Gus Agar was not the only person who had been badly let down by MI6. At the same time that he was having a row with them in the dacha at Terrioki, their incompetence had almost reduced Paul Dukes to tears.
Everything about his intelligence operation in Petrograd depended on money – money to bribe officials, money for agents, money to buy food in the famine-ridden city. He had not eaten for two days. When he had met Peter Sokolov in the gardens of the Winter Palace, it had not been safe to open the parcel there and then. He had just torn away a small corner of the wrapping to see what it contained and then stored it in a tomb in the Smolensk cemetery where he kept all his operational papers. But when he finally tore open the parcel he could not believe his eyes. The money consisted of forgeries – such poor forgeries that he would never be able to use them. There were twenty- and forty-rouble notes, but the dye was poor and the design on some of the notes was smudged. The paper was also too thin: anyone holding it would immediately look at it more closely. It simply felt wrong.
He had been holding out for this money. All his hopes rested on it. Paul later wrote of that moment:
‘I sat down, staring at the parcel, futilely counting the sheets. I whistled softly. It was the best substitute for weeping, and I could almost have wept.’
He knew now that he should never have come back to Russia. From the moment he had set out from Finland, the third stage of his mission had been dogged by disaster …
Getting back into Russia the third time at the very end of February 1919 had been harder then ever. Paul had expected to return across the ice of the frozen Gulf as Peter Sokolov had done. But he made the mistake of telling the commandant at Terrioki about this. The German commandant who had been forced to release Paul just a few weeks earlier was determined to do all he could to stop him now. Even orders from the Finnish government that Paul should be given every assistance carried no weight with him. He ordered that anyone seen on the ice should be shot on sight. The smuggler who had agreed to take Paul immediately refused to have anything more to do with him. Paul knew that he was being watched in Terrioki by German agents working for the commandant and that if he made an attempt to get onto the ice even without a guide he would probably be seen.
Eventually Paul told the commandant that he was going back to Helsinki to complain to the Interior Ministry about the way he had been treated. The commandant looked rather smug, happy to have upset a British intelligence operation – but in fact Paul had lied. He had other ideas.
His first thought was to use the Finnish border guards who had helped him before, but he found that they had been moved on. So he headed next into the far north of Finland where there were fewer villages and border patrols would be less frequent. He hoped to find a peasant who would conduct him across for money, although he had no idea how he would find such a person. Fortunately, on the train to Rautta in northern Finland he met the newly appointed commander of the Finnish garrison there and, using his papers from the Finnish War Ministry, Paul asked for his help in finding a guide.
Two nights later, Paul set off in the middle of the night on a sleigh with a local guide from Rautta. At a forester’s hut they left the sleigh and Paul’s guide checked on the latest news about Bolshevik patrols in the area. Then at midnight they proceeded on skis for the twenty-mile journey to a village across the border. At first Paul managed to keep up with his twenty-year-old guide, despite the fact that the skis were the wrong size for him. Their progress was quite fast but, every so often, the two men would stop to listen. The temperature was twenty degrees below zero, the forest was in complete silence and every sound seemed to carry for miles in the freezing air. In these woods they would hear a Russian patrol long before they saw it.
After an hour they crossed the border. This was marked by a wide strip of snow which had been cleared of all vegetation. Crossing this no man’s land was a great risk. The forest was so dense on either side of the strip that the first you would know if a patrol was hiding there would be as they opened fire. The only way to be sure was to sit and watch. But Paul found that every slight movement of bushes in the breeze seemed to be a sign that the Cheka were there. There was no way of knowing and they would just have to take their chances. Eventually his guide dashed across and Paul followed. They were safe, but their ski tracks in the snow remained for any passing patrol to find. Paul asked if they should attempt to cover them, but his guide simply shrugged and said that no one would be likely to follow them. Paul was not reassured, particularly since, as the man at the rear, he was the one most likely to get a bullet in the back if a patrol caught up with them.
The guide pushed on. Paul soon found himself in trouble. He had packed a large number of provisions about his person, especially chocolate and tins of condensed milk. In the famine conditions of Petrograd these commodities were worth almost as much as gold. He was also carrying large bundles of cash. These packages were all strapped to his body or carried in the voluminous pockets of a massive overcoat that he was wearing, but the sheer bulk and weight of all this meant that he found the journey much harder work than his guide who was in no mood to hang around waiting for this apparently fat and certainly very slow Englishman.
They pushed on for another three hours, frequently crossing frozen boggy areas where the additional weight meant that Paul had to struggle through muddy slush while his companion simply glided across and disappeared into the distance. But after a while it became clear to Paul that the young man was lost. Still the guide pushed on and Paul had no choice but to follow.
Finally, just as the morning began to get light, the guide came across a track and claimed to know where they were. He said it would only be another mile. Paul was almost at the end of his strength, but he promised himself that as soon as they reached the village he would sit down and rest as long as he wanted. He kept falling further and further behind and his guide became more and more agitated. As long as they stuck to the path there was a great risk that they would be spotted by a patrol, but they had to stay on the track or risk getting lost again.
The promised mile came and went and yet there was still no sign of the village. Paul’s chest and throat ached from continuously gulping great lungfuls of frozen air and the muscles in his legs were so tired that he could barely lift the skis. His guide had disappeared. Working automatically, Paul kept going: right ski, left ski, right ski, left ski …
The trees thinned out abruptly and Paul stopped in surprise. There was a hissing sound from the side of the track and Paul found his guide hiding in some bushes there. Paul collapsed onto the snow next to him and wondered if he would ever get up again. His legs and feet were so cold that he had lost all feeling in them.
The guide pointed across the clearing ahead to where a group of huts were situated at the base of a hill. He explained that Red Guards were based there. They would probably emerge some time in the next hour or so for the morning patrol. The guide said that they had come too far south, but that if they could cross the dyke ahead and make it past the huts without being seen they would only be about three miles from their destination.
Paul looked ahead and could see a small dyke in which a fast stream was running. He was about to ask his guide where the bridge was when the youth leapt up without a word, skied up to the dyke and simply used a thrust from his ski poles to leap right over it. Then he was gone, keeping low and gliding swiftly across the open snow past the huts.
Paul hauled himself upright by clinging to a nearby tree. He looked up and down the length of the dyke but there was no sign of any footbridge, not even a fallen log. If he waited much longer he would lose his guide completely and anyway the dyke was only about four feet wide. Under normal conditions he wouldn’t have thought twice about it.
Paul slid forward and tried to leap the dyke, using his ski poles to thrust him forward just as his guide had done. Two things immediately struck him: one was that his legs were so numb that he had hardly left the ground at all; the second was that in clearing the dyke his companion had dislodged a lot of snow and frozen soil from the far side and that it was now about twice as wide as it had been before.
Paul disappeared into the dyke and there was a loud splash.
Thirty seconds later, two skis were thrown out of the dyke onto the snow on the far side. Two gloved hands appeared as Paul tried to haul himself after them. The dyke was only about five feet deep, but Paul’s clothes and his huge overcoat were now drenched with freezing water after falling in the stream and he weighed almost twice as much as before. Also, he couldn’t get a purchase on the snow-covered ground. He scrambled frantically with his feet to boost himself upwards, but the embankment of the dyke simply turned to mud beneath him and he kept sliding back down into the fast-flowing water. From one of the nearby huts, he could hear the sounds of people stirring.
A strange combination of exhaustion and fear caused Paul to giggle quietly to himself even as he became more desperate. This was it. Britain’s top secret agent in Russia was going to die in a very small ditch! It seemed to him ridiculous at the time – he knew the ditch was not an enormous obstacle, but in the slippery mud and in his exhausted condition he just could not scramble out. Every time he tried he simply pulled yet another little avalanche of snow down on top of himself and made the slope even more slippery. All the time he was getting wetter, colder and heavier.
Finally, after thrashing around for ten minutes, he waddled further along the dyke and managed to grab the roots of a nearby bush. The first few times that he tried to pull himself up and out the damp roots slipped from his frozen fingers, but eventually he got a secure hold and inch by inch he hauled himself onto the snow.
Paul lay there, panting heavily. He did not care who could see him from the huts – he was simply too tired to move. Let them shoot him. He could not feel any part of his body and in the freezing conditions his soaked clothing was rapidly turning into a mass of ice. He laughed weakly at the thought that this was certainly no life for a concert pianist.
He was falling asleep from cold and exhaustion and wrote later that although he knew that this meant death he could not stop himself drifting away into pleasant unconsciousness. It was full daylight now. He lay there staring up into the clear blue sky and wondered if he should bother to move again.
But somehow it was the sight of that sky which helped Paul to gather his strength and force himself to his feet one last time.
He followed the ski tracks through the snow. He was by now in an almost trance-like state where he felt neither fatigue nor cold. He made no effort to remain concealed for there was no strength left for that. He only had energy for going forwards. He knew that if he stopped moving his skis that would be the end. He would just fall down, go to sleep and die.
He followed the guide’s tracks for another three miles. He climbed up hills and slid, almost helplessly, down long tree-covered slopes. He was aware that now and again he was passing people, peasants out gathering wood for the early-morning fires, but he did not have the energy to look left or right, only to go on, to follow the tracks which continued endlessly in front of him.
And then they stopped. They simply faded into the snow and the snow had merged into a muddy track.
He looked up and saw a village at the top of the hill at whose foot he was standing. He unfastened his skis and trudged slowly up the hill. He did not care if it was the right village, he was going into it. When he reached the top of the hill he looked around. Every wretched hut looked the same and there was no sign of his guide or anyone else in the bitter wind which blew flurries of loose snow along the street. Paul staggered to the nearest hut. He propped his skis against the wall and knocked quietly on the door. No one answered. He didn’t care. He opened the door and stepped inside.
The hut consisted of just one room. There was an old woman lying in a bed in one corner and five children of various ages and levels of grubbiness who had obviously just risen from a variety of straw pallets scattered around the floor. There was almost no furniture, but for some reason a small harmonium stood in one corner. The inhabitants of the hut stared at the apparition before them with a mixture of curiosity and fear. Paul crossed himself in front of the religious icons on the wall, staggered over to the stove in one corner of the room and slumped into a chair.
A few minutes later an old man in his mid-fifties entered. Paul mumbled an explanation about being on a foraging expedition. The man looked down at the growing pool of water around Paul’s feet as the ice in his clothing gradually melted. Paul said that he had fallen in a stream. The old man seemed not to care.
The family went about their business, getting dressed and preparing breakfast. No one said a word to Paul although the children occasionally glanced curiously at him. They carefully set out their meagre breakfast, tea and tiny pieces of black bread. The old man laid one small piece in front of Paul and apologised that they did not have more. Paul marvelled at their unselfish hospitality, so typical of every Russian peasant he had known. They had almost nothing at all, but what they had they would share.
Paul stayed there for the rest of the day. The family were very wary of him as well they might have been: he could have been a Bolshevik official come to spy on them. But everything changed when Paul hauled himself over to the harmonium and began to play. It was a simple instrument and Paul was reduced to playing the hymns of his childhood which he had learned when he had first watched his uncle play the organ in the tiny Congregational church in Bridgwater. The family – particularly the old man, who also played – warmed to him immediately. A man who played such music could not be a Bolshevik.
The old man explained that he was the children’s grandfather. The old woman was their grandmother. He never said what had happened to the children’s parents. He had lived there all his life. He explained how the Bolsheviks had come to the village one day. They had told him that he was a ‘capitalist’ because he owned three ponies and five cows. They had taken two ponies, four cows and half his land for redistribution to the ‘poor’. He looked around the broken-down one-room hut and wondered where these poor people lived. He had just been told that his remaining cow was to be confiscated so that the ‘poor’ could start a commune. All he hoped for now was that the Tsar would return and make everything better again.
The old man could see that Paul was in no state to walk any further. He said that Paul could stay as long as he needed to.
The old man planned to leave for Petrograd the following morning with his eldest granddaughter to smuggle into the city a small churn of milk which they hoped to sell. Paul set out with them. He was in a bad way. His feet were badly frost-bitten and he could barely walk. But he could not stay here. The family would not have made him leave, but they had so little that he could not find it in his heart to force himself on their hospitality any longer.
They set off well before dawn. Paul’s young guide had reappeared and he took them in a sleigh as far as the railway station. It was four o’clock in the morning when they arrived to catch the only train of the day. It was not due to leave until six but already the station was packed with desperate passengers. Once more Paul found himself fighting his way across a platform to try and get a place in an overcrowded carriage. Men shoved and cursed, women and children screamed or cried and every boot which trod on his frost-bitten toes drew cries of anger and pain from Paul. But, clutching the hands of the old man and his granddaughter tightly, Paul eventually elbowed his way into a carriage. It was designed to seat six people, but there were fourteen crammed in when the train finally pulled away. Many more people were squeezed into the corridors, lying on the roof of the train or clinging to handles and buffers on the outside. One of the men jammed into the compartment knew the old man and recognised Paul as a stranger. He asked if Paul had come from ‘over there’ – meaning Finland. The old man gave him a tremendous kick on the shins and the questioner minded his own business for the rest of the trip.
The journey was long and slow. Despite the overcrowding it was also cold because there was no heating in any of the carriages and many of the windows were broken. Then, halfway into Petrograd, the train braked to a sudden halt. A disturbance began at one end of the train and the news quickly spread along the corridors that troops were boarding it. There were panicked cries everywhere as people fought to get away. Some people scrambled out through windows and fled across the snow, others tried hiding beneath the train. But Paul’s feet were too badly damaged for him to run and he was too far from an exit of the carriage to get away. He sat there, resigned to his fate. But he need not have worried. The troops were not interested in checking papers only in looting the food which they knew these people would be bringing to sell in Petrograd. There were scuffles and shouts as they took whatever they could grab and as soon as they were gone the train moved on again.
Things were just as bad at Okhta station in the city. They arrived at nine o’clock and immediately there was a great scrum to leave the train. Troops had gathered at either end of the platform to stop people escaping. Once again they were going to search them, but, as before, the intention was to steal food rather than search for spies. Many people clambered out of windows or climbed under the train and ran away across the tracks. The granddaughter, who was the fastest of the three, told her grandfather that she would see him later at an address they knew and then disappeared under the train, clutching the precious churn of milk. On the platform the lines of soldiers quickly broke up as they dived into the crowd, seizing whatever took their fancy. People fought them or shoved past, hoping to get away with their precious goods in the confusion. Screams and cries of anger rent the air. Some soldiers fired their rifles over people’s heads to try and restore order, but this only increased the panic. Women and children were pushed to the ground and trampled underfoot and Paul was swept away by the crowd before he could bend down to help them. He saw one woman clawing with her nails at the face of a soldier as she was held on the ground. It was a scene from hell.
The crowd surged apart as more soldiers advanced and Paul was separated from the old man as they were carried along towards different exits. In his exhausted state and with his frost-bitten feet there was nothing Paul could do to fight against the tide. The sheer weight of the crowd carried him out of the station, clear across the Okhta bridge and into the city before it slowed down. Once there people rapidly dispersed in all directions through the snow-covered streets and only then did Paul have a chance to stop and catch his breath.
He stumbled on into the city. The pain was almost unbearable now and he had only one aim in mind: to get to a safe house and rest. By chance, he saw the old man near the centre of the city as he was shuffling along. The old man caught his eye and crossed the street to say goodbye to him. Paul tried to offer him money in return for the food and hospitality. With a typical Russian peasant’s stubborn pride, the old man would take nothing. All he would say was that if Paul ever needed help, then he should call on them. But Paul was never to see the old man or his family again.
And in the meantime things were about to go from bad to worse.
About an hour later Paul reached the safe flat that John Merritt had shown him three months ago. On the journey through the city it had seemed to him that security was tighter than ever. Squads of Mongolian and Lettish troops were hurrying here and there and many more people were being stopped in the streets. At the flat he banged on the door and was greeted sullenly by the stable boy from Merritt’s country estate who now lived there instead of Maria the housekeeper. Paul was almost at the point of collapse, but he had only been inside the flat for a few moments when the stable boy told him that the Cheka had been there that very morning. This had been their second visit. They were looking for Paul under the name of Krylenko. The stable boy had not known the name because Paul had never trusted him with it, but the Cheka officers had given an exact description of Paul, including the fact that he had a front tooth missing. Fortunately, the stable boy had told them that Paul had gone away on a long journey and would probably not be coming back. This was good news, but Paul knew that he could never use this flat again. The burning question was: if they knew of his Krylenko identity, did they also know of ‘Markovitch’?
Paul told the stable boy to stick to the story that he had gone away. Out in the street he wrapped his scarf around his head in the hope that no one would recognise him. This was not quite as silly as it sounds since many people were wrapped up against the cold in any old piece of clothing and with the lack of medical care in the city a lot of people were suffering from untreated ailments. With Paul’s shabby clothing the scarf around his head did not look out of place, but it was a disguise which he could not rely on for long.
He headed for Laura Cade’s language school. But even as he sloshed through the melting snow towards her building he could see that the flowerpot was missing from the chosen window. That was the warning signal: ‘Stay away!’ But was this because of the Cheka or just because Laura had troops billeted with her once again? Paul had no way of knowing. He turned down a side street and headed away from the area.
Paul was desperately tired, cold and hungry. Of his remaining safe houses he decided to head for the one belonging to the civil servant because it was the closest. He did not think he had the strength to go much further.
He stood in the street watching the entrance of the clerk’s building for some time. If the Cheka knew of the other flat they might well have traced this one as well because both were linked to John Merritt. But after half an hour he decided that he could wait no longer and shuffled through the entrance.
He crept slowly up the stairs. The clerk lived in a flat on the first floor. But before Paul had gone more than a few steps he heard whispering coming from the floor above. He stood absolutely still. There seemed to be two or three different voices and they were right outside the clerk’s front door. He heard the Russian word for ‘lock pick’ and a sound as though keys had been passed from one person to another.
That was enough for Paul. He turned and made a run for it. But in his haste he stumbled on some loose tiles and kicked them away across the hall, causing a clatter which was obviously heard on the floor above. There was the sound of boots running down the stairs. Paul kept running, thinking that he stood a better chance of getting away out in the open, but because of the agony of his frost-bitten feet his run was little more than a quick shuffle. He dived out through the door, but before he could even start down the steps a burly hand had grabbed him by the collar and the barrel of a revolver was jammed against the side of his head. The officer from the Cheka, wearing a leather jacket crossed with two belts of cartridges, threw him up against the wall and demanded to know who he was and what his business in the building was?
Paul acted on instinct. He pretended to be slightly retarded and a craven coward. It did not require a lot of pretence. He rolled his eyes and slobbered slightly. He stuttered that he had been looking for number 39 and had wandered into the hall of number 29 by mistake. As cover stories went it was pretty pathetic but, bowing and scraping, Paul eased past the officer and shuffled away down the steps.
At any moment he expected to be either shot or told to stop, but nothing happened. As he limped away and pretended to look for the right building number, out of the corner of his eye he saw the officer lower his revolver and stride back inside. As soon as he was gone Paul hurried into an alleyway and almost collapsed with relief.
So that was another safe house gone. Paul wondered if this was a routine search or if the Cheka had been tipped off? He also thought about the cowardly little clerk. If the Cheka had got him he would almost certainly talk. Paul tried to work out what was happening. There was a change in the mood of the city. He could sense it but he did not know what it meant. He bought one of the Bolshevik newspapers and looked for news about a security clampdown in the city. There was nothing, so perhaps the search was especially for him. The most likely possibility was that Zorinsky had at last cashed in all his chips by giving his information to the Cheka. But how did Zorinsky know so much about where Paul had been staying? He had always been so careful not to leave any clues and to make sure that Zorinsky didn’t have people following him. It was a mystery – a mystery that would kill him if he did not solve it soon.
Paul had two more safe houses left. One was that of Melnikov’s uncle. But that was clear across the other side of the city. Paul almost wept when he thought of the frostbite pain he would have to endure. But Melnikov’s uncle had never failed Paul before and, even though he knew he might be causing irreparable damage to his feet, Paul set off. The journey took several long hours, but finally Paul was able to look for the warning signal. This time it was that a large box would be placed in a certain window where it was visible from the street. He almost dreaded to look up as he approached the hospital, but the box was not there. With great relief he turned up at the door of the surgery. He was barely able to stagger in. He need not have worried about a cover story for being there – he was so ill that Melnikov’s uncle immediately booked him in as a patient.
He was amazed that Paul had made it into the city. His contact in the White underground, the mysterious ‘Shura’, had found out that Paul had become target number one for the Cheka. They seemed to know all about his movements and even had a photograph of him which showed his missing tooth. When the doctor saw Paul’s condition he was even more astonished. He immediately prescribed several days’ bed rest because of the frostbite injuries. Paul protested, but he did not have the strength to resist. His security was now in the doctor’s hands.
For two days Paul remained at the hospital. His boots had to be cut off, taking a great deal of the skin from his feet with them. His toes looked black and rotten. The doctor shook his head and said that Paul would not be able to walk for weeks and might never recover completely. Paul replied that he must walk again soon, even with crutches, and begged the doctor to find him another pair of boots.
Paul’s plan was to adopt a new identity and make the Cheka think that another British agent had arrived in Petrograd. The first step was to change his appearance. Paul needed to get rid of his shaggy beard and long hair. Melnikov’s uncle only had an aged and very blunt razor and a tiny sliver of soap. Paul described that shave as one of the most painful experiences of his life as he scraped his face red-raw until he was completely clean-shaven. Melnikov’s uncle then cut his hair and dyed it pitch black with some mysterious German hair lotion he found in the depths of the hospital. Finally, Paul replaced his missing tooth. It had fallen out while he was in Archangel in September 1918. He had saved it until he could see a doctor, by sewing it into the lapel of his trusty leather jacket. Now, using some tissue paper as wadding, he jammed it back into place. He looked in a mirror. He looked a bit bizarre, but at least it was nothing like his Cheka photograph. With his radically different appearance, almost all his former agents believed that he was a different man when they first saw him.
Melnikov’s uncle also provided a complete new set of clothes. They were threadbare, but Paul knew how hard the doctor had tried to get hold of them. There was also a pair of wire-framed spectacles which made Paul look like ‘a pale intellectual’. And from somewhere the doctor found him another pair of boots. These were very hard to find in Petrograd at that time and must have cost a great deal. They were several sizes too big, but with his feet bandaged it wasn’t too bad. Paul would be able to travel around the city – albeit it at the pace of a crippled shuffle.
It was dangerous for him to stay longer. Although he was still not well, on the second day he limped out of the hospital leaning heavily on a walking stick. There was no hope of running away from a Cheka patrol, but in fact the lameness from the frostbite proved to be a blessing in disguise. Several times over the next few weeks he was caught in random searches in the street. At first he panicked, but he was always allowed to limp on through without even being challenged. Becoming a cripple seemed to have made him invisible.
A few days later Paul solved the mystery of the identity of the Cheka’s informant. It was, as he had expected, Zorinsky. But the information came to light in an unusual way. Paul was limping alongside one of Petrograd’s many canals when he caught sight of a figure he thought he recognised on the other side of the street. It was Melnikov’s friend, the smuggler Ivan Sergeivitch. Paul had not seen him since that train journey to the border in Finland. Ivan was dressed as a soldier. Paul limped up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder, scaring him half to death.
Paul took Ivan to the gardens of the Winter Palace and finally convinced him that he really was Paul Dukes. It was then that Ivan told him to be on his guard: Zorinsky had spilled everything to the Cheka and there was now a substantial price on Paul’s head. Ivan knew this because Zorinsky had actually crossed the border into Finland hoping to find him, planning either to trick him into returning to Petrograd or to kill him and claim the bounty anyway. Zorinsky had arrived in Terrioki only a day or so after Paul had left. Ivan confirmed that Zorinsky had betrayed both Melnikov and the café where White sympathisers had gathered. The Cheka had paid him a rate per head for that job.
Ivan Sergeivitch had a long history with Zorinsky who was indeed a former army officer. Zorinsky had denounced Ivan to the Bolsheviks and he had been arrested, but had escaped from the Cheka on the very night he was to be shot by breaking away from his guards and throwing himself over a parapet into the Neva river. That was why he had fled to Finland. If he had known that Paul had met Zorinsky he would have warned him to have nothing to do with him. The genuine intelligence that Zorinsky had provided must have been bait to lure Paul into providing as much information about British intelligence operations in the city as possible – and to line Zorinsky’s pockets, of course.
Whilst Paul was not surprised, he still did not understand how Zorinsky had known so much about his other identities and safe houses. But after a short discussion with Ivan they thought they had a good idea. It could have been surveillance, but Paul had been very careful. It was more likely that Zorinsky had traced Paul’s telephone calls. He had either told the Cheka to monitor the calls Paul made when he came to dinner or he simply used the operator to find out where Paul was ringing from. Paul had called Zorinsky’s apartment from both the safe flats which had now been compromised. He could have kicked himself, but it was too late now: half of his network was blown.
Ivan then gave Paul the same advice that Melnikov’s uncle had given him: get out of Russia fast. It was too dangerous now. A simple change of disguise would only buy him a little time – the Cheka would hunt him down and corner him just as they had destroyed Cromie’s operations the year before.
Paul thought long and hard about it. He knew that both men were talking sense and he was highly tempted to make a break for it. And yet, when he considered the matter without panic, there were still possibilities. Zorinsky could not know of the Markovitch alias – Paul had guarded that so carefully that he had not even taken the papers back to Finland. So that, together with his new disguise, should give him a measure of protection. He could make new contacts. It would take time, but he knew that MI6 had no one else in Bolshevik Russia. If he did not do it, who would?
But in the end it was not bravado or a desire for glory which settled the issue, it was a purely practical matter. If Paul left Russia now he would have to walk across either the border or the sea ice and he was not in a condition to do either. He had to stay.
For the first few weeks of March 1919 he hardly moved about at all. As feeling returned to his feet almost any sort of movement was just too painful. He could do little to rebuild his network and relied almost completely on Melnikov’s uncle. Paul needed new agents for his network and new safe houses if he was to repair the damage that Zorinsky had done. He relied increasingly on women. Men were being drafted into the army, but women could move about the country freely and were less likely to be suspected. They are known to us today only by their pseudonyms.
One was ‘Aunt Natalia’, the pseudonym for a Miss Marple-like character who turned out to be the mainstay of Paul’s Petrograd network for the next four months. He had first met her in February 1919 through one of his other contacts who had suggested that her flat could be used for a meeting. Now that he had been deprived of so many other safe houses she came into her own. Aunt Natalia was an elderly spinster. Paul described her as ‘looking like a typical German hausfrau, small, neat and tidy, plain … she was always cheerful and composed and possessed amazing sang-froid’. She believed in non-violence but was passionately opposed to the Bolsheviks. Her brother had been one of the Tsar’s librarians. He had paid dearly for that association when he became one of more than five hundred people selected for execution by the Cheka in revenge for the assassination of Uritsky.
At first Paul used Aunt Natalia’s flat as a safe house. She would store his papers in a tightly bound little rubber bag which she hid in the bottom of a tub full of laundry. By coincidence, in April 1919, on the very first occasion when she used this hiding place, the Cheka arrived in the middle of the night. It was a routine search of the entire block but terrifying nevertheless. Paul’s Markovitch alias and supporting papers stood up to examination by the senior Chekist officer, but they still searched the flat.
Once the Cheka had left, Aunt Natalia revealed that she had known all along that there would be a search by the Cheka that night. When Paul demanded to know why the hell she had not warned him, she replied that it might have been called off and in any case she had not wanted to worry him! It says something about Paul that he found this an endearing trait rather than a sign of advancing senility … Fortunately, the hiding place had never even been suspected and Paul used it frequently over the next few months although he adapted the idea by placing the little bag in the toilet’s cistern which was mounted near the ceiling and was therefore harder to search than a modern cistern would be. Later, when he was cut off from his couriers in May and June 1919, Paul stored the large quantity of intelligence which was building up in Aunt Natalia’s family tomb in Smolensk Cemetery on Vasili Island in the west of the city.
By the middle of March disturbances in Petrograd factories had become so severe that Lenin himself planned to visit the city. He and the other two leading members of the Bolshevik party, Trotsky and Zinoviev, were going to address a meeting at which they would announce new measures aimed at restoring control of the city. But the security situation was so uncertain that the Bolsheviks could not risk a public meeting. Instead, the trio would be addressing a meeting composed only of specially selected party members. It was vital that Paul should find out what these new security measures were. He also knew that a report about the views of the Bolshevik leadership during this crisis would be a high priority for MI6. Somehow he had to pass himself off as a loyal Bolshevik and get into that meeting.
He asked if the mysterious Shura could help. Melnikov’s uncle passed a message and in a few days’ time the reply came through that Shura had arranged everything. Shura had asked to attend the meeting with a staunch party member named Rykov. At the last moment he would drop out, but would ask if ‘Markovitch’ could go instead. Paul would have to be careful because Rykov did not know he was a British agent. Shura would tell Rykov that Markovitch was a Bolshevik sympathiser who was in the city recovering from a long illness. It was risky, but on the other hand Shura thought the fact that Rykov was so widely known as a loyal Bolshevik meant that Paul was less likely to be questioned.
Paul added to his disguise for the meeting, pretending to be a virtual invalid by using two sticks instead of one and playing up the extent of his illness (although this was not far from the truth). He need not have worried. Rykov was so busy helping Paul up and down stairs that he barely had time to ask difficult questions. As Paul and his new friend approached the People’s Palace where the meeting was to be held, they could see that the building was heavily guarded by machine-gun emplacements and detachments of Lettish troops, the most loyal of the Bolsheviks’ supporters in the army. Even so, Lenin had to be smuggled into the building through a side door because of the risk of another assassination attempt. Security was strict, but Shura had been right: Rykov was recognised by one of the guards and Paul was not even asked for his papers. In the massive vaulted hall which was the centrepiece of the Palace, Lenin announced that all rail travel into Petrograd would be stopped for four weeks to prevent ‘speculators’ bringing food into the city. Instead food would be ‘requisitioned’ from the peasants in the countryside, brought into the city and distributed by the Bolsheviks – but only to true supporters. That would be how they would beat the famine in the city. Paul noted wryly that Zinoviev, the leader of the Bolsheviks in Petrograd who only two years before had been a stick-thin agitator, now weighed almost twenty stone. While the people of Petrograd lived in famine conditions, he was housed in luxury at the former Astoria Hotel.
Lenin also announced that there would be a new wave of suppression aimed at weeding out ‘counter-revolutionary elements’. More house searches would be conducted and, to cleanse the factories of ‘conspirators’, suspects would no longer be allowed to work in them. The Bolshevik leadership worked their audience into a frenzy of hatred. The Cheka would be given a completely free hand to pursue their objectives.
After the meeting Paul was able to produce a full report for London. It was one of the most timely and illuminating pieces of intelligence that MI6 had ever produced, right from the heart of the Bolshevik leadership. But the meeting also led Paul to change the nature of his operation. He now realised that it was no longer enough simply to report on conditions in the country. The Bolsheviks were potentially a threat to the whole of Europe. He needed to infiltrate the Bolshevik party if he was to be really effective.
To this end, Paul infiltrated the Comintern, the Bolshevik body dedicated to spreading world revolution. The chance came about almost by accident. Thanks to one of Cromie’s former agents in the Russian Admiralty, Paul used to visit a building near the docks which mainly housed sailors from the Baltic Fleet – ‘all rabid Communists’, as Paul described them. This was an excellent source of intelligence about what was happening in Kronstadt and the level of support for the Bolshevik leadership in the Russian navy. No one suspected Markovitch, the lame old man who played the piano to entertain them. It was the second time that his musical skills had enabled him to win people’s confidence. No one seemed to suspect a musician. The sailors were told by Cromie’s agent that Markovitch’s frail condition was due to months of torture in an English prison where he had been locked up for refusing to fight for the capitalists during the war. The sailors loved him all the more for that. From that house, Paul was able to meet those working for the Comintern and produced detailed intelligence about this secret organisation and those working for it. At one point there was even a proposal to send Paul to England as a Bolshevik spy. This would have been a useful way to escape from the country, but Paul decided reluctantly that he would be of more use in Russia and fortunately the idea was forgotten.
One of the greatest problems for Paul was raising money to support his ever-growing number of agents. By April 1919 he was short of funds once again. The Admiralty spy ring he was in touch with had their own ways of raising money, including bank robberies. Paul’s contact with the Admiralty network was a young naval first lieutenant called Kolya Orlov and Paul became closely involved with one of his raids. This was to provide one of the most memorable episodes from his time in Russia.
Kolya’s group was going to raid one of the ‘People’s Warehouses’. These were buildings where all the goods seized by the Cheka and Red Army troops were stored, supposedly for redistribution to the poor but actually to be sold to line the pockets of the Bolshevik hierarchy. The warehouses were stuffed full of cash, jewellery, works of art and furniture. Kolya and his friends hoped to ‘liberate’ some of this loot to raise money for the network.
They had already raided two of these places successfully. Paul said later that he did not ask them to carry out the raid for him, but there was much that he could not tell and we cannot be certain. He was certainly present at Kolya’s house before they set out for the raid. He said that he was there because Kolya had invited him, claiming that it would inspire the group. Whatever the reason for Paul’s involvement, there was little he could do. The affair was to end in disaster.
There were six men in the team, including Shura Marenko, the mysterious ‘Shura’ who had provided Paul with his Markovitch passport and some of his best intelligence leads. One of the team had carried out a reconnaissance of the warehouse and reported that it was guarded by only two officials and a couple of sentries. It looked easy. The group armed themselves from a stash of weapons at Kolya’s house and then travelled to the warehouse by separate routes. When they arrived at the rendezvous one of their number, Shura Marenko’s brother Serge, was missing. They were too young and inexperienced to realise that this meant trouble. The remaining five gang members went ahead with the robbery.
At first it all seemed to go according to plan. It was the end of the day and the warehouse would be closing at any minute so there should have been no members of the public left in there. Shura Marenko went into the building and made a last-minute check on the positions of the guards. He returned and said that all seemed to be as they had expected.
The five men then crossed the street to the warehouse. They overpowered the guard stationed just inside the main door. This guard, two terrified officials and two more sentries were taken into the ground-floor office where they were tied up and gagged. The gang began emptying the safe – and that was the moment when the net closed. There was a sound of trucks pulling up outside. Stupidly, the gang had not left a guard on the main door to watch the street and before they could move to cover it a gang of heavily armed Chekists burst through.
Gunfire erupted almost immediately, men throwing themselves across the warehouse in a desperate attempt to find cover wherever they could. The gang fought bravely, but they were heavily outnumbered. More and more Chekists poured through the entrance. One of the gang who tried to escape through the back door of the warehouse was cut to pieces in the alleyway. It had been a trap and they were now completely surrounded.
One by one the gang were killed, including Kolya Orlov, until only Shura Marenko was left. His revolver was empty and one arm hung limp at his side. Feebly dry-firing his now empty revolver at the advancing Chekists, he knew it was all over.
Suddenly there was a burst of gunfire from the doorway of the warehouse. A dark figure stood in the archway, silhouetted against the daylight and firing a revolver rapidly to cover Shura’s escape. Caught by surprise, the Chekists were cut down or threw themselves into cover.
As he sprinted towards the doorway Shura knew that it had to be his brother Serge. He was late, but anyway Shura thanked God for his arrival. Shouting for Serge to follow him, Shura dashed through the doorway and into the street. To his amazement there seemed to be no Chekists outside so he dashed down a side street, expecting at any minute to hear the Chekists charging after him. Shura ran as fast as he could without looking back, twisting and turning along every alleyway he could find, hoping to throw off any pursuit. Finally he turned a corner and found himself on the edge of a railway station goods yard. Despite the fact that he had only one good arm, he sprinted alongside a departing goods train and hauled himself into a boxcar. As the train gathered pace he crawled to the doorway and looked back. There was no sign of the Cheka – but there was no sign of the mystery gunman either.
Shura stayed on the run. He made his way to Murmansk where he handed himself over to the Allies and from there he went to Finland. Two thousand roubles which he had stuffed into his pocket during the raid were enough to pay for everything for the next few months. It was while he was staying in Finland some months later that he found out what had gone wrong with the raid and the true identity of the person who had rescued him. The story was so astonishing that at first he could not believe it. His saviour had not been Serge. Serge, his own brother, had betrayed the gang to the Cheka. The person who had saved him from certain death had been Kolya Orlov’s young sister, Sonia.
Paul Dukes had seen Sonia sitting quietly in the background during the meeting. He described her as ‘about nineteen, dark, curly-haired, good-looking, very reserved’. She resented the fact that Kolya would not let her take part in his anti-Bolshevik activities just because she was a woman and she constantly begged him to change his mind. On this day he had finally agreed that she could keep watch from a coffee shop on the corner of the street and let them know if anything happened. After the gang had left the house, she had dressed up in men’s clothing so as not to attract attention in the street. Then, with the assistance of the family retainer Akulina who had the key to the cellar where the weapons were kept, she had selected a revolver and left for the coffee shop. Kolya of course had never intended that she should be armed, but Akulina, who had once been Sonia’s nanny, thought differently.
Sonia had seen the gang go into the warehouse, but the Chekists had arrived and charged into the building so suddenly that there was nothing she could have done to warn her colleagues. Then the shooting had broken out and without thinking she had run across the street to help her brother. When she burst in through the entrance she probably had no time to realise who it was that ran past her and called for her to follow. The bitter twist to the tale was that Shura was her fiancé.
But Sonia had survived. Having emptied her revolver, she had tried to run out of the door again but before she could get away she had been bundled to the ground by several burly Chekists. She had fought back so furiously with arms, legs and teeth, and it took so many of them to subdue her, that Shura got clean away.
Sonia was trussed up and taken in the back of a truck to the Chekist headquarters at No. 2 Gorohovaya. She was interrogated every single day for three weeks, but she was incredibly brave. Even her interrogators grudgingly admired her. It was a classic Cheka interrogation. First she was deprived of sleep, food and water. Then she was dragged down into the cold, damp basement where a glaring lamp was shone directly into her face. There were slaps, barked orders and repeated questions until she was completely disorientated and almost unconscious. She was threatened with various ingenious tortures, including red-hot needles stuck under her fingernails, flogging or being locked in an isolation cell where she would be force-fed salted food without being given any water – she was told that prisoners went insane before they died in agony. At one point they even pretended that they were going to execute her. A revolver was held to her head and fired several times. Only when she realised that she was still alive did she see that the barrel of the gun had been moved slightly at the very last moment. She still refused to talk. In a way she was lucky. Her interrogator, Yudin, was considered one of the gentler Chekists.
After three weeks Sonia was moved from No. 2 Gorohovaya to Deryabinsky prison. The conditions were a little better there, but only just, and every few days she would be forced to walk all the way back to Gorohovaya for yet another interrogation. During one of these journeys she saw Shura Marenko’s brother Serge marching out of Gorohovaya in a Chekist uniform. She immediately denounced him to Yudin. Yudin questioned Serge and Sonia together, trying to use them to find the names of the conspirators. Serge had been working for the Cheka under an assumed name. He seemed to be horrified that there was a living witness to his terrible crime. That night he hanged himself in a cell with his belt, overcome with remorse at what he had done.
That night was also the worst so far for Sonia. Yudin tried a new tactic. He left her in the care of a female Chekist named Strunseva. Sonia later said that there was something very threatening about this woman. All her gestures were masculine and she smoked constantly. Sonia described her as having ‘a square face, square body in a black leather jacket, with dark eyes set in square sockets’. Strunseva sat very close to Sonia and began caressing her hair. She said: ‘… the truth is you are a bitch of a counterrevolutionary and you shot some of our men … how can you expect to be let off? But I can tell you, you needn’t lose heart – if you are sensible …’
Sonia, who had had a sheltered upbringing, had no idea what this meant, but as Strunseva sidled up closer to her Sonia was overcome with revulsion and suddenly pushed her away so hard that her tormentor flew backwards and fell over something on the floor. Strunseva stood up and grabbed Sonia by the hair so hard that she soon blacked out. Sonia remembered being dragged away but said that the rest of that night was just a blank in her memory. Perhaps it was. In any case, Sonia was to remain in prison for the next four months when she was to cross Paul Dukes’s path again.
In the meantime, the strain of living constantly among his enemies was beginning to tell on Paul. One day in May 1919 he visited one of his agents, a former general in the Tsarist army. Paul was only there long enough to collect a small packet containing the latest intelligence (and presumably pay the agent). He hid the tiny packet inside his hat band, but the sun was shining so brightly and the day was so beautiful that he took his hat off as he walked along so that he could feel the sun on his face. Earlier that afternoon he had been to a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony in the Winter Palace gardens and he was lost in remembering it as he sauntered along. He felt so good that he even forgot the state of his feet.
Suddenly he felt a tug on his arm. A young man handed him the small packet which he said Paul had dropped. With sudden horror Paul realised that it must have fallen out of his hat. The packet later turned out to contain precise details of Trotsky’s plans for an attack on the White forces under Admiral Kolchak. If some inquisitive person other than the polite young man had opened it, the agent who produced the intelligence and possibly the entire network would have been caught. This close shave was yet another reminder to Paul that he must never lower his guard even for an instant and increased the strain on his nerves still more.
That strain was increased by silence from MI6. Now that he was thoroughly familiar with working undercover in Bolshevik Russia, Paul was producing more and more intelligence. He had even managed to recruit a source right inside Trotsky’s ‘Revolutionary Council of the North’ and was able to copy the minutes of their meetings. He was amassing an ever greater store of excellent reports, but they were of no use unless he could get them to London. He had sent two couriers, but neither of them had returned. Major Scale had promised in February that ‘very special measures’ would be taken to ensure that he had couriers and an escape route. Where on earth were they?
By May 1919 the position had become critical. The future of Communist Russia was in the balance. The Red forces were under pressure from the White armies on all sides. In Estonia forces under Yudenich had advanced as far at Gatchina, only 20 miles from Petrograd. There was panic. Zinoviev, the Bolshevik leader in Petrograd, even packed up his things and prepared to flee to Moscow. On 1 May, Paul’s contacts in the Russian admiralty told him that the garrisons at Kronstadt and Krasnaya Gorka were ready to revolt. If Kronstadt fell to the Whites then there was no way that the Bolsheviks could hold Petrograd. All that the conspirators were waiting for was a sign from the British that they would come to their aid.
Paul had to confess to his contacts that he had no idea what the British were doing. He could feel the opportunity to win the civil war slipping away. Shortly after he was told about the plans for a revolt, he also heard that Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik Commissar for the Army and Navy, planned to appoint former Tsarist officers to their old positions in order to strengthen the armed forces. With these officers in place and discipline restored, the Bolsheviks might really be able to beat the Whites. Paul was running short of money and he needed to get his intelligence reports out of the country so that the British government could realise the importance of the situation. On 31 May Pravda printed a now infamous statement from Lenin and Felix Dzerzhinsky headed ‘Death to Spies!’ because the various White intelligence networks were providing so much help to their enemies.
Paul had to find a way to let them know that he was alive and still operating. In desperation he considered one last throw of the dice. He knew that the Red Army had powerful radio transmitters in the city. From his contacts in the army he knew of one radio operator who might accept a bribe. Paul devised a plan by which he would bribe this operator to broadcast a message which the British naval squadron cruising in the Gulf would have to pick up. He knew that the bribe would take all his remaining money. But the bribe had to be big because the man who sent the message would have to flee across the border immediately and would never be able to return. Paul had no idea how he would survive without more money, but the longer Cumming’s silence continued the more he became convinced that it would have to be done.
But before Paul could put his plan into operation, disaster struck. Yudenich’s thrust towards Petrograd had failed. The advance had been so successful because it had been led by six tanks driven by British soldiers who had volunteered for the mission. The Red forces had no answer to them and it seemed as though Petrograd must fall. But when they reached Gatchina, just 20 miles south-west of Petrograd, the British soldiers woke in the morning and found that the tanks had been sabotaged. Someone had poured sand into the gearboxes and without the proper spares the tanks had been reduced to so much scrap metal. The tanks had been sabotaged by officers of the White army. They were angry about British support for the independence of the Baltic states and Finland which they felt should remain part of the Russian empire. And they resented the idea that their former capital was about to be liberated by the British. The incident neatly summed up every reason why White resistance to the Bolsheviks failed.
With the White advance defeated the Bolsheviks took renewed heart. The Cheka began a new wave of crackdowns. And as part of this renewed offensive the Bolsheviks appointed one of their most brutal and feared officers as the new head of the Cheka in Petrograd: Iakov Kristoforovich Peters.
In many ways Peters was the perfect spycatcher because he knew what it was like to be on the run and how to organise espionage networks in a hostile foreign country. He was dedicated to his cause and had suffered heavily for it. More than any other Cheka officer he was responsible for destroying the Allied and White Russian agent networks which threatened to undermine Bolshevik Russia between 1918 and 1920.
He had been born in Latvia in 1886, the son of a farm labourer. As a youth he joined the Latvian Social Democratic Party and took part in the Russian Revolution of 1905. When the revolution failed, he was brutally tortured and then imprisoned for eighteen months. After his release in 1908, he travelled to London where he worked as a tailor’s presser – although most of the time he was unemployed. But his experiences under Tsarist rule had led to his politics becoming ever more extreme and in December 1910 he was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the ‘Houndsditch Murders’. This was an attempted burglary of a jeweller’s shop by Latvian terrorists which had led to the murder of three London policemen. Most of those responsible were later killed in the infamous ‘Siege of Sidney Street’. Peters survived and was tried with several co-defendants at the Old Bailey in May 1911. He was acquitted following the seemingly incredible defence that the murders had been committed by his Anarchist cousin who was so like him that they were often mistaken for twins. After his acquittal, Peters had gone back to work at the tailor’s shop and he later married an Englishwoman, May Freeman.
In April 1917 he had returned to Russia, leaving May behind in England. He helped to establish the Cheka and soon rose rapidly through the ranks, becoming deputy to Dzerzhinsky himself. He had certainly earned a reputation for brutality: he was known as the ‘Robespierre of the Russian Revolution’ from the eagerness with which he signed the death warrants of those arrested by the Cheka and ‘the Executioner’ because of the number of prisoners he had shot personally. To the British press he was known as ‘the Red Terrorist’.
He had already managed to break America’s leading secret agent in Russia, in September 1918. Xenophon Kalamatiano had been captured trying to reach the safety of the American consulate in Moscow. He was using the alias ‘Serpukhovsky’ and his papers appeared to be genuine. At that time the Cheka had no idea exactly who they had captured, but his interrogators had the feeling that he was far more important than he seemed. However, a body search had revealed nothing and he was refusing to answer any questions. Peters was summoned and with his perfect knowledge of English and Western mannerisms he quickly and cleverly broke Kalamatiano. As the pressure of the interrogation intensified, Kalamatiano remained cool, but Peters noticed that the American agent’s eyes occasionally flickered briefly towards the heavy walking stick he had been carrying when he was arrested. Peters ordered that it be examined more closely and it was soon found to be hollow. Inside were ciphered intelligence reports and receipts identifying more than thirty of America’s top agents in the country. This had been a great counter-espionage coup for the Cheka and at a single stroke Peters had wiped out American intelligence operations in Russia.
On 8 May 1919 Peters was appointed ‘Chief of the Petrograd Fortified Area’ as part of the Bolsheviks’ attempt to maintain control of the region in the face of Yudenich’s advance. Upon his arrival he was fascinated to learn that there was a British ‘super agent’ operating in the city, just like Kalamatiano. If Peters could find him and interrogate him he could destroy MI6 just as he had destroyed the American espionage effort. Peters made it his personal mission to hound Paul Dukes out of every one of his hiding places, drive him into the open and then capture and break him.
In one of his CX reports, Dukes was soon describing the terror measures introduced by Peters as ‘exceeding everything previously known’. A conspiracy was uncovered in the Red VIIth Army and anyone connected with it was ruthlessly dealt with. The Fleet based at Kronstadt was given a new set of political commissars and anyone whose loyalty was even the slightest bit suspect was taken away from the island. Everywhere people were stopped, searched, and questioned. Where there was any suspicion, people were shot. The Bolsheviks believed that they were engaged in a life-or-death struggle and they did not intend to lose.
As part of this renewed search for Paul, the Cheka raided Aunt Natalia’s flat while Paul was staying there. Fortunately, he did not know about the arrival of Peters and was fairly relaxed about the search since the Markovitch papers and his military exemption form were still valid. But they were due to expire in a little over a week and Paul noticed that the Chekist who examined them made a careful note of the expiry date in his notebook. Paul decided he had to find another base of operations.
Melnikov’s uncle had moved to a house in the suburbs, but the house where his medical practice was based was still in use. Paul stayed there together with a nurse who is today only known by her pseudonym ‘Klachonka’ (which means ‘little cart horse’). Like Aunt Natalia, Klachonka soon became one of Paul’s main agents. As a woman she could move around the city comparatively freely and as a nurse she was unlikely to be suspected if stopped. She also proved to be very quick-thinking …
It was 10 June and Paul was fast asleep on a sofa in the study of the flat. It was a very dangerous time for him. The Markovitch papers had now expired and Paul had been unable to renew them. He had almost no money and there was no news from MI6. The resistance movement was dispirited because of recent Bolshevik victories. Paul had decided that he would have to return to Finland, despite the fact that he had promised all his contacts that he would not leave them until the British arrived. To get across the border he had prepared some army identification papers. They would not pass inspection by the Cheka in Petrograd because they would immediately ask why he was not at the front, but they would probably be sufficient nearer the border where he could claim that he was reporting for duty or was on an errand. Paul planned to leave in two days’ time. In the meantime, he had one other protection: Melnikov’s uncle had suggested that Paul should pretend to be a patient being treated for epilepsy. He had taught Paul how to simulate a fit and it worked well – once they stopped laughing.
Knowing that he would be leaving in a day or so, Paul had let his guard drop and it almost cost him his life. In the middle of the night there was a loud banging at the door and shouting in Russian. It was the Cheka. Peters had increased the number and intensity of house searches, knowing that Paul must be hiding somewhere in the city. There was no time for Paul to react. He heard Klachonka hurrying along the passage and he thought she would delay them for a few minutes, but within moments the door of the room suddenly burst open and a Chekist officer strode in.
There was nothing Paul could do but pretend to be asleep. The forged army papers were in his pocket. As soon as they were found he was finished.
For a moment he thought he had got away with it. The officer glanced round and started to leave the room, but then a second officer standing in the hall pointed out that someone was sleeping on the sofa. The Chekist strode forward and wrenched the blankets back. Paul lay still, his eyes closed. There was nothing else he could do.
‘This must be the invalid – he’s asleep,’ said the Chekist and they marched out of the room. Paul knew that Klachonka had told the porter that there was a patient staying at the flat who was being treated for a severe medical condition. The Cheka must have spoken to him before coming up to the flat.
Paul leapt up from the sofa. His first thought was to put a match to the forged army papers. He burned them as quickly as possible and then mixed the ashes with those in the fireplace. Now he had only the expired Markovitch papers. He could hear the Cheka searching the dining room next door, but then he heard booted feet advancing down the corridor and knew they were coming back to the study. There was nothing to do but climb back under the covers, but as soon as they asked to see his papers it would all be over. He did not even have a gun with which to shoot his way out. He only carried his revolver when absolutely necessary. Now he was caught in exactly the sort of trap he had always sworn to avoid.
The door opened. Klachonka bravely barred the Chekists’ way, protesting all the time that the patient was in a very disturbed condition and that if he was woken suddenly it could ‘… provoke a fit at any moment!’
Those last desperate words were clearly directed at Paul. He took the hint. As the searchers approached the couch, he suddenly went into spasm. He began rolling around violently and howling incoherently. He was now able to fake a fit so well that he could even foam at the mouth. It must have been an Oscar-winning performance because the Chekists were completely baffled. They had never seen anything like it. Klachonka rushed to Paul’s side and shouted at the Chekists to get out. She must have been even more convincing because, astonishingly, they obeyed her.
They left shortly afterwards, but it was clear that Peters had forced someone to talk. Klachonka told Paul that the Cheka had been looking for an English spy ‘who limped because he had severe frostbite.’ They also had a more recent photograph of him. Paul was lucky that he had changed his appearance so radically. There was no way Zorinsky could have known about the frostbite, so Paul realised that there must be a new informer somewhere in the organisation. The Cheka must have gone for now, but Klachonka had been told that she must report to the Cheka headquarters at No. 2 Gorohovaya the next morning for further questioning. They seemed to know that Paul was somehow linked with the hospital.
It was now more imperative than ever that Paul should get out of Russia. If there was an unknown informant then he had no idea where he would be safe. He left Klachonka’s flat early the next morning. Without his army papers he needed to find somewhere to stay while he planned a new escape and it had to be somewhere that was not linked to his new organisation.
Paul tried everywhere he could think of. He hadn’t seen the Policeman for some time, but when Paul called he said that his daughter had been arrested for carrying compromising papers and that he expected the Cheka to arrive at any moment. Paul then tried to contact the network at the Admiralty which was independent from his own organisation, but there was no message at the dead letter box site they used and he had no idea that his usual contact had been killed recently.
Paul now had no identification papers and as long as he stayed on the streets he risked being stopped and arrested at any moment. As he moved swiftly from alleyway to alleyway watching for the Cheka, he noticed posters announcing a new 10 p.m. curfew were pasted to every wall. Anyone out on the streets after that hour would be arrested on sight. Paul had to find somewhere to stay. The ‘White Nights’ had almost begun and there were now 20 hours of daylight in every 24-hour period. There would be nowhere to hide from the patrols.
But by the evening he still had not found anywhere he could stay. The Cheka appeared to be everywhere. Even Laura Cade who was currently storing many of his intelligence reports had placed the flowerpot in the window which meant that she was under suspicion.
Finally, in desperation, Paul set out for the house belonging to one of his contacts with General Yudenich’s organisation. He did not like dealing with them because they were mainly former Tsarist military officers and aristocrats and therefore exactly the sort of people who might come under suspicion. But because he had little to do with them it also meant that it was unlikely that the informer was one of them. It was a gamble. There were only three hours until curfew and it would take Paul most of that time to get there, but he now had nowhere else to go.
Two hours later the officer who was his contact with the Yudenich group turned him away at the door. He protested that his family were in the house and that, because Paul was a British agent, it was just too big a risk to take him in. Paul begged him, saying that there was nowhere else to go and only a few minutes left before curfew, but the officer slammed the door.
Paul had trudged out of town towards the marshes. It was the only place he could think of. Even here there would be patrols looking for ‘speculators’ trying to enter or leave the city, but at least there might be reeds or bushes he could hide in.
Paul had not eaten for two days. Living on a poor diet and under constant nervous strain for the past nine months had seriously undermined his health. His frost-bitten feet made walking painful and still needed constant attention. He had no money, nowhere to hide and no news from MI6. It seemed that Peters’s plan to drive him out of hiding was working. He could not survive much longer.
That night, as Paul lay shivering in a small clump of bushes in the middle of the Petrograd marshes, all he could think was that his mission had failed.
He did not know it, but just thirty miles away Gus Agar was already on his way in with Peter Sokolov.