Russian Roulette

by Giles Milton

  ‘I was completely in the dark regarding the work of a whole group of British officers and officials for whose presence in Russia and for whose protection my position with the Bolsheviks was the only guarantee.’

  George Hill also spoke of these officers who ‘employed their energies against the Bolsheviks. They were working from a different angle; sometimes the lines on which our work ran parallel, sometimes even linked.’ He was often unaware of their true identities. Like the ‘inner circle’ of the Russian bureau that had helped to kill Rasputin, they were moving about in total secrecy.

  The growing number of reports received from Russia enabled Cumming to form a clearer picture of the situation inside the country. There was only one man who seemed capable of uniting the disparate anti-Bolshevik factions. This was Boris Savinkov, who had been Minister of War in the months that followed the first revolution.

  Ernest Boyce sent a report to Cumming advising him that Savinkov was the horse to back. ‘The only fighting organisation is that of Savinkov,’ he wrote, ‘who, thanks to his organising ability and, it is stated, to Allied support, has been able to gather around him 2,000 men.’

  These troops represented the core of his Union for the Defence of Fatherland and Freedom, a private militia whose goal was the destruction of Lenin’s government.

  Lockhart had also been gathering intelligence on Savinkov. Although he had been sent to Russia as an unofficial representative of the British government, Lockhart’s fascination with espionage and intrigue quickly got the better of him. By the spring of 1918, he was engaged in secret discussions with Savinkov’s senior advisors.

  Lockhart discovered some startling news, which he relayed to London in a telegram marked ‘Top Secret’. Savinkov was planning a counter-revolution. Aware that the Allied governments were considering landing troops in Northern Russia, he intended ‘to murder all Bolshevik leaders on [the] night of Allies’ landing and to form a government which will in reality be a military dictatorship.’ Lockhart believed that Savinkov had a real chance of success.

  The stage was set for a dramatic power struggle, one which was witnessed by three key people: Arthur Ransome, Robert Bruce Lockhart and Sidney Reilly. All of them were present at a raucous political forum that took place at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre on 4 July 1918.

  The Fifth Congress of the Soviets was intended to provide a platform for political debate, but it presented Lenin with a serious problem. A third of the elected delegates were not Bolsheviks: rather, they were Lenin’s political rivals – Socialist Revolutionaries – who stood in total opposition to peace with Germany. Now, they saw their chance to attack Lenin in public.

  Robert Bruce Lockhart had been granted permission to attend the Congress as an observer. He arrived early at the theatre and was alarmed to notice that ‘every entrance, every corridor, is guarded by troops of Lettish [Latvian] soldiers, armed to the teeth with rifle, pistol and hand-grenade.’ These troops were mercenaries, paid by the Bolsheviks to protect them from potential troublemakers.

  The initial assault on Lenin was led by the leader of the Social Revolutionary party, Maria Spiridonova. With her neatly coiffed hair and pince-nez, she looked like a prim schoolmistress. But she was a schoolmistress with a ruthless streak. She denounced Lenin in a torrent of invective, accusing him of using the peasantry for his own political ends.

  She then swung her gaze around to the peasant delegates in the theatre and harangued them for allowing themselves to be used as political pawns. ‘In Lenin’s philosophy,’ she shouted in her high, shrill voice, ‘you are only dung – only manure.’

  Her speech provoked wild applause from the auditorium. ‘Pandemonium ensues,’ wrote Lockhart. ‘Brawny peasants stand up in their seats and shake their fists at the Bolsheviks. Trotsky pushes himself forward and tries to speak. He is howled down and his face blenches with impotent rage.’

  Arthur Ransome had joined Lockhart in the theatre and was equally impressed by the spectacle unfolding before him. He described Spiridonova as ‘looking like a nursery governess rapt into incontrollable frenzy’ and he listened enraptured as she ‘poured out a rhythmic, screaming denunciation of the Brest-Litovsk treaty.’

  Lenin sniffed at the danger: he faced the real risk of losing the support of the crowd. If so, the entire future of his revolution stood in jeopardy. Aware that only his oratory could pacify the rabble, he rose to his feet and delivered a highly skilful response that cast a spell over Spiridonova’s supporters. Not for the first time, Ransome and Lockhart were witness to Lenin’s hypnotic charm. Like a magician, he was able to transfix the crowd that had been baying for his blood just moments before.

  ‘Gradually,’ wrote Lockhart, ‘the sheer personality of the man and the overwhelming superiority of his dialectics conquer his audience, who listen spell-bound until the speech ends in a wild outburst of cheering.’

  Lockhart knew that he was witness to an unequal political battle. He also knew that the final showdown between these political enemies was certain to have dramatic consequences.

  He returned to the Bolshoi Theatre on the following afternoon and was surprised to find not a single Bolshevik in the auditorium. ‘The parterre was filled with delegates, but many of the seats on the platform were vacant.’ The only politicians present were Social Revolutionaries.

  Lockhart remained at the theatre, unaware of the dramatic events that were taking place outside. ‘At six o’clock Sidney Reilly came into our box with the news that the theatre was surrounded by troops and that all exits were barred . . . Something had gone wrong.’

  The distant boom of artillery, along with close-range firing, added to the growing panic. ‘Our apprehension was not diminished by a loud explosion in the corridor above us.’

  Reilly conferred with a French agent who had joined them in their box. Both men feared that the Bolsheviks were about to storm the theatre, using hired mercenaries to eradicate their political enemies.

  According to Lockhart, both Reilly and the Frenchman ‘began to examine their pockets for compromising documents. Some they tore up into tiny pieces and shoved them down the lining of the sofa cushions. Others, doubtless more dangerous, they swallowed.’

  A further hour passed before Reilly discovered more about what was taking place. Earlier that afternoon, two Social Revolutionaries had called at the German Embassy and asked for an audience with Ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach. Invited into his office, they shot the ambassador at point-blank range. Their motive was clear: they hoped to provoke Germany into restarting its offensive against Russia.

  The outcome was rather different. The assassination sparked the beginning of a desperate counter-revolution, involving all who were opposed to Lenin’s regime. Two thousand armed men clashed with Bolshevik forces in the centre of Moscow and managed to capture the telegraph office. They broadcast an announcement saying that Lenin had been toppled.

  Boris Savinkov had been waiting patiently in his stronghold of Yaroslavl, some 150 miles from Moscow. Now, he swung his private militia into action, undaunted by the fact that no Allied forces had landed in Northern Russia.

  For the next forty-eight hours, Russia spiralled into turmoil. Lenin was so alarmed that he even considered abandoning the Kremlin. Yet the counter-revolution was abruptly stopped in its tracks. A cool-headed Trotsky called upon the services of his Latvian mercenaries. They fought with great tenacity and succeeded in driving the Social Revolutionary activists from the streets. Once the armed gangs were defeated, the Latvians made their move against the politicians.

  ‘The Social Revolutionary delegates in the Opera House were arrested without even a protest,’ wrote Lockhart who, together with Reilly, managed to slip out of the building. ‘The revolution, which was conceived in a theatre, ended in the same place.’ High drama had finished as farce.

  The failed counter-revolution consolidated Lenin’s grip on power. The Social Revolutionaries were eliminated as a political threat and Savinkov was forced to flee Russia.


  It also further damaged relations between the Bolsheviks and the small group of British diplomats and officers still based in Moscow. Trotsky went so far as to accuse Lockhart of helping to finance and organise Savinkov’s rebellion.

  Lockhart was indignant. ‘This is wholly untrue,’ he wrote. ‘Never at any time did I furnish Savinkov with financial aid. Still less did I encourage him in any action he took.’

  But the fact remained that he had staged a number of meetings with Savinkov’s advisors and Trotsky was determined to punish the Western powers. ‘[He] issued an order that all French and British officers were to be refused travelling passes on account of their counter-revolutionary activities.’

  The crushing of the counter-revolution taught Lockhart and Reilly an important lesson. They realised that it would take far greater guile to topple the Bolshevik regime. Espionage had revealed a great deal about the strengths and weaknesses of the regime. Now, it was time to take more direct action.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A DOUBLE LIFE

  George Hill was alarmed by the increasing hostility of the Bolshevik regime. He had originally hoped to work alongside the new leadership, continuing to train soldiers and pilots for service on the Eastern Front. This would have provided him with the perfect cover for gathering intelligence and passing it back to London.

  But now that Russia had pulled out of the war, his work as a military trainer was redundant. The time was fast approaching when the country’s revolutionary government would expel all the remaining Westerners. Hill realised that he would have to create an undercover identity and go into hiding if he was to remain in Russia.

  To this end, he invented a fictional persona with the name of George Bergmann, a travelling merchant of German-Baltic origin. ‘It had taken me long to decide on my new name,’ he wrote. ‘I hated giving up the name of Hill, and finally decided to get as near to it as I could in German. That is why I chose Berg, the equivalent for Hill, and I tacked on the “mann” to make it quite certain that I was of German descent.’

  He had good reason for doing this. ‘While my Russian was almost word perfect, I did from time to time make mistakes and it was much better for me to claim that I was a Russian of German extraction born in the Baltic provinces.’ It was a clever deceit. Neither the Cheka nor the Bolshevik authorities would be able to verify his family details, because the Baltic provinces were under occupation by the German Army.

  Sidney Reilly was able to advise Hill on leading a double life, for he had already experimented with shedding his old identity and adopting a new one, not as an actor playing a part but as a wholly new personality with traits and reflexes that were distinct from those of his former existence. Adopting a fictional persona entailed far more than simply growing a beard and wearing different clothes. To avoid detection by the Cheka, Hill would need to live and breathe his new identity.

  Hill and Reilly had first met shortly after the latter’s arrival in Moscow. They had bonded immediately. Hill described Reilly as ‘a man of action’ and clearly one after his own heart. Both men had a talent for languages. Hill noted that Reilly spoke perfect English, Russian, French and German, ‘though, curiously enough, with a foreign accent in each case.’

  Within days of meeting they had become firm friends and would remain so for years to come.

  Reilly explained to Hill that he had already created two fictional personas, Monsieur Massino and Mr Constantine. He now began working on a third, Sigmund Relinsky, with official papers to match. He managed to obtain them from a senior official who was trusted by the Bolsheviks as a staunch party loyalist. He was no such thing. He was yet another functionary who had joined the regime in order to undermine it from within.

  The papers identified Rellinsky as a member of the Cheka, a singular coup for Reilly and one of which he was justifiably proud. It would enable him to get inside information from the very heart of the regime. ‘It gave me opportunities which were of the greatest value to me,’ he later wrote, ‘and which I quickly turned to account.’

  Reilly’s three identities were to give him considerable freedom of movement in both Moscow and Petrograd and he proved adept at switching between them. His principal base in Moscow remained Number 3, Sheremetevsky Lane, where he lived with the two young actresses, an arrangement that would soon lead to romance. But he also made use of several other apartments in Moscow; these became places of refuge in times of danger.

  Reilly and Hill met regularly and put considerable thought into how they would work together over the weeks and months to come. They also had discussions with Ernest Boyce, Mansfield Cumming’s link man in Moscow, in order to discuss the practicalities of living underground.

  It was decided that each of them would perform different and well-defined roles. Reilly’s principal task was to oversee political intelligence. ‘[He] was receiving very excellent information from all possible sources,’ wrote Hill. ‘I considered that Lt Riley [sic] knew the situation better than any other British officer in Russia.’

  He also had better connections with key officials. ‘As he also had more delicate threads in his hands, I therefore agreed to . . . leave the political control and our policy in his hands.’

  Hill was meanwhile put in charge of coding Reilly’s reports, developing his own network of contacts and running a small destruction gang dedicated to destroying soft military targets (such as Bolshevik-controlled depots). More importantly, he was to establish a courier service that would link Moscow and Petrograd with the Stockholm bureau.

  The couriers were to prove essential to the successful running of the entire intelligence-gathering operation. It was one thing to acquire secret documents, quite another to transmit the information back to Mansfield Cumming in London. Throughout the First World War, numerous spies had been caught red-handed as they attempted to smuggle documents out of the countries in which they were working. German agents had tried to lessen the risks by finding highly inventive ways of hiding information. Hill was told of one incident in which a spy had concealed documents inside his mouth. It was all to no avail.

  ‘The searcher gently forced the mouth open, took out the top denture and from the roof of the man’s mouth a tiny packet of oiled silk, not the thickness of a postage stamp, fell on his tongue. Inside the packet was information in microscopic writing.’

  Reilly and Hill knew they were certain to be executed if caught with smuggled documents, especially ones containing intelligence about the Russian military. Hill’s priority therefore was to establish a secure courier service that could transport information out of the country.

  There were to be two routes, a northern and a southern, and both were fraught with danger. The northern route was to prove the most useful but also the most perilous. It was 500 miles from Moscow to the White Sea port of Archangel and there were numerous Red Army checkpoints on route. The risk of capture was so great that Hill decided to have information sent in duplicate, using two separate couriers travelling on different days.

  The southern route was far more circuitous. It passed through areas of Russia that had become virtual battlegrounds between the Bolsheviks and their political opponents. Hill quickly realised that the northern route was the only practical one in such troubled times.

  ‘I originally thought that it would be possible to maintain this northern service with an average of twenty-five couriers,’ he wrote. But this proved a woeful miscalculation. ‘It was of vital importance to get the messages through, and finally we elaborated a new plan which meant that we would have to employ over a hundred men and replace casualties as they occurred.’

  Hill had conceived of one courier covering the entire route from Moscow to the White Sea – a return journey of twenty-two days. A second courier would then take delivery of the information and accompany it to Stockholm where it would be handed to John Scale.

  But scarcely had the system been put into operation, in early July 1918, when it was found to have fatal flaws. The couriers repeatedly blundered in
to danger because they were ignorant of the system of Bolshevik checkpoints in the towns and villages to the north of Moscow.

  ‘Six of our men in all had now been caught and executed,’ wrote Hill just weeks after the service had begun. He was fortunate that none of them revealed any secret information before they were killed.

  Their deaths led to a rapid change of tactic. Hill now had the idea of establishing a chain service that linked villages across Northern Russia. ‘At each of them was a group commander whose duty it was to organise his men, select suitable places for living, procure documents and passports and control the funds for carrying on the work.’

  Under the new system, the first courier would travel north from Moscow to the provincial town of Vyatka, where he would hand his documents to the group commander. A second courier would then travel to the next centre, where the process would be repeated. The system worked like clockwork. ‘Each courier got to know his particular run, its pitfalls, dangers and dodges, and the strain was much less than would be involved in the entire journey.’

  It was nevertheless a hazardous occupation for the individual couriers. ‘Every time one of them set out he did so at the risk of his life and the ways in which they overcame difficulties were miraculous.’

  Hill placed the courier operation under the direct command of a former Russian cavalry officer known as Agent Z. He was to prove invaluable – ‘a patriot, fearless, a first-class judge of men and as good an organiser as I could have wished for.’

  Agent Z’s job was to prove no less hazardous than Hill’s and he needed a secret base in Moscow – a place that he could use to meet with returning couriers and brief them on their next mission. He elected to rent rooms in the house of a lady whose officer husband had been killed in the war.

  ‘For reasons best known to herself,’ wrote Hill, ‘she had taken to the oldest profession in the world and had been making quite a fair living on the Tverskaya Ulitza, the Bond Street of Moscow.’