Marija Emma Schuhl Ran Soviet Military Spy Ring in Finland
By Constance Bell ·
Two Latvian intelligence officers spent years deceiving Western governments with forged Canadian identities before they were captured by Finnish authorities in 1933.
Janis Alfred Tilton and Marija Emma Schuhl lived under borrowed names, moving through France and the United States while reporting to Moscow. For years, they navigated the West using Canadian documentation that did not belong to them, hiding the fact that they were professional intelligence officers.
PAQUETTE and MARTIN According to the file's catalogue entry in the UK National Archives (KV 2/1899), Tilton and Schuhl were Latvian nationals working for Soviet intelligence during the 1920s and 1930s. Their operations spanned two continents, placing them in France and the USA.
In 1928, the pair secured Canadian documentation. The record notes that they first used the name "PAQUETTE," though this identity was later changed to "MARTIN." In an era before digitized border controls, such identities provided a portable shield. By assuming the persona of Canadian citizens, they could move between the diplomatic and social circles of France and the United States without triggering the immediate suspicion that would follow a Soviet or Latvian passport.
The use of "PAQUETTE" and later "MARTIN" suggests a conscious effort to refresh their cover as they shifted their theater of operations. It is a detail that reflects the patience of the Soviet intelligence services in the interwar period, investing years in the maintenance of a single pair of assets.
A Ring in Finland The deception ended in 1933. The catalogue entry records that Tilton and Schuhl were arrested for espionage in Finland. It was here that the scale of their operation became clear: Schuhl was not merely a field agent, but was "in charge of a Soviet military espionage ring."
The distinction is critical. While general intelligence focuses on political intentions and diplomatic cables, military espionage targets the hard realities of defense: troop movements, fortification plans, and weapon specifications. That Schuhl—a woman—was placed in charge of such a ring indicates the high level of trust placed in her by Moscow.
The file describes them as "active Soviet intelligence officers," a designation that separates them from the coerced assets or ideological volunteers often found in these archives. They were professionals, trained in the tradecraft of the 1920s, and their arrest in Helsinki likely disrupted a significant pipeline of military data flowing from the Nordic region toward the Soviet Union.
Portland and the Admiralty The case of Tilton and Schuhl sits within a broader archive of Soviet penetrations held by the British Security Service. Other records in the same KV series document a different breed of betrayal: the insider. For instance, file KV 2/4384 describes Harry Frederick Houghton, a British clerk at the Admiralty Underwater Detection Establishment at Portland.
Unlike the professional officers Tilton and Schuhl, Houghton was a clerk who conspired with a colleague, Ethel Gee, to pass classified material to the Soviet Union. While Tilton and Schuhl were operating under aliases in the 1930s, Houghton’s activity lasted until his arrest in 1961. File KV 2/4476 notes that "all the indications are that he had been a spy from 1951 until his arrest."
The contrast between the two files illustrates the dual nature of Soviet efforts. On one hand, there were the "illegal" officers like Tilton and Schuhl, who existed entirely outside the law, using forged identities to build networks from the outside. On the other were the "moles" like Houghton, who leveraged their mundane positions in the British civil service to steal technical secrets from the heart of the Admiralty.
One operated through the fluidity of identity; the other through the invisibility of the bureaucracy. Both, however, were recorded by the Security Service in the PF Series files, creating a map of how the Soviet Union attempted to blind its adversaries during the first half of the century.
The catalogue descriptions for KV 2/1899, KV 2/1900, and KV 2/1901 leave the final chapter of the Latvians' story unwritten. They record the arrest in Finland, but they do not say if Tilton and Schuhl were imprisoned, traded in a prisoner exchange, or returned to the Soviet Union to face the purges of the late 1930s.