“It is common knowledge that the Germans are counting on their propaganda to bring about a separate peace with Russia; but the details of their intrigues are not so well-known.”170
—William G. E. Wiseman, May 1917
“The interests of the German government are identical with those of the Russian revolutionaries.”171
—Alexander Israel Helphand, or Parvus, January 7, 1915
WILLIAM GEORGE EDEN Wiseman172 looked every bit the stylish young English gentleman. He wore tweed suits and striped ties and kept his mustache neatly trimmed. Son of a British navy captain, grandson of a rear admiral, and tenth in a line of English baronets (a hereditary title) dating back to King Henry VIII in the 1600s, he had received proper British schooling at Westminster College and Cambridge. At school he had earned a spot on the “Fighting Blue” college team as a bantamweight boxer. He floundered after graduating, tried journalism at the London Daily Express, wrote satirical plays, and then dabbled in business, traveling to Canada and Mexico on behalf of British financiers.
But then came the world war, and Wiseman, twenty-nine years old with a wife and two small children, found his calling.
He enlisted as an artillery lieutenant and rose quickly to captain of the Sixth Battalion, British light infantry. They stationed him in Flanders, where his unit joined a multinational force defending the small Belgian town of Ypres on the Western Front. When German infantry attacked in April 1915, Wiseman saw violence at its worst. He found himself at the center of an ugly bloodbath that killed or wounded more than one hundred thousand young men in just three weeks. But what most terrified the soldiers and shocked the world about Ypres was the chlorine gas.
This was Germany’s first major use of poison gas in the war, and it caught the Allies by surprise. In their first attack there, German troops emptied six thousand canisters of chlorine into the wind. It formed an enormous green cloud that drifted silently over French lines and quickly crippled or killed some six thousand soldiers. The gas formed hydrochloric acid on contact with water or soft tissue—lungs, eyes, lips, throats, noses, or exposed skin. The acid burned whatever it touched, causing suffocation, blindness, bleeding, coughing fits, and scars. Most died of asphyxiation, suffocating from clogged lungs.
Wiseman experienced one of these gas attacks in Flanders. It damaged his body so severely that he had to be evacuated from the front and required months of hospitalization. His eyesight never fully recovered.
But William Wiseman, the tough college boxer, refused to let chlorine gas knock him out of the war. While recuperating in England, he found another way to participate—espionage. One day a friend sent him to see the leader of a British unit recently created to fight the Germans behind the lines. They called it the Secret Intelligence Service, “a department of the Foreign Office,” or MI1c (later MI-6). Its commander, George Mansfield Smith-Cumming, walked on a wooden leg, the result of a car accident, and relished disguise and secrecy. His agents referred to him in code as C, and sometimes he had them write in invisible ink. Smith-Cumming also had an eye for talent and found invalid soldiers like Wiseman ideal for undercover work: committed, idealistic, and smart. Add to this Wiseman’s prewar business background, his North American travels, and his upper-class breeding (and bank account). It made him perfect for planting in the United States. Wiseman jumped at the chance.
MI1c’s prior New York chief had been a washout, and Wiseman, after a first visit, decided to ask for the top spot himself. “Let me try it, Sir,” he’d said after hearing Smith-Cumming complain about his predecessor. “You?” the chief laughed. “Why not? You couldn’t do worse than the others.”
With that, Wiseman landed in New York City in late 1915 and opened a small office for MI1c, first in the Woolworth Building and then downtown at 44 Whitehall. He assembled a small staff, including Norman Thwaites, another injured combat veteran with experience as a New York newspaperman, a one-time private secretary to New York World publisher Joseph Pulitzer. As cover, they grafted their operation onto the British naval attaché’s office and called themselves the American and Transport Department of the Ministry of Munitions.
Early on, their work consisted mostly of chasing down rumors, arranging protection for munitions ships, and watching: people, groups, vessels in the harbor, local politics, anything suspicious. It could be tedious. Wiseman’s staff once spent days trying to discover who had stolen a pair of binoculars from a ship under their watch, then checking on a British socialite, a Duke of Morny, who had been accused of spying for Germany. The Morny charge, they decided, was “utter piffle.” In another case they hired guards to watch weapons being loaded onto a Russian ship called the SS Visigoth only to find that five of the hired men came drunk and, after enough whiskey, started harassing the Russian soldiers.173 In another job, Wiseman’s agents had to discover the identity of the German ambassador’s latest mistress.
The guard work alone soon had Wiseman managing more than two thousand private detectives. Wiseman also elbowed into politics, nurturing a relationship with Colonel Edward House, the close political confidante of President Woodrow Wilson. Wiseman and House would soon become a primary back channel for war contacts between London and Washington.
But the hardest, riskiest part of the job was finding German spies and stopping them. With America still neutral, the US government barely bothered with spy catching. Wiseman worked closely with New York City’s rough-and-tumble bomb squad, but he found Washington’s naval and military intelligence units still “amateur operations.”174 Wiseman, looking out at New York from his downtown office, saw threats everywhere, and no place more than among New York’s bulging masses of immigrants: Germans, Irish, and all the Russians and Jews.
Wiseman developed a knack for spying. He and his team built a network of sources that soon opened windows all over the city. Wiseman didn’t mention source names in his papers, but Thwaites wrote about his adventures years later, and occasional names popped up in cables. They included Russian commercial attaché C. J. Medzikhovsky; Sidney Reilly, the future “Ace of Spies” from books and the popular 1980s PBS/BBC television series; and even a Russian businessman named Alexander Weinstein, possibly a relative of Gregory Weinstein, editor of Novy Mir.
These sources only confirmed the dangers. German and Irish immigrants posed the most obvious threats. New York’s German neighborhoods teemed with active German agents, and its German-language newspapers routinely printed propaganda from Berlin. And the city’s two hundred thousand Irish virtually seethed with hostility. Just months earlier, Britain had crushed Ireland’s latest demand for home rule, the 1916 Easter Rising, an armed insurrection in Dublin that British troops had battled for six days of urban warfare. The fight had killed 318 rebels and civilians, 116 British soldiers, and sixteen Dublin policemen. British officials had sent sixteen Irish home rule leaders to death by firing squad. Calls for vengeance sounded on both sides of the Atlantic.
But even this blood feud paled in comparison to the threat posed by New York’s Russians and Jews. The danger here went beyond mere sabotage or propaganda. They threatened Britain with losing the war. All because of the tsar.
Britain needed Russia as a military ally in 1917. Its own army, even combined with France’s, stood badly outnumbered by Germany’s massive war machine on continental Europe. But Russia, with its five million soldiers, its Cossacks and vast spaces, had created a second front in Europe that forced Germany to split its forces, giving Britain and France a combined advantage in the west. But Russia’s involvement came at a steep price. The tsar had enemies.
For instance, virtually every single one of the million and a half Jews and Russian émigrés in New York City had known tsarist persecution. Russia’s history of violent anti-Semitism; its targeted, abusive military conscription; its bans against Jews attending universities, owning land, or even living in most cities; its waves of pogroms killing thousands of innocents and openly backed by tsarist officials had spawned deep resentment and been a principal cause behind massive Jewish emigration from Russia to New York since the 1880s. As a result, Jews flooded into every anti-tsarist movement and represented the large bulk of Russians (which then included Poles and Ukrainians) who had left for America.
Now in New York, these Jews and Russian émigrés stood ready to block any American attempt to enter the European war, seeing it as helping the tsar. It wasn’t just radicals or socialists who felt this way. Take Jacob Schiff, New York’s most prominent Jewish leader at the time. Schiff, seventy years old, chaired Kuhn, Loeb, and Company, one of Wall Street’s leading investment banks, and proudly used his bank’s muscle to protest Russian anti-Semitism. When Count Sergius Witte, Russia’s finance minister, came to New York in 1904 seeking financial support for Russia’s then-brewing war against Japan, Schiff met with Witte and told him to his face that so long as the tsar persecuted Jews, he would block any American loans.
Writing years later, Witte still shuddered at the encounter. “[Schiff] banged the table with his fist,” Witte recalled, “and declared that a government which indulged in massacres and inhuman persecution on religious grounds was not to be trusted.”175 Russia lost its war to Japan, and tsarist officials still fumed over the incident with typical bigotry. Said Russia’s finance minister in 1911, “Our government will never forgive or forget what that Jew, Schiff, did to us,”176 as if Russia’s own generals and Japan’s fleet had less to do with the defeat.
Since the outbreak of world war in 1914, Schiff again had refused to lend money to Britain and France so long as they supported the tsar, even if his Kuhn Loeb bank lost business and he was personally vilified as pro-German. Instead, he contributed to groups sending anti-tsarist literature to Russian soldiers at the front.
And then there was Trotsky. Wiseman had no special reason to think Trotsky the most dangerous Russian in New York City in February 1917. Most likely, Wiseman personally had never even met or seen Trotsky at that point. Still, for Wiseman, Trotsky’s type of radical, incendiary rhetoric set off loud alarms. The fact that so many Jews and Russians supported radical movements—Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, even American socialists—fed into Britain’s worst nightmare. All their talk of Marxist revolution raised an obvious question. What if one of these groups ever actually managed to pull the job off, topple the tsar, and lead Russia to sign a separate peace with Germany? Britain and France would then be left to fight Germany alone. To Wiseman and Britain, this outcome had to be stopped at all costs.
Wiseman’s MI1c organization had left nothing to chance and already had a file on Trotsky, starting with the first warnings about him from French officials in July 1915. The file contained all the reports about how they had caught Trotsky snooping around French military installations, about Trotsky’s Paris newspaper Nashe Slovo, and about his ties to a suspected Austrian agent. This was enough for MI1c to tag him for his “revolutionary and socialist tendencies.”177
If any Russian or Jew in New York City, be it Trotsky or anyone else, tried to overthrow the tsar or lead Russia out of the war, Wiseman and his team intended to find out first and use the vast resources at their command—the combined might of the British Empire and its allies—to stop them.
ON THE OPPOSITE side from Wiseman stood a man usually called by his friends simply Parvus. And this Parvus could not have been any more different from the Brit who ran MI1c’s operation in New York.178
Based in Denmark, Parvus enjoyed big cigars and drinking champagne at breakfast. Older, softer, chubbier than Sir William, with a goatee and a balding head, Parvus spoke a Russian-accented German interspersed with Turkish and enjoyed the company of attractive women. None of his three marriages lasted. Far from nobility, Parvus came from a poor Jewish home in southern Russia, grew up in Odessa, worked his way through school in Switzerland, and then moved to Germany to establish himself as a left-wing radical theorist. His money, and he had plenty, he had made through war-related business and speculation.
Just as Wiseman had devoted himself to the British cause, Parvus had dedicated himself to Germany, and in a special way. Parvus never joined the army, not for Germany or any other country. But it was Parvus who conceived the idea that Germany could win the world war quickly by helping revolutionaries achieve their dream of socialism in Russia. And now he had committed himself to making that plan reality.
And one more difference: Wiseman knew Trotsky only by reputation, but Parvus could truthfully claim to have once been Trotsky’s closest collaborator and friend.
His real name was Alexander Israel Lazarevich Helphand (or Gelfand). Parvus (Latin for “small,” perhaps a joke on his large appetites) was the nom de guerre he had chosen on joining the radical underground in the 1890s. Up until the war, Parvus had counted himself one of Europe’s leading leftist thinkers, equal in stature to Lenin himself. Trotsky had called Parvus “unquestionably one of the most important of the Marxists” of the era, but he tempered this praise with caution. Parvus had a rogue side, Trotsky wrote, “always something mad and unreliable” about him, including an “amazing desire to get rich.”179
Parvus’s early radical polemics had irritated German officials so much that they banished him from Prussia and Saxony. Settling in Munich, Parvus, who was three years older than Lenin and twelve years older than Trotsky, joined the early socialists, often siding with another rising young prodigy, Rosa Luxemburg, among the fringe “hotheads” and “firebrands.”180 But he always kept an eye out for profit. Parvus ran a Dresden newspaper, started a publishing house (where he apparently cheated novelist Maxim Gorky out of a large royalty payment), and helped Lenin launch Iskra, his journal for the budding Social Democratic movement.
Trotsky’s special friendship with Parvus began after his 1903 break from Lenin over the Bolshevik–Menshevik split. He and Natalya had traveled to Munich to ask Parvus for advice, and the two immediately became so friendly that Trotsky and Natalya moved into Parvus’s house in Munich’s Schwabing District, a popular bohemian neighborhood with plenty of bars and cafés, artists and writers. Over the next few months, Parvus and Trotsky worked together on what became one of Trotsky’s signature contributions to Marxist theory, his “theory of permanent revolution,” basically the notion that a backward country like Russia could skip over the liberal capitalist phase in its development and proceed directly to proletarian socialism, a key theoretical bridge for Russia’s 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
When Trotsky returned to Russia in early 1905 to join the antigovernment uprisings in Saint Petersburg, Parvus came too. Parvus saw the 1905 revolt as validating his stance on the importance of political mass strikes and the potential for “permanent revolution.” Like Trotsky, Parvus was arrested by police, served a prison term, and escaped.181 Back in Europe, he, Trotsky, and Natalya had spent the next summer on what Trotsky called a “tramp through Saxon Switzerland,” drinking, hiking, and enjoying the mountain air till the money ran out and they went separate ways.182
This cozy friendship ended abruptly, though, with the world war. Its outbreak in 1914 found Parvus in Constantinople, where he had settled and established himself as a financial adviser to foreign investors. Parvus used his commercial ties to win a key role in Turkey’s war mobilization. This allowed him to speculate financially on government decisions. He quickly became wealthy.
Around this time, Parvus had his epiphany. After so many years living in Germany, he had grown to appreciate German culture, music, food, and literature, though always as a political radical. Now he suddenly grasped the connection between these two strands in his life. German militarism posed no conflict with his socialism. Just the opposite. Germany’s war had created the best possible chance for his long-held Marxist aims for Russia. A German military victory over the tsar could open the door to a lasting socialist regime. And Germany’s best hope to win a quick victory in the world war—by forcing Russia out of the contest—could come from supporting Russian revolutionaries like his friends Trotsky and Lenin. If Lenin’s Bolsheviks toppled the tsar, it would save Germany the trouble.
Parvus used his new access to top German leaders, first in Constantinople and then in Berlin, to press the idea, and the German officials agreed. In fact, they found Parvus so convincing that in 1915 they gave him an account of one million marks (about $6 million in modern times) to promote Russian radicals wherever he thought best.
The opportunity seemed fantastic, and Parvus rushed to spread what he thought was wonderful news. It came as a surprise, then, when his radical friends not only disagreed but also denounced him as a pariah. They assaulted him with their worst insult, calling him a German “chauvinist.”
Parvus couldn’t believe it. He decided to take his case directly to Lenin. He traveled to Zurich in mid 1915 and went to a restaurant where Lenin was having lunch with his wife, Krupskaya, and friend Inessa Armand. He interrupted them and then followed Lenin home to his apartment. By all accounts, the meeting went badly. According to a friend who spoke to Lenin after the encounter, Lenin heard Parvus out and then called him a German agent, asked him to leave, showed him the door, and told him not to return.183
Trotsky, hearing about Parvus’s conversion to German militarism, also immediately denounced him. Trotsky wrote a column for his Paris newspaper Nashe Slovo titled “Epitaph for a Living Friend,” calling Parvus a “political Falstaff,” a “joke and a chauvinist” who “we now have to place on the list of the politically deceased.”184 Their friendship was over.
Fortunately for Parvus, he had a thick skin and an even thicker bankroll. Instead of giving up, he kept looking for ways to conjure his Russian Revolution. He started spending German money to help radical friends. He even pumped some into Trotsky’s Nashe Slovo, using as his vehicle a mutual friend named Christo Rakovsky, the one identified in French military police reports as an Austrian agent. Trotsky happily accepted Rakovsky’s money, apparently not knowing that it actually came from Parvus.
Early 1917 found Parvus in Copenhagen running a small conglomerate of new ventures, all backed financially by Germany, all designed to nurture revolution in Russia. He had founded an upright-sounding Institute for the Study of the Social Consequences of the War, plus a newspaper called Die Glocke. He created an import–export business that gave him an excuse to send agents into Russia and create pools of strategically located cash. To staff these ventures, Parvus tried to recruit friends from his former radical circle with Trotsky, including two who by January 1917 had already resurfaced in New York City and shared the small office with Trotsky at Novy Mir. One was Nikolai Bukharin, who turned Parvus down only after Lenin advised him to stay away. The other was Grigorii Chudnovsky, who actually had joined Parvus’s Copenhagen operation for a few months before reaching New York.
To hear recent news about his old friend Parvus, Trotsky only had to look up from his desk at Novy Mir and ask across the room.
But if Parvus still hoped to reconcile with his former friends, Lenin seemed to hammer a final nail into the idea. Seeing a copy of Parvus’s new newspaper, Die Glocke, Lenin publicly panned it as an “organ of renegades and dirty lackeys,” a “cesspool of German chauvinism” in which “not a single honest thought, not a single honest argument, not a single straightforward article” could be found.185
Despite these public denunciations, Lenin kept open a discreet back channel. He gave approval for a friend, Polish socialist Jakob Furstenberg (or Ganetsky), a skilled smuggler who had lived with Lenin near Cracow before the war, to join Parvus’s business operation in Copenhagen. Parvus made Furstenberg managing director of his trading company. As a result, Furstenberg knew all about Parvus’s German funding, his network of agents inside Russia, his strategically placed cash accounts, and the rest. And, by every indication, he kept Lenin appraised.
Parvus refused to take no for an answer. He bided his time in Copenhagen, building his fortune and indulging his appetites. Russia would rise up sooner or later, and when it did, he would be ready.