Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (15 page)

Ten days after his meeting with Mansfield Cumming, Reilly – now bearing the codename ST1 (the ST stood for the Stockholm bureau) – was en route to Bolshevik Russia. The plan was for him to enter the country at the port of Archangel and then make his way overland to Moscow, the new capital.

Cumming contacted his operatives in Vologda, 300 miles to the south of Archangel, and informed them of the imminent arrival of Reilly. ‘[A] Jewish-Jap type,’ was how he described him, ‘brown eyes very protruding, deeply lined sallow face, may be bearded, height five foot nine inches.’

Cumming added that he ‘carries code message of identification . . . ask him what his business is and he will answer: “Diamond Buying.” ’ This bogus occupation was rendered more believable by the fact that he was carrying sixteen large diamonds.

Reilly was not travelling incognito on the first stage of his journey. Shortly before leaving London, he had been issued with an official business visa by Maxim Litvinoff, the Bolshevik government’s sole representative in London. He was one of a small group of émigrés who had remained in England after the two Russian revolutions of 1917. Now, he found himself playing a role similar to that of Robert Bruce Lockhart.

Litvinoff was wholly ignorant of the fact that Reilly was being sent to Russia as a spy. Nor did he know that Reilly detested Lenin’s new regime. He took Reilly at face value and believed his claim to be a bona fide businessman who was keen to serve the new Bolshevik government.

Reilly’s independent spirit got the better of him before he even arrived at his destination. Instead of disembarking at Archangel, as Cumming had requested, he left the ship at Murmansk. He may have done this because he knew there was a direct train to Petrograd, but it meant that he immediately drew attention to himself. The port was being guarded by a small team of British marines who had been sent to prevent the stockpile of Allied munitions from falling into German hands. These marines promptly arrested Reilly and locked him up in HMS
Glory
until they had completed their investigations.

It was fortunate that another of Cumming’s operatives, Stephen Alley, happened to be in Murmansk at the time. The soldiers summoned Alley on board and asked for his opinion of this strange new arrival. ‘His passport was very doubtful and his name was spelt REILLI,’ wrote Alley. ‘This, together with the fact that he was obviously not an Irishman, caused his arrest.’

But Reilly was able to provide proof of his status. He uncorked a bottle of medicine and produced a minuscule message written in code. Alley immediately recognised it as a code of the Secret Intelligence Service and Reilly was released. He was free to continue his onward journey.

Alley himself was travelling in the other direction, returning to London under something of a cloud. He had been fired by Cumming for reasons that remain obscure: Alley would later make the sensational claim that he had been sacked for failing to carry out an order to assassinate Joseph Stalin, already a member of Lenin’s inner circle.

‘I didn’t always obey orders,’ he admitted. ‘Once I was asked to rub out Stalin. Never did like the chap much . . . [but] the idea of walking into his office and killing him offended me.’

Reilly was supposed to head directly to Moscow. Instead, he took the train to Petrograd in order to make contact with a number of old friends who might prove of use to him. He had not visited the city since 1915 and found that much had changed. War and revolution had left deep scars on the population and an air of decay hung like a stinking pall over the city’s imperial boulevards.

‘The streets were dirty, reeking, squalid. Houses here and there lay in ruins. No attempt was made to clean the streets, which were strewn with litter and garbage.

When Reilly had visited three years previously, queues for bread had been a fact of daily life. ‘Now . . . the bread queues were still there, but there was no food at all.’

More alarming was the presence of the newly founded Cheka, whose officers seemed to lurk on every street corner. ‘There was no police except for the secret police,’ wrote Reilly, ‘which held the country in thrall.’ It was testimony to Dzerzhinsky’s efficiency as head of the Cheka that it was already a malign presence in everyone’s lives, despite having been established just three months earlier.

Reilly took care not to draw attention to himself, for the last thing he wanted was to make his presence known to Lenin’s secret police. He made his way to the house of an old friend, Yelena Boyuzhovskaya, hoping that he was not yet being tracked. He confessed to being in a ‘cold bath of perspiration’ when he finally reached her apartment.

‘Watching that I was not observed, I slipped into the house. It might have been a necropolis I entered, and my footfall awoke a thousand echoes.’ He was delighted to find Yelena at home; she gave him a friendly welcome.

Reilly had equipped himself for many different eventualities during his time in Russia. He had entered the country on a genuine passport and intended to remain as Sidney Reilly for as long as was possible. But he was also prepared to change his identity and live in disguise if and when that became necessary.

He began perfecting several different personas while staying at Yelena’s apartment. He was to have two principal identities, one for Moscow and one for Petrograd. In Petrograd, he would pose as a Levantine merchant named Konstantine Markovich Massino. The Massino name was adopted from his second wife, Nadine: it perfectly suited the polyglot merchant he was pretending to be.

He was so proud of this Massino disguise that he had himself photographed for posterity. With his luxuriant beard and oil-slicked hair he looked the picture of a prosperous Levantine entrepreneur.

In Moscow, Reilly was to adopt a different identity. Here, he became Mr Constantine, a successful Greek businessman who gave his address as 3 Sheremetevsky Lane. This was the home of the actress Dagmara Karozus, the niece of one of his oldest friends.

Reilly knew that the moment of greatest danger would come when he switched from one persona to another. It was imperative that the Cheka should never make the link between Constantine, Massino and Reilly.

He decided that the safest place to change both costume and disguise would be on the train between Petrograd and Moscow. He would leave the former city as Monsieur Massino, decked in his Levantine business garb, and emerge in Moscow as Mr Constantine.

Other British spies would later follow suit, constantly switching identities in order to keep one step ahead of the Cheka.

Reilly spent four weeks in Petrograd, renewing acquaintances with people that could prove of use to him in the future.

‘I had many friends in the city,’ he wrote. ‘I knew where I could go when I arrived there. I knew upwards of a score of people on whose co-operation I could implicitly rely.’

These trusted friends were to provide Reilly with places of refuge when he found himself in trouble: without them, his undercover operations would have been impossible.

Among his most important contacts was the distinguished lawyer, Alexander Grammatikov, a close associate of Lenin. Senior Bolsheviks trusted Grammatikov as one of their most loyal supporters: Lenin himself had intervened to protect him from allegations that he had previously worked for the tsarist secret police.

Unbeknown to the Bolsheviks, these allegations were true. Grammatikov was secretly hostile to the new regime and was prepared to do everything in his power to undermine it.

‘[He] gave me a very graphic and terrible account of the position of affairs in Russia,’ wrote Reilly. ‘The new masters were exercising a regime of blood-thirstiness and horror hardly equalled in history.’ Grammatikov expressed his belief that Russia ‘was in the hands of the criminal classes and of lunatics released from the asylums.’

Grammatikov was to prove a conduit to some of the most senior Bolsheviks in the new government. He was on particularly friendly terms with General Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich who sat on the Bolshevik’s Supreme Military Council. The general was a fellow bibliophile and had recently been in touch with an eye to buying some of Grammatikov’s books.

Grammatikov saw this as an opportunity to get Reilly from Petrograd to Moscow, a train journey that could only be undertaken with a special pass. He informed the general that he would bring the books in person, but only if he could have two passes for travel. The general issued the passes without asking any awkward questions. A few days later, on 7 May, Grammatikov and Reilly stepped off the train in Moscow.

Sidney Reilly had many flaws in his character but one of the most alarming was his emotional hatred of Bolshevism.

It was true that many of Mansfield Cumming’s spies detested Lenin’s ideology, and even went so far as to form a Bolshevik Liquidation Society that met regularly to discuss the nature of the threat.

But most of these men viewed Bolshevism with the same clinical detachment that a surgeon might have when operating on a patient’s growth: seeing it as something to be cut out.

Reilly was more passionate in his hatred: he found it hard to keep a distance between himself and the enemy. ‘Bolshevism,’ he wrote, ‘. . . had been baptised in the blood of the bourgeoisie.’ Its leaders were ‘criminals, assassins, murderers, gunmen, desperadoes.’

The disgust felt by Reilly towards Russia’s new ruling elite was due, in part, to the fact that he was a social and intellectual snob. He viewed society as a hierarchical pyramid in which his own position was extremely close to the top. He particularly disliked the fact that the Bolsheviks had inverted the pyramid, welcoming into their ranks all the most downtrodden elements of society. Often, this was purely on the grounds that their grievance against the old regime was assured. ‘A man who could read and write was eyed askance; the illiterates were obviously of the oppressed, and now their time had come.’

Although the placing of so many poorly educated people in positions of authority was distasteful to Reilly, it was to prove of considerable benefit during his first months in Russia. He was travelling around the country with papers that were, as he himself confessed, ‘something more than dubious, and which were frequently scanned with an air of great knowingness by Commissars who could neither read nor write.’ Even in Moscow, many of the lower ranking commissars were illiterate and unable to tell whether or not the various passes and visas were genuine.

Reilly was appalled by the state of the new Bolshevik capital. It had suffered considerable damage in the street fighting that led to the Bolsheviks seizing control and evidence of the bloodshed still lay all around.

‘A city of the damned,’ he wrote. ‘There had been looting at first, but now there was nothing left to loot. The rabble had been riotous, full of the lust of blood and destruction. Now, the rabble was cowed and frightened, except for the few that were Bolsheviks.’

Reilly was also struck by the pervading sense of fear that was already blighting people’s lives. It was as if everyone was undertaking their daily lives in silence, scuttling through back streets in order to avoid the unwanted attentions of the secret police. ‘Over all, silent, secret, ferocious, menacing, hung the crimson shadow of the Cheka,’ wrote Reilly. ‘The new masters were ruling in Russia.’

Reilly had experimented with living under his fake persona while in Petrograd, testing it in the city’s squares and markets. He played the role of Massino with aplomb and was confident that he could fool even the most observant of Cheka agents. But he was reticent to shed his real identity just yet. In an act of customary boldness, he first intended to present himself at the Kremlin as Sidney Reilly, an official emissary of the British prime minister. He wanted to see if he could bluff his way into a face-to-face meeting with Lenin.

Exactly what he hoped to achieve by this high-wire strategy remains unclear. He may simply have wanted to see with his own eyes the man he was determined to destroy. He certainly thrived on dangerous games and always relished the idea of entering the lion’s den. Whatever his reasons, it was characteristically audacious and self-centred. Reilly informed no one of his plan, not even Mansfield Cumming. He preferred to work as a lone operator, reliant upon no one but himself.

On this occasion, all began well. Reilly marched up to the Kremlin gates in full dress uniform and informed the sentries that he was the personal emissary of Prime Minister David Lloyd George. He demanded to see Lenin.

It must have been a convincing act, for he was immediately granted entry and taken to meet one of Lenin’s senior aides. However, no sooner was he inside the building than the Bolshevik officials manning the gates immediately began investigating the identity of this uninvited emissary.