A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (18 page)

The Chekists had still not shaken out all the wrinkles of their newborn organisation; they were hungry for personnel, and didn’t subject recruits to particularly intense scrutiny. Sidney Reilly, after all, had been able to gain a post. Also, there were elements within the Cheka who had a particular interest in undermining Germany’s standing in Russia and the Ukraine, and were already taking steps to bring matters to a head. Around the core of Latvian Chekist deputy Martin Latsis and Ukrainian Jakov Bliumkin, a counter-espionage section was set up to penetrate the German Embassy in Moscow, in cooperation with George Hill.
³²

In this environment, it would be easy to insert a friendly agent into the Cheka.

Crucially, Moura was a Ukrainian. She came from a prominent landowning family, bred into the very class that was now ruling the country (just as it had in her childhood). If you wanted a spy to penetrate the heart of the Hetmanate, you’d have to search a long time before coming up with a better candidate than Moura Ignatievna von Benckendorff. Few could match her for persuasive charm, and none could beat her for courage.

At about the same time, Lockhart expressed a private worry that the Cheka might have obtained a copy of the cipher he used to encrypt his messages to London.
³³
It was said, many years later, that they were acquired by Moura, as part of some unspecified arrangement with the Cheka.
³⁴

The wolves were running, but this time she was running with them – and pursuing with the hounds as well. There was something in her which answered to the call of the game – the intrigue, the danger, the sense of knowing things that others did not – and it would never quite leave her as long as she lived.

In June the game began in earnest.
³⁵
Moura made the trip from Petrograd to Kiev. It was a journey she had last undertaken when visiting the Zakrevsky family estate. How long ago that seemed now – a different world, a different girl. It was over two days by train. If she hadn’t had official Bolshevik authorisation on the Russian side of the border and a mission to the leaders of the Hetmanate on the Ukrainian side, it would have taken much longer – and a good deal of dangerous subterfuge – to cross the frontier.

The familiar dull flatness of the Ukrainian Steppe matched a bleak patch in Moura’s heart. She had tried to get in touch with Lockhart before leaving, but he hadn’t replied. She read in the papers that he had gone to Vologda at the end of May to meet the Allied Ambassadors holed up there. ‘No news from you,’ she wrote to him, ‘and I want you very badly. I may have to go away for a short time, and would like to see you before I go.’ She had heard – not from him – that he was coming to Petrograd. ‘Do try and come as soon as you can,’ she pleaded, ‘I feel so lonely without you.’
³⁶

Lockhart arrived in Petrograd on 2 June to consult Cromie about the situation at Archangel. But he didn’t meet Moura; by the time he reached the city, she had gone. She had begun her journey; not just the literal one to Kiev, but the longer, more insidious journey into the service of the Bolshevik secret state.

In Kiev she lost no time making contact with the Hetmanate. She had a powerful
entrée
to their circle, besides merely her birth and class. Those things would make her trustworthy in the Ukrainians’ eyes, but she also had a direct connection. In early May, Hetman Skoropadskyi had appointed one Fedir Lyzohub
^†
as both minister for internal affairs – giving him responsibility for state security – and prime minister. As the right hand of the Hetman, Lyzohub took the traditional Cossack title
otaman.
^‡
Like Skoropadskyi, Lyzohub was a rich landowner. He had been prominent in the regional government of Poltava before the war,
³⁷
where he had known Moura’s father, Ignatiy Zakrevsky.

Moura approached Lyzohub – a solemn, dignified old gentleman with a steep forehead and a neat white beard – and offered her services as a spy against the Bolsheviks. He believed in her wholeheartedly (for why should he not believe in the daughter of a fellow noble, especially when she had such irresistible magnetism?) and immediately ordered the Ukrainian intelligence service to employ her.
³⁸

Moura was introduced to Skoropadskyi himself, and to Foreign Minister Dmytro Doroshenko.
^§
For the best part of the next month, and intermittently thereafter, she made journeys back and forth between Kiev and Russia, passing intelligence to both sides.
³⁹
What she was most skilled at was social espionage – listening for gossip, encouraging indiscretion. There is no underestimating the vanity of semi-powerful men, and their willingness to display their importance to an attractive young woman by telling her secrets. It wasn’t until much later – far too late for them to do anything about it – that the Hetmanate realised that Moura – daughter of their own kind – had been betraying them to the Bolsheviks. By then, Moura herself had more important things to worry about, and had left the province of her birth behind her, never to return.

During that summer of 1918, that was still in the future; in the meantime, during her trips back and forth to the Ukraine, Moura realised that she was facing a problem that eclipsed all others. She was pregnant.

Notes

*
Ukrainian sp.; Russian sp.: Pavel Skoropadski.

^†
Ukrainian sp.; Russian sp.: Fyodor Lizogub.

^‡
Chieftain.

^§
Ukrainian sp.; Russian sp.: Dmitri Doroshenko.

8

A Hair’s Breadth from War

June–July 1918

Lockhart had changed his mind. Almost overnight, he had utterly transformed his beliefs and his attitude. His faith in the Bolsheviks, which had been eroding throughout April and May, finally expired in June. They couldn’t be relied on, couldn’t be persuaded to support a British intervention against Germany. In that case, intervention must come whether the Bolsheviks willed it or not.

During his visit to Petrograd in early June, he had met an officer visiting from Archangel, who had convinced him that intervention would come, but not for a long while.
¹
This was typical of the British government – they pushed for intervention, but were dithering and dilatory in providing it. Well, that would have to change.

On his return to Moscow, he fired off a startling message to London: if they were going for military action in north Russia, it must come in the immediate future. If not, he would resign.
²
Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour clucked like a kicked hen at this astonishing about-face. Lockhart must learn to understand the subtle complications of international diplomacy, Balfour insisted. But Lockhart had neither time nor patience for the subtle complications of diplomats. He had enough of his own, and they were becoming increasingly risky. He had been secretly in contact with Savinkov’s anti-Bolshevik movement in April, before its abortive coup; now he began to involve himself more deeply.

His hope that he could swing the Bolsheviks against Germany was falling to pieces – and had been doing so since the arrival of Count Mirbach in Moscow. On 15 May – the very same day that Lockhart and Cromie had met Trotsky and were told that war with Germany was inevitable – Lenin had been meeting Mirbach and proposing a deal. Germany must accept Bolshevik policy in Russia and promise not to interfere in Russian internal affairs; in exchange, Russia would promise friendly and lucrative trading relations with Germany.
³
Lenin had told Lockhart that he would do whatever was necessary to prevent Russia becoming a British–German battleground; Lockhart hadn’t guessed that this was what he had in mind. If the agreement was ratified, it would end all hope for Britain in Russia, other than the vain hope of beating both Germany and Bolshevism by military action.

On 12 June, while Moura was still engaged in spying, a peace treaty between Hetmanate Ukraine and Bolshevik Russia was signed.
⁴
It wasn’t the end of hostility between them, or spying, but it all but obliterated Lockhart and Hill’s – and Trotsky’s and the Cheka’s – hope of a terminal breach.

Into the middle of this tangle of politics intruded the most basic, most pressing of human crises. A month on from their last passionate spell together in Moscow, Moura discovered that she was pregnant with Lockhart’s child.

As soon as she could, in the last days of June, she travelled to Moscow to tell him the news. The jokes they had concocted about an imaginary little boy Moura would give him, who would be fed on raw meat and be good at football, had suddenly become real.

Again Moura was surprised by her own feelings. It confirmed for her that Lockhart was the man she wanted to be with, and without whom she could not live. ‘All the day the thought of you never leaves me and I feel lost without you – why Baby, what have you done to me, the little callous icicle!’
⁵
She was thrilled to be able to give him a son; there was no doubt in either of their minds that it would be a boy, and they christened him ‘little Willy’ – or ‘little Peter’ if they were in a more serious mood. The welfare of both Moura and the baby were added to the towering stack of worries that overshadowed Lockhart night and day.

Together they faced the question of what was to be done about little Peter and about the future. There was a wife in England and a husband in Estonia to consider, not to mention Moura’s other children. What would become of them? It was decided that Moura must go to Yendel – with her freedom to travel and her experience of crossing borders, it should be little trouble. Her purpose there would be to contrive to have Djon sleep with her. Thus, when the baby was born, his legitimacy could not be disproved, and the two lovers could do what they wished without a stain on their little boy’s character.

It was a desperate plan, and a dreadful prospect. Unusually, Moura shrank from acting on it, and she delayed her departure from Moscow. After a month without his arms, his kisses, his presence, she clung to Lockhart. But eventually she had to detach herself from him. His situation in Russia was becoming more precarious by the week, and when Moura boarded the train for Petrograd on Thursday 4 July, it was with the possibility that he might not still be here when she returned.

Moura arrived in Petrograd to find a letter waiting for her. It was from Djon. She had contacted him to suggest a visit, but would he still wish to see her now? The last time they had been together, at the beginning of the year, it had been in a state of frigid dislike. Did he know about Lockhart? Tearing the letter open and racing through it, she was relieved to find that he wanted her to come to Yendel.
⁶

The relief was tinged with guilt. Moura fretted about the impending plot. ‘I love my kids very dearly,’ she wrote to Lockhart from Petrograd, ‘and placing them in a false situation apart from losing them . . . will be very very painful to me.’ But her resolve held – ‘not for a moment does it interfere with my decision, not for a moment does it make me think: “is it not better to give him up – return to the old life again” – I might as well think of giving up light – air’.
⁷

Whatever her feelings, she could do nothing immediately. There were no trains between Petrograd and Estonia, so she intended to travel by the same mail troika that had taken the children in March, with the same escort. But her delay in leaving Moscow had made her miss the departure. She would have to linger in Petrograd and wait for the man’s return.
⁸

It had become a miserable place – ‘dying a natural death’ from poverty and starvation.
⁹
There had been outbreaks of cholera, with more than three hundred new cases each day.
¹⁰
Everything was short, and Moura and her mother had become dependent on flour sent by Lockhart or Denis Garstin from Moscow, where food was plentiful if you had the money to pay the rocketing prices.

While she slipped back into her usual life – working, seeing Cromie and the other embassy people, gathering gossip, writing letter after letter to Lockhart – the situation took a sudden dramatic turn. In Moscow on Saturday 6 July, two days after Moura’s return to Petrograd, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, German Ambassador to Moscow, Lockhart’s nemesis, was assassinated – shot and bombed to death in his own embassy.