A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (17 page)

They got drunker by degrees, and took turns to wander outside under the lime trees to clear their heads. Only Lockhart stayed indoors, wreathed in music, along with Moura, who had a powerful resistance to alcohol and could drink strong men into oblivion without showing more than a slur in her voice.

Lockhart persuaded Madame Nikolaievna to repeat one particular song over and over; it was called ‘I Cannot Forget’, and was ‘in tune with my own turbulent soul’, ‘a throbbing plaint of longing and desire’ about a man reputed to be a faithless philanderer but who has been transfixed by one woman – ‘. . . why do I forget the rest / and still remember only you . . .’
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After the party, in the early hours before dawn, he and Moura took the car and drove out to the Sparrow Hills. The wooded slopes gave a spectacular view eastward over the city. The two lovers watched the sun rise, spilling a pool of fiery light over the Kremlin’s spires and gleaming domes. Looking back, it seemed to Lockhart like a portent of the violent mood of vengeance that had already been seeping, and would soon begin to flood through the city.

Moura finally knew, finally understood, how she felt. It was a revelation. As soon as she was back in Petrograd she rushed to put her feelings into words. ‘I am caught at last and for good,’ she wrote to him.
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Only one thing mattered to her now: ‘my love to you, my Baby-boy. I am childishly happy about it, so confident in the future’. Along with love came anxiety, and a yearning to be with him always. But there were so many obstacles; they were both married, and the tide of the Revolution was in spate and forcing them apart. Soon he might be forced to leave Russia, while she was trapped here, and her children stranded beyond the German border in Estonia. She had tried, foolishly and incoherently, to express her feelings to him when he came to see her off from the station after their dawn vigil in the Sparrow Hills. But he hushed her. There was nothing they could do but hope that they would conquer fate somehow.

Love might either see them through these terrible times, or it might destroy them. But one thing was certain – Moura would do whatever she had to in order to survive. In that respect she hadn’t changed. The complications of her tender feelings towards Lockhart were minor compared to the contradictions in the other activities she was being drawn into.

It was never recorded when they first approached her. History also failed to note exactly how they approached her, or who was responsible. Neither is it known what inducements were offered or what threats. All that ever came to light – and only to a handful of people – was that Moura began to spy on Lockhart and his colleagues on behalf of the Cheka.

The rumours that arose later were misinformed and inaccurate. What they omitted was that spying on Lockhart was only a small part of what she did. What nobody seemed ever to suspect was that the person who primed and prepared her to spy, who laid the path that took her into the Cheka, was Lockhart himself.

In those weeks of spring and summer, he was ever more preoccupied with the state of his mission: concerned with Bolshevik policy, the position of Germany in it and the multiple conflicting strands of British activity in Russia. Would there be military intervention, covert subversion or diplomacy?

He was so preoccupied that Moura began to worry when she returned to Petrograd that he might not love her as much as she did him. She would do anything for him, and she yearned to be with him; she wanted ‘happiness, peace, love, work’ and railed against fate and the ‘thousand and one things that come between me and all that’.
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‘I want you to come to me,’ she wrote, ‘when you are tired, to tell me, when you want my help . . . and I want to be your mistress, when you want passion.’ But for now all they could do was wait, hope, and snatch what time they could together – ‘And you will have to see, whether you really love me.’
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Perhaps it was that uncertainty which made her push back the bounds of what she was willing to do for him.

It began with gossip. Her letters, their pages blooming with love, were topped up with snippets of information and hearsay about the comings and goings of the other British missions in Russia. She knew them all well, personally and professionally. General Frederick Poole, who was heading for Archangel with a British military force of uncertain size and purpose, was a major concern. Moura warned Lockhart that there were rumours that Poole was ‘coming with greater powers’, that he might take full charge of all British operations, and bend them all towards military intervention. But Moura added darkly that if it were necessary to discredit Poole and his mission, ‘there is nothing easier than to expose him’. He was ‘in with the Jews’, she said cryptically.
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As an employee of Hugh Leech, she knew something of the underhand financial deals that several senior British officers with backgrounds in Russia had been involved in. Their purpose had been to fund anti-Bolshevik White forces and scupper German banking interests in Russia, but there were signs in Leech’s evasive behaviour that there might have been some misappropriation of funds going on;
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if so, Moura would be the person to sniff it out. He had fled once already to Murmansk and worked his way back.

She was able to reassure her beloved that Francis Cromie and Le Page were true to him (for which she took a little credit for herself), and the SIS chief Ernest Boyce had a high opinion of him. But there were concerns. Cromie worried her deeply one day by taking her aside and asking her quietly, ‘You’re friendly with Lockhart, and you don’t wish him any harm?’

Startled, she replied, ‘Of course not, why should I?’

‘Well, don’t go to Moscow again,’ said Cromie. ‘It might harm him, he’s got many old enemies in Moscow.’
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She wrote asking Lockhart what Cromie could possibly mean. ‘I don’t see it at all, but of course in some ways I have the psychology of the ostrich.’ Her psychology was actually the opposite of ostrich-like, but Cromie had alarmed her. It was only too clear that he was referring to the jealous diplomats and businessmen who resented the young upstart with his pro-Bolshevik policy and might take any opportunity to mar his reputation.

There was another cloud on Moura’s horizon. It took the bluff, moustached form of Colonel Cudbert Thornhill, an SIS officer who had come out to handle intelligence for General Poole’s mission in the north. He’d been in Petrograd before, at the British Embassy in 1915. For reasons she didn’t specify, Moura neither liked nor trusted Thornhill. The feeling seemed to be mutual, though again she didn’t elaborate on the reasons. ‘I am so suspicious of him in every way,’ she wrote to Lockhart. ‘If he comes here and suspects something between you and me and even without that – he will be sure to try and blacken me in your eyes.’ Perhaps this was some lingering rumour from the time of ‘Madame B’ and her salon. She worried in case Lockhart believed whatever it was that Thornhill might tell him. ‘Perhaps not,’ she mused, ‘but it will raise doubts in you – and there is nothing I deserve less.’
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Quickly she assured him that Thornhill was a fractious type who generally didn’t get on with people.
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This was true; there had certainly been friction between him and General Knox, and he’d had a strained relationship with Sir Mansfield Smith Cumming (the original ‘C’), the head of SIS.
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According to Moura, Thornhill and Poole didn’t like each other, which could spell doom for the Archangel mission, whatever it turned out to be.

But there was more to Moura’s role than gossip. Lockhart’s diplomacy was entering a new and dangerous phase. He could see intervention coming, and the mood among the British in Petrograd and Murmansk was all for it. He was feeling more than ever that the government at home didn’t value his work. As the last days of May passed by, he began to take on a more militant mood, and much of it was focused on the Germans.

In this respect his antipathy was matched by the Bolsheviks’ fears and suspicions of the occupied Balkan provinces and the much bigger threat of the Ukraine. In their lightning advance in February and March, the German army had overrun the Ukraine, and under the terms of the Brest-Litovsk treaty they took possession of it – ostensibly as an autonomous protectorate – and began shaping it to suit their own purposes.

On 29 April a coup brought down the Ukraine’s democratic socialist government. The coup was led by General Pavlo Skoropadskyi,
*
a Ukrainian Cossack aristocrat, and backed by the German army. Before the rise of Bolshevism, Skoropadskyi had been one of the biggest landowners in the Ukraine, a loyal Russian imperialist who had served as a staff officer in the Russian army and aide-de-camp to Tsar Nicholas II.
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A new government was set up, supported by Germany and composed of Ukrainian landowners, many with Cossack heritage. Skoropadskyi was installed as ruler, taking the traditional Cossack title
Hetman
– an autocrat presiding over a council of ministers. The first act of the Hetmanate government (as it became known) was to reverse the redistribution of land implemented by the socialist government, returning the Ukraine’s great estates and farmlands to their former owners. Strikes were banned, dissent crushed and peasant revolts violently subdued.
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The Ukraine became a client state of Germany, a rich source of grain for the German war machine, and a kind of sanatorium for German army divisions worn down by service on the Western Front; they were set loose to live upon the land and rebuild their strength and morale at the peasants’ expense.
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In Moscow, the Bolsheviks were appalled. Not only by what the Hetmanate stood for – a typically heinous bourgeois repression of the proletariat – but also by the terrifying feeling that this was the true face of Germany. Might this be how they intended to treat Russia? The coup in the Ukraine had occurred only three days after the arrival of Count Mirbach as German Ambassador in Moscow, which underlined the Bolsheviks’ fears.

Lockhart was privately delighted. In his eyes, the Germans were driving a massive Ukraine-shaped wedge between themselves and the Bolsheviks. On 6 May he noted in his diary that the Bolsheviks ‘regard this as a direct menace to their government’; it was seen as an attempt to initiate counter-revolution, ‘not only for Ukraine but for all Russia’. When he and Cromie met Trotsky a week later to discuss the German threat to the Russian Black Sea fleet – which was in Ukrainian hands – they were told that war with Germany was ‘inevitable’, and that he was ready to listen to any proposals the British might have.
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Even Lenin, the determined isolationist, was starting to see war with Germany as a possibility. He told Lockhart that he saw a future in which Russia would become a battlefield on which Germany and Britain would fight each other. He was willing to do whatever it took to prevent it.
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Lockhart took that cryptic assurance as encouragement – not realising that Lenin had his own secret plans for settling the situation.

For Lockhart and his inner circle, the Ukrainian crisis offered hope. Anti-British, anti-French, anti-American feelings were reaching a simmering point in Russia. The valedictory mood at Tamplin’s birthday party had reflected the belief that the feeling would grow, that it would take over the Central Committee, and finally drive the British out of Russia. But if the German threat were seen to overshadow the British threat, that would all change. With the token British force at Murmansk, however, and a new force on its way to Archangel, intervention against the German eastern frontier without approval from the Bolsheviks was looking increasingly likely. Direct intervention against the Bolsheviks themselves could not be ruled out.

There was still a chance to win the Bolsheviks over, Lockhart believed, but time was running out and his government was giving him nothing tangible to offer Trotsky.

The Bolsheviks – or rather elements among them – began to support guerrilla action in the Ukraine. Captain George Hill, Lockhart’s SIS friend, had close cooperative links to the Cheka and was trusted by the Bolshevik leadership, having helped Trotsky set up his military intelligence organisation, the GRU. Hill was central to the operation. He and his Canadian friend Colonel Joe Boyle had built up a network of agents, couriers and saboteurs which had been active in the Ukrainian mining regions for months, causing huge damage to its ability to contribute to Germany’s war economy. Starting in May he reactivated his agents, organising attacks on German army rest camps.
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Quite how Moura became caught up in the Ukrainian intrigue was never set down in writing – at least not in any form that survived. But the reasons for bringing her into it were clear enough, as was her role – not as a saboteur but as a gatherer of intelligence.
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Not only was she close to Lockhart, she was absolutely trusted by him, and eager for his approval; she had some experience of espionage – albeit of a genteel, domestic kind; and she knew the British secret intelligence people. That included George Hill. If anyone could secure her a place in the Cheka – which would be needed in order to acquire the necessary travel rights – it would be him.