Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (7 page)

A new Provisional Government was formed on the following day, with Prince Lvov as prime minister and the charismatic Alexander Kerensky as Minister of Justice.

‘Only those who know how things were but a week ago can understand the enthusiasm of us who have seen the miracle take place before our eyes . . .’ wrote Arthur Ransome. ‘It is as if honesty had returned.’

The Provisional Government moved swiftly to agree an eight-point programme with the Petrograd Soviet. Point One in this programme offered the ‘immediate amnesty for all political prisoners, including terrorists.’

In distant London, Mansfield Cumming had long ago expressed his belief that ‘Russia will be the most important country for us in the future.’ He was about to be proved right. The amnesty for Russian political prisoners was to have consequences that were both dramatic and unforeseen.

CHAPTER THREE

THE PERFECT SPY

Mansfield Cumming’s network of agents inside Russia expanded rapidly during the long years of war. As well as his team working at the Petrograd bureau, he also had men based at many of Russia’s key frontier posts.

These agents were ostensibly working as military control officers, helping their Russian allies to man the country’s vast borders. But they were also secretly collecting information on who was travelling in and out of the country.

One of these officers, Harry Gruner, was serving at the snowbound outpost of Torneå, a frontier village nestled on the border between Sweden and Finland. Few travellers would ever have come to Torneå were it not for the fact that it was also a railway junction with an onwards connection to Helsingfors (Helsinki) and Petrograd. Ever since the revolutionary upheaval of four weeks earlier, a stream of political exiles had been using this route to cross back into Russia.

Shortly before nightfall on Saturday, 15 April 1917, Gruner heard the muffled hiss of horse-drawn sleighs approaching the little border cabin. It was an unusually chill evening and the air was spiked with frost. Spring had yet to arrive in this frozen slice of the country and the wooden cabin was covered in a shroud of snow.

Gruner stepped into the darkness to greet the travellers and immediately saw that they were Russian. He also noticed that they were jumpy when asked to show their papers. There was good reason for their nervousness: among their number was the notorious revolutionary firebrand, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Lenin had been living in exile for almost a decade, preaching the gospel of class warfare and radical social upheaval. He had also been demanding Russia’s immediate withdrawal from the war. There were many inside the country who viewed him as a dangerous troublemaker.

Lenin appeared ‘outwardly calm’ as Gruner interrogated him. According to one of those in his party, the fellow revolutionary, Grigori Zinoviev, he was ‘most of all interested in what was happening in far off Petersburg.’ Yet he was also concerned that this young border guard would try to prevent him from crossing the frontier.

Gruner hoped to do just that: Lenin was a prize catch, one that would earn him plaudits in London. But he found himself in a dilemma. Russia’s new government had sanctioned the return of all political refugees, regardless of the threat they might pose. Lenin was clearly more dangerous than most, but Gruner had no obvious justification in preventing him and his party from crossing the frontier.

Reluctant to let his quarry slip so easily back onto Russian soil, he sent a telegram to Petrograd informing the government of Lenin’s arrival at Torneå. He also asked ‘whether a mistake had not been made in permitting him to return.’ While he awaited the reply, he submitted all the travellers to a humiliating strip search.

‘We were undressed to the skin,’ recalled Zinoviev’s wife indignantly. ‘My son and I were forced to take off our stockings . . . All the documents and even the children’s books and toys my son had brought with them were taken.’

Lenin, too, was searched and once again interrogated. Gruner asked him why he had left Russia and why he was going back. Lenin said nothing incriminating, much to Gruner’s disappointment. He knew he could not detain the group of Russians indefinitely. He made a meticulous search of Lenin’s luggage in the hope of finding seditious literature. There was none.

One of the Russians noticed Lenin chuckling with delight as the search finally came to an end. ‘He broke into happy laughter and, embracing me, he said: “Our trials, Comrade Mikha, have ended.” ’ He was confident that the Provisional Government would oblige Gruner to allow them to cross the frontier.

This was exactly what happened. Gruner received a telegram reminding him that ‘the new Russian Government rested on a democratic foundation. Lenin’s group should be allowed to enter.’

Gruner had no option but to allow them to proceed. He stamped their papers and let them continue on their journey. It was a decision he would later regret. One of his colleagues recalled that he was teased mercilessly for having set Lenin free.

‘You’re a bright lad,’ they would say to him. ‘Locking the stable door when the horse was out, or, rather, in.’

Another of them joshed that if Gruner had been Japanese, ‘he would have committed hara-kiri.’

He might have wished he had done so. Within a few months he would be arrested on Lenin’s orders and held under sentence of execution.

Four thousand miles away in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a tip-off from British intelligence had led to the arrest of Leon Trotsky, another of Russia’s most notorious revolutionary exiles.

Trotsky had been living in New York since the beginning of 1917, delivering fiery lectures on his hopes of destroying Russia’s new Provisional Government. He even urged the workers of Manhattan to bring down their own political masters, overthrowing them by way of violent revolution. ‘It’s time you did away with such a government once and forever,’ he told them.

Trotsky’s activities had not gone unnoticed by Mansfield Cumming, who was receiving regular reports from his principal spymaster in New York, William Wiseman.

Wiseman, a maverick baronet, had been sent to New York in the previous year. He had established an espionage bureau based in the British Consulate at 44 Whitehall Street, Manhattan. Its principal task was to monitor Indian and Irish revolutionaries living in the city. But Wiseman also kept a close eye on Trotsky, sending agents to infiltrate his meetings and keep tabs on his revolutionary collaborators.

In the last week of March, Wiseman received a tip-off that Trotsky was planning to return to Russia with a group of fellow activists. They were carrying a large sum of money, more than $10,000, which was to be used to finance a new wave of revolutionary activity, one far more violent than the unrest that had swept the tsar from power.

The revolutionaries boarded the SS
Kristianiaford
in New York, unaware that Wiseman’s agents were tracking them. Trotsky assumed that the voyage would be trouble-free; he was to get an unpleasant surprise when the vessel made a brief refuelling stop in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The port was manned by British naval officials, for Canada was still a dominion of the British Empire, and these officials had been ordered to arrest Trotsky and his men.

‘These are Russian socialists leaving for the purpose of starting revolution against the Russian government,’ read the telegram sent to Halifax.

Trotsky lost all his dignity when informed that he was being detained. According to one observer, he ‘crouched and whined and cried in abject terror’ – perhaps because he feared that the British would kill him. But when he realised he was not going to be executed, ‘his bluff returned and he protested violently.’

He was held under lock and key for the next four weeks and proved a most troublesome prisoner. He spent his waking hours preaching revolution to the German prisoners of war that had also been interned on Nova Scotia.

‘[Trotsky] is a man holding extremely strong views and of most powerful personality,’ wrote the British commandant, ‘his personality being such that after only a few days stay here he was by far the most popular man in the whole camp.’

In distant Petrograd, the Provisional Government was growing increasingly alarmed by the number of dangerous political exiles returning to Russia. When it learned of Trotsky’s internment, it asked the British to hold him indefinitely.

This proved a gift to revolutionary agitators in Petrograd, who were infuriated by Trotsky’s detention. They hinted that British nationals in Russia would be targeted unless he was immediately released.

For a few short days in the spring of 1917, British intelligence achieved the singular coup of holding both Trotsky and Lenin, the principal architects of the future Bolshevik revolution.

But as it was with Lenin, so it was to prove with Trotsky. In the third week of April, he was released and allowed to continue on his journey. Within a few days, he was aboard a new ship, the
Helig Olaf
, and bound for Petrograd.

As revolutionary figures returned to Petrograd in ever-increasing numbers, Mansfield Cumming began to consider how best to arrange his Russian operations. He was looking to the future, aware that his agents might soon have to work undercover in a country that was no longer an ally.

He jotted a number of notes on what he considered to constitute the ‘perfect spy’: someone who could enter a country under a fake identity and live there clandestinely for many months. One man who fitted the archetypal profile was George Hill, a British officer of exceptional talent.

A member of the Royal Flying Corps, Hill had been sent to Russia to help in the training of pilots on the Eastern Front. But he was also working for British military intelligence with the codename Agent IK8. He proved so good at infiltrating secret meetings that he was soon poached and given employment by Mansfield Cumming.

Hill had lived in numerous different cities, including London, Hamburg, Riga, St Petersburg, Tehran and Krasnovodsk. A broad-beamed individual with a potato-shaped face, he had a military gait and public-school buffoonery that left no one in any doubt as to his nationality. Yet he showed a remarkable talent for blending into foreign cultures.

In part, this was due to his skills as a linguist. ‘I had half a dozen languages at the tip of my tongue,’ he wrote, ‘[and] had learned to sum up the characteristic qualities and faults of a dozen nationalities.’

Hill knew that fluency in the language was only the first step to perfecting an undercover existence. A spy could live incognito for a sustained period of time only if he learned to adopt ‘the habits and ways of thoughts of the people among whom his field of operations lies’. He also needed ‘a brain of the utmost ability, able to draw a deduction in a flash and make a momentous decision in an instant.’