Russian Roulette

by Giles Milton

  ‘I will not say that the strain of many months’ disguised existence, with all its adventures, had left no mark on my nerves. I was tired and fully realised that I could not keep it up indefinitely, or even for much longer.’

  But getting out of the country was to prove considerably more difficult than getting in.

  Augustus Agar’s original plan had been to take his skimmer back across the Gulf of Finland and await Dukes’s arrival at a pre-arranged rendezvous. Dukes himself would then row out to the skimmer in the boat left behind by Sokoloff. But the boat had been discovered by a Red Army patrol and Agar had been obliged to send a second courier (and boat) to make contact with Dukes.

  This time, everything went according to plan. The courier, a man named Gefter, made contact with Dukes in Petrograd and informed him that the rendezvous with Agar had been changed: it was now set for the night of 14 August. He and Dukes would row out into the Gulf of Finland and meet with the skimmer at a previously agreed rendezvous.

  At around 10 p.m., under a sky still streaked with light, the two men clambered into the boat and began rowing out into the gulf. They glanced anxiously at the skyline for both had noticed that banks of angry clouds were rolling towards them.

  ‘After a while the sky blackened, the wind freshened, the wavelets became waves, their caressing grew into lashings,’ wrote Dukes.

  No less alarming was the fact that the boat was much lower in the water than normal. Gefter investigated what was wrong and discovered that there was a serious problem.

  He had forgotten to close the fish well – a basin in the centre of the boat that could be filled with water to keep the catch fresh. By the time he tried to plug the opening it was too late. Seawater was gushing in with tremendous force, dragging the boat deeper and deeper into the water.

  A waterlogged boat would have presented major difficulties in any weather conditions, but it was to prove a disaster in the face of an advancing storm. The breeze had stiffened into a gale, sloshing even more water into the boat. Soon Dukes and Gefter were up to their waists in water and no amount of bailing could save them.

  As the gunwale slipped below the waterline, both men must have realised that they were deeply in trouble.

  Augustus Agar and his crew were on their way to the rendezvous in the Gulf of Finland at the very moment when Dukes and Gefter’s boat slipped beneath the waves.

  Agar steered the skimmer through the chain of forts and successfully crossed the minefield. Soon, he could see the dark silhouette of the lightship that was anchored permanently in the gulf. He steered half a mile towards the Lissy Nos Point and then cut the engines. He had reached the rendezvous exactly on time.

  He scanned the water in the hope of seeing Dukes’s pre-arranged flashlight signal. There was no sign of it and he glanced anxiously at the mounting waves. He feared for the two men in their little boat.

  After a long wait, he flashed a signal in the direction of the shore. It was a dangerous thing to do, for it would expose the skimmer’s position to any Russian lookout. But he hoped it would help to guide Dukes towards them.

  Five minutes passed – then ten – but still there was no sign of Dukes. Agar and his men continued to scan the water for another forty minutes. But when the first rays of light began to streak low across the eastern sky, Agar reluctantly restarted the skimmer’s engines and swung the boat in the direction of Terijoki. He needed to pass the chain of forts before daybreak.

  Agar was depressed by his failure to rendezvous with Dukes and Gefter and feared that they had been caught by the Cheka. In fact, their plight had been even more dramatic.

  The two men had been in sight of Agar’s skimmer when their rowing boat slipped beneath the waves. But with a strong current against them, and a mounting sea, they had no option but to swim for the shore.

  The water was icy and the spray made rapid progress impossible. Dukes was a strong swimmer and eventually reached the shore exhausted and close to collapse. Gefter was washed up in an even more critical condition. His skin was white and he was suffering from acute hypothermia.

  The two men attempted to walk to safety. Gefter was barefoot for he had kicked off his boots in the water to stop himself from drowning. Now, the sharp rocks lacerated his feet and they were soon bleeding badly. Dukes attempted to carry him, but he was too heavy and the two men sat down exhausted. As they shivered in the chill air, Gefter suddenly slumped forwards and collapsed. He had stopped breathing.

  ‘In sudden terror I began to rub him with great energy,’ wrote Dukes. ‘I lay down beside him, covered his mouth with mine and blew down his throat. Alternately, I filled his lungs and pressed on his belly.’

  After a terrifying few minutes, Gefter vomited a bucketful of seawater. His eyes flickered and his hands stirred. He eventually managed to sit himself upright and a little colour returned to his face. Once dawn had broken through the pewter sky, Dukes carried him to a fisherman’s cottage and left him there to be nursed. He then made his return to Petrograd.

  Agar made one last attempt to pluck Dukes from Bolshevik Russia. It was a disaster. His skimmer crashed into a minefield and was almost blown apart. He and his men were lucky to limp back to Terijoki in one piece.

  Any future rescue mission was scuttled by Admiral Cowan’s actions in the Gulf of Finland. He had ordered more skimmers to be sent from England and had then used them to launch a devastating attack on the Soviet fleet. The Petropavlosk, Andrei Pervozvanni and the submarine depot ship Pamiat Azova were all either sunk or crippled.

  Shortly after the attack, Agar returned to London in order to report to Mansfield Cumming on everything that had happened. When he arrived at Whitehall Court, he was met by the same secretary that he had last seen on the eve of his departure for Finland. She told him that Cumming had asked him to wait in the corridor outside his office.

  The door soon opened and a tall, dark-haired man emerged from the room. ‘Something about him and his manner arrested my attention and seemed to me to be familiar, but whether it was the eager look in his eyes, or a certain tense expression in his face, I cannot say.’

  Agar hesitated for a moment: he could not take his eyes off the man.

  ‘Then, in a flash of intuition, a thought came to my mind. “Yes,” I said to myself, “it must be him.”

  ‘I was the first to speak.

  ‘ “Are you Dukes?”

  ‘ “Yes,” he replied.’

  Agar introduced himself, bringing a smile to Dukes’s face.

  ‘ “C has a habit of arranging these little matters like this.” At which point we both laughed and shook hands and entered C’s office together.’

  Cumming had already heard Dukes’s account of his dramatic escape. He had waded through a vast bog to reach the shores of Lake Lubans, which marked the frontier between Russia and Latvia. Braving Red Army patrols, he stole a half-derelict boat and rowed across to the Latvian shore where he was promptly arrested. He was eventually released by the border officials and made his way to Stockholm and thence to London.

  Cumming had delighted in Dukes’s tale of high adventure. Now, he was keen to hear Agar’s stories as well. He was not disappointed. ‘He laughed heartily over the amusing episodes and commended us for all we had done,’ wrote Agar.

  Agar had feared censure for his role in the raid on Kronstadt. Instead, Cumming wanted to reward him. ‘When it came to accounting for the thousand pounds I was given when we started our venture . . . I was told not to bother about accounts, but just hand back any balance left over after our expenses were paid.’

  Shortly after his meeting with Cumming, Agar was whisked to Buckingham Palace for an audience with King George V. The king had also expressed a wish to hear about his exploits in the Gulf of Finland.

  Agar recounted his tale once again, to the king’s evident relish. He presented Agar with the Victoria Cross and also awarded him the Distinguished Service Order. He told Agar that Dukes also deserved a Victoria Cross, but this was not possible sin
ce it was a purely military decoration. ‘He said he would make sure that some suitable recognition would be made for the services he had rendered.’

  This he duly did. Dukes was knighted just a few months later, the only person ever to be so honoured for services to espionage.

  Mansfield Cumming was proud of what had been achieved by Agar and Dukes. Dukes in particular had exceeded all his expectations: he had also helped to justify the growing expense of the Secret Intelligence Service. Now, in a modest way, Cumming wanted to thank both Agar and Dukes.

  ‘C and some of his staff, whom he always referred to as his “top mates” . . . gave a small dinner party at the Savoy Hotel to Paul Dukes and myself,’ wrote Agar.

  As the assembled company swilled their goblets of brandy, Cumming presented Agar with a silver salver. It was inscribed with four words: ‘From his top mates’.

  ‘After dinner,’ recalled Agar, ‘we adjourned to the supper rooms to watch the dancing and I can recollect the old man picking out the prettiest girl in the room – to us a complete stranger – and insisting on her dancing with me.’

  Agar was never one to turn down a pretty girl. He clutched her tightly as he led her onto the dance floor, just as Cumming had wished.

  ‘He always managed to get his own way,’ wrote Agar.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  DIRTY TRICKS

  Paul Dukes had been lucky to have got out of Petrograd alive. He had been helped by the fact that the city was close to the border with Latvia. He had also had the support of the Stockholm bureau, which could supply him with whatever he needed once he had crossed the frontier.

  It was a very different situation for Frederick Bailey, who had spent almost fourteen months hiding in Tashkent. He had to cross some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain if he was to make a safe return to British India. All of this land was now under Bolshevik control.

  There was by now a very real urgency to his getting out of Turkestan. He had collected vital information on the threat that was facing British India, which now needed to be transmitted to Indian intelligence. Bailey also faced an increased risk of capture from the ‘Special Department’ whose primary task was to root out traitors. He felt as if there were hidden eyes in every wall, especially when he learned that the Cheka ‘were making renewed efforts to find me.’

  But escape brought its own dangers. Just a few days earlier, a French agent named Captain Capdeville had tried to flee the city. The Cheka were soon on his trail and he was finally caught in the town of Osh, halfway to Kashgar. The captain’s arrest had potentially serious ramifications for Bailey; he had entrusted Capdeville with a batch of secret documents in the hope of getting them delivered to British India.

  It was fortunate that the Cheka officers did not realise that the rolls of rice paper in the Frenchman’s baggage contained Bailey’s secret messages. They used them to make hand-rolled cigarettes.

  ‘The paper was thin, clean and of a suitable thickness,’ wrote Bailey. ‘What would have happened if my secret ink had responded to heat it is interesting to imagine.’

  Bailey had already adopted six different identities during his time in Tashkent. He now changed into his final disguise – the one he would use to flee the city. He transformed himself into an Albanian prisoner of war named Joseph Kastamuni and invented a fictional autobiography to go with the disguise.

  He pretended that Kastamuni had been serving as an Albanian mercenary attached to the Serbian Volunteer Corps. The Albanian nationality was a clever choice, as Bailey knew all too well. He was most unlikely to meet anyone in Turkestan who could speak the language.

  The creation of an identity photograph of Kastamuni in service uniform proved more of a challenge. ‘There were no Serbian uniforms in Tashkent,’ explained Bailey, ‘. . . but we found that [they] could be sufficiently well copied from a photograph by cutting the shoulder straps off the Austrian uniform and turning the kepi back to front.’

  A friend helped him make special badges for the cap, fabricating them from paper and card. ‘We had no paste, so these were temporarily fixed for the purpose of the photo with the only sticky thing we had at hand, a kind of apricot preserve.’

  Bailey took the passport to a trusted contact of his who had formerly served in the Russian imperial police. ‘He said it would not have deceived him for a moment, but was good enough for the casual glance of a Soviet policeman or government official.’

  Bailey knew that leaving a country was far harder than entering it. There were two routes out of Tashkent: the eastern one to Kashgar or the western one to Meshed. The overland journey to either of these cities presented grave difficulties. Both involved hundreds of miles of travel and Bailey knew that every road, train station and railway junction was under heavy guard.

  After much consideration, he decided to head first for the ancient caravan city of Bokhara, which lay some 300 miles to the west of Tashkent. Bokhara was ruled by a British-friendly amir who Bailey could solicit for help in traversing the great Karakum Desert. If he managed to cross both the desert and the Persian frontier, he would at long last be back in friendly territory.

  Bailey hit upon a second idea to help him in his escape attempt, one that was characteristically bold. He decided to apply for a job with the counter-espionage branch of the Cheka, known as Voivne Kontrol or Military Control Department. Its function was to track down foreign spies working inside Turkestan.

  Acceptance into this organisation would bring him the special permit that was needed to travel with complete freedom. But he knew that applying for the job also carried huge risks.

  The department was headed by a thuggish Bolshevik commissar named Dunkov, a man who was infamous in Tashkent for killing all who crossed him. Bailey described him as ‘a most dangerous type’, someone who despised everyone who was not a Bolshevik. His fanaticism ‘led him to hunt out people suspected of opposite views and have them executed.’

  Bailey had closely investigated the activities of the Military Control Department and knew that he had one factor in his favour. Commissar Dunkov was urgently trying to substantiate rumours that the British were training anti-Bolshevik forces in Bokhara. He had already sent fifteen agents to the city with the hope of gathering intelligence. All fifteen had been executed. Not surprisingly, he was finding it difficult to find a sixteenth volunteer.

  This is where Bailey sniffed his opportunity. He knew that he stood a high chance of being accepted into the ranks of the Military Control Department if he offered to undertake a mission to Bokhara. But he also knew that he would have to meet Commissar Dunkov in person, and this would expose him to considerable risk.

  ‘I would have to walk down a long room where all the hottest Soviet spies were working at their desks,’ he wrote. ‘Some of these men had been specially on the lookout for me for months. I would then have to carry out a difficult and detailed conversation with Dunkov who might be suspicious.’

  In the event, he managed to avoid being scrutinised by these Soviet spies. With the aid of an intermediary, he set up an informal meeting with the commissar and was able to offer his services without being officially interviewed.

  Commissar Dunkov was as surprised as he was delighted by Bailey’s willingness to undertake a mission to Bokhara. ‘You must go at once and see what truth there is in these stories of British officers,’ he said.

  Within hours, Bailey was supplied with all the papers he needed. These included an open permit that allowed him to leave Tashkent and travel wherever and whenever he wanted.

  In mid-October, Bailey boarded a train at Tashkent and began the long journey to Bokhara.

  He wore the costume of a Military Control Officer and carried the identity papers of Joseph Kastamuni. His clothes were made of coarse woollen cloth cut in the Bolshevik fashion and on his cap was a red star decorated with a hammer and sickle, the badge of the Red Army.

  He alighted at the Bolshevik-controlled town of Kagan, which lay just a couple of miles to the south-east of B
okhara. Within minutes of arriving, he received a telegram from the Chief of the General Staff in Tashkent: ‘Please communicate all information you have regarding the Anglo-Indian Service Colonel Bailey.’ Bailey allowed himself an inner smile: he was being asked to spy on himself.

  The Bolshevik leaders in Kagan were impressed by the bravado of this newly arrived Military Control Officer. ‘[They] looked on me as a very brave man who, for the Soviet cause, was about to meet an unpleasant death in Bokhara.’

  In reality, Bokhara was to provide him with his first safe haven since leaving British India. He smuggled himself into the walled city and managed to gain an audience with the Amir of Bokhara, a grizzled autocrat whose age and infirmity prevented him from taking advantage of the 400 concubines in his harem.

  Bailey was still undecided as to whether to take the western or eastern route out of Turkestan. Now, the amir’s offer of assistance in crossing the Karakum Desert convinced him to continue heading west. It would enable him to reach Meshed, where a British officer named Wilfrid Malleson was busily establishing a highly subversive operation against the Bolsheviks. Bailey had already been sending reports to Malleson. If all went according to plan, he would soon meet him face to face.

  The amir offered Bailey five guides to help him cross the desert. In return, Bailey was asked to assist in the escape of seven White Russian officers who were fleeing from the Bolsheviks and two Indian Army officers on route to Persia. Also in the party was a Serbian renegade named Manditch and his new bride. Far from travelling light as Bailey had hoped, his entourage now numbered twelve, in addition to the five guides.

  The party set off under the cover of darkness on 18 December 1919, a far later date than anticipated. They were disguised as Turkman tribesmen, dressed in large sheepskin hats and woollen khalats. They hoped that the peasant costumes would prevent them from being molested by the bands of wild Turkman brigands who roamed the desert in search of easy prey. Bailey wore his corduroy riding breeches underneath the tribal garb, an extra layer against the bitter Bokharan winter.