by Giles Milton
‘I certainly cannot prevent you from breaking the seal,’ he said, ‘but I would not care to be the man who had done it when the news reaches the House of Commons and they protest to Moscow.’
After an animated discussion, Bailey eventually agreed to open the envelope on the condition that he would be set free if the promised information about Germany was contained within. His captors agreed to this and watched intently as Bailey prised off the impressive lump of red sealing wax. ‘I rather feared I had overdone the seal,’ he later wrote.
He read the relevant sentences about German backing for the anti-Bolshevik uprising and then gave his captors time to consider the information. They were astonished by the contents and not a little perplexed. Unaware that Bailey had written the letter with the express purpose of tricking them, they confessed their shock at Germany’s involvement in the anti-Bolshevik movement. After discussing the contents of Bailey’s letter among themselves, they withdrew all their accusations. ‘Voi svobodni!’ they shouted. ‘You are free.’
Bailey had had a lucky escape. The incident had been an unpleasant one and he had come within a whisker of being imprisoned. But he remained under suspicion and now had six spies appointed to monitor his every move.
His position was rendered more precarious by the fact that the rule of law in Tashkent had almost completely broken down. ‘Even if I were not executed by the government,’ wrote Bailey, ‘there was always the possibility of soldiers (drunk or sober) taking the matter into their own hands.’
He had long been toying with the idea of going underground. Now, he felt the moment was fast approaching. He was lunching with Roger Tredwell when he was handed a secret message informing him that he was to be arrested once again, along with a number of suspected agitators. The message ended with the sentence: ‘For Bailey, the position is especially dangerous and shooting is not out of the question.’
‘This was not a nice dish to be served up at lunch,’ wrote Bailey.
He had already made preparations for safe accommodation in the event of having to disappear. Now, he burned all his private papers and concealed his field glasses, telescope and camera. He then prepared his new clothes, an Austrian jacket and kepi, before taking them to a house that he knew to be safe. It was a terraced building with a long row of adjoining gardens at the back.
‘My plan was to enter the house in the usual unsuspicious way, to change with great rapidity, to run through the gardens behind, and to come out into the street further down in such a short time that, even if the six spies were sufficiently wide awake, they could not suspect that an Austrian walking out of a house some way down the street was the man they were watching, whom they had just seen walk into another house, dressed entirely differently.’
The success of his plan was to be entirely dependent on speed. As he entered the first property, he slammed the door behind him, aware that there was not a moment to be lost. ‘I tore off my overcoat, pulled on the Austrian tunic and kepi . . . wrapped my overcoat round the civilian hat . . . [and] dashed out into the garden.’ Less than a minute later, he emerged from a house at the far end of the terrace.
In the time that he took to change his costume, Frederick Bailey had ceased to exist. He now had a completely new identity and would henceforth answer to the name of Andre Kekeshi, an Austrian prisoner of war and a cook by profession.
‘I now had to adopt in every way I could think of the habits and manners of an Austrian prisoner,’ wrote Bailey. He remembered the advice that Richard Hanney had been given in The Thirty-Nine Steps: to melt into the background and become nothing more than a face in the crowd.
Yet he found it a disquieting experience to live as an underground fugitive. ‘On my disappearance, the town was searched for me. Notices were placarded in the streets of the town and in every country village and railway station, not only offering a reward for my arrest . . . but also threatening with death and confiscation of property . . . anyone who helped or harboured me in any way.’
Bailey knew that he was now on his own. Like Sidney Reilly and George Hill, he would henceforth be entirely reliant on his own wits.
CHAPTER TEN
THE PLOT THICKENS
Sidney Reilly was still in Petrograd when events turned sour. His plan to overthrow the Bolshevik Government had spun wildly out of control and he knew he would need his wits about him if he was to keep one step ahead of the Cheka.
He first realised that something was seriously awry when Captain Cromie, naval attaché at the British Embassy, failed to turn up to a secret rendezvous on the afternoon of 31 August. ‘Not like Cromie to be unpunctual,’ observed Reilly.
After waiting for another fifteen minutes at the pre-agreed location, he decided to make his way towards the embassy. It was ‘a dangerous move’ – for he risked being searched – ‘but I had brought it off successfully before.’
He turned into Vlademirovsky Prospect, only to be confronted by a group of men and women running towards him in panic. ‘They dived into doorways, into side-streets everywhere.’
Reilly was perplexed as to what was happening. A military car sped past, filled with Red Army soldiers. It was heading in the opposite direction to the crowd, racing towards the embassy. Reilly quickened his pace as he reached the end of Vlademirovsky Prospect. As he turned the corner, he immediately realised that something was seriously wrong.
‘The Embassy door had been battered off its hinges. The Embassy flag had been torn down. The Embassy had been carried by storm.’
On the pavement outside there were several bloodstained corpses. Reilly glanced at them and noticed that they were not English. They were Russians, Bolsheviks, who he presumed to have been killed while storming the building.
It was to be some hours before Reilly discovered the grim details of what had taken place. Others had been rather closer to the action. Nathalie Bucknell, wife of one of the few remaining staff at the embassy, was in the passport office on the ground floor when she heard the crack of gunshots coming from upstairs. It was exactly 4.50 p.m. She poked her head into the entrance hall, only to hear more intense shooting and ‘terrible screams’. She was as frightened as she was puzzled; she had not heard any soldiers entering the building.
The embassy porter crept into the hall and peered nervously up the stairwell. He motioned for her to take cover. She did so just in time. As she crouched in the small lobby adjoining the hall, a group of men could be heard careering down the grandiose staircase. At its head was Captain Cromie, wildly firing his revolver. Behind him, and in hot pursuit, were Red Guards. They too were firing their guns.
Nathalie sank to her knees in fear. There was a constant crackle of gunfire as the shoot-out intensified and bullets began to ricochet off the marble walls and columns. She peeked through the keyhole just as one of the bullets hit its target. ‘Captain Cromie fell backwards on the last step.’ He was seriously wounded and clearly in need of urgent medical attention.
The Red Guards dashed into the street, seemingly confused by the lack of other gunmen. As they did so, a second group of soldiers came clattering down the stairs, equally dazed by the shoot-out. One of them paused for a moment to kick Cromie’s half-conscious body.
Nathalie could hear the sound of yet more soldiers on the first floor of the building; they were bawling to the embassy staff who had hid themselves away in fear of their lives. ‘Come out of the room, come out of the room, or we will open machine-gun fire on you.’
Nathalie was joined by her friend Miss Blumberg, who had taken refuge in one of the downstairs rooms. Together, the two women gingerly stepped into the hall in order to see what they could do for Captain Cromie. He was smeared with blood. ‘Bending over him, [we] saw his eyelids and lips move very faintly.’
As Miss Blumberg attempted to speak to him, a group of Red Guards reappeared and started shouting insults. ‘Pointing their revolvers at her, [they] called very rudely: “Come upstairs immediately or we will fire at you.” ’
The two
women did not dare to argue; they were led up to the first floor with revolvers poking into their bodies. Nathalie saw graphic evidence of the shoot-out that had taken place. On the floor, lying in a pool of rapidly congealing blood, was the corpse of a Red Guard.
The two ladies were jostled into the Chancery room where Ernest Boyce, head of Mansfield Cumming’s operations inside Russia, was being held at gunpoint. ‘At that moment, the Red Commissary entered and told everyone that they must keep quiet with their hands up and that the Consulate was taken by the Red Guards.’
Miss Blumberg bravely asked if she could give the dying Cromie a glass of water. Her request was brusquely denied by the soldiers. The chaplain was treated with equal contempt when he asked to attend to the semi-conscious English captain.
The rest of the British staff were now brought into the Chancery and told that they were being held as prisoners. Most were still reeling from what had taken place. They knew of the assassination of Uritsky and of the attempt on Lenin’s life, but only Ernest Boyce was aware of Reilly’s planned coup and even he did not know that it had been exposed by the Cheka.
‘The room was now full of soldiers and sailors who were most brutal in their behaviour,’ wrote Nathalie. The porter was led through each room with a revolver pressed to his head. The guards said they would shoot him if he did not unlock every door and cupboard.
The hostages were held for several hours while the embassy was stripped of everything of value, including all its archives and secret documents. The staff were then marched down the stairs, passing the now-dead Captain Cromie, and taken to a nearby building. For the next fifteen hours, they were held prisoner and interrogated, one by one.
Nathalie overheard a soldier saying that five of them, including Boyce, were going to be shot. But the executions were inexplicably annuled before they could be carried out. At 11 a.m. on 1 September, all of the prisoners were informed that they were free to go. Bewildered as to why they were being released, but not daring to ask any questions, they gratefully made their way into the street.
Sidney Reilly’s arrival at the embassy had coincided with the end of the shoot-out and he was unaware of what had taken place. As he stood in Vlademirovsky Prospect he could only guess at what had happened.
He reached inside his pocket and felt for the forged Cheka papers of Sigmund Relinsky, the person he was pretending to be. Then, with characteristic brazenness, he approached one of the Cheka agents who was standing guard at the embassy gates. After showing his card, he asked for information. He was told that the Cheka ‘were endeavouring to find one Sidney Reilly and had actually raided the British Embassy in the hope that he would be there.’
Most men would have fled the country on hearing this news. But not Reilly. Instead of crossing the border into nearby Finland or Sweden, he decided to return to Moscow in order to place himself in the eye of the storm.
Tumultuous events were under way in the Bolshevik capital and he wanted to be there in order to influence their outcome.
Mansfield Cumming knew nothing of what had taken place in Petrograd. He was as yet unaware of the temporary arrest of Ernest Boyce and nor did he know that his Russian operations were hanging by a thread. It was to be some days before he learned that all of his senior agents had been compromised by Reilly’s attempted coup d’état.
In Moscow, there was an unnatural calm for almost twenty-four hours. As in Petrograd, all of the English prisoners had been released without explanation. For the time being, Lockhart was still a free man. But on 2 September, the Bolshevik newspapers splashed their front pages with news of a most dramatic nature. The government had uncovered an Anglo-French conspiracy that involved undercover agents and diplomats: its goal was nothing short of the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime. Reilly and a number of others were named as organisers of the conspiracy.
There was worse to come. A second bulletin revealed a number of key details about the plot. ‘Ten million roubles assigned for this purpose,’ it read. ‘Lockhart entered into personal contact with the commander of a large Lettish unit . . . should the plot succeed, Lockhart promised in the name of the Allies immediate restoration of a free Latvia.’
Each new bulletin contained new and more damning revelations. ‘Anglo-French capitalists, through hired assassins, organised terrorist attempts on representatives of the Soviet.’ The plotters now stood accused of the murder of Uritsky and the attempted assassination of Lenin.
Most alarming, for Lockhart at least, was the fact that he was being named as the organiser of the plot. The Bolshevik-controlled newspaper, Pravda, labelled him ‘a murderer and conspirator against the Russian Soviet government’. They then gave a detailed description of his alleged crimes.
‘A fine diplomatic representative organising murder and rebellion on the territory of the country where he is representative. This bandit in dinner jacket and gloves tries to hide like a cat at large, under the shelter of international law and ethics. No, Mr Lockhart, this will not save you. The workmen and the poorer peasants of Russia are not idiots enough to defend murderers, robbers and highwaymen.’
Lockhart remained in his post, even though the accusations against him grew ever more damning. He spent his daytime hours studying the newspaper stories being published about him.
‘We read the full tale of our iniquities in the Bolshevik Press,’ he later wrote, ‘which excelled itself in a fantastic account of a so-called “Lockhart plot”.’ He said that the entire story ‘read like a fairy tale’, but he must already have guessed that the ending would not be a happy one.
Lockhart’s situation was rendered more complicated by the fact that his love affair with Moura was public knowledge. He had flaunted her at dinners, balls and gypsy dances in the countryside. When news of the so-called Lockhart plot reached the Cheka, the first thing they did was arrest Moura.
Lockhart was distraught at the thought that he had been the cause of her incarceration. On 4 September, after another day of sensational stories in the press, he could bear it no longer. He decided to appeal to the Assistant Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Lev Karakhan, and beg for Moura’s release.
Karakhan listened patiently to Lockhart’s pleas, as well as to his vigorous denials of the stories printed in the Bolshevik press. ‘Now you know what we have to put up with from your newspapers,’ he said.
He made it abundantly clear that he would not be able to secure Moura’s freedom, whereupon Lockhart decided to take his complaint to Yakov Peters, Deputy Chairman of the Cheka. In doing so, he was placing himself in the lion’s den: it was Peters who had interrogated him just four days earlier.
Lockhart strode boldly up to the front entrance of the Loubianka and knocked at the door. When the guards asked the reason for his visit, he demanded an immediate meeting with Peters. This caused ‘some excitement and much whispering among the guards in the entrance hall.’
Peters allowed himself a private chuckle when he learned that Lockhart had come to see him and immediately invited him to step into his office. ‘I tackled him at once about Moura,’ wrote Lockhart. ‘I told him that the conspiracy story was a fake and that he knew it. Even if there were a grain of truth in it, Moura knew nothing about it.’
Peters listened with great patience and promised to do whatever he could. He then stared Lockhart in the eye and delivered his bombshell. ‘ “You have saved me some trouble,” he said. “My men have been looking for you for the last hour. I have a warrant for your arrest. Your French and English colleagues are already under lock and key.” ’
Peters called for his guards and Lockhart was led away to the cells. It was not long before he learned that he stood accused of assassination, attempted murder and planning a coup d’état. All three crimes carried the death sentence.
The Cheka had been extremely busy in the days that preceded Lockhart’s arrest. Within hours of the attempt on Lenin’s life, their operatives instigated mass arrests right across the capital.
Among those arrested was Eliz
aveta Otten, with whom Reilly had only recently started a love affair. She also happened to be one of his chief couriers. News of her arrest alarmed Reilly, for she was privy to countless secrets.
The Cheka officers immediately began interrogating her, bombarding her with questions. She played innocent, professing ignorance as to Reilly’s real identity. When the officers told her that her lover was an English spy, and a most dangerous one at that, she feigned indignation and shock.
In a petition she later wrote to the Red Cross Committee for the Aid of Political Prisoners, she said that she had been horrified to discover that Reilly was not who he claimed to be.
‘I discovered that Reilly had been foully deceiving me for his own political purposes,’ she wrote, ‘[and] taking advantage of my exclusively good attitude to him.’
Given that she had been working as his chief courier, her words must be read with a large dose of salt.
The Cheka officers were still interrogating Elizaveta when young Vi, one of George Hill’s agents, happened to arrive at her apartment. ‘The door was opened and Vi found herself covered with the revolver of a Cheka agent.’ So wrote Hill, who learned of the incident later that day.
Despite her youth, Vi remained remarkably cool under pressure. She pretended not to know Elizaveta and gained herself time to think by bursting into floods of tears. She told the officers ‘that she had simply brought a blouse for the lady which she had made herself.’
She was nevertheless interrogated and asked scores of questions as to whom she knew and why she knew them. ‘The Chekists failed to break down her story, though one of them, holding a revolver to her head, said she was lying.’
Unable to uncover anything incriminating, the officers eventually told her that she was free to go.
It was as she turned to leave that disaster struck. Sidney Reilly’s most important agent, Maria Friede, now arrived unexpectedly at the flat. It was most unfortunate that her visit coincided with the Cheka raid. She, after all, had supplied Reilly with a large number of military secrets obtained from her brother, Colonel Friede. Indeed, she had come to the apartment in order to drop off yet another batch of compromising documents.
