Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (22 page)

After a few weeks living as George Bergmann, Hill found that he had learned to live and breathe his new identity. When he sauntered down the street with his ginger beard and fingers stained yellow-brown from the chemicals in the film laboratory, he cut a very different figure from the old George Hill, with his military uniform, spats and Royal Flying Corps insignia. He was confident that no one would see through the disguise.

Yet he still made mistakes that could all too easily have cost him his life. On one occasion, Evelyn had glanced out of the window and noticed that he was striding down the street like a British officer on parade. ‘Your walk gives you away completely,’ she told him when he arrived back at the apartment. ‘No Russian of your class would ever walk like that.’

On another occasion, he entered a grocery store and, momentarily forgetting his adopted persona, ordered his goods in a tone of voice that no shabbily dressed Russian would ever have used. ‘I was behaving like the customer who was in the habit of giving such an order,’ he wrote. ‘The attendant gave me a searching look which brought me back to realities and, with a sick feeling, I, who should not have had a penny in the world, paid for my purchase and walked out of the shop.’

It was a dramatic reminder of the dangers of life as a spy and, Hill vowed, the last time he would make such a mistake. ‘I was constantly haunted by the fear of being caught, and always before my mind I had a vivid picture of the spies I had seen executed in Macedonia.’

Hill had not been in contact with Sidney Reilly for some days. Now, with Vi’s help, he managed to arrange a rendezvous in one of the Moscow parks.

‘I shall never forget my first glimpse of him,’ wrote Hill. ‘He, too, had grown a beard and he did look an ugly devil. I told him so and he returned the compliment.’

Reilly had obtained a great deal of sensitive military information from Colonel Friede and even more secretive documents from one of his high-level contacts serving in the Criminal Department of the Cheka. He had also obtained intelligence about the state of the Russian fleet at Krondstadt. All of this now needed to be forwarded to Whitehall Court, along with a sheaf of other documents.

What’s more, Reilly had a plan – one so bold that even his fellow spy was taken aback.

Mansfield Cumming had confessed to having a number of reservations about Sidney Reilly when he first offered him employment as a spy. Reilly’s reputation for being unscrupulous, together with his sharp business practices, had rung warning bells from the outset.

Yet ever since he had arrived in Russia, Reilly had proved himself of great value. He had managed to lay his hands on an impressive amount of classified information that shed light on the precarious state of the new regime. He had vindicated Cumming’s belief in human intelligence: only by having men on the ground could he form an accurate assessment of what was taking place inside Russia.

Hitherto, Reilly had confined his activities to acquiring secret documents and forwarding them to London. But in the third week of August, he allowed his vanity to get the better of him. At his meeting with George Hill, he confided some truly sensational news. There was a plot to assassinate the entire Bolshevik leadership and he, Reilly, stood at its epicentre.

The extraordinary events that followed were to involve spies, disgruntled army officers and at least one traitor, all of whom conducted themselves with maximum duplicity. ‘Bold and masterfully conceived,’ was how Hill described Reilly’s plot. He was kept informed of developments ‘so that should Lt Riley [sic] for any cause be prevented from bringing the work to a finish, I should at once be able to pick up the threads and carry on.’

The plot was initially conceived in Lockhart’s private apartment on the Khlebny Pereulok, an address to which he had moved shortly after the Allied landings. At lunchtime on 15 August 1918, he was surprised by a knock on his front door. When he opened it, he found himself face to face with two Latvian soldiers who said they needed to speak with him in private.

‘One was a short, sallow-faced youth called Smidchen,’ wrote Lockhart. ‘The other, Berzin, a tall powerfully-built man with clear-cut features and hard steely eyes, called himself a colonel.’

Colonel Berzin did most of the talking. He told Lockhart that he was a senior commander of the Lettish (Latvian) regiments that had been protecting the Bolshevik Government ever since the revolution. These regiments had proved indispensable to Lenin, saving his regime from several attempted
coups d’état
. Without them, the Bolsheviks would almost certainly have been swept from power.

Lockhart was initially suspicious of his unexpected visitors. But when they produced a letter from Captain Cromie, Britain’s naval attaché in Petrograd, he was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.

‘Always on my guard against agents provocateurs, I scrutinised the letter carefully,’ he wrote. ‘It was unmistakably from Cromie. The handwriting was his . . . The letter closed with a recommendation of Smidchen as a man who might be able to render us some service.’

Lockhart invited the men into his apartment and asked them a string of questions. They told him that the Latvian regiments had lost all enthusiasm for protecting the Revolutionary Government. They had only served Lenin because he paid them. But they were deeply concerned by the possibility of being sent into battle against the Allied forces in Northern Russia. To avoid this prospect, they wanted to return to their native Latvia.

This was impossible while it was under German occupation. But if the Allies were to win the war, as seemed increasingly likely, it would become a real possibility. In short, they asked Lockhart if he could send a message to the leader of the Allied forces in Northern Russia, General Poole, requesting him to facilitate their surrender.

Lockhart listened to the Latvians with interest but told them that he was unable to give them an answer straight away: he suggested that they return on the following day. As soon as they had gone, he made his way across town in order to discuss the matter with two of his French colleagues, General Lavergne and Consul Grenard.

The three of them agreed that it would do no harm to forward Colonel Berzin’s request to General Poole. After all, it was very much in the Allied interest for the Latvian troops to surrender. But it was extremely important that the matter should remain secret. Lockhart could not afford to be discovered assisting them.

The two Latvians returned to Lockhart’s apartment the next day as agreed. They were introduced to Consul Grenard, who had expressed a wish to meet them, and spoke of their willingness in helping the Allies to liberate Latvia from German rule.

Consul Grenard listened with care before making a wholly unexpected suggestion. He said that Colonel Berzin’s forces could be assured of a vigorous Allied campaign to defeat the German Army in Latvia if they would first help to overthrow the Bolshevik government.

This took the two Latvians by surprise. Consul Grenard was suggesting something far more dramatic and dangerous than their own proposition.

There was one other visitor in Lockhart’s apartment on that day. A heavily disguised Sidney Reilly was also in attendance and he was extremely interested in what Consul Grenard had to say. He had long dreamed of toppling the Bolshevik Government. Now, suddenly, he saw his chance.

‘The Letts were not Bolsheviks,’ he would later write, ‘they were Bolshevik servants because they had no other resort. They were foreign hirelings. Foreign hirelings serve for money. They are at the disposal of the highest bidder. If I could buy the Letts, my task would be easy.’

Reilly paid a visit to George Hill shortly after the meeting at Lockhart’s apartment and told him of the discussions that had taken place. Both men agreed that Lenin’s government would be doomed if the Letts abandoned the Bolsheviks.

‘The Letts were the corner stone and foundation of the Soviet government,’ wrote Hill. ‘They guarded the Kremlin, gold stock and the munitions.’ They also occupied many other positions of consequence. ‘At the head of the Extraordinary Commissions [Cheka], the prisons, the banks and the railroads were Letts.’

Essentially, though, Reilly was allowing his enthusiasm to cloud his judgement. It was one thing for the Latvians to talk of withdrawing their support for the Bolshevik regime – quite another for them to take up arms and overthrow it. Still, the conversation with Smidchen and Berzin had rekindled Reilly’s dream of being a second Napoleon.

‘A Corsican lieutenant of artillery trod out the embers of the French Revolution,’ he wrote. ‘Surely a British espionage agent with so many factors on his side could make himself master of Moscow?’ After discussing matters with Hill, he returned to Lockhart’s apartment in order to talk about the practicalities of organising a coup d’état.

Lockhart would later seek to distance himself from the entire plot. He would also claim that he and Consul Grenard both tried to discourage Reilly. ‘[He] was warned specifically to have nothing to do with so dangerous and doubtful a move.’

But Lockhart’s back-pedalling is at variance with a top-secret memorandum that he submitted to the British Government at the time. This revealed that he was implicated in the early stages of the coup, along with Reilly, and that he was also personally involved in raising finances.

On 17 August, Reilly met with Colonel Berzin at the Tramble Café on Tverskoy Boulevard. It was always busy, making it a perfect place to discuss the proposed coup without risk of being overheard. Once Reilly was satisfied that Berzin could be trusted, he set out his plans for destroying the Bolshevik regime.

This time Colonel Berzin raised no questions as Reilly unveiled his plot. Indeed, he assured him that Latvian support would be forthcoming. ‘The Letts were full of disgusted loathing for their masters,’ he told Reilly, ‘whom they served only as a
pis aller
(last resort).’

Reilly could scarcely have wished for more. To show that he meant business, he handed Colonel Berzin the huge sum of 700,000 roubles and promised that there would be plenty more to come. Much of the money had been collected by Lockhart, who had received 200,000 roubles from the Americans and the rest from the French.

By the third week of August, Reilly was having regular meetings with Colonel Berzin, George Hill and Ernest Boyce, who remained Mansfield Cumming’s most senior operative in Moscow. Boyce was of a far more cautious nature than Reilly and remained unconvinced by the proposed coup. His agents had been sent to Moscow to gather secret intelligence, not to overthrow the regime. He told Reilly that he considered ‘the whole thing was extremely risky’.

Reilly refused to backtrack. After much persistence, he wrung a lukewarm endorsement from Boyce. He told Reilly ‘it was worth trying’, but stressed that it was a matter of such extreme sensitivity that it must remain a private undertaking. It was to be Reilly’s coup and the British Secret Service was not to be involved in any way.

‘The failure of the plan,’ he said, ‘would drop entirely on Reilly’s neck.’ With these words, he handed over to Reilly full operational responsibility for everything that was to follow.

Sidney Reilly now set to work on the detailed planning of the coup. It was to depend almost entirely on the Latvian soldiers based in Moscow. They were to arrest Lenin and Trotsky during a meeting of the Congress of Soviets, when all of the Bolshevik leadership would be gathered under one roof.

Once their downfall had been broadcast to the country, Reilly wanted ‘to parade them publicly through the streets, so that everybody should be aware that the tyrants of Russia were prisoners.’