Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (16 page)

Reilly’s presence in Moscow was as yet unknown to the skeleton staff of the British Embassy. Robert Bruce Lockhart was taken by surprise when, at six o’clock that evening, he received a telephone call from Lev Karakhan, the Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs.

The commissar had an extraordinary story to recount. ‘That afternoon,’ he told Lockhart, ‘a British officer had walked boldly up to the Kremlin gate and had demanded to see Lenin.’

Karakhan provided Lockhart with a few more details before asking if the man was an impostor. Lockhart was as perplexed as the commissar and asked to know more. He was told that the man’s name ‘was Relli’.

This meant nothing to Lockhart. ‘I nearly blurted out that he must be a Russian masquerading as an Englishman, or else a madman.’

But he knew that Mansfield Cumming was intending to send new agents into Russia and he chose to bite his tongue. ‘Bitter experience . . . had taught me to be prepared for almost any surprise and, without betraying my amazement, I told Karachin [sic] that I would inquire into the matter.’

There was only one man who could tell him more. Ernest Boyce was now working as Cumming’s principal agent in Moscow and he was also the link man with the main Stockholm bureau. Lockhart was sure that he would know the identity of this mystery individual.

Boyce was nonplussed when Lockhart recounted the story of Reilly’s visit to the Kremlin. He calmly replied that, ‘the man was a new agent, who had just come out from England.’

Lockhart was furious that he had not been pre-warned and ‘blew up in a storm of indignation.’ He insisted that Reilly come to the embassy on the following day in order to explain himself.

Reilly agreed to meet with Lockhart but made no apologies for his actions. Indeed, he expressed his surprise that Lockhart was so angry. ‘The sheer audacity of the man took my breath away . . .’ fumed Lockhart, ‘although he was years older than me, I dressed him down like a schoolmaster and threatened to have him sent home.’

Reilly, who was forty-five years of age, was amused to be ticked off by a man fourteen years his junior. He had already warmed to Lockhart and now used his natural charm to placate him. ‘He took his wigging humbly but calmly and was so ingenious in his excuses that in the end he made me laugh.’

Lockhart was, by his own admission, captivated by the human chameleon seated opposite him. Reilly was the person he secretly wished to be. ‘The man who had thrust himself so dramatically into my life was Sidney Reilly, the mystery man of the British secret service,’ he would later write in his memoirs, ‘and known today to the outside world as the master spy of Britain.’ Reilly’s methods, he said, ‘were on a grand scale which compelled my imagination.’

Reilly returned to the Kremlin two days later, this time with his friend Grammatikov in tow. He was granted an audience with General Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich, Director of the Bolshevik’s Supreme Military Council and ‘the brain centre of the entire Bolshevik organisation.’

Reilly was at his loquacious best. He painted himself as a Bolshevik sympathiser, telling the general that he was ‘very interested in Bolshevism, the triumph of which had brought me back to Russia.’

This was ‘quite true’, noted Reilly in his memoirs; although he had obviously not come back to celebrate the triumph.

Reilly was anxious to discover two key pieces of information from the general. First, he wanted to know the state of relations between Germany and Russia now that the two countries were no longer at war. Secondly, he wanted to know if there were any divisions in the Bolshevik leadership.

He soon discovered that the leadership was split from top to bottom on the very issue of peace with Germany. The general himself was furious with the concessions that his fellow Bolsheviks had made to the German high command. Dropping his guard, he confessed to Reilly his fears that the Foreign Commissar, Georgy Chicherin, had been ‘bought by the Germans.’

Reilly had been accorded a private glimpse into the rival factions that already existed in the new regime. One of his aims was to push Russia back to war. He now knew that this was not a forlorn hope: several senior Bolshevik commissars wanted to do the same.

Over the weeks to come, Reilly went out of his way to court the general. He quickly saw the benefit of cultivating contacts within the regime, commissars who could provide access to Lenin’s inner circle.

‘Nobody could be more officious on our behalf than Bruevich,’ wrote Reilly. He even supplied Reilly with a pass that enabled him to attend a meeting of the Soviets in the Grand Theatre.

Reilly sent a series of reports to Mansfield Cumming detailing the strengths and weaknesses of the Bolshevik leadership. He admitted that their seizure of power was almost complete and that they were the ‘only real power in Russia.’ Yet he also revealed that the political opposition was growing in strength. ‘If properly supported,’ he wrote, ‘[it] will finally lead to [the] overthrow of [the] Bolsheviks.’

Reilly proposed a twin-pronged strategy for dealing with Russia. The most immediate objective was to safeguard the stockpiles of Allied weaponry in the ports in Northern Russia. This would necessitate the landing of significant numbers of British troops, something that could only be done with the co-operation of the Bolsheviks.

At the same time, Reilly recommended funding the opposition movement with the long-term aim of toppling Lenin’s government. ‘[It] may mean an expenditure of possibly one million pounds,’ he told Cumming, ‘and part of this may have to be expended without any real guarantee of ultimate success.’

Reilly never received the one million pounds. It was far too much money for a country still at war. But his advice about safeguarding the Allied weaponry in the White Sea ports certainly struck a chord. There was a growing feeling in Whitehall that military intervention might be the only way of preventing the revolutionary government from playing fast and loose with the stockpile of munitions.

Sidney Reilly soon found that he had courted General Bonch-Bruevich rather too assiduously. ‘[He] intended to be obliging to the point of embarrassment,’ he wrote. ‘We were permitted to go nowhere unattended . . . wherever we went we were followed.’

This was deeply frustrating for Reilly, who wished to start investigating ways of toppling the Bolshevik regime from within. He could not do this while his every movement was coming under scrutiny. ‘It became obvious that, if I were to carry out the mission on which I was engaged, I must disappear.’

In order to shake off the agents on his tail, he decided to pretend that he was returning to Petrograd with his friend, Grammatikov. In reality, Reilly would remain in Moscow under the assumed identity of Mr Constantine while Grammatikov would return to Petrograd with a third person pretending to be Reilly. ‘Our only task was to light on someone who bore a passable resemblance to me,’ wrote Reilly.

He soon found someone willing to play the game, enabling Grammatikov to leave Moscow by train with the pseudo-Reilly in tow.

The genuine Sidney Reilly watched them leave from a secret vantage point in the station. He was nervous as he saw them board the train, for he knew he had reached a point of no return. There could no longer be any pretence that he was a bona fide businessman eager to help the Bolsheviks. Now, he was embarking on an undercover life outside the law. He risked imprisonment and execution if his deception were to be unmasked.

He also felt anxious for Grammatikov and the pseudo-Reilly. ‘I knew that hidden eyes were watching them, that unseen spies were dogging their footsteps.’ But their deception was helped by a sudden change of weather. ‘The day was squally and my representative with his nose appearing from a voluminous if ragged coat, bore a sufficiently close resemblance to me.’

Reilly spent the rest of the day perfecting his assumed identity, the Greek businessman, Mr Constantine. He decided to embark on a wholly new existence, eschewing all the acquaintances of his former life. The only exception was Grammatikov’s trustworthy niece, Dagmara Karozus. A dancer at the Arts Theatre, she offered him lodgings in her apartment.

Reilly was delighted to discover that she shared her flat with a twenty-two-year-old blonde actress named Elizaveta Otten. Elizaveta had two obvious attractions: she was fluent in four languages and had the looks of a movie star. Reilly immediately marked her down as both a potential lover and potential spy.

In the first instance, however, it was Dagmara who proved invaluable. She was a good friend of a girl named Maria Friede, whose brother, Colonel Friede, was the Chief of the Bolshevik Staff.

Colonel Friede gave every appearance of being a loyal Bolshevik. He was so trusted by the regime that he had access to all of the military reports being sent to Moscow. But Colonel Friede’s support for the Bolsheviks was a façade. In reality, he despised the new rulers of Russia and was prepared to betray all the secrets of the regime.

‘I had one or two surreptitious meetings with Friede,’ wrote Reilly, ‘and when we were each assured of the others bona fides, he became my most willing collaborator.’

Reilly made the bold claim that every military communiqué of importance now passed through his hands. ‘All army orders, all military plans, all confidential documents relating to the army fell within his [Friede’s] province and many a copy of a highly confidential document he handled was read in England before the original was in the hands of the officer to whom it was addressed.’

Colonel Friede smuggled the documents to his sister, who then passed them on to Reilly. ‘Every morning he [the colonel] would bring home copies of the Bolshevik despatches and orders,’ wrote Reilly. ‘The following morning, she brought them round to the Cheremeteff Pereulok, where they were duly handed over to me.’

Reilly’s claim to have access to so much military information is an extraordinary one, yet it is endorsed by an unlikely source. A senior KGB general named Alexander Orlov was able to examine the Cheka’s file on Reilly shortly before defecting to the West. The file bore witness to many of Reilly’s claims.

‘Sidney Reilly . . . formed a highly efficient network of spies,’ wrote Orlov. Members of this network included Colonel Friede, Weneslav Orlovsky, the chief of the Soviet Criminal Police, Major General Zagriazhsky, Major General Politkovsky and an important clerk of the Soviet Executive Committee. All of these men handed him highly sensitive information – information that was then sent to Mansfield Cumming’s headquarters in Whitehall Court.

Alexander Orlov expressed a grudging respect for Reilly. ‘[He] was soon able to supply London with a regular supply of fairly accurate information about the Red Army, the doings of the Soviet government and the political happenings in Russia.’

Sidney Reilly was not the only agent sending reports back to London. Mansfield Cumming’s Russian network was steadily expanding as the nature of the threat became more apparent. Many of Cumming’s agents were working in the shadows, their names unknown even to Robert Bruce Lockhart.

‘I was completely in the dark regarding the work of a whole group of British officers and officials for whose presence in Russia and for whose protection my position with the Bolsheviks was the only guarantee.’

George Hill also spoke of these officers who ‘employed their energies against the Bolsheviks. They were working from a different angle; sometimes the lines on which our work ran parallel, sometimes even linked.’ He was often unaware of their true identities. Like the ‘inner circle’ of the Russian bureau that had helped to kill Rasputin, they were moving about in total secrecy.

The growing number of reports received from Russia enabled Cumming to form a clearer picture of the situation inside the country. There was only one man who seemed capable of uniting the disparate anti-Bolshevik factions. This was Boris Savinkov, who had been Minister of War in the months that followed the first revolution.