Russian Roulette

by Giles Milton

  He took a few deep breaths to calm himself down. Then, after convincing himself that he was doing the right thing, he prepared to leave his flat and begin a wholly new life, taking a last glance at the treasured possessions he was leaving behind: ‘My hat and sword, my photographs and favourite books, one or two prized decorations, various small things I had bought to take back to England . . .’

  He abandoned his Mauser and his Webley-Scott revolvers, reasoning that they would serve him no purpose. ‘Nine times out of ten, a revolver is of no earthly use and will seldom get a man out of the tight corner.’ He much preferred his trusty swordstick, which he had wielded to deadly effect several months earlier.

  The process of adopting his new identity was done in two stages. First, he left his apartment and went to a secure house that he had rented several months previously. ‘I went out by a different entrance from the one I had used in entering, casually glanced round to see that I was not being followed, stepped into a cab and drove to the other end of Moscow.’

  Once arrived, he changed into a new set of clothes. These had been made to measure and delivered to the safe house some days earlier. ‘There were three or four dark blue hessian shirts which buttoned at the neck, some linen underclothing, a pair of cheap ready made black trousers, peasant-made socks such as were on sale on the stalls in the market, a second-hand pair of top-boots and a peak cap which had already been well used.’

  Hill dressed hastily and then prepared to send his former identity up in smoke. ‘I put my English suit, underclothing, tie, socks and boots into the stove; I laid a match to the kindling wood and shut the stove door. Ten minutes later, my London clothes were burnt.’

  His chief courier, Agent Z, arrived shortly afterwards with a new set of identity papers complete with stamps and visas for added authenticity. He also brought a cheap mackintosh, a hundred Russian cigarettes and the latest reports from various agents, ‘which I put into the bag and then left the flat as George Bergmann.’ The switch of identities was complete: George Hill had ceased to exist.

  He made his way to one of the poorer quarters of town, south of the Moscow River, to another of the flats he had rented. Here, he met up with his secretary, Evelyn, ‘who was au courant with all the work I had been doing.’ Evelyn was partly English, but she had been educated in Russia and spoke both languages fluently, as well as German, French and Italian.

  ‘We had decided that our best chance of success was to become people of the lower middle class and to live an entirely double life.’ Evelyn had managed to get a job as a teacher in one of the new Bolshevik-run schools. ‘This gave her the necessary papers and also the very coveted ration cards from the Bolshevik organisation; coveted because without cards or enormous sums of money, it was impossible to get food.’

  Hill also managed to get employment, working as a film developer in a cinematograph studio. This entitled him to ration cards as well, and it brought another unexpected advantage. He got to see the day’s newsreels before the general public, allowing him to stay one step ahead of the game.

  Hill hired the services of two girls of English birth but Russian upbringing named Sally and Annie. They were to help in the running of his underground cell. Hill immediately took a shine to Sally. ‘One of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen,’ he wrote. ‘She had raven-black hair, a peach-like complexion and the most sensitive, pale, transparent hands.’ Annie, by contrast, had no share in her sister’s good looks. She was dumpy but merry – ‘a good-natured soul.’

  Annie was to prove a key member of the team. Her cover was to be that of a dressmaker, in which guise she was able to provide Hill and his couriers with costumes. But she also took orders from the wider public. It was a clever ruse. ‘At a dressmaking establishment it was only natural that there would be people coming and going.’ Secret information could be brought to the apartment and forwarded to couriers with very little suspicion.

  They soon needed another person to help with the running of messages. After much consideration, they invited a trusted young Russian orphan girl named Vi to join the team. Hill found her no less alluring than Sally. ‘[She] was a tall blonde with blue eyes and the most appealing ways and time proved that she was also full of pluck.’

  Faced with the choice of flirting with Sally or Vi, he was initially tempted by the latter, even though she had just turned seventeen. ‘Dear Vi . . .’ he wrote, ‘she made many a long hour pass quickly for me and at one time we gravely discussed having an affair.’ But Hill was concerned by her extreme youth and decided to desist. Besides, he first needed to get his espionage operations up and running.

  Hill and the four girls soon slipped into a routine, always taking extreme care not to arouse suspicions. The flat where they lived had been carefully chosen: it was a low, single-storey block that contained many other apartments. ‘It had two great advantages,’ wrote Hill, ‘a front door opened on the street and a back door led out into a large yard shared by the other houses around it.’

  The only problem – common to all shared blocks – was the presence of a dvornik or porter. These dvorniks were on the payroll of the Cheka and ‘pried into the doings and sayings of the people living in every block.’

  The girls had already hatched a story about taking in a lodger who was suffering from malaria. ‘[This] was framed with the purpose of giving me time to grow a beard,’ wrote Hill. His face was well known in Moscow and it was important for him to radically alter his appearance.

  The beard growing proved a torture. ‘First of all, the beastly thing was of a brilliant red colour . . . then, as the hair sprouted they turned round and bit my face and covered my skin with a sore and irritable rash.’ It took a bottle of fine old brandy to restore his humour.

  Hill soon found himself with a great deal of work. He had made many contacts during his months in Russia and now had reliable anti-Bolshevik agents working for him on many fronts, particularly in towns and villages where White Russian soldiers were attacking troops of the Red Army. Hill knew that the Western Allies were considering taking a more offensive role against the Bolshevik government. But before they could land more troops, accurate military information was an imperative. This is where Hill’s men proved their worth.

  ‘[They] had to find out the best roads, know all of the traps, take stock of the disposition of the Soviet troops, guns, food stores, dumps and morale of the army . . . [and] if necessary, they were also to occupy themselves with gentle sabotage.’

  Some of these sabotage operations were directed against the German Army in the Ukraine; others targeted the Red Army. They were never as ‘gentle’ as Hill suggested. He personally took part in one of these operations, blowing up an industrial gasworks with homemade explosives.

  ‘There was a blinding flash followed by a terrific explosion and then a deadly silence. We staggered away. For hours afterwards, my nose bled most violently and nothing I did would stop it.’

  His attacks on German targets were so successful that they prompted an attempt on his life. He was parking his car next to a hangar at the Moscow Aviation Park when a German hit-man stepped from the shadows and tossed a grenade at his feet.

  It failed to explode and Hill was quick to respond. He caught his would-be assassin and dashed a brick into his face, leaving him severely wounded. ‘I never knew whether I had killed him or not,’ wrote Hill, ‘but at the time I sincerely hoped I had.’

  Hill gathered a great deal of information on the fighting abilities of the White Armies that were organising resistance to the Bolsheviks. His reports made for alarming reading, for he found them to be disunited and poorly led.

  ‘Lack of order, supplies, ammunition, material were constantly being reported and internal strife was rumoured,’ he warned in a coded memo to London.

  Forwarding military intelligence was a risky business and Hill had to act with prudence. Every document had to be coded and then typed up by one of the girls using a typewriter that had been smuggled into the apartment. ‘Two sh
ort floorboards had been taken up along the inner wall of the living room and there the typewriter and codes were housed.’

  Whenever Hill was coding the military documents, he kept a little bottle of petrol to hand. ‘If the house was suddenly raided, messages and codes were to be pitched into the typewriter cover, the petrol poured over them and set alight.’

  The capture of three of his couriers and the discovery of their coded messages led Hill to change the system of transmitting information to John Scale in Stockholm. ‘The men had been caught because the messages, sewn into the lining of their coats, had rustled when they were frisked.’

  Henceforth, messages were typed onto strips of linen and then sewn into the collars of coats. ‘Tedious work,’ commented Hill, ‘and took infinitely longer than typing on paper.’

  The pressures of work were such that Hill had little time for pursuing Sally. Besides, she had proved rather too successful in perfecting her disguise as a downtrodden Moscow girl. On one occasion, Hill returned to the flat and was surprised to see a ragged figure tipping dirty water into a drain. ‘It was Sally, the beautiful Sally, transformed into a barefooted slut who wore a begrimed white blouse.’ As he passed, she blew her snotty nose into the gutter in a most undignified manner.

  After a few weeks living as George Bergmann, Hill found that he had learned to live and breathe his new identity. When he sauntered down the street with his ginger beard and fingers stained yellow-brown from the chemicals in the film laboratory, he cut a very different figure from the old George Hill, with his military uniform, spats and Royal Flying Corps insignia. He was confident that no one would see through the disguise.

  Yet he still made mistakes that could all too easily have cost him his life. On one occasion, Evelyn had glanced out of the window and noticed that he was striding down the street like a British officer on parade. ‘Your walk gives you away completely,’ she told him when he arrived back at the apartment. ‘No Russian of your class would ever walk like that.’

  On another occasion, he entered a grocery store and, momentarily forgetting his adopted persona, ordered his goods in a tone of voice that no shabbily dressed Russian would ever have used. ‘I was behaving like the customer who was in the habit of giving such an order,’ he wrote. ‘The attendant gave me a searching look which brought me back to realities and, with a sick feeling, I, who should not have had a penny in the world, paid for my purchase and walked out of the shop.’

  It was a dramatic reminder of the dangers of life as a spy and, Hill vowed, the last time he would make such a mistake. ‘I was constantly haunted by the fear of being caught, and always before my mind I had a vivid picture of the spies I had seen executed in Macedonia.’

  Hill had not been in contact with Sidney Reilly for some days. Now, with Vi’s help, he managed to arrange a rendezvous in one of the Moscow parks.

  ‘I shall never forget my first glimpse of him,’ wrote Hill. ‘He, too, had grown a beard and he did look an ugly devil. I told him so and he returned the compliment.’

  Reilly had obtained a great deal of sensitive military information from Colonel Friede and even more secretive documents from one of his high-level contacts serving in the Criminal Department of the Cheka. He had also obtained intelligence about the state of the Russian fleet at Krondstadt. All of this now needed to be forwarded to Whitehall Court, along with a sheaf of other documents.

  What’s more, Reilly had a plan – one so bold that even his fellow spy was taken aback.

  Mansfield Cumming had confessed to having a number of reservations about Sidney Reilly when he first offered him employment as a spy. Reilly’s reputation for being unscrupulous, together with his sharp business practices, had rung warning bells from the outset.

  Yet ever since he had arrived in Russia, Reilly had proved himself of great value. He had managed to lay his hands on an impressive amount of classified information that shed light on the precarious state of the new regime. He had vindicated Cumming’s belief in human intelligence: only by having men on the ground could he form an accurate assessment of what was taking place inside Russia.

  Hitherto, Reilly had confined his activities to acquiring secret documents and forwarding them to London. But in the third week of August, he allowed his vanity to get the better of him. At his meeting with George Hill, he confided some truly sensational news. There was a plot to assassinate the entire Bolshevik leadership and he, Reilly, stood at its epicentre.

  The extraordinary events that followed were to involve spies, disgruntled army officers and at least one traitor, all of whom conducted themselves with maximum duplicity. ‘Bold and masterfully conceived,’ was how Hill described Reilly’s plot. He was kept informed of developments ‘so that should Lt Riley [sic] for any cause be prevented from bringing the work to a finish, I should at once be able to pick up the threads and carry on.’

  The plot was initially conceived in Lockhart’s private apartment on the Khlebny Pereulok, an address to which he had moved shortly after the Allied landings. At lunchtime on 15 August 1918, he was surprised by a knock on his front door. When he opened it, he found himself face to face with two Latvian soldiers who said they needed to speak with him in private.

  ‘One was a short, sallow-faced youth called Smidchen,’ wrote Lockhart. ‘The other, Berzin, a tall powerfully-built man with clear-cut features and hard steely eyes, called himself a colonel.’

  Colonel Berzin did most of the talking. He told Lockhart that he was a senior commander of the Lettish (Latvian) regiments that had been protecting the Bolshevik Government ever since the revolution. These regiments had proved indispensable to Lenin, saving his regime from several attempted coups d’état. Without them, the Bolsheviks would almost certainly have been swept from power.

  Lockhart was initially suspicious of his unexpected visitors. But when they produced a letter from Captain Cromie, Britain’s naval attaché in Petrograd, he was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘Always on my guard against agents provocateurs, I scrutinised the letter carefully,’ he wrote. ‘It was unmistakably from Cromie. The handwriting was his . . . The letter closed with a recommendation of Smidchen as a man who might be able to render us some service.’

  Lockhart invited the men into his apartment and asked them a string of questions. They told him that the Latvian regiments had lost all enthusiasm for protecting the Revolutionary Government. They had only served Lenin because he paid them. But they were deeply concerned by the possibility of being sent into battle against the Allied forces in Northern Russia. To avoid this prospect, they wanted to return to their native Latvia.

  This was impossible while it was under German occupation. But if the Allies were to win the war, as seemed increasingly likely, it would become a real possibility. In short, they asked Lockhart if he could send a message to the leader of the Allied forces in Northern Russia, General Poole, requesting him to facilitate their surrender.

  Lockhart listened to the Latvians with interest but told them that he was unable to give them an answer straight away: he suggested that they return on the following day. As soon as they had gone, he made his way across town in order to discuss the matter with two of his French colleagues, General Lavergne and Consul Grenard.

  The three of them agreed that it would do no harm to forward Colonel Berzin’s request to General Poole. After all, it was very much in the Allied interest for the Latvian troops to surrender. But it was extremely important that the matter should remain secret. Lockhart could not afford to be discovered assisting them.

  The two Latvians returned to Lockhart’s apartment the next day as agreed. They were introduced to Consul Grenard, who had expressed a wish to meet them, and spoke of their willingness in helping the Allies to liberate Latvia from German rule.

  Consul Grenard listened with care before making a wholly unexpected suggestion. He said that Colonel Berzin’s forces could be assured of a vigorous Allied campaign to defeat the German Army in Latvia if they wou
ld first help to overthrow the Bolshevik government.

  This took the two Latvians by surprise. Consul Grenard was suggesting something far more dramatic and dangerous than their own proposition.

  There was one other visitor in Lockhart’s apartment on that day. A heavily disguised Sidney Reilly was also in attendance and he was extremely interested in what Consul Grenard had to say. He had long dreamed of toppling the Bolshevik Government. Now, suddenly, he saw his chance.

  ‘The Letts were not Bolsheviks,’ he would later write, ‘they were Bolshevik servants because they had no other resort. They were foreign hirelings. Foreign hirelings serve for money. They are at the disposal of the highest bidder. If I could buy the Letts, my task would be easy.’

  Reilly paid a visit to George Hill shortly after the meeting at Lockhart’s apartment and told him of the discussions that had taken place. Both men agreed that Lenin’s government would be doomed if the Letts abandoned the Bolsheviks.

  ‘The Letts were the corner stone and foundation of the Soviet government,’ wrote Hill. ‘They guarded the Kremlin, gold stock and the munitions.’ They also occupied many other positions of consequence. ‘At the head of the Extraordinary Commissions [Cheka], the prisons, the banks and the railroads were Letts.’

  Essentially, though, Reilly was allowing his enthusiasm to cloud his judgement. It was one thing for the Latvians to talk of withdrawing their support for the Bolshevik regime – quite another for them to take up arms and overthrow it. Still, the conversation with Smidchen and Berzin had rekindled Reilly’s dream of being a second Napoleon.

  ‘A Corsican lieutenant of artillery trod out the embers of the French Revolution,’ he wrote. ‘Surely a British espionage agent with so many factors on his side could make himself master of Moscow?’ After discussing matters with Hill, he returned to Lockhart’s apartment in order to talk about the practicalities of organising a coup d’état.