Spies and Commissars

by Robert Service

  The Whites conducted a deep surveillance of planning and conditions in the Red Army. Denikin’s agency was called Azbuka (or ABC). Its operatives received a wide licence from him for its spying activity — they even kept an informant inside the National Centre despite the fact that it was firmly allied to his Volunteer Army. Azbuka’s penetration of Ukraine had been deep ever since 1918;36 and as the Volunteer Army grew in strength, the agency increased its geographical range and reported in detail on what Russia’s workers thought about the Bolsheviks and on how the peasants were reacting to Soviet rule.37 In 1918, the technical specialists working for Azbuka had often even succeeded in intercepting conversations between Bolshevik leaders on the Hughes telegraph apparatus;38 they had also been well informed about exchanges between the Germans and the Soviet authorities.39 In 1919 they regularly picked up Moscow’s confidential news broadcasts to local Bolshevik administrations across Russia and caught Soviet messages going to and from European radio stations.40

  Nonetheless these advantages in intelligence and equipment did Yudenich no good when he started his offensive in October 1919. Kolchak was fleeing eastwards through Siberia with his beaten army; Denikin was hastily withdrawing to the Ukrainian south. The Red Army was free to concentrate on the military threat emerging from Estonia. And even though Zinoviev, the Bolshevik leader in Petrograd, began to panic, the Politburo in Moscow reacted swiftly. Trotsky and Stalin were dispatched to head the political co-ordination of defence. Stern measures were taken against the middle classes across the city. A preventive terror was organized. Stalin ordered that formerly wealthy citizens should be paraded in a line in front of the Red defences so that they would be the first to be hit by the artillery fire of the North-Western Army. Trotsky travelled away from the city outskirts and saw military action while stiffening the resolve of his troops and commanders.41 As the Whites advanced from Estonia into Russia, they gave a good account of themselves and for a few days the battle for Petrograd lay in the balance. But the Red Army had the resources and experience it needed. Yudenich’s offensive collapsed and he was quickly forced into retreat with his men and equipment.

  A young Russian observed them as they streamed back towards Estonian territory:

  We saw a vast column on the move. They had arrived by the same branch line as us and disembarked at the same place. There were at least 2000 of them, wearing British greatcoats and accompanied by light artillery and machine guns. Obviously something was wrong at the front, and either the Reds had broken through it or outflanked it at Luga. The rumour was that Pskov too was about to surrender.42

  The rumour was all too true; and although the Civil War was not yet over in the old borderlands, Russia itself was firmly in the hands of the communists. Bolshevik celebrations in Petrograd and Moscow were long and vigorous.

  21. WESTERN AGENTS

  The Allied intelligence agents operating in Russia had worked long and hard to prevent the Red victory. None of them failed to appreciate the shortcomings of the Whites; indeed their reports frequently highlighted the urgent need for the White commanders to improve their military potential by paying greater attention to the political and social concerns of people living in the zones they occupied. Western espionage and subversion were conducted in difficult conditions — and the absence of normal diplomatic relations between Soviet Russia and the Allies meant that they had to be imaginative in their activities.

  Agents operated in a wide variety of guises. At one end of it, there was the spy Sidney Reilly, who gathered information illicitly and co-organized a plot to overthrow communist rule. Robert Bruce Lockhart, his superior, had covertly initiated that conspiracy while working openly for the British government and enjoying something like official accreditation from the Kremlin. The Allied powers also sent military missions that secretly paid Russians to gather intelligence and carry out subversion. Jean Lavergne busied himself in this way for the French. But military missions were always suspect to the Bolsheviks, and the Allies had to turn to less formal agents for contact with the communist leadership. Raymond Robins of the American Red Cross was the US embassy’s main intermediary. He was an American patriot who sincerely believed that a rapprochement between the US and Lenin’s Russia was in the interests of both countries. The British reporter Arthur Ransome, a Secret Service Bureau informant, shared this conviction; he warmed to the Bolsheviks while rejecting the idea of transplanting their ideas and system to Britain. And the French embassy made similar use of Jacques Sadoul before deciding that he was more trouble than he was worth when he identified himself unconditionally with the Bolshevik cause.

  The Lockhart Case was a breaking point for the Western agencies. As even unconventional kinds of diplomacy were made impossible, the Allied embassies packed their bags and left Russia altogether; and the Bolshevik leaders, scarred by the experience of Lockhart’s trickery, became warier. Nonetheless Ransome continued to be made welcome on his visits and his reports to the British secret service on Kremlin politics retained their immediacy, whereas Robins never returned to Russia. Sadoul stayed in Moscow, but as a convicted deserter and traitor he lost direct contact with French public life.

  The West’s intelligence networks quickly restored their operations after the damage done by the Cheka raids of September 1918, but it no longer made sense to keep Moscow or Petrograd as their main bases. Allied agents had already renounced any tendencies towards flamboyance. This came hard for a man like George Hill who liked to mix jollity with danger. On arrival in Russia in late summer 1917 he had spent evenings with young grand dukes in the Gypsy encampment at Strelnaya.1 He had a chum called Colonel Joe Boyle, a Canadian, who was a former US amateur heavyweight boxing champion and used his fists whenever provoked — or even just when he imagined that someone had tried to provoke him.2 Hill and Boyle disapproved of the October Revolution. But they offered their services to the Bolsheviks in getting the trains moving again around the Moscow regional network because the Western Allies still hoped to keep Russia in the war. Adolf Ioffe, who worked at that time in the Petrograd Soviet’s Military-Revolutionary Committee, gratefully signed personal affidavits for them — he overlooked the carping tone of Boyle’s insistence that they should be addressed by their military ranks rather than as Comrade Boyle and Comrade Hill.3

  Their greatest escapade had involved them in transporting the Romanian gold reserve and crown jewels across Russia and Ukraine to Iasi in eastern Romania at the request of Ambassador Diamandy in December 1917. The Romanians had deposited them in Moscow for safekeeping in time of war. Boyle and Hill travelled down from Petrograd by train no. 451 in the carriage of the former empress.4 The valuables were held in the Russian state vaults, and permission to move them had to be obtained from Moscow’s military commandant Nikolai Muralov. Since it was a time when the Bolsheviks and the Allies were still trying to avoid a rupture, Muralov gave his consent. Boyle and Hill prudently packed the valuables into wicker baskets to avoid untoward attention as they moved the heavy load across Moscow to their waiting train. The next stage of the journey involved a route through the lines of Russian and Ukrainian forces ranged against each other near Bryansk.5 No sooner had this danger been surmounted than the engine became caught in a snowdrift 120 miles north of Kiev. As if this was not bad enough, the crew was hit by shots fired by a Ukrainian army detachment which decided that they were Russian invaders — this was indeed a time of chaotic uncertainty. Boyle and Hill intervened to keep the train moving onwards to Kiev and some temporary safety before attempting the last stage of the journey to Romania.6

  They used subterfuge and a degree of compulsion, including holding a gun to their driver’s head, as they left for the Ukrainian–Romanian border. Arriving at Iasi on 24 December after a trip of nine days they received the thanks of Prime Minister Ionel Bratianu. The King bestowed the Grand Cross of the Crown of Romania on Boyle and the Order of the Star of Romania on Hill.7

  Returning to Moscow, Hill lived a double life after the Brest-Litovsk treaty.
While helping Trotsky to set up a Soviet air force, he established a secret network of informants and couriers across Russia and Ukraine.8 He also liaised with Savinkov.9 In the same weeks he sponsored and led irregular units in night raids on German army camps on Ukrainian territory. Hill blew up gasometers in towns where the Germans were garrisoned — and he supervised the sabotage of coal mines by pouring sand into their pumping systems.10 When the nature of his activities came to the notice of the German secret service, it dispatched an agent to assassinate him at the Moscow Aviation Park. Hill spotted the danger at the last moment. He fought off the agent in an alleyway, leaving him with a bleeding head and triumphantly stealing his Mauser.11 The Germans made another attempt by putting a time bomb in his office. Hill’s sixth sense of jeopardy helped him and he got rid of the device before it exploded.12 Not all his couriers were as lucky. Two of them were discovered and executed on their way to Murmansk; a further six perished in another of his operations.13

  After the Allies had seized Archangel, Hill heard that Trotsky had given the order for his arrest.14 He went undercover. Until then he had worn uniform but now he burned his English clothes. He had several young women working for him. He appreciated their skill in using ciphers and sewing messages into clothing — the messages were produced with the use of a dictionary and coding card. Hill kept a bottle of petrol within reach in case of a Cheka raid when he would need to destroy evidence.15 Along with three of his women he rented premises as the supposed owner of a sewing business and assumed the false identity of George Bergmann, pretending to be a Russian of Baltic-German descent.16 For some days he stayed indoors to let his beard grow and told the neighbours he was recovering from a bout of malaria. Then he found a job at a cinematograph studio as a film developer. With a ginger beard and hands discoloured by chemicals, he could easily walk around Moscow unidentified. Regular employment entitled him to a ration card, which meant that he could get food without flaunting his money and attracting undesirable attention. The hours of work — from six in the evening till eleven at night — enabled him to work as a spy during the hours of daylight.17 The other bonus of the job was that he was able to view the latest official newsreels before release.18

  Throughout the summer of 1918, Hill created two chains of informers and couriers: one stretched south to the Black Sea, the other went north to the White Sea.19 In Moscow, he maintained eight clandestine apartments for his operatives.20 By the autumn he was running a hundred couriers.21 For his northern chain he organized a route out to Vyatka from Moscow on the Trans-Siberian railway, then up the branch line to Kotlas and beyond.22 Although this quickened the delivery of reports, it still took twelve to fifteen days to get a message to the British base in Archangel.23 Hill also paid acquaintances at the Khodynka radio station north of Moscow to send marconigrams direct to the War Office in London for onward transmission to the Russian north — it was not the Cheka but German counter-intelligence which put an end to this dodge.24

  In October 1918, Hill left with the Lockhart party for Finland but was ordered to go back into northern Russia to help repair the recent organizational damage instead of returning immediately to the United Kingdom. Mission completed, he reached London on Armistice Day.25 Despite his tiredness, he received an assignment to go to southern Russia with Sidney Reilly in December. Reilly had been running his own separate operation concurrently with Hill’s earlier in the year. Now they joined forces. Their instructions were to make for the Volunteer Army’s headquarters at Rostov-on-Don disguised as merchants seeking to restore international trade.26 Arriving shortly before the New Year, they bridled at the condescension shown them by British military officers.27 Hill and Reilly had a lengthy discussion with Generals Denikin and Krasnov; but since the telegraph system was in some chaos at the time, Hill went down to Odessa to communicate with London before leaving for England with the written report.28 He thought poorly of Denikin’s political set-up and felt he had a lot to learn about ruling a country. On the military side, Reilly was damning about the Volunteer Army’s readiness. The equipment and provisioning left much to be desired, and Reilly predicted a hard struggle ahead for Denikin.29 Hill’s mood fell further in Odessa. The French high command had signalled the city’s low point on their global priorities list by garrisoning the city with troops from their Senegalese colony.30 When he got back to London, Hill conveyed his impressions in person to the Foreign Office and the War Office and to the many MPs who contacted him.31

  He returned yet again to southern Russia after his stay at the Peace Conference, visiting General Denikin in Yekaterinodar.32 Reilly went back to tending his business interests while paying attention to the Soviet scene from afar. Seeing a chance of making money if the Whites won the Civil War, he wrote to John Picton Bagge in Odessa claiming that the British were being left behind by the French in preparing for this. He commented on how the French government had helped to set up a Paris agency for future commercial, industrial and financial activity in Russia.33 Reilly wrote a lengthy memorandum on ‘The Russian Problem’, arguing the need to bang together the heads of Denikin and the leaders of Finland, Poland and the other ‘bordering states’ with a view to bringing down Bolshevism in Moscow.34

  Mansfield Cumming’s willingness to gamble in selecting agents for the Secret Service Bureau was not confined to Maugham, Hill and Reilly. One of his inspired choices was Paul Dukes, who until 1914 had worked as a répétiteur at the Imperial Mariinski Theatre and helped conductor Albert Coates with preparations for Stravinsky’sNightingale.35 Dukes’s father was a Congregational minister and staunch anti-Papist who often had to change incumbencies because deacons objected to his authoritarian style of leadership.36 Paul, a sickly child, showed an early talent for music. The Rev. Dukes had a future in mind for him as a chapel organist, but Paul rebelled in his mid-teens and ran away from home with less than four pounds in his pocket. He worked his way from Holland to Poland by teaching English, and his earnings enabled him to enrol as a student at the St Petersburg Conservatoire.37 Young Dukes lodged for a while with Sidney Gibbes, tutor to the Imperial family, who sometimes took him to Nicholas II’s residence at Tsarskoe Selo. When war broke out, the British embassy employed him to produce daily wartime summaries of the Russian press for Ambassador Buchanan.38

  In February 1917, according to his own account, Dukes became ‘a fiery revolutionary’ and took to the streets against the Romanovs.39 Evidently his friendship with Gibbes had not turned him into an admirer of Nicholas II. Soon afterwards he returned to London to work for the novelist John Buchan at the Department of Information. One of his assignments was to go to Paris under the alias of Dr Robinson to examine Bolshevik correspondence intercepted by the French secret services.40

  Steadily the scope of his ambition was widening and Buchan proved an understanding boss, allowing Dukes to return to Russia to report on the general situation under cover of a job with the YMCA in Samara and another with the Boy Scouts on the Siberian border.41 (The YMCA worked closely with the American authorities and set up facilities for the US military expedition to Siberia.)42 Dukes discharged his tasks impressively and, when Buchan recommended him for more serious clandestine work, a message was sent calling him back to London.43 As yet he was unaware of what awaited him at the interview in Mansfield Cumming’s office in July 1918.44 The office was like nothing Dukes had seen before. On his desk Cummings kept a bank of six telephones, numerous model aeroplanes and submarines, various test tubes and a row of coloured bottles.45 Dukes talked so nervously that Cumming was going to fail him as an effete musician until he expressed an interest in the collection of firearms displayed on the wall. Cumming sat him down again and restarted the interview.46 The outcome was that Dukes received twenty-four hours to think over the invitation to become an agent.47 When he accepted, Cumming brightly enjoined him: ‘Don’t go and get killed.’ The Secret Service Bureau expected its men to learn on the job, and Dukes was disconcerted to find that the training course lasted no longer than three weeks
.48

  His first task was to go to Russia and gather information on ‘every section of the community’, on the scale of support for the communists, on the adaptability of their policies and on the possibilities for a counter-revolution. No Briton knew the streets of Petrograd better and he was raring to go. Cumming let his new agent ST25 decide for himself the best way of getting back on to Russian soil.49 He started his journey on 3 January 1918 by boarding an American troopship bound for northern Russia. Trying to make his way on foot to Petrograd, he found that the Soviet authorities were guarding the roads to the south. So instead he went to Helsinki, from where he took a train across the Russian border. Having visited Moscow, he moved to Smolensk and Dvinsk near the German front. In February he went to Samara, where the Socialist-Revolutionary leadership had established their anti-Bolshevik government. In his diary he mentioned Arthur Ransome, Yevgenia Shelepina and Harold Williams as being among his acquaintances — a politically broad bunch of people. By the end of June he was in Vologda for a few days before going up to Archangel, Kandalaksha and Pechenga and making his way back to London on 15 July.50