Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (36 page)

Agar had previously been working for special operations in the secretive Coastal Motor Boats division. The boats were known as skimmers and they combined revolutionary design with advanced engineering.

They looked like elongated kayaks and were powered by two massive petrol-drawn engines that enabled the craft to attain hitherto unimaginable speeds. Their hydroplane hulls weighed next to nothing and there was no onboard equipment. All they carried was two torpedoes.

The armistice had led to the cancellation of a planned attack on the German fleet and the skimmers were put into storage. Agar bemoaned the fact that all his training had been in vain.

Now, with his summons back to Osea Island, his life was about to take an unexpected turn. ‘Well, Agar,’ said his commanding officer, ‘would you like to go on Special Service?’

Agar pricked up his ears and asked what it involved, at which point the officer asked the secretary to leave the room.

‘No one must know where you are going until you are under way,’ he said. ‘Not even your crew . . . It is of the utmost importance that not a soul, either here in England, on the journey out, or even when you arrive in those waters, shall have any suspicions of your activities.’

Agar listened with growing excitement as the officer continued. ‘I need hardly add that your mission is of great political importance and for this reason secrecy is vital.’ The officer then told him to report to the London Admiralty on the following morning, where he would be given clearer instructions.

Agar headed back to London the next day and was briskly escorted from the Admiralty to Naval Intelligence. But this was not his final destination that morning.

‘I was taken to another building, through more corridors, up many flights of stairs, through a small passage and yet into a third building.’

Finally, a young secretary emerged and told him to knock on the door in front of him and enter immediately. Agar did as instructed. ‘Seated at a large desk with his back to the window and apparently absorbed in reading a document was the most remarkable man I have ever met in my life.’ Agar was struck by his huge head, intelligent features and the fact that he did not even look up from his work.

‘Then, with startling suddenness, he put his papers aside and banging the desk with his hand said, “Sit down, my boy, I think you will do.” ’

Agar still had no idea of the purpose of his mission and nor did he know his destination. But one thing was clear: ‘Something really eventful had come into my life. This was my first introduction to C – the name by which this man was known to all who came in official contact with him.’

Over the course of the next hour, Cumming briefed Agar on the mission for which he had been selected. His destination was Soviet Russia – ‘ a closed book,’ he was told, ‘and hostile country with which we were virtually at war.’

Cumming told Agar that his finest agent had been keeping a close eye on the Soviet leadership and had managed to infiltrate a number of government agencies.

‘He said there was a certain Englishman – unnamed, and with regard to whom no details were given – who had remained in Russia to conduct Intelligence, whose work was regarded of vital importance and with whom it was essential to get in touch.’

It was necessary to bring this agent out alive, ‘as he was the only man who had first-hand reliable information on certain things which was required urgently by our government.’

There was one problem. The Bolsheviks had turned the Gulf of Finland into a giant minefield, with a sweep of mines to the north and south of Kotlin Island. These surrounded Petrograd in an extending arc, making naval access to the city almost impossible.

It was hoped that Agar’s skimmers could overcome this dangerous obstacle. Dukes’s reports had revealed that the Russian minefields lay at a depth of no more than three feet below the surface. This made the gulf impassable for any conventional vessel. But the skimmers were designed to draw just 2’9” of water; in theory, they would pass over the top of the mines. It was a high-risk undertaking, for their lives would be dependent on those three inches of water.

Cumming provided a few more details of the planned mission. Agar was to pick a small group of young men, all of whom would be transferred from the Navy to the Secret Intelligence Service. The only stipulation was that they should be unmarried and without ties.

They would travel to Finland ‘in the guise of yachtsmen’, with the ostensible object of promoting the sale of British motor-boats. But their real task was to cross the Gulf of Finland and make contact with Dukes. ‘That was the general plan,’ Cumming told Agar, adding that the details had yet to be worked out.

‘He paused for a moment and looking me straight in the face said: “Well, my boy, what do you think of it?” ’

Then, without giving Agar the chance to reply, he added: ‘I won’t ask you to take it on, for I know you will.’

Agar left the room in a state of high excitement and almost walked into the arms of the same pretty secretary who had accompanied him to Cumming’s office.

‘You look rather bewildered,’ she said. ‘Come in here and have a cigarette.’

Agar began planning his mission the following day. He picked six young officers, all as ‘keen as mustard’. He then selected two of the 40ft skimmers and began refitting their engines. The craft were painted white to make them look like pleasure craft. All supplies were to be acquired in Finland, with the exception of a special charging plant for compressed air which was needed to start the engines.

Two days after his first meeting with Cumming, Agar was back in Whitehall Court. Cumming quizzed him about the skimmers and then asked how much money he needed.

Agar had not considered the cost of the operation. He said the first sum that came into his head – a thousand pounds – before realising that this was a vast amount of money. Cumming did not bat an eyelid. ‘I could hardly believe my ears when the old man pressed a button to call a secretary and I heard him say quite simply: “Make a cheque to bearer, pay cash, for one thousand pounds.” ’

Agar had supposed that his mission would be conducted without backup and support. But Cumming now revealed that he had a complex system of agents at work in Scandinavia.

‘Each contact had a number,’ wrote Agar. ‘I myself would be given one and would only be known by that number, with which I was to communicate with headquarters.’

Agar’s number was ST34 and he was told that the Stockholm bureau would help him plan his mission.

Cumming stressed that the operation would be extremely dangerous. He said that ‘if we were caught “on the wrong side of the line”, it would be our own funeral, for in the circumstance, nothing officially could be done to save us.’

When the meeting came to an end, Agar was ushered to a training room at the top of the building. ‘I was shown how to make use of a most ingenious rough and ready cipher code . . . [and] methods of using invisible ink on various kinds of the thinnest of thin paper.’ Messages, he was told, were to be carried in boots, ‘if possible, between the soles.’

On the day before Agar was due to leave London for Finland, he was whisked to a farewell luncheon at one of Cumming’s clubs. ‘We drove there in his large Rolls-Royce, himself at the wheel, and I remember the boyish delight he took in driving at terrific speed past the sentries and through the arch of the Horse Guards Parade.’ Cumming was one of only five Londoners who had been granted this privilege.

Russia was not mentioned during lunch. Nor was there any dramatic farewell when the time came for Agar to leave. ‘He just gave me a pat on the back and said: “Well, my boy, good luck to you” – and he was gone.’

On the following morning, Agar and his team left for Hull and thence for the Baltic. When he stepped off the ship at the port of Abo in Finland, two of Cumming’s agents – ST30 and ST31 – were waiting to greet him.

Mansfield Cumming had been right to be concerned for Paul Dukes’s safety. He was living a perilous existence in Petrograd and had been lucky to escape arrest by the Cheka.

The first danger had come when he picked up rumours that his closest collaborator, Colonel Zorinsky, was actually on the Cheka’s payroll. To minimise the risk of capture, Dukes moved to a new safe house on Vasili Island owned by a friendly doctor.

He then set about changing his look. First, he shaved off the shaggy beard he had worn for the previous six months. This alone, he noted, ‘altered my appearance to a remarkable degree.’

He also cut his hair and dyed it black. There was one last detail to complete his disguise. For many months, Dukes had been missing a front tooth; it made him instantly recognisable and it was how Colonel Zorinsky had known him. Now, he reinserted the missing tooth and closed the gaping aperture. His ‘diabolic leer’ was transformed back into a regular smile.

Dukes studied himself in the mirror and was pleased by what he saw. ‘Attired in a suit of [the doctor’s] old clothes, and wearing eye-glasses, I now presented the appearance of a clean shaven, short-haired, tidy but indigent, ailing and unfed “intellectual.” ’ He looked very different from the ‘shaggy-haired, limping maniac of the previous days.’

Dukes and the doctor together concocted a story as to why he was lodging in the building: he was to pretend to be an epileptic suffering from such life-threatening fits that he needed a doctor on call at all times.

Dukes practised having fits until he had perfected the art. It stood him in good stead when the Cheka arrived unexpectedly one night and raided the apartment.

‘A loud groan from beneath the bedclothes – a violent jerk – and I made my body rigid, except for tortuous motions of the head and clenched fists.’

He even managed to foam at the mouth. The Cheka officers glanced at him anxiously and made a hasty exit.

Dukes continued to gather intelligence in spite of the difficulties. ‘From Moscow, I received regular reports regarding Soviet internal policy and the special reports submitted to Trotsky on the state of the Red Army.’

At one point, Dukes even considered moving to Moscow in order to be nearer the centre of decision-making. But when he learned that Petrograd was to be made the headquarters of the Comintern, he realised that this northern city was ‘of greater importance to me as a base of operations.’

After a second raid on the doctor’s apartment, Dukes deemed it prudent to leave. Homeless and adrift, he was reduced to spending his nights in Volkovo Cemetery where he hid in the neglected tomb of an Old Believer.

His precarious existence made it increasingly difficult to smuggle his reports out of the country. ‘I was completely isolated,’ he confessed, ‘. . . for although I found couriers to carry my despatches out, none returned to me and I was ignorant as to whether my messages were being delivered.’

Dukes’s chief courier remained Pyotr Sokoloff, who had carried many reports from Petrograd to Finland (and thence to Stockholm). But one day Sokoloff failed to return. Dukes made discreet enquiries but could discover no news of what had happened to him.

‘When a month passed and there was no sign of him, I became anxious, but when two months and more passed and there was still no sign of him, I began to fear the worst.’

Dukes made strenuous efforts to get his reports out of the country by other means; he even tried to bribe an operator at the Petrograd wireless station, but the man wanted too much money. Dukes found himself in the galling position of having to destroy some of his hard-won intelligence reports to prevent them falling into the wrong hands.