By contacting the British community in Petrograd for funds Paul weakened his organisation. George Gibson advanced 200,000 roubles to Petrovskaya but then the Cheka moved in. Gibson and Petrovskaya were arrested. During his interrogation Gibson was shown coded messages from Dukes which showed that the courier network had been fatally compromised. The networks were broken up, although it is hard to estimate to what extent because of the subsequent weeding of MI6 files. This disaster meant that Paul’s espionage work had little long-term effect in Russia.
Paul went on one more mission for MI6 (to Poland), but because of post-war budget cuts and his notoriety he was never taken on as a full-time officer. He left for America where he gave lectures based on his experiences and, in 1922, he wrote a book about them (Red Dusk and the Morrow). Paul remained on MI6’s books as an ‘asset’ who could be contacted for particular operations, but his life increasingly centred on two things: a quest for religious truth and the practice of yoga. Paul was largely responsible for introducing yoga to the Western world.
He married twice, the first time in 1922 to Margaret Rutherford, an heiress connected to the Vanderbilt family. The marriage was unhappy and was dissolved in 1929. His second marriage, in 1959, was to his secretary Diana Fitzgerald, who remained his wife until his death. He had no children.
He died on 27 August 1967 in Cape Town, South Africa. It has often been reported that he died from injuries following a motoring accident. What actually happened was that in the winter of 1966 he slipped on icy steps at his home in Bagshot as he was showing an elderly friend to her car. His legs did slide under the car, but it was parked and did not injure him. However, he did suffer some unspecified internal damage and this greatly reduced his mobility. Diana took him to South Africa in the hope that he would revive, but he got steadily worse during the following eight months and really just faded away.
Paul Dukes was referred to in various ways following his exploits – ‘The Man They Couldn’t Trap’, ‘The New Scarlet Pimpernel’, ‘The Man with a Hundred Faces’ – and there was of course his unique knighthood. But perhaps one of the greatest tributes came during the Second World War. Enigma decryption material was so heavily protected that it was issued through MI6 as if it was being produced by human agents. Those in Whitehall who were privileged to receive the reports confided to their friends that they knew the identity of the ‘super agent’ who must be behind it all: it could only be Paul Dukes!
He continued to serve with the Royal Navy, including a period on the Royal Yacht. In 1940, he was again charged with conducting a daring raid on an enemy harbour: the plan was to strike at German invasion barges at Boulogne. The operation was dogged by constant problems and when Agar’s vessel, the destroyer HMS Hambledon, was struck and crippled by a mine in the Channel the project was finally cancelled. Agar went on to command HMS Dorsetshire, a heavy cruiser, but after much success she was sunk in the Indian Ocean by Japanese aircraft in April 1942. Agar survived the attack but was badly injured. He was declared unfit for service, but became President of the Royal Naval College in Greenwich from 1943 until 1946.
He never did marry ‘Dor’. In 1920 after he had returned to England he was quite a celebrity and in July of that year he married Mary Dent, the nineteenth Baroness Furnivall. The marriage was not happy and they were eventually divorced in 1931. But like Paul Dukes, Agar found love the second time around when he married Ina Lindner shortly afterwards. They remained happily married until his death.
He retired to run a strawberry farm at Alton, Hampshire and he died at Alton on 30 December 1968.
He is commemorated on the Archangel Memorial in St Petersburg, but the site of his grave is now lost.
He was demobilised in January 1920 and joined MI6 the following month. After a few weeks of training in Paris, he was sent to Stockholm where he worked as Passport Control Officer, the usual MI6 cover role in those days. Agar believed that Sindall wanted to return to the area because he planned to marry a Russian heiress whom he had met at Terrioki. He left Stockholm in March 1924. His movements after that date are unknown.
He was sent initially to a nursing home on the Isle of Wight but he never fully recovered from the strains of the mission. He was demobilised in January 1920. He received £768 4s 1d as his share of the prize money from the sinking of the Oleg. He married and settled in Moretonhampstead in Devon where he died at the tragically early age of 38 in 1936.
His service record appears to be one of those which were destroyed by fire. Nothing is known about his subsequent career.
He returned with the team to England and was demobbed on 21 November 1919. Nothing more is known about him. Members of the Beeley family attended a presentation at the Imperial War Museum in London in the 1970s, but since then contact with them has been lost.
Both men were demobbed on the same day as Beeley and, as with Beeley, nothing more about them is known.
He continued to serve in the Royal Navy, rising to the rank of Rear Admiral. He retired in 1935 and died at Chatham in June 1940, aged just 55.
He rose to the rank of Commander and served until the Second World War. He retired to Winkleigh in Devon where he died in 1981, aged 88. He is believed to have been the last survivor of the Kronstadt Raid.
He was repatriated in March 1920. After he recovered from his wounds he joined the NID and then MI6. He rose to become Assistant Chief Staff Officer (equivalent to Director level today). In 1940, together with Cuthbert Bowlby, another former CMB officer, he set up the very first MI6 station in Cairo. It is believed that he retired in 1947.
At 19 he was one of the youngest men to take part in the Kronstadt Raid. He continued to serve in the Navy, attaining the rank of Commander. He retired in 1946 and died at Worthing, West Sussex in 1980.
He continued to serve in the RAF until his retirement in 1947 as Air Marshall Sir David Grahame Donald KCB, DFC, AFC, MA. He died in Hampshire in 1976.
Thanks largely to the material produced by Paul Dukes, MI6 survived the intelligence review of 1919. It staggered on through the 1920s and 1930s despite budget cuts and numerous intelligence failures and financial scandals, including one suicide. The decline in its reputation was such that by 1939 Winston Churchill wanted to abolish it completely. MI6 tried to bridge the gap during the 1930s by creating the ‘Z Organisation’ (comprised of MI6 officers under very deep cover) but this was completely blown within days of the start of the Second World War, negating years of careful work. Eventually Churchill was persuaded to run MI6 in parallel with the newly formed Special Operations Executive. This new organisation completely outperformed MI6 during the war, but MI6’s reputation was bolstered by Ultra material which, for security reasons, was released as if produced by MI6 agents. When this is stripped out, MI6 contributed comparatively little to the Allied victory. But at the end of the war MI6’s political influence in the public-school old-boy network of Whitehall enabled it to absorb SOE – a source of bitterness to many former SOE members. Today, despite its poor performance over the past one hundred years, it is more powerful than ever.
He continued to lead MI6 until his death in June 1923, although he was often absent due to illness. The myth that he was an intelligence mastermind persists to this day.
The ineffective head of MI6 in Petrograd before Dukes’s arrival continued to blunder. He was largely responsible for Sidney Reilly travelling to his death at the hands of OGPU (the successor organisation to the Cheka) in 1925, and in 1927 a major network that he was running in Russia was shown to be comprehensively penetrated. He retired in disgrace in 1928 and worked in Paris for former MI6 officer Stephan Alley. In 1938 he reapplied to MI6 but was told that his services were no longer required.
He is believed to have left MI6 in 1921.
He continued to serve with MI6 in Finland and Estonia where, among other failures, he fell for a ruse and bought documents which appeared to show that the Soviets were funding the IRA. The documents were fairly poor White Russian forgeries and when this hoax was exposed it led to a further fall in the reputation of MI6 in Whitehall.
He returned to London in December 1919 following the collapse of Paul Dukes’s networks. He returned to civilian duties with the Post Office Wireless Department at North Foreland. He was still alive in 1960 when he was Secretary of the Portsmouth Branch of the Royal Naval Association.
He continued to work on Russian operations for MI6 from his base in Finland. He worked again with Paul Dukes during the Second World War. He eventually retired to Sweden where he lived under the name ‘Peter Sahlin’ because of the risk of KGB reprisals. He died in 1971.
He disappeared after the war, although he did come to England to visit Paul Dukes in 1920. He contributed an article about his work to a book published in Germany in the 1920s, but that is the last reliable trace of him.
He became a translator for the BBC and later worked at the Sandhurst Military Academy. He was still alive and living in England at the time of Dukes’s death as he wrote a letter of condolence to Lady Dukes.
He and his wife retired to Sussex.
Her true identity has never been firmly established and her fate is unknown.
She was finally arrested by the Cheka in December 1919. The charges are not known – they might have concerned her connection with Dukes or they might have been to do with someone else she aided. One night in January 1920 she was taken with a group of other prisoners to Irinovka, a town east of Petrograd. She was machine-gunned together with the other prisoners and their bodies were thrown into an unmarked pit.
Sadly Akulina, Sonia’s nanny, wrote later to Paul saying that Sonia had succumbed to famine, illness and the effects of her captivity during the harsh winter of 1919. Shura joined one of the White armies to take revenge on the Bolsheviks who were responsible for the death of his young wife. Whether he succeeded will never be known as he was never heard from again. The story haunted Paul who years later rewrote the entire incident as a short story, but changed their ending to a happy one, with the couple escaping to Finland.
He was arrested and imprisoned between November 1919 and October 1920 because of his connection to the Dukes network. At his interrogation the Cheka produced a letter in code which they had intercepted on its way to him (whether by post or secret courier Gibson never knew). Gibson recognised the code as the one that Paul had given him but he refused to acknowledge it. After his release he returned to England. He tried to claim compensation for the enormous amount of money that he had loaned to Paul and to Paul’s successor Petrovskaya. MI6 dragged its heels and it was only when Paul threatened to publicly renounce his knighthood and expose their lack of trustworthiness that they finally gave way.
She was arrested in December 1919 as part of the round-up of Dukes’s suspects. But she escaped and hid in Petrograd. She got a message to Paul who sent Peter Sokolov to rescue her. In January 1920 they walked out (although the route is not known). It must have been a hard journey as those who knew her in later life remembered that she still suffered the effects of frostbite. She settled in Littlebury, near Saffron Walden in England. Stories vary: some people remember her as very rich, others only remember her working as a companion to a lady who was very rich. She was in the village until at least the 1950s. She was always accompanied by a young Russian woman who had escaped with her but whose identity is unknown. Her movements after Littlebury are unknown.
He was finally released and repatriated in 1921 after almost three years of brutal incarceration. However, the US secret service disowned him and he died in 1923 from an infection caused by a hunting accident. In the words of Gordon Brook-Shepherd: ‘He was only forty-one, but had packed in twice as much adventure into his few adult years as most people do in a full lifetime.’
In the 1920s he led the operations that captured both Boris Savinkov and Sidney Reilly. He later became first deputy chairman of the Moscow City Soviet, but was apparently arrested and executed during one of Stalin’s purges in 1938. However, as befits a man of Peters’s reputation there are some doubts about this. Some reports say that he was not executed until 1942, others that he escaped execution altogether.
He was created ‘Baronet of the Baltic’ for his work in 1919. He then enjoyed a successful naval career, rising to the rank of admiral. He was placed on the retired list in 1929 but at the outbreak of war in 1939 he applied for re-enlistment even though he was almost seventy. He became liaison officer to 11 Commando, undergoing the same training as the recruits despite his age. He later joined the Indian Armoured Corps in North Africa where he took a full part in the fighting. He was awarded a bar to his DSO for war services and received the unprecedented distinction (for an admiral) of being appointed an honorary colonel for his work with the army. He retired for the second time in 1944 and died in 1956, aged 85.
He had already left Osea by the time Agar returned from the Baltic, but he was the best man at Agar’s wedding in 1920. He enjoyed a successful naval career, becoming Admiral Sir Wilfred French. However, his career ended under something of a cloud when he was blamed for a successful attack by German submarines at Scapa Flow. This was somewhat unjust since French had warned about the very weaknesses that allowed the Germans to attack.
She was displayed at the Motor Boat Exhibition at Olympia in 1920 before being returned to the Thornycroft yard at Platt’s Eyot. When the yard closed in the 1960s she was returned to the Navy who stored her at Southampton. She was discovered some years later in a very dilapidated condition and restored by boatbuilding apprentices. She is now part of the Historic Ships Committee’s Core Collection of Historic Vessels. She is currently displayed at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford although she is now just a shell, her engine and controls being sadly long gone.
She was too badly damaged to be salvaged. When the base at Terrioki was closed down, she was towed out to sea by CMB4 and was sunk with gun-cotton charges.
Despite the success of the Kronstadt Raid the Admiralty did not really know what to do with the CMBs. Those that had travelled abroad were either destroyed or left to rot. HMS Osea was gradually wound down, finally closing in 1921. Some CMBs were transferred to a new base at Haslar, but this was closed in 1925 and the remaining CMBs were either scrapped or used for target practice. Today only CMB4 and one example of a 55ft CMB remain.
Agar and the CMBs had their revenge on the vessel that had inflicted the greatest number of CMB losses. Together with Russell McBean, Agar laid mines in the cleared channel through the Russian defences. The Gavriil ran onto these on 21 October 1919 and sank. There were only two survivors.