A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (10 page)

His wife Jean came to Queensferry to see him off. She had accompanied him to Russia once, but even had it been safe, she wouldn’t do it a second time. Their relationship was not a happy one, and Lockhart felt guilty for having married her; whether one looked at it financially, romantically or morally, the poor woman had got a bad bargain.
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Just three companions – his mission team – were going with him aboard HMS
Yarmouth
. Captain William Hicks had been to Petrograd before as an adviser to the Russian army on poison gas. He was charming, a good linguist, and knew the people and politics of Russia. He also had a background in intelligence, attached to the staff of Colonel Byrne.
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‘Hickie’ would become Lockhart’s closest companion in the trials of the coming months – ‘a most loyal colleague and devoted friend’.
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Also going with him were Moscow businessman Edward Birse as the mission’s commercial expert, and Edward Phelan, a young civil servant from the Ministry of Labour. More staff would be seconded from the Embassy in Petrograd, but for now, these four men were the entirety of the British mission.

One member of the party was missing. Lockhart had been provided with an orderly to help manage his diplomatic ciphers, a huge Irish guardsman who was perpetually drunk and had offered to fight Lockhart in Princes Street for half a crown. He had disappeared somewhere between Edinburgh and Queensferry, and wasn’t missed.

In a brilliant Scottish dawn, the
Yarmouth
weighed anchor and, with her two destroyers leading the way, began steaming slowly down the Forth estuary past the massed lines of the Royal Navy’s battle fleet. Lockhart, recalling his childhood, imbued with the tales of Robert Louis Stevenson, felt a thrill at the onset of what promised to be a great adventure.

Had he known that it was an adventure that might be the death of him, he might have felt differently. But he would undoubtedly still have gone – he was that kind of man.

After a harrowing voyage through a mountainous North Sea, during which even veteran seamen were sick, the
Yarmouth
struggled up the fjord to Bergen in a snowstorm. There Lockhart was reunited briefly with Sir George Buchanan. It was just over a week since the former Ambassador and his party had left Petrograd, and they had been waiting some time for the
Yarmouth
to arrive and take them back to Britain. Sir George was pleased to see his former favourite, but he was tired and ill (ten months of revolution had aged him ten years, Lockhart reckoned) and the whole party were demoralised and dispirited.
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They were not the only refugees from Russia Lockhart encountered on his journey. As he and his three companions continued by land and sea through Norway, Sweden and Finland, more and more British expatriates were met making their way home, along with Russian aristocrats fleeing the Revolution. The hotels along the route were full to bursting.

The previously ‘safe’ route in and out of Russia, avoiding German forces, had itself become a war zone. The chaos of Russia was leaking into all its provinces and protectorates. Fighting between the Red and White forces of the Finns and the Russians was breaking out everywhere in the duchy of Finland. In Helsingfors
*
there was shooting in the streets. Lockhart and Hicks, having ventured out looking for accommodation for the night, found themselves caught up in a massacre – Red Russian sailors armed with machine guns were pursuing a fleeing mob, spraying the street with bullets. Lockhart and Hicks had to throw themselves onto the bloody snow among the corpses to avoid being cut down. Their British passports, together with Lockhart’s letter from Litvinov, saved their lives when they were picked up and challenged, and bought them assistance from the local Red forces.

Even with official help the journey was tense and arduous. On the way from Helsingfors to Petrograd, a rail bridge had been half-destroyed, and the passengers were obliged to make their way across the precarious structure on foot, and board a second train on the far side.

By the time his party disembarked at Petrograd, Lockhart had lost some of his thirst for adventure. It wasn’t the dangers that troubled him so much as the chaos and the air of doom and depression. He had always felt, long before the Revolution, that there was a cold greyness hiding behind the beautiful faÇade of Petrograd, even in summer – ‘Beneath its lovely exterior,’ he wrote, ‘its heart was chill.’
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There was certainly a bitter cold here now. Lockhart looked gloomily at the dead horse in the bank of snow by the corner of the Troitskiy Bridge as the sledge slowed to a halt in front of the British Embassy. Petrograd had become a place of death.

His first visit had been in 1915, summoned by Sir George to report on the huge anti-German riots that had broken out in Moscow in June that year. He was acting consul-general at the time, and came to Petrograd with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, fearful of being held in some way responsible for the riots, but thrilled to be noticed by the Ambassador. In those days, few people had imagined that revolution could come to Russia. Lockhart had been one of the few. He saw the evidence everywhere, in the people’s feelings about the Tsar, the Duma, and about the police who kept them in order. He reported to Sir George that there was widespread disgust at the Russian government, and the imperial family were growing ever more unpopular; a workers’ uprising could not be ruled out.
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By the middle of 1917 he had become a frequent visitor to the Embassy, trusted by Sir George and involved in diplomacy with Kerensky and his government. The mood had been different then, and many of the younger British men, filled with ideals about democracy and justice, believed that there was hope for the new Russia, rid of despotism, and soon to be rid of poverty and repression.

Just half a year on, and Russia was stained red with blood and Bolshevism, and everything looked very different. Lockhart, Captain Hicks, Birse and Phelan alighted from the sleigh, and while their luggage was fetched by the servants, they passed in through the rather modest-looking doorway in the grand façade, and mounted the imposing stairway that lay behind it.

For the time being, every department of Lockhart’s life was dominated by diplomacy, including with his own side. Lockhart had feared that he might be resented by Francis Lindley, the chargé d’affaires who was nominally in charge now that there was no ambassador. But he was careful to consult Lindley about everything and treat him as if he were actually in charge. The embassy staff were divided into those who favoured recognising and doing business with the Bolsheviks, and those who were opposed – the ‘recognitionists’ and ‘anti-recognitionists’. Lindley couldn’t make up his mind which he was, and Whitehall had given him no official line to follow. None of that mattered much, of course, because neither Lindley nor any of his staff had any official contact with the Bolshevik government. That was Lockhart’s job.

Trotsky was Lockhart’s main concern, but the Commissar for Foreign Affairs was still away at Brest-Litovsk, failing to negotiate satisfactory peace terms with the Germans. Therefore Lockhart dealt initially with his stand-in, Georgy Chicherin, who suggested that with Russian–German relations going so badly, now would be a good time for Britain to extend a hand of friendship towards Russia. Always assuming, Chicherin added blandly, that Britain was willing to accept the great socialist International that was coming – the world revolution that would destroy the bourgeoisie for good.

The Bolsheviks had already decided on their diplomatic attitude to Britain, and lost no time publicising it, which made things exceptionally awkward for Lockhart. Having intended his mission to be discreet, off the record, and entirely secret, he was embarrassed to find himself being trumpeted in the Bolshevik press as Lloyd George’s ‘man of confidence’; he was said to be a politician of considerable influence at home, and wholly sympathetic to the Bolshevik cause. America’s intelligence man in Russia (who had swallowed the preposterous fantasy that Trotsky was a German agent) reported to the US government that Lockhart was a dangerous revolutionary.
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This was pleasing to the Bolsheviks, but deeply uncomfortable for Lockhart. But at least it would have the advantage of obliging Lenin and Trotsky to meet him.

For the first week, Lockhart and his companions lodged with various members of the embassy staff. This wouldn’t do, so he lost no time in taking an apartment; he found one in a grand mansion at 10 Palace Quay, just a hundred yards from the Embassy. It had a view of the river and the Petropavlovskaya fortress, and was large enough to serve as residence and headquarters of the Lockhart mission. The rent was peppercorn-cheap for such a lavish place; had he wished, he could have had a palace. Many of Petrograd’s grand buildings stood empty, and their aristocratic owners were anxious to have them occupied and guarded against the mob.
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The apartment also possessed a fine wine cellar, for which a good price was negotiated. And so the social life of the mission was catered for.

Its social and diplomatic lives were inseparable from each other. As he had done since his very earliest days in Russia, the British agent devoted his all to immersing himself in every source of knowledge. The British Embassy came equipped with a social network that extended beyond the British colony and into Russian society. Those members of the Russian ruling classes who had the courage to stay in Petrograd (or who had no option) were a valuable source of intelligence. They were able to give insights into the mind and mood of Russia, and a few even had some understanding of – and indeed an element of sympathy with – Bolshevism and its leaders.

One Sunday evening when Lockhart had been in Petrograd for just over a fortnight, Hicks brought a guest to dinner. A young Russian lady from a family of diplomats and aristocrats, she was very well known and popular among Petrograd’s British community. Hicks had known her during his last period in Petrograd. Her name was Madame Maria von Benckendorff, though everybody knew her as Moura.

Robert Bruce Lockhart had always been susceptible to feminine charm, but Madame Benckendorff was something new and extraordinary in his experience. Recalling his first impression of her many years later, he was captivated all over again by the powerful allure she possessed. As with everyone else who knew her, the attraction for him was in her eyes, ‘which in tranquillity looked like wells of melancholy and danced with merriment when she was amused’. To his mind her attractiveness surpassed that of all other Russian women of her era.
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For the present, though, Lockhart’s mind was far too full with diplomacy and politics to take proper notice of Moura’s physical attractions. The conversation over dinner that Sunday evening turned on Russia’s peace negotiations with Germany.
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Lockhart, having been struck by her looks, was impressed by Moura’s intellect. As with the Moscow liberals – who had all been men – she knew the mood and temper of her country, and her opinion was hard currency to him.

Two days earlier, Lockhart had had his first meeting with Leon Trotsky. The People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs had just returned from Brest-Litovsk, where he had laid down a breathtaking and extremely rash challenge: since Germany would not moderate its territorial demands, no peace agreement could be reached. All discussion was over. And yet Russia would not be continuing the war; indeed, it would continue the process of demobilisation it had already begun. In other words, Russia was taking its ball and going home, and Germany could make up its own mind what to do about it. Trotsky was confident that the Germans would not dare go back on the offensive; their troops would lack the will. Both Germany and Austria-Hungary had recently been plagued by strikes, and Trotsky believed that the workers of the West were ripe for revolution. He assured the Central Committee accordingly, and in a speech to the Petrograd Soviet on the evening of 15 February,
^†
he declared himself ninety per cent certain that Germany would not attack.
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Lockhart wasn’t so sure; and neither was he wholly convinced by Trotsky’s show of confidence. At that first meeting – which ran for two hours – he sensed that Trotsky was privately worried about the German reaction to his ‘no peace, no war’ declaration. For Lockhart, the man’s anger at the way the Germans had humiliated him during the negotiations – flatly denying the Bolsheviks’ terms and demanding great swathes of territory in return for peace – proved once and for all that Trotsky was not a German agent, no matter what some fools in Whitehall might think. He struck Lockhart as courageous, patriotic and enormously vain – ‘a man who would willingly die fighting for Russia provided there was a big enough audience to see him do it’.
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But Trotsky’s ire against the Germans was nothing compared to his anger against the British. In Lockhart’s opinion, it had been a dreadful mistake to treat him as a criminal during his time in American exile. Kerensky had wanted him returned to Russia, but the British interned him in Canada first, stoking up his hostility and turning him away from the moderate Mensheviks and towards the Bolsheviks.
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Sir George Buchanan had personally paid the price for this, forced to weather the storm of Trotsky’s dislike. He had also contributed to it, by participating in the secret channelling of funds to the anti-Bolshevik Don Cossacks and communicating with their leader, Alexei Kaledin, a subterfuge which Trotsky learned about.
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Buchanan had tried to resist implementing this policy (fearing violent reprisals against the British in Russia), but his hand had been forced by Whitehall. The fear and stress of the situation had contributed to his breakdown.