Russian Roulette

by Giles Milton

  Private Boctroff reported that a number of his comrades had been very close to the spot where the M Device had landed. ‘They did not know what the cloud was and ran into it and some were overpowered in the cloud and died there; the others staggered about for a short time and then fell down and died.’

  Boctroff claimed that twenty-five of his comrades had been killed. The gas also drifted through the adjacent village and hung in the air for fifteen minutes before eventually dispersing.

  The attacks continued throughout the month of September, with chemical strikes on the Bolshevik-held villages of Chunova, Vikhtova, Pocha, Chorga, Tavoigor and Zapolki, along with a number of other places. Some of these attacks used large quantities of M Devices: 183 canisters were dropped on Vikhtova.

  As soon as the gas had dissipated, British and White Russian troops (equipped with gas masks) would attack and drive out any remaining Bolshevik soldiers. They were warned to avoid skin contact with the earth and not to drink any water. If they were unfortunate enough to inhale any residual gas, they were told that smoking would bring relief.

  One British lieutenant, Donald Grantham, later questioned many Bolshevik prisoners about the attacks. They described their gassed comrades as ‘lying practically helpless on the ground and the usual symptoms of bleeding from the nose and mouth.’ In extreme cases, the men coughed up large quantities of blood.

  The use of chemical weapons was said to have caused widespread demoralisation on the battlefield, even among those who had not inhaled the gas. Yet they proved less effective than Churchill had hoped. Chemical attacks did not lead to the collapse of the Red Army, as he believed they would. Nor did they lead to any major breakthrough on the Northern Front. The weather was primarily to blame. Toxic gas proved ineffectual in the damp and misty conditions of an early Russian autumn.

  By September, as British forces prepared to withdraw from Archangel and Murmansk, the chemical attacks were halted and then permanently stopped. According to a report written for the War Office, a total of 2,718 M Devices had been dropped on Bolshevik positions; 47,282 remained unused.

  It was deemed too dangerous to ship these remaining devices back to England. In mid-September, the decision was taken to dump them in the White Sea. A military tug took them to a position thirty miles north of the Dvina Estuary and they were tipped overboard.

  They remain on the sea bed to this day in forty fathoms of water.

  Sidney Reilly and George Hill had hurried back to London after their meetings with General Denikin and presented their findings to Mansfield Cumming and other Whitehall officials. ‘A fund of useful information,’ was how one Foreign Office mandarin described their mission.

  Their warnings about the failings of the White Army leadership did little to deter Churchill from persisting in supporting those armies throughout the autumn of 1919. There were times when it seemed as if his gamble would pay off. Admiral Kolchak made sweeping westward advances across Siberia and General Denikin’s war machine rolled relentlessly northwards, capturing a string of towns and cities. Before long, he was just 250 miles from Moscow and looked certain to vanquish the Red Army. ‘We were deciding which horses we should ride during the triumphal entry into Moscow,’ recalled a British lieutenant who was serving with the general.

  In the North-West of Russia, General Yudenitch also seemed unstoppable. He marched his army towards Petrograd, sweeping all before it: by October 1919 his troops were just twelve miles from the city. Lenin panicked. ‘Finish him off,’ he wrote in a desperate telegraph to Trotsky. ‘Despatch him.’

  Trotsky launched his dramatic counter-attack in the third week of October and succeeded in pushing Yudenitch’s army back from the gates of Petrograd. In the same week, General Denikin suffered a series of serious reverses. The Red Army smashed through his front line just a short time after a powerful rebel leader had seized control of three major towns in his rear.

  A few days later, the Red Army was also victorious in Siberia, making sweeping advances against Admiral Kolchak. The admiral’s end came shortly afterwards. After being decisively beaten on the battlefield, he was captured by the Bolsheviks at Irkutsk. There he was shot in cold blood, and his corpse ignominiously tipped into the river; it quickly disappeared under the ice.

  On the same day as Kolchak’s execution, the Bolsheviks triumphantly entered Odessa on the Black Sea coast, having recovered almost all of the territory seized by General Denikin.

  George Hill happened to be back in Odessa when the Red Army rode into the city. He was woken by a breathless friend who urged him to flee before he was captured. ‘The Reds have broken through!’ he was told. There was no time to be lost.

  Hill reacted with magnificent calm. He had a leisurely wash and shave before putting on a newly cleaned pair of spats and checking out of his hotel. He made his exit just as the Bolshevik soldiers entered the city.

  By the time Odessa was in Bolshevik hands, General Yudenitch had also been defeated in the north-west of the country. He had got tantalisingly close to Petrograd – close enough to catch the glint of the city’s domes and spires. But Trotsky’s Red Army ultimately proved unstoppable. Yudenitch was driven back to the Baltic States from whence he had come.

  British military intervention against the Bolsheviks had never been on the scale that Churchill wanted. Nevertheless, his support for the anti-Bolshevik forces had cost 329 British lives. It had also cost the government a staggering £100,000,000. Over the previous year, numerous shipments of munitions had been sent to the three White generals who were fighting Lenin’s regime. The ‘final packet’ to Denikin was more modest than most, yet it nevertheless contained eighty field guns, twenty-five aeroplane engines and a vast quantity of winter clothing, including a million pairs of socks and 85,000 pairs of trousers.

  The Chief of Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, surveyed the wreckage of Churchill’s Russian policy and was damning in his assessment. ‘So ends in practical disaster another of Winston’s military attempts . . .’ he wrote. ‘His judgement is always at fault and he is hopeless when in power.’

  Churchill himself was unrepentant. ‘I am convinced that very great evils will come upon the world and particularly upon Great Britain,’ he wrote in a letter to the American president, Woodrow Wilson. ‘We shall find ourselves confronted almost immediately with a united Bolshevik Russia, highly militarised and building itself up on victories easily won over opponents in disarray.’ He feared more than ever for the frontiers of British India. But he also feared for the world at large.

  Mansfield Cumming had a rather different concern. His finest agent, Paul Dukes, had gone missing. There was every possibility that he had been captured by the Cheka.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  AGENT IN DANGER

  Paul Dukes had sent regular despatches to London during his early months in Russia. These had included military and political reports as well as monthly updates on the state of the country. But by the spring of 1919, they were arriving with less frequency and soon they dried up altogether.

  There was no explanation for the breakdown in communication. Dukes had not signalled that he was in danger and the regime had given no indication that he had been captured. Nor could the Stockholm bureau shed any light on the matter. Cumming was as mystified as he was concerned. After a few more weeks of no contact, he took the unprecedented decision to send a mission to find out what was wrong.

  The person selected to lead this mission was a young naval captain named Augustus Agar. He was on leave and pottering in his room at the Waldorf Hotel in London when he received an unexpected call from his commanding officer.

  ‘Agar?’ he said, ‘I’ve got a proposition for you and want you back at once.’

  Agar was excited by the summons and hoped it would lead to adventure. He was finding it hard to adapt to peacetime after four long years of conflict. ‘I was still keen to take part in more of our war activities . . .’ he wrote. ‘[It] meant excitement, adventure and something out of t
he ordinary dull routine.’ He packed his clothes and hurried to the train station. By lunchtime, he was back at his base on Osea Island in Essex.

  Agar had previously been working for special operations in the secretive Coastal Motor Boats division. The boats were known as skimmers and they combined revolutionary design with advanced engineering.

  They looked like elongated kayaks and were powered by two massive petrol-drawn engines that enabled the craft to attain hitherto unimaginable speeds. Their hydroplane hulls weighed next to nothing and there was no onboard equipment. All they carried was two torpedoes.

  The armistice had led to the cancellation of a planned attack on the German fleet and the skimmers were put into storage. Agar bemoaned the fact that all his training had been in vain.

  Now, with his summons back to Osea Island, his life was about to take an unexpected turn. ‘Well, Agar,’ said his commanding officer, ‘would you like to go on Special Service?’

  Agar pricked up his ears and asked what it involved, at which point the officer asked the secretary to leave the room.

  ‘No one must know where you are going until you are under way,’ he said. ‘Not even your crew . . . It is of the utmost importance that not a soul, either here in England, on the journey out, or even when you arrive in those waters, shall have any suspicions of your activities.’

  Agar listened with growing excitement as the officer continued. ‘I need hardly add that your mission is of great political importance and for this reason secrecy is vital.’ The officer then told him to report to the London Admiralty on the following morning, where he would be given clearer instructions.

  Agar headed back to London the next day and was briskly escorted from the Admiralty to Naval Intelligence. But this was not his final destination that morning.

  ‘I was taken to another building, through more corridors, up many flights of stairs, through a small passage and yet into a third building.’

  Finally, a young secretary emerged and told him to knock on the door in front of him and enter immediately. Agar did as instructed. ‘Seated at a large desk with his back to the window and apparently absorbed in reading a document was the most remarkable man I have ever met in my life.’ Agar was struck by his huge head, intelligent features and the fact that he did not even look up from his work.

  ‘Then, with startling suddenness, he put his papers aside and banging the desk with his hand said, “Sit down, my boy, I think you will do.” ’

  Agar still had no idea of the purpose of his mission and nor did he know his destination. But one thing was clear: ‘Something really eventful had come into my life. This was my first introduction to C – the name by which this man was known to all who came in official contact with him.’

  Over the course of the next hour, Cumming briefed Agar on the mission for which he had been selected. His destination was Soviet Russia – ‘ a closed book,’ he was told, ‘and hostile country with which we were virtually at war.’

  Cumming told Agar that his finest agent had been keeping a close eye on the Soviet leadership and had managed to infiltrate a number of government agencies.

  ‘He said there was a certain Englishman – unnamed, and with regard to whom no details were given – who had remained in Russia to conduct Intelligence, whose work was regarded of vital importance and with whom it was essential to get in touch.’

  It was necessary to bring this agent out alive, ‘as he was the only man who had first-hand reliable information on certain things which was required urgently by our government.’

  There was one problem. The Bolsheviks had turned the Gulf of Finland into a giant minefield, with a sweep of mines to the north and south of Kotlin Island. These surrounded Petrograd in an extending arc, making naval access to the city almost impossible.

  It was hoped that Agar’s skimmers could overcome this dangerous obstacle. Dukes’s reports had revealed that the Russian minefields lay at a depth of no more than three feet below the surface. This made the gulf impassable for any conventional vessel. But the skimmers were designed to draw just 2’9” of water; in theory, they would pass over the top of the mines. It was a high-risk undertaking, for their lives would be dependent on those three inches of water.

  Cumming provided a few more details of the planned mission. Agar was to pick a small group of young men, all of whom would be transferred from the Navy to the Secret Intelligence Service. The only stipulation was that they should be unmarried and without ties.

  They would travel to Finland ‘in the guise of yachtsmen’, with the ostensible object of promoting the sale of British motor-boats. But their real task was to cross the Gulf of Finland and make contact with Dukes. ‘That was the general plan,’ Cumming told Agar, adding that the details had yet to be worked out.

  ‘He paused for a moment and looking me straight in the face said: “Well, my boy, what do you think of it?” ’

  Then, without giving Agar the chance to reply, he added: ‘I won’t ask you to take it on, for I know you will.’

  Agar left the room in a state of high excitement and almost walked into the arms of the same pretty secretary who had accompanied him to Cumming’s office.

  ‘You look rather bewildered,’ she said. ‘Come in here and have a cigarette.’

  Agar began planning his mission the following day. He picked six young officers, all as ‘keen as mustard’. He then selected two of the 40ft skimmers and began refitting their engines. The craft were painted white to make them look like pleasure craft. All supplies were to be acquired in Finland, with the exception of a special charging plant for compressed air which was needed to start the engines.

  Two days after his first meeting with Cumming, Agar was back in Whitehall Court. Cumming quizzed him about the skimmers and then asked how much money he needed.

  Agar had not considered the cost of the operation. He said the first sum that came into his head – a thousand pounds – before realising that this was a vast amount of money. Cumming did not bat an eyelid. ‘I could hardly believe my ears when the old man pressed a button to call a secretary and I heard him say quite simply: “Make a cheque to bearer, pay cash, for one thousand pounds.” ’

  Agar had supposed that his mission would be conducted without backup and support. But Cumming now revealed that he had a complex system of agents at work in Scandinavia.

  ‘Each contact had a number,’ wrote Agar. ‘I myself would be given one and would only be known by that number, with which I was to communicate with headquarters.’

  Agar’s number was ST34 and he was told that the Stockholm bureau would help him plan his mission.

  Cumming stressed that the operation would be extremely dangerous. He said that ‘if we were caught “on the wrong side of the line”, it would be our own funeral, for in the circumstance, nothing officially could be done to save us.’

  When the meeting came to an end, Agar was ushered to a training room at the top of the building. ‘I was shown how to make use of a most ingenious rough and ready cipher code . . . [and] methods of using invisible ink on various kinds of the thinnest of thin paper.’ Messages, he was told, were to be carried in boots, ‘if possible, between the soles.’

  On the day before Agar was due to leave London for Finland, he was whisked to a farewell luncheon at one of Cumming’s clubs. ‘We drove there in his large Rolls-Royce, himself at the wheel, and I remember the boyish delight he took in driving at terrific speed past the sentries and through the arch of the Horse Guards Parade.’ Cumming was one of only five Londoners who had been granted this privilege.

  Russia was not mentioned during lunch. Nor was there any dramatic farewell when the time came for Agar to leave. ‘He just gave me a pat on the back and said: “Well, my boy, good luck to you” – and he was gone.’

  On the following morning, Agar and his team left for Hull and thence for the Baltic. When he stepped off the ship at the port of Abo in Finland, two of Cumming’s agents – ST30 and ST31 – were waiting to greet him.


  Mansfield Cumming had been right to be concerned for Paul Dukes’s safety. He was living a perilous existence in Petrograd and had been lucky to escape arrest by the Cheka.

  The first danger had come when he picked up rumours that his closest collaborator, Colonel Zorinsky, was actually on the Cheka’s payroll. To minimise the risk of capture, Dukes moved to a new safe house on Vasili Island owned by a friendly doctor.

  He then set about changing his look. First, he shaved off the shaggy beard he had worn for the previous six months. This alone, he noted, ‘altered my appearance to a remarkable degree.’

  He also cut his hair and dyed it black. There was one last detail to complete his disguise. For many months, Dukes had been missing a front tooth; it made him instantly recognisable and it was how Colonel Zorinsky had known him. Now, he reinserted the missing tooth and closed the gaping aperture. His ‘diabolic leer’ was transformed back into a regular smile.

  Dukes studied himself in the mirror and was pleased by what he saw. ‘Attired in a suit of [the doctor’s] old clothes, and wearing eye-glasses, I now presented the appearance of a clean shaven, short-haired, tidy but indigent, ailing and unfed “intellectual.” ’ He looked very different from the ‘shaggy-haired, limping maniac of the previous days.’

  Dukes and the doctor together concocted a story as to why he was lodging in the building: he was to pretend to be an epileptic suffering from such life-threatening fits that he needed a doctor on call at all times.

  Dukes practised having fits until he had perfected the art. It stood him in good stead when the Cheka arrived unexpectedly one night and raided the apartment.

  ‘A loud groan from beneath the bedclothes – a violent jerk – and I made my body rigid, except for tortuous motions of the head and clenched fists.’

  He even managed to foam at the mouth. The Cheka officers glanced at him anxiously and made a hasty exit.