Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (41 page)

Wilfrid Malleson had known about the arrival of the Indian revolutionaries in Tashkent for several months, for he’d received copies of Frederick Bailey’s intelligence reports. Now he was brought news of a far more alarming nature.

One of his agents handed him a widely circulated pamphlet written by the revolutionary agitator, Abdul Hafiz Barkatulla. As Malleson studied it, he was shocked to discover that it was nothing short of a rallying cry for a Soviet-backed
jihad
. It informed Islamic warriors that the Bolsheviks wanted to enter into a crusading alliance against ‘the usurpers and despots, the British.’

‘Oh Muhammedans!’ it began. ‘Listen to this divine cry: respond to this call of liberty, equality and brothership which brother Lenin and the Soviet Government of Russia are offering you.’

There were two principal reasons why the pamphlet was so toxic. One was its highly provocative language, designed to inflame Islamic sensibilities against the British. The second was the fact that it stressed the common goal of Bolshevism and Islam – namely, the destruction of British India. This, it said, would bring about the defeat of ‘the savage wolves who stand ready to conquer countries and enslave people.’

There was a third pernicious element to the pamphlet, one that did not go unnoticed by Malleson. The writer stressed the similarities between the followers of the Prophet Mohammed and the followers of Lenin. There was no mention of Bolshevism’s inherent atheism. Instead, the pamphlet compared Lenin’s economic policies to the Islamic institution of Bait-ul-Mal, a charitable body for the relief of the poor.

Malleson was appalled by what he was reading. It was a gross distortion of the truth and he immediately forwarded the document to British India, where it was also greeted with grave concern.

‘The pamphlet is of a very dangerous nature,’ wrote a senior government secretary. Malleson was ordered to intercept and destroy as many copies as possible.

Malleson undertook this task to the best of his ability, instructing his agents to seize copies wherever they were being printed. But he also decided to take the offensive. If the Soviets were prepared to finance inflammatory propaganda, then so was he. He hired the services of the distinguished Islamic scholar Jalaluddin al Hussaini, and paid him to write a vitriolic rebuttal to the pamphlet.

Jalaluddin excelled himself, pouring scorn on the notion of holy Islam entering into an alliance with ‘the pig-eating infidels of Russia.’ He also rubbished the claim that Bolshevism and the Bait-ul-Mal shared the same economic goal. He reminded Muslims that the latter was one of Islam’s most noble institutions – a treasury of money that had been used to care for the needy for many centuries.

Bolshevism, by contrast, was simply ‘an institution for plunder’ and one that attracted ‘the very dregs of Russians and irreligious, unpatriotic, sinful people, Jews, Kafirs, robbers, pick-pockets and blood-thirsty assassins.’

Warming to his theme, he thundered that Bolshevism was an atheistic creed that was ‘against the regulations and decrees of Islam’. Its leaders were not to be trusted, for they were ‘accursed, vicious, irreligious tyrants.’

Jalaluddin invoked the holy name of the Prophet in order to forbid the Muslims of Central Asia to ‘unite and combine with these tyrannical heathens.’

Jalaluddin’s authorship of the pamphlet gave it considerable weight and ensured that it received widespread attention. It also provided Malleson with much food for thought. He now realised that it was no longer enough to remain on the defensive when dealing with the Bolsheviks.

If he was to protect the world from the Soviet threat, then he would have to play an even more devious game.

Wilfrid Malleson’s most pressing concern at this time was the number of enemy agents managing to infiltrate his headquarters.

‘Bolshevik spies and counter-espionage agents are becoming more and more numerous in Persia,’ he wrote. ‘[They] come in freely and even when known to be spies, I have little or no power to deal with them.’

Two of his own spies had recently been shot by Bolsheviks. Now, he asked India for the authority to execute the spies that he had managed to capture.

He received no reply and nor did he press the issue. His preferred mode of action was to act first and inform India afterwards: this gave him the greatest possible freedom.

Malleson now began to expand dramatically his own network of agents and informers. These were always men of dubious probity whom he, in common with Mansfield Cumming, referred to as ‘his ruffians’. They were often well-educated local men who showed great ability in infiltrating Bolshevik organisations and acquiring intelligence directly from the source.

A number of them also managed to infiltrate key telegraphic exchanges, enabling Malleson to intercept hundreds of top-secret messages. They included telegrams sent from Lenin and Trotsky to the Tashkent government, the Indian revolutionaries and the Amir of Afghanistan.

Malleson was staggered by the content of these intercepts: they detailed everything from troop movements and the export of weaponry to decrees from the Comintern and the Soviet regime. As such, they were intelligence gold dust.

The despatches that Malleson sent to British India give some inkling of the extent and reach of his network. In one month alone, he received comprehensive reports from his agents in towns right across the region, including Kuskh, Kabul, Yulatan, Sarakhs, Kerki, Bokhara, Tejend and Daragaz, as well as every frontier post on the borders of Turkestan.

‘The mission is well adapted for providing advanced information of events in Central Asia,’ he wrote to India, ‘but the work is rapidly increasing. Fifty pages of foolscap daily is required for the wireless intercepts, and to go through them takes hours.’

Malleson was justifiably proud of his vast team. ‘I had some most excellent officers speaking numerous languages,’ he said. ‘I had agents up to distances of a thousand miles or more, even in the Government Offices of the Bolsheviks. I had relays of men constantly coming and going in areas which I deemed important.’

He kept a particularly close eye on the movement of suspect people. ‘There was hardly a train on the Central Asian Railway which had not one of our agents on board, and there was no important railway centre which had not two or three men on the spot.’

Just as Malleson had been given carte blanche by British India, so he gave his men the freedom to arrest and interrogate suspects in the manner that they thought best. None of his agents would ever be punished for using heavy-handed tactics when questioning their subjects.

‘Travellers of every sort and description were cross-examined at scores of different places. Intelligence cannot well be improvised. It needs to be slowly built up. But we started with nothing beyond a few agents and ended with a great deal.’

The quantity of information reaching Malleson continued to grow with every week that passed. ‘We sent [to British India] . . . a stream of information from every part of the huge area for which we were responsible. It was a veritable
tour de force
for the officers I have in mind to have organised and to have brought to such a state of efficiency in so short a time so excellent an intelligence system.’

This system enabled Malleson to build a highly accurate picture of what was taking place inside Turkestan. More than that, it revealed the tightening links between Soviet Russia and Afghanistan. A Soviet-Afghan alliance presented a serious threat to British India, for it would enable the Bolsheviks to establish military bases on the very frontiers of the Raj.

Malleson’s first inkling of the close relationship between Moscow and Kabul had come during the amir’s invasion of British India in the spring of 1919. His agents intercepted a number of secret telegrams that revealed the Soviet intention of supporting the invasion.

One of these telegrams, sent to the governor of Kabul, informed the Afghans that ‘500 camel loads of munitions, including bombs and aircraft parts, would soon arrive at Kushk for Herat, with seven aircraft mechanics.’

The delivery of this military hardware was being co-ordinated by a professional revolutionary known as Bravin, a man already being tracked by Malleson.

The Afghans were defeated long before the Soviet weaponry could be used but it was clear that the dangers of a co-ordinated Bolshevik-Islamic assault were growing by the day. Malleson intercepted scores of Afghan orders for Soviet weaponry, many of which read like extended shopping lists: ‘Seven airplanes, 24 machine-guns, 2,000 hand grenades, 50,000 rifles . . .’

Telegraphic intercepts also confirmed that senior Bolshevik figures were intending to boost their support for Afghanistan. One of these telegrams, sent from Moscow’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs to his counterpart in Turkestan, made for particularly perturbing reading.

‘Military help to Afghanistan will be given free of charge as soon as railway communications are established with Tashkent . . . Aeroplanes will be despatched in the immediate future.’

The wireless correspondence between Lenin and the Amir of Afghanistan was also intercepted; British India found itself with tangible proof of the warm relations between the two leaders.

‘Now [that] the standard of Bolshevism has been raised by Russia,’ declared the Afghan leader, ‘the Amir hastens to declare that she has earned the gratitude of the whole world.’

Lenin responded by telling the amir that ‘the long awaited flame in the East has flared up and the fire is gathering all shades of Muhammedans in its trail.’

In distant Moscow, Cheka officers were quick to realise that Malleson was eavesdropping on these secret communications. They warned senior-ranking commissars to take additional precautions when sending telegrams.

‘In future, answers to our coded telegrams must be coded, as non-coded telegrams are intercepted by the English.’ The Soviet transmissions were henceforth coded as requested, but it made little difference for Malleson’s team of code-breakers managed to crack the cipher within days.

Malleson was by now fully alerted to the dangers of a Soviet-Afghan pact. His response was to begin a proxy war against the Bolsheviks, providing their Turkic enemies with secret military information. This enabled the Turkman fighters to take effective action for the first time since the revolution reached Turkestan.

The town of Tejend was a case in point. When Malleson discovered that the Bolshevik garrison was understrength, he passed this information to his allies. ‘[They] promptly fell on Tejend . . . slaughtered its garrison and wrecked the station.’ Attacks such as this were repeated right across the region and seriously rattled the Bolsheviks.

Malleson was convinced that the Soviets and Afghans were unlikely comrades and he set himself the task of destroying their friendship. Like a puppeteer, he stood in the shadows and pulled the strings.

‘We laid ourselves out to “queer the pitch”,’ he admitted with customary lack of scruple. With access to the secret communications of both camps – and a talent for dirty diplomacy – Malleson was able to ‘queer the pitch’ with remarkable effect.

‘It became our task to do everything possible to prevent the consummation of Afghan and Bolshevik plans for an offensive and defensive alliance,’ he wrote.

His first task was to sow discord in the Afghan camp, exploiting the tensions between the country’s different Muslim factions: the Shia West and the Sunni East.

When a bloody massacre of Shias took place in Kandahar, Malleson’s propaganda team distributed thousands of highly inflammatory leaflets in Shia areas of the country. These blamed the Sunnis for the acts of violence and expressed outrage at the humiliating treatment of the minority Shia population. ‘We were able to make much capital of this,’ wrote a gleeful Malleson.

His propaganda campaign proved so successful that he began poisoning relations between the Afghans and their new Soviet allies. He printed vicious leaflets about the militant atheism of the Bolsheviks and had them smuggled across the border into Afghanistan.

‘[They] invariably circulated freely amongst the people we desired they should reach’ – the tribal chieftains and mullahs – and provided many examples of the ‘notorious faithlessness of the Bolsheviks’.

Malleson’s next trick was to instruct his Kabul-based agents to make contact with senior figures in the Afghan elite. Masquerading as advisors, they warned that Afghanistan would be wise to extract territorial pledges from Moscow before striking an alliance with ‘such dangerous people to the God-granted kingdom’.