by Giles Milton
Lockhart would later seek to distance himself from the entire plot. He would also claim that he and Consul Grenard both tried to discourage Reilly. ‘[He] was warned specifically to have nothing to do with so dangerous and doubtful a move.’
But Lockhart’s back-pedalling is at variance with a top-secret memorandum that he submitted to the British Government at the time. This revealed that he was implicated in the early stages of the coup, along with Reilly, and that he was also personally involved in raising finances.
On 17 August, Reilly met with Colonel Berzin at the Tramble Café on Tverskoy Boulevard. It was always busy, making it a perfect place to discuss the proposed coup without risk of being overheard. Once Reilly was satisfied that Berzin could be trusted, he set out his plans for destroying the Bolshevik regime.
This time Colonel Berzin raised no questions as Reilly unveiled his plot. Indeed, he assured him that Latvian support would be forthcoming. ‘The Letts were full of disgusted loathing for their masters,’ he told Reilly, ‘whom they served only as a pis aller (last resort).’
Reilly could scarcely have wished for more. To show that he meant business, he handed Colonel Berzin the huge sum of 700,000 roubles and promised that there would be plenty more to come. Much of the money had been collected by Lockhart, who had received 200,000 roubles from the Americans and the rest from the French.
By the third week of August, Reilly was having regular meetings with Colonel Berzin, George Hill and Ernest Boyce, who remained Mansfield Cumming’s most senior operative in Moscow. Boyce was of a far more cautious nature than Reilly and remained unconvinced by the proposed coup. His agents had been sent to Moscow to gather secret intelligence, not to overthrow the regime. He told Reilly that he considered ‘the whole thing was extremely risky’.
Reilly refused to backtrack. After much persistence, he wrung a lukewarm endorsement from Boyce. He told Reilly ‘it was worth trying’, but stressed that it was a matter of such extreme sensitivity that it must remain a private undertaking. It was to be Reilly’s coup and the British Secret Service was not to be involved in any way.
‘The failure of the plan,’ he said, ‘would drop entirely on Reilly’s neck.’ With these words, he handed over to Reilly full operational responsibility for everything that was to follow.
Sidney Reilly now set to work on the detailed planning of the coup. It was to depend almost entirely on the Latvian soldiers based in Moscow. They were to arrest Lenin and Trotsky during a meeting of the Congress of Soviets, when all of the Bolshevik leadership would be gathered under one roof.
Once their downfall had been broadcast to the country, Reilly wanted ‘to parade them publicly through the streets, so that everybody should be aware that the tyrants of Russia were prisoners.’
Reilly also intended to convene a new government within hours of Lenin and Trotsky being seized. This would lessen the risk of a dangerous vacuum with no one in control.
One of his friends, General Judenitch, was to step in initially and hold the reins of power. There were to be senior positions for other close acquaintances: Grammatikov was to become Minister of the Interior and a former business associate by the name of Tchubersky was to be Minister of Communications. These three men would be given the authority ‘to suppress the anarchy which would almost inevitably follow such a revolution.’
Reilly met with Colonel Berzin on several more occasions, handing over two further payments totalling 500,000 roubles. The two men agreed on most elements of the coup d’état, although Berzin was strongly against Reilly’s idea of parading Lenin and Trotsky through the streets. This, he said, was theatrical nonsense. He insisted that the two men should be executed, arguing that ‘their marvellous oratorical powers would so act on the psychology of the men who went to arrest them that it was advisable not to risk it.’
Reilly discussed the matter further with George Hill and the two of them decided to stick to the plan of putting Lenin and Trotsky on public display. ‘The policy should be not to make martyrs of the leaders,’ said Reilly, ‘but to hold them up to ridicule before the world.’ It was a rare moment of weakness in one who was usually so decisive.
On 25 August, Reilly attended an important meeting at the American Consulate in Moscow. It was convened in order that the intelligence agents of America and France could be informed of what was due to take place. The head of American operations in Russia was Xenophon Kalamatiano, a flamboyant businessman-turned-adventurer with a reputation for intrigue. France’s principal agent was Colonel Henri de Vertement.
‘I had an uneasy feeling,’ wrote Reilly, ‘such as one frequently gets in dangerous situations, when one’s nerves are constantly on the “qui vive”, that I should keep myself to myself and not go to the meeting which had already been arranged for me. But in the end, I allowed myself to be persuaded.’
There were two items on the agenda: Reilly’s planned coup d’état and a possible campaign of mass sabotage. The meeting also provided an opportunity for the three agents – Reilly, Kalamatiano and Colonel de Vertement – to discuss future joint projects.
Reilly chatted with his American and French counterparts. Then, to his surprise, another invitee arrived at the consulate. It was René Marchand, the Moscow correspondent of Le Figaro, and a man whom Consul Grenard described as a secret agent of the French government.
‘And here it was, that the uneasy feeling, which had been haunting me all along, became acute,’ wrote Reilly. A sixth sense was warning him that Marchand could not be trusted.
His suspicions increased still further during the course of the discussions. At one point, Reilly discreetly drew Colonel de Vertement into an adjoining room in order to discuss some important details of the coup d’état. ‘The room in which we were [standing] was long and badly lighted. In the midst of an animated discussion, I suddenly became aware that Marchand had crept into the room and no doubt had already overheard a large part of our conversation.’
In spite of Reilly’s concerns about Marchand, the planning of the coup continued in the days that followed the meeting at the consulate. Colonel Berzin assured Reilly that his most loyal Latvian troops would be guarding the theatre on the day of the Congress of Soviets.
‘At a given signal, the soldiers were to close the doors and cover all the people in the Theatre with their rifles, while a selected detachment was to secure the persons of Lenin and Trotsky,’ wrote Reilly.
He, meanwhile, would be hiding behind the theatre curtains in order to monitor the unfolding coup. ‘In case there was any hitch in the proceedings,’ he wrote, ‘in case the Soviets showed fight or the Letts proved nervous . . . the other conspirators and myself would carry grenades in our place of concealment behind the curtains.’
There was one last-minute change of plan: Reilly learned that the meeting of the Congress of Soviets had been unexpectedly postponed until 6 September. This meant that the date of the coup also had to be shifted.
Neither Reilly nor Colonel Berzin was unduly concerned by the postponement. Indeed, it provided Reilly with more time to plan the interim government that was to take control after the overthrow of the Bolsheviks. On 28 August, he left Moscow for Petrograd in order that he might confer with one of his fellow conspirators, Alexander Grammatikov.
It was while Reilly was away from the capital that two unforeseen incidents occurred. The first unwelcome surprise came on 30 August when a young military cadet assassinated Moisei Uritsky, the head of the Petrograd Cheka. He claimed to have been motivated by his disgust at the mass executions ordered by Uritsky. On the same day, a Socialist Revolutionary named Fanya Kaplan shot Lenin as he left a meeting at a Moscow factory. She fired two bullets at point-blank range: one missed Lenin’s heart by less than an inch and the other just failed to penetrate his jugular vein. Although he was not dead, he was severely injured and there was every chance that he would not survive.
It was Grammatikov who broke the news of the shootings to Reilly. After recovering from the initial shock, R
eilly realised that the two incidents had changed everything. There was certain to be an unleashing of terror on the part of the Bolsheviks in revenge for what had taken place. There would be mass arrests, interrogations and summary executions.
It was obvious that the planned coup would have to be postponed, perhaps indefinitely. This was a great disappointment to Reilly, who had felt tantalisingly close to success. More worrying was the possibility that his fellow plotters would get caught up in the inevitable wave of arrests. If so, they might break down under interrogation and betray the planned coup in order to gain their release. Reilly feared that ‘the danger to ourselves and our friends was imminent.’
He was entirely correct in this assessment. The first person to feel the danger was Robert Bruce Lockhart, 400 miles away in Moscow. At 3.30 a.m. on Saturday 31 August, he was woken by a rough voice ordering him out of bed. ‘As I opened my eyes, I looked up into the steely barrel of a revolver. Some ten men were in my room.’
An indignant Lockhart asked what the hell they were doing. ‘No questions,’ answered one of the men. ‘Get dressed at once. You are to go to Loubianka No 11.’ As Lockhart well knew, this was the infamous headquarters of the Moscow Cheka.
Lockhart realised that something had gone seriously awry with Reilly’s planned coup. As he threw on some clothes, ‘the main body of the invaders began to ransack the flat for compromising documents.’
He and Captain Hicks, with whom he shared his apartment, were then bundled into a car and driven at high speed to the Cheka headquarters. They were led to a small unfurnished cell and locked inside.
After an agonisingly long wait, the door crashed open and two gunmen barged into the room. They pointed at Lockhart, ordered him to stand to his feet and then led him down a long unlit corridor. Eventually they stopped at a door and knocked. A ghostly voice told them to enter. Lockhart found himself in a large room lit by a single desk lamp on a writing table.
‘At the table, with a revolver lying beside the writing pad, was a man, dressed in black trousers and a white Russian shirt.’ His face was sallow and sickly, as if he never saw the light of day. ‘His lips were tightly compressed,’ wrote Lockhart, ‘and, as I entered the room, his eyes fixed me with a steely stare’. It was Yakov Peters, Dzerzhinsky’s deputy at the Cheka.
Lockhart, struggling to keep up a show of bravado, formally protested against his arrest. He remained an accredited diplomat and he expressed his outrage at being treated in such a fashion. Peters did not care to listen. After informing Lockhart of the gravity of the situation in which he found himself, he fired two questions in quick succession. The first was, ‘Do you know the Kaplan woman?’ The second was, ‘Where is Reilly?’
He then added a third question that was even more alarming. He produced the letter that Lockhart had personally written for Colonel Berzin. It provided him with an introduction to General Poole, head of the Allied forces in Northern Russia. ‘Is that your writing?’ snapped Peters.
Lockhart refused to answer and Peters did not press the issue. But he took the opportunity to inform Lockhart that it was ‘a very grave matter’ and one that was certain to have serious ramifications.
After a few more minutes of unpleasantness, Peters rang a bell and ordered the gunmen to escort Lockhart back to his cell, where Captain Hicks had been waiting anxiously. The two men dared not speak with each other, for they knew that the room was certain to be bugged, but it was obvious to Lockhart that the Bolsheviks were trying to implicate him in the attempt on Lenin’s life.
No less alarming was the mention of Reilly. ‘I guessed,’ wrote Lockhart, ‘that there had been a hitch somewhere and that my two Lettish visitors’ – the two Latvian soldiers – ‘were agents provocateurs.’
Lockhart and Hicks spent the night locked inside their cell. At six in the morning, the door was unlocked and a woman was pushed inside. ‘Her hair was black and her eyes, set in a fixed stare, had great rings under them.’ Lockhart guessed it was Fanya Kaplan. She was executed a few hours later.
At 9 a.m., Yakov Peters entered the room in which the two men were being held. He breezily informed them that they were free to go, offering no explanation as to why they were being released. Lockhart was as perplexed as he was relieved. He could not fathom Peters’ change of heart and would not learn the reason for several hours. In the meantime, he returned home in order to shave and take a bath. He then paid a visit on Herr Oudendyke, a friend who worked at the Dutch Legation, in order to discuss the alarming turn of events.
‘I found him in great agitation,’ wrote Lockhart. ‘There had been a terrible tragedy in St Petersburg.’
It was a tragedy in which Sidney Reilly was dangerously entangled.
CHAPTER NINE
VANISHING TRICK
Two thousand miles from Moscow, in distant Tashkent, Frederick Bailey was finding life increasingly perilous.
The local government faced anti-Bolshevik armies on no fewer than four fronts and it was making the commissars understandably jumpy. The attempted assassination of Lenin had only increased their nervousness. The local press was filled with vitriolic articles about the British.
‘Red Terror and wholesale executions were advocated in revenge for the attempt on Lenin’s life,’ wrote Bailey. ‘Every day, the papers contained bulletins of the temperature, pulse and respiration of Comrade Lenin.’
Bailey’s comrade, Major Blacker, had fallen sick and been permitted to leave the country – a rare act of clemency on the part of Tashkent’s revolutionary leaders. Bailey himself was strictly forbidden from returning to India. This was typical of the unpredictability of the authorities. Commissars and ministers changed positions on a weekly basis and everyone seemed to be making policy on a whim.
In Major Blacker’s absence, Bailey’s principal companion became the American consul, Roger Tredwell. He had valiantly remained at his post, even though he was suspected of espionage by the local authorities. Like Bailey, his movements were carefully monitored.
‘The whole of this time we were watched by spies,’ wrote Bailey. ‘Tredwell and I were each honoured with the company of three of these gentlemen. They took rooms opposite the houses we were occupying and spent many hours looking out of the windows in a bored way.’
Bailey found it almost impossible to send information back to British India. Yet he was not entirely without news from the outside world. One morning, he was surprised to be woken by a heavily disguised former soldier of the 11th Bengal Lancers who had been sent from Kashgar in order to make contact. The soldier’s overland journey had been one of such extreme danger that it would not be repeated. He had spent two days in jail and a third in detention, at great risk of being executed. But he had eventually been released and then used considerable guile to smuggle himself into Tashkent without the knowledge of the local authorities.
His return to Kashgar is not recorded by Bailey, but it is almost certain he took with him the dossier of secret intelligence that Bailey had managed to gather. This contained the very first hint of a plot that threatened to engulf the entire region in bloodshed and anarchy. According to Bailey, Moscow’s Assistant Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Lev Karakhan, had ordered the Soviet minister in Kabul to start supplying arms to the Islamic tribes on the North-West Frontier.
This was exactly what was most feared by the government of British India. A Soviet-backed armed rebellion in the volatile region of the Hindu Kush was indeed a serious threat. Unrest would rapidly spread to other areas and the meagre forces of British India would be unable to cope.
Bailey’s most urgent task was to find out how, and where, any rebellion would occur. But this was far from easy. He was daily expecting to be arrested and accused of some trumped-up charge, especially in the days and weeks after the attempt on Lenin’s life. Bailey felt as if he was a pawn in a very dangerous game; a game for which he no longer knew the rules.
All he could do was prepare himself for the inevitable search of his lodgings. ‘I destroyed certai
n papers [and] put my private correspondence into a safe place, leaving a few letters from tradesmen to be found.’
He also concealed an Austrian army uniform that he had only recently acquired: it was to form a part of his disguise if and when he went underground.
Bailey had learned the importance of staying one step ahead of the game. He now planned an elaborate ruse that would help him out of difficulty if ever he came to be arrested by the Cheka. He wrote a letter addressed to the British Government in which he described a huge anti-Bolshevik uprising that he knew was being planned in the mountains to the east of Tashkent.
He revealed that the uprising was intended to destabilise Turkestan’s revolutionary government and added that it was being heavily financed by Germany. ‘This sentence in my letter was to make all the difference to me,’ he confessed when he later wrote about the incident, ‘and probably saved my life.’
The reason why the sentence was so important only became apparent when Bailey was indeed arrested by the Cheka. Accused of involvement in the uprising, he feigned indignation and warned that the British Government would be furious when news of his arrest reached the House of Commons.
It was a throwaway line but a clever one. Many of? Tashkent’s commissars were under the impression that Britain was locked in its own revolutionary struggle between the House of Commons and House of Lords. The last thing they wanted to do was offend the House of Commons, the very body they hoped would soon recognise the Bolshevik Government.
‘I had learnt that in the eyes of the type of man in the employ of the Bolsheviks, the House of Commons was an assembly of riff-raff who were almost Bolsheviks themselves.’
Bailey informed his captors that he had in his possession a sealed letter that he had written to the House of Commons. He said that it contained important information about German support for the anti-Bolshevik uprising. But he refused to open the document on account of the many secret revelations within.
