Russian Roulette

by Giles Milton

  They travelled by pony, reaching the mighty Oxus River on Christmas Day. From this point on, they were entering the barren Karakum where there were no settlements and precious few wells.

  The desert crossing was to prove more arduous than any of them had imagined and it left them close to collapse. The freezing wind whipped dust and gravel into their eyes, causing constant pain. It also delivered a ferocious blizzard that arrived from nowhere. Five inches of snow fell in a matter of minutes and obliterated the few distinguishing landmarks. ‘The steppe . . . was rough,’ wrote Bailey, ‘rather like a stormy sea, the waves of which had been frozen.’

  The snow made their progress even more wearisome. ‘We had had practically nothing to eat for several days, except the ponies’ food, which we either parched or boiled according to the individual’s taste.’

  They were soon suffering from severe hypothermia and might easily have died a lonely death in the desert had it not been for a chance encounter with some nomads. They managed to acquire three sheep that were promptly slaughtered and then roasted on the cleaning rods of their rifles.

  In spite of the gruelling hardship, Bailey’s fascination with native flora and fauna was undiminished. He was hoping to shoot a rare specimen of gazelle, Gazella subgutturosa, that he knew to inhabit this area of desert. Unable to get close enough to kill one, he eventually stumbled across the carcass of an animal that had recently died. ‘I took the horns,’ he later wrote, ‘and they are now in the Bombay History Society’s Museum.’

  Finally, almost three weeks after setting out from Bokhara, Bailey’s party glimpsed the snow-topped mountains of Persia. They were glinting in the winter sunshine and brought a renewed sense of optimism to the weary travellers. ‘The feelings for all of us at the sight of a free land, even in the distance, is hard to describe,’ wrote Bailey.

  There was a brief skirmish with Red Army border guards at the frontier with Persia, leading to an exchange of bullets. This might have proved deadly, were it not for the fact that the guards were poor shots. The only loss was Mrs Manditch’s saddle bag containing dozens of Bokharan silk dresses. Unable to recover them (to Mrs Manditch’s great distress), the party rode on to the town of Sarakhs inside Persia. Here, Bailey was able to telegraph Wilfrid Malleson with the news that he was alive and safe. Soon after, he rode triumphantly into Malleson’s headquarters in Meshed.

  The British sentries initially refused him entry to the compound: they took one look at his Soviet-made clothes and assumed he was a Russian Bolshevik. But Bailey soon convinced them of his real identity and he was promptly whisked into the staff mess for a hearty luncheon.

  ‘My difficulties and dangers were over,’ he wrote. ‘It was pleasant to see the Union Jack waving over the barracks after such a long time under other colours.’

  The story of Bailey’s escapades in Turkestan were so colourful that it would eventually be published in The Times, albeit in an edited and carefully censored form. Under the headline ‘A Central Asian Romance’ the article gleefully recounted how Bailey had outwitted Bolshevik spies for many months.

  The Soviet press took an altogether different line. They announced Bailey’s death in a shoot-out on the Persian frontier and said that he had been given a military funeral.

  Bailey’s lengthy mission to Tashkent had once again highlighted both the strengths and weaknesses of solo operations in hostile lands. He had found it relatively easy to gather intelligence on the growing alliance between Soviet and Indian revolutionaries. It had proved altogether more difficult to smuggle this information out of the country.

  Now that he was in Persia, he was able to debrief Wilfrid Malleson more fully on the disturbing new threat. He also warned that the ultimate goal of Bolshevism remained global revolution.

  ‘The Bolsheviks cannot sit still,’ he wrote in the conclusion to his intelligence report. ‘Their object has always been world revolution . . . When the East has adopted Soviet government, the whole world will be compelled to adopt the same principles.’

  Agents such as Frederick Bailey, Paul Dukes and Arthur Ransome had proved themselves masters at laying their hands on secret information. Wilfrid Malleson was to prove no less masterful at using this information for his own nefarious purposes.

  Malleson had long harboured a pathological hatred of Bolshevism and had privately vowed to devote all his energies to unpicking their dream of world revolution. He was to prove a formidable enemy.

  He had originally been sent to Persia as commander of the British and Indian troops stationed along the Afghan-Persian border – a small defensive unit known as the East Persian Cordon.

  Changing circumstances had led to a dramatic change of brief. The intelligence obtained from Moscow and Tashkent now presented Malleson with a very different challenge. He was to spy on the Bolsheviks, eavesdrop on their communications and do whatever he could to prevent the spread of revolution into British India. ‘The times were critical,’ he would later write. ‘The Government of India hardly slept at nights.’

  The growing strength of the Bolsheviks had led Malleson to conclude that something dramatic needed to be done. But before he launched himself into his new mission, he sent a telegram to British India asking for clarification as to the extent of his powers.

  The reply informed him ‘that I was on the spot and had a free hand.’ He was allowed to act in any way he chose.

  In a speech that he later made to the Royal Central Asian Society, he wryly noted that being given a free hand was ‘in the nature of a gift from the Greeks.’ If he were successful in his work, then ‘some gentlemen in easy chairs on a hilltop 2,000 miles away would appropriate the credit.’ If he failed, on the other hand, he would be ‘spurned and repudiated and thrown remorselessly to the wolves.’

  Malleson was not in the habit of failing. Nor did he intend to fail on this occasion. Sabotaging the fledgling alliance between the Soviets and the Indian revolutionaries was to prove his most difficult mission to date, but he was well equipped for the task ahead. He had the use of a small army, the 28th Light Cavalry and the 19th Punjabis, whom he described as ‘magnificent material’. He also had an effective channel of communications with British India and a team of highly dependable agents.

  Surviving photographs of Malleson suggest an archetypal military commander. He sports a handsome upturned moustache and his eyes sparkle brightly at the camera. But there is an icy chill to the gaze, perhaps hinting at the adamantine core within. Malleson’s men were terrified by his ‘hard-boiled temperament’ and they were also fearful of his fierce lack of sentiment.

  ‘His attitude was determined by the task he had undertaken . . .’ wrote one officer, ‘with very little regard for the teeming life going on around him.’

  He collected sporting guns and revolvers and spent his leisure hours blasting game birds from the skies above Ashkabad. Those serving under him described him as ‘unorthodox’, ‘critical of authority’ and ‘cynical’, especially in his dealings with others. He was also a lonely man ‘who could unbend only when discussing something of particular interest to himself.’

  Malleson was employed by neither Indian Political Intelligence nor Mansfield Cumming. His ostensible boss was the government of India, but he operated in the fashion of an Elizabethan privateer, wreaking chaos in a spirit of patriotic duty. Except instead of gathering booty, he distributed lies and falsehoods among his enemies.

  A measure of his ruthlessness can be detected in his decision, taken in August 1918, to lead a private military offensive against the Bolsheviks. He led his cavalry across the frontier into Turkestan, where a much larger force of Red Army troops were fomenting unrest. After two nights of gruelling marching, his men spotted the Bolsheviks at the desert town of Dushak.

  Malleson had long displayed a cavalier approach to warfare. Now, he ordered his troops to attack at dawn and told them to show no mercy. The men advanced against heavy machine-gun fire from the entrenched Bolsheviks and displayed considerable bravery in t
he face of sustained shooting.

  The Punjabi forces were first to reach the enemy trenches and they attacked with their bayonets, causing the Bolshevik soldiers to flee in panic to the hills behind the town. Here, they were decimated by Malleson’s hidden cavalry forces.

  The fight was costly in human life. Malleson lost sixty of his men, while more than a thousand Bolsheviks were killed.

  The government of India was alarmed that Malleson had interpreted their offer of a carte blanche with quite such freedom. They told him not to launch any more attacks and they also forbade him from advancing any further. They did not want to provoke a full-scale war against Soviet Turkestan.

  Malleson halted his offensive but he kept his forces inside Turkestan for much of the winter before finally returning to Meshed. It was from his Meshed headquarters that he now set about planning his next round of dirty tricks.

  Wilfrid Malleson had known about the arrival of the Indian revolutionaries in Tashkent for several months, for he’d received copies of Frederick Bailey’s intelligence reports. Now he was brought news of a far more alarming nature.

  One of his agents handed him a widely circulated pamphlet written by the revolutionary agitator, Abdul Hafiz Barkatulla. As Malleson studied it, he was shocked to discover that it was nothing short of a rallying cry for a Soviet-backed jihad. It informed Islamic warriors that the Bolsheviks wanted to enter into a crusading alliance against ‘the usurpers and despots, the British.’

  ‘Oh Muhammedans!’ it began. ‘Listen to this divine cry: respond to this call of liberty, equality and brothership which brother Lenin and the Soviet Government of Russia are offering you.’

  There were two principal reasons why the pamphlet was so toxic. One was its highly provocative language, designed to inflame Islamic sensibilities against the British. The second was the fact that it stressed the common goal of Bolshevism and Islam – namely, the destruction of British India. This, it said, would bring about the defeat of ‘the savage wolves who stand ready to conquer countries and enslave people.’

  There was a third pernicious element to the pamphlet, one that did not go unnoticed by Malleson. The writer stressed the similarities between the followers of the Prophet Mohammed and the followers of Lenin. There was no mention of Bolshevism’s inherent atheism. Instead, the pamphlet compared Lenin’s economic policies to the Islamic institution of Bait-ul-Mal, a charitable body for the relief of the poor.

  Malleson was appalled by what he was reading. It was a gross distortion of the truth and he immediately forwarded the document to British India, where it was also greeted with grave concern.

  ‘The pamphlet is of a very dangerous nature,’ wrote a senior government secretary. Malleson was ordered to intercept and destroy as many copies as possible.

  Malleson undertook this task to the best of his ability, instructing his agents to seize copies wherever they were being printed. But he also decided to take the offensive. If the Soviets were prepared to finance inflammatory propaganda, then so was he. He hired the services of the distinguished Islamic scholar Jalaluddin al Hussaini, and paid him to write a vitriolic rebuttal to the pamphlet.

  Jalaluddin excelled himself, pouring scorn on the notion of holy Islam entering into an alliance with ‘the pig-eating infidels of Russia.’ He also rubbished the claim that Bolshevism and the Bait-ul-Mal shared the same economic goal. He reminded Muslims that the latter was one of Islam’s most noble institutions – a treasury of money that had been used to care for the needy for many centuries.

  Bolshevism, by contrast, was simply ‘an institution for plunder’ and one that attracted ‘the very dregs of Russians and irreligious, unpatriotic, sinful people, Jews, Kafirs, robbers, pick-pockets and blood-thirsty assassins.’

  Warming to his theme, he thundered that Bolshevism was an atheistic creed that was ‘against the regulations and decrees of Islam’. Its leaders were not to be trusted, for they were ‘accursed, vicious, irreligious tyrants.’

  Jalaluddin invoked the holy name of the Prophet in order to forbid the Muslims of Central Asia to ‘unite and combine with these tyrannical heathens.’

  Jalaluddin’s authorship of the pamphlet gave it considerable weight and ensured that it received widespread attention. It also provided Malleson with much food for thought. He now realised that it was no longer enough to remain on the defensive when dealing with the Bolsheviks.

  If he was to protect the world from the Soviet threat, then he would have to play an even more devious game.

  Wilfrid Malleson’s most pressing concern at this time was the number of enemy agents managing to infiltrate his headquarters.

  ‘Bolshevik spies and counter-espionage agents are becoming more and more numerous in Persia,’ he wrote. ‘[They] come in freely and even when known to be spies, I have little or no power to deal with them.’

  Two of his own spies had recently been shot by Bolsheviks. Now, he asked India for the authority to execute the spies that he had managed to capture.

  He received no reply and nor did he press the issue. His preferred mode of action was to act first and inform India afterwards: this gave him the greatest possible freedom.

  Malleson now began to expand dramatically his own network of agents and informers. These were always men of dubious probity whom he, in common with Mansfield Cumming, referred to as ‘his ruffians’. They were often well-educated local men who showed great ability in infiltrating Bolshevik organisations and acquiring intelligence directly from the source.

  A number of them also managed to infiltrate key telegraphic exchanges, enabling Malleson to intercept hundreds of top-secret messages. They included telegrams sent from Lenin and Trotsky to the Tashkent government, the Indian revolutionaries and the Amir of Afghanistan.

  Malleson was staggered by the content of these intercepts: they detailed everything from troop movements and the export of weaponry to decrees from the Comintern and the Soviet regime. As such, they were intelligence gold dust.

  The despatches that Malleson sent to British India give some inkling of the extent and reach of his network. In one month alone, he received comprehensive reports from his agents in towns right across the region, including Kuskh, Kabul, Yulatan, Sarakhs, Kerki, Bokhara, Tejend and Daragaz, as well as every frontier post on the borders of Turkestan.

  ‘The mission is well adapted for providing advanced information of events in Central Asia,’ he wrote to India, ‘but the work is rapidly increasing. Fifty pages of foolscap daily is required for the wireless intercepts, and to go through them takes hours.’

  Malleson was justifiably proud of his vast team. ‘I had some most excellent officers speaking numerous languages,’ he said. ‘I had agents up to distances of a thousand miles or more, even in the Government Offices of the Bolsheviks. I had relays of men constantly coming and going in areas which I deemed important.’

  He kept a particularly close eye on the movement of suspect people. ‘There was hardly a train on the Central Asian Railway which had not one of our agents on board, and there was no important railway centre which had not two or three men on the spot.’

  Just as Malleson had been given carte blanche by British India, so he gave his men the freedom to arrest and interrogate suspects in the manner that they thought best. None of his agents would ever be punished for using heavy-handed tactics when questioning their subjects.

  ‘Travellers of every sort and description were cross-examined at scores of different places. Intelligence cannot well be improvised. It needs to be slowly built up. But we started with nothing beyond a few agents and ended with a great deal.’

  The quantity of information reaching Malleson continued to grow with every week that passed. ‘We sent [to British India] . . . a stream of information from every part of the huge area for which we were responsible. It was a veritable tour de force for the officers I have in mind to have organised and to have brought to such a state of efficiency in so short a time so excellent an intelligence system.’

&
nbsp; This system enabled Malleson to build a highly accurate picture of what was taking place inside Turkestan. More than that, it revealed the tightening links between Soviet Russia and Afghanistan. A Soviet-Afghan alliance presented a serious threat to British India, for it would enable the Bolsheviks to establish military bases on the very frontiers of the Raj.

  Malleson’s first inkling of the close relationship between Moscow and Kabul had come during the amir’s invasion of British India in the spring of 1919. His agents intercepted a number of secret telegrams that revealed the Soviet intention of supporting the invasion.

  One of these telegrams, sent to the governor of Kabul, informed the Afghans that ‘500 camel loads of munitions, including bombs and aircraft parts, would soon arrive at Kushk for Herat, with seven aircraft mechanics.’

  The delivery of this military hardware was being co-ordinated by a professional revolutionary known as Bravin, a man already being tracked by Malleson.

  The Afghans were defeated long before the Soviet weaponry could be used but it was clear that the dangers of a co-ordinated Bolshevik-Islamic assault were growing by the day. Malleson intercepted scores of Afghan orders for Soviet weaponry, many of which read like extended shopping lists: ‘Seven airplanes, 24 machine-guns, 2,000 hand grenades, 50,000 rifles . . .’

  Telegraphic intercepts also confirmed that senior Bolshevik figures were intending to boost their support for Afghanistan. One of these telegrams, sent from Moscow’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs to his counterpart in Turkestan, made for particularly perturbing reading.

  ‘Military help to Afghanistan will be given free of charge as soon as railway communications are established with Tashkent . . . Aeroplanes will be despatched in the immediate future.’