Spies and Commissars

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 mar-conigrams 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 Intelligence Service 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 ’s Nightingale.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 Intelligence Service 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

Dukes did not stay for long. On 12 August he left again for Archangel on a Russian trip that lasted till early October, when he made for Britain’s intelligence base in Stockholm. After a brief respite it was back into Russia for another assignment until early December. A trip to Helsinki followed before he went on yet another Russian mission.⁵¹ One of his jobs was to support the National Centre in Moscow. Its leaders were at first reluctant to accept British money since they wanted their efforts to stay strictly in Russian hands, but the financial assistance from Kolchak had broken down and they agreed to take Dukes’s cash. Dukes also met with the Tactical Centre, a clandestine political body which had formed itself to challenge Bolshevik rule throughout Russia, and made contact with Yudenich’s North-Western Army. Although none of these organizations was effective in its subversive activity, each supplied him with valuable intelligence about conditions in Soviet Russia. This partnership came to an end when the Cheka penetrated the National Centre and the Tactical Centre and arrested many of the leaders.⁵² His informants obtained illicit material for him from the offices of Sovnarkom.⁵³

Dukes showed physical courage and, doubtless helped by his theatrical experience, a talent for disguise. Piecing together the stories he told her, his widow later called him the Scarlet Pimpernel of the October Revolution. He even enlisted in the Red Army. By volunteering, he knew he could join a regiment led by a commander who was a secret anti-Bolshevik.⁵⁴ This was not the quixotic move it might seem:

Apart from greater freedom of movement and preference over civilians in application for lodging, amusement, or travelling tickets, the Red soldier received rations greatly superior both in quantity and quality to those of the civilian population. Previous to this time I had received only half a pound of bread daily and had had to take my scanty dinner at a filthy communal eating house, but as a Red soldier I received, besides a dinner and other odds and ends not worth mentioning, a pound and sometimes a pound and a half of tolerably good black bread, which alone was sufficient, accustomed as I am to a crude diet, to subsist on with relative comfort.⁵⁵

He had just as many adventures as Hill. Whereas Dukes was modest and discreet in his memoirs, it would seem that he personally rescued two of the former emperor’s nieces, making himself into a human bridge across a dyke at one point. A couple of Englishwomen also owed their lives to him, as did a merchant called Solatin who had tumbled from wealth and influence to destitution after 1917. Dukes and his couriers ran fearful risks—at least one of them was trapped and shot by the Cheka. He was once pursued so hotly that he hid in a tomb in a graveyard. The sight of him emerging from it next morning terrified a passer-by.⁵⁷ But he was not just the Pimpernel. His couriers helped him finance counter-revolutionary enterprises and gather information that was urgently needed in London—and one of his subordinates fondly recorded him as having been a person of great decency. ⁵⁸ The reports that Dukes relayed to the Secret Intelligence Service were concise and vivid. He treasured the spectacle of striking workers who sang the Marseillaise while carrying a banner that read: ‘Down with Lenin and horse meat, up with the Tsar and pork!’⁵⁹

Whatever may explain the disarray of Western policy and activity in Russia, it was not the absence of efficient spying networks. In 1918 the British were already picking up Soviet cable traffic to Europe—and when in June they came across a message from Trotsky to Litvinov, they kept it for their own information and prevented it from reaching Litvinov.⁶⁰ In the following year a Government Code and Cypher School was created on Lord Curzon’s recommendation and quickly proved its worth. Among its employees was the leading former Russian Imperial cryptanalyst Ernst Fetterlein, who provided his services after escaping Soviet Russia. Fetterlein was the first director of the School and scarcely any wireless traffic from Moscow was invulnerable to his attention and that of his Russian colleagues.⁶¹

Although it had been the American spy network that suffered worst in the Cheka raids of September 1918, the US never let up in its activity in wireless interception. Chicherin conducted a lively traffic with Baron Rosen in Berlin seeking a rapprochement between Germany and Soviet Russia; he had no inkling that the Americans were regularly scrutinizing these exchanges. ⁶² The German Foreign Office was divided into two factions, one supporting an alliance and the other wanting to postpone any decision. The first faction saw the communist governments of Russia and Hungary as offering good trading opportunities for Germany; its advocates supposed that this was achievable on the agreed basis that communism would not be exported into German cities and that Lenin would come to terms with a ‘social-democratic or democratic government’. At a time when Denikin’s forces were trampling Red resistance in southern Russia and Ukraine it was not implausible to think that Sovnarkom might come to such an accommodation. Against this proposal for foreign policy stood the second faction, which contended that Germany’s future interest lay in supporting the Whites and earning their permanent gratitude for making life difficult for the Bolsheviks.⁶³

Western intelligence agencies generally offered a sound analysis of conditions in Soviet Russia. They reported that the Red Army, weak in its early months, was getting stronger. This came through the reports of all the British agents. It was also the opinion of people in French intelligence like the wonderfully named Charles Adolphe Faux-Pas Bidet who had helped to expel Trotsky from France in 1916. He was therefore a marked man when undertaking a mission to Russia in 1918 and was swiftly arrested. Trotsky enjoyed the opportunity of interrogating him, using sarcasm rather than threats against his former tormentor. When released on 17 January 1919, Faux-Pas Bidet at his debriefing duly emphasized the growing strength of Soviet rule.⁶⁴

While most agents agreed on this burgeoning strength, Arthur Ransome went further and insisted that the Bolsheviks were nowhere near as bloody as they were painted. This caused controversy in British governing circles, and Bruce Lockhart wrote in the London Morning Post that he should keep quiet because he had been out of Russia for half a year.⁶⁵ Lockhart went round claiming to be a diplomat pure and simple and Ransome—agent S76—affected to be just a journalist: neither disclosed their work for the Secret Intelligence Service. As it happened, the Secret Intelligence Service shared Lockhart’s reservations about Ransome but concluded, on balance, that he did ‘quite good work for us’. Ransome was therefore sanctioned to return on the pretext of collecting Bolshevik pamphlets for the British Museum. His British handlers assumed they could filter out the pro-Soviet bias from his reports and obtain something useful for themselves since no one else could get as close to the Kremlin leaders.⁶⁶ Ransome, resourceful as ever, made the best of a bad job by using Lockhart’s criticism as a sort of passport to secure interviews with the supreme party leadership. He had missed the October Revolution, but no correspondent after 1917 shuttled quite so easily between Russia and the West.⁶⁷

The results of Western intelligence activity were mixed, through no fault of the agents themselves. There is in fact no evidence that Churchill or Curzon took up the anti-Soviet cause because they were decisively influenced by the secret reports of Dukes, Reilly and Hill or by the Times articles of Harold Williams. Churchill and Curzon were political militants against the Bolsheviks from the moment they heard of the October Revolution, and their belligerence was only reinforced by material forwarded to them as ministers. Similarly it is impossible to show that Lloyd George softened his treatment of Russia as the result of Ransome’s purrings. Undoubtedly the energetic secret agents and decryption experts of the Allied powers supplied their political masters with information of high quality. In trying to influence politics, they were motivated by patriotism and a sense of adventure (and, in Reilly ’s case, by financial greed). All of them but Ransome detested communism—and even Ransome did not want it for Britain. But although they often tried to be backseat drivers, the holders of supreme public office—Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau—took little notice unless the received advice conformed to what they themselves wanted.