Spies and Commissars

Mansfield Cumming at the Secret Intelligence Service trusted his instincts and took risks, and he was often proved right when choosing recruits whom others regarded as unqualified or unsuitable. He ignored the thick sheaf of warnings sent to him about Reilly.⁵ The Bureau needed Russian-speakers with audacity and initiative, and Reilly fitted that bill. Cumming sent him to Russia via Archangel as agent ST1. Reilly started as he meant to go on, disembarking in Murmansk against orders and without explanation. The British expeditionary force there threw him into the lock-up of the merchant vessel that had brought him out from England. Admiral Kemp asked an intelligence officer, Stephen Alley, to interrogate him. Alley reported: ‘His passport was very doubtful, and his name was spelled Reilli.’ The peculiar spelling was possibly a deliberate one; it may well have been based on the calculation that a strange English version of the name would attract less suspicion since although Reilly claimed to be from Ireland and spoke with perfect grammar his accent was unmistakably from eastern Europe.⁶ When challenged about his identity, he pulled out ‘a microscopic message in code, which he had secreted under a cork of a bottle of aspirin tablets’. Alley recognized the message and instructed that Reilly be permitted to proceed south as he wished.⁷

On reaching Moscow in April 1918, Reilly avoided contact with British officials and threw protocol aside. Instead he made straight for the Kremlin where he claimed that he was researching a book on the achievements of the Soviet order. This got him an interview with Lenin’s chief of staff Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich. The meeting was an amicable one and Reilly was given use of an official limousine as well as an invitation to attend the May Day celebrations at the Polytechnical Museum where Trotsky was to deliver a speech on the Red Army. The hall was already packed when Reilly and a friend arrived. With their privileged seats on the platform, only a piano separated them from Trotsky. Reilly whispered: ‘This is just the moment to kill Trotsky and liquidate Bolshevism!’⁸ But a sense of self-preservation intruded and Reilly stayed his hand. Although he had come to Russia with a rather gentle opinion of Bolshevism, a few days in Moscow changed his mind and he began to talk about the Soviet regime with venom.⁹ It was only then that Lockhart heard that an unidentified Briton had visited the Kremlin to seek an interview with Lenin. He was furious at being bypassed and hauled Reilly in for a stiff lecture on lines of authority.

After clearing the air in this fashion, Lockhart felt he could take Reilly into his confidence about his current plans to bring down the Bolsheviks. Lockhart had gained greater liberty for himself after the British embassy decamped to Vologda—this was, as he liked to put it, his ‘great luck’.¹⁰ When he had moved to Moscow with Trotsky, he had specifically demanded authority from London to remain ‘independent’; he insisted in particular that Oliver Wardrop, who served as consul-general, should render him every assistance without being set in authority over him.¹¹ He wanted to be free to pursue his tasks in diplomacy and intelligence without interference.

He also wanted freedom in his private life. Despite having previously been sent home to avoid scandal over an affair with a married woman, he lost no time in finding another lover in Moscow. He first met Maria Benckendorff (née Zakrevskaya) on 2 February 1918 over a game of bridge in Petrograd. On that occasion they only shook hands, but he was smitten by her glamour and vivacity.¹² Moura, as she liked to be known, still moved in the old high society that existed before the October Revolution. She was bored by her husband Ioann, who had retreated with their children to his large Estonian estate some weeks earlier.¹³ Lockhart was looking for excitement and would confess: ‘I fell desperately in love with her.’¹⁴ Soon they were having an affair. ¹⁵ She fell pregnant by him and clearly expected that both she and Lockhart would soon divorce their respective spouses. But it is far from certain that Lockhart would have ended his marriage to Jean, and when Moura miscarried the baby in September, her happiness quickly started to sour.¹⁶ Subsequently she came under suspicion of informing for Soviet intelligence—something she was certainly doing by the 1930s.¹⁷ But there is no evidence that she already worked for the Chekists in mid-1918. At any rate Lockhart had taken a risk in having an affair with her and giving her the run of his apartment. If he was not spied upon, it was not because he took sensible precautions.

Lockhart and others in the British intelligence network in Moscow had an uninhibited lifestyle. But Sidney Reilly outdid them all. Among his many lovers was a young Russian actress, Yelizaveta Otten, who rented a well-appointed apartment in Sheremetev Lane a few hundred yards north of the Kremlin.¹⁸ Yelizaveta’s flatmate Dagmara Karozus was, according to George Hill, another of Reilly’s conquests.¹⁹ Dagmara was a German citizen who in 1915 had been investigated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs as a possible spy. She had sensibly responded by applying for Russian citizenship.²⁰ Then there was Olga Starzhevskaya, who fell head over heels in love with Reilly and foolishly believed they were about to be married. She knew him as a Russian called Konstantin Markovich Massino.²¹ Starzhevskaya was a typist in the central administration of the All-Russia Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets—no doubt her potential access to important material was her main attraction for him.²² Reilly handed over the money for her to rent and decorate an apartment for them both on Malaya Bron-naya Street.²³

Reilly was expert at running his amours in parallel and even employed several of the women as his operatives. Probably Maria Fride was the most useful of them. As a single woman in her early thirties, she had worked as a teacher and nurse.²⁴ Her prime asset was access to her brother Alexander, a lieutenant colonel employed in the communications office of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs.²⁵

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 over-prove 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 clear-headed 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 agreement 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 Intelligence Service 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.