Spies and Commissars: The Bolshevik Revolution and the West (40 page)

Throughout the summer of 1918, Hill created two chains of informers and couriers: one stretched south to the Black Sea, the other went north to the White Sea.
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In Moscow, he maintained eight clandestine apartments for his operatives.
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By the autumn he was running a hundred couriers.
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For his northern chain he organized a route out to Vyatka from Moscow on the Trans-Siberian railway, then up the branch line to Kotlas and beyond.
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Although this quickened the delivery of reports, it still took twelve to fifteen days to get a message to the British base in Archangel.
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Hill also paid acquaintances at the Khodynka radio station north of Moscow to send marconigrams direct to the War Office in London for onward transmission to the Russian north – it was not the Cheka but German counter-intelligence which put an end to this dodge.
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In October 1918, Hill left with the Lockhart party for Finland but was ordered to go back into northern Russia to help repair the recent organizational damage instead of returning immediately to the United Kingdom. Mission completed, he reached London on Armistice Day.
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Despite his tiredness, he received an assignment to go to southern Russia with Sidney Reilly in December. Reilly had been running his own separate operation concurrently with Hill’s earlier in the year. Now they joined forces. Their instructions were to make for the Volunteer Army’s headquarters at Rostov-on-Don disguised as merchants seeking to restore international trade.
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Arriving shortly before the New Year, they bridled at the condescension shown them by British military officers.
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Hill and Reilly had a lengthy discussion with Generals Denikin and Krasnov; but since the telegraph system
was in some chaos at the time, Hill went down to Odessa to communicate with London before leaving for England with the written report.
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He thought poorly of Denikin’s political set-up and felt he had a lot to learn about ruling a country. On the military side, Reilly was damning about the Volunteer Army’s readiness. The equipment and provisioning left much to be desired, and Reilly predicted a hard struggle ahead for Denikin.
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Hill’s mood fell further in Odessa. The French high command had signalled the city’s low point on their global priorities list by garrisoning the city with troops from their Senegalese colony.
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When he got back to London, Hill conveyed his impressions in person to the Foreign Office and the War Office and to the many MPs who contacted him.
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He returned yet again to southern Russia after his stay at the Peace Conference, visiting General Denikin in Yekaterinodar.
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Reilly went back to tending his business interests while paying attention to the Soviet scene from afar. Seeing a chance of making money if the Whites won the Civil War, he wrote to John Picton Bagge in Odessa claiming that the British were being left behind by the French in preparing for this. He commented on how the French government had helped to set up a Paris agency for future commercial, industrial and financial activity in Russia.
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Reilly wrote a lengthy memorandum on ‘The Russian Problem’, arguing the need to bang together the heads of Denikin and the leaders of Finland, Poland and the other ‘bordering states’ with a view to bringing down Bolshevism in Moscow.
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Mansfield Cumming’s willingness to gamble in selecting agents for the Secret Service Bureau was not confined to Maugham, Hill and Reilly. One of his inspired choices was Paul Dukes, who until 1914 had worked as a répétiteur at the Imperial Mariinski Theatre and helped conductor Albert Coates with preparations for Stravinsky’s
Nightingale
.
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Dukes’s father was a Congregational minister and staunch anti-Papist who often had to change incumbencies because deacons objected to his authoritarian style of leadership.
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Paul, a sickly child, showed an early talent for music. The Rev. Dukes had a future in mind for him as a chapel organist, but Paul rebelled in his mid-teens and ran away from home with less than four pounds in his pocket. He worked his way from Holland to Poland by teaching English, and his earnings enabled him to enrol as a student at the St Petersburg Conservatoire.
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Young Dukes lodged for a while with Sidney Gibbes, tutor to the Imperial family, who sometimes took him
to Nicholas II’s residence at Tsarskoe Selo. When war broke out, the British embassy employed him to produce daily wartime summaries of the Russian press for Ambassador Buchanan.
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In February 1917, according to his own account, Dukes became ‘a fiery revolutionary’ and took to the streets against the Romanovs.
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Evidently his friendship with Gibbes had not turned him into an admirer of Nicholas II. Soon afterwards he returned to London to work for the novelist John Buchan at the Department of Information. One of his assignments was to go to Paris under the alias of Dr Robinson to examine Bolshevik correspondence intercepted by the French secret services.
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Steadily the scope of his ambition was widening and Buchan proved an understanding boss, allowing Dukes to return to Russia to report on the general situation under cover of a job with the YMCA in Samara and another with the Boy Scouts on the Siberian border.
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(The YMCA worked closely with the American authorities and set up facilities for the US military expedition to Siberia.)
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Dukes discharged his tasks impressively and, when Buchan recommended him for more serious clandestine work, a message was sent calling him back to London.
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As yet he was unaware of what awaited him at the interview in Mansfield Cumming’s office in July 1918.
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The office was like nothing Dukes had seen before. On his desk Cummings kept a bank of six telephones, numerous model aeroplanes and submarines, various test tubes and a row of coloured bottles.
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Dukes talked so nervously that Cumming was going to fail him as an effete musician until he expressed an interest in the collection of firearms displayed on the wall. Cumming sat him down again and restarted the interview.
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The outcome was that Dukes received twenty-four hours to think over the invitation to become an agent.
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When he accepted, Cumming brightly enjoined him: ‘Don’t go and get killed.’ The Secret Service Bureau expected its men to learn on the job, and Dukes was disconcerted to find that the training course lasted no longer than three weeks.
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His first task was to go to Russia and gather information on ‘every section of the community’, on the scale of support for the communists, on the adaptability of their policies and on the possibilities for a counter-revolution. No Briton knew the streets of Petrograd better and he was raring to go. Cumming let his new agent ST25 decide for himself the best way of getting back on to Russian soil.
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He started his journey on 3 January 1918 by boarding an
American troopship bound for northern Russia. Trying to make his way on foot to Petrograd, he found that the Soviet authorities were guarding the roads to the south. So instead he went to Helsinki, from where he took a train across the Russian border. Having visited Moscow, he moved to Smolensk and Dvinsk near the German front. In February he went to Samara, where the Socialist-Revolutionary leadership had established their anti-Bolshevik government. In his diary he mentioned Arthur Ransome, Yevgenia Shelepina and Harold Williams as being among his acquaintances – a politically broad bunch of people. By the end of June he was in Vologda for a few days before going up to Archangel, Kandalaksha and Pechenga and making his way back to London on 15 July.
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Dukes did not stay for long. On 12 August he left again for Archangel on a Russian trip that lasted till early October, when he made for Britain’s intelligence base in Stockholm. After a brief respite it was back into Russia for another assignment until early December. A trip to Helsinki followed before he went on yet another Russian mission.
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One of his jobs was to support the National Centre in Moscow. Its leaders were at first reluctant to accept British money since they wanted their efforts to stay strictly in Russian hands, but the financial assistance from Kolchak had broken down and they agreed to take Dukes’s cash. Dukes also met with the Tactical Centre, a clandestine political body which had formed itself to challenge Bolshevik rule throughout Russia, and made contact with Yudenich’s North-Western Army. Although none of these organizations was effective in its subversive activity, each supplied him with valuable intelligence about conditions in Soviet Russia. This partnership came to an end when the Cheka penetrated the National Centre and the Tactical Centre and arrested many of the leaders.
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His informants obtained illicit material for him from the offices of Sovnarkom.
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Dukes showed physical courage and, doubtless helped by his theatrical experience, a talent for disguise. Piecing together the stories he told her, his widow later called him the Scarlet Pimpernel of the October Revolution. He even enlisted in the Red Army. By volunteering, he knew he could join a regiment led by a commander who was a secret anti-Bolshevik.
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This was not the quixotic move it might seem:

Apart from greater freedom of movement and preference over civilians in application for lodging, amusement, or travelling tickets, the Red soldier received rations greatly superior both in quantity and quality to those of the civilian population. Previous to this time I had received only half a pound of bread daily and had had to take my scanty dinner at a filthy communal eating house, but as a Red soldier I received, besides a dinner and other odds and ends not worth mentioning, a pound and sometimes a pound and a half of tolerably good black bread, which alone was sufficient, accustomed as I am to a crude diet, to subsist on with relative comfort.
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Dukes travelled about Russia under the alias of artillery commander V. Piotrovski.
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The runaway pianist became a Red Army officer who filed regular reports to London from whatever place he was moved to.

He had just as many adventures as Hill. Whereas Dukes was modest and discreet in his memoirs, it would seem that he personally rescued two of the former emperor’s nieces, making himself into a human bridge across a dyke at one point. A couple of Englishwomen also owed their lives to him, as did a merchant called Solatin who had tumbled from wealth and influence to destitution after 1917. Dukes and his couriers ran fearful risks – at least one of them was trapped and shot by the Cheka. He was once pursued so hotly that he hid in a tomb in a graveyard. The sight of him emerging from it next morning terrified a passer-by.
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But he was not just the Pimpernel. His couriers helped him finance counter-revolutionary enterprises and gather information that was urgently needed in London – and one of his subordinates fondly recorded him as having been a person of great decency.
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The reports that Dukes relayed to the Secret Service Bureau were concise and vivid. He treasured the spectacle of striking workers who sang the Marseillaise while carrying a banner that read: ‘Down with Lenin and horse meat, up with the Tsar and pork!’
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Whatever may explain the disarray of Western policy and activity in Russia, it was not the absence of efficient spying networks. In 1918 the British were already picking up Soviet cable traffic to Europe – and when in June they came across a message from Trotsky to Litvinov, they kept it for their own information and prevented it from reaching Litvinov.
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In the following year a Government Code and Cypher School was created on Lord Curzon’s recommendation and quickly proved its worth. Among its employees was the leading former Russian Imperial cryptanalyst Ernst Fetterlein, who provided his services after escaping Soviet Russia. Fetterlein was the first
director of the School and scarcely any wireless traffic from Moscow was invulnerable to his attention and that of his Russian colleagues.
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