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

by Deborah McDonald

  16 Downie report, quoted in Bainton, Honoured by Strangers, pp. 214–15.

  17 Bainton, Honoured by Strangers, pp. 220–23.

  18 Cromie, letter to Adm. W. R. Hall, Apr. 1918, in Jones, ‘Documents on British Relations’ IV, pp. 551–2.

  19 Cromie, letter to Cdre S. S. Hall, Apr. 1918, in Jones, ‘Documents on British Relations’ IV, pp. 550–51.

  20 Moura’s fascination with gossip, intelligence and politics comes through in many of her letters between 1918 and the early 1920s.

  21 A. E. Lessing, addendum to telegram to Col. Keyes, 17 Mar. 1918, quoted in Kettle, The Road to Intervention, p. 3.

  22 Lockhart, British Agent, pp. 251–2.

  23 Lockhart, entry for 19 Mar. 1918, Diaries, pp. 34–5. Balfour (born 1848) was actually 69 at this time.

  24 Lockhart, unpublished diary entry, 21 Apr. 1918; British Agent, p. 269.

  25 Kettle, The Road to Intervention, pp. 16–17.

  26 Cabinet minute, 18 Apr., quoted in Kettle, The Road to Intervention, pp. 68–9.

  27 Lockhart, unpublished diary entry, 21 Apr. 1918.

  28 In British Agent (p. 263) Lockhart has nothing but praise for Maj. McAlpine (‘a man of first-class intellect’) and implies that the two were in agreement in their opposition to Allied military intervention in Russia. He does, however, mention him in connection with officers who didn’t understand his policy and ‘intrigued against me’. In fact, McAlpine’s view on intervention seems to have been as muddled and indecisive as everyone else’s (e.g. see Kettle, The Road to Intervention, pp. 99–100).

  29 Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably between 16 and 20 Apr. 1918. (Most of the 28 letters Moura wrote to Lockhart prior to October 1918 are undated, and their chronology has had to be pieced together from content and context.)

  30 Lockhart, British Agent, p. 269.

  31 Lockhart, unpublished diary entry, 21 Apr. 1918.

  32 Lockhart, British Agent, p. 260.

  33 Lockhart, British Agent, pp. 261–2. Fittingly, Okhotny Ryad became the site of a Moscow Metro station in 1935, and later still an underground shopping mall. Alexander Vertinsky was a major star in early 20th-century Russia (Stites, Russian Popular Culture, pp. 14–15). He was later alleged to be a Soviet spy.

  34 Lockhart, British Agent, pp. 260–61.

  35 Lockhart’s recollection that Moura ‘was never to leave’ after their reunion in Moscow was figurative rather than literal, referring to the fact that it was at that encounter that their relationship entered a new, unbreakable phase.

  36 In 1918 in Russia Easter began on 5 May.

  37 Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably between 28 and 30 Apr. 1918.

  38 Lockhart, British Agent, pp. 267–8. Lockhart gives credit for this victory to Evgenia Shelepina, Trotsky’s secretary, who later married Lockhart’s friend Arthur Ransome. He repaid the favour by using his position to provide her with an under-the-counter British passport which enabled her to leave Russia with Ransome.

  39 Lockhart, British Agent, p. 268.

  40 Kettle, The Road to Intervention, pp. 71–2.

  41 Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War, pp. 139–41; Kettle, The Road to Intervention, pp. 66–7.

  42 Lockhart, telegram to Balfour, 21 Apr. 1918, cited in Long, ‘Searching for Sidney Reilly’, p. 1227. In his memoirs, Lockhart makes no mention of having had contacts with anti-Bolshevik elements this early in 1918. The date of his telegram to Balfour coincides with the arrival of Moura and Le Page in Moscow.

  43 Kettle, The Road to Intervention, p. 83; see also Leggett, The Cheka, p. 280.

  44 Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably between 28 and 30 Apr. 1918. It isn’t absolutely clear whether she feared a German invasion or was anticipating a British one, but her tone in the letter is anxious, so it was probably the former.

  45 Advice by Adm. Reginald Hall and annotations thereon, Foreign Office document FO 371/3332, file 91788, 155–158, cited by Lynn, Shadow Lovers, pp. 192–3. Oddly, Lynn interprets this as evidence that Moura was not trusted by the British. The annotation on the document says ‘I did not know there were other ladies besides Mme Benckendorff. I think all our missions should be warned against employing them.’ The sense of this is clearly that ‘them’ refers to the ‘other ladies’.

  46 Kettle, The Road to Intervention, p. 83.

  Chapter 7: Old Enemies, Strange Alliances

  1 Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably between 7 May, the day Lockhart summoned Boyce to Moscow, and 9 May, the day appointed to travel.

  2 Lockhart, British Agent, p. 276.

  3 Lockhart, British Agent, pp. 276–7; Robin Lockhart, Ace of Spies, pp. 67–8.

  4 Hill, Go Spy the Land, p. 201.

  5 Opinions differ on Reilly’s origins. Robin Lockhart (Ace of Spies, p. 22) describes him as a Russian-Ukrainian Catholic called Georgi, whereas Jeffery (MI6, p. 136) identifies him as Shlomo Rosenblum, a Ukrainian Jew. Kettle (The Road to Intervention, pp. 85–6) gives his name as Sigmund Georgievich Rosenblum, the son of a Polish-Jewish landowner.

  6 Lockhart, British Agent, p. 277.

  7 Robin Lockhart, Ace of Spies, p. 68; Hill, Go Spy the Land, p. 239; according to Long (‘Searching for Sidney Reilly’, p. 1229) Reilly’s Cheka post has been taken as evidence for suspecting him of being a double agent. However, there was a surprising degree of covert cooperation between the SIS and the Cheka at this time; also a very wide variety of ethnicities served in the Cheka. Russia had been a cosmopolitan empire and was less sensitive to ‘foreignness’ than most Western European countries.

  8 Dorril, MI6, p. 193. Tamplin later worked as a banker in Riga, and in the Second World War was a colonel in the Special Operations Executive. He died of a heart attack in 1943 while on active service in Egypt – see ‘War Office: Roll of Honour, Second World War’. Database. Army Roll of Honour 1939–45. Soldiers Died in World War Two. (WO304). CD-ROM. Naval & Military Press. Available online at ancestry.com (retrieved 23 Apr. 2014).

  9 Not to be confused with Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, daughter of the Tsar.

  10 Lockhart, British Agent, pp. 279–80. Lockhart gives the date of this event as the night of 24/25 May, but according to his unpublished diary Moura went back to Petrograd on 20 May. Other dating evidence in the diary (published and unpublished) suggests that the true date was 19/20 May. It’s unusual for him to be so inexact, as he wrote British Agent by reference to his diaries. We do know that Moura insisted that he alter the original text of his memoir in several places where the story concerned her (letter 18 Jun. 1932, LL). This could be one of them.

  11 Lockhart, British Agent, pp. 277–8.

  12 Manchester Guardian, 27 Jun. 1918, p. 4.

  13 Leggett, The Cheka, p. 62.

  14 Lockhart, British Agent, p. 280.

  15 Lockhart, British Agent, p. 280.

  16 Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably 21 or 22 May 1918.

  17 Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably 21 or 22 May 1918.

  18 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 22 May 1918.

  19 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 22 May 1918. According to Cook (Ace of Spies, pp. 187–8), General Poole was having affairs with two women; it’s possible that Moura was alluding to this as well.

  20 Kettle, The Road to Intervention, p. 83; Churchill and the Archangel Fiasco, pp. 428–9.

  21 Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: late May 1918.

  22 Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably 22 or 23 May 1918.

  23 Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably 22 or 23 May 1918; and letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 22 May 1918.

  24 Jeffery, MI6, p. 102. Even his obituary (The Times, 16 Aug. 1952, p. 6) noted that Cudbert Thornhill’s attitude ‘was sometimes mistaken . . . for lack of judgment’ and implied that his later service with the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War was marred (unfairly) in the
same way. No evidence has survived to indicate the specific cause of dislike between him and Moura.

  25 Subtelny, Ukraine, ch. 19.

  26 Subtelny, Ukraine, ch. 19.

  27 Hill, Go Spy the Land, pp. 182, 202–3; see also Swain, Origins of the Russian Civil War, pp. 149–50.

  28 Lockhart, diary entry for 15 May 1918, Diaries vol. 1, p. 36.

  29 Lockhart, British Agent, p. 271.

  30 Hill, Go Spy the Land, pp. 88–9, 202–4; see also Kettle, The Road to Intervention, pp. 81–2. The Irish-Canadian Joseph W. Boyle was an adventurer and privateer who travelled in Europe and Russia during the First World War. For Hill, Trotsky and the GRU, see Deacon, A History of the Russian Secret Service, pp. 160–61.

  31 Lockhart makes no mention of Moura being involved in any kind of espionage in his memoirs. However, it appears that he did put it in his original draft (which has apparently not been preserved). We don’t know what he wrote, but we do know that Moura, who had a veto on the text, insisted that he remove ‘the bit about the spying business’, which she claimed gave the book a ‘Mata Hari touch’ that would be ‘quite impossible for me’ (Moura, letter to Lockhart, 18 Jun. 1932, LL).

  32 Leggett, The Cheka, p. 293.

  33 Lockhart, British Agent, p. 278. When he arranged for Kerensky’s exit from Russia in mid-May, he didn’t dare telegraph London about it until he was certain that the fugitive was safely out of the country, because he suspected that his encrypted messages were being decoded by the Bolsheviks.

  34 For example, Berberova, Moura, pp. 44–7; Lynn, Shadow Lovers, pp.193–4. It is far from clear whether this allegation has any truth. Neither author had any notion of Moura’s involvement in espionage in the Ukraine (or the Cheka/SIS cooperation), and both seem to have overlooked the fact that Lockhart would not be the only British diplomat who used the same cipher.

  Diplomatic ciphers at this time were usually of the code-book or ‘dictionary’ type, in which words had predetermined four- or five-digit number substitutes, listed in a ‘dictionary’. The numbers were not sequential, so a coded message could not be read without a copy of the dictionary (which depending on the system could be pocket-size or a very substantial volume containing tens of thousands of words and their number equivalents). Some systems used an additional step which further encrypted the encoded message by altering the numbers mathematically according to a further, separate cipher (see Gannon, Inside Room 40, ch. 4; Beesly, Room 40, ch. 3). A code + cipher system is much more secure. Properly speaking, a code involves disguising words according to predetermined word/letter/number equivalents; a cipher disguises words on the fly, using an alphabetical or numerical algorithm where the substitutions are unpredictable. Ciphers are thus much more efficient and capable of being more secure (because the cipher key is easier to hide and easier to change), but can be vulnerable to mathematical deciphering.

  Cryptography in most diplomatic services in 1918 was very lax, both in coding/ciphering procedures and security (e.g. see Andrew, Secret Service; Plotke, Imperial Spies Invade Russia). If the Bolsheviks had the British diplomatic code dictionary by May 1918 (and/or the cipher, if one was used), it could have come from a wide variety of sources in Petrograd, Moscow, Vologda or Murmansk.

  35 Moura’s movements throughout most of 1918 are accounted for, either in her letters or the diaries and memoirs of others. The only blank is in June. Throughout most of that month she did not write to Lockhart, and was not with him. This is the most likely time for her to have made her trips between Russia and Kiev. Coincidentally, there are two week-long gaps in Lockhart’s diary during the second half of June. It is possible (though less likely) that she made short trips to the Ukraine in July and August.

  36 Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably 31 May 1918. Lockhart was in Vologda from 29 to 31 May (British Agent, pp. 281–4).

  37 Katchanovski et al., Historical Dictionary of Ukraine, pp. 347–8.

  38 Moura Budberg MI5 file, document 16.Y, 1932, translation of original Russian document.

  39 Kyril Zinovieff, interview with Andrew Boyle, CUL Add 9429/2B/125. As a young man in 1929, Zinovieff dined with Pavlo Skoropadskyi in Berlin, and asked the former Hetman if he knew Moura Budberg. After a moment’s thought, Skoropadskyi recalled her: ‘He had known her in the Ukraine after the revolution and had taken her to be an agent working for him. Later he came to realise that all the time she had been spying for the Bolsheviks.’

  Chapter 8: A Hair’s Breadth from War

  1 Lockhart, British Agent, pp. 285–6.

  2 Lockhart, message to Foreign Office, 6 June 1918, cited in Hughes, Inside the Enigma, p. 132.

  3 Swain, Origins of the Russian Civil War, p. 151.

  4 Subtelny, Ukraine, ch. 19.

  5 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 5 Jul. 1918.

  6 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 5 Jul. 1918.

  7 Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably mid-Jul. 1918.

  8 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 6 or 7 Jul. 1918.

  9 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 21 May 1918.

  10 Cromie, letter to Adm. W. R. Hall, 26 Jul. 1918, in Jones, ‘Documents on British Relations’ IV, p. 560.

  11 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 8 Jul. 1918; see also Ullman, Intervention, p. 230; Kettle, The Road to Intervention, p. 256.

  12 The official name ‘Russian Soviet Republic’ was adopted at the Third Congress of Soviets on 8 January 1918. Almost nobody outside the governing parties used the name.

  13 Hill, Go Spy the Land, pp. 206–9; Lockhart, British Agent, pp. 295–300. Hill’s and Lockhart’s accounts of the Congress differ slightly in some details (such as the order of the speakers and assignment of boxes) but agree on the atmosphere and main events.

  14 Quoted in Lockhart, British Agent, pp. 297–8.

  15 Hill, Go Spy the Land, p. 209.

  16 Quoted in Lockhart, British Agent, p. 299.

  17 Leggett, The Cheka, pp. 71–4.

  18 Accounts of the incident differ in details. Lockhart (British Agent, p. 301) was told that Mirbach had been killed by Blyumkin’s revolver fire, whereas Figes (People’s Tragedy, p. 633) states that the bullets missed, and it was the bomb that killed the Count. Leggett (The Cheka, p. 74) adds the detail of the broken leg. Lockhart says that Blyumkin’s pretext to gain entry was to discuss an alleged assassination plot uncovered by the Cheka, whereas Leggett (who provides the details about the warrant) states that the ostensible business was to discuss the arrest of Mirbach’s nephew.

  19 Swain (Origins of the Russian Civil War, pp. 172–5) suggests that Lockhart was complicit in Savinkov’s coup. Lockhart himself always denied it. He had been ordered by Balfour to have nothing to do with Savinkov, but on 6 July he telegraphed the Foreign Secretary to urge Allied military intervention as quickly as possible to make good the strategic position Savinkov was trying to secure; in the weeks that followed, he channelled funds to Savinkov without authorisation (Ullman, Intervention, p. 231).

  20 Quoted in Leggett, The Cheka, p. 82.

  21 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 8 Jul. 1918.

  22 Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, pp. 184, 299.

  23 A later investigation by the Cheka showed that the Left SRs in Petrograd, most of whom were not dedicated militants who were not aware of the Moscow uprising, had not intended to rise against the Bolsheviks. The Red Army’s assault on the Pazhesky Korpus was a deliberate provocation designed to destroy the Left SR power base in Petrograd (Rabinowitch, Bolsheviks in Power, pp. 300–301).

  24 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 8 Jul. 1918.

  25 Cromie, letter to Adm. W. R. Hall, 26 Jul. 1918, in Jones, ‘Documents on British Relations’ IV, pp. 559–60.

  26 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 8 Jul. 1918.

  27 Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably 8–10 Jul. 1918.

  28 Moura, letter to
Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably 8–10 Jul. 1918.

  29 Lockhart later claimed that he had laughingly refused the guard offered by the Bolsheviks (British Agent, p. 303), but Moura seems to have been under the impression that he had accepted it.

  30 Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 6–7 Jul. 1918.

  31 Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably 10-15 Jul. 1918.