Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (5 page)

At first glance, Rayner was unlikely material for espionage and subversion. The son of a Birmingham draper, he grew up with neither money nor prospects. But he found employment as an English teacher in Finland (then an autonomous grand duchy of the Russian Empire) and taught himself Russian.

He then returned to England to read Modern Languages at Oxford University. It was a move that would transform his life.

Rayner’s fluency in Russian, French and German did not escape official notice when he sought to join the army at the outbreak of war. Such linguistic ability was of great use in wartime. Rayner was sent to Petrograd in November 1915, with the task of co-ordinating the censorship of telegrams. It was not long before he found himself playing a far more dangerous game.

Yusupov is circumspect when he writes in his memoirs about his old friend from Oxford. He mentions bumping into him on the day after the murder of Rasputin but presents their meeting as a chance encounter.

‘As I went down to dinner,’ he wrote, ‘I met my friend Oswald Rayner, a British officer who I had known at Oxford. He knew of our conspiracy and had come in search of news.’

Yusupov may well have met Rayner on the evening that followed the murder and Rayner was certainly with Yusupov when he fled Petrograd by train. But Rayner had not needed to ‘come in search of news’.

Rayner would later admit to his family that he was present in the Yusupov Palace on that night in December, information that would eventually find its way into his obituary. And Yusupov himself confessed that his Oxford friend knew of the murder in advance, although he stopped short of saying that Rayner was in the palace at the time.

Surviving letters from Rayner’s fellow agents also reveal his involvement. ‘A few awkward questions have already been asked about wider involvement,’ wrote one. ‘Rayner is attending to loose ends and will no doubt brief you on your return.’

It was the tsar himself who made enquiries as to whether or not Rayner had been involved in the killing. He had picked up rumours that were circulating around the palaces of Petrograd – rumours of British involvement in the plot. Anxious to know more, he went so far as to summon the ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, and ask him whether or not ‘Yusupov’s Oxford University friend’ had a hand in the murder of Rasputin.

The ambassador was wholly ignorant of the affair and discreetly asked Samuel Hoare for information. Hoare robustly denied that any of his men had been involved. An ‘outrageous charge’, he told the ambassador, and ‘incredible to the point of childishness.’ Buchanan did not probe any further. He said he would ‘solemnly contradict it to the Emperor at his next audience.’

Whether or not Hoare knew the truth of what took place remains unclear. He was certainly aware of a plot to ‘liquidate’ Rasputin for he had been told about it by Vladimir Purishkevich, one of the conspirators. He claims not to have believed it. ‘I thought his words were symptomatic of what everyone was thinking and saying, rather than the expression of a definitely thought out plan.’

Although Hoare may have been ignorant of his agent’s involvement in the murder, he was remarkably quick to learn of Rasputin’s death. He sent the news to London several hours before it was publicly known in Petrograd.

‘In the early morning of Saturday, December 30th,’ begins his report, ‘there was enacted in Petrograd one of those crimes that by their magnitude blur the well-defined rules of ethics and by their results change the history of a generation.’

The report was sent directly to London, where it landed on the desk of ‘the Chief’, or ‘C’, as he was known to his agents. He was the man ultimately in charge of the Russian bureau. He also ran the London headquarters of an organisation that was to operate under a number of names, but would eventually become known as the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).

Nameless, faceless and working from a secret location in Whitehall, C was to be in charge of all of the boldest undercover operations in Russia for the next six years.

CHAPTER TWO

THE CHIEF

The Chief sat in his office, his back to a glazed dormer window. A broad shaft of sunlight spilled through the glass behind him, lighting the secret inks that stood on his desk in slim glass phials.

The positioning of his chair by the window was no accident: it meant that visitors were momentarily dazzled by the light. For the first few seconds they saw only a silhouette.

The identity of the head of the Secret Intelligence Service was one of the most strictly guarded secrets in Whitehall. Even his trustworthy agents had no clue as to who he was. They knew him by his initial, C, and only in exceptional circumstances did they get to meet him.

‘A pale, clean-shaven man, the most striking features of whose face were a Punch-like chin, a small and beautifully fine bow of a mouth and a pair of very bright eyes.’ So wrote Compton Mackenzie, author of
Whisky Galore
, who worked for C during the First World War.

C’s chin was indeed Punch-like (one visitor described it as ‘like the cut-water of a battleship’) and his eyes were piercing. Few interviewees would ever forget them, not least because his penetrating stare was accentuated by a gold-rimmed monocle.

The monocle was used to theatrical effect; C would let it drop from his eye as a sign of disapproval. But his gruff exterior was offset by an underlying warmth of spirit. With favoured colleagues, that stern countenance would slowly melt into a grin and those sharp eyes sparkle in amusement.

The Chief rarely looked up from his paperwork when visitors entered his office. ‘He remained bent over the table, perusing through a pair of dark, horn-rimmed spectacles some documents,’ wrote Mackenzie of his nerve-wracking first meeting. Finally, C glanced up and inspected his visitor. ‘[He] took off his glasses, leant back in his chair and stared hard at me for a long minute without speaking. “Well?” he said finally.’

Mackenzie introduced himself and reminded C that he was just returned from a long stint abroad.

‘ “And what have you to say for yourself?” he asked, putting in an eyeglass and staring at me harder than ever.’

The ice was soon broken and the ensuing meeting went well: C even suggested that they dine together at the Savoy. ‘I intended to make myself extremely unpleasant to you,’ he later admitted, ‘but I said that when I saw you I should probably find a man after my own heart and fall on your neck.’

C often whisked newly appointed agents to lunch at one of his London clubs. He would drive them there at breakneck speed in his magnificent Rolls-Royce, as if he wished to initiate them into a new and more reckless world.

Those in C’s inner circle would eventually get to know his real name: it was Mansfield George Smith Cumming (the Cumming was adopted from his wife). He was a naval commander by profession, but suffered from such acute seasickness that he was retired from active service and posted to Southampton where he worked on the harbour’s boom defences.

Cumming was fifty and in semi-retirement when he received an unexpected letter from the Admiralty. ‘Boom defence must be getting a bit stale . . .’ it read. ‘I have something good I can offer you and if you would like to come and see me on Thursday about noon, I will tell you what it is.’

The letter was signed by Rear Admiral Alexander Bethell, director of Naval Intelligence, and dated 10 August 1909. It was to mark the beginning of an illustrious new career for Mansfield Cumming.

The offer was a startling one. The government had decided to establish a wholly new organisation called the Secret Service Bureau, with two separate but connected divisions. One was to deal with domestic intelligence, the other exclusively with foreign.

Cumming was to head the latter division, charged with gathering military, political and technical intelligence from overseas. His task was to recruit agents, train them and then send them into foreign countries in order to report on the threat they posed to Britain.

The establishment of the Secret Service Bureau was not the first government foray into foreign espionage. The navy had set up an intelligence department in the 1880s and the War Office also had an Intelligence Branch. These were preoccupied with military espionage. Now, the increasingly tense international situation called for the creation of a new, more professional organisation, with a far wider reach.

Cumming accepted the job offer with alacrity, reasoning that it would be a wonderful opportunity to do good work ‘before I am finally shelved.’

His organisation would eventually expand until it operated across the globe, but it had very modest beginnings. Cumming’s first day at work, on 7 October 1909, did not begin well. ‘Went to the office,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and remained all day but saw no one, nor was there anything to do.’

He was denied access to War Office files, an essential starting point for his new bureau, and had virtually no equipment.

A week later, he was still complaining of having nothing to do. ‘Office all day,’ he wrote. ‘No one appeared.’

In a letter to Rear Admiral Bethell, who had offered him the job, he vented his frustration. ‘Surely we cannot be expected to sit in the office month by month doing absolutely nothing?’ He soon realised that the success of his new bureau would be entirely dependent upon his own initiative.

Cumming’s first office was established in London’s Victoria Street, opposite the Army and Navy Stores, where it was to operate under the guise of a detective agency. The location was not ideal, largely because C kept bumping into friends who wanted to know what he was doing there.

To preserve his anonymity, he rented a private flat in Ashley Mansions on Vauxhall Bridge Road and moved most of his operations to this unassuming new headquarters. An office, he would say, arouses interest and curiosity, ‘but a private dwelling calls for no comment.’

He would later move again, to the eaves of an Edwardian mansion at Number Two, Whitehall Court. This was a labyrinthine collection of offices close to the centre of government. Potential agents were led up six flights of stairs before entering a warren of corridors, passageways and mezzanines.

Nothing was quite as it appeared. There were mirrors and blind corners and doors that seemed to lead to nowhere. Many recruits felt as if they were wandering through an optical illusion. One of them noted that by the time he reached C’s door, he had the distinct impression that he was back in the same place as when he had first arrived on the sixth floor.

Cumming referred to his Whitehall Court staff as his ‘top mates’ while the spies themselves were ‘rascals’ and ‘scallywags’. He had no qualms about hiring men of dubious repute, so long as they were up to the job. One potential spy recalled the Chief swivelling around in his chair and saying: ‘I know all about your past history. You are just the man we want.’

Yet Cumming’s attitude was the exception to the norm. Many in the government and army viewed espionage as both immoral and disreputable. Britain’s pre-war military attaché in Berlin had baulked at the idea of sending intelligence back to London. ‘You will not have forgotten when we talked this matter over some months ago, that I mentioned how distasteful this sort of work was to me.’

Cumming viewed things rather differently. ‘After the War is over, we’ll do some amusing secret service work together,’ he told Compton Mackenzie. ‘It’s capital sport.’

The author-turned-spy, Valentine Williams, described Cumming as ‘cunning as an old dog fox, as
rusé
and as full of guile as a veteran sergeant major.’ He would sit behind his vast desk and await the delivery of some secret report from the hands of his secretary.