Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (40 page)

In mid-October, Bailey boarded a train at Tashkent and began the long journey to Bokhara.

He wore the costume of a Military Control Officer and carried the identity papers of Joseph Kastamuni. His clothes were made of coarse woollen cloth cut in the Bolshevik fashion and on his cap was a red star decorated with a hammer and sickle, the badge of the Red Army.

He alighted at the Bolshevik-controlled town of Kagan, which lay just a couple of miles to the south-east of Bokhara. Within minutes of arriving, he received a telegram from the Chief of the General Staff in Tashkent: ‘Please communicate all information you have regarding the Anglo-Indian Service Colonel Bailey.’ Bailey allowed himself an inner smile: he was being asked to spy on himself.

The Bolshevik leaders in Kagan were impressed by the bravado of this newly arrived Military Control Officer. ‘[They] looked on me as a very brave man who, for the Soviet cause, was about to meet an unpleasant death in Bokhara.’

In reality, Bokhara was to provide him with his first safe haven since leaving British India. He smuggled himself into the walled city and managed to gain an audience with the Amir of Bokhara, a grizzled autocrat whose age and infirmity prevented him from taking advantage of the 400 concubines in his harem.

Bailey was still undecided as to whether to take the western or eastern route out of Turkestan. Now, the amir’s offer of assistance in crossing the Karakum Desert convinced him to continue heading west. It would enable him to reach Meshed, where a British officer named Wilfrid Malleson was busily establishing a highly subversive operation against the Bolsheviks. Bailey had already been sending reports to Malleson. If all went according to plan, he would soon meet him face to face.

The amir offered Bailey five guides to help him cross the desert. In return, Bailey was asked to assist in the escape of seven White Russian officers who were fleeing from the Bolsheviks and two Indian Army officers on route to Persia. Also in the party was a Serbian renegade named Manditch and his new bride. Far from travelling light as Bailey had hoped, his entourage now numbered twelve, in addition to the five guides.

The party set off under the cover of darkness on 18 December 1919, a far later date than anticipated. They were disguised as Turkman tribesmen, dressed in large sheepskin hats and woollen
khalats
. They hoped that the peasant costumes would prevent them from being molested by the bands of wild Turkman brigands who roamed the desert in search of easy prey. Bailey wore his corduroy riding breeches underneath the tribal garb, an extra layer against the bitter Bokharan winter.

They travelled by pony, reaching the mighty Oxus River on Christmas Day. From this point on, they were entering the barren Karakum where there were no settlements and precious few wells.

The desert crossing was to prove more arduous than any of them had imagined and it left them close to collapse. The freezing wind whipped dust and gravel into their eyes, causing constant pain. It also delivered a ferocious blizzard that arrived from nowhere. Five inches of snow fell in a matter of minutes and obliterated the few distinguishing landmarks. ‘The steppe . . . was rough,’ wrote Bailey, ‘rather like a stormy sea, the waves of which had been frozen.’

The snow made their progress even more wearisome. ‘We had had practically nothing to eat for several days, except the ponies’ food, which we either parched or boiled according to the individual’s taste.’

They were soon suffering from severe hypothermia and might easily have died a lonely death in the desert had it not been for a chance encounter with some nomads. They managed to acquire three sheep that were promptly slaughtered and then roasted on the cleaning rods of their rifles.

In spite of the gruelling hardship, Bailey’s fascination with native flora and fauna was undiminished. He was hoping to shoot a rare specimen of gazelle,
Gazella subgutturosa
, that he knew to inhabit this area of desert. Unable to get close enough to kill one, he eventually stumbled across the carcass of an animal that had recently died. ‘I took the horns,’ he later wrote, ‘and they are now in the Bombay History Society’s Museum.’

Finally, almost three weeks after setting out from Bokhara, Bailey’s party glimpsed the snow-topped mountains of Persia. They were glinting in the winter sunshine and brought a renewed sense of optimism to the weary travellers. ‘The feelings for all of us at the sight of a free land, even in the distance, is hard to describe,’ wrote Bailey.

There was a brief skirmish with Red Army border guards at the frontier with Persia, leading to an exchange of bullets. This might have proved deadly, were it not for the fact that the guards were poor shots. The only loss was Mrs Manditch’s saddle bag containing dozens of Bokharan silk dresses. Unable to recover them (to Mrs Manditch’s great distress), the party rode on to the town of Sarakhs inside Persia. Here, Bailey was able to telegraph Wilfrid Malleson with the news that he was alive and safe. Soon after, he rode triumphantly into Malleson’s headquarters in Meshed.

The British sentries initially refused him entry to the compound: they took one look at his Soviet-made clothes and assumed he was a Russian Bolshevik. But Bailey soon convinced them of his real identity and he was promptly whisked into the staff mess for a hearty luncheon.

‘My difficulties and dangers were over,’ he wrote. ‘It was pleasant to see the Union Jack waving over the barracks after such a long time under other colours.’

The story of Bailey’s escapades in Turkestan were so colourful that it would eventually be published in
The Times
, albeit in an edited and carefully censored form. Under the headline ‘A Central Asian Romance’ the article gleefully recounted how Bailey had outwitted Bolshevik spies for many months.

The Soviet press took an altogether different line. They announced Bailey’s death in a shoot-out on the Persian frontier and said that he had been given a military funeral.

Bailey’s lengthy mission to Tashkent had once again highlighted both the strengths and weaknesses of solo operations in hostile lands. He had found it relatively easy to gather intelligence on the growing alliance between Soviet and Indian revolutionaries. It had proved altogether more difficult to smuggle this information out of the country.

Now that he was in Persia, he was able to debrief Wilfrid Malleson more fully on the disturbing new threat. He also warned that the ultimate goal of Bolshevism remained global revolution.

‘The Bolsheviks cannot sit still,’ he wrote in the conclusion to his intelligence report. ‘Their object has always been world revolution . . . When the East has adopted Soviet government, the whole world will be compelled to adopt the same principles.’

Agents such as Frederick Bailey, Paul Dukes and Arthur Ransome had proved themselves masters at laying their hands on secret information. Wilfrid Malleson was to prove no less masterful at using this information for his own nefarious purposes.

Malleson had long harboured a pathological hatred of Bolshevism and had privately vowed to devote all his energies to unpicking their dream of world revolution. He was to prove a formidable enemy.

He had originally been sent to Persia as commander of the British and Indian troops stationed along the Afghan-Persian border – a small defensive unit known as the East Persian Cordon.

Changing circumstances had led to a dramatic change of brief. The intelligence obtained from Moscow and Tashkent now presented Malleson with a very different challenge. He was to spy on the Bolsheviks, eavesdrop on their communications and do whatever he could to prevent the spread of revolution into British India. ‘The times were critical,’ he would later write. ‘The Government of India hardly slept at nights.’

The growing strength of the Bolsheviks had led Malleson to conclude that something dramatic needed to be done. But before he launched himself into his new mission, he sent a telegram to British India asking for clarification as to the extent of his powers.

The reply informed him ‘that I was on the spot and had a free hand.’ He was allowed to act in any way he chose.

In a speech that he later made to the Royal Central Asian Society, he wryly noted that being given a free hand was ‘in the nature of a gift from the Greeks.’ If he were successful in his work, then ‘some gentlemen in easy chairs on a hilltop 2,000 miles away would appropriate the credit.’ If he failed, on the other hand, he would be ‘spurned and repudiated and thrown remorselessly to the wolves.’

Malleson was not in the habit of failing. Nor did he intend to fail on this occasion. Sabotaging the fledgling alliance between the Soviets and the Indian revolutionaries was to prove his most difficult mission to date, but he was well equipped for the task ahead. He had the use of a small army, the 28th Light Cavalry and the 19th Punjabis, whom he described as ‘magnificent material’. He also had an effective channel of communications with British India and a team of highly dependable agents.

Surviving photographs of Malleson suggest an archetypal military commander. He sports a handsome upturned moustache and his eyes sparkle brightly at the camera. But there is an icy chill to the gaze, perhaps hinting at the adamantine core within. Malleson’s men were terrified by his ‘hard-boiled temperament’ and they were also fearful of his fierce lack of sentiment.

‘His attitude was determined by the task he had undertaken . . .’ wrote one officer, ‘with very little regard for the teeming life going on around him.’

He collected sporting guns and revolvers and spent his leisure hours blasting game birds from the skies above Ashkabad. Those serving under him described him as ‘unorthodox’, ‘critical of authority’ and ‘cynical’, especially in his dealings with others. He was also a lonely man ‘who could unbend only when discussing something of particular interest to himself.’

Malleson was employed by neither Indian Political Intelligence nor Mansfield Cumming. His ostensible boss was the government of India, but he operated in the fashion of an Elizabethan privateer, wreaking chaos in a spirit of patriotic duty. Except instead of gathering booty, he distributed lies and falsehoods among his enemies.

A measure of his ruthlessness can be detected in his decision, taken in August 1918, to lead a private military offensive against the Bolsheviks. He led his cavalry across the frontier into Turkestan, where a much larger force of Red Army troops were fomenting unrest. After two nights of gruelling marching, his men spotted the Bolsheviks at the desert town of Dushak.

Malleson had long displayed a cavalier approach to warfare. Now, he ordered his troops to attack at dawn and told them to show no mercy. The men advanced against heavy machine-gun fire from the entrenched Bolsheviks and displayed considerable bravery in the face of sustained shooting.

The Punjabi forces were first to reach the enemy trenches and they attacked with their bayonets, causing the Bolshevik soldiers to flee in panic to the hills behind the town. Here, they were decimated by Malleson’s hidden cavalry forces.

The fight was costly in human life. Malleson lost sixty of his men, while more than a thousand Bolsheviks were killed.

The government of India was alarmed that Malleson had interpreted their offer of a carte blanche with quite such freedom. They told him not to launch any more attacks and they also forbade him from advancing any further. They did not want to provoke a full-scale war against Soviet Turkestan.

Malleson halted his offensive but he kept his forces inside Turkestan for much of the winter before finally returning to Meshed. It was from his Meshed headquarters that he now set about planning his next round of dirty tricks.