The Race to Save the Romanovs
Page 18
Lied was in Petrograd when the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917. He met Lenin and Trotsky in the hope of striking a business deal with the new government and, having a flat in Petrograd where he had amassed a considerable art collection, travelled back and forth in an attempt to hang on to his Russian company or at the least sell up and get the profits out of the country.26 Lied was therefore pleased to receive an invitation on 26 February 1918 to go to London to ‘discuss the possibility of leading an expedition to the Kara Sea during the forthcoming summer’. It came just after he had resigned as managing director of the Siberian Trading Company, which would soon fall victim to the Bolshevik nationalisation of foreign businesses in Russia.
The invitation had come from Henry Armitstead, the Hudson’s Bay official involved in the construction of the putative Murmansk House, who had met Lied during 1916 on business trips to northern Russia. Armitstead had been in conversation with HBC’s accountant about the continuing viability of trade with Siberia and whether there was sufficient demand for its hemp, flax and linseed. They had agreed that Lied’s opinion on the matter was important and that ‘Something might be built upon his experiences and upon the organization which he possesses.’27
In response, Lied wasted no time in taking the fast British boat from Bergen to Aberdeen. Arriving in London on 4 March, he was met and installed in the comfort of a suite at the swish Savoy Hotel by Colonel Frederick Browning. This came as something of a surprise, for Browning was no ordinary army officer; he was in fact number two to Mansfield Cumming, head of MI1(c), the foreign division of the Secret Intelligence Service (now MI6), which had already been taking an interest in Lied.28
According to Lied’s diary, held in the Norwegian Maritime Museum in Oslo, he had several meetings at the Savoy Hotel with Armitstead and his superior, Charles Sale, to discuss the Kara Sea expedition.29 A whole string of further encounters – with senior government ministers – followed over the next few days. The names are recorded in Lied’s diary: William Mitchell-Thomson, director of the Restriction of Enemy Supplies (whose significance will become apparent later in this chapter); Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour; and Lord Robert Cecil, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Lied was also invited to dinner with Armitstead at the home of Sir Reginald Hall, director of British naval intelligence. This roster of pre-eminent military and political officials suggests that the utmost importance was being placed on their private discussions with Lied; but at this point none of them had revealed to Lied exactly why they were paying so much solicitous attention to him. ‘What is all this about?’ he asked his diary on 8 March.30
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Till now a huge amount of wishful thinking has been invested in this scenario – first by Summers and Mangold, and then by Shay McNeal in The Secret Plot to Save the Tsar – followed by everyone else who has drawn on these two sources as gospel on the subject and repeated the story without questioning it. The assumption has always been that Lied was called to London specifically to discuss a Romanov rescue plan. But this is not so. We have here a classic chicken-and-egg situation. It was British self-interest in wartime that prompted the invitation. Lied’s expertise was being drawn on during these meetings first and foremost with a view to a secret economic mission to protect and promote British trade interests in Siberia.31
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This expedition did in fact set out in late June 1918, involving Henry Armitstead, British industrialist Leslie Urquhart and others, under instructions from SIS chief Mansfield Cumming.32 It is confirmed in a Commercial Russia file FO368/1970 held in the National Archives and headed ‘Supplies from Central Siberia: Regarding proposal of Siberian Trading Co for expedition to Kara Sea’, which talks of the expedition ‘tapping the area between Tobolsk and Krasnoyarsk … for our own requirements’. Documents in this file for March–May 1918 refer to the Hudson’s Bay Company, Armitstead and Lied – but not as putative Romanov rescuers. The mission (under the umbrella of the department for the Restriction of Enemy Supplies) was to be composed of four 3,000-ton steamers taking ‘salt, nails, clothing, sheet iron and carpenters tools’ to be ‘unloaded at the mouths of the rivers Yenisei and Obi’, where the return Siberian cargoes – of flax, hemp, linseed oil, butter and hides that had been brought down in barges from Krasnoyarsk and Tobolsk – would be loaded. These commodities (of which hemp and flax,* essential for war industries, were in short supply) were abundant in Siberia, but could only be got out via the waterways, as the railways in northern Russia were ‘in total disorganisation’.33 But to bring them out of Siberia would have to be agreed with the Russians.
Enter Jonas Lied. British intelligence was already well aware of his valuable Russian experience; he was ‘understood to be on good terms with the Bolshevik regime, and would therefore perhaps stand a fair chance of securing good relations with the Soviets’ on their behalf. After extensive consultation, Hudson’s Bay Company director Charles Sale advised that such an expedition ‘would involve much risk and high cost’, but that ‘Mr Lied, who is now in London on a very brief stay [i.e. his March 1918 visit] … has expressed his willingness to carry out such transactions in co-operation with the Hudson’s Bay Company.’34
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It is only at this point that the much-discussed Romanov connection, about which there has been so much subsequent speculation, begins to fall into place.
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During his discussions with British officials, as he later described in his 1943 memoir Return to Happiness, Lied says that he ‘became possessed of another idea’ that perhaps could be achieved as part of this expedition: to ‘rescue the tsar and his family from Siberia’.35 The Kara Sea mission would involve taking boats to and from Tobolsk – why not try to help the beleaguered Imperial Family while they were at it?
To an experienced navigator such as Lied, the best way of getting the family out would be by his river steamer, based at Nakhodka at the mouth of the Ob, which also served Tobolsk. ‘It should not have been beyond the power of Tsarist sympathisers to organize the escape of the Tsar and his family down the rivers to the Arctic and thence to Western Europe,’ he argued. It would be their task to liberate the family from their Tobolsk prison in the first phase of the operation. Indeed, a river rescue had been mooted by Alexander Ievreinov the previous autumn; and Markov II also later claimed to have a skipper ready and waiting to take the Tobolsk schooner Svyataya Mariya up the Ob (though whether his plan was in any way connected with Ievreinov’s is unknown). But in reality it would have required a highly experienced navigator such as Lied to oversee the family’s escape via the Irtysh at Tobolsk, downriver to the mouth of the Ob and out to the Kara Sea.36
Nearly two weeks after his arrival in London, and after he had been vetted carefully by this assortment of key officials and had discussed his idea of the Romanov rescue with them, Lied was invited to a meeting. On 20 March he met Sir Francis Barker, director of the famous engineering and armaments firm Vickers, which had ‘made millions out of imperial Russia’ during the war. Vickers, Lied suggested, could provide the final essential link in the plan – a ‘fast motor launch’ to get the Romanovs out from the Kara Sea and presumably across to the safe house at Murmansk.37
Such a rescue, north and then out via the Arctic, could only be effected once the ice had melted – at the earliest, late June 1918, which would of course tie in with the Kara Sea mission planned for July. Sir Francis Barker, as Lied recalled, thought his idea ‘feasible’, though ‘daring and certainly most romantic’, but put the dampener on any official involvement by Vickers. There was also the problem, as always, of obtaining financial support for the project, even though Lied had received the offer of funding of £500 from a Norwegian friend named Hagen.* Vickers, Barker told him, ‘would not wish its name to be in any way associated with the adventure’. Instead he put him in touch with the Tsar’s cousin, Grand Duke Mikhail Mikhailovich, who lived at Cambridge Gate near Regent’s Park, as ‘the man you ought to meet’.38 While th
e Grand Duke in turn offered Lied his ‘courtly attentiveness’ during their meeting and wished him all the best with his scheme, he referred to Nicholas somewhat disparagingly as ‘the little man’ and, like Barker at Vickers, was adamant about one thing: ‘on no account must his name ever be mentioned in connection with the proposed exploit’. Lied found this kneejerk British reticence extremely frustrating: ‘Well, if his name was not to be mentioned, whose name was? It was characteristic of the whole reaction to my plan: “Please don’t mention my name!”’39
As a Norwegian, the revolution was not my funeral. Even my scheme to save the Emperor was non political. Its inspiration was partly the call of the Kara Sea, and partly, I admit, a sense of gratitude to the imperial house for the sympathetic way it had helped me to establish the Siberian business.40
Lied felt a certain loyalty to the Tsar, whom he had found ‘extremely warm and friendly’ when he had met him at Tsarskoe Selo before the revolution; and the Romanovs were, after all, relatives of the Norwegian king, Haakon.41
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Official British War Cabinet, Admiralty and FO papers are all, predictably, absolutely silent on Lied’s Romanov rescue scheme. Not a word survives, if there ever was one on the record, of the discussions that took place with him in March 1918 about getting the Romanovs out of Tobolsk. And the situation is not helped by there being some discrepancies between the Lied manuscript diary and the much later account in his published memoirs.42 Summers and Mangold spent many years trying to get to a British ‘Naval Intelligence dossier on a mission to bring the family out’ that might back up the Lied plan. Its existence was confirmed to them in 1974 by the then Under-Secretary of State, Sir Anthony Royle. But ‘He could not reveal its contents, he said, because he was bound by the Official Secrets Act.’43 Does that file still exist somewhere in the National Archives?
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A close examination of all available Scandinavian and English sources indicates that the whole story of the supposed Lied Romanov rescue has been repeatedly misinterpreted. That is not to say, however, that the British did not briefly toy with the idea, before dismissing it as foolhardy. The desire of all those concerned to be ‘kept out of it’ clearly implies that the initiative had not come from them, but from Lied. In the face of their lukewarm response, he placed the idea in abeyance after leaving London on 30 March. What is more, Lied would seem to have felt obliged to conceal the details when he published a very anodyne version of the story in Return to Happiness twenty-five years later. This is reinforced by the fact that the memoirs describe a meeting Lied had with Sir George Buchanan after the October Revolution in which they appeared to discuss ‘the future of large British undertakings’ in Russia, such as the British petroleum industry in the North Caucasus and mining enterprises in the Urals, but puzzlingly it makes no mention of the one subject for so long close to Sir George’s heart – the welfare of the Romanov family.44
According to Summers and Mangold, Jonas Lied did in fact later confide the true story of his rescue plan to an English friend, Ralph Hewins, who for many years had been a specialist Scandinavian newspaper correspondent and is best known for his biography of the Norwegian traitor, Quisling. In private conversation, Lied told Hewins that:
he was asked by Metropolitan-Vickers … to berth a British boat at his sawmill depot [this must be Maklakovo] at the mouth of the Yenisey and to transport the Imperial Family from Tobolsk downriver in one of his cargoboats. The plan was feasible. The torpedo boat [i.e. a British RN or a Vickers one sent specially] was to take a course far north into the Arctic, through Novaya Zemlya, so as to avoid wartime minefields and possible Bolshevik pursuit.45
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As Wilhelm Wilkens, Jonas Lied’s nephew, confirmed to me in an email, ‘I remember that my uncle (he died in 1969) told me that neither the monarch, nor the British government were interested in saving the tsar’s family. I think that was from political reasons.’46 In fact ahead of the London meetings, the Hudson’s Bay Company had already expressed doubts about Lied’s abilities to head the economic mission, being of the mind that he was ‘inclined to minimize the difficulties and exaggerate the possibilities’, and concluding that ‘it will be necessary to regard both Mr Lied and his organization as instruments rather than as the controlling element’.47
The faulty and often second- or third-hand recall of crucial events many years after they happened is a persistent problem that all historians have to deal with on a regular basis. There are a number of them in the Romanov story, in particular an assortment of claims about either a Russian monarchist or a British Secret Service rescue plan, backed – or even instigated – by King George V himself. The possibility of such a mission is something I had frequently discussed with my World War I and Intelligence Services expert adviser, Phil Tomaselli. We had, despondently, picked over what little evidence there was and agreed that while the Lied/Murmansk plan was viable, there was little or nothing in official records to back it up, let alone tie it to a clear British initiative.
But then a few clues came my way, as things often do in historical research, via an unsolicited email from a reader.
I don’t know where to start really … I have just watched the wonderful documentary films about the Romanovs,* and wondered if you would be interested in some additional material concerning their last days, and a planned British rescue mission, all of which I can authenticate … It was my maternal grandfather who was actually responsible … for a very well planned British escape. His full name was Stephen Berthold Gordon-Smith.
My informant went on to describe how his grandfather had been involved in an operation:
with the necessary connivance of a lot of minor local Russian people … bribing people, such as … domestic staff to help prepare necessary supplies, clothes, food and valuables for transport, organizing overland transport via carriages & sleighs & arranging drivers and their reindeer or horse Staging Posts, for all the various parts of the route to Archangel, plus the coordinated arrangements of a British submarine to be standing by, fully crewed and briefed, at the appointed date, in the only ice-free port Arkhangelsk.48
There was talk too of ‘a seaplane’ being involved in the rescue, but all this rather confused information had been passed down to my informant at a two-generation remove, and no doubt elaborated on in the process. Through no fault of his own, the version that he in turn handed on to me was, to say the least, muddled and full of loopholes.49 But might there be a grain of truth in it?
Could there really have been a British plan to get the Romanovs from Tobolsk to Archangel overland? Surely not; it is clear that this was something even the monarchists inside Russia had abandoned as logistically impossible. The Lied plan by river was much more efficient. The only supporting material my informant could give me was a 1980s newspaper cutting and some typed notes from his step-grandmother – Gordon-Smith’s widow, Patricia Eykyn – that she had made for the family:
In 1917 Steven [sic] was sent to Russia ostensibly with the British Military Mission, Victor Warrender (now Lord Bruntisfield) and Bruce Lockhart* were in the same party, but the real reason Steven was sent was to bring The Imperial Family to England. He not only knew the Imperial Family, but could easily pass as a Russian. There was a British submarine standing by at Archangel. And then the word came from London ‘Abandon operation return via Stockholm’ … and so, as Steven has told me so often, he did what he will regret to his dying day. He obeyed orders. No one other than Steven will ever know all the details and the whole truth.50
Stephen’s grandson confirmed that the diaries and letters referring to this mission had been kept by Stephen’s daughter – his mother, Joy – and that his sister and Patricia, the second wife, had both seen them. And yes, ‘the diaries and letters showed there was definitely a rescue plan that Steven was involved in’.51
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‘But where are those diaries and letters now?’ I asked, with a sense of mounting excitement.
The response, whe
n it came, was the one all historians dread hearing: ‘Joy burnt it all.’ When Patricia Eykyn remarried, ‘out of discretion to her new husband’ she passed on all her former husband Stephen’s letters and diaries to their daughter, Joy. But Joy, sadly, destroyed all Gordon-Smith’s papers, including this precious evidence.52
Such bitter disappointments are legion in historical research.
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The newspaper cutting provided to back up the Gordon-Smith story comes from the Mail on Sunday for 20 November 1988, entitled ‘The King Could Have Saved the Tsar’. In it Patricia Eykyn confirmed that ‘though he never told me many details’, the ‘real reason’ her husband was sent to Russia ‘was to bring [my italics] the Tsar and his family to England’ – perhaps suggesting a role as escort. But there is a fly in the ointment: when asked by the Mail about his role in this alleged mission, Lord Bruntisfield denied all knowledge of it, adding however that ‘if influential people in Britain had seriously attempted to get the Tsar out, I am pretty sure they would have succeeded’.53
Studying these two flimsy accounts of Gordon-Smith’s alleged mission, and setting aside the obvious discrepancies, he would appear, at the very least, to have had all the right credentials. At this time the British SIS mission in Russia numbered only about ten personnel and consisted mainly of desk officers and security personnel validating travel documents and watching border crossings; it is logical therefore that highly experienced military men such as Gordon-Smith, based in northern Russia, would be called upon as back-up.54
Stephen Berthold Smith (without the Gordon, which was added during World War I to avoid confusion with so many war-dead named Smith) was born in Russia in 1890 to a wealthy English grain exporter who had married a Russian and settled in Taganrog. The family had been extremely well connected, and during his childhood he had met several members of the Imperial Family. He was bilingual and also spoke fluent French and German. After studying at Cambridge he enlisted with the 8th South Staffordshire regiment on the outbreak of World War I, but was invalided out with trench foot in 1915. ‘I can’t march, but I can fly,’ he said defiantly, and joined the Royal Flying Corps. He soon got his wings and in around November 1916, no doubt due in part to his language skills, he was seconded to the Russian Air Force.55 He was sent with a group of airmen to assemble and test British aircraft transported by sea to the Russians via Archangel and from there by rail to Moscow. Based at the flying school of the Moscow Imperial Aeronautical Society, the RFC team trained Russian pilots and mechanics, and in March 1917 Gordon-Smith was awarded the Order of St Stanislav, third grade, for his ‘achievements in preparing the aircraft and aeronautic equipment from Britain’.56 In June 1917, the RFC team was sent to the south-western front in Galicia. It was attached to the XIth Army during Kerensky’s summer offensive, but by the autumn the collapse of discipline in the Russian army in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution prompted a decision to bring the British pilots home. Gordon-Smith was back in England by the beginning of 1918, but soon afterwards was reposted to the British Supply Mission to Russia (known as Rusplycom) based at Archangel.