Deception (28 page)

By this the naive and impulsive Lockhart incriminated himself, further endangered Cromie, and confirmed Bolshevik suspicions of British meddling. He added to the disaster by putting the two visitors in touch with Sidney Reilly, a spy based at the British consulate in Moscow. Born Sigmund Rosenblum near Odessa in Imperial Russia sometime in the
1870
s, Reilly – later nicknamed the ‘Ace of Spies' – was a ‘complex, unpredictable and undoubtedly self-serving individual mired in deception and conspiracy'.
¹⁹
Like Lockhart he was wildly overconfident. He wrote in his notes:

 

I was confident that the terror [Bolshevism] could be wiped out in an hour and that I myself could do it. And why not? A Corsican lieutenant of artillery trod out the embers of the French Revolution. Surely, a British espionage agent with so many factors on his side, could make himself master of Moscow?
²⁰

 

Reilly was also a womaniser and remarkably careless. He arranged a meeting with B
ē
rzi
ņ
Å¡
at the apartment of one of his mistresses, but turned up late. While waiting, the Latvian noticed an envelope in Reilly's writing that gave an address that turned out to be the home of an actress, Elizabeth Otten, who had allowed her apartment to be used as a meeting place for Reilly and his spies. The Cheka began arresting all those who visited it. One of them was Maria Friede, sister of a colonel in the Red Army General Staff who was carrying secret documents from him, destined for Reilly. Her brother, duly arrested, confessed his cooperation with an American intelligence officer who was later imprisoned.
^ar

In another blunder, Lockhart's French colleagues confided in René Marchand, the Moscow correspondent of
Le Figaro
, in the bizarre belief that he was a spy for their government – which like the British and American ones was deeply alarmed by, and hostile to, the revolutionaries. Marchand, being in fact rather sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, immediately informed Dzerzhinsky. This added more details to those provided by the bogus Latvian ‘mutineers'. Dzerzhinsky learned that the coup was planned for
28
August at a Party meeting in the Bolshoi Theatre. The Latvian soldiers were to seize the entrances and train their rifles on the audience. Reilly and a small group concealed behind the curtains would arrest the Bolshevik leadership. One plan was to humiliate them by marching them half-naked through the streets of Moscow. But the plotters thought it safer to shoot them on the spot. Reilly, Marchand revealed, had promised the conspirators senior positions in the government of a future independent Latvia, to be set up under Allied protection.
²¹

Armed with the details of the plot, Dzerzhinsky went straight to Lenin. The problem was how to use Marchand's material. Lenin came up with an ingenious suggestion to protect his source's journalistic integrity. The French journalist was to write a confidential letter to the French president, Raymond Poincaré: nobody could blame a journalist for warning his head of state that his country's spies were planning a ludicrously risky stunt. The letter would then be ‘found' by the Cheka during a search of Marchand's flat. Helpfully, Dzerzhinsky drafted the letter. For a few days, the Bolsheviks were content to watch the plot developing. But the assassination on
30
August of the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Uritsky (followed in the evening by a shooting that came within a whisker of killing Lenin himself) prompted the communist leaders to spring the trap. On
31
August eight Chekists raided the British embassy in Petrograd, shooting Commander Cromie, who bravely tried to delay the intruders to allow two of his agents to escape from the building.
^as
Lockhart and his assistant as well as the French consul-general were jailed and eventually deported, and
521
hapless Russians were arrested as ‘counter-revolutionaries'. Colonel Friede was shot. Reilly was sentenced to death in absentia, but had already escaped.

The fiasco highlighted a central, persistent, and unrecognised dilemma for Western intelligence services in their dealings with the Soviet enemy. Their mission was well described as ‘a mixture of intelligence-gathering, disruption, sabotage and assistance to British military forces'.
²²
But those elements are inherently incompatible. Watching in the shadows is one thing; twisting arms is another. It is hard for the same spy to do both. The tension between covert action and intelligence nearly cost the life of probably the most able British spy ever deployed against the Soviet regime.

Paul Dukes, a concert pianist from Bridgwater in Somerset, had honed his skills in evasion, deception and persuasion as a schoolboy, faced with the unpleasant necessity of dodging a predatory paedophile who was both a teacher at his boarding school and a friend of his father. A natural linguist, he had arrived in Russia in
1910
as a music student. Rejected for military service because of a heart condition, he spent much of the war years working for a government-financed information service called the Anglo-Russian Bureau. In
1917
, he was summoned to London for a meeting with SIS, in those days an outfit run by eccentric upper-class men with a dilettantish approach to espionage (cynics might say nothing much changed in subsequent decades). Dukes was told:

 

As to the means whereby you gain access to the country, under what cover you will live there, and how you will send out reports, we shall leave it to you, being best informed as to conditions, to make suggestions.
²³

 

After brief training in invisible ink and cipher, Dukes was dispatched back to the most dangerous place in the world for a foreign spy, to live and work undercover as an illegal – rather as Donald Heathfield and the others were to do in America seventy years later. But whereas they exploited the vulnerabilities of an open society, he had to work in a police state, under the noses of the fearsome Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka. He was an astonishing success: in
1919
he was the most effective, and quite possibly the only, SIS officer inside Bolshevik-controlled Russia. He was running a network of agents in Petrograd,
²⁴
collected in part via a military canteen in which he had installed himself as a part-time pianist (disguised as a tattily dressed and limping tramp). At other times he managed to pass as an official of the Cheka itself, as a member of the Communist Party, and as a Red Army soldier. The result was intelligence of a stellar quality and quantity.
²⁵
Dukes had not only established a network of informers, civilian and military, throughout the city and its great port. He had penetrated the top Bolshevik leadership of Petrograd to such an extent that he was able to transmit to London translations of the highly secret minutes of their meetings in full. But the star spy was in increasingly desperate straits. The tightening Bolshevik bureaucratic controls on movements, food supplies and residency made maintaining his aliases and safe houses increasingly difficult: getting the right papers was tricky and having the wrong ones fatal. The Cheka knew the British spy was at large in the city and had on several occasions nearly caught him. Money could help – but SIS had sent him ineptly forged cash: when the fake banknotes got wet, the ink ran. His priceless intelligence was useless unless it could reach the increasingly frantic politicians in London but getting across the border was difficult: in one two-week period in the summer of
1919
no fewer than six couriers had been captured.
²⁶

Cumming tasked a young naval lieutenant, Augustus ‘Gus' Agar, with rescuing Dukes using lightweight torpedo boats. These contraptions, plywood shells powered by aircraft engines, were the forerunners of the vessels that would be used to send SIS agents to the Baltic states twenty-five years later. The ‘eggshells' (when their delicate engines worked, which was not always) could travel at the then astonishing speed of over
40
knots. The mission was dogged by bad luck, communications breakdowns, security breaches, meddling from other officials, and suspicion from Agar's Finnish hosts (who had no desire to provoke the Bolsheviks by supporting madcap British raids and spookery). Agar's main ally against these odds was Admiral Sir Walter ‘Titch' Cowan, the commander of a British naval squadron that was helping the Estonians beat off their various foes, though its two light cruisers and ten destroyers were outgunned by Russia's much heavier warships: the
Oleg
, a heavy cruiser, and two battleships, the
Petropavlovsk
and
Andrei Pervozvanni
.
^at
In theory, Agar's mission was solely the clandestine exfiltration of Dukes from Petrograd. He and his crew wore civilian clothes, and turned up in Helsinki pretending to be speedboat salesmen. But they had also taken a couple of torpedoes (launched in a hair-raising manoeuvre over the back of the craft, travelling in the same direction: the helmsman had a few seconds to turn away from their path). And they had naval uniforms on board, to be donned in the event of real warfare.

Dukes reported that the Russian fleet was riven by disputes between the officers and men loyal to the Bolsheviks, those sympathetic to the Whites, and those with loyalties to other factions. One report, citing a senior Bolshevik, said that the men regarded their officers as ‘class enemies' while the officers were a ‘mass of spies'.
²⁷
Dukes also obtained a secret transcript from a commission of enquiry following a failed attack on the British squadron. A sailor from the submarine
Pantera
answered with remarkable frankness as follows:

 

Judge:        Will you attack the British?

Sailor:        If the commander orders it, we will.

Judge:        But will you fire on them?

Sailor:        Yes.

Judge:        Will you hit them?

Sailor:        No.

 

Following this debacle, Lenin put Trotsky in charge of reforming the navy. He immediately began replacing ideologically sound but useless officers with experienced Tsarist-era ones. He also banned the practice under which committees of ‘revolutionary sailors' forced their officers to clean toilets and sweep floors. That restored the fleet's offensive capability. He also ordered the laying of many thousands of mines, making it far harder for the British to attack. Dukes dutifully reported all this, plus a crucial piece of intelligence for Agar: the one-metre depth at which the mines defending the Kronstadt naval base were to be laid. The ‘eggshell' boats drew only
2
'
9
” (
84
cm). With a few inches to spare, they could therefore cross the minefield and use their torpedoes to attack the Bolshevik fleet at anchor.

As Agar waited to rescue Dukes, he watched with despair the Bolshevik fleet pounding the nearby fortress of Krasnaya Gorka (Red Hill) where the garrison had rebelled: this was a tragic miscalculation by its leaders, Ingrian nationalists – ethnic cousins of the Finns and Estonians – who were hoping to make their own bid for freedom. In a daring raid into the heart of Kronstadt harbour, and in defiance of his instruction to concentrate on intelligence work, Agar succeeded in torpedoing and sinking the
Oleg
. It was too late to save the Ingrians, but a second raid with seven more torpedo boats sank both the Bolshevik battleships, ending the struggle for naval superiority in the Baltic and ensuring Estonia's and Latvia's independence – and their lasting, if ultimately misplaced, faith in British integrity and capability. This was to feature in the disasters of the
1940
s and
1950
s, and in the renewed intelligence ties of the
1990
s.

Agar received the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest military honour. But his exploits doomed his mission. Dukes was still stuck in Russia, where Soviet authorities now understood the vulnerability of their defences to the fast British vessels. A later attempt to rescue the master-spy was abandoned under heavy fire. Dukes finally escaped via Latvia, frostbitten, filthy, half-starved and exhausted. SIS showered him with praise – but in a signal piece of mean-mindedness refused to pay his operation's debts. George Gibson, a leading figure in the dwindling British community in Petrograd, had at great personal risk lent Dukes
375
,
000
roubles
^au
to make up for the poor forgeries supplied by SIS. But when Gibson returned to London, SIS said his paperwork was inadequate and refused to pay. Only when an infuriated Dukes threatened publicly to renounce his knighthood did SIS back down.

A more famous if less impressive British agent in this era was Dukes's friend Arthur Ransome. To many readers, his name will be inextricably linked with a quite different genre: the ‘Swallows and Amazons' children's books. But he was also an expert on Russia, and on the books of SIS as agent ‘S-
76
'. Ransome moved to the Estonian capital in
1918
, tasked with gaining information about Soviet Russia. He was also asked by the Estonian authorities to carry a secret message to the Bolshevik leadership expressing their willingness to strike a peace deal. Ransome saw at once that peace with Estonia would be followed by a similar agreement with Latvia. This would help secure the Bolshevik regime in Russia, which, as a left-winger, Ransome broadly supported. It would also end the fighting that was devastating the region. Not for the first time, a British intelligence agent was finding that local allies' wishes clashed with the geopolitical interests of his bosses. For London, the aim of the war was to topple the reds, not to promote democracy or freedom (still largely seen as an eccentric American preoccupation).