Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (38 page)

Later that evening Admiral Cowan invited him to a champagne dinner and two days later, when he returned to Cowan’s flagship once again, he was given a hero’s welcome. Every vessel in the fleet was lined with cheering sailors. ‘Such moments as these can never be forgotten,’ wrote Agar.

Agar was fortunate in having Cowan’s support, for his actions caused uproar in Whitehall. Not for the first time, one of Mansfield Cumming’s agents had wildly exceeded his brief.

Cumming himself was delighted when he heard of Agar’s attack. It was exactly the sort of operation he loved – bold, hastily improvised and completely outlandish. He was already thinking about how to reward Agar.

The Bolsheviks were rather less amused. They put a price of £5,000 on Agar’s head and let it be known that he would be executed if caught by the Cheka.

Paul Dukes had hoped that the fake banknotes brought by Pyotr Sokoloff would bring him new opportunities for espionage. But he soon discovered they were useless.

‘[They] had the correct design and wording, but the paper was thin, its dye was not good and the inscription on some of them was smudged. The sheets were not of uniform thickness or colour.’ He knew that using them would carry unacceptable risks.

Dukes could not operate without money. He needed to pay his contacts and he also needed funds ‘for lodging, food, clothing, travelling, sending couriers, paying “sackmen” [private bootleggers] and agents, purchasing information, tipping, bribing and all kinds of emergencies.’

He now turned to the only available means of getting money: the last remaining English nationals in Petrograd. They had stayed behind in a forlorn bid to save their businesses. Now, Dukes hoped they would be able to advance him some cash.

Among those still living in the city was George Gibson of the United Shipping Company. Gibson was constantly trailed by the Cheka and had already endured one spell in a Petrograd prison. The strain of living under observation had made him suspicious of everyone. Little wonder that he was extremely sceptical when a bearded Red Army officer pitched up at his office and whispered that his real name was Paul Dukes.

Gibson had not seen Dukes for many months: indeed he had no idea that he was still living in the city. He was about to slam the door on this uninvited visitor when he heard the words ‘Henry Earles’ slip from Dukes’s lips. Gibson peered more closely at his visitor. Henry Earles was a password agreed between the Foreign Office and the residue of British nationals in Petrograd: it denoted an agent in need of help. Only now was Dukes invited inside.

He told Gibson that he was in desperate need of money. Gibson responded with extreme generosity, advancing Dukes a total of 375,000 roubles – some £250,000 in today’s money. In return, Dukes gave him a receipt signed ‘Captain McNeill’; it was one of his Secret Intelligence Service cover names. He assured Gibson that the money would be refunded within two months. (In the event, it took rather longer, but Gibson was eventually repaid.)

Now that Dukes had money, he could once again set to work and he did so with customary aplomb. For months there had been a concerted drive by the Bolsheviks to recruit people into the party. Now, it was realised that many had joined in the hope that a party ticket would bring them employment. Trotsky called such people ‘radishes’ – red on the outside only.

In the summer of 1919 the party was purged on a dramatic scale. The majority quit when it was decreed that all party members were subject to mobilisation at the battlefront. ‘The cowards and good-for-nothings have run away from the party,’ said Lenin. ‘Good riddance.’

Dukes saw the purge as an opportunity. With his new identity papers he now applied to join the party of the faithful. Acceptance brought him the status of a trusted loyalist.

‘My party ticket was everywhere an Open Sesame,’ he wrote. ‘I passed with the first, wherever documents had to be shown. I travelled free on trams and railways.’

Determined to profit from his remaining time in Russia, he also applied to join the Red Army. This would enable him to gather intelligence on soldier loyalty and how the army functioned. He was recruited into the automobile section of the Eighth Army, whose commander was one of his key contacts.

‘Enlistment brought enormous advantages in its train,’ he wrote. As well as being able to observe the inside workings of the army, ‘the Red Army soldier received rations greatly superior to those issued to the civilian population.’ After months of hunger, Dukes could finally fill his stomach.

Dukes learned that the closed meetings of the Petrograd Soviet were always attended by elected representatives of the Red Army. He now put forward his candidacy and was duly elected as a delegate. He was privately jubilant, having managed to ‘achieve the peak of my ambition, which was to be delegated to attend meetings of the Soviet . . . I was deputed as the official guest for my regiment.’

Dukes also travelled to Moscow at this time and made contact with a secret anti-Bolshevik organisation called the National Centre. It was while he was in the capital that he picked up a dramatic rumour. The Comintern was in the process of establishing a terror school for revolutionary activists. Its principal task was in ‘training agitators to go abroad and stir up class warfare, foment strikes and preach seditious propaganda in the defence forces of all western countries.’

This school was to devote the greater part of its resources to spearheading attacks on the Raj. ‘In particular,’ wrote Dukes, ‘numerous highly paid agitators were being despatched to aggravate the trouble in India.’ They intended to strike first in the most volatile areas of the North-West Frontier province, where British rule was facing severe difficulties.

Dukes was unaware that Frederick Bailey was sending similar intelligence to Simla. He was completely cut off from news of the outside world and felt that it was time to leave Russia and provide a briefing to Mansfield Cumming in London, especially as he had achieved so much in the previous few weeks.

‘I will not say that the strain of many months’ disguised existence, with all its adventures, had left no mark on my nerves. I was tired and fully realised that I could not keep it up indefinitely, or even for much longer.’

But getting out of the country was to prove considerably more difficult than getting in.

Augustus Agar’s original plan had been to take his skimmer back across the Gulf of Finland and await Dukes’s arrival at a pre-arranged rendezvous. Dukes himself would then row out to the skimmer in the boat left behind by Sokoloff. But the boat had been discovered by a Red Army patrol and Agar had been obliged to send a second courier (and boat) to make contact with Dukes.

This time, everything went according to plan. The courier, a man named Gefter, made contact with Dukes in Petrograd and informed him that the rendezvous with Agar had been changed: it was now set for the night of 14 August. He and Dukes would row out into the Gulf of Finland and meet with the skimmer at a previously agreed rendezvous.

At around 10 p.m., under a sky still streaked with light, the two men clambered into the boat and began rowing out into the gulf. They glanced anxiously at the skyline for both had noticed that banks of angry clouds were rolling towards them.

‘After a while the sky blackened, the wind freshened, the wavelets became waves, their caressing grew into lashings,’ wrote Dukes.

No less alarming was the fact that the boat was much lower in the water than normal. Gefter investigated what was wrong and discovered that there was a serious problem.

He had forgotten to close the fish well – a basin in the centre of the boat that could be filled with water to keep the catch fresh. By the time he tried to plug the opening it was too late. Seawater was gushing in with tremendous force, dragging the boat deeper and deeper into the water.

A waterlogged boat would have presented major difficulties in any weather conditions, but it was to prove a disaster in the face of an advancing storm. The breeze had stiffened into a gale, sloshing even more water into the boat. Soon Dukes and Gefter were up to their waists in water and no amount of bailing could save them.

As the gunwale slipped below the waterline, both men must have realised that they were deeply in trouble.

Augustus Agar and his crew were on their way to the rendezvous in the Gulf of Finland at the very moment when Dukes and Gefter’s boat slipped beneath the waves.

Agar steered the skimmer through the chain of forts and successfully crossed the minefield. Soon, he could see the dark silhouette of the lightship that was anchored permanently in the gulf. He steered half a mile towards the Lissy Nos Point and then cut the engines. He had reached the rendezvous exactly on time.

He scanned the water in the hope of seeing Dukes’s pre-arranged flashlight signal. There was no sign of it and he glanced anxiously at the mounting waves. He feared for the two men in their little boat.

After a long wait, he flashed a signal in the direction of the shore. It was a dangerous thing to do, for it would expose the skimmer’s position to any Russian lookout. But he hoped it would help to guide Dukes towards them.

Five minutes passed – then ten – but still there was no sign of Dukes. Agar and his men continued to scan the water for another forty minutes. But when the first rays of light began to streak low across the eastern sky, Agar reluctantly restarted the skimmer’s engines and swung the boat in the direction of Terijoki. He needed to pass the chain of forts before daybreak.

Agar was depressed by his failure to rendezvous with Dukes and Gefter and feared that they had been caught by the Cheka. In fact, their plight had been even more dramatic.

The two men had been in sight of Agar’s skimmer when their rowing boat slipped beneath the waves. But with a strong current against them, and a mounting sea, they had no option but to swim for the shore.

The water was icy and the spray made rapid progress impossible. Dukes was a strong swimmer and eventually reached the shore exhausted and close to collapse. Gefter was washed up in an even more critical condition. His skin was white and he was suffering from acute hypothermia.

The two men attempted to walk to safety. Gefter was barefoot for he had kicked off his boots in the water to stop himself from drowning. Now, the sharp rocks lacerated his feet and they were soon bleeding badly. Dukes attempted to carry him, but he was too heavy and the two men sat down exhausted. As they shivered in the chill air, Gefter suddenly slumped forwards and collapsed. He had stopped breathing.

‘In sudden terror I began to rub him with great energy,’ wrote Dukes. ‘I lay down beside him, covered his mouth with mine and blew down his throat. Alternately, I filled his lungs and pressed on his belly.’