Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (9 page)

Price turned his head towards Lenin as he listened to the speech. ‘[He] was calmly stroking his chin, apparently wondering whether the words of Kerensky would come true, and on whose shoulders the cloak of dictatorship, if it came, would rest.’

The motion of confidence in the Provisional Government won the day: Lenin’s revolutionary Bolsheviks were roundly defeated. Yet they were not downhearted. Every setback seemed to reinvigorate them and their confidence grew to such an extent that Cumming’s agents at the Russian bureau became seriously alarmed.

It was imperative to keep Kerensky in power, since he was held to be the only political leader who could impose his will on the army. Yet there was a growing fear that his grasp on power was weakening and that his eventual downfall was inevitable. This would spell disaster not just for Britain, but also for the United States, which had become a fellow combatant less than a month after the February revolution.

To avert such a catastrophe, ministers in Whitehall asked Mansfield Cumming to set up a joint Anglo-American intelligence mission to Russia. Its aim was to supply Kerensky’s pro-war government with money, extra resources and more vigorous anti-German propaganda.

Cumming immediately contacted his man in New York, William Wiseman, who had forged close links with his opposite number in American intelligence. Wiseman knew that American officials also viewed Russia’s continued role in the war as imperative. It did not take much to persuade them to back the joint mission.

The British government supplied Wiseman with $75,000. The money, destined for Russia’s Provisional Government, was wired into his J.P. Morgan and Co. account in New York. A similar sum was received from the Americans. All Wiseman now needed was an agent who could be relied upon to deliver the money to Kerensky without raising any suspicions.

Secrecy was imperative: both the Germans and the Bolsheviks could make a lot of political capital out of such blatant intervention in Russian politics.

Wiseman thought long and hard before selecting his man. Agent Somerville, better known as the writer, Somerset Maugham, had already proved his worth in Switzerland. He had been sent there two years previously to act as a link man for Cumming’s agents working inside enemy Germany.

‘If you do well you’ll get no thanks,’ he had been told on his departure from England, ‘and if you get into trouble you’ll get no help.’

Maugham was on holiday on Long Island when he received Wiseman’s unexpected summons at the beginning of July 1917. Intrigued, he made his way to Wiseman’s Lower Manhattan offices.

Wiseman briefed Maugham on the necessity of keeping Kerensky at the helm of the Russian government. He also spoke of the importance of supporting Russia’s fight against Germany on the Eastern Front.

‘The long and the short of it,’ wrote Maugham, ‘was that I should go to Russia and keep the Russians in the war.’

Maugham was daunted by the prospect of undertaking such a mission, especially when he was told that the British and American governments were determined that it should succeed.

‘I was staggered by the proposition,’ he later admitted. ‘I told Wiseman that I did not think I was competent to do the sort of thing that was expected of me.’

He asked for forty-eight hours to think it over. He was in the early stages of tuberculosis, had a high fever and was coughing up blood. But he was excited by the prospect of working again for British intelligence and decided to accept Wiseman’s proposal.

The weeks that followed were taken up with meticulous planning. Maugham was introduced to key contacts who would be able to facilitate his journey across a country that was rapidly descending into chaos. Among those charged with helping him was Emanuel Voska, an American secret agent who was to travel with him to Petrograd.

Agent Voska had also been briefed about what needed to be done: his instructions were similar to those given to Maugham. ‘Keep Russia in the war,’ he was told. ‘We will stand you any expense. So far as we are concerned, you may have the greatest freedom of action.’

By the end of July, Maugham was fully prepared. He had one last question for Wiseman before he left New York: he asked if he would be paid for his mission. He said that his operations in Switzerland had been undertaken as a gentleman amateur, ‘and found afterwards that I was the only man working in the organisation for nothing and that I was regarded not as patriotic or generous but merely damned foolish.’ Wiseman took the hint and offered both a salary and expenses.

Maugham left for San Francisco carrying $21,000 of the money for Kerensky in cash. It was concealed in a belt hidden under his shirt. He was accompanied by Emanuel Voska, three American diplomats and three Czech emissaries. Once inside Russia, Maugham was to travel alone and incognito.

‘The Czechs and I should appear to be entire strangers to one another,’ he wrote, ‘and communicate, if necessary, only with precaution.’ If anyone asked his occupation, he was to say that he was a journalist being sent to Petrograd to cover the unfolding revolution.

Maugham would later write several accounts of his mission to Russia, including an intimate portrait of a nameless secret agent working for the Americans. It is almost certainly the wily Emanuel Voska, who seemed to have many of the facets required by the perfect spy.

‘Ruthless, wise, prudent and absolutely indifferent to the means by which he reached his ends,’ wrote Maugham. ‘[There was] something terrifying about him . . . he was capable of killing a fellow creature without a trace of ill-feeling.’

Maugham and his fellow travellers travelled by boat to Vladivostok before boarding the Trans-Siberian Express for Petrograd. By the time they were approaching the Russian capital, in August 1917, Kerensky’s position had been seriously weakened.

In mid June, his Provisional Government had launched a massive offensive against the German Army. After initial success, the Russians suffered a catastrophic counter-attack that resulted in the slaughter of half a million men. In the wake of defeat came more political unrest. Ministers wrangled among themselves, leading to the eventual collapse of the government. In the political vacuum that followed, Lenin’s revolutionaries took their protest to the streets.

‘On the Nevsky Prospekt, about ten o’clock, the shooting began,’ wrote the journalist, Harold Williams. ‘Who began it is not clear, but men on motor-lorries with machine-guns began firing indiscriminately into the crowd.’

The situation was precarious but Kerensky eventually managed to restore order. A heavily disguised Lenin slipped away to Finland while Trotsky was temporarily arrested, along with a number of other key activists. Few doubted that the political unrest would continue.

‘The feeling of Petrograd,’ wrote the journalist Arthur Ransome, ‘is rather like that of a person half awake and not quite sure whether he has been visited by a burglar or a bad dream.’

This was the city in which Somerset Maugham arrived in August 1917. He checked into the Hotel Europe – ‘a stamping ground for Allied agents’ – and then went for a stroll along the Nevsky Prospekt. He was disappointed in Russia’s imperial capital, finding it ‘dingy and sordid and dilapidated’.

On the morning after his arrival, he presented himself at the British Embassy for a meeting with the ambassador, Sir George Buchanan. He was hoping that Buchanan would provide him with assistance in making contact with Kerensky. He was quickly disabused of this notion.

Buchanan was studiously late for the meeting and when he did at long last arrive, he treated Maugham with glacial disdain, speaking to him in the manner of an Edwardian headmaster admonishing a wayward pupil.

Buchanan was always frosty with people who worked for Mansfield Cumming. He was outraged that British agents were allowed to operate on what he considered to be his patch. The fact that they conducted their affairs without any reference to him only served to further offend him.

A few months earlier he had telegraphed London and demanded that all of Cumming’s agents in Russia be placed under his personal control. This was met with a swift (but private) snub from the War Office. An internal memo said that ‘Secret Service was not a matter with which amateurs could be trusted.’ It added that Cumming was financing the Russian bureau and should therefore have full control over its operations.

Buchanan was indignant to learn that Agent Somerville was ‘on a confidential mission’ of which he was to remain wholly ignorant. Maugham did not help matters by his extreme nervousness. ‘I was conscious that I made a very poor impression on him,’ he wrote. ‘I was nervous and stammered badly.’

Buchanan grew even more offended when he learned that he was expected to place the embassy’s cable-transmitters at Maugham’s disposal, even though he was not to be privy to the contents of the cables being sent to London. They were to be written in a secret code known only to Maugham.

‘He looked upon it as a grave affront,’ wrote Maugham. ‘I realised that I could not count on much help in that quarter.’

Maugham had other contacts in Petrograd who proved rather more than willing to assist. Among them was Alexandra Lebedev, née Kropotkin, with whom he had once had a brief love affair. She was a friend of Kerensky and promised to provide Maugham with an introduction, as well as setting up meetings with other senior ministers in the government.

Maugham was taken aback when he finally met the Russian leader. ‘What struck me most was his colour,’ he wrote. ‘One often reads of people being green in the face with fright and I had always thought it an invention of novelists. But that is exactly what he was.’

The man upon whom the Western democracies were pinning their hopes appeared indecisive, nervous and sick. ‘He seemed fearfully on edge. Sitting down and talking incessantly, he took hold of a cigarette box and played with it restlessly, locking and unlocking it, opening and shutting it, turning it round and round.’

Maugham had heard a great deal about the Russian leader’s strengths and qualities. Now, sitting face to face with him, he found himself talking to a shadow. ‘His personality had no magnetism. He gave no feeling of intellectual or of physical vigour.’

Maugham’s task was not to judge Kerensky but to do business with him. To this end, he staged a series of meetings with him and his ministers at Mjedved restaurant, the finest in town. ‘I provided my guests with quantities of caviare at the expense of the two governments who had sent me to Petrograd, and they devoured it with relish.’

They discussed how the British, Americans and French could best support the Russian Government, with Maugham’s friend Alexandra Lebedev acting as interpreter.

Maugham also had several meetings with Boris Savinkov, the feisty Minister of War. Here, at last, was someone with whom he could do business. He described Savinkov as ‘the most remarkable man I met.’

His fascination was due, in part, to the fact that Savinkov had been personally responsible for the assassination of a number of senior imperial officials in the years before the war. Maugham found it hard to picture such a genial individual killing people in cold blood. ‘He had,’ he wrote, ‘the prosperous look of a lawyer.’

As the champagne flowed and the party grew increasingly merry, Maugham plucked up the courage to quiz Savinkov about the assassinations. ‘When I asked him if it wasn’t rather nervous work, he laughed and said: “Oh, it’s just business like another.” ’

Savinkov was disarmingly frank when telling Maugham about the dangers posed by the Bolshevik revolutionaries. He warned that they were bent on annihilating all who did not share their radical views. ‘He said to me once in his casual way: “Either Lenin will stand me up in front of a wall and shoot me or I shall stand him in front of a wall and shoot him.” ’

Maugham reported every detail of his conversations back to Wiseman in America. Wiseman, in turn, forwarded the information to Mansfield Cumming. As a precaution against the Germans intercepting these telegraphic messages, Maugham wrote in code, with special signifiers for each letter of the alphabet and previously agreed names for all the principal players.

Kerensky was Lane, Lenin was Davis and Trotsky was Cole. Three governments also had codenames: the British were Eyre and Co., the Americans were Curtis and Co., and the Russians were Waring and Co.

When Maugham later came to write his Ashenden spy novels – semi-fictional versions of his own experiences – he gave an account of the time and effort it took his hero to write his despatches. ‘[The code] was in two parts, one contained in a slim book and the other, given him on a sheet of paper and destroyed by him before he left allied territory, committed to memory.’

Decoding was even worse. ‘Ashenden deciphered the groups of numbers one by one . . . his method was to abstract his mind from the sense till he had finished, since he had discovered that if you took notice of the words as they came along, you often jumped to a conclusion and sometimes were led into error.’

Maugham’s cables made for sombre reading in London and Washington. He expressed his belief that the Russian government was doomed and that more serious unrest was inevitable.

‘Perhaps if I had been sent to Russia six months earlier I might have done something,’ he wrote. ‘The condition of things is much more serious than appears on the surface . . . the situation [is] entirely out of hand.’

Maugham worked hard at fulfilling his brief, despite the atmosphere of gloom. His key task was to establish how best Britain and America might support Kerensky’s government. He thought that anti-German propaganda needed to be given a far higher profile. The Germans, he noted, were masters of political manipulation, ‘with a vast, well-organised Secret Service covering all chief Russian centres.’