by Giles Milton
But as it was with Lenin, so it was to prove with Trotsky. In the third week of April, he was released and allowed to continue on his journey. Within a few days, he was aboard a new ship, the Helig Olaf, and bound for Petrograd.
As revolutionary figures returned to Petrograd in ever-increasing numbers, Mansfield Cumming began to consider how best to arrange his Russian operations. He was looking to the future, aware that his agents might soon have to work undercover in a country that was no longer an ally.
He jotted a number of notes on what he considered to constitute the ‘perfect spy’: someone who could enter a country under a fake identity and live there clandestinely for many months. One man who fitted the archetypal profile was George Hill, a British officer of exceptional talent.
A member of the Royal Flying Corps, Hill had been sent to Russia to help in the training of pilots on the Eastern Front. But he was also working for British military intelligence with the codename Agent IK8. He proved so good at infiltrating secret meetings that he was soon poached and given employment by Mansfield Cumming.
Hill had lived in numerous different cities, including London, Hamburg, Riga, St Petersburg, Tehran and Krasnovodsk. A broad-beamed individual with a potato-shaped face, he had a military gait and public-school buffoonery that left no one in any doubt as to his nationality. Yet he showed a remarkable talent for blending into foreign cultures.
In part, this was due to his skills as a linguist. ‘I had half a dozen languages at the tip of my tongue,’ he wrote, ‘[and] had learned to sum up the characteristic qualities and faults of a dozen nationalities.’
Hill knew that fluency in the language was only the first step to perfecting an undercover existence. A spy could live incognito for a sustained period of time only if he learned to adopt ‘the habits and ways of thoughts of the people among whom his field of operations lies’. He also needed ‘a brain of the utmost ability, able to draw a deduction in a flash and make a momentous decision in an instant.’
According to Hector Bywater, an expert in professional espionage, the perfect spy could only make such decisions if he kept an icy detachment from the pressures of work.
‘Steady nerves were, of course, a great asset, for the Secret Service man was liable at any moment to find himself in an awkward situation which demanded perfect coolness and presence of mind.’
A photographic memory was also vital, as future operations in Russia were to demonstrate. Agents would often find themselves with only a few minutes to study crucial documents, maps and military plans.
Above all, a talent for organising – what Hill called ‘the office work of espionage’ – was absolutely essential. ‘Nine out of ten spies who are caught have faulty organisation or communication to blame for their arrest,’ he wrote.
Arrest for Cumming’s men in the months ahead would spell certain death. No one was so aware of the high stakes as Hill himself. He had witnessed the execution of two Bulgarian spies in the Balkan city of Monastir and left a graphic description of them being killed by firing squad.
‘The wall behind, white a moment before, was scarred by bullet marks and bespattered with blood, just as if a paint brush had been dipped into a pot of red paint and flicked on the wall.’
The grotesque spectacle got the better of him. ‘I hurried off to find a spot where I could be sick without disgracing myself.’
Mansfield Cumming had started training programmes for his spies in or around 1915. When Samuel Hoare had been recruited into the Secret Service, he had been enrolled on an intensive four-week espionage course. He was not at liberty to reveal any more than the barest outlines of what was taught.
‘One day it would be espionage or contre-espionage’, he wrote, ‘another coding and ciphering, another, war trade and contraband, a fourth, postal and telegraphic censorship.’
Other agents recalled Cumming himself giving twice-weekly lectures on spy-craft, the details of which are sadly lost.
George Hill was also given a rudimentary training in espionage in the weeks before he left London. ‘Experts from Scotland Yard lectured me on shadowing [people] and recognising the signs of being shadowed,’ he wrote. ‘I was taught the methods of using invisible inks. I learned a system of codes and was primed with all the dodges which are useful to spies.’
Codes, invisible inks and mechanical gadgets were stock in trade to Cumming. In the rare moments when he was not at his desk, he would invariably be found bent over a lathe in the workshop that he had installed at Whitehall Court. It was equipped with drills, chisels and other instruments, brought specially from his country house in Bursledon.
Long after the office staff had gone home for the night, Cumming could be found in his workshop knocking together one of the speciality homespun contraptions that he liked to devise for his agents in the field.
He had heavy hands and sausage fingers, yet he must have had a delicate touch for he was capable of building precision instruments, including a long-case clock made out of phosphor bronze and chromium steel. It stands in the headquarters of MI6 to this day.
‘He had a passion for inventions of all sorts,’ recalled one of his agents, Edward Knoblock, ‘and being a rich man, he often bought the rights to them, such as strange telescopes, mysterious mechanisms with which to signal in the dark . . . rockets, bombs etc.’
Secret inks held a particular fascination for Cumming, with good reason. The ability to transmit messages in disappearing ink had proved extremely important during the war. It would be even more important for his agents working in revolutionary Russia.
Cumming hired the services of the distinguished physicist, Thomas Merton, who conducted ink experiments with many different chemical solutions. These included potassium permanganate, antipyrine and sodium nitrate. One reliable ink was made with a blend of sodium thiosulphate and ammonia solution, which could then be developed with gold chloride.
‘Secret inks were our stock in trade and all were anxious to obtain some which came from a natural source of supply.’ So wrote Frank Stagg, who had joined Cumming’s headquarters at the outbreak of war. ‘I shall never forget C’s delight when the Chief Censor, Worthington, came one day with the announcement that one of his staff had found out that semen would not respond to iodine vapour.’
As Cumming chortled into his cravat, Stagg told him ‘that he had had to remove the discoverer from his office immediately as his colleagues were making life intolerable by accusations of masturbation.’
Cumming expressed concern that his female spies might not have a ready access to semen. He ‘asked Colney Hatch [a lunatic asylum] to send [a sample of] female equivalent for testing.’ Whether or not they obtained any is alas not recorded.
Semen was certainly used by some of Cumming’s spies, to the great displeasure of those on the receiving end. ‘Our man in Copenhagen, Major Holme, evidently stocked it in a bottle,’ wrote Stagg, ‘for his letter stank to high heaven and we had to tell him that a fresh operation was necessary for each letter.’
Information obtained illicitly was to be transmitted in secret code as well as invisible ink. Cumming had a highly skilled team of cipher men in London who were constantly changing the codes in order to minimise the chance of them being decrypted. George Hill would later write about one of the codes he used while working in Russia.
‘It had been invented by a genius at the Secret Service headquarters in London and of the many I have seen [it] was the easiest and safest for a secret service man to carry.’
He was not allowed to provide any details, except to say that it required only a pocket dictionary and the key to the cipher, ‘which was on a tiny card and could easily be hidden.’
George Hill would carry many additional items during his time in Russia and they were to serve him well in times of danger. ‘I had always found the value of including in my kit a certain amount of good plain chocolate, half a dozen pairs of ladies’ silk stockings and two or three boxes of the more expensive kind of Parisian toilet soap,’
he recalled. ‘My experience was that, presented at the right psychological moment, they would unlock doors which neither wine nor gold would open.’
Hill hinted at an extensive range of gadgets available to Cumming’s agents. ‘Secret inks, tiny cameras the size of half a crown and not much thicker, photographs reduced so that their films can be concealed in a cigarette . . .’
But he warned his readers that such items were of no use ‘unless one has the essentials – will, wit and determination to carry out the task which is set.’
Hill had little previous experience in intelligence work when he arrived in Petrograd in the aftermath of the first revolution that had swept the tsar from his throne. The principal menace at this point came not from Lenin’s Bolsheviks but from the Germans, who had insinuated numerous enemy agents into Russia. These agents were working hard to undermine the new government and force Russia’s withdrawal from the war.
Hill became acquainted with a lady known as Madame B who was running a network of Russian double agents, all of whom were working secretly for Germany. What none of them knew was that Madame B was herself an agent provocateur whose job was to expose their activities.
Hill attended one of Madame B’s meetings in order to eavesdrop on their conversations. When he left at the end of the evening, he realised that he was being followed by two of the men from the gathering.
‘Just as they were about to close with me I swung round and flourished my walking stick. As I expected, one of my assailants seized hold of it.’
He was in for an unpleasant surprise. ‘It was a swordstick, which had been specially designed by Mssrs. Wilkinson, the sword-makers of Pall Mall, and the moment my attacker had the scabbard in his fist, I drew back the rapier-like blade with a jerk and with a forward lunge ran it through the gentleman’s side.’
His would-be assailant let out a scream and then collapsed onto the pavement in a pool of blood. As his comrade ran off, Hill fumbled for his revolver. But by the time he was ready to fire, the man had disappeared.
Hill returned to the Bristol Hotel, where he was staying, and went straight to his room, ‘examining the blade on the stairs, anxious to know what it looked like after its adventure. I had never run a man through before.’
He was surprised by the cleanness of the blade. ‘It was not a gory sight. There was only a slight film of blood half-way up the blade and a dark stain at the tip’.
Lenin’s Bolsheviks were one of the smallest of the numerous political groups in Petrograd but they quickly made their mark. On the morning after Lenin’s arrival at Finlyandsky Station they broke into the vacant mansion belonging to the celebrated ballerina, Mathilde Kschessinskaia. There was no respect for the fact that it was private property.
When the British ambassador’s daughter, Muriel Buchanan, opened her curtains and gazed across the street, she saw ‘an enormous scarlet flag fluttering above the walls.’ She was surprised that the revolutionaries had dared to occupy Madame Kschessinskaia’s house, but was not unduly alarmed by their presence. ‘Nobody took them seriously,’ she wrote. ‘They were just another lot of fanatics.’
Lenin’s supporters were the most unruly element in the Petrograd Soviet, the revolutionary assembly established to represent the city’s workers. On 3 May, Lenin demanded ‘all power to the Soviets’ – the numerous councils and assemblies that had sprung up across Russia – and argued that the Provisional Government had far too much authority. His demand fell on deaf ears: for the moment, the Provisional Government felt secure enough to ignore the Bolsheviks.
Lenin’s supporters were to be dealt a harsher blow some two weeks later when the Provisional Government’s brightest talent, Alexander Kerensky, was put in charge of the War Office and Admiralty.
Kerensky’s appointment delighted the Entente governments. A gifted orator with a deep sense of purpose, he was a safe pair of hands. Russia was unlikely to implode into violence so long as he remained at the helm.
Kerensky was also vigorously in favour of continuing the fight against Germany. ‘There is no Russian front,’ he said in one highly publicised speech. ‘There is only one united Allied front.’
Kerensky and Lenin were each regarded by their supporters as great orators. Yet to one detached observer, Kerensky stood head and shoulders above his political rival. The journalist Morgan Philips Price listened to both men debating a confidence motion in the Provisional Government. Lenin lambasted the ministers he detested, taunting them for running scared of the workers and peasants of Russia.
‘One sat spellbound at his command of the language and the passion of his denunciation,’ wrote Price. ‘But when it was all over, one felt inclined to scratch one’s head and ask what it was all about.’ Like so many people, Price underestimated Lenin’s magnetism until it was too late.
Next to his feet was Kerensky, who was determined to humiliate Lenin in public. ‘There was a hush in the hall as there rose up a short, thickset man with a square face and close-cropped hair . . . his face was pale with nervous tension and his eyes blazed like fiery beads.’
Kerensky began his speech in quiet, measured tones, clinically dissecting Lenin’s argument. He then launched a scornful attack on Lenin’s dream of a second revolution. ‘You say that you want to strengthen our new-won freedom,’ he said as he jabbed his finger at Lenin, ‘and yet you propose to lead us the way of France in 1792. Instead of appealing for reconstruction, you clamour for further destruction. Out of the fiery chaos that you wish to make will arise, like a Phoenix, a dictator.’
Price turned his head towards Lenin as he listened to the speech. ‘[He] was calmly stroking his chin, apparently wondering whether the words of Kerensky would come true, and on whose shoulders the cloak of dictatorship, if it came, would rest.’
The motion of confidence in the Provisional Government won the day: Lenin’s revolutionary Bolsheviks were roundly defeated. Yet they were not downhearted. Every setback seemed to reinvigorate them and their confidence grew to such an extent that Cumming’s agents at the Russian bureau became seriously alarmed.
It was imperative to keep Kerensky in power, since he was held to be the only political leader who could impose his will on the army. Yet there was a growing fear that his grasp on power was weakening and that his eventual downfall was inevitable. This would spell disaster not just for Britain, but also for the United States, which had become a fellow combatant less than a month after the February revolution.
To avert such a catastrophe, ministers in Whitehall asked Mansfield Cumming to set up a joint Anglo-American intelligence mission to Russia. Its aim was to supply Kerensky’s pro-war government with money, extra resources and more vigorous anti-German propaganda.
Cumming immediately contacted his man in New York, William Wiseman, who had forged close links with his opposite number in American intelligence. Wiseman knew that American officials also viewed Russia’s continued role in the war as imperative. It did not take much to persuade them to back the joint mission.
The British government supplied Wiseman with $75,000. The money, destined for Russia’s Provisional Government, was wired into his J.P. Morgan and Co. account in New York. A similar sum was received from the Americans. All Wiseman now needed was an agent who could be relied upon to deliver the money to Kerensky without raising any suspicions.
Secrecy was imperative: both the Germans and the Bolsheviks could make a lot of political capital out of such blatant intervention in Russian politics.
Wiseman thought long and hard before selecting his man. Agent Somerville, better known as the writer, Somerset Maugham, had already proved his worth in Switzerland. He had been sent there two years previously to act as a link man for Cumming’s agents working inside enemy Germany.
‘If you do well you’ll get no thanks,’ he had been told on his departure from England, ‘and if you get into trouble you’ll get no help.’
Maugham was on holiday on Long Island when he received Wiseman’s unexpected summons at the beginning
of July 1917. Intrigued, he made his way to Wiseman’s Lower Manhattan offices.
Wiseman briefed Maugham on the necessity of keeping Kerensky at the helm of the Russian government. He also spoke of the importance of supporting Russia’s fight against Germany on the Eastern Front.
‘The long and the short of it,’ wrote Maugham, ‘was that I should go to Russia and keep the Russians in the war.’
Maugham was daunted by the prospect of undertaking such a mission, especially when he was told that the British and American governments were determined that it should succeed.
‘I was staggered by the proposition,’ he later admitted. ‘I told Wiseman that I did not think I was competent to do the sort of thing that was expected of me.’
He asked for forty-eight hours to think it over. He was in the early stages of tuberculosis, had a high fever and was coughing up blood. But he was excited by the prospect of working again for British intelligence and decided to accept Wiseman’s proposal.
The weeks that followed were taken up with meticulous planning. Maugham was introduced to key contacts who would be able to facilitate his journey across a country that was rapidly descending into chaos. Among those charged with helping him was Emanuel Voska, an American secret agent who was to travel with him to Petrograd.
Agent Voska had also been briefed about what needed to be done: his instructions were similar to those given to Maugham. ‘Keep Russia in the war,’ he was told. ‘We will stand you any expense. So far as we are concerned, you may have the greatest freedom of action.’
By the end of July, Maugham was fully prepared. He had one last question for Wiseman before he left New York: he asked if he would be paid for his mission. He said that his operations in Switzerland had been undertaken as a gentleman amateur, ‘and found afterwards that I was the only man working in the organisation for nothing and that I was regarded not as patriotic or generous but merely damned foolish.’ Wiseman took the hint and offered both a salary and expenses.
