity, she left Berlin in 1928 for China, where she hoped to continue her work against world imperialism and for the revolution being advocated by Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang nationalists, a cause that had gained the support of Moscow.

In Shanghai, most of Smedley's work was actually undertaken in behalf of the Soviet state and its security apparatus. She acted as a mail drop and liaison, and used her home for secret meetings--not to advance the world revolution, but, as Price explains, to "aid the military intelligence operations of Stalin's government." Smedley was Soviet spy Richard Sorge's chief recruiting agent: "Her home served as a site for his group's nocturnal gatherings, and she provided Sorge with data on American political and economic activities in China." Smedley looked the other way at the growing repression in the USSR, showing only gratitude at what she saw as Moscow's commitment to China's liberation. Moscow, Smedley said, was now her "beloved city ... the grandest, most inspiring place on earth."

As China moved toward war with Japan, Smedley sought to gain entr,e to the areas of China controlled by Mao and the Red Army, eventually gaining access to Mao's base camp at Yenan, where she was wined and dined by the Communist leaders as a friendly Western journalist. Smedley enchanted and then scandalized the Chinese leadership, to whom she taught Western dancing (the fox trot) and her own belief in sexual liberation. Her activities evoked jealousy and antagonism among many of the puritanical Red military leaders and their wives. While in China, she asked Margaret Sanger to send her birth-control devices for both men and women, to combat what she felt was a sexually repressed environment. This was apparently the last straw; she was asked to leave Yenan.

Smedley explained to an old friend that she used her "typewriter as a machine gun"--and that she wished she could use the real thing. She accompanied the Eighth Route Red Army troops on their expeditions and reported on their bravery and sacrifices. She herself was jobless and destitute: Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden wrote, after meeting with her at Eighth Route Headquarters, that she bore "all the suffering, all the injustice of the world" by herself, to the point that she was continually inconsolable. After reading Price's book, no one would dispute that Agnes Smedley was selfless, inspired by and dedicated to the cause of the Chinese Red Army and its goal of a Communist China. What one does question, however, is whether Smedley's sincerity excuses her vast blind spots.

Returning to the U.S. in 1941, Smedley devoted the rest of her years to gathering support from her American countrymen for the Chinese struggle. In 1949, General MacArthur and others accused her of being a Soviet spy, a charge she vehemently denied. Smedley had a unique capacity to escape the net closing in around her, and to gain the support of honest advocates of civil liberties, who vouched for her and whose word served to convince others of her innocence. Her defense committee included such luminaries as Pearl Buck, John Hersey, John K. Fairbank, and Harrison Salisbury.

She thought of herself as a Jeffersonian true to her own native land's revolutionary tradition; yet she willingly served both Stalin's secret police and Mao's Red Army. A final judgment from her old friend Katherine Anne Porter rings true. Porter loved Smedley but thought her "a lamentable dupe of the kind our generation and place produced in extraordinary numbers." In the countries she "adores so," Porter wrote--referring to Soviet Russia and the Soviet zones created by Mao in China--"she would have been sent to a labor camp or put to death if a man corresponding in power to General MacArthur had accused her of treason."

Nevertheless, Ruth Price sees Smedley's work as having "enduring value," her writings as providing "a message of hope and optimism that still lifts our spirits." It is owing to the strength and brilliance of Price's rivetingly well-written book that one can disagree with her conclusion and her desire to depict Smedley as a heroine, and still recommend her work as a moving and genuinely dramatic biographical portrait.

Mr. Radosh, adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is co-author of the forthcoming Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance with the Left.