A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (12 page)

The German army, vast and unstoppable, was pushing the frontier eastward day by day. It was just a matter of time before they would be in Petrograd. The Russian army, depleted by Trotsky’s demobilisation and his ‘no peace, no war’ policy, fell back towards their homeland. Many of them – the Latvians, Ukrainians and other men from the empire’s outer nations – had already seen their homelands consumed by the advance. The Bolsheviks argued among themselves and tried frantically to negotiate, but the Germans were resolute – all conquered territories were to be ceded to Germany, and then there would be peace. No negotiations. And in the meantime they went on conquering more.

Lockhart’s mission, less than a month old, looked like failing. His overriding purpose in Russia was to persuade the Bolsheviks to stay in the war. Sooner or later, the Central Committee would agree to swallow Germany’s terms, and it would all be over. On Sunday 24 February he forced an emergency meeting with Trotsky, who was holed up in his office in the Smolny Institute, the former school ‘for noble maidens’ which had been requisitioned as the Bolshevik headquarters. Lockhart found it a bizarre place; the doors still bore the plaques denoting girls’ dormitories, linen stores, classrooms – but the Bolsheviks had made it into a sty. Unwashed soldiers and workmen lounged everywhere, litter and cigarette butts were all over the floors.
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Trotsky – whose office was an island of order and cleanliness among the filth – was in a towering rage. Having demanded to know whether Lockhart had any message from London (he hadn’t), Trotsky railed against the Allies, especially the British, for their intrigues in Russia, blaming them for the country’s situation. The allegations that Trotsky was a German agent were still being bruited about by the diplomatic missions, together with the patently fabricated evidence. Lockhart winced inside; he had received a message from the Foreign Office that very day, in which the damned fool Lord Robert Cecil was still expressing these very suspicions. Trotsky had a pile of the incriminating documents on his desk, and he thrust them angrily at Lockhart, who was already painfully familiar with them – every Allied mission in Petrograd had seen copies. A few months later it would be proven that all the documents, which supposedly came from a variety of sources all over Europe, had all been concocted on a single typewriter. But still the anti-Bolshevik hotheads believed the claims.
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Lockhart tried to laugh the matter off, but Trotsky wasn’t having it. ‘Your Foreign Office does not deserve to win a war,’ he fumed, sickened by Britain’s vacillating policy on Russia. ‘Your Lloyd George is like a man playing roulette and scattering chips on every number.’
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Lockhart couldn’t help but agree. In his opinion, Britain should either recognise the Bolsheviks and do business with them before they had a chance to make friends with Germany, or come out and make war on them in earnest. This constant indecision would just lead to disaster for Russia and for Europe.

The meeting ended with a promise. Although Russia would have to accept the Germans’ terms, and the peace treaty would be signed, Trotsky believed the treaty would not be honoured. The Bolsheviks had no intention, he said, of letting bourgeois, monarchist Germany walk off with a third of Russia’s territory. The peace, once signed, would not last long. It was a morsel of reassurance for the British.

But private promises would make little difference to the immediate course of events. To the outside world, it was clear that there would be peace between Germany and Russia. Therefore the time had come for the Allied governments to withdraw their embassies – or what was left of them – from Russia. The day fixed for departure was Thursday 28 February. Lockhart had the task of arranging exit visas for the British personnel. He went with an armful of passports to be stamped. Some of the military personnel were suspected by the revolutionary authorities of conducting covert anti-Bolshevik activities, and Lockhart had to invoke Trotsky’s name (and some subterfuge) to get all the passports approved and stamped.

His own was not among them. Despite the pressure on him to accept that his mission was not only doomed but misguided, Lockhart wouldn’t be leaving with the rest. Telegrams arrived from the Foreign Office warning him to abandon his cosy relationship with the Bolsheviks. His wife Jean wrote imploring him to change tack or his career would be ruined. People were vilifying him. Although Lloyd George had continued to support Lockhart in Cabinet and to press for recognition of the Bolsheviks,
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he was losing ground to the consensus. Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, and his deputy Robert Cecil led the anti-Bolshevik party. General Knox, who was now advising the Cabinet on Russia, had called Lockhart’s ‘flirtation’ with the Bolsheviks ‘wrong and immoral’. Another officer with experience in Russia gave his view that Lockhart was ‘a fool or a traitor’ and ought to be hanged.
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And yet Lockhart had elected to stay, and believed he had good reasons for doing so. The peace treaty hadn’t been signed yet, and he had faith in Trotsky’s promise of a short-lived peace.
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What Lockhart had no way of knowing – although perhaps he should have guessed – was that the Bolsheviks were misleading him. Lloyd George wasn’t the only one playing freely with his roulette chips. Lockhart was a valuable asset to Lenin and Trotsky, a man with powerful connections, and they were keen to make use of him. The other Allies had unofficial agents in Petrograd – such as the larger-than-life American Raymond Robins. An emotional, dramatic man and a good friend of Lockhart’s, Robins was officially in Russia as head of the American Red Cross, but in fact was acting as the United States’ unofficial agent. But neither he nor any other agent had been personally despatched by their countries’ leaders. Lockhart was unique: a direct conduit to the British Prime Minister. Robins had no such access to President Woodrow Wilson. Therefore it was vital for Lenin and Trotsky that they maintain a good relationship with the British agent. He was their only hope of influencing the Allies directly. The Bolsheviks were anxious to prevent Japan intervening in Siberia, so Japan’s allies must be reassured that Russia was not going to become friendly with Germany or remain out of the war permanently. And so they fed Lockhart promises that the war would resume sooner or later – promises which they could be sure would fly straight to Whitehall, Downing Street and the War Cabinet.
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Trotsky’s opposition to making terms with Germany was genuine enough, but the real will of the Revolution lay ultimately with Lenin. The day after the embassies left Petrograd, Lockhart had his first meeting with the great leader, in his spartan office in the Smolny Institute.
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At first sight he was inclined to be amused by Lenin’s almost comical appearance – the bald, chubby-faced little fellow was ‘more like a provincial grocer than a leader of men’ – but he immediately recognised the power in him. Whereas Trotsky was ‘all temperament’, Lockhart found Lenin coldly authoritative – he was ‘impersonal and almost inhuman. His vanity was proof against all flattery.’
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Trotsky was present at the meeting, and Lockhart was struck by his silent obeisance. Behind closed doors in Party meetings, Lenin was strongly in favour of a lasting peace with Germany – indeed, if it had been solely up to him, without the electoral power of the Central Committee to thwart him, he’d have had peace months ago – but for the time being he allowed Lockhart to believe that the peace – if signed – might not last. Indeed, Trotsky admitted, there was a genuine fear that the Germans, given Russia’s weakness, might invade, or force the Bolsheviks out and install a bourgeois puppet government.

And so Lockhart went on believing that he was doing the right thing, and that his diplomatic mission wasn’t dead.

Politics and diplomacy weren’t the only reasons he wished to stay in Russia, possibly not even the principal ones; they were just the reasons he was willing to admit to publicly. Privately, there was a much more compelling reason to stay. Moura. His feelings about her were moving beyond mere fancy and romantic fascination, evolving into something that sleigh-rides and stolen kisses could not satisfy.

Moura was in her element during those days, as February gave way to March. She was as happy as she had ever been in her life. All dullness and drabness had receded, and even with all the uncertainty and privations of the Revolution, her life was burgeoning.

Despite the edicts being issued by the government, she still had Djon’s huge apartment for herself and her children, without the uncongenial presence of Djon himself. And she still had Djon’s money. If you were rich enough and had the right connections, there was still a semblance of the good life to be had in Petrograd.

And there was Lockhart. Moura was still struggling with her unfamiliar feelings about him, but the thrill she felt in his company was strong and irresistible. They dined in company at each other’s apartments, and in their spare hours had their occasional sleigh-rides, but still Moura resisted his overtures and treated their friendship as a jest.

Her days were filled with her work at the British Embassy. Even though the diplomatic staff had departed at the end of February, the place wasn’t shut down, and wasn’t deserted. Aside from Lockhart, a handful of men – including some of her closest friends – had stayed.

Captain Francis Cromie was one. He had been serving as naval attaché for several months, and was now to be caretaker head of Britain’s diplomatic remnant in Petrograd. He was also still responsible for the Royal Navy submarine flotilla in the Baltic. The command had been officially dissolved in January, when the Navy ceased collaborating with the Russian Admiralty,
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but the subs were still there, and still at risk of falling into German hands. He had moved them from Reval to Helsingfors, where they were in the care of skeleton crews.

Like Lockhart, Cromie too had romantic reasons for staying, but more complicated ones. He was attached to Moura, but she was growing away from him, and he had begun to develop an amour with the beautiful Sophie Gagarin,
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who lived in the British Embassy building with her relative, Princess Anna Saltikoff. The princess owned the building and leased it to the British government, and kept an apartment for herself in half of it.
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Also staying was Denis Garstin, with whom Moura now worked in the propaganda office as a translator. (Her friend Miriam had also taken a job alongside her as a clerk.) Moura adored her ‘Garstino’ with a sisterly affection, and the feeling was reciprocated. Garstino’s position was becoming uncertain. The Bolsheviks were so profoundly suspicious of any hint of British subterfuge, propaganda was no longer practicable.

Garstin’s chief, and Moura’s employer, was an enigmatic, slippery fellow called Hugh Leech, a British businessman with a background in the oil industry. Leech was officially a commercial agent for British businesses in Russia. He ran the trading firm of Leech & Firebrace for that purpose, and the Embassy’s propaganda office was officially just a sideline.
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In fact, although few knew it at the time, Hugh Ansdell Farran Leech was deeply involved in covert activities. He was an agent of the Secret Intelligence Service – the SIS
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– and throughout 1917 his firm had received tens of thousands of pounds in British government funding for his anti-Bolshevik propaganda activities. Since the Revolution he had been involved in further schemes to fund the anti-Bolshevik Don Cossacks and buy up controlling interests in Russian-based banks and businesses to prevent the Germans gaining influence.
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Moura also provided translation services to Commander Ernest Boyce, the head of the SIS Petrograd office.
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Whether or not she knew that two of the men she worked for were agents of British intelligence (she probably did; she was too smart not to notice what they did, and she’d already had contacts with SIS agent George Hill), Moura delighted in the atmosphere of intrigue that had begun to surround the old Embassy. Life – which had seemed so dismal and hopeless at the beginning of the year – was becoming exciting and fulfilling in every way.

She might have guessed that it couldn’t last. On 2 March the German aeroplanes which had been making intermittent flights over Petrograd began dropping bombs. The next day, the Bolsheviks capitulated to the inevitable, and signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, accepting the German terms in full. On 8 March they announced the treaty’s ratification to the public. Lenin was reviled as a Judas by the far left of the Party, but he weathered the storm and kept his position. Germany had conquered most of the western subject states of the old Russian Empire. With the signature of the treaty by the beaten Bolsheviks, Russia lost a third of its people and lands. Among them was Estonia, which became nominally independent under German protection.

So Djon von Benckendorff had got what he desired – peace, order and a semblance of freedom for Estonia with German monarchist patronage. The border between Estonia and Russia slammed shut. Moura was cut off from Yendel, and her children from their father.