A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (14 page)

At one of these meetings in early April he had been introduced for the first time to the man who was regarded as the embodiment of Bolshevik terror. A slender, impeccable villain from a well-to-do Belarusian family, with a goatee streaked with grey and a nose like a scimitar, Felix Dzerzhinsky was the founding head of the Cheka. A lifelong radical with years of imprisonment and exile behind him, he’d served in the military arm of the Bolshevik Party in the October Revolution. He was highly regarded by Lenin, and already had a reputation for utter ruthlessness in annihilating anything that smelled of counter-revolution. The meeting made a profound impression on Lockhart. Although Dzerzhinsky had twinkling eyes and his thin, delicate mouth tended to twist into a slanted smirk, Lockhart sensed no trace of humour in him.

Accompanying the Cheka boss was a rather short, thickset man of about forty, with a long nose resting on an abundant black moustache; below his dense thatch of combed-back hair, a pair of narrow, intense but faintly humorous eyes stared out. Lockhart was introduced to him and shook his hand, but neither man spoke. The fellow was called Josef Dzhugashvili, a name that meant nothing to the British agent. He gathered that the man was ambitious, but not taken very seriously. ‘If he had been announced then to the assembled Party as the successor of Lenin,’ he would recall, ‘the delegates would have roared with laughter.’
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But already Dzhugashvili was cultivating a chilling, steely persona and going by his revolutionary pseudonym,
Stalin
.
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Dzerzhinsky, having built a ring of security around Lenin, was looking outward at the threats massing against the Bolshevik state. After months of disorder, the regime was beginning to impose discipline on the city of Moscow. Counter-revolutionary plotters were to be eradicated, and the Anarchists were high on the list. They had been valued comrades of the Bolsheviks during last year’s revolutions, but the Anarchist Communists had broken away when the Bolsheviks abandoned their ideal of obliterating the state and began setting up their own tyranny. The Anarchists, driven underground, had evolved into a strange and frightening hybrid of subversive political movement and criminal plague, their ranks made up of an unholy mix of ex-soldiers, radical students and criminals. Their leaders had tried to disavow the criminal element, but the Bolsheviks had made up their minds that the Anarchists might once have been allies but had now become counter-revolutionary bandits, and had to go. The Cheka embarked on a campaign to clean them out.

The first big strike against them began on 12 April. It had its origins in an incident a few days earlier, when a motor car belonging to Raymond Robins, Lockhart’s American counterpart, was stolen, allegedly by Anarchists.
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In the early hours of the morning, over a thousand Cheka troops mounted raids on some twenty-six locations known to be Anarchist strongholds, many of them in the opulent houses of Povarskaya Street in the western district where Moscow’s wealthy merchants had formerly lived. The Anarchists were well armed, and the gun battles went on for hours, from house to house and room to room. Dozens of Anarchists were killed,
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and another twenty-five summarily executed by the Chekists.
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More than five hundred were captured alive and herded away.

In the afternoon, Dzerzhinsky sent a car to collect Robins and Lockhart, and arranged for his deputy, Yakov Peters, to give them a conducted tour of the scene of the raids.

Peters was an unforgettable character. Latvian by birth, he was a fanatical revolutionary. He had lived in exile in England for some years, and stood trial at the Old Bailey in 1911 as one of the participants in the Sidney Street siege, in which three policemen had been shot dead by a gang of radicals. Peters was acquitted of murder and in 1917 returned to Russia to take part in the Revolution. He had a broad, round face with an upturned nose and a downturned mouth like a sickle blade, and looked on the world with an intense, burning stare. As a Chekist he was utterly implacable, entirely without pity or passion. He would execute and torture freely if needed, but took no delight in it. The security of the state was what counted, and like both Lenin and Dzerzhinsky he believed that terror was the most effective way to achieve it.
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But he had a civilised side, and was soft-spoken. Later that year, Lockhart would be forced to get to know Yakov Peters much more closely, and despite everything he knew about the man, and the people he had summarily condemned to torture or to death, and everything Lockhart himself suffered at his hands, he found it difficult to dislike him.

Peters had a soft spot for the British and Americans, and rather liked Lockhart and Robins. He seemed to enjoy taking them from house to house along Povarskaya Street, exhibiting the corpses and the devastation that resulted from the Cheka’s merciless handling of counter-revolution. Lockhart couldn’t summon up much feeling for the dead and the punished; the squalor they had created and in which they had lived in these luxurious, comfortable houses – filth everywhere, paintings slashed, faeces on the carpets – disgusted him.
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This district had once been his home, during his days at the Consulate. He’d shared an apartment with Jean just one street away from this very spot. These houses, soiled and degraded, had belonged to his neighbours and acquaintances.

But the woman shot dead in the drawing room of the Gracheva house was different. Prostitute or not, she was young, and presumably innocent. Peters commented coldly that perhaps it was for the best that she had died, but whether he meant because she was a prostitute or merely that she wasn’t a very attractive one, he didn’t say.
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This was a day that would remain in Lockhart’s memory forever. It proved one thing – that the Bolsheviks, for all their vacillating over the war, were fully capable of screwing down a steel clamp on their cities. They might create a powerful nation yet. It wasn’t clear at this moment whether that was a reassuring or a terrifying prospect.

Sunday 21 April 1918

Russia was green again. The snows had thawed and the leaves were budding on the trees that flickered past the train window.

Moura had been stuck so long in Petrograd, it was strange to be in motion again. About this time last year she had travelled to Yendel, hoping that the revolutionary madness was over and the world might settle down again. Now Yendel was cut off and the world had tumbled back into an insanity without cure. She wondered if she would ever see her children again. Moura was willing to admit that she didn’t have much of a maternal instinct, but by her own reckoning she loved her children. Whether she loved them enough to sacrifice herself for them hadn’t yet been put to the test.
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It was a long haul to Moscow, all day and overnight, bringing back memories of the interminable trek to the family estate at Beriozovaya Rudka when she was a child. That was almost twice as far as Moscow – about eight hundred miles – and after the death of her father there was never any joy at the end of it. How different things were now, in every way. Every mile was bringing her closer to the moment when she would see Lockhart at last.

When the train slowed through the northern suburbs of Moscow, Moura’s heart beat a little faster. As soon as it jolted to a halt in Nikolayevsky station
*
in a cloud of steam and smoke she collected her valise, straightened her skirt, and stepped down onto the platform. She was gallantly assisted by Commander George Le Page, a heavily built, bearded and genial naval officer who had travelled down on the same train. Le Page, a Guernsey islander by birth, was a member of Francis Cromie’s mission, and had come to Moscow on urgent business with Lockhart.

Naval affairs were not going well for the British or the Russians. Cromie – ‘old Crow’, as Moura called him – had been depressed for the past two weeks, having finally had to destroy his beloved submarine flotilla. At the beginning of April it had been confirmed that Germany was sending an army division to take control of Finland, where the conflict between Red and White Finnish and Russian forces was still spluttering away. The Royal Navy flotilla, still sheltering at Helsingfors after the retreat from Reval, was under threat. With no operational crews, there was no way to mobilise the submarines. Cromie travelled up to Helsingfors on 3 April. The business community there, who had helped sponsor the German invasion, offered him £50,000 if he would prevent the Red Russian fleet from intervening in the German landings. Had he been a mercenary, Cromie could have become a rich man – just recently the anti-Bolshevik Russian White Guard had offered him five million if he would hand over the flotilla to them.
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Whatever their value on the open market, the subs would be priceless to the Germans. Cromie ordered his second-in-command, Lieutenant Downie, to destroy the flotilla. Over the next five days, while the German division landed and closed in on Helsingfors, the subs were towed out into the ice floes, charges were set and detonated. Each sinking was followed a few minutes later by a titanic explosion as the sea water rushed into the breached hull and blew up the massive batteries.
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Cromie stayed on in Helsingfors to carry on the scuttling of three British merchant vessels.
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Exhausted after days of ‘hard labour as engineer, stoker, deck hand and skipper combined, with a crew of useless army officers’, he ‘got out of Helsingfors in the nick of time’ with the help of his White friends.
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He was deeply upset by the loss of the submarines, and felt he would never forgive the White Finns for it.
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With the flotilla scuttled, the last vestige of Captain Cromie’s naval role had ceased; from now on, he was wholly a diplomat and intelligence agent.

Moura, working every day in the offices of the British Petrograd mission, took it all in. Intrigue thrilled her, and she was always hungry for information. Some of her inquisitiveness came from a need to understand what was happening to her country and what its future might be, but it was also exhilarating to feel oneself a part of world-shaping events.
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Her interest had attracted notice, and one or two members of the British mission were worried about her friendship with Lockhart – ‘Have Lockhart warned if there is any suspicion of Benckendorff,’ one of them wrote.
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But Moura never gave them any real cause for suspicion, and was allowed to continue in her job.

She and Le Page took a cab to Petrovka Street. Moura, who wasn’t very familiar with the city, looked curiously at the passing streets. It was less European than Petrograd – more onion domes and squat Asiatic arches, slightly fewer Palladian façades – yet it wasn’t vastly different. But as she would soon learn, the atmosphere was changing, becoming more controlled, with fewer radical dissenters, less crime and an intense climate of fear.

So this was the new nest of the Bolsheviks. Moura wondered how she would like it. It was like a different country from Petrograd. She wondered whether it had changed Lockhart, and how she might feel about him when she saw him again after so many weeks of anxious waiting.

A week had passed since the attack on the Anarchists, and Lockhart’s workload showed no sign of letting up. He was still having to manage almost all of it alone.

He had been without Captain Hicks since a few days after their arrival in Moscow. Lockhart had despatched him to Siberia to investigate reports that there was a German bandit army running loose, made up of former prisoners of war who’d been armed and mobilised by the Bolsheviks. The report came from SIS, and its claims were flatly denied by Trotsky, who happily gave his blessing for an investigation. Hicks had been gone over a month now, and had travelled all over Siberia, visiting prison camps in company with an officer from the American Red Cross. Not a single armed German had been found.
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Lockhart laid the blame for this farce at the door of his enemy, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour and his ludicrous policy-making – ‘what we are playing at God alone knows,’ he wrote tartly in his diary, ‘but one cannot expect much with a Foreign Minister of 74’.
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Hicks was due back any day now, and Lockhart would be very glad to see him. ‘Hickie’ had become an indispensable colleague and friend. He was also much more of a dab hand with ciphers.

Meanwhile, there was work. Sunday morning was entirely taken up by meetings in his rooms at the Elite. Nothing unusual in that. What was unusual was the feeling of suppressed excitement tingling away under his skin. At ten o’clock, Le Page arrived from Petrograd.
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There were fears on all sides about the Russian Black Sea fleet, which was vulnerable to being seized by the Germans operating in the Ukraine. The British were worried for obvious reasons, and the Bolsheviks weren’t sure of the loyalty of the sailors.
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Le Page had served with the fleet before the Revolution, and knew it well. He needed Lockhart’s opinion on the political situation and access to Trotsky (who had taken up his post as war commissar despite Russia’s continuing failure to reopen the war against Germany).