Spies and Commissars

Intelligence agencies are predictably shy about releasing the names of their employees. This has often opened the door to speculation, and one of the enduring controversies from the early Soviet years is about whether Sidney Reilly was a Cheka agent.¹ Suspicion enveloped him after the temporary destruction of the Allied intelligence networks in autumn 1918. DeWitt Poole, acting consul-general for the Americans in Moscow, had left Russia with the rest of the American diplomatic personnel in those weeks. He had formed a poor opinion of Reilly and sounded an alarm when talking things over with Sir Mansfeldt Findlay at the UK embassy to Norway. Poole recounted the rumours that Reilly was a Cheka agent provocateur. Although the evidence was no more than circumstantial, it worried Findlay enough for him to place it before the Foreign Office and the Secret Intelligence Service. Poole’s concerns had sprouted from the discrepancy between what Lockhart had discussed with him and what Reilly had apparently enacted. He wanted the British to investigate the possibility that Reilly had betrayed Lockhart.² Kalamatiano, the American secret service leader in Russia, languished in Soviet custody and Poole naturally felt sore about this. Poole had confidence in Lockhart and mistrusted Reilly. It did not cross his mind that Lockhart too might have been less than frank with him in Moscow.

Although Lockhart had private reservations about Reilly’s personal integrity, ³ he never queried his political allegiance. Reilly expressed outrage at the insinuations against him and complained to Lockhart, a few weeks after they returned from the Russian capital, about ‘those unfortunate libels’. ⁴ Like Lockhart, he called for a hard line to be taken on Soviet Russia; he described Lloyd George as being soft-headed about Bolshevism and planning to use philanthropy as a ‘panacea for all social evils’. He thought the British cabinet failed to understand the menace to civilization that would soon spread abroad if it was not stamped out in Moscow.⁵ He rejected the view that the Soviet order was an unworkable or weak one. Having seen it in motion in Russia, he had no doubt that it could be made operational elsewhere.⁶

Was this the play-acting of a double agent? Reilly’s patron Mansfield Cumming probed the possibility by asking Commander Ernest Boyce, an old Russia intelligence hand, to conduct an internal enquiry. Boyce’s researches revealed a brash man with a chaotic personal life. Reilly did everything to excess; he was abstemious only with drink. He loved women, and it was rare for him to limit himself to a single girlfriend—and on his return to London he went around with a tart who rejoiced in the nickname of Plugger.⁷ Reilly was a bigamist, never having divorced his first wife Margaret, who tracked him down and squeezed money out of him in return for her silence. He was a gambler who often risked everything in the casino as in the rest of his life.⁸ When he had money he spent it ostentatiously, and high society paid him the attention he craved. He bought a flower for his buttonhole daily at Solomons in St James’s Street. He took a suite at the Savoy Hotel and, when this palled, he moved to the Ritz. Reilly seemed the quintessential man about town.⁹

Commander Boyce’s enquiry into Reilly extended to having lunch with Robert Bruce Lockhart and his wife Jean at the Langham Hotel in Regent Street in December 1918. He arranged for Jean to arrive earlier than her husband so as to do a bit of judicious questioning. Jean told him that ‘Bertie’ believed that Reilly would always ‘work for the highest bidder’.¹⁰ But even this revelation merely suggested that Reilly was nothing more than a money-grubbing rascal rather than a Chekist, and Cumming felt safe in sending him on yet another Russian mission together with George Hill.¹¹ But the whisperings against him continued and it may well have been on his return to London that Cumming called in George Hill and Paul Dukes and set up a separate enquiry.¹² Although Reilly was cleared, Cumming refused to grant him a fixed appointment, offering the excuse that the Foreign Office was the source of the hostility. At any rate the Secret Intelligence Service continued to use Reilly for foreign assignments and throughout his time in London he continued to fire off tirades against Lloyd George’s softening of Allied policy on Russia. If he had been a Soviet mole, it is difficult to see why his handlers would have approved of this behaviour at a time when Sovnarkom hoped to turn Western public opinion in favour of diplomatic recognition and commercial acceptance. It is still not impossible that Reilly took money from the Bolsheviks at some other time. But whether he did or not, he could never be a reliable double agent: Reilly’s first and last loyalty was to himself and his financial interests.

The Soviet authorities were still finding their way in the activities they promoted abroad. They were juggling two priorities. One was to stir communist parties into life and revolution; the other was to agitate for trade with Russia. At the very time that the Bolsheviks were trying to arrange deals with Western big business they were also sending people and funds to undermine capitalism. This ‘contradiction’ did not worry the Politburo. Communist leaders assumed that if their best hope was fulfilled—revolution—then it would no longer matter what sums had been given or promised to businessmen in the West. And if things went wrong for communism in Europe, at least Sovnarkom would possess signed contracts to facilitate Russian economic recovery from the years of fighting. Often the same agents were stirring up politics while reassuring businessmen. The Politburo lived comfortably with the paradox. Bolshevik leaders accepted that ‘history’ was messy and that twists and turns in policy were essential if communism was to triumph. They thrived on the ‘contradictions’ in world affairs. If Bolsheviks lower down the party did not yet appreciate this situation, surely eventually they would do so—and the prestige and authority of Lenin and his close comrades were deployed to ensure that this came about.

The Soviet agents fostered organizational splits in the parties of the political far left so as to win recruits for Comintern. They sent funds and instructions abroad. They gathered reports on discussions among the great powers. They organized propaganda in translation. As agreements were signed with Western countries, the plenipotentiaries working for People’s Commissariats conducted clandestine activity behind the screen of their legal work. Comintern recruited people from the new communist parties for espionage and subversion on the Kremlin’s behalf. In June 1919 the Cheka at last set up an illegal operations department for work abroad.¹³ The pace of international activity was steadily being increased. Agents were sent to all continents in the revolutionary cause.

Bolsheviks were expert at spiriting funds across frontiers. They had to be: they had committed themselves to international subversion, and governments and police forces everywhere took them at their word. Russia no longer had diplomatic recognition in any country after the closure of the German, Swiss and Scandinavian missions in the winter of 1918–19.¹⁴ This meant among other things that the Russian plenipotentiaries and couriers lost the facilities associated with diplomatic bags. They carried money on their persons for political purposes at their destinations. This was a hazardous undertaking since countries bordering on Russia teemed with policemen under orders to lay their hands on Kremlin agents, who were marked men and women when passing through customs points. The maintenance of the Allied economic blockade around the territory under Soviet rule aggravated the problem, and trade between Russia and its neighbours fell to a small fraction of what it had been before 1914. (During the Great War there had been a substantial exchange of goods even with Germany via neutral Sweden.) Agents who went on foreign trips to buy goods for Sovnarkom had to bring back what they could pack in suitcases because they could not make wholesale purchases for dispatch as rail freight. They restricted themselves to bringing back medicine, saccharine and other easily carried products.¹⁵

Alternative options were quickly found. Since 1917 Sovnarkom had confiscated a huge quantity of extremely valuable jewels that were small, light and easily exchangeable for cash—and they were used even before the withdrawal of diplomatic privileges. Louise Bryant was one of the couriers. She agreed to the work after her baggage had been seized in Finland on a journey from Petrograd in the winter of 1917–18. When she asked at the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs how to avoid such trouble in future, Ivan Zalkind replied: ‘Why, I’ll make you a courier for the Soviet government!’ The advantage was that she could have her bags sealed with wax and the customs men—at least in Scandinavia—would not touch them. This was how she took official material to ‘the Bolshevik minister’ Vatslav Vorovski on her next trip to Stockholm. The only drawback was that hoteliers treated her with suspicion as a Soviet agent and she found it hard to get a room for the night.¹⁶ Women were the perfect couriers because they could wear the valuables discreetly round their necks and on their arms. When Yevgenia Shelepina made her final departure from Russia with her future husband Arthur Ransome in 1922 she transported diamonds and pearls worth 1,039,000 rubles by arrangement with Chicherin.¹⁷

Courier work was not an exclusively female occupation. When Francis Meynell, a director of the London Daily Herald, agreed to transport two strings of pearls to the United Kingdom he hid them in a jar of butter; and on one occasion he carried jewels inserted into a box of chocolate creams.¹⁸ Meynell advertised his sympathies so widely that Special Branch asked the Secret Intelligence Service to keep an eye on him.¹⁹ The same authorities were watching over People’s Commissar Leonid Krasin when he entered the United Kingdom with jewels in his luggage to the value of over seven million rubles.²⁰ It was an open secret that many couriers were on assignments that involved more than carrying messages, money or jewellery. Some of them became involved in pro-Soviet organizations; others helped to arrange the circulation of revolutionary literature.²¹ The difference between a courier, an agent and an activist was often a blurred one. The Special Branch in London knew what was going on but refrained from arguing for stoppage of the courier facilities. British counter-intelligence found it more convenient to use Soviet emissaries as a way of surveying the political left in the United Kingdom than to block their entry into the country.

In January 1920 John Reed received a million rubles’ worth of diamonds for disbursal in the US. His American comrade Kristap Beika (alias Comintern official John Anderson) received a similar amount. The emergent US communist movement would not lack financial support. The record of such assignments kept by the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in 1919–20 referred to several other countries, including Hungary, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Italy and France.²² It was not a perfect system, as the heads of Soviet diplomatic missions made clear in their reports to the Kremlin. Yan Berzin in Switzerland in 1918 was disgusted by the quality of couriers sent out to him, claiming that several of them had given speeches in favour of the Mensheviks as they passed through central Europe.²³ Nor was every courier distinguished by basic honesty. Just as they could cross borders in one disguise, so they could abandon their communist errand and run off with the valuables that had been entrusted to them. Lenin huffed and puffed about morality and penalties. But it was difficult at long range to impose discipline on unruly agents until such time as communist parties were able to act as enforcers, and even then the system was vulnerable to abuse.

The Soviet missions were also active in translating and publishing communist writings. When Yan Berzin arrived in Berne as Soviet plenipotentiary in May 1 9 18 he rushed Bolshevik texts into print in German and French. A group of local translators was employed, and a small publisher was found outside the city so as to avoid governmental interference. Lenin’s The State and Revolution received priority alongside his The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, and Trotsky’s From the October Revolution to the Brest Peace Treaty quickly appeared. Books by Radek, Philips Price and Sadoul went to press. Profit was not the aim. Moscow was willing to shower whatever finance was required to spread the doctrines of communism.²⁴

It was not always necessary to do this through communist agents. When George Lansbury went to Moscow in February 1920 and mentioned that his Daily Herald was in financial trouble he was offered money to save the newspaper from falling into the hands of socialists who opposed the Soviet regime. He addressed the Moscow Soviet and commended communists on their achievements in economic reconstruction.²⁵ As part of the deal he agreed to help publish translated booklets by the Russian communist leadership. The Bolsheviks were people of the printed word. There were marvellous orators among them but their basic premise was that thorough indoctrination required books to be made available for study—and somehow a flow of revolution would proceed from them. Chicherin told Litvinov to give the funds to the Swedish communist Fredrik Ström for handing over to Lansbury. The scheme worked as the newspaper moved leftwards and advocated direct political action in Britain.²⁶ The Daily Herald’s dependence on Soviet money became public knowledge after Fetterlein decrypted the telegrams. Lansbury—an early Soviet dupe—denied trying to hide anything shameful, alleging that he was only counteracting a discreet boycott by British paper suppliers.²⁷ A Christian socialist, he wrote that everything was fine in Russia because there was no religious persecution. Even the Bolsheviks laughed when they heard about it.²⁸

Another urgent task for the Cheka and the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs was to make sense of public opinion in the West. Before 1917 Lenin and Trotsky had assumed that politics merely reflected big economic interests. They had generally thought that the outstanding foreign enemies of the October Revolution—Churchill, Curzon or Clemenceau—were mere puppets of industrial and financial lobbies in London and Paris. As soon as they came to power they recognized the need to take personalities seriously in international politics. They courted the good opinion of Woodrow Wilson in 1918–19. Despite considering him a capitalist scoundrel, they did not dismiss the possibility that he might be induced to depart from the line preferred by Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Lenin in particular followed the ages-old tradition of clever rulers in seeking to divide and influence the enemies of his government.

A lot of what the Kremlin needed to know could be plucked from the air either by its agents or by the telegraphists they bribed. The gigantic Nauen radio station, twenty-four miles to the west of Berlin, had two masts 850 feet high. It was the biggest installation in the world and could transmit signals as far as New York. Soviet leaders regarded it as their ‘window on Europe’. There were only undulating hills and no mountains between the Russian and German capitals and Soviet telegraphists had no problem in getting hold of news of political and military importance for the Bolsheviks.²⁹ The People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs used a more traditional method by scrutinizing the Western press for information.³⁰ Its diplomats examined the newspapers for important news and sent the material back to Moscow.³¹ The practical usefulness of their reports was diminished by the fact that they applied the same ideological filter as Lenin and Trotsky. Although Yan Berzin commented on the disastrous impact on Western opinion of Trotsky ’s handling of the Czech Corps and warned Soviet leaders to take account of the international perspective before acting so precipitately, he undercut his own sound advice by assuring Moscow that he had the evidence that ‘proletarian revolution is uninterruptedly growing in all countries’.³²

The fact that he wrote in this fashion from the stable Swiss capital shows that information was only as good as the Bolsheviks were willing to let it be. They allowed nothing to interfere with their belief that the West was teetering on the revolutionary brink. They had to keep comforting each other with lines from their credo. Otherwise the world would take on an altogether bleaker appearance in their eyes.

Arthur Ransome reinforced their preconceptions. The Kremlin knew that he was no mere journalist since a Cheka report in March 1921 stated that ‘Lloyd George’s group’ had sent Ransome on his latest mission to Moscow. ³³ (Soviet leaders were wrong on one detail: they were under the mistaken impression that this was the first time that Ransome came to them with the sanction of the British government.) Whether Ransome mentioned to the Kremlin that he was the emissary of a specific group is not known, but it was anyhow an open secret that several British ministers were displeased about the moves by Lloyd George for a rapprochement with Soviet Russia. The communist leaders had always given a warm welcome to Ransome because his books burnished their image. They also saw him as someone who could explain the British political scene to them. Ransome duly complied and gave an account of the factions in ruling circles, one led by Lloyd George and the other by Curzon and Churchill. He added the names of Paul Dukes and Harold Williams as protagonists on the anti-Soviet side along with Leslie Urquhart, George Hill and Sir George Buchanan.³⁴ This was not a bad summary of the leadership and opinion-formers on the Russian question in the United Kingdom, providing information beyond what could be gleaned from The Times and the Manchester Guardian.

Ransome went outside the boundaries of his brief as a British agent when disclosing to the Cheka what he knew about those people in Soviet Russia who were obstructing the progress towards a trade treaty with the United Kingdom. He mentioned Simon Liberman, a Menshevik expert and ex-businessman working in the timber industry, in this connection. He also gave encouragement to the Bolsheviks in their global rivalry with Britain by suggesting that Muslims in Asia were responding better to Soviet than to British ‘diplomatic influence’.³⁵ Getting into his stride, he commented that France might be willing to resort to military measures in the Baltic Sea if this would help to bring down the Soviet government.³⁶ Evidently the gangly, eccentric Englishman had his own bias about Western politics and readily deployed it. And he could not stop himself pandering to the ideological prejudices of the Soviet leaders he met. In his references to Liberman, he was even putting an innocent Russian economic official in jeopardy of arrest by spreading unfounded rumours about him. The best that may be said is that Ransome was perhaps only acting like many newspaper reporters in seeking to butter up a politician so as to get information out of him or her. At any rate it was not his finest hour.

Liberman had already been out of favour with Dzerzhinski, who questioned his loyalty at the start of his employment in the Soviet administration in November 1918. But they patched up their disagreements at the end of 1920 and Dzerzhinski supported him.³⁷ Ransome came near to messing everything up for Liberman. Truly he could be a dangerous acquaintance for Russians who were not Bolsheviks. British intelligence in any case constantly monitored his political allegiance even while using his services. The Manchester Guardian’s editor C. P. Scott was asked for a guarantee that he would not print anything from Ransome that was detrimental to British national interests. Only then was Ransome allowed to go on his Russian mission.³⁸ The Secret Intelligence Service never felt it could drop its guard with him, especially after learning that he had told Russians that a particular British official was ‘an agent of the British government’.³⁹ In Britain he continued to talk up the Soviet cause at the drop of a hat.⁴⁰ Such was Ransome’s intimacy with the Kremlin leadership that Litvinov took the trouble to wire him about how to avoid the latest travel difficulties.⁴¹ But the Secret Intelligence Service persisted with Ransome, finding him useful because of ‘his friendship with the Bolchevik [sic] leaders’ and his capacity to supply ‘a lot of most valuable stuff’.⁴² A fellow British intelligence operative put the problem about agent S76 succinctly: ‘He will report what he sees, but he does not see quite straight.’⁴³

Lenin and Trotsky saw things no straighter. Having seized power in Petrograd in a spirit of millennial optimism, they could not afford to let themselves think that capitalism might survive and flourish around the world. They sieved out information that might deflate their optimism, preferring the news that pointed to trouble for the post-war settlement in Europe. They looked keenly for disturbances in central Europe. Viewed from the Kremlin, Western countries appeared ripe for Soviet-style revolutions.