A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy

by Deborah McDonald

  The double-cross had been slow to bear fruit, but as the summer of 1918 waned towards the harvest season, it looked like bringing in a large crop of British, French and American diplomats and agents. Quite what the Cheka hoped to achieve with their entrapment, and what they would have done with the fruit of the harvest, was never discovered, because out of the blue the whole scheme was blasted by two lightning bolts.

  On the morning of Friday 30 August, Moisei Uritsky, the head of the Petrograd Cheka, a man with a reputation for cruel retributive justice, was shot dead on his way to his office. The assassin was Leonid Kannegisser, a young army cadet with a reputation as a poet and intellectual. All that was known about Kannegisser’s politics was that he had been a keen supporter of Kerensky.34

  The news of the murder flashed through immediately to the Moscow Cheka and the Kremlin. Lenin personally ordered Felix Dzerzhinsky (now firmly back in control of the Cheka after the Left SR revolt in early July, but technically in a sort of semi-retirement) to set aside all current business and go straight to Petrograd to investigate.

  Having despatched his top man to deal with the case, Lenin carried on with his programme for the day. In the evening he spoke at a public meeting of workers at the Mikhelson armaments factory in Moscow. His theme was the poison of counter-revolution and how it must be purged from the system. ‘There is only one issue,’ he declared, ‘victory or death!’

  At about eight o’clock in the evening, Lenin left the building through a dense press of people crowding the hallway and the roadside. Just as he got outside, a woman accosted him and began to berate him about the injustice of flour being confiscated from the people by the government. Lenin denied the accusation – then, as he was in mid-sentence, another woman in the crowd produced a revolver, aimed at the leader and fired three shots. The first bullet hit Lenin in the shoulder; the second hit him in the neck; the third missed and hit a woman standing nearby. Lenin’s driver, who had been preparing the car, pushed through the fleeing, screaming crowd towards the sound of shooting, and found the leader lying face-down on the ground.35

  The arrests began immediately. Sixteen people were seized at the scene and taken away to the Cheka headquarters in the Lubyanka. Lenin was lifted into the car and taken to the Kremlin. He was still alive, but barely.

  Felix Dzerzhinsky heard the shocking news when he was still en route to Petrograd to begin his investigation into the Uritsky assassination. Immediately he turned back to Moscow. During his absence, the investigation was begun by his deputies, principally Yakov Peters, who began the interrogation of suspects. In the early hours of the next morning, Peters extracted a confession from the most likely person – a young Ukrainian Jewish woman who went by the name of Fania Kaplan. ‘I was the one who fired at Lenin,’ she declared, and admitted that she had been planning it for months. But beyond that, she would say nothing about her motives, her political affiliation or her accomplices.36

  The Bolsheviks were stunned and enraged by the two shootings; coming within hours of each other, they looked like the first rockfalls of a landslide. It became all the more urgent that the forces of counter-revolution be exterminated, root and branch, without mercy. Until now, the Cheka had been ruthless in putting down the enemies of the state, but now a new movement burgeoned – instantaneously, almost while the gunshots were still echoing. It was a movement based on fear, constant suspicion, and violent summary justice. They called it the Red Terror.

  ‘Without mercy, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds,’ declared the popular paper Krasnaya Gazeta. ‘Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritsky let there be floods of bourgeois blood – more blood, as much as possible.’37

  During that last day of August, while Uritsky’s body lay in the morgue and Lenin’s life hung by the frailest of threads, the British in Petrograd and Moscow wondered what would happen to them. Inevitably, the assassinations were being blamed on all kinds of counter-revolutionary movements – the Anarchists, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the White Guard – but the recurring theme uniting them all was the Anglo-French imperialists. They must have a hand in it somewhere, and the time had come to sever the hand from the arm that controlled it.

  Notes

  * Tapestry Street.

  † Great Lubyanka Street.

  ‡ Bread Lane.

  11

  The Knock on the Door in the Night

  August–September 1918

  Saturday 31 August 1918, Petrograd

  In Britain they called it murder, the incident that occured that day. The people who were actually there were less certain about what had occurred, but the British press and politicians, in their righteous indignation against all things Bolshevik, called it cruel, cold-blooded murder of a fine and gallant man.

  Whatever they called it, it was tragic, and left an indelible mark on Moura. She wasn’t there when it happened, but when she saw the scene weeks later and found the bloodstains, still there on the floor in the deserted, haunted building, it wrung her already breaking heart. The men in her life – the three very dearest of them – were being violently torn away from her, one by one, by forces which she struggled to understand. The tangled chain of events stretched back a long way, but the final act of the tragedy began on that last August day in faraway Petrograd.1

  It was a strange day from the very beginning. The summer was dissolving in a chilly dampness, and the atmosphere of hate and dread that followed the shootings of Uritsky and Lenin affected everyone. The Bolshevik press was full of furious demands for imperialist blood.

  The British who worked in the old Petrograd Embassy felt the atmosphere keenly. Those who were most alert – such as Francis Cromie – seemed to sense that a blow was about to fall. What Captain Cromie did not know was that it already had. He was vaguely unsettled that his invaluable right hand, Commander George Le Page, had not turned up for work that morning. Something was afoot. Perhaps it was connected with the shootings of Uritsky and Lenin; on the other hand, with the almost total lawlessness on the streets, it wasn’t unusual for foreigners to be murdered by robbers and their bodies dumped in the Neva. Cromie was also aware that Sidney Reilly was back in Petrograd, full of plots and delighted with the progress he was making with the Latvians in Moscow. It was all rather unnerving. As Cromie stood in Le Page’s office, some impulse made him open the desk drawer and take out the revolver that was kept there. For some unaccountable reason, he had left his own pistol at home, despite his life having been threatened more than once during the spate of arrests and anti-British reprisals earlier that month.2 He put Le Page’s pistol in his trouser pocket and closed the drawer.

  At that moment, the pistol’s owner was in a cell in the Petropavlovskaya fortress across the water, having been arrested and interrogated by the Cheka during the night, along with several other British subjects. The Red Terror was already in action, and turning its angry attention on the foreigners who were known or believed to be up to their imperialist necks in counter-revolution.

  At some time after four o’clock, several motor cars approached Palace Quay and stopped outside the British Embassy. A party of Cheka officers, backed up by a squad of Red Guards, got out. They quickly surrounded the building. Ignoring the notice pinned to the front door stating that the former Embassy was now under the legal protection of the neutral Netherlands Legation (which had taken over the job of representing British subjects since the arrests in early August), they forced their way in. They believed they would find evidence inside linking the British to the assassination of Uritsky.3

  On the first floor, where the naval and military offices were, Cromie was conducting a meeting with some of his secret agents. A car was heard in the courtyard. At the same time the handle of the locked door was rattled by someone out on the landing.

  Cromie glanced out of the window. Simultaneously, one of his agents, a man called Hall, went to the door. Cromie had guessed immediately what was happening. ‘Do
n’t open the door!’ he called, but it was too late – Hall found himself confronted by a man levelling a pistol at him. He slammed the door shut instantly. Cromie crossed the room in a couple of strides, drawing Le Page’s revolver from his pocket. ‘Remain here,’ he said, ‘and keep the door after me.’

  Flinging the door open, he pointed the revolver at the startled Chekist. ‘Clear out, you swine,’ Cromie snarled, and stepped forward. The man backed away, and Cromie drove him at gunpoint back along the passage towards the main landing. At the far end was a corridor leading to the chancery offices; on the right was the grand staircase curving up to the upper floors; on the left was the long, straight, broad staircase leading down to the front door. In the chancery corridor were more armed Chekists, taking control of the offices and herding the staff at gunpoint.

  It was never determined who fired first, but it was certain who made the first kill. As Cromie reached the landing, he collided with a Chekist coming up the stairs from the hall. Cromie shoved the man aside, and turned to head down the stairs towards the entrance. That was when the shooting started.

  One Chekist was killed instantly; a second was hit in the stomach. Furiously shooting back and screaming for help, the Chekist crawled back through the door into the chancery, where the horrified embassy staff were being held. Cromie ran for the main door, taking the stairs two at a time, bullets striking the walls around him and shattering the glass in the main door.

  Young Nathalie Bucknall, the wife of one of the staff, had been sitting in the reception office. Startled by the shooting and afraid for her husband, who had just gone upstairs, she hurried into the hallway and saw Captain Cromie racing down the stairs towards her, Russians firing at him from the landing. Suddenly, he seemed to stagger; he twisted, and fell backwards down the last few stairs, his head striking the last step.

  Nathalie ran to him and raised his head. His eyelids were fluttering, and she could feel warm blood running over her hand.

  Before she could so much as speak, she was seized violently by one of the Chekists who had been shooting; he slapped her hard and drove her forcibly up the stairs, shouting angry abuse at her and hitting her in the back. She was put with her husband and the rest of the embassy staff in the chancery. After being searched, they were all herded out of the building. As they passed down the stairs and through the hallway, Nathalie saw that Cromie’s body had been shoved to one side, under the coat stand. Several people, including the embassy chaplain, had tried to tend to him, but were refused by the Chekists.

  The prisoners were marched through the streets to the Cheka headquarters. Some of the women were let go the next day – including Nathalie, who had been interrogated throughout much of the night – while all the rest were moved to cells in the dungeons of the Petropavlovskaya fortress. Meanwhile, the Cheka completed their breach of the law of extraterritoriality by ransacking the Embassy from top to bottom, looking for evidence linking the British to the shootings of Uritsky and Lenin, and all the other counter-revolutionary activities they were suspected of being involved in.4

  It would be some time before Moura learned what had happened to her dear Crow. Communications between Petrograd and Moscow were intermittent, and she soon had more than enough trouble of her own to cope with.

  While the lethal drama unfolded in Petrograd, in Moscow the Bolsheviks moved more slowly but more deliberately against the Allies. Since hearing the news about Lenin, Lockhart and Hicks had been debating what to do. Leaving Russia was not an option – even if they were allowed, which they wouldn’t be, Hicks had to consider his Russian fiancée, Liuba, and Lockhart had Moura. Neither man had the skills or resources to go underground as Hill and Reilly had done. So they stayed up late into the night talking it over and over, but got no closer to a solution. There was nothing they could do, nowhere they could hide.

  Sunday 1 September 1918, Moscow

  At around two o’clock in the morning, a motor car turned in to Khlebnyy pereulok. It drove slowly along the narrow, unlit lane; near the end a grey six-storey apartment block loomed into the headlight beams. The car stopped and three men got out: two in plain clothes, the other a uniformed police officer.

  The younger of the two plain-clothes men was Pavel Malkov, Chekist and Commandant of the Moscow Kremlin. He walked up to the front door of the block. In the wash of the car’s lights he could make out the number – 19. This was the right building. This was where the British agent Lockhart had his nest.

  Malkov had been summoned to the Lubyanka headquarters just after midnight by Yakov Peters, deputy head of the Cheka. Peters always spoke slowly with a heavy Latvian accent, as if picking his words with difficulty. ‘You are going to arrest Lockhart,’ he said simply.5

  The young Chekist took the order calmly. He had met Lockhart a few times: first when he was head of security at the Smolny Institute in Petrograd during its time as the Bolshevik headquarters, and later on the train to Moscow in March. He’d been impressed by the British agent but didn’t like his air of superiority. He would later recall him as ‘outwardly calm, with a military bearing; a dry, energetic person under a thick cap of dark brown, slicked-back hair’, who had an air of experience despite his youth. He spoke Russian fluently, with no trace of an accent. Malkov and Lockhart had carefully cultivated each other, pretending friendship and pumping each other for intelligence.6

  ‘Remember,’ said Peters, ‘we have to act decisively, but . . . diplomatically. Try to be polite to him. But you will conduct a thorough search, and if he tries to resist, well then . . .’

  Malkov shook his head. ‘He will not resist.’

  Peters nodded. ‘Perhaps not. It isn’t his style. And he’s a coward; makes himself out to be saintly, and gives all the dirty work to his assistants. But be prepared, understand?’ Malkov understood. He was accustomed to violent action, and he was prepared for anything.

  Glancing up at the black windows of the darkened apartment block, he checked the Colt semi-automatic tucked in his back trouser pocket, then, gesturing to his Cheka comrade and the policeman to follow, he stepped inside the pitch-black hallway. By the glow of cigarette lighters, the three men made their way cautiously up the stairs, pausing to note the door numbers as they went. Finally, on the fifth floor, they came to number 24.

  Moura was woken by a thunderous hammering on the front door. Heart racing, she listened in the darkness, wondering if she had dreamed it. The knocking sounded again. She switched a light on. Beside her, Lockhart was sound asleep, oblivious. The poor Baby-Boy; so anxious, so full of stress. He and Hickie had stayed up talking things through until long after midnight; eventually he had crashed into bed beside her utterly exhausted, falling instantly into the sleep of the dead.

  Again the knocking. Bozhe moy!* Moura pulled on her peignoir and padded out into the hall. There was no sound from Hickie’s room. The knocking came again, reverberating through the apartment. Whoever was out there wasn’t going to give up. What time was it?

  She unlatched the door and opened it an inch. Peering out, she couldn’t see a thing in the black hallway, but she could sense the presence of people. Before she could open her mouth to speak, hands gripped the edge of the door and pulled hard (the door was eccentrically fitted to open outwards).7 It only moved a few inches before it was stopped by the chain that Moura had cautiously left in place. Out in the gloom a male voice cursed, and a figure stepped into the shaft of light spilling out from the apartment.

  Moura recognised the face – long and blockish with close-set eyes – and felt a chill. She didn’t know the man’s name, but she knew he was Cheka.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked, thickening her heavily English-accented Russian and feigning incomprehension. ‘What do you want?’ The Chekist quickly jammed his foot in the door. ‘I have come to see Mr Lockhart,’ he said.

  ‘What could anyone want with Mr Lockhart so late?’ Moura demanded.

  ‘I will state my business to Mr Lockhart alone,’ he growled.

  Moura coul
d sense the Chekist’s patience rapidly eroding, but she stood her ground, assailing him with questions and refusing to release the chain.

  There was a sound behind her, and she turned to see Hicks coming out of his room. Bleary and dishevelled with sleep, he peered out through the gap. At the sight of the Cheka officer he stiffened and turned pale. ‘Mr Mankoff?’8 he said, summoning a polite smile and taking the chain off the door. ‘What can I do for you?’

  Immediately, Malkov pulled the door open and, pushing Hicks aside, strode into the flat, followed by his two companions. His Chekist assistant was a burly, rough-looking middle-aged man with black dirt ingrained in his skin – the indelible tattoo of years of factory work.

  ‘Take me to Lockhart,’ Malkov demanded.

  ‘Pardon me,’ said Hicks. ‘Mr Lockhart is asleep; I’ll have to wake him.’

  ‘I’ll wake him,’ said Malkov.

  Hicks showed him to Lockhart’s room. The Chekists and the policeman all strode in. Malkov glanced around, his proletarian soul faintly offended by the figured Karelian birch wardrobe and cupboard, the dressing table laden with Moura’s trinkets and jewellery, the pair of easy chairs, the deep patterned carpet, and in the centre of the room the ottoman bed, draped with a beautiful tapestry rug and containing a recumbent British agent – still soundly sleeping despite the sudden intrusion of three armed men and the light being switched on.

  Malkov crossed to the bed and pushed gently at Lockhart’s shoulder.

  Lockhart was dimly aware of his name being called by a rough-sounding voice. Slowly he clawed his way upward from the deep, black pit of sleep he’d fallen into. Opening his eyes, he got the blurry impression that the room was full of people – at least ten, it seemed to him at first, all armed. But the thing that focused his attention and snapped him wide awake was the muzzle of a pistol pointing steadily at his face from a few inches away. The face behind it was hauntingly familiar – he had seen it at the Smolny, and a few times since, and knew its owner’s chilling reputation. ‘Mr Mankoff!’ he mumbled nervously.