A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (26 page)

As soon as Lockhart had finished dressing, he and Hicks were taken down to the car. Sitting with an armed guard either side of them, they were driven away. It was around five o’clock now, and dawn light was beginning to seep over the pallid buildings and deserted streets. They passed the Kremlin and turned down Bolshaya Lubyanka ulitsa, drove past the building where Lockhart had had his office until a month ago, and pulled up at number 11, the squat, forbidding headquarters of the Moscow Cheka. The prisoners were marched inside and left in a tiny bare room, with just a rough table and chairs.

They had been there only a few minutes when Lockhart was taken out again and marched down a corridor to an office. Behind the desk sat a man with a sickle-blade mouth compressed in a hostile arc, and eyes that glinted in the lamplight. Lockhart had last seen him in the role of guide amidst the carnage of the raids against the Anarchists in Povarskaya Street. To Lockhart’s bewildered mind, Yakov Peters resembled a poet, dressed in a loose white shirt, his long black hair brushed back from his forehead. On the desk in front of him lay a revolver.
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After dismissing the guards, Peters stared at Lockhart in silence for a long while, then opened a folder. ‘I am sorry to see you in this position,’ he said.

He ignored Lockhart’s protests and demands to see the Commissar for Foreign Affairs. ‘Do you know the Kaplan woman?’ Peters asked.

‘You have no right to question me,’ Lockhart replied.

‘Where is Reilly?’

The mention of that name gave Lockhart his first real jolt of fear. Peters took a piece of paper from his folder and held it out. ‘Is that your writing?’ With another jolt, Lockhart recognised the pass he had given the Latvian officers to identify themselves to General Poole. He felt queasy. He had expected to be inconvenienced by a fruitless attempt to link him to the shooting of Lenin; he’d had no idea that they had uncovered his involvement with the Latvians. How deeply they had penetrated it, he had not the slightest conception.

‘I cannot answer any questions,’ he said carefully.

‘It will be better for you if you tell the truth,’ Peters replied softly.

Lockhart was silent. Peters summoned the guards and told them to take the prisoner back to his room.

He and Hicks were left alone together. Aware that they were being listened to, they confined themselves to trivial chat. Lockhart was scared; the Cheka knew about the Latvian conspiracy; in the light of that, there was no predicting what they might do with him. Diplomatic protocols might count for nothing; he had dishonoured his side of the diplomatic bargain; could he really expect the Bolsheviks to honour theirs?
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It was even worse than he had thought. During the night the Cheka had been swooping upon all the leads their Latvian informants had given them, and Lockhart was not the only catch.

After dropping the prisoners at the Lubyanka headquarters, Malkov had hurried back to the Kremlin to find out how Lenin was and check on his guards. On his way home a couple of hours later, he called in at the Cheka to see Peters. He found him fast asleep on a sofa, exhausted after three days on constant alert. Lockhart wasn’t the only one who’d been on edge since the shooting. Peters had left instructions that he was to be woken, and Malkov had to almost drag him off the sofa to rouse him.

There had been a new development. Cheka officers had remained at Lockhart’s flat to continue the search. A woman had turned up at the door, attempting to deliver an unmarked package, and had been arrested on the spot by a female Chekist. She had just been brought to Peters for interrogation when Malkov arrived, and he sat in on the interview. The lady proved to be young, well dressed and, to Malkov’s eyes, remarkably beautiful. She gave her name as Maria Fride, but refused to give any further information. Peters opened the package she had been attempting to deliver to Lockhart’s flat. Inside was an incredible, unsettling document – a thick report detailing the dispositions of Red Army regiments on the front lines. The whole thing had been written by a single roving individual. It was headed ‘Report No. 12’, and even included details of German forces culled from Soviet army intelligence.
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Maria Fride claimed she knew nothing of the document, or of the occupant of the flat in Khlebnyy pereulok; she had been out shopping for milk (she did in fact have a can of milk with her) and had been given the package by a stranger and asked to deliver it to flat 24. She even described the stranger in detail – medium height, wearing a military uniform.

Peters listened for a few moments, then quietly interrupted: ‘You lie.’

But although he pressed her hard, she stuck to her story. ‘I swear to God,’ she insisted.

‘Do not swear to a God we don’t believe in. Do you have any relatives here? Family?’

She admitted to having two brothers who worked for the government, but claimed not to know which ministry. Realising he was going to get nothing more from this obstinate woman, Peters sent her to solitary confinement.
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Later that day, Maria Fride’s brothers were traced. One of them, Aleksandr Fride, was a former colonel in the Tsar’s army, now working in the intelligence section in the Commissariat for Military Affairs. He had used his position to obtain secret documents, which he had passed to Lockhart and Sidney Reilly, sometimes using his sister as a courier. They furnished exactly the kind of information that would be useful to counter-revolutionary rebels fighting the Red Army, and by agents trying to stir up mutiny among loyal regiments. Aleksandr Fride was quickly arrested and made a full confession.
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Maria’s flat was searched (it was on the far side of the city, which undermined her story about having been out buying milk, despite the can she had been carrying). At the same time as the raid on Lockhart’s flat, the apartment rented by Sidney Reilly and his mistress had been raided and searched. Reilly himself, having gone to Petrograd to see Cromie, avoided being caught.

With Colonel Fride’s confession, together with the statements of other people swept up in the dragnet, the Cheka had a full and profoundly incriminating picture of the network of British, French and American spies, agents and couriers operating in and around Moscow.

The spy ring, grave and insidious as it was, had been merely an intelligence-gathering operation. By comparison, Lockhart’s involvement in the attempt to suborn the Latvian regiments – the men who held the safety of the Soviet government in their care – was altogether more heinous. And now Uritsky was dead and Lenin possibly dying. Was this Lockhart’s doing? Now was the time to discover the connection between Fania Kaplan and Robert Bruce Lockhart.

The Cheka knew of one possible but tenuous connection. The Ukraine. Kaplan was a Ukrainian, as was Moura Benckendorff, the Bolsheviks’ spy in Kiev, and Moura was Lockhart’s mistress. They had known this all along, while the British secret agents and the Cheka conducted their uneasy cooperative projects and spied on each other at the same time. But was there a hidden connection there too?

Kaplan was questioned obliquely about whether her motivation had anything to do with the Hetmanate government, or if she knew of the terrorist network linked with the counter-revolutionary Boris Savinkov. She denied both charges.
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At every turn the Cheka seemed to find indications that there might be Party insiders connected to the attempted assassination, and backed off, to their intense frustration.
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There was something here that was beyond the ken of the Cheka – they were a new organisation, skilled in terror and summary justice but still inexperienced in investigation and plotting. The only way they could see to connect Kaplan to Lockhart would be to bring them face to face and see what happened.

Lockhart and Hicks had been in custody for several hours, trying not to think what would be done with them.

Summary executions were already going on. Everywhere in Moscow and Petrograd sporadic outbreaks of gunfire could be heard as the death squads went to work on any Russian who was so much as suspected of counter-revolutionary activities or sympathies. The bourgeoisie were the main targets, and anyone loyal to them – families and servants alike. And in both cities it looked like the British prisoners might be next up against the wall.

Lockhart wondered what had happened to Moura. Had she been left behind at the flat? Or had she found somewhere else to go?

The door opened, and Lockhart and Hicks were surprised to see a young woman led into the room, dressed all in black. The guards went out and left her there. Lockhart regarded her with interest. ‘Her hair was black, and her eyes, set in a fixed stare, had great black rings under them.’
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She was bizarrely calm and composed; ignoring the two Englishmen, she went over to the window and stood looking out, with her chin on her hand. After a long interval of strange, awkward silence, the sentries came and took her away again. Lockhart guessed she was the woman who’d been charged with Lenin’s shooting, and guessed the reason for bringing her face to face with him. Presumably Peters had been hoping for some sign of recognition between her and Lockhart. Well, he hadn’t got it. If they had ever seen each other before in their lives, neither showed the slightest indication of it.

Lockhart and Hicks had been in custody for about six hours when, suddenly and surprisingly, they were told they were free to go.

Outside, they found the weather ‘wet and beastly’. Managing to find a cab, the two men made their weary, dejected way home.
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Yakov Peters was frustrated. He had been advised by Commissar Chicherin – Lockhart’s sole remaining friend in the government – to release him on the grounds of diplomatic immunity – despite the fact that the government was even now arguing that the same immunity should be stripped from the French and American consuls.

When Malkov learned of Lockhart’s release, he was incredulous. Peters shrugged it off. Now that Lockhart had been arrested and most of his co-conspirators were locked up or under observation, he was no longer dangerous. He could always be picked up again. He would be under close watch, and if he still had agents not yet known to the Cheka, they might try making contact, and then . . . more counter-revolutionary fish in the net.
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Arriving back at the flat in Khlebnyy pereulok, Lockhart and Hicks found it turned upside-down, drawers hanging open, belongings strewn about. There was nobody home. Lockhart’s manservant, Ivan, and his cook, Dora, were gone. So was Moura. The building’s porter, who had watched all the morning’s proceedings, told Lockhart that the servants and the lady had all been taken away by the Cheka.

Notes

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My God!

12

Sacrificial Offering

September–October 1918

Wednesday 4 September 1918, Moscow

Arrested! How could they? How could these beasts arrest
her
? After what she had risked on their behalf, putting herself in mortal danger, betraying her very people, to gather information for the Soviet state. And now arrested! It was the Bolshevik way – they recognised no obligation beyond their present needs, no loyalty other than to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and the Revolution.

They accused her of being sympathetic to the Allies – an echo of the accusation Djon had thrown at her, and no less dangerous for being only half-true. They said she had a ‘pro-English orientation’. She had worked for the British, her friends were British, and her lover was British.
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That hadn’t troubled them before – indeed, it had made her invaluable to them. But now her associates had been revealed to be elbow-deep in counter-revolutionary plots. The Chekists, shaken by the July rebellion and the killing of Uritsky, were suspicious of their own shadows, and apt to execute first and not worry about asking questions at all. And Moura, daughter and darling of the aristocracy, was a natural enemy.

From the Lubyanka headquarters they had moved her to the notorious Butyrka prison-fortress. This hexagonal ring of beetling brick cell blocks guarded by four squat round towers resembled a cross between a factory and a castle. It had long been the place for political prisoners – Felix Dzerzhinsky had been held here during his days as a revolutionary outlaw, and had been freed during the February Revolution. Now he ruled the organisation that sent its victims here, none of whom was likely to be saved as he had been. Moura was not alone. Many British and French citizens had been rounded up, along with the Russians who had collaborated with them. Sidney Reilly’s mistress was in the women’s section along with Moura.

Conditions in the prison were foul – dirty, verminous and overcrowded. Rations consisted of water and a half-pound of black bread per day, sometimes supplemented with a little thin soup or horse meat. In these conditions, prisoners would grow rapidly thinner and their health would deteriorate. Some could be here for months without charge. Over all of them hung the fear of death (a bullet to the back of the head was the Cheka’s preferred method), brutal interrogation or deportation to the new concentration camps.
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