Spies and Commissars

by Robert Service

  There was no uniform pattern of work among the Allied intelligence agencies and the new US network was run noticeably more staidly than the British one. It was centred on the Information Service set up in Russia before the October Revolution and supposedly dedicated to ‘educational and informational work’.26 From March 1918, the head of the Service was the exotically named Xenophon Dmitrievich de Blumenthal Kalamatiano. Kalamatiano was born in the Russian Empire in 1882 and was of Greek and Russian extraction. As a boy he had emigrated with his mother and stepfather to America, where he took a degree in Chicago before returning to his native country for a job with an American tractor company in Odessa. He subsequently moved to Moscow where manufacturing contracts during the Great War made him a rich man. As his business fell off in 1917, he made himself useful to American diplomats trying to understand the situation in Russia.27 The Information Service was the front for a network of thirty-two agents including Kalamatiano. After 1917, apart from gathering intelligence, their task was to make contact with Sovnarkom’s military enemies.28 Kalamatiano started by sending people to the bigger cities adjacent to the vast eastern front, cities stretching from Novgorod in the north to Rostov in the south. He then extended the coverage to Ukraine, Belorussia and the lands of the Baltic coast. When the Allied embassies left for Vologda he stayed behind and registered himself as a Russian citizen, which gave him the cover to continue his operations without going underground.29 And although the American operation was late in getting started, it quickly became an effective one. Kalamatiano obtained material from informers in the Red Army and made contact with the Socialist- Revolutionaries.30 He paid handsomely too — as did the other Allied agencies. Alexander Fride received up to 750 rubles a month from Kalamatiano for his reports.31

  The intelligence agencies co-operated with each other, consulting regularly, sharing their findings and sometimes even running the same agents — Alexander and Maria Fride worked simultaneously for the British and the Americans.32 The British and French secret services had plenty of practice in acting together without dropping their guard — each understood that the other might act independently for one reason or another in the national interest. When Noulens had stimulated Savinkov’s ill-fated uprising in Yaroslavl in July he did not tell Lockhart what exactly he was promising to the rebels; and Lockhart was justifiably annoyed that the French had played fast and loose with the anti-Bolshevik resistance, risking and losing Russian lives in an irresponsible fashion.33 The Americans would seem to have been more trusting than was good for them. In early 1918 British agents bought documents purportedly showing that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were the paid employees of the Germans. Reilly and Hill took a close look at them and found that most of the documents were produced on a single typewriter despite the claim of the sellers that they originated in places hundreds of miles from each other. The British, they concluded, had purchased expensive forgeries. So what did they do? They put the documents back on the market and let Edgar Sisson of the American Information Service buy them up — and in this way they recouped the financial loss. All was thought fair in wartime when budgets were tight.34

  Sisson’s ‘revelations’ failed to gain universal acceptance in the American press. The New York Evening Post made savage criticisms, and Santeri Nuorteva of the Finnish Information Bureau as well as John Reed had the opportunity to do the same in the New York Times.35 The Committee on Public Information under George Creel investigated on the administration’s behalf. Creel was already sympathetic to Sisson and, buoyed by support from Professor Samuel Harper and the National Board for Historical Science, pronounced most of the documents to be genuine. The threat to civilization in both Russia and America was said to come from a ‘German–Bolshevik conspiracy’.36

  Not everyone even among the British approved of such tomfoolery. Lockhart had never accepted that Lenin and Trotsky were agents of Germany or any other power. Denying that the Bolsheviks were ‘pro-German’, he reported that he ‘had little faith in documents I have seen which overprove the case for collusion’;37 he also pointed out that the French officials in Moscow shared his suspicions.38 Sisson’s ‘discovery’ interfered with his desire to convince the Allied governments that the Kremlin leadership were acting out of a sense of their own interests. He too wanted to overturn the Bolsheviks but argued that this would best be done in the light of a well-informed analysis.39 The documents bought by Sisson in fact came from former officials of the Okhrana. They had made the forgeries either out of financial greed or because they frantically wanted to steer the Allies away from thinking that any kind of deal could be done with Sovnarkom after the Brest-Litovsk treaty. Lockhart had once been one of those who favoured collaboration, but he quickly abandoned that position. In any case the debate about Sisson’s allegations wasted everyone’s time and energy just when the Allies needed to be clearheaded about what was going on in Russia. All that could be said in favour of Sisson was that he helped to steel US public opinion against unnecessary compromises with the Soviet authorities.

  While still pretending to be Trotsky’s best Allied friend, Lockhart himself undertook a number of subversive activities after the Brest- Litovsk treaty — and although he had wide scope to use his initiative, he reported regularly to London and sought the permission of higher authority when he thought he needed it.40 From inside the Bolshevik administration he had a frequent supply of information from Yevgenia Shelepina as well as from a ‘Mr Pressman’.41 He also secretly corresponded with the Volunteer Army in the south and met leaders of the National Centre in Moscow. He even attended an undercover National Centre conference in July and spoke with notable anti- Bolshevik politicians such as Pëtr Struve and with a colonel who represented General Alexeev and the Volunteer Army. Lockhart delivered ten million rubles to the Volunteers, whom he reported as making military progress. He noted that Alexeev was entirely opposed to Pavel Milyukov’s overtures to the Germans. Lockhart now regarded the Volunteer Army as the best option for the Allies to back in Russia so long as the Whites could put aside old political quarrels and foster their political attractiveness to Russian workers. He reported that Struve was intending to travel north to consult General Poole; he also noted that Alexeev expected soon to be able to incorporate battalions of Czechs in his forces.42

  The Allied occupation of Archangel worsened Lockhart’s standing with the Bolsheviks, and on 5 August the British consulate in Moscow was raided and several officials were arrested. The French consulate and military mission suffered in the same way. Lockhart was left free; but he felt the need to destroy his ciphers, which made his further diplomatic work in Moscow impractical. (He had got rid of his written files when Mirbach was assassinated.) He also protested loudly to Karakhan, who apologized. Although the Allied officials were quickly released, they all were denied permission to leave Moscow.43

  It was in this febrile atmosphere that Lockhart, being no longer able to communicate confidentially with London, resolved to undertake drastic measures of his own. He continued to have secret meetings with representatives of the National Centre and the Volunteer Army. This was dangerous enough for him after the Cheka’s recent raid. But on 14 August he went further by confidentially hosting Colonel Eduard Berzin of the 1st Latvian Heavy Artillery Division at his Moscow apartment. The two of them agreed a plot to dislodge the Latvians serving in the Red Army from supporting Sovnarkom.44 In none of his later accounts did Lockhart explain how he came to approach Berzin. The reason for his reticence is fairly clear. He was to find it inconvenient to admit how deeply embedded he had been in British intelligence work in Russia. Privately, however, he gave a fuller account and acknowledged that Sidney Reilly initiated things by bringing representatives of the Latvians to him — and Lockhart then took over the planning and co-ordination.45

  Whereas earlier Lockhart had provided money and encouragement for Russians to carry out subversion, now he was taking a British initiative without consulting any Russian organization. Lockhart arrived at an imaginative ag
reement with Berzin. The Latvian troops were known as the Soviet government’s praetorian guard. Despite having crushed the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and helped to recapture Kazan, the Latvians felt no debt of allegiance to Sovnarkom. George Hill recorded that they were fed up with being used as ‘executioners’ for the Bolsheviks.46 They were the human flotsam of the Great War since it was impossible for them to return home while the Germans held Riga; but the Latvians were increasingly worried that fighting for the Soviet cause would irritate the Western Allies and cost them dearly if the Allied coalition won the war. In any case, why risk life and limb in the service of the Reds? Lockhart himself always denied that he had instigated anything. He claimed that it had been the Latvians who made the approach to him and not the other way round. He also maintained that his proposal had merely been to move the riflemen from Moscow to the side of the British in Murmansk.47 The Cheka would bluntly reject this. The records of their investigation and interrogations indicated that Lockhart proposed to finance the Latvians to enable them to arrest the Soviet leadership and overthrow Bolshevism — and Lockhart in old age admitted to his son that the Soviet version of the episode was essentially correct.48

  The scheme for a Latvian coup was not wholly outlandish. For a time, just tens of thousands of Czechs had tipped the balance in the war between Komuch and Sovnarkom. The Latvians occupied sensitive positions of power in Moscow, including the Kremlin itself. They could wreak havoc if they wanted. Of course, they would never get official permission to depart from Moscow. They would have to commandeer a train and probably use force. Soviet authorities would instruct stations on the Moscow–Murmansk line to obstruct their passage. The Red Army was unlikely to be allowed to stand still in the Volga region while the British expanded their influence. Lockhart had at the very least started a conspiracy to disrupt Soviet rule. There was bound to be fighting in Moscow — and he must have hoped that if things went well, his Anglo-Latvian initiative might somehow bring about the downfall of Sovnarkom. There was no other reason for causing mayhem in Moscow.

  Lockhart met Berzin again on 15 August. This time Sidney Reilly and Fernand Grenard, the French consul-general, were present.49 Two days later Lockhart gave an affidavit to Latvian rifleman Jan Buikis enabling him to talk to British intelligence officials in Petrograd.50 The plot was thickening as Lockhart sought to lay the groundwork for the coming action. He was aware that the Soviet leadership’s anger at the recent British occupation made his own situation in Moscow precarious. Thinking that the Foreign Office might recall him to London at any moment, he transferred the overseeing of the Latvian arrangement to Reilly. Berzin said that three or four million rubles would be needed to see things through to a successful conclusion. Reilly was given 700,000 rubles to hand over to the Latvians as a first instalment; Lockhart subsequently passed on another 700,000 rubles. Lockhart and Reilly saw each other as rarely as possibly. Both of them had complete trust in Berzin.51

  Only at this juncture — according to both Lockhart’s and Hill’s memoirs — was the plot expanded to involve a coup d’état. Although they wrote admiringly about Reilly, they held him personally responsible for this changed objective; and Reilly was dead by the time their books appeared. They claimed that the new idea was for the Latvian military units guarding the Kremlin precinct to surprise the communist leaders at gunpoint in the course of a Sovnarkom session. Hill maintained that there was to have been no killing because Reilly sensed that the Russian people would object to a foreign force cutting down Russia’s government. Reilly supposedly wanted to parade the communist leaders through the streets of Moscow with the aim of humiliating them and showing how vulnerable they were. Lenin and Trotsky would be stripped of their ‘nether garments’ and forced to appear in their shirts alone.52 It is an entertaining but implausible story, and even Hill subsequently claimed to have thought the plan impractical. The idea that Reilly thought he would secure success by removing the underwear of the Soviet leadership is hard to believe. Hill, like Lockhart, knew he was breaking the rules by publishing a personal account of secret intelligence work and probably judged it wise to tenderize his account of British subversive activity in August 1918. Or maybe Hill and Lockhart simply wanted to clear their own names in connection with a conspiracy that went badly wrong.

  At any rate a Cheka secret report, collated in 1920 by Yakov Peters from testimonies and interrogations two years earlier, told a very different story: Lenin and Trotsky were to be shot after capture.53 Peters was not writing for general publication but for distribution inside the supreme communist leadership. And indeed even if the Cheka report was a fiction and the account given by Lockhart and Hill was true, there can be no doubt that the outcome of the conspiracy would inevitably have been a violent one. Lockhart had authored a scheme which, however it was activated, would soak Moscow in blood. The Western Allies sensed the coming of victory in northern France. The British Foreign Office and Secret Service Bureau led the way in plotting to prepare a future for Russia free from Bolshevik rule. All Europe including its Russian extremity was to be transformed.

  15. A VERY BRITISH PLOT

  Robert Bruce Lockhart’s fingers were still wrapped around the Latvian conspiracy on 25 August 1918 when he took Sidney Reilly to the US consulate to brief the Americans and French about his plans. The acting consul-general DeWitt Clinton Poole Jr and Xenophon Kalamatiano were present together with the French consul-general Fernand Grenard and the Figaro correspondent René Marchand.1 Reilly later claimed to have felt doubts about whether he had been sensible in going to such a meeting.2 The conversation covered progress with the Latvians and reportedly dwelt on the desirability of co-ordinating Allied undercover activities.3 But Marchand, who had once regretted the fall of Kerenski and the Provisional Government, felt repelled by the conspiracy being set up by Lockhart and Reilly, and he took the silence of Poole and Grenard as proof that they condoned it. He wrote an angry letter to President Poincaré denouncing what agents of the Western Allies were getting up to — he rightly assumed that Poincaré was in the dark about the plot.4 Of much greater importance was the fact that he also went to the communist authorities and told them what he had heard in the American consulate. Marchand became a turncoat.5

  The Frenchman assumed that he was the first to inform the Chekists, but in fact they learned of the plot several days earlier. Colonel Berzin told Yakov Peters (another Latvian, as it happened) as soon as Lockhart had made his proposition. Peters consulted Dzerzhinski and the decision was taken to ask Berzin to play along with the British. They hoped that this would lead them to all the British, Russian and Latvian conspirators as well as supply a pile of compromising information on Allied diplomats.6

  The Lockhart plot became an open secret at the top of the communist leadership. Ivy Litvinov would later recall:

  Very interesting about Lockhart. They had Lockhart in — they arrested him, you know, and nobody here knew why. Oh, yes, being implicated in a plot with White Russians to seize Lenin or something like that. All true but it was all provocation. Yes, Maxime told me. Our people employed, I mean the Soviet people — they were not called Soviet people then — I forget… A certain agent provocateur — I am putting it very primitively, you know — said would you like to take part in a plot… and he said ‘Yes, with pleasure.’ Then they flung him into prison. That’s never been written, you know.7

  Allied officials in Russia had seriously underestimated the Bolshevik party’s hard-won expertise in methods of police infiltration and provocation. They had also overrated their own cleverness. In reality they had set a trap whereby they would ensnare themselves rather than the Bolsheviks.

  Two events on 30 August induced the Cheka to abandon its stealthy approach. The first was the assassination of Petrograd’s leading Chekist Moisei Uritski by anti-Bolshevik socialist Leonid Kanegisser. Later in the day Lenin gave a couple of stirring speeches to factory workers and was returning to his limousine at the Mikhelson factory when shots were fired at him. Badly wo
unded, he was hurried to the Kremlin for emergency treatment. For some time it was uncertain whether he would survive. Dora Kaplan, a woman loitering outside the factory for no good reason, was arrested as the culprit and summarily executed. Since she was extremely myopic and mentally very confused, she had almost certainly not committed the crime. But the Bolshevik leaders wanted to show that they meant business. Yakov Sverdlov took command of both the party and the government. A Red terror was proclaimed.

  The Cheka took hundreds of Allied officials and residents of Moscow and Petrograd into custody. Chekist officials already had plenty of evidence against prominent Britons, Frenchmen and Americans, and believed that there could well be other intelligence operations they had yet to uncover. Better to wait for more Allied spies and agents to come to light. Better, too, to show the Allies that the Bolsheviks would not be pushed around and were able to look after themselves. The Cheka behaved liked the vanguard of the Soviet order when one of its units raided the apartment of Colonel Henri de Verthamont, head of the French secret service. Verthamont escaped over the rooftops, leaving behind a cache of explosives and other compromising material, but Chekists succeeded in capturing six of his agents. As the news spread, the British broke contact with the French in the hope of being left alone.8 This did not stop the Cheka. Lockhart, who had Moura Benckendorff with him, was arrested at his flat at 3.30 a.m. on 31 August. At first he refused to disclose his name. But the charade could not continue and he yielded to the Chekists. Moura and Major Hicks were also taken into custody.9

  Lockhart was promised that there would be no harsh interrogation if he answered the accusations against him.10 It was a gentle confinement by Soviet standards, and Lockhart and Hicks were released on 1 September.11 Next day Lockhart returned to plead with Karakhan for the liberation of Moura and his own servants. Karakhan promised to do what he could. The following morning Lockhart was shocked to read Moscow newspapers ‘full of the most fantastic accounts of Allied conspiracy of which I am said to be the head’. He stood accused of buying up the Latvian Riflemen and conspiring to murder Lenin and Trotsky and blow up bridges around the capital. A further charge was that the Allies aimed to appoint a compliant dictator.12 The details may have erred on the fantastical side; but the truth was that Lockhart was genuinely distressed — both at being rumbled and at the possible public consequences that were likely to flow from this. Events quickened their pace. News came through that Maxim Litvinov had been imprisoned in London so as to ensure the safety of all Britons held in Soviet gaols.13 Then, on 4 September, Lockhart was rearrested.14 This time he was taken inside the precincts of the Kremlin: it was the only area of Moscow where security could be guaranteed, and the Soviet leaders were intent on holding on to their valuable British prize.