Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (18 page)

The couriers were to prove essential to the successful running of the entire intelligence-gathering operation. It was one thing to acquire secret documents, quite another to transmit the information back to Mansfield Cumming in London. Throughout the First World War, numerous spies had been caught red-handed as they attempted to smuggle documents out of the countries in which they were working. German agents had tried to lessen the risks by finding highly inventive ways of hiding information. Hill was told of one incident in which a spy had concealed documents inside his mouth. It was all to no avail.

‘The searcher gently forced the mouth open, took out the top denture and from the roof of the man’s mouth a tiny packet of oiled silk, not the thickness of a postage stamp, fell on his tongue. Inside the packet was information in microscopic writing.’

Reilly and Hill knew they were certain to be executed if caught with smuggled documents, especially ones containing intelligence about the Russian military. Hill’s priority therefore was to establish a secure courier service that could transport information out of the country.

There were to be two routes, a northern and a southern, and both were fraught with danger. The northern route was to prove the most useful but also the most perilous. It was 500 miles from Moscow to the White Sea port of Archangel and there were numerous Red Army checkpoints on route. The risk of capture was so great that Hill decided to have information sent in duplicate, using two separate couriers travelling on different days.

The southern route was far more circuitous. It passed through areas of Russia that had become virtual battlegrounds between the Bolsheviks and their political opponents. Hill quickly realised that the northern route was the only practical one in such troubled times.

‘I originally thought that it would be possible to maintain this northern service with an average of twenty-five couriers,’ he wrote. But this proved a woeful miscalculation. ‘It was of vital importance to get the messages through, and finally we elaborated a new plan which meant that we would have to employ over a hundred men and replace casualties as they occurred.’

Hill had conceived of one courier covering the entire route from Moscow to the White Sea – a return journey of twenty-two days. A second courier would then take delivery of the information and accompany it to Stockholm where it would be handed to John Scale.

But scarcely had the system been put into operation, in early July 1918, when it was found to have fatal flaws. The couriers repeatedly blundered into danger because they were ignorant of the system of Bolshevik checkpoints in the towns and villages to the north of Moscow.

‘Six of our men in all had now been caught and executed,’ wrote Hill just weeks after the service had begun. He was fortunate that none of them revealed any secret information before they were killed.

Their deaths led to a rapid change of tactic. Hill now had the idea of establishing a chain service that linked villages across Northern Russia. ‘At each of them was a group commander whose duty it was to organise his men, select suitable places for living, procure documents and passports and control the funds for carrying on the work.’

Under the new system, the first courier would travel north from Moscow to the provincial town of Vyatka, where he would hand his documents to the group commander. A second courier would then travel to the next centre, where the process would be repeated. The system worked like clockwork. ‘Each courier got to know his particular run, its pitfalls, dangers and dodges, and the strain was much less than would be involved in the entire journey.’

It was nevertheless a hazardous occupation for the individual couriers. ‘Every time one of them set out he did so at the risk of his life and the ways in which they overcame difficulties were miraculous.’

Hill placed the courier operation under the direct command of a former Russian cavalry officer known as Agent Z. He was to prove invaluable – ‘a patriot, fearless, a first-class judge of men and as good an organiser as I could have wished for.’

Agent Z’s job was to prove no less hazardous than Hill’s and he needed a secret base in Moscow – a place that he could use to meet with returning couriers and brief them on their next mission. He elected to rent rooms in the house of a lady whose officer husband had been killed in the war.

‘For reasons best known to herself,’ wrote Hill, ‘she had taken to the oldest profession in the world and had been making quite a fair living on the Tverskaya Ulitza, the Bond Street of Moscow.’

Her work as a prostitute – which was known to the authorities and tolerated by them – gave Agent Z the perfect cover. ‘What was more natural,’ wrote Hill, ‘than that unknown men should constantly be coming and going in and out of her flat.’ He added that she was absolutely reliable ‘and our weary couriers could rest in safety in one of our rooms there.’

This was just one of many addresses available to Hill and his couriers. He had nine other safe houses to be used in times of emergency, including a dacha in the countryside outside Moscow. This was ‘a small wooden country residence forty miles away, which was to be a final retreat and refuge if Moscow grew too hot for me or any of my agents.’

Renting so many properties was expensive but essential. Each one also had to have a cover to mask its real purpose: ‘a completely plausible and natural raison d’être for its existence,’ wrote Hill.

Hill’s own headquarters was to be at an unassuming house on Djatnitakaia Street in one of the poorer quarters of the capital. It was here that he spent much of his time. It was here, too, that he stored his money, kept his papers and directed his espionage operations. He shared the house with three women accomplices, all of them talented and two of them beautiful. It was a happy arrangement for the womanising Hill.

The Bolshevik regime had not yet formally broken diplomatic relations with its former allies. The Western powers were also reluctant to further damage their relations with Russia. Based on the political information being received from Reilly, there was still a faint hope that Trotsky might be persuaded to rekindle the war against Germany.

Hill had no wish to commit himself to an underground existence until such time as relations between the two countries were irrevocably ruptured. He used the intervening weeks to perfect his new identity.

‘By this time I was living a double life,’ he wrote. ‘Part of the day I would be in uniform . . . and living as a British officer, the rest of the time I was dressed in mufti, visiting my agents on foot.’

A consummate spy, he knew that success lay in detailed planning. ‘I was looking ahead . . . beginning to organise secret quarters which would be very necessary for me once the Bolsheviks attempted to restrict my activities.’

At the same time as Sidney Reilly and George Hill were preparing to go permanently underground, Robert Bruce Lockhart was struggling to keep open the channels of diplomacy between the British Government and the Bolsheviks. This was proving far from easy: every decision taken by London seemed to widen still further the gulf between the two countries.

The British Government’s most pressing concern remained the security of the stockpiles of Allied weaponry in the ports of Northern Russia. Ministers had been hoping that Lenin would permit them to send troops into these ports in order to ensure their safe keeping. But this was not to be: Lenin and Trotsky were vehemently opposed to such a move.

Lockhart discussed the issue with Reilly and Hill. Then, based on the information they were able to give him, he attempted to advise the British Government on matters of policy. But the only consistency to his advice was its inconsistency. One minute he proposed making friendly overtures to the Bolsheviks, the next he was advocating military intervention on a grand scale. The lack of clarity earned him a barrage of criticism from senior officials in London.

‘Lockhart’s advice has been in a political sense unsound and in a military sense criminally misleading,’ fumed Major-General Alfred Knox, who had formerly served at the British Embassy in Petrograd.

The Foreign Office agreed with Knox’s assessment, but injected a note of humour into their response. ‘Although Mr Lockhart’s advice may be bad,’ wrote Lord Robert Cecil, ‘we cannot be accused of having followed it.’ It was fortunate that they were receiving a more accurate assessment of the situation from other sources, notably Arthur Ransome.

The criticism of Lockhart was not without justification, but Whitehall mandarins would have done well to turn the spotlight on themselves. In the months since the Bolshevik revolution, their dealings with Russia had been muddle-headed and inconsistent. They had vacillated, made policy U-turns and failed to inform Lockhart of their thinking. Their most important decision was whether or not to risk the Bolsheviks’ wrath by landing troops in the northern ports. Yet even on this issue, there was no clarity.

‘For three months London had given no indication of its policy or policies,’ wrote Lockhart. It was scarcely surprising that he found it impossible to do his job.

He responded to their criticism of him with a withering assessment of their own conduct. ‘There was no British policy, unless seven different policies can be called a policy.’

Even Lenin agreed with Lockhart. ‘Your Lloyd George,’ he said, ‘is like a man playing roulette and scattering chips on every number.’

In such troubled times, Lockhart sought solace in women. He had fallen head over heels in love with the dazzlingly seductive Maria Zakrveskia, an old-style aristocrat possessed with charm, wit and unconventional good looks. Moura – that was what everyone called her – had previously been married to Count von Benckendorff, the Tsarist ambassador to London. The count’s murder at the hands of the Bolsheviks had left her single. Now, she was to find herself the focus of Lockhart’s most ardent devotions.

He confessed himself to be spellbound by Moura’s vitality, and he lavished her with presents and praise. ‘Into my life something had entered which was stronger than any other tie, stronger than life itself.’

He vowed never to be parted from his beloved Moura, who became a living obsession. ‘Where she loved, there was her world,’ he wrote, ‘and her philosophy of life had made her mistress of all the consequences.’ So fervent was his ardour that he flaunted Moura in public and did little to conceal their affair from the prying eyes of the Cheka.

Lockhart had originally been sent to Moscow as a semi-official agent of the British government. His diplomatic accreditation had given him access to Lenin, Trotsky and other senior Bolsheviks. But the rumour that he had been involved in Savinkov’s counter-revolution, coupled with the increasing likelihood of Allied intervention in Northern Russia, had earned him the mistrust of the new regime.

‘The sands were running out,’ wrote Lockhart of the increasingly bleak political situation. ‘We were drifting rapidly towards the inevitable tragedy.’

That tragedy moved one step nearer on the evening of 17 July 1918, eight months after the revolution, when Lockhart became the first Westerner to learn of the brutal execution of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife the tsarina, and all of their children. News of the killings was immediately conveyed to London, where it caused shock and outrage. The attitude of the Bolshevik government made the crime all the more heinous in the eyes of British ministers.

‘There was no question of disapproval or disavowal,’ wrote Lockhart. ‘In its leading articles, the Bolshevik press did everything it could to justify the murder and reviled the tsar as a tyrant and a butcher.’

While Allied governments digested news of the tsar’s execution, a game of diplomatic brinkmanship was being played out in the northern town of Vologda. It only served to reinforce Lockhart’s opinion that real danger was just around the corner.