Russian Roulette

by Giles Milton

  Dukes continued to gather intelligence in spite of the difficulties. ‘From Moscow, I received regular reports regarding Soviet internal policy and the special reports submitted to Trotsky on the state of the Red Army.’

  At one point, Dukes even considered moving to Moscow in order to be nearer the centre of decision-making. But when he learned that Petrograd was to be made the headquarters of the Comintern, he realised that this northern city was ‘of greater importance to me as a base of operations.’

  After a second raid on the doctor’s apartment, Dukes deemed it prudent to leave. Homeless and adrift, he was reduced to spending his nights in Volkovo Cemetery where he hid in the neglected tomb of an Old Believer.

  His precarious existence made it increasingly difficult to smuggle his reports out of the country. ‘I was completely isolated,’ he confessed, ‘. . . for although I found couriers to carry my despatches out, none returned to me and I was ignorant as to whether my messages were being delivered.’

  Dukes’s chief courier remained Pyotr Sokoloff, who had carried many reports from Petrograd to Finland (and thence to Stockholm). But one day Sokoloff failed to return. Dukes made discreet enquiries but could discover no news of what had happened to him.

  ‘When a month passed and there was no sign of him, I became anxious, but when two months and more passed and there was still no sign of him, I began to fear the worst.’

  Dukes made strenuous efforts to get his reports out of the country by other means; he even tried to bribe an operator at the Petrograd wireless station, but the man wanted too much money. Dukes found himself in the galling position of having to destroy some of his hard-won intelligence reports to prevent them falling into the wrong hands.

  Isolated and alone, he was at a loss to know what to do.

  Augustus Agar chose the Finnish fishing port of Terijoki as his base for rescuing Dukes. In pre-revolutionary days it had been used as a sailing club by the aristocracy of St Petersburg. Now the village had fallen into decay and its wooden dachas were abandoned. Agar could conduct his operations untroubled by prying eyes.

  The skimmers arrived in Terijoki within a few days, having been specially transported across the North Sea. Agar could set to work on the detailed planning of his mission.

  His first task was to acquire a Russian chart of the minefields that lay between Terijoki and Petrograd. This proved very easy. ‘Like a magician, ST30 produced one on a Russian document.’ It revealed all of the submerged breakwaters that linked the forts and batteries in the Gulf of Finland.

  Cumming’s agents had also managed to track down Dukes’s courier, Pyotr Sokoloff. He had been forced to seek temporary refuge in Finland after a particularly hazardous mission. Now, he was brought to Terijoki and solicited for information that might lead to Dukes’s rescue. Agar immediately warmed to Sokoloff, finding him ‘full of guts and courage.’ The feeling was mutual: Pyotr agreed to participate in Agar’s mission, even though it would place him back in danger.

  Agar’s plan was to cross the Russian minefields in the skimmer and deposit Sokoloff on the thickly wooded shores to the north-west of Petrograd. Sokoloff would then head to the city on foot, make contact with Dukes and bring him back to the same stretch of shoreline. Both men would then be plucked off by Agar a few days later. The outbound mission was scheduled to take place on the night of 10 June, just before the white nights of midsummer.

  On the evening in question, the men synchronised their watches and checked their revolvers before pushing off into the night. It was exactly 10 p.m. and the sky was dark, but they knew that the summer nights were so short that they had only a few hours to complete their mission.

  The journey across the Gulf of Finland was extremely treacherous. They had to pass through the chain of heavily armed forts and breakwaters that linked Kronstadt with the mainland and they also had to cross the minefield.

  Agar silenced the engines as they approached the forts and they inched forwards at an agonisingly slow speed. They did not even whisper to each other, lest they alert the Russian garrison to their presence. Soon, the naval battlements loomed large in the darkness, black silhouettes against a grey night sky.

  ‘Four pairs of eyes were glued on them as if hypnotised,’ wrote Agar. ‘Every nerve was tense, every muscle taut. Would these suddenly flash out the beam of a searchlight?’

  If so, Agar knew what to do. He would slam the skimmer into full throttle and attempt to outrun the gunfire that would be sure to follow.

  In the event, they slipped through the forts unnoticed and were soon nearing the circular minefield. Only now did Agar thrust the engine into full speed. The little craft reacted in an instant, lurching forwards and then skimming across the surface of the water leaving the mines beneath undisturbed.

  They travelled so fast that they reached the Neva Delta in less than fifteen minutes. Agar then cut the engines and helped Sokoloff unlash the tiny boat that had been strapped to the skimmer. This was to be his means of reaching the rocky shore.

  ‘I waited there for his signal,’ wrote Agar. ‘It came soon, three short flashes on his electric torch from the direction of the rushes.’ Sokoloff was safely ashore and the first stage of the mission had gone like clockwork.

  Agar fired the engines and headed back to Terijoki. His plan was to return in three days to pick up Dukes.

  Paul Dukes was reunited with Sokoloff quite by chance while he was strolling through the gardens of the Winter Palace. He caught sight of a familiar figure seated on a park bench.

  ‘I peered – and my heart gave a bound – for to my unspeakable joy and surprise I recognised my courier for whom I had so long been waiting.’

  Sokoloff tried to explain about Agar and his high-speed skimmers but it made no sense whatsoever to Dukes. He spoke of ‘some mysterious kind of motor-boat’ and of strange British operations in the Gulf of Finland. ‘But throughout the jumble there constantly recurred a name – “Eggar-Eggar-Eggar” and I gathered at once that this man “Eggar” as Peter pronounced it, was the man who by some quite miraculous means had deposited him here in Petrograd in the early hours of that morning.’

  Dukes stopped him in mid-sentence and asked him to start from the beginning. Sokoloff repeated what he had said, explaining how Agar had arrived from England with the most extraordinary boats he had ever seen. They were so fast that they flew across the water, throwing out a mountainous wave on either side.

  ‘I listened spellbound to this amazing story,’ wrote Dukes, ‘punctuating it with innumerable questions as incident after incident, each more incredible than the last, was unfolded.’ He was especially astonished that ‘Eggar’ had managed to cross the mine-strewn Gulf of Finland.

  Sokoloff was carrying a letter from Mansfield Cumming: this informed Dukes that he should remain in Russia if at all possible, ‘but that if I found it necessary to leave, I could return with the bearer.’ Sokoloff was also intending to remain in Petrograd for the foreseeable future.

  Dukes was keen to stay longer in Russia but was hampered by a lack of money. Now, Sokoloff came to the rescue. He handed him a large stack of Russian roubles that had been carefully forged by Cumming’s team in London. This clinched it for Dukes. He decided to spend a further month in Petrograd before being taken out by Agar in July.

  Augustus Agar and his skimmers were not the only British naval forces in Baltic waters at this time. In January 1919, Admiral Sir Walter Cowan had been sent with a fleet of ships to patrol the coastline of the newly independent Estonia and Latvia. His orders were to keep the sea-lanes open to merchant shipping.

  Agar had contacted Admiral Cowan on his arrival in the Baltic, just as Mansfield Cumming had requested. The admiral was friendly and asked if he could be of any assistance. Agar did indeed have a request and it was one that Cowan was not expecting. He asked if he could have a couple of torpedoes with which to arm his skimmers.

  ‘I explained that although in London I had been told quite definitely that I was to avoid all op
erations which would involve us in a hostile act . . . yet these torpedoes might come in very useful in self-defence.’

  Cowan was hesitant: the torpedoes on his flagship were among the most powerful ever produced and could easily sink a large vessel. But such was Agar’s persistence that the admiral eventually agreed to his request.

  Agar may have indeed intended to use the torpedoes for self-defence. But his time in Terijoki coincided with the mutiny of the huge Russian garrison in Kronstadt. This presented a serious threat to the Bolshevik regime and Trotsky’s response was characteristically brutal. He ordered the fortress to be bombed into submission.

  Agar felt a very British sense of indignation: the bombardment was not fair play, and he began toying with a bold if reckless retort. ‘Should I or should I not single-handed and without orders, set out to attack the bombarding battleships?’

  He knew he could wreak havoc with his torpedoes but he also knew that to attack the Soviet fleet would be to go against orders from London. He therefore decided to request permission to attack, sending a cipher to Sweden and thence to Whitehall.

  The answer arrived within hours. ‘BOATS TO BE USED FOR INTELLIGENCE PURPOSES ONLY – STOP – TAKE NO ACTION UNLESS SPECIALLY DIRECTED BY S[ENIOR].N[AVAL].O[FFICER]. BALTIC.’

  The note was clear and unambiguous: the requested permission had not been forthcoming. But Agar felt that the last sentence gave him room for manoeuvre. He was sure that Admiral Cowan would wish to encourage the mutinous troops and therefore took the momentous decision to attack the Bolshevik vessels that very evening.

  He set out in a single skimmer at around 11 p.m. on 17 June, when it was completely dark. He and his crew were nervous as they inched towards the Russian fleet; they kept their engine on the lowest throttle so that no one might be alerted to their presence. Agar had already selected his target: he intended to fire his torpedo at the biggest ship at anchor, the armoured cruiser, Oleg. The only drawback was that she was fenced in with destroyers and patrol vessels. Agar needed to penetrate this cordon before he could strike.

  In the darkness of the night, the skimmer slipped silently through the cordon of ships. All was quiet on the Russian fleet and the sentries, weary after the day’s bombardment, had fallen asleep at their posts.

  Agar’s eyes were fixed on the looming silhouette in front of him. It grew larger in the darkness and soon he could pick out details of the vessel. He knew that the time had come to launch his attack and felt a sudden rush of adrenaline.

  With a decisive flick of his wrist, he slammed hard on the throttle. As he did so, the front end of the skimmer rose high in the water and the twin petrol engines roared into action. Within seconds, they were alongside the Oleg, firing their torpedo at point-blank range and then spinning the skimmer on its nose in order to shoot away at full speed.

  ‘We looked back to see if our torpedo had hit and saw a large flash abreast the cruiser’s foremast funnel, followed almost immediately by a huge column of black smoke reaching up to the top of her mast.’

  They would have surveyed the damage more carefully had it not been for the burst of machine-gun fire that raked their path. Only the speed of the skimmer saved them from catastrophe: within seconds, they were beyond range of the Russian guns.

  Agar returned to Terijoki in jubilant spirits: he had crippled the Oleg. He was not prone to self doubt and was convinced he had done the right thing. But he experienced an uncharacteristic flutter of nerves as he prepared to inform Admiral Cowan of his nocturnal attack.

  He need not have worried: Cowan was delighted and said that the attack had boosted his own stature. ‘This enables me to show them [the Bolsheviks] that I have a sting which I can always use if they ever show their noses out of Kronstadt.’

  Agar confessed his concerns about the reaction in London, but he was reassured by Cowan. ‘He told me he approved absolutely of everything I had done and that if there was trouble with the Foreign Office about exceeding my instructions he would make my position quite clear and stand by me.’

  Agar was extremely relieved. ‘I went in feeling depressed, apprehensive and a little frightened – and I left in an exactly opposite mood.’

  Later that evening Admiral Cowan invited him to a champagne dinner and two days later, when he returned to Cowan’s flagship once again, he was given a hero’s welcome. Every vessel in the fleet was lined with cheering sailors. ‘Such moments as these can never be forgotten,’ wrote Agar.

  Agar was fortunate in having Cowan’s support, for his actions caused uproar in Whitehall. Not for the first time, one of Mansfield Cumming’s agents had wildly exceeded his brief.

  Cumming himself was delighted when he heard of Agar’s attack. It was exactly the sort of operation he loved – bold, hastily improvised and completely outlandish. He was already thinking about how to reward Agar.

  The Bolsheviks were rather less amused. They put a price of £5,000 on Agar’s head and let it be known that he would be executed if caught by the Cheka.

  Paul Dukes had hoped that the fake banknotes brought by Pyotr Sokoloff would bring him new opportunities for espionage. But he soon discovered they were useless.

  ‘[They] had the correct design and wording, but the paper was thin, its dye was not good and the inscription on some of them was smudged. The sheets were not of uniform thickness or colour.’ He knew that using them would carry unacceptable risks.

  Dukes could not operate without money. He needed to pay his contacts and he also needed funds ‘for lodging, food, clothing, travelling, sending couriers, paying “sackmen” [private bootleggers] and agents, purchasing information, tipping, bribing and all kinds of emergencies.’

  He now turned to the only available means of getting money: the last remaining English nationals in Petrograd. They had stayed behind in a forlorn bid to save their businesses. Now, Dukes hoped they would be able to advance him some cash.

  Among those still living in the city was George Gibson of the United Shipping Company. Gibson was constantly trailed by the Cheka and had already endured one spell in a Petrograd prison. The strain of living under observation had made him suspicious of everyone. Little wonder that he was extremely sceptical when a bearded Red Army officer pitched up at his office and whispered that his real name was Paul Dukes.

  Gibson had not seen Dukes for many months: indeed he had no idea that he was still living in the city. He was about to slam the door on this uninvited visitor when he heard the words ‘Henry Earles’ slip from Dukes’s lips. Gibson peered more closely at his visitor. Henry Earles was a password agreed between the Foreign Office and the residue of British nationals in Petrograd: it denoted an agent in need of help. Only now was Dukes invited inside.

  He told Gibson that he was in desperate need of money. Gibson responded with extreme generosity, advancing Dukes a total of 375,000 roubles – some £250,000 in today’s money. In return, Dukes gave him a receipt signed ‘Captain McNeill’; it was one of his Secret Intelligence Service cover names. He assured Gibson that the money would be refunded within two months. (In the event, it took rather longer, but Gibson was eventually repaid.)

  Now that Dukes had money, he could once again set to work and he did so with customary aplomb. For months there had been a concerted drive by the Bolsheviks to recruit people into the party. Now, it was realised that many had joined in the hope that a party ticket would bring them employment. Trotsky called such people ‘radishes’ – red on the outside only.

  In the summer of 1919 the party was purged on a dramatic scale. The majority quit when it was decreed that all party members were subject to mobilisation at the battlefront. ‘The cowards and good-for-nothings have run away from the party,’ said Lenin. ‘Good riddance.’

  Dukes saw the purge as an opportunity. With his new identity papers he now applied to join the party of the faithful. Acceptance brought him the status of a trusted loyalist.

  ‘My party ticket was everywhere an Open Sesame,’ he wrote. ‘I passed with the first, whe
rever documents had to be shown. I travelled free on trams and railways.’

  Determined to profit from his remaining time in Russia, he also applied to join the Red Army. This would enable him to gather intelligence on soldier loyalty and how the army functioned. He was recruited into the automobile section of the Eighth Army, whose commander was one of his key contacts.

  ‘Enlistment brought enormous advantages in its train,’ he wrote. As well as being able to observe the inside workings of the army, ‘the Red Army soldier received rations greatly superior to those issued to the civilian population.’ After months of hunger, Dukes could finally fill his stomach.

  Dukes learned that the closed meetings of the Petrograd Soviet were always attended by elected representatives of the Red Army. He now put forward his candidacy and was duly elected as a delegate. He was privately jubilant, having managed to ‘achieve the peak of my ambition, which was to be delegated to attend meetings of the Soviet . . . I was deputed as the official guest for my regiment.’

  Dukes also travelled to Moscow at this time and made contact with a secret anti-Bolshevik organisation called the National Centre. It was while he was in the capital that he picked up a dramatic rumour. The Comintern was in the process of establishing a terror school for revolutionary activists. Its principal task was in ‘training agitators to go abroad and stir up class warfare, foment strikes and preach seditious propaganda in the defence forces of all western countries.’

  This school was to devote the greater part of its resources to spearheading attacks on the Raj. ‘In particular,’ wrote Dukes, ‘numerous highly paid agitators were being despatched to aggravate the trouble in India.’ They intended to strike first in the most volatile areas of the North-West Frontier province, where British rule was facing severe difficulties.

  Dukes was unaware that Frederick Bailey was sending similar intelligence to Simla. He was completely cut off from news of the outside world and felt that it was time to leave Russia and provide a briefing to Mansfield Cumming in London, especially as he had achieved so much in the previous few weeks.