The Race to Save the Romanovs

by Helen Rappaport

  Such a meeting was in fact alleged in the diaries of a now utterly discredited fantasist, an army officer named Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen. In a note in his diary for August 1918, he described an alleged conversation that he had had earlier in the summer with the King and Lord Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff, at Buckingham Palace.37 During it, Meinertzhagen claimed that King George had said ‘he was devoted to the Tsar and could anything be done about rescuing them by air as he feared the whole family would be murdered’.38 With his limited technical knowledge, it is not improbable that the King might have asked Trenchard about the possibility of an air rescue; but the logic of such a mission rescuing – one by one – all seven members of the Romanov family is absurd. The best aircraft on offer at the time by the RFC (two-seater fighter or reconnaissance aircraft, such as the Sopwith 1½ Strutter) had a maximum flying distance of about 300 miles before they would need to land and refuel.39 Murmansk was 1,844 miles from Ekaterinburg, and Archangel considerably closer, at 1,162. To cover that kind of distance, any plane based with Allied forces there would have needed a vast, coordinated system of fuel dumps at strategic points along the route. The only feasible alternative could have been a shorter flight to the White Russian lines in the east, but this too would have required a network of White agents and personnel to facilitate it.

  In a Mystery Files programme for National Geographic in 2010, Prince Michael of Kent claimed that when Air Commodore Peregrine Fellowes (who was appointed ADC to King George in 1926) was a pilot in the Royal Naval Air Service, he had been involved in ‘an attempt made by aircraft’ to rescue the Romanovs. Fellowes, he asserted, was ‘given the opportunity to plan an escape and would have flown in and landed nearby and got them out’. Peregrine Forbes Morant Fellowes was indeed a pioneer pilot of considerable courage and daring during World War I. He qualified as a pilot in the Royal Naval Air Service in August 1915, and in April 1917 was appointed Squadron Commander of 2 Squadron at Saint-Pol-sur-Mer, Dunkirk and was based there until November. But there is no indication of him being stationed in, or even near, Russia at any time. There is nothing in his service record either to suggest that he would have chosen to fly anything other than a single-engined aircraft – and certainly nothing like a Handley Page Type O/400 biplane, used by the RNAS and capable of carrying a passenger.

  The myth of Peregrine Fellowes’s role goes back, sadly, to the untrustworthy Meinertzhagen. According to the author Julian Fellowes, his father was told back in the 1970s, when interviewed by Summers and Mangold, that Meinertzhagen had claimed that ‘the pilot of the aircraft in this scheme was my great uncle’.40 Puzzlingly, Summers and Mangold did not feature the Meinertzhagen claim until the third edition of File on the Tsar in 2002, by which time nobody was taking Meinertzhagen seriously; nor did they mention Fellowes’s supposed involvement. The story was, however, fashioned to suit the narrative of Michael Occleshaw’s Romanov Conspiracies in 1993, when he accessed the original Meinertzhagen diaries at Rhodes House Library, Oxford, in order to claim that Grand Duchess Tatiana escaped the slaughter at the Ipatiev House, spirited away by a plane that had – quite preposterously – landed nearby. In the end the Meinertzhagen rescue plan, in so far as it remotely relates to Lieutenant Colonel Fellowes in 1918 – by which time he held a senior enough rank to take charge of some kind of secret ‘aerial extraction unit’ – has one enormous gaping hole. In May 1918 (when this last-ditch mission was supposedly being talked of) he was a prisoner of war, having been shot down by the Germans over Zeebrugge.

  There are other reasons to doubt Richard Meinertzhagen as a reliable witness. Far from being involved, as he claimed, in developing British intelligence in Russia during World War I, prior to 1918 he had in fact been based in East Africa and then Palestine.* He had no proven on-the-ground knowledge of Russia and seems a most unlikely candidate for such a mission, particularly as in 1918 he was yet to retrospectively create his supposed career as a dashing and daring intelligence officer.41 His undoubted forging, at a later date, of what are supposed to be contemporary diaries was conclusively proved in Brian Garfield’s 2007 book The Meinertzhagen Mystery – The Life and Legend of a Colossal Fraud. Garfield here provides compelling evidence that Meinertzhagen was often not where he claimed to be and had a habit of stealing other people’s exploits as his own. Did he do so here, with regard to the Romanovs?

  * * *

  Not a shred of reliable evidence on this or any other meeting between the King and the SIS about a rescue plan has ever surfaced from the Royal Archives. In the case of the National Archives, this is not to say that documents might not once have existed, or still lurk there, overlooked or misfiled. Searches undertaken for this book have yielded, for example, the Woodhouse Telegram, not previously listed or cited, which was sitting in a file waiting to be discovered, despite repeated assurances made over the years by the TNA that ‘nothing has been withheld’.42

  When we strip away all the false trails and improbabilities, we are left with only one tenuous scenario relating to the Ekaterinburg period. This revolves around a secret British mission planned by forty-two-year-old Major Stephen Alley of MI1(c) – undoubtedly one of the best SIS operatives in Russia at the time. It appears to have involved, at the least, an initial recce of the Ipatiev House, its location and guards, in order to assess the potential for a rescue.

  * * *

  The dapper, moustachioed Stephen Alley was born in Moscow in 1876, son of a British engineer working for the Russian railways, and was a fluent Russian speaker. After university and training as an engineer he worked for the family firm in London, before returning to Russia in 1910. In 1914 he was recruited by Mansfield Cumming of the SIS as an assistant military attaché at the Petrograd embassy, as part of the Intelligence Mission later headed by Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Hoare. In 1916 he was made British Military Control Officer in Petrograd, working on counter-intelligence. Alley and a fellow agent from the Petrograd Station, Oswald Rayner, have since been implicated in the murder of Rasputin at the Yusupov Palace in December that year. Whether or not they played a part in his demise, Alley was certainly aware of the murder plot, and well in with members of the old tsarist regime (he had actually been born in a house owned by the Yusupovs in Moscow and had worked with the Provisional Government’s secret service). In view of this, he was quietly removed from Petrograd after the Bolshevik takeover in October 1917.43 His on-the-ground knowledge of Russia was, however, too valuable not to exploit, and in March 1918 he was sent to Murmansk as Senior Naval Intelligence Officer, where he remained until approximately August 1918.44

  In Russia, Alley ran an extensive spy network and may have also been connected with an American National Intelligence Department operation running Russian agents into Siberia. A file in the National Archives indicates that the British were certainly intercepting telegrams between the local Soviets, including Ekaterinburg, and Moscow, and Alley would have been in a position to receive ciphered information about the Romanov family in the city.45 In 2006, a television documentary, Three Kings at War, for Channel 4 showed for the first time Alley’s personal notebook and a sketch map of the crossroads by the Ipatiev House, to which historian Andrew Cook had been granted access by the Alley family. The assumption has always been that Alley himself made the trip, but given his key role at Murmansk in control of numerous agents in Russia, it is far more likely that these observations were passed back to him by another agent whom he had sent on ahead.46 The sketch map shown could in fact quite easily have been made by Alley from examination of a good 1900s map of the city that was then in existence. He would not have needed to go there to draw it.

  Whoever it was who sent information back to Alley (and whether indeed any British agent at all was specifically sent to Ekaterinburg), that person would most likely have holed up at the British consulate not far from the Ipatiev House, or possibly even in Thomas Preston’s own home, in order to spy on the comings and goings there. The Ipatiev House was located at 49 Voznesensky Prospekt; the Br
itish consulate was further down at no. 27, but Preston’s house was much closer, ‘some four houses away’, at either 46 or 44.47 Or perhaps Preston himself provided the information via an internal ciphered message to Murmansk? He had after all been living in Ekaterinburg since 1913 and knew the city better than anyone.

  Wherever Alley – or his agent – was based in Ekaterinburg, the evidence in his notebook is scanty, suggesting the vantage point was very limited. Finding somewhere high enough that would allow sight of the house and the garden where the family walked, over and beyond the two high palisades surrounding it, would have been extremely difficult. It was bristling with machine-gun posts and had a rota of fifty or so heavily armed guards – stationed outside the gates, between the two palisades, and also within the house itself. The building was impregnable to anything but a highly organised military attack; and, even then, the family were held in upstairs rooms accessible only by a single staircase. In the event of an attack, their captors could have killed them all before help had reached them.

  Nevertheless, on 24 May, ahead of this recce, Alley had written to MI1C headquarters to discuss the possible rescue and delivery of the seven ‘valuables’ (a promotion for the Romanovs from Yakovlev’s ‘baggage’) back to Murmansk. He would need a grant of £1,000 a month to fund the surveillance by four officers, he said, and specifically named the SIS men whom he wished to enlist for the mission: Second Lieutenant G. Hill (possibly George Edward Hill), Lieutenant John Hitching, Lieutenant Ernest Michelson and Lieutenant Commander Malcolm MacLaren, the last of whom was already on his staff at Murmansk. ‘These officers should clearly understand [the] nature of employment,’ he added, ‘which may require them to pass as civilians.’48 Alley chose well: all four men spoke fluent Russian and knew the country like any native. Hitching, like Alley, had spent much of his early life in Russia; Hill’s family had traded with Russia since the eighteenth century; and Michelson had lived in Russia since the 1890s and had done undercover sabotage and intelligence work in Finland; MacLaren had been born on an oil claim near the Caspian Sea, was married to a Russian and could pass as one.49

  At this point one must ask the question: had the original Jonas Lied rescue plan via the Arctic been reconsidered, even though the house in Murmansk had still not been erected to receive the family? For Henry Armitstead was once again back in the frame as the important link-man in Archangel, having already been primed for the British economic mission to Siberia discussed with Lied. As Alley noted:

  I have made it clear to Armitstead, in no uncertain terms, that his role is strictly liaison and that he must leave all arrangements for the journey to Murmansk to us. We are responsible for securing and delivering the valuables, he is responsible for their safe passage out of Russia.50

  Comments in Alley’s notebook suggest his plan was that the Romanovs should be taken by train to Murmansk, and from there on a British ship to England. But bearing in mind the hair-raising experiences only recently encountered by Yakovlev during a much shorter rail journey with the family, this would have exposed them to constant danger and certain attack. Alley’s knowledge of the Russian railway system might have influenced his choice, but the added complication of getting the Romanovs north from Ekaterinburg, rather than from Tobolsk, makes Lied’s original river plan seem a much better bet. Archangel as the ultimate venue – again as per the original Lied plan – would have been nearer and thus quicker to reach, although by June 1918 the British and Americans had landed an intervention force at Murmansk and had control of the port. A Royal Navy cruiser could, theoretically, have been waiting for the Romanovs there in June/July 1918.

  Of the undercover British officers who can actually be placed firmly in Ekaterinburg, the only one who can be identified is someone not on Alley’s list: Captain Kenelm Digby-Jones. His presence in Ekaterinburg on ‘special duty’ is confirmed in British consul Thomas Preston’s memoirs Before the Curtain; his service record is extant and certainly supports the fact that he was on a mission there in July 1918 on behalf of the commander of Allied forces in Northern Russia, Major General Poole.51 Fortuitously Digby-Jones’s War Office file contains detailed timings of his movements. He left Murmansk on about 3 June, travelling via Vologda to Archangel. On 10 July he carried on south from Archangel to Ekaterinburg via Vyatka and Perm – a circuitous route through Bolshevik-controlled territory, and some of it on horseback by road and track, in order to avoid arrest. But Digby-Jones did not arrive in Ekaterinburg until 16 July.52

  The timing does not fit the Alley scenario, but it does show that the overland journey from Archangel alone was about five days, thus indicating the enormous difficulties faced in getting one person, let alone seven Romanovs, out to safety. It would almost certainly preclude Alley giving up that amount of time to go to Ekaterinburg himself, particularly as on 29 May he stated that he was ‘short of staff’. A ciphered FO telegram confirms that the nature of Digby-Jones’s mission was primarily to make contact with the Czech Legions, who were advancing along the Trans-Siberian Railway from the east, and pass on secret despatches for their leaders that they should ‘occupy Perm and Viatka, and join up with Allied forces at Vologda’.53 But Digby-Jones died of complications brought on by Spanish flu at Chelyabinsk in September 1918, and yet again the door slams shut: we have nothing more to go on.54

  If we take a more rational look at the possible presence of British agents in Ekaterinburg in the summer of 1918, it is likely, as with the Lied mission, that there has been a degree of misinterpretation. There was a very good reason for Allied spies to be there – indeed, the city was swarming with them, especially American and French ones – in the run-up to its seizure by the Whites and Czechs at the end of July.55 In mid-May 1918 a German ‘Red Cross mission’ had arrived in Ekaterinburg, ostensibly undertaking humanitarian work with POWs. Times correspondent Robert Wilton confirmed that their ranks included undercover agents, sent to ascertain details on how the Romanovs were living and being treated at the Ipatiev House. But most of the agents watching the city had other objectives: the Urals region was rich in mineral deposits and the Russian mint was based in Ekaterinburg. A major platinum refinery had been established there in 1914, at a time when Russia was providing 90 per cent of the world’s supply.56

  The Bolsheviks, who had nationalised all the mines in 1917, knew that the city was likely to fall to the counter-revolutionaries and for weeks had been busily moving out consignments of minerals and gemstones by rail to Perm and on to Moscow.57* Thomas Preston, who had mined for gold in Siberia in his youth, had been specifically reappointed British consul to the city in 1913 so that he could monitor the Urals mining industry, in particular platinum production, to the War Office. In 1918 he was sending back regular reports on this and was attempting to procure platinum for the British Ministry of Munitions.58 There were thus plenty of other reasons – both military and economic – for British agents to be on clandestine missions in Ekaterinburg in June–July 1918, to which the possible rescue of the Romanovs was (much like the Jonas Lied mission) only a possible adjunct.

  Whatever the truth of the matter, it would appear that Stephen Alley quickly concluded that any attempt to storm the Ipatiev House would be madness – a suicide mission. But there is no report to confirm this in the official files, if he did indeed put anything in writing. He was recalled to London soon afterwards, maintained his intelligence links and worked in MI5 from 1939 until his retirement in 1957. Bound by the Official Secrets Act, Alley never spoke of his mission to Ekaterinburg, nor did he ever reveal anything of his secret exploits in Russia to his wife Beatrice; he was ‘a real clam’, she said.59 Many years later she confided to Anthony Summers that ‘when she asked her husband what he did, he would say, “Sometimes I will go away for a night and sometimes for a year, and I won’t be able to tell you where I am, but I’m working for the king.” She thought he was going for dirty weekends.’60

  Alley’s elusive personality is but one of the many obstacles in this story. Was this elevent
h-hour rescue plan devised at the explicit request of King George without his government’s knowledge? Or was it an offshoot of another secret government objective? There is no evidence to show it ever got beyond Alley’s sketchy notes, but if such a foolhardy mission had been initiated – and then botched – it would by necessity have had to be hushed up, in order to spare the King and his government any embarrassment. Romanov writer Michael Occleshaw argues that in this situation the Royal Archives would have had to be ‘weeded of any incriminating evidence’, to save the King from being accused of ‘wilfully gambling with his relatives’ lives’. A member of the Alley family interviewed in 2006 said that word in the family was that the mission ‘was actually aborted because it wasn’t possible to achieve it’. But at what point this happened we shall never know.61 Certainly it was the view of Thomas Preston that ‘to have attempted anything in the nature of their escape would have been madness and fraught with great danger to the Royal family themselves’. There were ‘ten thousand Red soldiers in the town and Bolshevik spies at every corner and in every house’.62

  By the summer of 1918 the difficulties of obtaining news of the Romanovs, made worse by the fact that they were no longer allowed to send and receive letters, had greatly heightened not just their sense of abandonment, but also the anguish of their relatives who were desperate for news of them. Yet, from a distance, one member of King George’s extended family in England had by now become so deeply concerned about the fate of the family – particularly the Romanov children – as to take independent action on their behalf.