by Giles Milton
‘To my bewilderment, the cover did not open, until, passing my finger accidentally along what I thought was the edge of the pages, the front suddenly flew open of itself, disclosing a box.’
Dukes almost dropped the volume in astonishment. As he clutched it to prevent it falling from his hands, a sheet of paper slipped out. ‘I picked it up hastily and glanced at it. It was headed Kriegsministerium, Berlin, had the German Imperial arms imprinted on it and was covered with minute handwriting in German.’
Dukes hastily stuffed it back into the box and replaced the book on the shelf. He did so in the nick of time, for the colonel re-entered the room at that very moment. ‘A – the – er – Chief is not in,’ he told Dukes. ‘But you may see him tomorrow.’
He then proceeded to chat about his little library, informing him that the only volume of value was a book on Cardinal Richelieu. It was directly above Henry Esmond and Dukes warily pulled it from the shelf ‘expecting something uncommon to occur, but it was only a musty old volume in French with torn leaves and soiled pages.’
Dukes returned to the building for a third time on the following day and was ushered back to the colonel’s room. The colonel was keen to talk more about his book collection, telling Dukes that he was particularly proud of his Thackeray volumes. He asked him if he would care to look at them.
‘I looked at the colonel very hard, but his face was a mask . . . I rose quietly and took down Henry Esmond, which was in exactly the same place as it had been the day before. To my utter confusion, it opened quite naturally and I found in my hands nothing more than an edition de luxe printed on Indian paper and profusely illustrated.’
Dukes was utterly mystified. There was no other copy of Henry Esmond and the volume of Cardinal Richelieu stood directly above it, as it had done on the previous day. ‘ “It’s a beautiful edition,” he repeated, as if wearily. “Now, if you are ready, we will go and see – er – the Chief.” ’
Dukes was led through a maze of corridors and passages until he was totally confused as to where he was. ‘From the suddenness with which the angle of view changed, I concluded that in reality we were simply gyrating in one very limited space, and when suddenly we entered a spacious study – the sanctum of “er – the Chief” – I had an irresistible sentiment that we had moved only a few yards.’
Dukes still had no clue as to Cumming’s identity and was unsure as to how he should introduce himself. The colonel knocked and then opened the door. ‘From the threshold, the room seemed bathed in semi-obscurity,’ wrote Dukes. ‘The writing desk was so placed with the window behind it that on entering, everything appeared only in silhouette.’
In the long silence that followed, he was able to make a brief survey of the room. ‘A row of half-a-dozen extending telephones stood at the left of a big desk littered with papers. On a side table were numerous maps and drawings, with models of aeroplanes, submarines and mechanical devices, while a row of bottles of various colours and a distilling outfit with a rack of test tubes bore witness to chemical experiments and operations.’
Dukes was not at liberty to name Cumming in his memoirs, for C’s identity was at that time still a closely guarded secret. ‘I may not describe him,’ he wrote, ‘nor mention even one of his twenty-odd names.’ Yet he managed to convey the aura with which Cumming liked to cloak himself.
‘In silhouette I saw myself motioned to a chair. The Chief wrote for a moment then suddenly turned with the unexpected remark, “So, I understand you want to go back to Soviet Russia, do you?” as if it had been my own suggestion.’
Cumming proceeded to brief Dukes on what he would be required to do once he was back inside Russia. He was to travel alone and would be expected to create his own network of couriers to smuggle out his reports.
‘ “Don’t go and get killed,” said the Chief in conclusion, smiling. “You will put him through the ciphers,” he added to the colonel, “and take him to the laboratory to learn the inks and all that.” ’
It was the end of the meeting. Dukes was escorted back out of the room and given a brief training in codes and secret inks. Three weeks later, he was on his way back to Soviet Russia.
Paul Dukes was not the only new recruit to Cumming’s revamped Russian network. For the previous two years, Arthur Ransome had been passing information to the Secret Intelligence Service, although always in an unofficial capacity. Now, that was about to change. Ransome was an obvious candidate to be sent back to Soviet Russia as an officially employed spy.
There were, however, problems with his appointment. Ransome’s close personal friendship with the Bolshevik leaders and his intimate relationship with Trotsky’s secretary had made him a suspect person. The publication of his pamphlet, On Behalf of Russia: An Open Letter to America had hardly helped matters. It was an attempt to reconcile the American government to the new political reality inside Russia. Its tone, similar to that of his newspaper despatches, particularly offended officers from MI5.
‘His articles have been, I consider, most detrimental,’ wrote one of those officers, ‘as he has frequently applauded the Bolshevik Government and one is forced to the conclusion that he has become a Bolshevik himself.’
The head of Military Intelligence, William Thwaites, also mistrusted Ransome, labelling him ‘a Bolshevik agent’. He said that his articles were ‘nothing but Bolshevik propaganda’ and added: ‘personally, I cannot understand the Daily News or any other paper being prepared to pay for the rubbish he telegraphs.’
Matters would eventually reach a head. The editor of the Daily News, A.G. Gardiner, had also become increasingly irritated by Ransome’s articles. He told colleagues that his erstwhile correspondent had ‘gone native’ and decided to recall him from his current base in Stockholm.
There was a swift response when this news reached Whitehall Court. A senior member of Cumming’s team paid a visit to Gardiner and quietly informed him that it was essential for Ransome to remain at his post. His work was so vital to British interests that the Secret Intelligence Service offered to cover all his costs.
Officers from MI5 were also warned to stop attacking Ransome. ‘We expect to get a lot of most valuable stuff from him,’ they were told. ‘It is hoped that you will see your way, so to speak, to leave him alone for a bit and give him a chance.’
Ransome’s rehabilitation was facilitated by Robert Bruce Lockhart. After his expulsion from Russia, Lockhart had met up with Ransome in Stockholm. He took the opportunity to introduce him to Clifford Sharp, who was working for Cumming’s Stockholm bureau under the acronym S8.
Lockhart held Ransome in high esteem, having become friends with him when the two of them were living at the Elite Hotel in Moscow. He told Sharp that Ransome ‘was on excellent terms with the Bolsheviks and frequently brought us information of the greatest value.’
He also dismissed suggestions that he was not to be trusted and showed considerable insight in appreciating Ransome for what he was: a radical thinker with a sentimental streak.
‘[He] was a Don Quixote with a walrus moustache,’ he wrote, ‘a sentimentalist who could always be relied upon to champion the underdog, and a visionary whose imagination had been fired by the revolution.’
Lockhart was infuriated by those who claimed that Ransome was unpatriotic: ‘I championed him resolutely against the secret service idiots who later tried to denounce him as a Bolshevik agent.’
George Hill joined Lockhart in testifying to Ransome’s trustworthiness. ‘He was extremely well informed, intimate with the Bolsheviks and masterly in summing up a situation,’ he said.
Hill had also spent time at the Elite Hotel and had at one point even shared a bathroom with Ransome. ‘Our profoundest discussions and most heated arguments took place when Ransome was sitting in the bath and I wandering up and down my room dressing,’ he recalled.
Ransome hated losing their verbal sparring matches. ‘Sometimes, when I had the better of an argument and his feelings were more than usually outraged, he woul
d jump out of the water and beat himself dry like an angry gorilla.’
Ransome would then disappear and Hill would not see him for two or three days. ‘Then we would meet and grin at each other, I would ask after the pet snake which lived in a large cigar box in his room, and the following morning he would come in as usual and we would begin arguing again, the best of friends.’
Clifford Sharp heard enough about Ransome to be convinced that he could be trusted. ‘[He] may be regarded as absolutely honest,’ he wrote in a report to London. ‘His reports about conditions in Russia may be relied upon absolutely with only the proviso that his view tends to be coloured by his personal sympathies.’
Cumming’s Stockholm bureau chief, John Scale, had also changed his opinion of Ransome. He conceded that he had been ‘badly handled’ and informed London that ‘he is quite loyal and willing to help by giving information, and that this appearance of working against us is due to his friendship with the Bolshevik leaders, not by any means to any sympathy with the regime, which the Terror had made him detest.’
This was true enough. In a private letter to his mother, Ransome admitted that although he enjoyed the company of a handful of senior Bolsheviks – men like Karl Radek – the rest were ‘a pig-headed, narrow-minded set of energetic lunatics, energetic as if possessed by seven devils apiece.’
Cumming had heard enough to believe that Ransome could be trusted and now formally enrolled him on his books, giving him the acronym ST76. There remained one logistical problem: how to get him and Shelepina back into Russia. Both had fled the country just before the Allied intervention and were unlikely to be granted permission to return.
Two events saved the day. The first was a widely reported speech given by Lockhart, quite possibly at the behest of the Secret Intelligence Service. Lockhart publicly denounced Ransome’s journalism as erratic and untrustworthy.
The second, more dramatic, event was orchestrated by John Scale. He persuaded the Swedish authorities to expel Ransome and Shelepina from the country, along with eleven others, on the grounds that they were revolutionary Bolsheviks.
These two developments were enough to convince the regime in Moscow that Ransome could still be trusted. Within weeks he was on a boat bound for Petrograd, travelling legitimately under his own name. But to Cumming’s team in London, he was now Agent ST76.
CHAPTER TWELVE
TOXIC THREAT
In the great southern underbelly of Soviet Russia, Frederick Bailey was still living an undercover double life disguised as Andrei Kekechi, an Austrian chef. He had to tread with care for he was a wanted man with a price on his head. Anyone found harbouring him risked being shot.
The authorities were so desperate to catch Bailey that they assigned agents from both the Cheka and the counter-espionage department to his case. ‘Some amusement was caused when the counter-espionage spies arrested the Inquiry Commission [Cheka] spies on suspicion of being enemy agents,’ wrote Bailey.
His most important task was to gather intelligence on the threat that Tashkent’s Moscow-backed regime posed to British India. He also needed to discover the extent of Bolshevik rule in the bleak plains and mountain ranges of Russian Central Asia.
He soon learned that not all of Turkestan had fallen to the Bolsheviks. Little islands of resistance remained and these were becoming rallying points for all who opposed Lenin’s regime. The caravan cities of Bokhara and Khiva remained hostile, as did the remote Ferghana Valley.
But the independence of such places was looking shaky. Bailey knew that if these little bastions fell to the Bolsheviks, then Afghanistan and Chinese Turkestan would be likely to follow suit. If so, Lenin’s realm would extend to the gates of India.
Bailey tried to travel to one of these enclaves but it proved well-nigh impossible. All of the routes were controlled by forces loyal to the Bolsheviks. This was a blow, but there was far worse to come. On his way back to Tashkent, he lost his balance in the deep snow and plunged more than two hundred feet down the side of a mountain, smashing his leg on a rocky outcrop and severely dislocating his knee. Only a large dose of self-administered opium enabled him to bear the excruciating pain.
‘The accident upset all my plans,’ he wrote from his temporary refuge in a mountain cave. As the snow stacked up against the vertical peaks that encircled him, he could do nothing but gaze helplessly at the gunmetal sky. He was to be out of action for several months.
Only at this point did the dangers of being a lone operator become acutely apparent. Unlike Mansfield Cumming’s agents, who were rarely more than two days’ journey from the Russian border with Finland, Bailey was hundreds of miles from safety. Worse still, he was entirely without backup or support. His life would have been in grave danger in the aftermath of the accident had it not been for a group of local tribesmen who protected him and brought him food.
Back in England, Bailey’s elderly mother, Florence, was growing increasingly alarmed by the lack of news from her intrepid son. She had no idea why he had been sent to Tashkent and nor did she know how long he was to be away. The only certainty was that he was engaged in an operation that entailed great danger.
She had last heard from him in September, when she received an unsigned letter containing the cryptic lines: ‘Nothing I can write, but things are pretty interesting for us.’ This did little to reassure Florence. ‘When we know what that word implies these days,’ she wrote to John Shuckburgh, Secretary to the Political Department of the India Office, ‘you will scarcely wonder at my anxiety. He has been in many a tight hole and extricated himself, but I fear circumstances must be against him now.’
Shuckburgh could say little to put Mrs Bailey’s mind at rest. A wire transmission from Kashgar revealed that Bailey had disappeared without trace. The only good news was that he seemed to have escaped capture.
‘Had anything untoward happened . . .’ the wire read, ‘some rumour of it would almost certainly have reached us by now and [the] probability is that he is in hiding.’
Mrs Bailey was right to be concerned for her son. Although Bailey’s shattered knee eventually healed, his return to Tashkent was thwarted by a brutal anti-Bolshevik uprising. In a report that he managed to send to Percy Etherton, he described how the rebellion was crushed amid scenes of grotesque violence. The renegades were arrested by Bolshevik soldiers, stripped naked and shot in cold blood.
‘Some of the Red Guards were drunk and missed or wounded their victims, who had to wait until someone finished them off, usually with a bayonet.’ One man bragged of having slaughtered more than 750 rebels.
Bailey eventually smuggled himself back into Tashkent, only to find himself with another problem. For months he had been living under the identity of an Austrian named Andre Kekeshi. He had even been able to acquire identity papers bearing Kekeshi’s name; papers that had seen him through several sticky situations.
‘I had always imagined that Kekeshi must have been one of the many thousands of prisoners of war who had died,’ wrote Bailey. But now, on his return to Tashkent, he discovered that Kekeshi ‘was very much alive and was incommoded by the absence of his passport which he had lent to a friend for a short time.’
Bailey was fortunate in acquiring a new set of papers that had formerly belonged to a Romanian soldier named Georgi Chuka. He disposed of his Austrian uniform and kitted himself out with civilian clothes. ‘I also obtained a pair of plain (non-magnifying) pince-nez as a further disguise,’ he wrote. These, together with his bushy beard, made him look convincingly Romanian.
Even so, he often found himself in a tight corner. He was lodging with a Tashkent landlord who kept asking him questions about his assumed homeland. ‘If we had a melon on the table, I was asked if such things grew in Romania. If we had fish for dinner, I was asked about fish in Romania.’ Bailey derived some amusement from inventing answers, ‘knowing full well that what I said would be soon forgotten.’
Frederick Bailey’s return to Tashkent coincided with two connected events that w
ere to prove of immense political significance. These events were not only destined to affect Central Asia; they would also send shockwaves right around the globe.
In March, the railway line to Moscow was finally reopened, enabling a direct connection between Tashkent and the Russian capital for the first time since the revolution. Among the first people to arrive from Moscow was a team of hardline Bolshevik commissars, determined to bring order to unruly Turkestan.
They also brought a three-point plan for revolutionary action. This plan called for aggressive propaganda against British India, the establishment of agents inside the Raj and the organisation of crack military units. Turkestan was called to create ‘special battalions from among the Russian Muslims in order to render active assistance to the East in its struggle against the British imperialists.’
Lenin sent a personal letter of support to the Tashkent commissars. He was intent on starting a whole new round of the Great Game, the struggle for control of Central Asia, only this time the goal was to spark violent revolution right across the East.
‘Cossacks’ spears appearing on the Himalayan summits were Britain’s nightmare in the past,’ declared an official Bolshevik document published at the time. ‘Now, these will be the spears of Russian proletarian Muslims.’
Bailey learned of the arrival of the Bolshevik commissars within hours of them entering Tashkent. He also heard news that they were accompanied by a small band of Indian revolutionaries.
The threat to the Raj from home-grown revolutionaries was nothing new. For almost a decade, Mansfield Cumming had been working closely with Indian Political Intelligence on this very danger. His agents in New York, Berlin and elsewhere had been keeping close tabs on these men, monitoring their movements and intercepting their mail.
