by Stephen Grey
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History, it is said, is told by the victorious. In the case of the Soviets, it was particularly distorted. But while Britain’s role as a conspirator was deliberately exaggerated, there was no question that the British secret service was plotting to destroy the Bolsheviks.
After seeing Cromie in Petrograd, around 15–16 August the two Lettish officers, Buikis and Sprogis, went to see Lockhart. He, according to a Soviet account, told Buikis, ‘Your first and most important task is to arrest and kill Lenin. Yes, yes, kill him because if he escapes that will be the end of the cause.’ Lockhart denied fomenting any such violence. His official reports suggested that he approved of Reilly’s plan to get the Lettish regiments to change sides, but ‘when he referred again to the necessity of a movement in Moscow [i.e. an attempted coup] we all demurred and pointed out there was nothing to gain by this’.28
Lockhart did give the Letts a laissez-passer to cross the British lines. But, he said, it wasn’t until Reilly started getting involved that a conspiracy developed. He claimed at one point to have warned Reilly to have nothing to do with ‘so dangerous and doubtful [a] move’ as a coup attempt.29
But, whether with official backing or not, Reilly, as an employee of SIS, took matters into his own hands. He began to develop a much more elaborate plot, hoping to use the Lettish regiments to take on Soviet power in both Petrograd and Moscow. Reilly later told Soviet interrogators, ‘From passive intelligence work, I, like other members of the British mission, gradually switched to a more-or-less active fight against Soviet power.’30 Lockhart recorded in his official report:
After my release I discovered from Captain George Hill, R.F.C., who was Reilly’s assistant in Moscow, that the Bolshevik accusations were substantially true and that in spite of the advice of [the French general] Lavergne, myself and the other Allied representatives a coup d’état had been planned … The charges of bridge and railway destruction were also true.31
Reilly even started preparing a list of the new ministers he wanted in power, many of whom were old cronies of his. The Lettish officers, Buikis and Sprogis, were now joined by a Lieutenant-Colonel E. P. Berzin, the commander of the Lettish regiment guarding the Kremlin, to give their tale credibility. Reilly’s deputy in Moscow, Captain George Hill, recorded that Berzin had suggested ‘that men like Trotsky and Lenin should be assassinated’ but Reilly had opposed the idea, not wishing to ‘make martyrs of the leaders’.32
By 17 August, Reilly was meeting Berzin alone. He gave him 1.4 million roubles to carry out the plot. Lockhart wrote in a telegram that they had agreed to give Berzin financial support and to leave the money with Reilly, ‘who is an extremely able man and in my opinion by far the cleverest of our agents in Russia’.33 The plan was that all British diplomats should be evacuated, but the two secret service officers in Moscow, Reilly and Hill, should stay behind. They could shoulder the blame for whatever happened. ‘In the event of failure and our being found in any plot, Reilly and myself should have simply been private individuals and responsible to no one … the whole brunt would have been borne by us.’34 That message was reinforced in Petrograd by Commander Boyce, the secret service chief of station, who told Reilly that his Lettish coup plan was ‘extremely risky but … worth trying, and that failure of the plan would drop entirely on the neck of Lt Reilly’.35
On 3 September, three days after the raid on the British Embassy, the Bolsheviks announced the shocking details of what they called the Lockhart Plot, claiming that the British had conspired to overthrow Lenin. Soviet newspapers and pamphlets described the discovery of a ‘sensational plot’ to overthrow their government: ‘Allied complicity in counter-revolutionary plot proved,’ screamed one bulletin.36
Much of the detail – eagerly repeated by pro-Soviet writers in the years ahead – was invented. As the Bolshevik revolution descended into terror, the plot became Exhibit A of conspiracy. In truth, the Letts never did plan to revolt. Evidence of a connection between what Reilly, Lockhart and Cromie had been plotting and the shootings of Lenin and Uritsky was tenuous. And the reason for that was that the British secret service had been entirely tricked: almost all of the British contacts proved to be provocateurs – agents of the Cheka. As Lockhart discovered when confronted in his cell by the Bolshevik chief of counter-revolution, Yakov Peters, when the Lettish officers had first come to him they had been acting on Peters’s instructions.37
For British spying it was a disaster. They had tried to plot and, unluckily for Reilly, there had been many witnesses. He had wanted to capture Lenin and defeat the Revolution. But the men they recruited for their mission were all in the pay of ‘Iron Felix’ Dzerzhinsky, founder and chief of the Cheka. In a farce of the first order, a fictional plot – spun together by British agents and Cheka provocateurs – had been overtaken by a real plot, so that the shootings of both Uritsky and Lenin came as a genuine surprise.
The aftermath of the fake and real plots was terrible. The shooting of Lenin was followed directly by the events of the Red Terror, in which tens of thousands were to perish. On 1 September, the Red Army journal Krasnaya Gazeta declared, ‘Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritsky … let there be floods of blood for the bourgeois – more blood, as much as possible.’ The same day the Bolshevik Commissars for Justice and Internal Affairs issued a decree stating, ‘It is absolutely essential to safeguard the rear by means of terror.’ Isvestia, the Bolshevik party’s newspaper, printed a letter from Joseph Stalin demanding ‘open, mass, systematic terror’. His orders were carried out and between 50,000 and 200,000 people were executed.38
Although the British secret service’s bungled intrigues added to Bolshevik paranoia and provided useful propaganda, it is hard to imagine that they really made much difference to the scale of this terrible revenge. Certainly, the active plotting against the Bolsheviks gave the Cheka an excuse to raid the embassy and sealed Cromie’s fate. And if Reilly, Cromie and their friends had succeeded in their bolder plans and had, for instance, managed to kill some Soviet leader, then that could have led to further dire consequences. But with hostile troops on their territory, the Russians had plenty of reasons already to distrust the British. As Winston Churchill wrote later, this was a time of confrontation: ‘Were they [the Allies] at war with Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil.’39 But despite their clearly opposed interests, the Bolsheviks’ foreign policy was intrinsically pragmatic. The discovery that Britain’s diplomats were prepared to finance the assassination of Bolsheviks – proof of malicious intent – may have helped to sway their calculations, encouraging the view that negotiation was pointless and convincing them that Britain was hostile.
London neither sanctioned nor gave advance approval for Reilly’s plots. SIS files provide no indication that Cumming knew that his agents were fomenting such schemes. Reilly and the others were sent to perform espionage, not organize coups. But this was not the age of micromanagement. His Majesty’s agents, just like his ambassadors, were expected to think for themselves. When Reilly returned, Cumming gave no sign that he disapproved of his actions. Instead, Reilly was given the Military Cross and dispatched, within a month, to spy on the Soviets again (this time working with White Russian forces in the Ukraine).
Reilly was not dismissed from the secret service until 1921. Within twelve months, Cumming was advising his Vienna station that the ‘master spy’ was now in the cold: ‘You should certainly not appear to be hiding anything from him or show a want of frankness, but at the same time be careful not to tell him anything of real importance.’40
For the next few years, Reilly continued his scheming, mostly for profit. Then, in 1925, he was lured back to Russia by Soviet agents, only to be captured and executed by the Cheka on 5 November. He had confessed to being an intelligence operative but – Russian archives revealed
later – he did not name any of his comrades.41
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So, what impact did all these escapades have on the nature of spying?
Actual spying in Russia, it was soon clear, would become nigh on impossible for foreigners like Reilly, even if they had been born there. The adventurer-spy Reilly had epitomized was rapidly becoming an anachronism – or at least under the sort of closed regime that the communists ran. Probably the last of such agents was Reilly’s friend Paul Dukes, who entered Russia and continued to work undercover until 1920. He left unscathed and received a knighthood. Of all SIS’s early spies, he was the most successful. A fluent Russian speaker who, as a music student, had a genuine reason for being in Petrograd, Dukes infiltrated local Bolshevik groups, worked in munitions factories and even joined the Red Army as a soldier (where he deliberately blew up the wrong bridges). But George Hill, in his report to British intelligence on his activities in Russia, spelled out in a very down-to-earth way the difficulties of performing secret work in the growing security state. For a start, there were simple practical problems. The telephone system was suspended or was monitored, so ‘it was quite impossible to give warnings or to ring up to find if the coast was clear’. Finding accommodation was equally impossible, because ‘house committees’ were established that checked the identity of anyone renting a room, and the new ‘servants’ league’ offered rewards to servants who helped to ‘impeach their employers as enemies of the people’. Anyone’s house was subject to search ‘without writ or order’ and a cover story was hard to come by since so many professions were on a blacklist. Hill had bought an antiques-cum-chemist’s shop as a cover, but now it was illegal to sell medicines without a licence and antiques were protected as ‘national treasure’. It was also hard to keep account of payments to agents. While they needed to be superbly ‘over-paid’ to stop them earning more by betraying you, or turning to blackmail, none would sign a receipt.
As Hill explained, ‘It should be noticed that today in Russia not a single agent will put his name to any piece of paper or receipt, so that if in future agents are to be employed by us in Russia, any hope of establishing control by the old system of voucher must be abandoned.’ Just getting hold of money – with the banks in revolutionary hands – was one of the ‘greatest difficulties of the Russian SS [secret service] work’.42
Summing up the nature of the profession in his memoirs, Hill described how British spies ‘commonly take up their dangerous duty out of sheer love of adventure’. But he hinted at the shift away from that and towards an activity defined by the hiring of others – towards, at its worst, renting a pair of second-hand eyes:
British spies have slipped through the Khyber Pass disguised as Afghans, or loitered in Eastern bazaars in the dress of native traders, but it is difficult for a man, however much he has tarried amongst them, to imitate with faultless exactitude the accent, habits, ways of thought of an alien people, and for that reason the espionage agent finds himself again and again compelled to resort to the employment of nationals. It is because of this part of his work, because of the necessity imposed on him of associating with traitors, that a certain odium has come to be attached to the name of spy.43
Whatever that odium, in the light of the experience of early Soviet Russia, modern spying came to depend on the employment of traitors. A government hired an intelligence officer working for an intelligence agency, and then that officer and agency hired a local person, usually an amateur, to actually do the spying and to betray their country’s secrets.
The point is not that British or American officers never did any real spying themselves, but that stealing secrets was no longer their main job. Instead, others – be they stooges or fully informed recruits – were hired or cajoled to grab the secrets on behalf of the professionals.
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In the spy game after Reilly and Dukes, intelligence officers typically also handled these local recruits from a safer vantage point. For most of the interwar years, SIS officers retreated into the protection of British embassies. From 1919, the agreed primary cover of the SIS officer was as a ‘passport control officer’ in the consular section. While this would not have protected Cromie, it was a compromise that usually gave Cumming’s emissaries a degree of safety and also an excuse to be in the country (although not formal diplomatic immunity). It also kept spying at some distance from regular diplomacy. (Profits from issuing passports and visas to Britain also provided a secret additional subsidy for SIS that supplemented the ‘secret service vote’, which was passed annually in Parliament in an open session.44)
British soldier-adventurers continued to be sent in wartime to spy behind enemy lines. During the Second World War, swashbuckling types such as Fitzroy Maclean parachuted into German-held Yugoslavia to link up with the partisans, and fellow irregular Neil ‘Billy’ McLean went into occupied Albania.
But after the Second World War, officers from almost all foreign services, including both SIS and the newly formed CIA, returned to embassy work. This time they worked undercover while fully accredited as diplomats, thus claiming immunity from prosecution for their activities under the Vienna Conventions. The drawback was this required them to exhaust themselves doing two jobs: both working for the spy service and performing their ‘cover tasks’ – for example, by doing consular jobs.
The intelligence world had turned such a complete circle that to even call an intelligence officer a spy at the close of the twentieth century was seen as offensive and certainly inaccurate. In the official language of espionage, they were not even secret agents.
In 1978, the chief counsel of the US House of Representatives’ Select Committee on Assassinations introduced the next witness, a Mr John Clement Hart, as ‘a career agent with the CIA, having served approximately twenty-four years’. He was to offer evidence on the interrogation of a KGB defector, Yuri Nosenko. After he swore the oath, Hart just had one point of clarification:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, gentlemen. Before I begin my statement, I would like to make a prefatory remark on a technical aspect of what was said about me … I was not and never have been what is called a career agent with the CIA. I bring that up only because that term happens to have a technical meaning in the Agency. I was what you would call an employee or an officer of the Agency. And I would like to have that made part of the record.45
In the jargon of the modern spy agency, those directly employed on the staff of the ‘service’ were ‘operations officers’, ‘case officers’, ‘operatives’, ‘handlers’ and ‘spymasters’ – many things, but not agents. At the CIA in particular, they liked this to be clear. In a 2004 talk, another former senior CIA operative, Howard Hart (no relation), made the point emphatically: ‘We are not spies, we run spies. We recruit spies.’46 The CIA elaborated on its website: ‘A spy is someone who provides classified information about his country to another country.’47
The same point of view could be heard in Britain. A former leading officer of British intelligence, interviewed in a quiet corner of England, was quite particular: ‘I take it rather badly to be called a spy. I would prefer you refer to me as a spymaster.’ And this is what became of the secret service.
At the root of spying, such men knew, was a grubby act of betrayal. As Hill had hinted, the shift from spying directly to hiring others had made spying synonymous with treachery, and far less glorious. Spies could be liked but never fully trusted. Fundamentally, spies were not our people. They were and are – as ‘C’ called Reilly – ‘very doubtful’.
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While in the real world the all-action ‘master spy’ may have become a rare beast, he lives on in the popular imagination, as James Bond and other heroes of popular fiction demonstrate. For a fiction writer, it was certainly far more exciting to merge the now distinct roles of intelligence officer and secret agent. It was also expedient to blend the role of peacetime secret agent with wartime military intelligence work.
Ian Fleming, who wrote the Bond novels, got a tast
e of espionage when, in the Second World War, he worked as assistant to the director of naval intelligence. Here he had ample chance to meet the different elements of Britain’s wartime secret state. In addition he got to know Colonel ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), who went on to found the CIA. In 1942, Fleming became involved in setting up a unit of commandos whose special mission was to make shock raids to gather intelligence. No wonder Fleming said the Bond character he invented was ‘a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war’.48
In the case of Bond, there is some indication that Fleming was also influenced by the Reilly legend, in particular through a friend, the same Bruce Lockhart, then head of the ‘black propaganda’ political warfare executive, who had been Reilly’s co-conspirator in Russia. One of Fleming’s former colleagues at the Sunday Times claimed that Fleming ‘once told me he invented the character of James Bond after reading about the exploits of Sidney George Reilly in the archives of the British intelligence service’.49 This may be fanciful but, as Andrew Cook puts it:
Like Fleming’s fictional creation, Reilly was multi-lingual with a fascination with the Far East, fond of fine living and a compulsive gambler. He also exercised a Bond-like fascination for women, his many love affairs standing comparison with the amorous adventures of 007. Unlike James Bond, though, Sidney Reilly was by no stretch of the imagination a conventionally handsome man. His appeal lay more in the elusive qualities of charm and charisma. He was, however, equally capable of being cold and menacing.50