by Edward Lucas
This aspect of the struggle was purely military. Britain played a leading role in the Russian Civil War, intervening to help the White (monarchist) armies on four fronts.15 A British poster of the time gives a flavour. It shows a British soldier, laden with arms, hastening to help three soldiers in the uniform of the White Army, fighting a hideous gap-toothed Bolshevik monster. It reads:
My Russian Friends! I am an Englishman. In the name of our common cause I ask you just to hang on a bit longer, like the good chaps that you have always been. I have delivered, and will deliver in unlimited amounts, all that you need; and most importantly I will deliver you new weapons with which to destroy those disgusting, bloodthirsty red monsters.16
But that British soldier was representing his bosses, not the masses. Strikes and mutinies showed that many in Britain’s big industrial towns, either war-weary or radicalised, regarded the Russian revolution of 1917 with sympathy and admiration, as did many idealistic intellectuals. Communism seemed merely an advanced and vigorous version of socialism. The murderous and dictatorial side of the Soviet regime, apparent to first-hand observers in the ‘Red Terror’ of August 1918, was yet to become fully visible. Outsiders’ desire to eradicate Bolshevism was both stoked and constrained by fear of its attractiveness. Western rulers worried that efforts to crush the communist experiment might backfire, leading to the radicalisation of their workers – and, worse, their soldiers and sailors. But letting the Bolsheviks stay in power was dangerous too: Lenin, Trotsky and the others had made it clear that world revolution was their goal. If they succeeded in Russia then other countries would soon be facing a communist threat too.
The other front, seemingly less risky, was domestic subversion, which was to fail just as badly as the military intervention. Amidst the pressure and panic of their early months in power, the Bolshevik leadership found the time to manage an elaborate deception operation that would leave British and French spy chiefs humiliated. According to Aleksandr Orlov, later a top Soviet defector, Lenin in the summer of 1918 decided that as the foreign powers were trying to overthrow him, it would be a good idea to catch the plotters red-handed and expose them.17 The Bolshevik leader gave the task to the fearsome head of the Cheka secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, who decided to centre the deception operation on the regime’s most effective fighting force, the Latvian Riflemen. Conscripted into the Tsarist army, the Latvians had become radicalised by their careless ill-treatment and high casualty rate, but were not fanatical Bolsheviks. Given the choice, many of them might have preferred a socialist Latvia to a communist Russia.
The first thread in Dzerzhinsky’s web involved a short sallow-faced former naval ensign with a complicated name who offered a neat way into the British spies’ plans and thinking.18 An informer for the Cheka, he had already been approached twice by Commander Leslie Cromie, the British naval attaché in Petrograd.aq On 7 August he opened the trap by responding to Cromie’s overtures, with the claim that his friend, Colonel Eduard Bērziņš, a senior Latvian officer, wished to cooperate with the allies. This was exactly what British intelligence officers were hoping for, and they were all too willing to believe it. A week later the two men appeared at the Moscow apartment of the British envoy Robert Bruce Lockhart. An intriguing character in every sense, libidinous, extravagant, brainy and moody, Lockhart was a forerunner of Graham Greene’s ‘Quiet American’ – just the sort of person that secret service work most disastrously attracts. Bērziņš explained to Lockhart, who was accompanied by two French colleagues, that the Latvians did not intend to fight the Bolsheviks’ battles indefinitely and wished to go home. If they were sent north to fight General Poole’s forces, they would like to surrender: could Lockhart arrange it? He also requested four million roubles to get to work on his fellow-Latvians’ sympathies. Lockhart countered that it would be better if two Latvian regiments would switch sides at the provincial town of Vologda, opening a second front against the Bolshevik forces there, while those remaining in Moscow would assassinate Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership. But he wrote a laissez-passer to help the Latvians reach General Poole and provided 900,000 roubles as a down payment.
By this the naive and impulsive Lockhart incriminated himself, further endangered Cromie, and confirmed Bolshevik suspicions of British meddling. He added to the disaster by putting the two visitors in touch with Sidney Reilly, a spy based at the British consulate in Moscow. Born Sigmund Rosenblum near Odessa in Imperial Russia sometime in the 1870s, Reilly – later nicknamed the ‘Ace of Spies’ – was a ‘complex, unpredictable and undoubtedly self-serving individual mired in deception and conspiracy’.19 Like Lockhart he was wildly overconfident. He wrote in his notes:
I was confident that the terror [Bolshevism] could be wiped out in an hour and that I myself could do it. And why not? A Corsican lieutenant of artillery trod out the embers of the French Revolution. Surely, a British espionage agent with so many factors on his side, could make himself master of Moscow?20
Reilly was also a womaniser and remarkably careless. He arranged a meeting with Bērziņš at the apartment of one of his mistresses, but turned up late. While waiting, the Latvian noticed an envelope in Reilly’s writing that gave an address that turned out to be the home of an actress, Elizabeth Otten, who had allowed her apartment to be used as a meeting place for Reilly and his spies. The Cheka began arresting all those who visited it. One of them was Maria Friede, sister of a colonel in the Red Army General Staff who was carrying secret documents from him, destined for Reilly. Her brother, duly arrested, confessed his cooperation with an American intelligence officer who was later imprisoned.ar
In another blunder, Lockhart’s French colleagues confided in René Marchand, the Moscow correspondent of Le Figaro, in the bizarre belief that he was a spy for their government – which like the British and American ones was deeply alarmed by, and hostile to, the revolutionaries. Marchand, being in fact rather sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, immediately informed Dzerzhinsky. This added more details to those provided by the bogus Latvian ‘mutineers’. Dzerzhinsky learned that the coup was planned for 28 August at a Party meeting in the Bolshoi Theatre. The Latvian soldiers were to seize the entrances and train their rifles on the audience. Reilly and a small group concealed behind the curtains would arrest the Bolshevik leadership. One plan was to humiliate them by marching them half-naked through the streets of Moscow. But the plotters thought it safer to shoot them on the spot. Reilly, Marchand revealed, had promised the conspirators senior positions in the government of a future independent Latvia, to be set up under Allied protection.21
Armed with the details of the plot, Dzerzhinsky went straight to Lenin. The problem was how to use Marchand’s material. Lenin came up with an ingenious suggestion to protect his source’s journalistic integrity. The French journalist was to write a confidential letter to the French president, Raymond Poincaré: nobody could blame a journalist for warning his head of state that his country’s spies were planning a ludicrously risky stunt. The letter would then be ‘found’ by the Cheka during a search of Marchand’s flat. Helpfully, Dzerzhinsky drafted the letter. For a few days, the Bolsheviks were content to watch the plot developing. But the assassination on 30 August of the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Uritsky (followed in the evening by a shooting that came within a whisker of killing Lenin himself) prompted the communist leaders to spring the trap. On 31 August eight Chekists raided the British embassy in Petrograd, shooting Commander Cromie, who bravely tried to delay the intruders to allow two of his agents to escape from the building.as Lockhart and his assistant as well as the French consul-general were jailed and eventually deported, and 521 hapless Russians were arrested as ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Colonel Friede was shot. Reilly was sentenced to death in absentia, but had already escaped.
The fiasco highlighted a central, persistent, and unrecognised dilemma for Western intelligence services in their dealings with the Soviet enemy. Their mission was well described as ‘a mixture of intelligence-gathering,
disruption, sabotage and assistance to British military forces’.22 But those elements are inherently incompatible. Watching in the shadows is one thing; twisting arms is another. It is hard for the same spy to do both. The tension between covert action and intelligence nearly cost the life of probably the most able British spy ever deployed against the Soviet regime.
Paul Dukes, a concert pianist from Bridgwater in Somerset, had honed his skills in evasion, deception and persuasion as a schoolboy, faced with the unpleasant necessity of dodging a predatory paedophile who was both a teacher at his boarding school and a friend of his father. A natural linguist, he had arrived in Russia in 1910 as a music student. Rejected for military service because of a heart condition, he spent much of the war years working for a government-financed information service called the Anglo-Russian Bureau. In 1917, he was summoned to London for a meeting with SIS, in those days an outfit run by eccentric upper-class men with a dilettantish approach to espionage (cynics might say nothing much changed in subsequent decades). Dukes was told:
As to the means whereby you gain access to the country, under what cover you will live there, and how you will send out reports, we shall leave it to you, being best informed as to conditions, to make suggestions.23
After brief training in invisible ink and cipher, Dukes was dispatched back to the most dangerous place in the world for a foreign spy, to live and work undercover as an illegal – rather as Donald Heathfield and the others were to do in America seventy years later. But whereas they exploited the vulnerabilities of an open society, he had to work in a police state, under the noses of the fearsome Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka. He was an astonishing success: in 1919 he was the most effective, and quite possibly the only, SIS officer inside Bolshevik-controlled Russia. He was running a network of agents in Petrograd,24 collected in part via a military canteen in which he had installed himself as a part-time pianist (disguised as a tattily dressed and limping tramp). At other times he managed to pass as an official of the Cheka itself, as a member of the Communist Party, and as a Red Army soldier. The result was intelligence of a stellar quality and quantity.25 Dukes had not only established a network of informers, civilian and military, throughout the city and its great port. He had penetrated the top Bolshevik leadership of Petrograd to such an extent that he was able to transmit to London translations of the highly secret minutes of their meetings in full. But the star spy was in increasingly desperate straits. The tightening Bolshevik bureaucratic controls on movements, food supplies and residency made maintaining his aliases and safe houses increasingly difficult: getting the right papers was tricky and having the wrong ones fatal. The Cheka knew the British spy was at large in the city and had on several occasions nearly caught him. Money could help – but SIS had sent him ineptly forged cash: when the fake banknotes got wet, the ink ran. His priceless intelligence was useless unless it could reach the increasingly frantic politicians in London but getting across the border was difficult: in one two-week period in the summer of 1919 no fewer than six couriers had been captured.26
Cumming tasked a young naval lieutenant, Augustus ‘Gus’ Agar, with rescuing Dukes using lightweight torpedo boats. These contraptions, plywood shells powered by aircraft engines, were the forerunners of the vessels that would be used to send SIS agents to the Baltic states twenty-five years later. The ‘eggshells’ (when their delicate engines worked, which was not always) could travel at the then astonishing speed of over 40 knots. The mission was dogged by bad luck, communications breakdowns, security breaches, meddling from other officials, and suspicion from Agar’s Finnish hosts (who had no desire to provoke the Bolsheviks by supporting madcap British raids and spookery). Agar’s main ally against these odds was Admiral Sir Walter ‘Titch’ Cowan, the commander of a British naval squadron that was helping the Estonians beat off their various foes, though its two light cruisers and ten destroyers were outgunned by Russia’s much heavier warships: the Oleg, a heavy cruiser, and two battleships, the Petropavlovsk and Andrei Pervozvanni.at In theory, Agar’s mission was solely the clandestine exfiltration of Dukes from Petrograd. He and his crew wore civilian clothes, and turned up in Helsinki pretending to be speedboat salesmen. But they had also taken a couple of torpedoes (launched in a hair-raising manoeuvre over the back of the craft, travelling in the same direction: the helmsman had a few seconds to turn away from their path). And they had naval uniforms on board, to be donned in the event of real warfare.
Dukes reported that the Russian fleet was riven by disputes between the officers and men loyal to the Bolsheviks, those sympathetic to the Whites, and those with loyalties to other factions. One report, citing a senior Bolshevik, said that the men regarded their officers as ‘class enemies’ while the officers were a ‘mass of spies’.27 Dukes also obtained a secret transcript from a commission of enquiry following a failed attack on the British squadron. A sailor from the submarine Pantera answered with remarkable frankness as follows:
Judge: Will you attack the British?
Sailor: If the commander orders it, we will.
Judge: But will you fire on them?
Sailor: Yes.
Judge: Will you hit them?
Sailor: No.
Following this debacle, Lenin put Trotsky in charge of reforming the navy. He immediately began replacing ideologically sound but useless officers with experienced Tsarist-era ones. He also banned the practice under which committees of ‘revolutionary sailors’ forced their officers to clean toilets and sweep floors. That restored the fleet’s offensive capability. He also ordered the laying of many thousands of mines, making it far harder for the British to attack. Dukes dutifully reported all this, plus a crucial piece of intelligence for Agar: the one-metre depth at which the mines defending the Kronstadt naval base were to be laid. The ‘eggshell’ boats drew only 2’9” (84cm). With a few inches to spare, they could therefore cross the minefield and use their torpedoes to attack the Bolshevik fleet at anchor.
As Agar waited to rescue Dukes, he watched with despair the Bolshevik fleet pounding the nearby fortress of Krasnaya Gorka (Red Hill) where the garrison had rebelled: this was a tragic miscalculation by its leaders, Ingrian nationalists – ethnic cousins of the Finns and Estonians – who were hoping to make their own bid for freedom. In a daring raid into the heart of Kronstadt harbour, and in defiance of his instruction to concentrate on intelligence work, Agar succeeded in torpedoing and sinking the Oleg. It was too late to save the Ingrians, but a second raid with seven more torpedo boats sank both the Bolshevik battleships, ending the struggle for naval superiority in the Baltic and ensuring Estonia’s and Latvia’s independence – and their lasting, if ultimately misplaced, faith in British integrity and capability. This was to feature in the disasters of the 1940s and 1950s, and in the renewed intelligence ties of the 1990s.
Agar received the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest military honour. But his exploits doomed his mission. Dukes was still stuck in Russia, where Soviet authorities now understood the vulnerability of their defences to the fast British vessels. A later attempt to rescue the master-spy was abandoned under heavy fire. Dukes finally escaped via Latvia, frostbitten, filthy, half-starved and exhausted. SIS showered him with praise – but in a signal piece of mean-mindedness refused to pay his operation’s debts. George Gibson, a leading figure in the dwindling British community in Petrograd, had at great personal risk lent Dukes 375,000 roublesau to make up for the poor forgeries supplied by SIS. But when Gibson returned to London, SIS said his paperwork was inadequate and refused to pay. Only when an infuriated Dukes threatened publicly to renounce his knighthood did SIS back down.
A more famous if less impressive British agent in this era was Dukes’s friend Arthur Ransome. To many readers, his name will be inextricably linked with a quite different genre: the ‘Swallows and Amazons’ children’s books. But he was also an expert on Russia, and on the books of SIS as agent ‘S-76’. Ransome moved to the Estonian capital in 1918, tasked with gaining information abo
ut Soviet Russia. He was also asked by the Estonian authorities to carry a secret message to the Bolshevik leadership expressing their willingness to strike a peace deal. Ransome saw at once that peace with Estonia would be followed by a similar agreement with Latvia. This would help secure the Bolshevik regime in Russia, which, as a left-winger, Ransome broadly supported. It would also end the fighting that was devastating the region. Not for the first time, a British intelligence agent was finding that local allies’ wishes clashed with the geopolitical interests of his bosses. For London, the aim of the war was to topple the reds, not to promote democracy or freedom (still largely seen as an eccentric American preoccupation).
The Bolsheviks responded coolly. Undeterred, Ransome crossed the Russian–Estonian front line in a journey that he portrayed as hair-raising (other writers and his biographer reckon it was trouble-free).28 His aim was not spying but to rescue Evgenia Shelepina, who was his mistress and Trotsky’s secretary. It is unclear whether she was using Ransome to snoop on the British, providing him with real intelligence, in love with a glamorous Englishman, or some permutation of these three. During stints in Tallinn and then in the Latvian capital Riga, Ransome spent the next few years in a half-world between journalism and intelligence work. Unable to divorce his English wife Ivy, he could not return to England – his private life was as tangled as his political views. He publicly defended the Bolshevik suppression of the Kronstadt uprising in 1921: perhaps sincerely, perhaps to preserve his personal or professional contacts in Russia.