by Giles Milton
Her work as a prostitute – which was known to the authorities and tolerated by them – gave Agent Z the perfect cover. ‘What was more natural,’ wrote Hill, ‘than that unknown men should constantly be coming and going in and out of her flat.’ He added that she was absolutely reliable ‘and our weary couriers could rest in safety in one of our rooms there.’
This was just one of many addresses available to Hill and his couriers. He had nine other safe houses to be used in times of emergency, including a dacha in the countryside outside Moscow. This was ‘a small wooden country residence forty miles away, which was to be a final retreat and refuge if Moscow grew too hot for me or any of my agents.’
Renting so many properties was expensive but essential. Each one also had to have a cover to mask its real purpose: ‘a completely plausible and natural raison d’être for its existence,’ wrote Hill.
Hill’s own headquarters was to be at an unassuming house on Djatnitakaia Street in one of the poorer quarters of the capital. It was here that he spent much of his time. It was here, too, that he stored his money, kept his papers and directed his espionage operations. He shared the house with three women accomplices, all of them talented and two of them beautiful. It was a happy arrangement for the womanising Hill.
The Bolshevik regime had not yet formally broken diplomatic relations with its former allies. The Western powers were also reluctant to further damage their relations with Russia. Based on the political information being received from Reilly, there was still a faint hope that Trotsky might be persuaded to rekindle the war against Germany.
Hill had no wish to commit himself to an underground existence until such time as relations between the two countries were irrevocably ruptured. He used the intervening weeks to perfect his new identity.
‘By this time I was living a double life,’ he wrote. ‘Part of the day I would be in uniform . . . and living as a British officer, the rest of the time I was dressed in mufti, visiting my agents on foot.’
A consummate spy, he knew that success lay in detailed planning. ‘I was looking ahead . . . beginning to organise secret quarters which would be very necessary for me once the Bolsheviks attempted to restrict my activities.’
At the same time as Sidney Reilly and George Hill were preparing to go permanently underground, Robert Bruce Lockhart was struggling to keep open the channels of diplomacy between the British Government and the Bolsheviks. This was proving far from easy: every decision taken by London seemed to widen still further the gulf between the two countries.
The British Government’s most pressing concern remained the security of the stockpiles of Allied weaponry in the ports of Northern Russia. Ministers had been hoping that Lenin would permit them to send troops into these ports in order to ensure their safe keeping. But this was not to be: Lenin and Trotsky were vehemently opposed to such a move.
Lockhart discussed the issue with Reilly and Hill. Then, based on the information they were able to give him, he attempted to advise the British Government on matters of policy. But the only consistency to his advice was its inconsistency. One minute he proposed making friendly overtures to the Bolsheviks, the next he was advocating military intervention on a grand scale. The lack of clarity earned him a barrage of criticism from senior officials in London.
‘Lockhart’s advice has been in a political sense unsound and in a military sense criminally misleading,’ fumed Major-General Alfred Knox, who had formerly served at the British Embassy in Petrograd.
The Foreign Office agreed with Knox’s assessment, but injected a note of humour into their response. ‘Although Mr Lockhart’s advice may be bad,’ wrote Lord Robert Cecil, ‘we cannot be accused of having followed it.’ It was fortunate that they were receiving a more accurate assessment of the situation from other sources, notably Arthur Ransome.
The criticism of Lockhart was not without justification, but Whitehall mandarins would have done well to turn the spotlight on themselves. In the months since the Bolshevik revolution, their dealings with Russia had been muddle-headed and inconsistent. They had vacillated, made policy U-turns and failed to inform Lockhart of their thinking. Their most important decision was whether or not to risk the Bolsheviks’ wrath by landing troops in the northern ports. Yet even on this issue, there was no clarity.
‘For three months London had given no indication of its policy or policies,’ wrote Lockhart. It was scarcely surprising that he found it impossible to do his job.
He responded to their criticism of him with a withering assessment of their own conduct. ‘There was no British policy, unless seven different policies can be called a policy.’
Even Lenin agreed with Lockhart. ‘Your Lloyd George,’ he said, ‘is like a man playing roulette and scattering chips on every number.’
In such troubled times, Lockhart sought solace in women. He had fallen head over heels in love with the dazzlingly seductive Maria Zakrveskia, an old-style aristocrat possessed with charm, wit and unconventional good looks. Moura – that was what everyone called her – had previously been married to Count von Benckendorff, the Tsarist ambassador to London. The count’s murder at the hands of the Bolsheviks had left her single. Now, she was to find herself the focus of Lockhart’s most ardent devotions.
He confessed himself to be spellbound by Moura’s vitality, and he lavished her with presents and praise. ‘Into my life something had entered which was stronger than any other tie, stronger than life itself.’
He vowed never to be parted from his beloved Moura, who became a living obsession. ‘Where she loved, there was her world,’ he wrote, ‘and her philosophy of life had made her mistress of all the consequences.’ So fervent was his ardour that he flaunted Moura in public and did little to conceal their affair from the prying eyes of the Cheka.
Lockhart had originally been sent to Moscow as a semi-official agent of the British government. His diplomatic accreditation had given him access to Lenin, Trotsky and other senior Bolsheviks. But the rumour that he had been involved in Savinkov’s counter-revolution, coupled with the increasing likelihood of Allied intervention in Northern Russia, had earned him the mistrust of the new regime.
‘The sands were running out,’ wrote Lockhart of the increasingly bleak political situation. ‘We were drifting rapidly towards the inevitable tragedy.’
That tragedy moved one step nearer on the evening of 17 July 1918, eight months after the revolution, when Lockhart became the first Westerner to learn of the brutal execution of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife the tsarina, and all of their children. News of the killings was immediately conveyed to London, where it caused shock and outrage. The attitude of the Bolshevik government made the crime all the more heinous in the eyes of British ministers.
‘There was no question of disapproval or disavowal,’ wrote Lockhart. ‘In its leading articles, the Bolshevik press did everything it could to justify the murder and reviled the tsar as a tyrant and a butcher.’
While Allied governments digested news of the tsar’s execution, a game of diplomatic brinkmanship was being played out in the northern town of Vologda. It only served to reinforce Lockhart’s opinion that real danger was just around the corner.
Vologda, which lay some 430 miles to the north of Moscow, was the town to which many diplomats had retreated when the threat of the advancing German Army overrunning Moscow and Petrograd had been at its height. Lockhart was one of the few who had been courageous enough to remain.
‘As a connecting link with Moscow,’ he wrote, ‘it [Vologda] was as useless as the North Pole.’
Most diplomats had nevertheless remained there in splendid isolation, keeping themselves aloof from the dangers of Moscow. Their number included the ambassadors of America and France as well as the Italian chargé d’affaires. To Lockhart, their self-imposed exile was little short of preposterous. ‘It was as if three foreign Ambassadors were trying to advise their governments on an English cabinet crisis from a village in the Hebrides.’
They show
ed no enthusiasm for meeting the Bolshevik rulers and even less interest in trying to understand the nature of the threat that the new regime posed to the world. They preferred to remain in Vologda, doing nothing except eating, drinking and playing poker.
The leader of this indolent band was David Francis, the octogenarian American ambassador. ‘Knowledge of Russian politics he had none,’ wrote Lockhart. ‘To do him justice, he made no pretence of professing to understand the situation.’
His ignorance was matched by that of the Brazilian representative, whose attitude would have been comical had the situation not been so dangerous. ‘He had reduced the art of diplomacy to a simple formula: do nothing and promotion and honours are certain.’
He slept all day, played poker all night and fulfilled a vow made several years earlier never to do a stroke of work. ‘From that moment,’ noted Lockhart in characteristically laconic tone, ‘his diplomatic career had been one long triumph and his promotion had been as regular as clockwork.’ He added that ‘the formula is not so absurd as the layman may imagine. It has stood more than one British diplomat in good stead.’
Into this far-flung ambassadorial Arcadia now strutted Karl Radek, ‘the Bolshevik Puck’, as Lockhart described him. Employing his customary tactics of bluster and grit, he ordered all the diplomats to return to Moscow.
‘He appeared before the Ambassadors with his revolver,’ wrote Lockhart. ‘He argued, cajoled and even threatened.’ But the ambassadors refused to budge, for they mistrusted the intentions of the Bolsheviks.
In this, at least, they showed wisdom. Lenin and Trotsky were convinced that the Allies were going to land a significant number of troops in Northern Russia. ‘Realising that intervention was now inevitable,’ wrote Lockhart, ‘they desired to hold the Ambassadors in Moscow as hostages.’
Karl Radek had not travelled alone to Vologda: he had been accompanied by Arthur Ransome. As a trusted confidant of the Bolsheviks, Ransome had been asked to act as Radek’s ‘interpreter and referee’.
Ransome was naïve to have agreed to this, for it put him on a collision course with the ambassadors. He told them it was ridiculous to remain in Vologda and gave the poker-loving American ambassador a curt dressing down.
He also criticised the British chargé d’affaires, Sir Francis Lindley, for refusing to leave the safety of Vologda and return to the capital. Lindley could hardly believe what he was hearing. ‘You don’t seem to realise,’ he hissed to Ransome, ‘that these people are our enemies.’
An ill-timed telegram from Foreign Commissar Georgy Chicherin only increased the fears of the ambassadors. The commissar warned them that their lives would be in grave danger unless they immediately returned to Moscow. His words had quite the opposite effect. On 25 July, all of the foreign diplomats in Vologda boarded a train to Archangel and left Bolshevik Russia forever.
In the aftermath of their departure, Ransome once again found himself accused of having pro-Bolshevik sympathies. Major-General Knox was the most outspoken about Ransome’s intimacy with the Bolshevik leaders: on one occasion, he went so far as to say that he should be ‘shot like a dog.’
But Ransome had personal reasons for fearing a rupture of relations with Moscow. It was certain to lead to his expulsion from the country, along with the other remaining Westerners, and this would have serious ramifications on his relationship with Evgenia. The two of them could not marry, for Ransome already had a wife, and Evgenia (as his mistress) was unlikely to be granted an entry visa for Britain. Yet she faced a potentially dangerous situation if she remained in Moscow. Ransome feared that the Allied powers would march on Moscow and purge Russia of its Bolshevik masters. If so, Evgenia would be caught in the maelstrom.
Ransome had spent a considerable amount of time trying to persuade Evgenia to leave Russia with him in the event of the Allies landing troops in Archangel. Evgenia had at first demurred, but Ransome eventually secured her agreement. He then went directly to Lockhart and asked for assistance in getting Evgenia the necessary papers.
Lockhart proved as obliging as ever. He sent a telegram to the Foreign Office in London asking for help. ‘A very useful lady, who has worked here in an extremely confidential position in a government office desires to give up her present position,’ he wrote.
He requested permission to provide her with all the necessary papers. ‘She has been of the greatest service to me and is anxious to establish herself in Stockholm where she would be at the centre of information regarding underground agitation in Russia.’
This would only be possible with the assistance of the British government. ‘In order to enable her to leave secretly, I wish to have authority to put her to Mr Ransome’s passport as his wife and facilitate her departure via Murmansk.’
When MI5 learned of Lockhart’s request they were totally against it. They feared that Evgenia and Ransome would return to England and stoke revolutionary trouble on home soil. But Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, was fully aware of the services that the two of them had performed. He overrode MI5’s concerns and Lockhart was sanctioned to supply Evgenia with the necessary papers.
With international tensions at boiling point, Ransome decided to take no chances. As well as equipping himself and Evgenia with English papers, he persuaded his friends in the Bolshevik government to issue him with a Soviet passport as well. He paid a high price for this document: he was charged with delivering three million roubles in cash to the Bolshevik’s International Bureau in Sweden.
Ransome kept quiet about the smuggling operation, hoping that no one would discover what he had agreed to do. But it was soon leaked to an unnamed British agent who found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to report on one of his own.
An internal telegram reported that Ransome was rumoured to be leaving Russia with ‘a large amount of Russian Government money and to be travelling with Bolshevik passport.’
Evgenia was to travel separately from her English lover, leaving the country in the company of a Bolshevik mission to Berlin. From here she intended to travel to Stockholm in order to be reunited with him.
Ransome paid a final visit to Lockhart before leaving the country. ‘[He] told us that the show was over,’ wrote Lockhart. A dangerous course was being plotted, and Soviet Russia was now on a direct collision course with the Western democracies.
Ransome’s departure came in the nick of time. After a brief stop in Petrograd at the beginning of August, he made his way to the border with Finland and soon arrived in Helsingfors. By the time he was safely in the Finnish capital, all hell had broken loose in Archangel. Allied forces had landed in the port and wild stories began to circulate about the size of the invasion.
‘For several days the city was prey to rumour,’ wrote Lockhart. ‘The Allies had landed in strong force. Some stories put the figure at 100,000.’
There were also rumours that the Japanese had landed seven divisions in the Far East and were even now marching through Siberia.
‘The confusion was indescribable,’ recalled Lockhart. He found it impossible to get accurate information on the landings and paid a visit on Oliver Wardrop, one of the few diplomats who had not left the country. It was while the two men were chatting that even more dramatic events unfolded.
‘The Consulate General was surrounded by an armed band,’ wrote Lockhart. ‘It was composed of agents of the Cheka. They sealed up everything, and everyone in the building was put under arrest except Hicks and myself.’
The Cheka foolishly neglected to search the top rooms of the consulate, much to Lockhart’s relief. ‘While the Cheka agents were cross-examining our Consular officials downstairs, our intelligence officers were busy engaged in burning their ciphers and other compromising documents upstairs. Clouds of smoke belched from the chimneys and penetrated even downstairs, but, although it was summer, the Cheka gentlemen noticed nothing untoward in this holocaust.’
In all, some two hundred Allied nationals were arrested by the Cheka and interned as hosta
ges. Lockhart escaped imprisonment. Trotsky had given him a special laissez-passer when he first arrived in Russia and for the time being this still held good. He was free to travel around Moscow unmolested.
American nationals were also spared, as it was not yet known that their forces had taken part in the Allied landings.
There were a small number of others who had also avoided arrest. Sidney Reilly remained a free man, albeit one with an assumed name and fake papers. George Hill was also still at large. Just a few weeks earlier, he had asked Karl Radek what would happen if the Allies landed troops in Russia.
Radek was full of playful jest, but his humour was characteristically chilling. He told Hill that he would either be incarcerated or executed ‘to show Bolshevik contempt for officers of a capitalist power.’
Hill was appalled. ‘The joke was far too near probability for me to enter into a discussion with any feeling of enjoyment.’
For months, he had been planning the moment when he would go underground. Now, the time had come.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MISSION TO TASHKENT
Two thousand miles to the south-east of Moscow, amid the lonely peaks of the Pamir Mountains, a small party of men was winding a slow passage across high-altitude glaciers and icy scree.
They included three intrepid Englishmen, each of whom was well qualified for the task ahead. Frederick Bailey was an officer serving with the Indian Political Department, an elite band dedicated to the protection of British India. He was a distinguished explorer and recipient of the Royal Geographical Society’s coveted gold explorers’ medal. He had also served as a Tibetan-speaking subaltern in Sir Francis Younghusband’s 1904 invasion of Tibet. Shot at Flanders and again at Gallipoli, he was deemed far too valuable to be returned to the battlefield for a third time. His exceptional linguistic skill saw him transferred to India where he was singled out for a highly unusual mission that would take him deep into Bolshevik-controlled Central Asia. ‘An absolutely first class man,’ was how the viceroy described Bailey.