by Giles Milton
The left-wing British newspaper, the Daily Herald, was appalled by Lord Curzon’s ultimatum. ‘Such a note sent by one Great Power to another would, before 1914, have meant war.’
The Soviet Government also expressed surprise at the aggressive tone of the ultimatum and went so far as to accuse Lord Curzon of inventing the transcripts. But Moscow had no desire to sever the hard-won trade relations at a time of continued economic chaos. It backed down once again, only this time it promised to abandon forever its designs on British India.
‘The Soviet Government undertakes not to support with funds or in any other form persons or bodies or agencies or institutions whose aim is to spread discontent or to foment rebellion in any other part of the British Empire.’
After all the setbacks, a line had finally been drawn in the sand. Even Lord Curzon himself felt that the danger was finally over. ‘I think that I may claim to have won a considerable victory over the Soviet Government,’ he wrote in a private letter to a friend. ‘I expect them to behave with more circumspection for some time to come.
As the dust slowly settled, one question remained unanswered: who was supplying Mansfield Cumming with the top-secret intelligence from Moscow?
One clue to his identity was the fact that he could procure the actual minutes of Politburo meetings. This, coupled with his reports of verbatim conversations between commissars, strongly suggests that Cumming’s finest agent was a Russian mole by the name of Boris Bazhanov.
If so, this represented a sensational coup. Bazhanov was one of Soviet Russia’s most senior functionaries, who rose to become secretary to both Joseph Stalin and to the Politburo.
Unbeknown to Moscow, Bazhanov was also a fifth-column insider. As Lenin’s inner circle discussed tactics for destroying British India, they had no idea that the man taking the minutes was sending them directly to London.
Bazhanov would later publish his memoirs in French under the title,? Avec Staline dans le Kremlin. He confessed to having been a double agent from the very moment he joined the Communist Party in 1919, describing himself as a ‘Trojan horse’ who infiltrated ‘the Communist fortress’ in order to undermine the system from within.
‘It was an undertaking of the greatest peril,’ he wrote, ‘but I did not allow myself to be deterred by the thought of risk. I had to be constantly on my guard. I had to watch every word I spoke, every move I made, every step I took.’
Those steps took him to the top of the Soviet ladder. Within a year, he had become one of the regime’s key secretaries with access to all the top-secret reports being produced by Stalin and the Politburo.
‘As a soldier of the anti-Bolshevist army, I had set myself the difficult and dangerous task of penetrating to the very heart of enemy headquarters. I had achieved my goal.’
This was to prove of vital importance for British intelligence. As Bazhanov said, the Politburo was responsible for all major decisions respecting the government of the country, as well as questions of world revolution.
‘I held in my hands the key to the secret bureau where the dark destiny of Russia was being planned, along with the plot against the peace of the civilized world.’
Bazhanov’s behaviour eventually aroused Stalin’s suspicions. In fear of his life, he made an exhilarating flight from Russia to Persia with the secret police hot on his trail. After contacting British intelligence in Meshed, Bazhanov was smuggled to British India by car, camel caravan and the viceroy’s private train. Once he arrived in Simla, he supplied intelligence chiefs with yet more valuable information about the inner workings of the Soviet regime.
Bazhanov would continue to work sporadically for British intelligence until the outbreak of the Second World War, when Britain’s alliance with Stalin proved more than he could stomach.
Bazhanov’s story is as remarkable as it is full of twists. When his autobiography was translated from French into English, all the lines about his work as a mole were mysteriously expunged. Bazhanov does not explain who ordered them to be deleted. Nor does he say why.
He would eventually settle in Paris, a hunted man with a $5 million price on his head. He was to survive no fewer than a dozen assassination attempts, including one notable occasion when a hired thug tried to knife him to death in his garage. The fact that Stalin made such efforts to have him killed is strong evidence that he was telling the truth about his life as a mole.
When first interviewed by the French authorities, Bazhanov warned them that he would be hunted for the rest of his life. ‘I must tell you straight away that if I am suddenly tapped on the shoulder in the street by a stranger in civilian clothes and pushed towards a car, I shall simply shoot him down with the pistol I now always carry with me.’
Stalin’s assassins never succeeded in their quest to kill him: Bazhanov died peacefully at a ripe old age.
By the time of Bazhanov’s heady ascent up the Soviet hierarchy, many of Cumming’s old players had moved on to new games. George Hill undertook a brief intelligence mission to the Middle East, only to be left destitute when Secret Intelligence Service funds dried up. He returned to England and moved into a caravan in Sussex with his wife.
He was recalled into service at the outbreak of the Second World War and given employment in his original field of expertise: sabotage and destruction. One of his most able students was a young Cambridge graduate named Kim Philby, later to become infamous as one of the Cambridge Five. Philby referred to Hill as ‘Jolly George’.
Hill’s final and most extraordinary mission came in 1941, when he led a team to Moscow in order to set up a joint Allied operation that brought together Britain’s Special Operations Executive and Stalin’s secret police. It was the point at which his life had turned a full circle. He had started out his career working with Russia as an ally. Now, twenty-five years later, he found himself doing the same thing.
George Hill’s undercover work in the turbulent early years had cemented his friendship with Sidney Reilly. The two men continued to socialise together and Hill acted as best man at Reilly’s third wedding, in 1923, to the actress Pepita Bobadilla.
Reilly had thoroughly enjoyed life as a spy and was keen to continue serving Mansfield Cumming. But when his offer to work against the Soviet regime was rejected, Reilly turned instead to Boris Savinkov, who remained the most credible opponent to the Russian Government. In 1925, Reilly was lured back to Moscow in the hope of making contact with Savinkov’s supporters inside Russia.
‘I would not have undertaken this trip,’ he wrote to Pepita, ‘. . . if I was not convinced that there is practically no risk attached to it.’
Reilly walked straight into a trap. He was arrested by the Soviet secret police and subjected to a long and gruelling interrogation. He had already been sentenced to death in absentia back in 1918. Now that sentence was carried out. He was executed in November 1925, and buried in the inner courtyard of the old Cheka headquarters, the Loubianka.
Robert Bruce Lockhart had always enjoyed the dangers and intrigues that came with espionage. He also happened to be a gifted raconteur. In the early 1930s, he began working on his autobiography, Memoirs of a British Agent. Published in the following year, it became an international bestseller and was turned into a Warner Brothers movie. Lockhart went on to write a string of successful books and also became editor of the Evening Standard’s gossip column, Londoner’s Diary.
He would be recalled to service in the Second World War, helping to produce propaganda against Nazi Germany. But his best days were passed: he never again matched the fame and notoriety he had achieved for his role in what had become known as the ‘Lockhart Plot’. He was still a controversial figure when he died in 1970: one of the last people to visit him at his deathbed is said to have been his beloved Moura.
Moura would herself earn a posthumous fame of sorts as the great-great-aunt of Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg.
Paul Dukes, knighted in 1920, chose a very different path from his fellow agents. In the aftermath of his
return to England he was increasingly drawn to Eastern mysticism. In 1922, he joined a tantric community at Nyack, near New York, led by an eccentric doctor known as Omnipotent Oom.
Dukes would also develop an enduring fascination for yoga, which he introduced to the Western world in a series of successful books.
The final significant member of Cumming’s team, Arthur Ransome, had left Russia with Evgenia in 1919. After spending several years cruising around the Baltic coastline in his beloved yacht, Racundra, he eventually married Evgenia in 1924. The couple then moved into an old stone cottage above Windermere in the Lake District. Here, Ransome began writing Swallows and Amazons, the first in a series of highly successful children’s books.
His work for Mansfield Cumming – and the controversies that surrounded it – was quietly forgotten for many years. The intelligence file on his activities in Russia, including MI5’s reports about his pro-Bolshevik sympathies, was only released into the public domain in 2005.
Some agents found it difficult to settle down after the excitement of their undercover work. Frederick Bailey returned to British India after brushing the Karakum sand from his boots. But he was soon off in search of new adventure, heading to Gangtok in the state of Sikkim, where he lived with his new wife, Irma.
He made frequent travels to Tibet and became close friends with the thirteenth Dalai Lama. He also added to his already extensive collection of butterflies, Nepalese birds and stuffed mammals. These were eventually bequeathed to the British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Bailey died in 1967, along with Paul Dukes and Arthur Ransome. George Hill died shortly afterwards, in 1968. It was the end of an era for British espionage.
And what of Mansfield Cumming himself? He remained a workaholic to the end, even though he was suffering from increasingly severe angina. He suffered his first heart attack just before Christmas Day, 1922. A second one followed a few days later.
He returned to his offices in Holland Park as soon as he was recovered, but he knew that he could not continue forever. Reluctantly, he decided that it was time to pack up his gadgets and secret inks and retire to Bursledon.
He never got the chance. He was still hard at work when a third heart attack killed him on 23 June 1923.
He had just had a valedictory drink with one of his former agents, Valentine Williams, who had come to wish him a happy retirement. Shortly after Williams left the building, Cumming sat down on the sofa in his office. A few minutes later, he was dead.
‘He died in harness,’ wrote Williams, ‘as he would have wished.’ Work had brought meaning to his life: it was appropriate, perhaps, that it also brought about his end.
He was buried close to his beloved home in Bursledon, just a short distance from the First World War tank in which he liked to tour the Hampshire countryside. There was no obituary, nor even any announcement of his death. He simply disappeared without trace. It was exactly as he would have wished.
His successor had been chosen before his death: it was to be Rear Admiral Hugh Sinclair, the cigar-smoking, pleasure-seeking former head of Naval Intelligence. Cumming had been delighted when he learned of Sinclair’s appointment, describing him as ‘in every way qualified and suitable.’
Sinclair was also made director of the Government Code and Cipher School, bringing code-breaking and deciphering into the orbit of the Secret Intelligence Service.
A few months before his retirement, Cumming had told Samuel Hoare, his former bureau chief in Petrograd, that the service was destined to have an illustrious future under Sinclair. ‘In his capable hands, this organisation will grow to be very useful – it is not too much to say essential – to the Govt. Departments we serve.’
In fact, Winston Churchill had made it clear that its work was already deemed essential by government ministers. The Secret Intelligence Service had begun as a ramshackle network of ‘rascals’, ‘scallywags’ and public school adventurers. In little more than a decade, it had become a slick and highly skilled organisation that could penetrate to the very heart of enemy governments. Mansfield Cumming had successfully overseen the creation of the world’s first professional secret service.
By the time of Cumming’s death, a new team of special agents was at work in Moscow and Petrograd. Their principal task was to infiltrate the Soviet regime’s new chemical weapons programme.
This was a whole new story, one that was once again to involve deception, subterfuge and secret intelligence. Mansfield Cumming, of course, was no longer at the helm. But he would have been pleased to know that by the time the first game of Russian Roulette had come to an end, the second one had already begun.
NOTES AND SOURCES
The material for Russian Roulette is derived from two principal sources: published accounts written by the agents themselves and their unpublished intelligence reports and letters. Most of the reports were written for either Mansfield Cumming or for his colleagues in the Indian Bureau (in Simla) and Indian Political Intelligence in London.
The original material is stored in two principal repositories: the National Archives (NA) in Kew and the India Office Collection in the British Library.
MI6 files remain closed, a source of continual frustration to historians. There is the occasional (and exceptional) release of material. Documents relating to Arthur Ransome were placed in the public domain as recently as 2005.
The story of Russian Roulette largely concerns British India, and the records of Indian Political Intelligence were released en masse in 1997. They are a treasure trove of information, not least because they contain some duplicate copies of original MI6 records that are still kept under lock and key.
These records reveal the close working relationship between the Secret Intelligence Service and Indian Political Intelligence.
When the files were initially placed in the public domain, the historian Patrick French commented that ‘an ambitious PhD student could have a field day.’ So, indeed, can anyone with a British Library reader’s ticket and plenty of time on their hands.
Espionage is by its very nature secret, but the 751 files and volumes of Indian Political Intelligence, coupled with the thousands of once-classified documents at the National Archives, provide a fascinating glimpse into the murky world of espionage and deception that took place inside Soviet Russia in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution.
In the notes below, full references to each book are given unless they are listed in Selected Reading.
Prologue
The eyewitness account of Lenin’s arrival at Finlyandsky Station, as recorded by an unnamed Russian journalist, can be found at http://bigsiteofhistory.com/lenins-address-at-the-finland-station
Paul Dukes’s account of Lenin’s arrival is recorded in his book, The Story of ST 25. William Gibson’s impressions were published in his book, Wild Career: My Crowded Years of Adventure in Russia and the Near East.
Sir George Buchanan’s memoirs were published under the title, My Mission to Russia. Lord Hardinge’s account was published in The Reminiscences of Lord Hardinge of Penshurst (London, 1947). Sir George Molesworth, who was later to play a key role in the Anglo-Afghan War and the defence of the Raj, wrote up his experiences in Afghanistan, 1919.
PART ONE: SHOOTING IN THE DARK
1: Murder in the Dark
Samuel Hoare wrote extensively about his experiences in Russia in Fourth Seal: The End of a Russian Chapter (London, 1930). His time as Mansfield Cumming’s bureau chief is also analysed in Michael Smith’s excellent study, Six: A History of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (London, 2010). Smith also discusses the unlikely secret service career of Oswald Rayner.
The traditionally accepted account of Rasputin’s murder is derived from Prince Feliks Yusupov’s highly coloured autobiography, Lost Splendour.
Yusupov’s account has been convincingly picked apart by Richard Cullen in his fascinating book, Rasputin: The Role of Britain’s Secret Service in his Torture and Murder.
&nbs
p; Cullen’s book revisits all the surviving accounts, published and unpublished, including the autopsy report written by Professor Kosorotov.
With the help of experts in ballistics, he presents a highly convincing scenario for Rasputin’s murder, implicating not only Oswald Rayner, but several other members of Mansfield Cumming’s team inside Russia.
Cullen’s work has sparked a vigorous debate on the Internet: this can be followed at: http://forum.alexanderpalace.org/index.php?action=printpage;topic=1363.0
Rasputin’s death was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 documentary, Great Lives: Rasputin (January 2013). This is on-line at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01phgjs
2: The Chief
The best recent biography of Mansfield Cumming is Alan Judd’s The Quest for C. There is also much information to be found in Keith Jeffrey’s MI6. I also consulted Christopher Andrew’s Secret Service for a wealth of background material.
Other anecdotes about Cumming are to be found in Compton Mackenzie’s Greek Memories, Valentine Williams’ The World of Action (London, 1938), Samuel Hoare’s The Fourth Seal (London, 1930) and Edward Knoblock’s Round the Room: An Autobiography (London, 1939).
Hoare’s account is adapted from his book, Fourth Seal; Harvey Pitcher, Witnesses of the Russian Revolution; Smith, Six; Yusupov, Lost Splendour; Chambers, Last Englishman. The story about William Gibson is from his autobiography, Wild Career. Knox’s reminiscences can be found in his book, With the Russian Army.
3: The Perfect Spy
The most detailed account of Lenin’s arrival at Torneå is to be found in Michael Pearson’s Sealed Train. See also Helen Rappaport’s fascinating Conspirator. The story about Harry Gruner is explored in Smith, Six; there are also anecdotes about Gruner in William Gerhardie’s Memoirs.