Adventures of a British Master Spy

by Sidney Reilly

  All that he has told me so far about the duping of the états majors and of the diplomats is absolutely correct. There are plenty of proofs of it.

  Who can be sure that he is not sincere? And if he really is, he is a victim like all the rest.

  Ask me nothing about my intentions: forget what I have written to you at other times. Above all, speak to nobody of my plans. By and by I will see you again and then we will speak of all that.

  I have sent you a telegram begging you to come here. Now I think that it is better for me to come to Paris. I want only to beg you to secure the publication by your friends in Liberté of the articles which GK will send on to you. The past of Opp. cannot prevent us from profiting by the information which he has given us. My advice is that we must do all in our power to avert each of the ruses and basenesses, which the Bolsheviks employ to fool and entrap honest people.

  Understand that for me it is agony to speak of it: I have suffered so much of it, but I have found the power to forget my own sentiments and to cry out their crimes against all the world.

  Au revoir, ma petite, je t’embrasse tendrement, and I beg you again to await me in Paris forgetting all I have written to you.

  Telegram from Marie Schultz

  Much had happened before this letter came into my hands. Marie sent a telegram to General K. announcing that she was returning to Russia. The General wired back at once telling her to await his arrival, and left for Finland with two officers. He came back to Paris shaking his head and looking very grave. He told me that the shock of the discovery which she had made seemed to have unhinged her mind and that she was no longer normal. She seemed bent on returning to Russia to wreak her vengeance on the people who had duped her, and thus to cleanse herself of the blood of the many, whom unwittingly she had sent to their death.

  The General then left the two men with her and returned to Paris. A fortnight passed. And then one day at the American Express a telegram was handed to me. It had been handed in at Helsingfors and the date it bore was two weeks before. The clerk at the American Express apologised profusely. There was another Mrs Reilly on their books and the telegram had been handed to her. On such things does human fate depend. The telegram was from Marie. She asked me to join her. She was going into Russia with Opperput, so great was the confidence with which this loathsome provocateur had inspired her. She wanted me to accompany her. In her grief and her loneliness her mind had flown to me, whom she had wounded so terribly and tried so hard to heal. Was there yet time? I wired Marie to await me, and hurried to the home of General K.

  A terrible shock awaited me there. With the General were the two men, whom he had left at Helsingfors to watch over Marie. She had given them the slip and passed over into Russia with Opperput.

  On the face of it, it is incredible. Marie, who knew the wiles of the Bolsheviks so well, had allowed herself to be lured into Russia by a transparent provocateur. Marie, who from bitter experience knew that there were no depths of duplicity to which the Bolsheviks would not descend, had been trapped by a device so patent as this. But there it is. One after another, the enemies of the Soviet were being lured back to their doom. No form of diabolical cunning in which the Bolsheviks were not past-masters. One way or another, with bluff and double bluff, they were drawing their enemies into the net. It is perhaps as Marie herself said that the omnipotence of the Bolsheviks exercised a sort of hypnotism, to which all became subject who approached the fringes of its baleful influence. How otherwise should these people, so shrewd, so well-informed, so sceptical, have been drawn into the lure?

  Once the news reached us that Marie had gone back into Russia, it was only a matter of waiting for the news of her death. We had only a few days to wait before the papers published an account of how she had been taken by the Bolsheviks and, rather than be captured, had turned her revolver on herself and fatally wounded herself.

  Opperput had escaped and had not been taken. Of course he had escaped. Of course he had not been taken.

  And thus died the bravest of all Russian women, who fought against the tyrants of their country.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  AND NOW THE drama, in the course of which my husband had vanished and Marie Schultz had gone to an unknown fate, was drawing to its close. The terrible ‘Trust’ had done its work of provocation mercilessly. First Sidney, and then Maroussia had fallen into the pit which had been dug for them. One had not even the consolation of knowing that they had died doing their duty. Fooled by a sham conspiracy, initiated into a bogus organisation, they had obeyed the instructions of their implacable enemies in going to a relentless doom. Life seems very vain and profitless.

  But one more victim was to die before the close. Immediately after receiving the news about Marie I had written to her husband – George Nicholaivitch Radkevitch, to give him his true name – a letter of condolence and deep commiseration. He was then in Warsaw. I shortly received the following reply in his poor, pathetic, misspelt, broken French.

  Dear Madame Pepita,

  I thank you very much for your kind letter and I regret that I cannot send you any good news. The story is always sad and black.

  I am writing to you, because I well know that you can understand me better than all the others. You have undergone the same suffering, and, what causes me infinite distress, your sorrow has come on you, without your will, through myself and Maroussia. You ought to hate us for that, but you have so much goodness that you pardon our fault.

  God bless you for that, for otherwise existence would be entirely insupportable, and the only thing that would remain for me would be to die – for I do not see how I could possibly help you and make good the injury we have done. I am certain that it was for this reason that Marie put herself in that frightful position, where death was almost certain.

  I did not see Marie for four months before that happened, but from her last letter I realise that she suffered terribly and wished to die.

  You tell me that I ought to have a feeling whether Marie is alive or not. I think that it is impossible for me, particularly after what I have told you. I fear that my soul is not so sensitive as to receive impressions of what takes place on the border line or beyond the veil. Marie often used to tell me that I had a brain like a horse. I do not know if you can understand me: it is so difficult to explain in French, but I know that you will not laugh even if I make a mess of what I am saying.

  I beg you to go to the fortune teller. Marie has told me how once she said a great deal that was true with regard to herself and Sidney Georgevitch. On one occasion to a man, who was a complete stranger, she named Marie and said that Marie would have to perish. I wanted very much to go to her myself but I have not the time for it. The same cause has prevented me from meeting you. Perhaps sometime in the future I will be in Paris, when I want to see you and explain what I cannot say in a letter.

  You say that you are going to London to find out something. I send you the last photograph of Maroussia. Take it with you. Perhaps it will help you.

  Perhaps the others will laugh at my letter, but I know that you won’t laugh, for you are good.

  I want to tell you once again that I feel myself very blameworthy before you, and all the more I thank you for the interest you take in Marie.

  It was not long before George Nicholaivitch followed his letter to Paris. His experience meantime had been terrible. At first he had been despairingly resigned to the blow. Then as time went on and he realised more clearly what had happened and that he would have to live without Marie forever, his soul rose in revolt, and his hopes, overthrowing his reason, declared to him that Marie was still alive. He longed for company and for comfort. He was not the sort of man who can face life alone. Never have I seen a face so desperate. He was completely broken down. The sight of his sorrow-stricken countenance first, I think, drew me out of my morbid grieving for my husband, over whose doubtful fate I had been brooding all these months. I realised that there were others as wretched as myself and for a similar caus
e. George Nicholaivitch had relied on his wife as I had on Sidney. She had been his prop and stay. I have no doubt that she had ordered him to marry her as she ordered all the other activities of his life. He was not what you would call a strong character, only simple, loyal, kind-hearted.

  I found him waiting in my room one morning when I came down, sitting with staring, vacant eyes, with dishevelled hair, with drawn, desperate face. He looked as if he had had no sleep for nights, and as if he had been drinking too. There is something sacred in so much grief. I could say nothing. I had felt the death of Marie myself very keenly. I felt in a measure responsible for it. She had gone to avenge my husband, whom she had unwittingly betrayed. She had offered her blood for his blood by way of atonement. We had somehow been drawn into the vortex of horrible things, where death was piled on death, and fresh blood dripped on the old. So I sat and regarded whether George Nicholaivitch should go.

  ‘Now Marie is gone,’ he said at last.

  I said nothing. What could I say? I was acutely conscious of the clock ticking impertinently loud on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Now Maroussia is gone,’ he repeated after a long pause. ‘But she will come back. She will come back.’

  ‘Of course she will come back,’ said I, to soothe him.

  He laughed vacantly.

  ‘Of course she will come back,’ he repeated. ‘I will go fetch her. I will go to Russia to fetch her.’

  ‘Wait and there will be news,’ I told him. ‘Wait here as I am waiting.’

  ‘Poor Mme Reilly,’ he said, seeing me, it seemed, for the first time. ‘You have been waiting a long time.’

  ‘A very long time.’

  ‘I cannot wait,’ said George Nicholaivitch. ‘I cannot wait a long time. I am going to Russia to fetch her. I cannot get on without her. I am going today.’

  ‘Stay a little in Paris.’

  ‘No, I must go at once.’ He started reaching for his hat. And then suddenly he turned round and looked me straight in the face. ‘You don’t think she’s dead?’

  ‘I am sure she is not,’ I answered, to comfort him, though my own heart was like ice.

  ‘That’s right. Not dead. That’s what I say. They say she’s dead. They say she shot herself. But we know better. You and I know better – eh?’

  ‘Of course we do,’ I answered.

  ‘That’s what I say. You and I know better. She’s wounded. She’s a prisoner. They have captured her and have her in prison. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I assured him.

  ‘Very well, then. Now what am I going to do? I am going to Russia and have her out. That’s what I am going to do. Your husband is there too, isn’t he? He’s not dead, is he?’

  ‘No, he’s not dead either.’

  ‘Very well then. I am going to Russia and have him out. Have them both out. That’s what I’m going to do.’

  I saw him later in the day in a café much frequented by Russian exiles. He was drowning his sorrows in drink. Without Marie to rule him and order him about, as that amazing woman did, poor George Nicholaivitch was going to pieces. But his desire to return to Russia remained unshaken. I asked him to stay and work with General K., but it was of no avail. Very worried, I sought out the General, and asked him to exercise his authority, but the General thought it better that George Nicholaivitch should go.

  ‘You see what it is,’ said the General to me. ‘He is lost either way. If he stays here he just goes to waste and ends a gallant career in ignominy. It is better for him to die like a man in the open.’

  Of course George could not use his old passport. One day he came to me and asked me to get him another one. I was still diffident, but I had to admit the cogency of General K.’s reasoning.

  Besides George Nicholaivitch himself was most pathetically serious and eager. After temporising a little I told him I would do my best.

  It was from a Rumanian friend that I secured the false passport, which I gave to George, and now nothing stood in the way of his immediate departure. We lunched together at Drouan before he went, the General, George Nicholaivitch and myself. It was a queer meal. It seemed to me that poor Marie Schultz’s husband was already dead. My heart was very heavy as I sat there and made a pretence of eating. Over the table General K. gave his final instructions, as quietly and normally as if George Nicholaivitch was going out for a day’s hunting. His first task was to find out whether Maroussia or Sidney was still alive: secondly, where they were confined: thirdly to get word to them: or, if that proved impossible, he was to blow up a part of the prison and endeavour to get at them during the confusion. But, before making any attempt, he was to inform the General and myself at two different addresses.

  It seemed best that he should go, but God knows it was bitter to watch him depart to a certain doom. I wanted even then to call him back, but he went that afternoon, proceeding to Rumania and thence crossing into Russia, and the whole way the eyes of the trackers of blood were upon him.

  With the exposure of the ‘Trust’ my interest in Russian politics had waned. At the beginning of the year I had applied for a Bolshevik passport to enable me to go and see my husband in Russia. I had told the full story, keeping nothing back, and admitting that Captain Reilly had entered Russia under an assumed name on espionage work. But my request had been refused. However anxious they were to get me into Russia, the Tcheka did not wish me to enter the country thus openly. Any hopes I now had – and I am still convinced that my husband is alive in Russia – were centred in George Nicholaivitch.

  The weeks went by. There was no news from George.

  Then one morning there was a notice in the paper:

  EXPLO SION AT THE LOUBIANKA (MOSCOW)

  On the evening of 6 July, two White Russian officers, who came from Paris through Rumania and Bulgaria, aided by Rumanian secret agents, threw two bombs in the Passport offices of the Tcheka. By the explosion one was killed and the other gravely injured. Mr G. N. Radkevitch was killed, the other, an émigré, was arrested near Polosk (Moscow). A communiqué from Warsaw says that the Red Cross wagons have taken away many dead and wounded.

  And so ended poor George Nicholaivitch Radkevitch, taking in his death a terrible revenge on the Tcheka, which had robbed him of all he held dear. About two months afterwards a letter reached me from Warsaw, written by him on the very day before his death and reading ‘trying to save both tomorrow. If I fail, adieu.’

  It was the report he was to send to the General and myself before he took action, according to the General’s instructions. Were they both really still alive? Had George Nicholaivitch succeeded on his quest? Had he ascertained in what dungeon the victims of the Tcheka were lying? What happened to Sidney Reilly? Is he alive or dead? For my part I am sure that he is lying without trial or conviction in a Russian prison.

  A memorial service was held for poor George Nicholaivitch in the Russian church in the Rue Crimée. It was for the third victim of the ‘Trust’. As the priest from the altar pronounced the solemn and magnificent words promising immortal life to the soul of George Nicholaivitch Radkevitch, I saw their figures rise before me, saw them trailing up the shaft of summer light which shone through the window, saw Sidney and Madame Schovalovsky and Marie Schultz and George Nicholaivitch rising and soaring up the sunbeam into infinite space. My mind ranged over all the adventures which had befallen me in these few short years, I thought of the meeting at the Hotel Adlon, of our marriage, of Drebkoff, of Savinkoff, of what had happened to us in New York, Paris and London. I lived again through our parting on the platform at Cologne, and endured the agony of bereavement at Hamburg once more. The figures marshalled themselves before me and hurried into space. All that portion of my life seemed like a strange interlude, in which it was impossible to believe. And now I was quite alone. The sun had sunk to his setting; the streets were bathed in the religious gleams of evening; here and there lights were beginning to show in the windows, as I walked disconsolately home.

  APPENDIX ONE<
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  REPORT TO THE WAR OFFICE FROM THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES

  London

  Nov. 26th, 1918

  From:—

  Captain G. A. Hill,

  4th Manch. Regt., & RAF

  To:—

  DMI

  War Office,

  London.

  Sir,

  I have the honour to enclose herewith a report showing work done for DMI from February 24th until October 2nd 1918.

  DMI work directly reported on is on page, 7, 8, 10, 12 to 26.

  I have the honour to be,

  Sir,

  Your obedient servant,

  (Sgd.) George Alfred Hill, Capt.

  4th Manch. & RAF.

  Copies to Lt-Gen. S. C. Poole, CB, CMG, DSO.

  Lt-Col. Thornhill, DSO.

  R. H. B. Lockhart, Esq.

  MI1c

  REPORT OF WORK DONE IN RUSSIA TO END OF 1917

  SEPTEMBER 1917

  28th Reported to Lt-Col. Maund RFC and worked under him in Moscow for some weeks.

  OCTOBER 1917

  Was ordered by Lt-Col. Maund RFC to Stavka at the summons of General Barter to attend the Russian Aviation conference to which the French specialists were also invited. This conference sat for about five weeks and was composed of officers from every aviation and artillery branch of the armies of the field, and its technical problem was to introduce western methods into its very badly organised services. Underlying this conference, which was attended by Kerensky, was a strong political movement, which however, came to nothing.