Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (30 page)

He soon learned that not all of Turkestan had fallen to the Bolsheviks. Little islands of resistance remained and these were becoming rallying points for all who opposed Lenin’s regime. The caravan cities of Bokhara and Khiva remained hostile, as did the remote Ferghana Valley.

But the independence of such places was looking shaky. Bailey knew that if these little bastions fell to the Bolsheviks, then Afghanistan and Chinese Turkestan would be likely to follow suit. If so, Lenin’s realm would extend to the gates of India.

Bailey tried to travel to one of these enclaves but it proved well-nigh impossible. All of the routes were controlled by forces loyal to the Bolsheviks. This was a blow, but there was far worse to come. On his way back to Tashkent, he lost his balance in the deep snow and plunged more than two hundred feet down the side of a mountain, smashing his leg on a rocky outcrop and severely dislocating his knee. Only a large dose of self-administered opium enabled him to bear the excruciating pain.

‘The accident upset all my plans,’ he wrote from his temporary refuge in a mountain cave. As the snow stacked up against the vertical peaks that encircled him, he could do nothing but gaze helplessly at the gunmetal sky. He was to be out of action for several months.

Only at this point did the dangers of being a lone operator become acutely apparent. Unlike Mansfield Cumming’s agents, who were rarely more than two days’ journey from the Russian border with Finland, Bailey was hundreds of miles from safety. Worse still, he was entirely without backup or support. His life would have been in grave danger in the aftermath of the accident had it not been for a group of local tribesmen who protected him and brought him food.

Back in England, Bailey’s elderly mother, Florence, was growing increasingly alarmed by the lack of news from her intrepid son. She had no idea why he had been sent to Tashkent and nor did she know how long he was to be away. The only certainty was that he was engaged in an operation that entailed great danger.

She had last heard from him in September, when she received an unsigned letter containing the cryptic lines: ‘Nothing I can write, but things are pretty interesting for us.’ This did little to reassure Florence. ‘When we know what that word implies these days,’ she wrote to John Shuckburgh, Secretary to the Political Department of the India Office, ‘you will scarcely wonder at my anxiety. He has been in many a tight hole and extricated himself, but I fear circumstances must be against him now.’

Shuckburgh could say little to put Mrs Bailey’s mind at rest. A wire transmission from Kashgar revealed that Bailey had disappeared without trace. The only good news was that he seemed to have escaped capture.

‘Had anything untoward happened . . .’ the wire read, ‘some rumour of it would almost certainly have reached us by now and [the] probability is that he is in hiding.’

Mrs Bailey was right to be concerned for her son. Although Bailey’s shattered knee eventually healed, his return to Tashkent was thwarted by a brutal anti-Bolshevik uprising. In a report that he managed to send to Percy Etherton, he described how the rebellion was crushed amid scenes of grotesque violence. The renegades were arrested by Bolshevik soldiers, stripped naked and shot in cold blood.

‘Some of the Red Guards were drunk and missed or wounded their victims, who had to wait until someone finished them off, usually with a bayonet.’ One man bragged of having slaughtered more than 750 rebels.

Bailey eventually smuggled himself back into Tashkent, only to find himself with another problem. For months he had been living under the identity of an Austrian named Andre Kekeshi. He had even been able to acquire identity papers bearing Kekeshi’s name; papers that had seen him through several sticky situations.

‘I had always imagined that Kekeshi must have been one of the many thousands of prisoners of war who had died,’ wrote Bailey. But now, on his return to Tashkent, he discovered that Kekeshi ‘was very much alive and was incommoded by the absence of his passport which he had lent to a friend for a short time.’

Bailey was fortunate in acquiring a new set of papers that had formerly belonged to a Romanian soldier named Georgi Chuka. He disposed of his Austrian uniform and kitted himself out with civilian clothes. ‘I also obtained a pair of plain (non-magnifying) pince-nez as a further disguise,’ he wrote. These, together with his bushy beard, made him look convincingly Romanian.

Even so, he often found himself in a tight corner. He was lodging with a Tashkent landlord who kept asking him questions about his assumed homeland. ‘If we had a melon on the table, I was asked if such things grew in Romania. If we had fish for dinner, I was asked about fish in Romania.’ Bailey derived some amusement from inventing answers, ‘knowing full well that what I said would be soon forgotten.’

Frederick Bailey’s return to Tashkent coincided with two connected events that were to prove of immense political significance. These events were not only destined to affect Central Asia; they would also send shockwaves right around the globe.

In March, the railway line to Moscow was finally reopened, enabling a direct connection between Tashkent and the Russian capital for the first time since the revolution. Among the first people to arrive from Moscow was a team of hardline Bolshevik commissars, determined to bring order to unruly Turkestan.

They also brought a three-point plan for revolutionary action. This plan called for aggressive propaganda against British India, the establishment of agents inside the Raj and the organisation of crack military units. Turkestan was called to create ‘special battalions from among the Russian Muslims in order to render active assistance to the East in its struggle against the British imperialists.’

Lenin sent a personal letter of support to the Tashkent commissars. He was intent on starting a whole new round of the Great Game, the struggle for control of Central Asia, only this time the goal was to spark violent revolution right across the East.

‘Cossacks’ spears appearing on the Himalayan summits were Britain’s nightmare in the past,’ declared an official Bolshevik document published at the time. ‘Now, these will be the spears of Russian proletarian Muslims.’

Bailey learned of the arrival of the Bolshevik commissars within hours of them entering Tashkent. He also heard news that they were accompanied by a small band of Indian revolutionaries.

The threat to the Raj from home-grown revolutionaries was nothing new. For almost a decade, Mansfield Cumming had been working closely with Indian Political Intelligence on this very danger. His agents in New York, Berlin and elsewhere had been keeping close tabs on these men, monitoring their movements and intercepting their mail.

Among those they had been tracking was Abdul Hafiz Mohamed Barkatullah, who had established an Indian government-in-exile in the spring of 1916. Now, Barkatullah pitched up in Tashkent in order to forge closer links with the Bolsheviks.

‘The ideas advanced by the Bolsheviks have already taken root in the Indian masses,’ he told a journalist from
Izvestia
, ‘and a small spark of active propaganda would be sufficient to set aflame a huge revolutionary fire in middle Asia.’

Bailey learned that the Indian revolutionaries had been given access to Tashkent’s printing presses and were preparing inflammatory propaganda leaflets for distribution inside India. He managed to obtain one of these leaflets and was shocked by the lies that were being peddled. It said that the British had forcibly closed all mosques and Hindu temples, that education had been forbidden to Indians and that slave labour had been reintroduced.

‘The Bolshevik plans for India were to start disturbances by any means possible,’ wrote Bailey. ‘The professed plan in the East was to exploit countries considered ripe for revolution’ – India and Afghanistan – ‘and compel them to adopt Communism.’

Bailey was witness to a most alarming menace; one that was wholly new. The rulers of Bolshevik Russia were intent on forging an alliance with the Islamic tribes of Afghanistan, Chinese Turkestan and the frontier regions of India. Their idea was to bring together Islamic extremists and revolutionary Bolsheviks, thereby creating a highly inflammatory movement that would be capable of engulfing British India.

The scale of their project was not merely local or regional but of global significance. ‘The complete Bolshevism of Asia,’ warned Bailey, ‘was the key to World Revolution.’

Bailey’s most urgent goal was to inform India of the plot that was taking place. But sending information from Tashkent – never easy – had become almost impossible.

‘Road to Kashgar is closed by robbers,’ he wrote in one report that would eventually reach Percy Etherton in Kashgar. ‘I may possibly be able to send occasional messages by wireless and will only try in case of urgency. Please warn stations. Messages will be in my cipher and unsigned.’

Etherton forwarded Bailey’s note to operational headquarters in Simla, adding that all of the recent messages received from Tashkent had been extremely difficult to read. ‘Owing to the faintness of the invisible ink used, portions of the above message are quite illegible, repeated attempts having failed to decipher them.’

Bailey became increasingly inventive in transmitting his messages. One important report was written in invisible ink inside a book of old lithographs of Samarkand. Etherton received a message from a third party alerting him to the fact that the book ‘should be rubbed with ammonia. It contains messages in invisible ink.’

Bailey’s reports were picked up not only by intelligence officers in Simla but also by Mansfield Cumming’s men as well. The Stockholm bureau had a particularly deep reach and its officers were, on occasion, able to transmit news of Bailey’s movements to their colleagues in India.

‘Colonel F M Bailey, Tashkent, sends his best salaams to [Sir Arthur] Hirtzel and [Sir John] Shuckburgh, India Office,’ read one message picked up by Major Scale. ‘He is at present disguised.’

Another memorandum informed the India Office that Bailey was using the key: ‘Where three empires meet’. A third revealed that Bailey was ‘trying to send short code messages interpolated in Bolshevik wireless from Tashkent’. Such messages had to be sent sparingly: Bailey placed himself in considerable danger each time he tried to contact his colleagues.

Frederick Bailey’s work was not only dangerous but also extremely complex. He was attempting to uncover intelligence on a rapidly changing situation that involved people whose movements and communications were by necessity kept secret.

His task was further complicated by an unexpected development that took place in the spring of 1919. The ruler of Afghanistan, Amir Amanullah, declared a holy war against British India. His proclamation of
jihad
was primarily intended to deflect from domestic difficulties, but this was cold comfort to the poorly armed soldiers guarding the remote North West Frontier of India.

‘Make their hearts tremble with your Islamic war cries,’ shouted the amir in an address to his troops, ‘and destroy them with your flashing swords.’

The rhetoric was fiery, but still it was pretty standard fare. More alarming was the uncompromising decree issued by the Indian revolutionaries in Tashkent. ‘Murder the English wherever you find them, cut the telegraphic lines, destroy the railways lines and the railway bridges and help in all respects the liberating armies.’

The Afghans fought well, seizing several towns inside India and highlighting the extreme weakness of the British forces guarding the mountainous frontier. The first British counter-attack stalled, then failed in the stifling 40 degree heat.