Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (21 page)

‘This danger seemed to us, at the time, not only to be very real and of immediate urgency, but also we envisaged the danger of awkward complications after the war,’ wrote Bailey.

On this issue, at least, Damagatsky offered some crumbs of comfort. Religious propaganda, he said, was contrary to the policy of the Soviet Government. He professed no interest in fomenting Islamic rebellion.

As the inconclusive meeting drew to a close, Bailey feared that he and Blacker would be arrested as spies. ‘Internment for any length of time would, as I realised later, have meant almost certain death,’ he wrote.

The only place they could be held was the city prison where survival was a matter of chance. ‘A party of drunken soldiers would go to the gaol, take people out and shoot them. Once we were walking down the street, we heard cries and shots from a house. One of these murders was being perpetrated.’

Bailey added that ‘slightly more justifiable executions took place when the gaol was full and it was necessary to make room.’

In the event, Damagatsky chose to bide his time. He allowed Bailey and Blacker to walk free from the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. But they knew they were marked men. ‘We were followed everywhere by spies and when we returned home at night after going to a concert or cinema, electric torches flashed mysterious signals and bells were rung to report our safe arrival. The police made frequent searches by day and night and once came to us at two o’clock in the morning.’

It was clear that their lives would be in continued danger if they remained in Tashkent. Sooner or later they would be arrested and quite possibly be killed. Yet flight from the city was also fraught with difficulty. The Cheka was already viewing them as valuable hostages and Bailey knew that Cheka agents would be certain to swoop the moment they attempted to flee.

With so many factors weighing against them, Bailey and Blacker could do little but sit tight. But they had already realised that the time would soon come when they would have to disappear from view.

Then, like Mansfield Cumming’s agents in Moscow and Petrograd, they could re-emerge as completely different people.

CHAPTER EIGHT

GOING UNDERGROUND

Sidney Reilly and George Hill found Moscow increasingly dangerous in the days that followed the landing of Allied forces in Northern Russia.

The Bolshevik leadership was incensed by what had taken place and was already calling it an invasion. In reality, it was not an invasion at all. A mere 1,500 men had been put ashore and their goal was to secure the stockpiles of unused weaponry, not to attack the Bolsheviks. Yet it had led to a swift reaction from Lenin and Trotsky. The raid on the Western consulates on the day of the landings was a clear sign that Bolshevik Russia was now a hostile power.

George Hill had been preparing to go underground for many months. Yet when the time finally came, he felt a sudden panic. ‘I had a momentary but first-class attack of nerves,’ he wrote. ‘In half an hour, I should be a spy outside the law with no redress if caught, just a summary trial and then up against a wall.’

He took a few deep breaths to calm himself down. Then, after convincing himself that he was doing the right thing, he prepared to leave his flat and begin a wholly new life, taking a last glance at the treasured possessions he was leaving behind: ‘My hat and sword, my photographs and favourite books, one or two prized decorations, various small things I had bought to take back to England . . .’

He abandoned his Mauser and his Webley-Scott revolvers, reasoning that they would serve him no purpose. ‘Nine times out of ten, a revolver is of no earthly use and will seldom get a man out of the tight corner.’ He much preferred his trusty swordstick, which he had wielded to deadly effect several months earlier.

The process of adopting his new identity was done in two stages. First, he left his apartment and went to a secure house that he had rented several months previously. ‘I went out by a different entrance from the one I had used in entering, casually glanced round to see that I was not being followed, stepped into a cab and drove to the other end of Moscow.’

Once arrived, he changed into a new set of clothes. These had been made to measure and delivered to the safe house some days earlier. ‘There were three or four dark blue hessian shirts which buttoned at the neck, some linen underclothing, a pair of cheap ready made black trousers, peasant-made socks such as were on sale on the stalls in the market, a second-hand pair of top-boots and a peak cap which had already been well used.’

Hill dressed hastily and then prepared to send his former identity up in smoke. ‘I put my English suit, underclothing, tie, socks and boots into the stove; I laid a match to the kindling wood and shut the stove door. Ten minutes later, my London clothes were burnt.’

His chief courier, Agent Z, arrived shortly afterwards with a new set of identity papers complete with stamps and visas for added authenticity. He also brought a cheap mackintosh, a hundred Russian cigarettes and the latest reports from various agents, ‘which I put into the bag and then left the flat as George Bergmann.’ The switch of identities was complete: George Hill had ceased to exist.

He made his way to one of the poorer quarters of town, south of the Moscow River, to another of the flats he had rented. Here, he met up with his secretary, Evelyn, ‘who was
au courant
with all the work I had been doing.’ Evelyn was partly English, but she had been educated in Russia and spoke both languages fluently, as well as German, French and Italian.

‘We had decided that our best chance of success was to become people of the lower middle class and to live an entirely double life.’ Evelyn had managed to get a job as a teacher in one of the new Bolshevik-run schools. ‘This gave her the necessary papers and also the very coveted ration cards from the Bolshevik organisation; coveted because without cards or enormous sums of money, it was impossible to get food.’

Hill also managed to get employment, working as a film developer in a cinematograph studio. This entitled him to ration cards as well, and it brought another unexpected advantage. He got to see the day’s newsreels before the general public, allowing him to stay one step ahead of the game.

Hill hired the services of two girls of English birth but Russian upbringing named Sally and Annie. They were to help in the running of his underground cell. Hill immediately took a shine to Sally. ‘One of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen,’ he wrote. ‘She had raven-black hair, a peach-like complexion and the most sensitive, pale, transparent hands.’ Annie, by contrast, had no share in her sister’s good looks. She was dumpy but merry – ‘a good-natured soul.’

Annie was to prove a key member of the team. Her cover was to be that of a dressmaker, in which guise she was able to provide Hill and his couriers with costumes. But she also took orders from the wider public. It was a clever ruse. ‘At a dressmaking establishment it was only natural that there would be people coming and going.’ Secret information could be brought to the apartment and forwarded to couriers with very little suspicion.

They soon needed another person to help with the running of messages. After much consideration, they invited a trusted young Russian orphan girl named Vi to join the team. Hill found her no less alluring than Sally. ‘[She] was a tall blonde with blue eyes and the most appealing ways and time proved that she was also full of pluck.’

Faced with the choice of flirting with Sally or Vi, he was initially tempted by the latter, even though she had just turned seventeen. ‘Dear Vi . . .’ he wrote, ‘she made many a long hour pass quickly for me and at one time we gravely discussed having an affair.’ But Hill was concerned by her extreme youth and decided to desist. Besides, he first needed to get his espionage operations up and running.

Hill and the four girls soon slipped into a routine, always taking extreme care not to arouse suspicions. The flat where they lived had been carefully chosen: it was a low, single-storey block that contained many other apartments. ‘It had two great advantages,’ wrote Hill, ‘a front door opened on the street and a back door led out into a large yard shared by the other houses around it.’

The only problem – common to all shared blocks – was the presence of a
dvornik
or porter. These
dvorniks
were on the payroll of the Cheka and ‘pried into the doings and sayings of the people living in every block.’

The girls had already hatched a story about taking in a lodger who was suffering from malaria. ‘[This] was framed with the purpose of giving me time to grow a beard,’ wrote Hill. His face was well known in Moscow and it was important for him to radically alter his appearance.

The beard growing proved a torture. ‘First of all, the beastly thing was of a brilliant red colour . . . then, as the hair sprouted they turned round and bit my face and covered my skin with a sore and irritable rash.’ It took a bottle of fine old brandy to restore his humour.

Hill soon found himself with a great deal of work. He had made many contacts during his months in Russia and now had reliable anti-Bolshevik agents working for him on many fronts, particularly in towns and villages where White Russian soldiers were attacking troops of the Red Army. Hill knew that the Western Allies were considering taking a more offensive role against the Bolshevik government. But before they could land more troops, accurate military information was an imperative. This is where Hill’s men proved their worth.

‘[They] had to find out the best roads, know all of the traps, take stock of the disposition of the Soviet troops, guns, food stores, dumps and morale of the army . . . [and] if necessary, they were also to occupy themselves with gentle sabotage.’

Some of these sabotage operations were directed against the German Army in the Ukraine; others targeted the Red Army. They were never as ‘gentle’ as Hill suggested. He personally took part in one of these operations, blowing up an industrial gasworks with homemade explosives.

‘There was a blinding flash followed by a terrific explosion and then a deadly silence. We staggered away. For hours afterwards, my nose bled most violently and nothing I did would stop it.’

His attacks on German targets were so successful that they prompted an attempt on his life. He was parking his car next to a hangar at the Moscow Aviation Park when a German hit-man stepped from the shadows and tossed a grenade at his feet.

It failed to explode and Hill was quick to respond. He caught his would-be assassin and dashed a brick into his face, leaving him severely wounded. ‘I never knew whether I had killed him or not,’ wrote Hill, ‘but at the time I sincerely hoped I had.’

Hill gathered a great deal of information on the fighting abilities of the White Armies that were organising resistance to the Bolsheviks. His reports made for alarming reading, for he found them to be disunited and poorly led.

‘Lack of order, supplies, ammunition, material were constantly being reported and internal strife was rumoured,’ he warned in a coded memo to London.

Forwarding military intelligence was a risky business and Hill had to act with prudence. Every document had to be coded and then typed up by one of the girls using a typewriter that had been smuggled into the apartment. ‘Two short floorboards had been taken up along the inner wall of the living room and there the typewriter and codes were housed.’

Whenever Hill was coding the military documents, he kept a little bottle of petrol to hand. ‘If the house was suddenly raided, messages and codes were to be pitched into the typewriter cover, the petrol poured over them and set alight.’

The capture of three of his couriers and the discovery of their coded messages led Hill to change the system of transmitting information to John Scale in Stockholm. ‘The men had been caught because the messages, sewn into the lining of their coats, had rustled when they were frisked.’

Henceforth, messages were typed onto strips of linen and then sewn into the collars of coats. ‘Tedious work,’ commented Hill, ‘and took infinitely longer than typing on paper.’

The pressures of work were such that Hill had little time for pursuing Sally. Besides, she had proved rather too successful in perfecting her disguise as a downtrodden Moscow girl. On one occasion, Hill returned to the flat and was surprised to see a ragged figure tipping dirty water into a drain. ‘It was Sally, the beautiful Sally, transformed into a barefooted slut who wore a begrimed white blouse.’ As he passed, she blew her snotty nose into the gutter in a most undignified manner.