A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (24 page)

A few days later, at his flat, Lockhart received a second visit from the young, sallow-faced Latvian officer, Smidkhen. This time his young comrade was absent; in his place was an older man, ‘tall, powerfully built’ with ‘clear-cut features and hard, steely eyes’. He introduced himself as Lieutenant Colonel E. P. Berzin, commanding officer of the Latvian Special Light Artillery Regiment, one of the ‘Praetorian Guard’ units whose job was to guard the Kremlin. He had talked with Smidkhen and agreed that his fellow officers could be persuaded to act against the Bolshevik government, given the right inducements. Moreover, they certainly had no intention of fighting against Allied forces.
²⁸

The next day, Lockhart consulted his remaining Allied counterparts, the American and French Consuls-General, DeWitt C. Poole and Fernand Grenard. (Although they were as much part of the Entente alliance as Britain, the Bolsheviks had reacted much less harshly against them, especially the Americans.) Both men approved the plan, and that same day Grenard and Lockhart met with Colonel Berzin. Also present was Sidney Reilly, who had returned to Moscow from Petrograd, his bogus position in the Cheka still intact. He was now going by the name ‘Constantine’.

Berzin was asked what it would take to subvert the Latvian regiments. His answer was simple: money. Between 3 and 4 million roubles should do the job. Lockhart and Grenard agreed to consider the amount. They also promised, despite lacking their governments’ backing, full self-determination for Latvia in the event of the defeat of Germany and the fall of Bolshevism.
²⁹
Berzin’s task would be to prevent Latvian units being used against General Poole’s force; without their contribution, even that pitiably small formation ought to be able to link up with the Czechs and take Vologda. With that aim, Lockhart provided Berzin with signed documents to be used by picked Latvian officers as passports to the British lines, so that Poole could be informed of the plan.

If it occurred to him that with those small slips of paper, bearing his signature, he was potentially putting a lethal weapon into the hands of his enemies, it didn’t deter him.

Reilly suggested an additional scheme – to suborn the Latvian regiments within Moscow and the Kremlin, stage a coup and place Lenin and Trotsky under arrest. Lockhart and Grenard flatly refused to have anything to do with such a dangerous plan. Or so Lockhart later claimed. He would also claim that this was the last time he saw Sidney Reilly, and that his involvement with the Latvian scheme, having set it in motion and handed it over to Reilly to manage, ended here.
³⁰
In fact, Reilly went back undercover, bringing his fellow SIS agent George Hill – still in hiding in Moscow – into the plot. They began building up an intelligence-gathering network in and around Moscow and planning to use the Latvians to stage the decapitation coup which Lockhart had supposedly forbidden. Lockhart remained fully in contact with Reilly and Hill and their agents, and was equipped with the secure SIS cipher system in order that they could communicate with him.
³¹

Lockhart was playing an extremely dangerous game. His role in the plot to subvert the Latvians would later, from the viewpoint of history, become almost invisible. But at the time he lacked the luxury of concealment which Reilly and Hill enjoyed. He was starkly visible, dependent on secrecy and on the hope that the remaining threads of his diplomatic status would keep him safe. But if the Bolsheviks discovered what he was involving himself in, it would offer him no protection at all.

While all this was going on, Moura remained in the background. The blanket of secrecy that was being tucked in around everyone involved covered her completely. If she was present in the flat while Lockhart was meeting Reilly, Berzin and Smidkhen, nobody ever recorded it. Neither was it ever noted whether her keen nose for intrigue detected what was going on. Still less was there any intimation of whether she was still connected to the Cheka, and if so, whether any information from within the flat at 19 Khlebnyy pereulok was ever passed to the grim offices at 11 Bolshaya Lubyanka by her pretty hands.

She and Lockhart continued to live their private life of romance in the spaces between political upheavals. There were days of relaxation in the gardens of the defunct British Consulate, where the men, English, French and American, played football.

And there was still nightlife. One evening, in an attempt to relive the memory of Guy Tamplin’s birthday party, Lockhart and Moura, together with Hicks, went out to Petrovsky Park, where the night-restaurants were. Sadly, the Strelna had been closed down. They found the maîtresse, Lockhart’s old and dear friend Maria Nikolaievna, living in a dacha nearby. ‘She wept over us copiously,’ Lockhart would recall, and having sung them some of their favourite gypsy songs in a faint, mournful voice, pleaded with them to stay with her – ‘She saw tragedy ahead of us.’ Lockhart was chilled by her words and her mood, and haunted by the memory of their parting, ‘beneath the firs of Petrovsky Park with the harvest moon casting ghostly shadows around us. We never saw her again.’
³²

While Lockhart and Moura indulged their passion and looked forward to their life together with their unborn baby, while he and his associates plotted, they were being closely watched.

After the conspirators’ meeting in Lockhart’s flat, the Latvian officers Smidkhen and Colonel Berzin had gone across the centre of Moscow to a certain notorious office in the Bolshaya Lubyanka ulitsa, where Berzin reported in full to deputy chief of the Cheka and fellow Latvian Yakov Peters. The truth was that Colonel Berzin was not a disaffected officer at all; he was an honest and scrupulous one, entirely loyal to the Bolshevik government. It was upon the orders of the Cheka that he had gone with Smidkhen to meet with Lockhart.

Likewise, Smidkhen himself was not a mutineer in waiting but an officer of the Cheka, real name Jan Buikis. Both he and the accomplice with whom he had first approached Lockhart – the man identified as ‘Bredis’, whose real name was Jan Sprogis – had been primed from the beginning by Peters and his boss, Felix Dzerzhinsky.

All three Latvians were what Lockhart had feared they might be –
agents provocateurs
. Their mission had been in train for months. Smidkhen and Bredis had been briefed to make contact with the British mission in Petrograd, and after two months of careful preparation had succeeded in getting themselves ‘cultivated’ by Captain Cromie, to whom they suggested the idea of subverting the Latvian regiments. Cromie was impressed and believed in them. Putting the plan into action, he sent them on to Lockhart. As soon as they arrived in Moscow, they reported to their chiefs in the Cheka, and continued to do so throughout the conspiracy. When Lockhart asked for a senior officer, the Cheka picked out Colonel Berzin from the Kremlin guard and briefed him to go along with Lockhart’s scheme.
³³

The double-cross had been slow to bear fruit, but as the summer of 1918 waned towards the harvest season, it looked like bringing in a large crop of British, French and American diplomats and agents. Quite what the Cheka hoped to achieve with their entrapment, and what they would have done with the fruit of the harvest, was never discovered, because out of the blue the whole scheme was blasted by two lightning bolts.

On the morning of Friday 30 August, Moisei Uritsky, the head of the Petrograd Cheka, a man with a reputation for cruel retributive justice, was shot dead on his way to his office. The assassin was Leonid Kannegisser, a young army cadet with a reputation as a poet and intellectual. All that was known about Kannegisser’s politics was that he had been a keen supporter of Kerensky.
³⁴

The news of the murder flashed through immediately to the Moscow Cheka and the Kremlin. Lenin personally ordered Felix Dzerzhinsky (now firmly back in control of the Cheka after the Left SR revolt in early July, but technically in a sort of semi-retirement) to set aside all current business and go straight to Petrograd to investigate.

Having despatched his top man to deal with the case, Lenin carried on with his programme for the day. In the evening he spoke at a public meeting of workers at the Mikhelson armaments factory in Moscow. His theme was the poison of counter-revolution and how it must be purged from the system. ‘There is only one issue,’ he declared, ‘victory or death!’

At about eight o’clock in the evening, Lenin left the building through a dense press of people crowding the hallway and the roadside. Just as he got outside, a woman accosted him and began to berate him about the injustice of flour being confiscated from the people by the government. Lenin denied the accusation – then, as he was in mid-sentence, another woman in the crowd produced a revolver, aimed at the leader and fired three shots. The first bullet hit Lenin in the shoulder; the second hit him in the neck; the third missed and hit a woman standing nearby. Lenin’s driver, who had been preparing the car, pushed through the fleeing, screaming crowd towards the sound of shooting, and found the leader lying face-down on the ground.
³⁵

The arrests began immediately. Sixteen people were seized at the scene and taken away to the Cheka headquarters in the Lubyanka. Lenin was lifted into the car and taken to the Kremlin. He was still alive, but barely.

Felix Dzerzhinsky heard the shocking news when he was still en route to Petrograd to begin his investigation into the Uritsky assassination. Immediately he turned back to Moscow. During his absence, the investigation was begun by his deputies, principally Yakov Peters, who began the interrogation of suspects. In the early hours of the next morning, Peters extracted a confession from the most likely person – a young Ukrainian Jewish woman who went by the name of Fania Kaplan. ‘I was the one who fired at Lenin,’ she declared, and admitted that she had been planning it for months. But beyond that, she would say nothing about her motives, her political affiliation or her accomplices.
³⁶

The Bolsheviks were stunned and enraged by the two shootings; coming within hours of each other, they looked like the first rockfalls of a landslide. It became all the more urgent that the forces of counter-revolution be exterminated, root and branch, without mercy. Until now, the Cheka had been ruthless in putting down the enemies of the state, but now a new movement burgeoned – instantaneously, almost while the gunshots were still echoing. It was a movement based on fear, constant suspicion, and violent summary justice. They called it the Red Terror.

‘Without mercy, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds,’ declared the popular paper
Krasnaya Gazeta
. ‘Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritsky let there be floods of bourgeois blood – more blood, as much as possible.’
³⁷

During that last day of August, while Uritsky’s body lay in the morgue and Lenin’s life hung by the frailest of threads, the British in Petrograd and Moscow wondered what would happen to them. Inevitably, the assassinations were being blamed on all kinds of counter-revolutionary movements – the Anarchists, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the White Guard – but the recurring theme uniting them all was the Anglo-French imperialists. They must have a hand in it somewhere, and the time had come to sever the hand from the arm that controlled it.

Notes

*
Tapestry Street.

^†
Great Lubyanka Street.

^‡
Bread Lane.

11

The Knock on the Door in the Night

August–September 1918

Saturday 31 August 1918, Petrograd

In Britain they called it murder, the incident that occured that day. The people who were actually there were less certain about what had occurred, but the British press and politicians, in their righteous indignation against all things Bolshevik, called it cruel, cold-blooded murder of a fine and gallant man.

Whatever they called it, it was tragic, and left an indelible mark on Moura. She wasn’t there when it happened, but when she saw the scene weeks later and found the bloodstains, still there on the floor in the deserted, haunted building, it wrung her already breaking heart. The men in her life – the three very dearest of them – were being violently torn away from her, one by one, by forces which she struggled to understand. The tangled chain of events stretched back a long way, but the final act of the tragedy began on that last August day in faraway Petrograd.
¹

It was a strange day from the very beginning. The summer was dissolving in a chilly dampness, and the atmosphere of hate and dread that followed the shootings of Uritsky and Lenin affected everyone. The Bolshevik press was full of furious demands for imperialist blood.