A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy

by Deborah McDonald

  The encounter took place at the Lubyanka headquarters. Moura had now been in prison for four days. All the while the Terror was rising. Just the day before, Fania Kaplan had been taken from the Lubyanka to the Kremlin, where without trial or further questioning she was shot – a single revolver bullet to the back of the head, in the Cheka style – and her remains destroyed without burial. Her executioner was the man who had brought Lockhart and Moura to the Lubyanka – Commandant Pavel Malkov. In this climate, nobody was safe.

  Yakov Peters regarded Lockhart impassively. Before stating his business, Lockhart insisted on a gentlemen’s agreement – the meeting must be treated as unofficial, off the record and entirely secret. Peters agreed. Lockhart launched immediately into an impassioned plea for Moura’s release. He claimed that the reports about the Latvian conspiracy were untrue – but even if there was some truth in it, Moura was completely innocent.

  Peters listened patiently, and promised to give Lockhart’s words due consideration.8 Then he changed the subject.

  ‘You have saved me some trouble in coming here,’ he said. ‘My men have been looking for you for the past hour. I have a warrant for your arrest.’

  By the next day, everyone was saying that Lockhart was going to be shot. Moura heard the news of his release and re-arrest from Major Wardwell, the heroically kind American Red Cross man who came regularly with food for the Allied captives in the Butyrka prison.9 The Bolsheviks, he said, were executing people in their hundreds, and Lockhart was likely to be among them.

  Her love, her life, her all was going to die.

  It would always be a mystery how she survived those days without going mad with worry. Moura was nothing if not tough – for all her pampered upbringing, she was capable of withstanding physical discomfort (although not without complaint if she had someone to complain to). But mental anguish was different. This period of gnawing worry would age her and alter her, take away some vital element of her personality that she would never quite recapture. Believing that she was about to lose Lockhart forever would leave a wound that would never heal. She would do anything to see him, to keep him, and if that failed, at least to save him from death or confinement in a dreadful Cheka prison.

  Lockhart was kept in a room in the Lubyanka headquarters, a grubby, ill-furnished office used by junior clerks. It contained a dilapidated sofa on which he was sometimes allowed to sleep while the clerks worked and two sentries watched over him.10

  At all hours of the night, Peters would have him brought to his office for interrogation. The questioning was persistent but calm. Lockhart was exhorted to confess to his crimes, as some of his fellow conspirators allegedly had; otherwise he would be handed over to the Revolutionary Tribunal for examination. Lockhart denied that he had done anything other than what his government had ordered him to do and insisted that the claims that he was the instigator of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy were false. But the Cheka had the hard evidence of espionage and the witness evidence of conspiracy, and Lockhart was in it over his head.

  Oudendijk, the Netherlands Minister, lobbied the foreign ministry and the Cheka to spare Lockhart’s life. He reported to his British contacts that the Russian government had ‘sunk to the level of a criminal organisation’. It seemed to him that the Bolsheviks ‘realise that their game is up and have entered on a career of criminal madness’.11 Oudendijk warned Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin that Britain was more powerful than Russia, and would not be deterred even if hundreds of Britons were executed.

  In his report on his negotiations, Oudendijk gave his views on the political situation in Russia, and on Bolshevism. He was regarded by everyone as a kindly, honourable and good man, and what he had to say wasn’t at all out of step with the times; but it was a chilling foreshadowing of Europe’s future. He felt it his duty to tell the governments of the world that ‘if an end is not put to Bolshevism in Russia at once the civilisation of the whole world will be threatened . . . I consider that the immediate suppression of Bolshevism is the greatest issue now before the world.’ He believed that the infection was ‘bound to spread in one form or another over Europe and the whole world, as it is organised and worked by Jews who have no nationality, and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things. The only manner in which this danger could be averted would be collective action on the part of all Powers.’12 Oudendijk noted that the Germans and Austrians were thinking it too. What none of them could have imagined was the solution that would eventually be conceived to tackle the imagined threat.

  While the Dutch and Swedish diplomats negotiated with the Bolsheviks, the neutral Norwegian Legation became a refuge for Moscow’s Allied outlaws. Will Hicks and Lockhart’s assistants Tamplin and Lingner, along with many other British, American and French fugitives, had gone into hiding there. The building was besieged by the Cheka; unwilling to force an entry into neutral diplomatic territory this time, they hoped to starve the criminals out. It would be a long siege – the building had previously been the headquarters of the American Red Cross, and its basement was well stocked with food supplies.

  Unhappily, the same couldn’t be said for the prisoners in Petrograd – confined in the dungeons of the Petropavlovskaya fortress, they were being slowly starved to death in cells without functioning toilets; many were suffering chronic diarrhoea but were refused medical care.13

  When Oudendijk returned to Petrograd after two days of bargaining, he had been promised that Lockhart would be released, but he wasn’t reassured – ‘his position is precarious in the extreme,’ he reported.14

  And then, quite suddenly, everything changed.

  The cause of the change would never be entirely clear, because those who were involved – Lockhart, Yakov Peters and Moura – took steps to blur the record.

  First the circumstances altered. On 6 September it was announced that Lenin was out of danger. The mood of vengeance among the Bolsheviks gave way briefly to one of relief. At the same time, a deal with the British was being considered. In reprisal for the death of Captain Cromie, the British had arrested the Soviet Ambassador in London, Maxim Litvinov. He and his staff were being held in Brixton prison. An exchange of prisoners was being talked about. Lockhart might be one of them. But whatever the mood, and regardless of the diplomatic situation, there was no getting around the enormity of the crimes Lockhart was accused of – espionage, counter-revolutionary sabotage, and an implicit threat to the lives of the heads of the Soviet government. The author of such a plot couldn’t possibly be let go, could he?

  Lockhart had been in custody for three days when he was told that he was to be moved from the Lubyanka to the Kremlin. Peters had summoned Pavel Malkov and ordered him to prepare accommodation for the prisoner. The last person Malkov had taken there from the Lubyanka had been Fania Kaplan, whom he had executed five days earlier. Lockhart’s fate would be different – for the time being, at least. He was to be held until a decision had been made about what to do with him.

  Malkov wasn’t particularly pleased about having to take responsibility for Lockhart again. He set aside a suite of rooms in the Freylinsky corridor of the Grand Kremlin Palace, which was still mostly empty. The rooms appeared to have been some kind of lady-in-waiting’s quarters – small and with no windows. With unconscious irony he selected guards from the Kremlin’s Latvian regiment – the very ‘Praetorian Guard’ whom the Lockhart Plot had tried to suborn.15

  Lockhart was alarmed to find that he had a companion living in his apartment: Smidkhen, the Latvian officer who had come to him from Cromie just over a month ago – the man who had led him to get involved in the plot, and who had brought Colonel Berzin to see him. Lockhart guessed that this was an attempt to prise some indication of guilt from him, and for two days he didn’t dare speak a word. Eventually Smidkhen was removed. Lockhart never learned his fate, and suspected that he had been shot. He never knew that the Latvian had been a Cheka plant from the beginning.16

  Lockhart
kept pressing both Peters and Malkov about Moura. He protested her innocence, accused Peters of making war on women, and demanded that she be set free. Peters agreed to let Lockhart write Moura a letter – provided it was in Russian so that he could censor it if necessary.

  This was the moment at which the situation began to change rapidly and dramatically, and none of the persons involved ever gave a clear or consistent explanation of how or why. They kept silent, or lied.

  ‘My dear, dear Baby,’ Moura wrote. ‘I have just received your letter through M. Peters. Please don’t be anxious about me.’17 After more than a week in the squalid, overcrowded Butyrka prison, his note had brought exquisite relief, a glimpse of blue sky in the darkness of her captivity. He was alive, and that was all that mattered.

  What Peters thought when he met Moura, what he felt, what was said between them, went unrecorded. All Moura would say in her reply to Lockhart, written on the headed Cheka notepaper that Peters had given her, was the astonishing news that ‘M. Peters has promised to release me today’. But her freedom meant little without Lockhart:

  I don’t mind waiting at all as long as you are not free. I will be able however to send you linen and things and perhaps he will arrange for me to see you. I love you my dear Baby more than life itself and all the hardships of the past days have only linked me all the more to you for life. Forgive this incoherent letter – I am still bewildered, anxious about you and so lonely but hoping for the best.

  Bless you my beloved.

  Your Moura.

  Her bewilderment was so great that, when she stepped outside the gates of the prison, she turned and walked a long way before realising she was going in the wrong direction. She eventually made her way back to Khlebnyy pereulok, trudging along under the fading early-autumn trees – Russia was succumbing early to wintry weather – then up the five flights to the apartment. There she sat in utter solitude. The servants were still in prison, Hicks was besieged in the Norwegian Legation, and Lockhart was in the Kremlin.

  Moura knew the fear that was attached to that name. Some said that prisoners who were taken within the walls of the Kremlin never came out again. But Moura had faith, and just knowing that her beloved was still alive was enough.

  The next morning she began gathering things to take to him, as Peters had promised she could. Clothes and books went into her basket, along with tobacco, some coffee and a fantastically expensive ham she had managed to procure. And she wrote another letter, trying to convey her confusing feelings of love and despair.

  Baby, baby – all this has wrought a great change in me. I am now an old, old woman and I feel I will be able to smile again only when God will grant me the joy of having you again . . . Oh, my Baby – what is freedom without you. My imprisonment was nothing while I thought you were free, then it became an agony of incertitude and anxiety. But I know we both must be brave and think of the future. There is one thing – Baby – all the details of life – all the small petty things I used to talk to you about – all have vanished. I only know I want to make you happy and this to me will be everything. Baby – no woman has ever loved anyone as I love you, my life, my all. I cannot write any more – my misery is too great and my longing for you too infinite.18

  It was too much to hope that she would be allowed to see him – she just had to trust Peters’ word that Lockhart would receive the letter and the basket of gifts. The Chekist honoured his word, and Lockhart was uplifted by the confirmation of Moura’s freedom and profoundly grateful for her provisions.

  Knowing his habits when under stress, Moura had inserted a pack of cards in the bundle. He began a ritual of playing hand after hand of Chinese patience, just as he had when she was away on her dangerous mission to Yendel in July. This time, he felt he was gambling his life on the game, reasoning superstitiously that if he could win a hand each day, he would be safe. Although he no longer feared execution, he expected to be handed to the Revolutionary Tribunal and given a long term in prison. A real prison, not like this.19 The news from outside wasn’t encouraging. The Red Army was recovering its strength, growing week by week and beating back its enemies on the Volga, regaining ever more territory from the White and Allied forces.

  While Lockhart turned over his cards, immersed himself in books and pondered his fate, did he wonder how Moura had worked this trick? He never said, but it must have played on his mind. She was an aristocrat, the known consort and paramour of an alleged enemy spy, a long-time friend of the British . . . Regardless of any service she had given the Bolsheviks in the past, it was a marvel that she had been allowed to live, let alone been set free. And how extraordinary it was that she should be allowed to come to the Kremlin each day and deliver food and gifts for her lover – and exchange letters too. Sometimes Peters insisted that the notes be in Russian so that he could check them, but sometimes he allowed them to pass in English.20 How had she achieved all this? Did her past service to the Cheka count for so much? Or was there something else?

  There were a few gossips in Moscow who believed they could supply an answer. Yakov Peters was as susceptible as any other man to the magnetism of Moura, and as willing, given the right encouragement and the right manipulation, to succumb to her powers of persuasion. (Pregnancy had evidently not diminished her attractiveness.) The young lady had been seen, said the gossips, riding about the city on the pillion of Peters’ motorcycle. It was all too clear that she had sold herself to the deputy chief of the Cheka, become his mistress. There were others who thought it more likely that she had allowed herself to be recruited, body and soul, into the Cheka itself.21

  Moura never spoke of this time, except to admit, some years later, that she had found Yakov Peters ‘kind’.22 Also muddying the waters, Lockhart would try to claim that he had secured Moura’s release by giving himself up as a kind of hostage.23 The true events – the compromises and bargains – were obscured forever; all that remained was the evidence of the results.

  There was more to come. Diplomacy had saved Lockhart from the executioner’s bullet; Moura’s arrangement with Peters had won her release from prison and the ability to bring provisions and gifts to Lockhart. But her beloved was still a prisoner, still facing an unguessable sentence from the Revolutionary Tribunal. And she was beginning to realise that even if by some miracle he were released, he would be ejected from Russia. Either way she was going to lose him. And what would happen to her and her unborn child then? Would she be able to abandon everything and follow him? Would she even be allowed?

  ‘Don’t think me an hysterical coward,’ she wrote, tormented by the inability to see Lockhart and touch him. ‘I cry bitter scorching tears and I feel so small, so helpless, so utterly miserable. But I try so hard to be brave, Baby. We both need it so in order to keep all our strength and build a happy future.’ As the days went by, she worked away at Peters, and felt she was having some success. ‘I pray so hard that God should let this dreadful time for us pass quickly and I feel He is gradually answering my prayer.’24

  The first real sign of an answer came during the second week of Lockhart’s captivity, when Moura was at last allowed to see him.25 Peters escorted her to the apartments in the Grand Palace. The corridor was now serving as a cell block for several high-grade prisoners, including the former commander of the Imperial Russian Army, General Brusilov, and the Left SR conspirator Maria Spiridonova.

  From the moment Moura stepped into the room and her eyes met Lockhart’s and saw the joy there, every detail remained in her memory as vivid as life itself. ‘The sofa with the little blue cushion I sent you, where your dear curly head rests – and the litter of books; and the patience – and you, you, my Baby, there, alone . . .’26 They weren’t allowed to touch or speak to each other. Peters kept between them. He was in a garrulous mood, and sat and talked to Lockhart, reminiscing about his life as a revolutionary.

  While Peters’ attention was occupied, Moura stood behind him, pretending to browse some books piled on a side table. Catching Lockhart’s eye
, she held up a note and slipped it between the pages of Carlyle’s The French Revolution. ‘My heart stopped beating,’ Lockhart recalled. ‘Fortunately, Peters noticed nothing or else Moura’s shrift would have been short.’ As soon as he was alone again, Lockhart rushed to the table and leafed through the book until he found the little slip of paper. On it were just six words: ‘Say nothing – all will be well.’27

  Whatever price Moura was secretly paying, it seemed to be working. Peters promised to bring her to Lockhart again, and continued to let her communicate with him and bring him provisions. Her life at the flat was lonely and miserable. The servants, Dora and Ivan, had been released and come home, but Dora was ill and both were traumatised – ‘they worry the life out of me,’ Moura wrote, ‘crying and remembering their prison experiences’.28

  Despite her belief that her efforts, her sacrifice and her faith could see her through this awful time and make everything come right with Lockhart, the next time she saw him she had dreadful, heartbreaking news. She had miscarried. They had lost little Peter. Lockhart, who rarely mentioned his intimate feelings in his diary, wrote, ‘Moura brought very sad news yesterday. I am much upset and wonder how everything will end.’29 Moura tried to lift his spirits: ‘Don’t be sad about what I told you yesterday as it may make it more difficult to bear.’30

  Amidst her own grief, Moura was on the verge of panic, worrying that Lockhart’s love for her would falter now that there was no child to bind their futures together. They had been making tentative plans to escape together via Sweden if he were released, but now he seemed to be wavering. ‘I am very depressed that you are so grieved,’ she wrote to him. ‘You probably care for me less now?’ She promised to make up for the loss: ‘Don’t worry, Baby. Pray God I will be able to give you later on a dear sturdy boy.’31