Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (37 page)

Isolated and alone, he was at a loss to know what to do.

Augustus Agar chose the Finnish fishing port of Terijoki as his base for rescuing Dukes. In pre-revolutionary days it had been used as a sailing club by the aristocracy of St Petersburg. Now the village had fallen into decay and its wooden dachas were abandoned. Agar could conduct his operations untroubled by prying eyes.

The skimmers arrived in Terijoki within a few days, having been specially transported across the North Sea. Agar could set to work on the detailed planning of his mission.

His first task was to acquire a Russian chart of the minefields that lay between Terijoki and Petrograd. This proved very easy. ‘Like a magician, ST30 produced one on a Russian document.’ It revealed all of the submerged breakwaters that linked the forts and batteries in the Gulf of Finland.

Cumming’s agents had also managed to track down Dukes’s courier, Pyotr Sokoloff. He had been forced to seek temporary refuge in Finland after a particularly hazardous mission. Now, he was brought to Terijoki and solicited for information that might lead to Dukes’s rescue. Agar immediately warmed to Sokoloff, finding him ‘full of guts and courage.’ The feeling was mutual: Pyotr agreed to participate in Agar’s mission, even though it would place him back in danger.

Agar’s plan was to cross the Russian minefields in the skimmer and deposit Sokoloff on the thickly wooded shores to the north-west of Petrograd. Sokoloff would then head to the city on foot, make contact with Dukes and bring him back to the same stretch of shoreline. Both men would then be plucked off by Agar a few days later. The outbound mission was scheduled to take place on the night of 10 June, just before the white nights of midsummer.

On the evening in question, the men synchronised their watches and checked their revolvers before pushing off into the night. It was exactly 10 p.m. and the sky was dark, but they knew that the summer nights were so short that they had only a few hours to complete their mission.

The journey across the Gulf of Finland was extremely treacherous. They had to pass through the chain of heavily armed forts and breakwaters that linked Kronstadt with the mainland and they also had to cross the minefield.

Agar silenced the engines as they approached the forts and they inched forwards at an agonisingly slow speed. They did not even whisper to each other, lest they alert the Russian garrison to their presence. Soon, the naval battlements loomed large in the darkness, black silhouettes against a grey night sky.

‘Four pairs of eyes were glued on them as if hypnotised,’ wrote Agar. ‘Every nerve was tense, every muscle taut. Would these suddenly flash out the beam of a searchlight?’

If so, Agar knew what to do. He would slam the skimmer into full throttle and attempt to outrun the gunfire that would be sure to follow.

In the event, they slipped through the forts unnoticed and were soon nearing the circular minefield. Only now did Agar thrust the engine into full speed. The little craft reacted in an instant, lurching forwards and then skimming across the surface of the water leaving the mines beneath undisturbed.

They travelled so fast that they reached the Neva Delta in less than fifteen minutes. Agar then cut the engines and helped Sokoloff unlash the tiny boat that had been strapped to the skimmer. This was to be his means of reaching the rocky shore.

‘I waited there for his signal,’ wrote Agar. ‘It came soon, three short flashes on his electric torch from the direction of the rushes.’ Sokoloff was safely ashore and the first stage of the mission had gone like clockwork.

Agar fired the engines and headed back to Terijoki. His plan was to return in three days to pick up Dukes.

Paul Dukes was reunited with Sokoloff quite by chance while he was strolling through the gardens of the Winter Palace. He caught sight of a familiar figure seated on a park bench.

‘I peered – and my heart gave a bound – for to my unspeakable joy and surprise I recognised my courier for whom I had so long been waiting.’

Sokoloff tried to explain about Agar and his high-speed skimmers but it made no sense whatsoever to Dukes. He spoke of ‘some mysterious kind of motor-boat’ and of strange British operations in the Gulf of Finland. ‘But throughout the jumble there constantly recurred a name – “Eggar-Eggar-Eggar” and I gathered at once that this man “Eggar” as Peter pronounced it, was the man who by some quite miraculous means had deposited him here in Petrograd in the early hours of that morning.’

Dukes stopped him in mid-sentence and asked him to start from the beginning. Sokoloff repeated what he had said, explaining how Agar had arrived from England with the most extraordinary boats he had ever seen. They were so fast that they flew across the water, throwing out a mountainous wave on either side.

‘I listened spellbound to this amazing story,’ wrote Dukes, ‘punctuating it with innumerable questions as incident after incident, each more incredible than the last, was unfolded.’ He was especially astonished that ‘Eggar’ had managed to cross the mine-strewn Gulf of Finland.

Sokoloff was carrying a letter from Mansfield Cumming: this informed Dukes that he should remain in Russia if at all possible, ‘but that if I found it necessary to leave, I could return with the bearer.’ Sokoloff was also intending to remain in Petrograd for the foreseeable future.

Dukes was keen to stay longer in Russia but was hampered by a lack of money. Now, Sokoloff came to the rescue. He handed him a large stack of Russian roubles that had been carefully forged by Cumming’s team in London. This clinched it for Dukes. He decided to spend a further month in Petrograd before being taken out by Agar in July.

Augustus Agar and his skimmers were not the only British naval forces in Baltic waters at this time. In January 1919, Admiral Sir Walter Cowan had been sent with a fleet of ships to patrol the coastline of the newly independent Estonia and Latvia. His orders were to keep the sea-lanes open to merchant shipping.

Agar had contacted Admiral Cowan on his arrival in the Baltic, just as Mansfield Cumming had requested. The admiral was friendly and asked if he could be of any assistance. Agar did indeed have a request and it was one that Cowan was not expecting. He asked if he could have a couple of torpedoes with which to arm his skimmers.

‘I explained that although in London I had been told quite definitely that I was to avoid all operations which would involve us in a hostile act . . . yet these torpedoes might come in very useful in self-defence.’

Cowan was hesitant: the torpedoes on his flagship were among the most powerful ever produced and could easily sink a large vessel. But such was Agar’s persistence that the admiral eventually agreed to his request.

Agar may have indeed intended to use the torpedoes for self-defence. But his time in Terijoki coincided with the mutiny of the huge Russian garrison in Kronstadt. This presented a serious threat to the Bolshevik regime and Trotsky’s response was characteristically brutal. He ordered the fortress to be bombed into submission.

Agar felt a very British sense of indignation: the bombardment was not fair play, and he began toying with a bold if reckless retort. ‘Should I or should I not single-handed and without orders, set out to attack the bombarding battleships?’

He knew he could wreak havoc with his torpedoes but he also knew that to attack the Soviet fleet would be to go against orders from London. He therefore decided to request permission to attack, sending a cipher to Sweden and thence to Whitehall.

The answer arrived within hours. ‘BOATS TO BE USED FOR INTELLIGENCE PURPOSES ONLY – STOP – TAKE NO ACTION UNLESS SPECIALLY DIRECTED BY S[ENIOR].N[AVAL].O[FFICER]. BALTIC.’

The note was clear and unambiguous: the requested permission had not been forthcoming. But Agar felt that the last sentence gave him room for manoeuvre. He was sure that Admiral Cowan would wish to encourage the mutinous troops and therefore took the momentous decision to attack the Bolshevik vessels that very evening.

He set out in a single skimmer at around 11 p.m. on 17 June, when it was completely dark. He and his crew were nervous as they inched towards the Russian fleet; they kept their engine on the lowest throttle so that no one might be alerted to their presence. Agar had already selected his target: he intended to fire his torpedo at the biggest ship at anchor, the armoured cruiser,
Oleg
. The only drawback was that she was fenced in with destroyers and patrol vessels. Agar needed to penetrate this cordon before he could strike.

In the darkness of the night, the skimmer slipped silently through the cordon of ships. All was quiet on the Russian fleet and the sentries, weary after the day’s bombardment, had fallen asleep at their posts.

Agar’s eyes were fixed on the looming silhouette in front of him. It grew larger in the darkness and soon he could pick out details of the vessel. He knew that the time had come to launch his attack and felt a sudden rush of adrenaline.

With a decisive flick of his wrist, he slammed hard on the throttle. As he did so, the front end of the skimmer rose high in the water and the twin petrol engines roared into action. Within seconds, they were alongside the
Oleg
,
firing their torpedo at point-blank range and then spinning the skimmer on its nose in order to shoot away at full speed.

‘We looked back to see if our torpedo had hit and saw a large flash abreast the cruiser’s foremast funnel, followed almost immediately by a huge column of black smoke reaching up to the top of her mast.’

They would have surveyed the damage more carefully had it not been for the burst of machine-gun fire that raked their path. Only the speed of the skimmer saved them from catastrophe: within seconds, they were beyond range of the Russian guns.

Agar returned to Terijoki in jubilant spirits: he had crippled the
Oleg
. He was not prone to self doubt and was convinced he had done the right thing. But he experienced an uncharacteristic flutter of nerves as he prepared to inform Admiral Cowan of his nocturnal attack.

He need not have worried: Cowan was delighted and said that the attack had boosted his own stature. ‘This enables me to show them [the Bolsheviks] that I have a sting which I can always use if they ever show their noses out of Kronstadt.’

Agar confessed his concerns about the reaction in London, but he was reassured by Cowan. ‘He told me he approved absolutely of everything I had done and that if there was trouble with the Foreign Office about exceeding my instructions he would make my position quite clear and stand by me.’

Agar was extremely relieved. ‘I went in feeling depressed, apprehensive and a little frightened – and I left in an exactly opposite mood.’