by Giles Milton
Among those they had been tracking was Abdul Hafiz Mohamed Barkatullah, who had established an Indian government-in-exile in the spring of 1916. Now, Barkatullah pitched up in Tashkent in order to forge closer links with the Bolsheviks.
‘The ideas advanced by the Bolsheviks have already taken root in the Indian masses,’ he told a journalist from Izvestia, ‘and a small spark of active propaganda would be sufficient to set aflame a huge revolutionary fire in middle Asia.’
Bailey learned that the Indian revolutionaries had been given access to Tashkent’s printing presses and were preparing inflammatory propaganda leaflets for distribution inside India. He managed to obtain one of these leaflets and was shocked by the lies that were being peddled. It said that the British had forcibly closed all mosques and Hindu temples, that education had been forbidden to Indians and that slave labour had been reintroduced.
‘The Bolshevik plans for India were to start disturbances by any means possible,’ wrote Bailey. ‘The professed plan in the East was to exploit countries considered ripe for revolution’ – India and Afghanistan – ‘and compel them to adopt Communism.’
Bailey was witness to a most alarming menace; one that was wholly new. The rulers of Bolshevik Russia were intent on forging an alliance with the Islamic tribes of Afghanistan, Chinese Turkestan and the frontier regions of India. Their idea was to bring together Islamic extremists and revolutionary Bolsheviks, thereby creating a highly inflammatory movement that would be capable of engulfing British India.
The scale of their project was not merely local or regional but of global significance. ‘The complete Bolshevism of Asia,’ warned Bailey, ‘was the key to World Revolution.’
Bailey’s most urgent goal was to inform India of the plot that was taking place. But sending information from Tashkent – never easy – had become almost impossible.
‘Road to Kashgar is closed by robbers,’ he wrote in one report that would eventually reach Percy Etherton in Kashgar. ‘I may possibly be able to send occasional messages by wireless and will only try in case of urgency. Please warn stations. Messages will be in my cipher and unsigned.’
Etherton forwarded Bailey’s note to operational headquarters in Simla, adding that all of the recent messages received from Tashkent had been extremely difficult to read. ‘Owing to the faintness of the invisible ink used, portions of the above message are quite illegible, repeated attempts having failed to decipher them.’
Bailey became increasingly inventive in transmitting his messages. One important report was written in invisible ink inside a book of old lithographs of Samarkand. Etherton received a message from a third party alerting him to the fact that the book ‘should be rubbed with ammonia. It contains messages in invisible ink.’
Bailey’s reports were picked up not only by intelligence officers in Simla but also by Mansfield Cumming’s men as well. The Stockholm bureau had a particularly deep reach and its officers were, on occasion, able to transmit news of Bailey’s movements to their colleagues in India.
‘Colonel F M Bailey, Tashkent, sends his best salaams to [Sir Arthur] Hirtzel and [Sir John] Shuckburgh, India Office,’ read one message picked up by Major Scale. ‘He is at present disguised.’
Another memorandum informed the India Office that Bailey was using the key: ‘Where three empires meet’. A third revealed that Bailey was ‘trying to send short code messages interpolated in Bolshevik wireless from Tashkent’. Such messages had to be sent sparingly: Bailey placed himself in considerable danger each time he tried to contact his colleagues.
Frederick Bailey’s work was not only dangerous but also extremely complex. He was attempting to uncover intelligence on a rapidly changing situation that involved people whose movements and communications were by necessity kept secret.
His task was further complicated by an unexpected development that took place in the spring of 1919. The ruler of Afghanistan, Amir Amanullah, declared a holy war against British India. His proclamation of jihad was primarily intended to deflect from domestic difficulties, but this was cold comfort to the poorly armed soldiers guarding the remote North West Frontier of India.
‘Make their hearts tremble with your Islamic war cries,’ shouted the amir in an address to his troops, ‘and destroy them with your flashing swords.’
The rhetoric was fiery, but still it was pretty standard fare. More alarming was the uncompromising decree issued by the Indian revolutionaries in Tashkent. ‘Murder the English wherever you find them, cut the telegraphic lines, destroy the railways lines and the railway bridges and help in all respects the liberating armies.’
The Afghans fought well, seizing several towns inside India and highlighting the extreme weakness of the British forces guarding the mountainous frontier. The first British counter-attack stalled, then failed in the stifling 40 degree heat.
Superior weaponry and the judicious use of Handley Page bombers eventually won the day. The amir’s forces were driven back over the frontier. But the invasion rang warning bells in Simla and led British and Indian intelligence agents to redouble their efforts to intercept the telegraphic transmissions between Moscow and Tashkent.
These intercepted telegraphs shed much light on the alarming new threat that Bailey had witnessed in Tashkent. In the same month as the amir’s invasion, a top-secret message was intercepted while it was being sent from Moscow to Tashkent.
‘Islam is in imminent danger of extinction,’ it warned, ‘and all Mohammedan races who value their religion as well as their own existence as independent peoples should rise and join us in the struggle for world freedom.’
Such a rallying cry would have made for disturbing reading if it had come from the pen of an Islamic ruler. Far more alarming was the fact that it had been written by a Bolshevik commissar. It revealed Moscow’s intention of harnessing radical Islam to its own revolutionary movement.
Shortly afterwards, Tashkent’s government began issuing propaganda sheets calling upon Islamic warriors across Asia to join forces with the Bolsheviks. It urged the Muslim world to launch a violent crusade against British interests.
‘The British are bleeding to death 300 million Indians . . . they have raised to the ground the tomb of the prophet . . . they have converted the Golden Shrine [in Meshed] into a cow-shed.’
Bailey did his best to monitor the negotiations between Moscow, Tashkent and Afghanistan. One of his agents managed to intercept a number of letters between Lenin and the Afghan ruler. In these letters, Lenin proposed the opening of formal and friendly relations between the two countries. What’s more, he also offered military assistance to Afghanistan.
Shortly after this, Bailey witnessed a meeting in Tashkent between Afghan officials and Bolshevik commissars. ‘They are treated royally,’ he wrote, ‘bedecked with flowers and they were received with salutes; afterwards, there was a gala performance at the theatre.’
Bolshevik leaders in Moscow had awoken to the importance of Islam to the revolutionary struggle in Central Asia. Stalin himself addressed a Muslim-Communist congress that had met in Moscow just a few months earlier. He stressed the need to spread revolutionary doctrine into the mosques and madrasahs of the Islamic world. ‘No one can erect a bridge between the West and East as easily and quickly as you can,’ he told the delegates.
In the autumn of 1919, those same delegates met for a second time in Tashkent and consecrated their lives to insurrection. They sent a resolution to Moscow declaring that ‘Soviet Turkestan is becoming a revolutionary school for the whole East. Revolutionaries of neighbouring states are coming to us in droves . . . through them and with their help we are taking all measures for the spread of the Communist idea in the East.’
Frederick Bailey’s work was extremely dangerous and he lived in constant fear of being caught. ‘The danger of arrest was still as great as ever,’ he wrote. ‘It was impossible not to allow at least a few people to know who and where I was, but I kept the circle as small as possible.’
The Moscow
authorities had established a ‘Special Department’ in Tashkent, whose task was to root out spies and traitors. ‘This department posted notices in the streets asking all work people to report at once on the evil doings of the bourgeoisie, speculators, sabotagists and hooligans,’ wrote Bailey. It felt like there were hidden eyes everywhere.
After a long period of no news from Bailey, British Indian officials contacted a Danish Red Cross representative named Captain Brun who was known to have met with him in Tashkent. The captain spoke of his concerns for Bailey’s safety.
‘With my knowledge of his pluck and energy, I hope that he has managed to escape and baffle the energetic pursuit of the government,’ he wrote. ‘But in case they should succeed in finding him, I am afraid his life would be in great danger.’
For some weeks Bailey had been living at the house of an anti-Bolshevik engineer named Andreyev. Now, this lodging became too dangerous. He was helped to find new accommodation by Miss Houston, the indefatigable Irish governess who had remained in Tashkent despite the turmoil.
‘Stand on the corner of Romanovsky and Voronsovsky at five-thirty,’ she told him, ‘and you will see a grey-haired lady coming along from our house direction with a bundle wrapped in a red tablecloth under her arm.’
This was to be his new landlady. ‘She will stop at the Town Hall for a minute and light a cigarette, then go on walking. You must follow; then, when she will go into her house, you pass and afterwards come back and go in yourself.’
Bailey changed his identity on several occasions in order to avoid discovery. But the house-to-house searches that were being daily conducted by the Cheka meant that even his new lodgings had become too dangerous.
‘For a few days, I carried on my old plan of sleeping a single night in different houses,’ he wrote. He travelled light, carrying only a small bundle of clothes, and sought shelter with the few contacts that he knew could be trusted. But this peripatetic life required a large network of safe lodgings. ‘Finding fresh quarters . . . was proving difficult,’ he wrote, ‘[and] for the rest of my time in Tashkent, I flitted from house to house.’
He knew that his days in the city were numbered and that it would soon be time to make his escape.
PART THREE
THE PROFESSIONAL SPY
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MASTER OF DISGUISE
The night was thick with frost and the moon hung low in the sky.
On the banks of the River Sestro, which marked the frontier between Finland and Russia, a lone figure could be seen crouching in the shadows. When he was sure that no one was watching, he slipped into a nearby boat and rowed in silence across the fast-flowing water.
As he jumped out on the opposite bank, he missed the shore and crashed through a sheet of ice, plunging into the freezing water. Dripping and shivering, he pulled himself onto the snowy banks. It was November 1918, and Paul Dukes – Mansfield Cumming’s newest recruit – had just crossed over into Soviet Russia.
Scarcely had he recovered his breath than he heard gunshots. A Red Army border patrol had been disturbed by the crack of breaking ice and the men began firing wildly into the night.
Dukes pushed himself deep into the snow and waited. ‘Finally, all was silent again,’ he later recalled. After spending the rest of the night in the bitter chill, he made his way to the local station at Beloostrov and bought himself a ticket to Petrograd.
The task facing Dukes was a daunting one. Cumming urgently required intelligence on the intentions of the Bolshevik Government. Lenin’s regime was now overtly hostile, that much was clear, but it was not yet known if it had the wherewithal to pursue its goal of creating lasting military alliances in Central Asia and then setting the East on fire.
Cumming also needed information about the Baltic fleet and Red Army, as well as on conditions inside the country. The Bolsheviks were under attack from three separate White armies. British ministers needed to know whether or not these forces should be backed with military hardware and troops.
To fulfil all these tasks was a tall order for one man. Dukes knew he would have to locate anti-Bolshevik insiders in the government commissariats and persuade them to hand over secret documents. If discovered, he – and they – would be shot.
Dukes had learned much from Sidney Reilly about the advantages of having several different aliases. Long before he crossed back into Soviet Russia, he had begun creating a host of false identities. Not for nothing would he later be known as ‘The Man with a Hundred Faces’.
‘To go back as an Englishman was totally out of the question,’ he wrote. ‘I resolved at Archangel to transform myself into a Russian and a Bolshevik.’
He had already switched identity twice on route to Russia, arriving at the Finnish border post as Sergei Ilitch, a Serbian businessman. Now, he changed into the clothes he had bought in Vyborg’s bustling flea market: ‘a Russian rubashka (shirt), black leather breeches, black knee boots, a shabby tunic and an old leather cap with a fur brim and a little tassel on top.’ When he glanced at himself in the mirror, he saw what he described as ‘a thoroughly undesirable alien.’
The Finnish guards manning the border post with Russia had been forewarned about Dukes’s mission. As agreed, they helped him to create yet another fake identity. He was to enter Russia as a Ukrainian by the name of Joseph Ilitch Afirenko – the nationality had been chosen in order to explain his slight foreign accent when he spoke Russian.
The guards handed him a newly forged passport and identity papers. One of the men then opened a cupboard ‘and took out a box full of rubber stamps of various sizes and shapes with black handles.
‘ “Soviet seals,” he said, laughing at my amazement. “We keep ourselves up to date, you see.” ’
The seals were an important element in making the identity papers look authentic: Dukes said they were ‘a talisman that levelled all obstacles.’ Many Bolshevik officials were illiterate and only inspected the seals. If these were in order, the bearer was allowed to pass.
Dukes was even more surprised when one of the border guards handed him a freshly typed certificate on official paper that read as follows: ‘This is to certify that Joseph Afirenko is in the service of the Extraordinary Commissar.’ The document attested to his employment by the Cheka.
Dukes felt that this was taking deception a step too far, but the guards said that it would afford him the greatest possible protection once he was inside Russia. He would have carte blanche to travel wherever he wanted.
An important aim of Dukes’s mission was to supply low-level intelligence on conditions inside Russia. This was the oft-forgotten (and less glamorous) side of espionage, yet it was vitally important. The exodus of British nationals from Russia meant there was very little news of what was taking place inside the country. Information about daily life was urgently required. To this end, Dukes began supplying Mansfield Cumming with monthly reports describing the hardships faced by the populace.
The catastrophic decline in living standards became apparent as soon as he stepped off the train in Petrograd. The streets were strewn with garbage and pervaded with the stench of dead and decaying corpses of horses. The inhabitants presented a picture of human misery. ‘Lines of wretched people standing patiently, disposing of personal belongings or of food got by foraging in the country.’
The opulent palaces that lined the Moika lay deserted, for the dynastic families had either fled or been shot in the Red Terror. The city’s liberal intelligentsia, along with its writers and journalists, had met with a similar fate. So had the wealthiest business magnates.
Felix Dzerzhinsky himself had encouraged his Cheka officers to devote all their energies to a ruthless class war. He called for ‘the extermination of the enemies of the revolution on the basis of their class affiliation or of their pre-revolutionary roles.’ He said that up to ten million people would have to be annihilated – all those who had actively supported the old order.
Dukes had grown up in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg
and had known the city at the height if its imperial splendour. Now he got to see first-hand the Soviet system that Lenin was determined to impose on the city, the vast country and ultimately the rest of the world.
‘The market places of Petrograd are crowded daily with thousands selling every imaginable sort of goods . . .’ he wrote, ‘people with a few herrings in filthy pieces of newspaper, a number of individuals displaying on their open palms lumps of sugar at 6 or 7 roubles per lump.’ It was tangible evidence of a growing economic catastrophe.
Dukes had decided to remain incognito during his entire time in Russia, for he had no wish to implicate any of his former friends. But he did make contact with John Merrett, who had been keeping Mansfield Cumming’s espionage operations alive ever since the departure of Reilly, Hill and Lockhart.
Merrett told him how the secret police had been on his trail for many weeks. Just a few days earlier he had managed to make ‘a larky getaway’ as they burst into his apartment. He escaped from their clutches by ‘slithering down a drainpipe outside his kitchen window.’
On that occasion he had managed to disappear into the night, but he knew they would soon be back on his trail. ‘The blighters are looking for me everywhere,’ he told Dukes. ‘I was held up one evening by one of their damned spies under a lamppost, so I screwed up my face into a grimace and asked him for a light. Then I knocked him down.’
Merrett provided Dukes with a graphic account of the dangers of life in Russia. He also told him of his intention to leave the country immediately, for he had been warned that the Cheka were closing in on him.
He gave Dukes a list of all his underground contacts and agents, including several employed by the Ministry of War. He also gave him the addresses of all the safe houses in the city.
Then, after a brief farewell, Merrett fled the city in disguise: ‘With his face smudged with dirt and decorated with three day’s growth of reddish beard, a driver’s cap that covered his ears and a big sack on his back, Murometz [Dukes’s codename for Merrett] looked – well, like nothing on earth.’
