My great purpose at present was of course to secure copies of those confidential military documents which passed through the hands of Colonel Friede. And as it happened the Colonel’s sister was not only a close friend of the Mlles S. but frequently visited them at their flat in the Cheremeteff Pereulok. These young ladies were entirely on my side, and it was arranged that I should meet Mlle Friede there. The meeting was a great success. When I was sure of Mlle Friede, I unfolded my proposition to her, namely that her brother should secure me copies of all documents which passed through his hands. Mlle Friede greeted the suggestion with joy, and assured me that her brother was only too anxious to be able to strike a blow against Bolshevism.
I had one or two surreptitious meetings with Friede, and when we were each assured of the other’s bona fides, he became my most willing collaborator. All communiqués from the Archangel front, from the Korniloff front, from the Koltchak front passed through his hands. All army orders, all military plans, all confidential documents relating to the army fell within his province, and many a copy of a highly confidential document he handled was read in England before the original was in the hands of the officer to whom it was addressed.
The house in Cheremeteff Pereulok was a large place, containing no fewer than 200 flats, and some of these were of the largest size. The flat for example, occupied by the Mlles S. which was on the third floor, was altogether too spacious for the young ladies who occupied it, and rooms of it were let to two sub-tenants, an ex-government official and a professor of music. These interesting young ladies had a regular visitor, whom they knew as Sidney Georgevitch, officially described as Relinsky of the Tcheka-Criminel.
What more natural than that the young artistes should be visited by a close friend of theirs, Mlle Friede, also of the Arts Theatre? The young ladies were apparently very much attached and the visits were of daily occurrence. Mlle Friede would bring her portfolio with her, and no doubt the young ladies met for the purpose of practising triolets together under the guidance of the music master.
Yes, but portfolios may be made to carry many more things than a pianoforte score. Mlle Friede lived with her brother in a flat not very far away. Every evening he would bring home copies of the Bolshevik dispatches and orders. The following morning she brought them round to the Cheremeteff Pereulok, where they were duly handed over to me.
In fact the flat in Cheremeteff Pereulok was my headquarters in Moscow and Mlles S., Friede and Dagmara K. were among my most loyal and devoted collaborators.
And thus it was that I was absolutely au courant with everything that was happening on all the Bolshevik fronts, and was enabled to get a correct orientation of the political and military position of the regime. Some of these communiqués were in the highest degree humorous and characteristic, as when the young Red General Sabline telegraphed: ‘Our canaille has ratted again, and we have been obliged to yield Red Hill.’
My own official reports to my superiors in London always took one form. Beneath their national apathy the great mass of the Russian people longed to be delivered from their oppressors. Give Russia a popular government and once more she would show a united front to the Germans. In any case Bolshevism was a far worse enemy than Germany, a hideous cancer striking at the very root of civilisation.
It was pretty obvious that, if they could only be made to co-operate, the anti-Bolsheviks could seize the reins of power with ease. Numerically they were far superior to their enemies. But they were leaderless. The Russians are useless without a leader. Without a leader they will stand and let themselves be slaughtered like so many sheep. I was positive that the terror could be wiped out in an hour, and that I myself could do it. And why not? A Corsican lieutenant of artillery trod out the embers of the French Revolution. Surely a British espionage agent, with so many factors on his side, could make himself master of Moscow?
The armed forces on which the Bolsheviks relied were Letts. The Red soldiers were deserting by hundreds of thousands. But the Letts could not desert. Latvia was in the hands of the Germans. The Letts were the only soldiers in Moscow. Whoever controlled the Letts controlled the capital. The Letts were not Bolsheviks; they were Bolshevik servants because they had no other resort. They were foreign hirelings. Foreign hirelings serve for money. They are at the disposal of the highest bidder. If I could buy the Letts my task would be easy.
Meantime it was necessary for me to travel to Petrograd fairly often, both to carry the dispatches which Colonel Friede brought and to confer with my friends in that city. Accordingly I requested Colonel Friede to secure me a pass. The Colonel advised me to obtain an official post under the Soviet, as he had done, and gave me, in addition to the pass, a letter of introduction to Orlovsky, President of the Tcheka-Criminel in Petrograd, but like Friede an anti-communist.
There are two branches of the Tcheka – the political secret police, of which Dzerjinski was the head, the most diabolical organisation in the history of the world, and the criminal branch answering to the civic police in a civilised country. It was of this latter that Orlovsky, formerly a judge, was President, and to his office I went on my arrival in Petrograd.
It was entering the lion’s den with a vengeance, but there was no help for it. If I was to have a regular pass to Orlovsky I must go. And accordingly when I returned to Moscow I was Comrade Relinsky, collaborator of the Tcheka.
Needless to say I was not slow to make use of my new office. It gave me opportunities, which were of the greatest value to me and which I quickly turned to account in securing very valuable information.
Orlovsky was a man of sardonic humour. I remember Grammatikoff’s account of his first meeting with Monsieur le President. One day to his extreme horror he received a summons from the Tcheka-Criminel. In fear and trembling poor Grammatikoff presented himself at the offices of the Tcheka, which were situated in the old Ministry of the Interior on the Fontanka quay, and was immediately conducted into the sumptuous apartment of the old Ministry, which had been assigned to the President of the Tcheka-Criminel. The President was sitting at his desk, and a stenographer was in the room with him.
When Grammatikoff entered the President introduced himself with a strong Polish accent as ‘Veneslav Orlovsky’.
Then he dismissed the stenographer and turning to Grammatikoff said in pure Russian:
‘Well, Monsieur Grammatikoff, I perceive that you do not recognise me.’
Grammatikoff realised that the gentleman before him was someone he knew, but who it was he could not say. The President resembled someone – but who?
‘You remember Orloff,’ resumed the President, ‘juge d’instruction at Vaisovie?’
Grammatikoff was a barrister and had practised in that court. And now he recognised in the gentleman before him the famous juge d’instruction in espionage cases. How had he become President of the Tcheka? That was the sort of question one did not ask.
‘I know,’ said Orloff, ‘that you must go to Moscow, but all travelling between Petrograd and Moscow is forbidden to the ordinary citizen. Here is a return ticket. You will travel as a collaborator of mine. And now – au revoir. Come and see me again as soon as you return from Moscow.’
Grammatikoff and myself thus very simply solved the extremely difficult question of travelling between Moscow and Petrograd. We travelled as collaborator of the Tcheka-Criminel.
On my return to Moscow I proceeded at once with the organisation of my conspiracy, and the preparation of the White Russians to wipe out the terror. I had to be cautious though.
The Tcheka was everywhere and the chances that I would enlist some of its provocateurs into my scheme were large. It was essential that my Russian organisation should not know too much, and that no part of it should be in a position to betray another.
The scheme was accordingly arranged on the ‘Five’ system, and each participant knew another four persons only. I myself, who was at the summit of the pyramid knew them all, not personally, but by name and address only, and very useful was I to fi
nd the knowledge afterwards, as I shall have to show. Thus, if anything were betrayed, everybody would not be discovered, and the discovery would be localised. The mind shudders to contemplate how ghastly the revenge would be if there were a complete betrayal.
No less than 60,000 officers, who lived in Moscow, were in the conspiracy and were ready to mobilise immediately the signal was given. Grammatikoff had been right in saying that the White Russians were only waiting for a leader. A well-known Tsarist officer, General Judenitch, was immediately to take command of this army. From the outside our nearest assistance would be from General Savinkoff who was hammering away at the outskirts of Russia with one of the counter-revolutionary armies. As soon as the insurrection had proved successful the way for Savinkoff into Russia would be clear and what remained of the Bolsheviks would be between an upper and a nether millstone.
All arrangements were made for a provisional government. My great friend and ally Grammatikoff was to become Minister of the Interior, having under his direction all affairs of police and finance. Tchubersky, an old friend and business associate of mine, who had been head of one of the greatest mercantile houses in Russia, was to become Minister of Communications. Judenitch, Tchubersky and Grammatikoff would constitute a provisional government to suppress the anarchy which would almost inevitably follow from such a revolution.
All this of course entailed a great deal of organisation. Looking back I wonder that in so short a time I was able to accomplish so much. Only two things remained to be done. The most formidable obstacle in our path was constituted by the Lettish garrison, who, as I have explained, were mercenaries in the pay of the Bolsheviks. I must buy their support. Secondly, I must time the rising when both Lenin and Trotsky should be in Moscow. For Lenin and Trotsky were Bolshevism. Once they were removed the whole foul institution would crumble to dust, but while they lived there could be no peace in Russia. It was accordingly necessary to our success for us to arrest Lenin and Trotsky at the first blow.
The money was very soon forthcoming for the purchase of the Letts. There was no lack of anti-communists in Moscow who were prepared to sacrifice their all if necessary to overthrow the horror which was reigning in Russia. In a surprisingly short space of time there were hundreds of thousands of roubles in the bureau drawer in Mlle S.’s flat in the Cheremeteff Pereulok.
Finally I got into touch with Colonel Berzin, one of the three Lettish commandants. Berzin was a soldier and a gentleman, a sworn foe of Germany and of Communism. If afterwards he revealed to the Bolsheviks certain details of our conspiracy, it was under the stress of tortures too terrible to be borne. I am satisfied that the Bolshevik story that he was from the start one of their provocation agents is a vile scandal.
Berzin came to me, as it were, with a recommendation. He was already co-operating with the Allied secret service, with de Vertemont the French agent, and with de Vertemont’s American colleague, Kalamatiano. At the time I had not met these two gentlemen, judging it best to keep myself to myself, but I was informed of their activities by Captain Hill, who was attached to the British mission and whom in the course of my duties I met frequently in Moscow. Afterwards Hill and myself were to be in several tight corners together and to get out safely. That was when the mission was under surveillance, when Bruce Lockhart, its head, was a prisoner, and when Hill was a wanderer in a Moscow grown rabid.
When I had sounded Berzin and entirely satisfied myself with regard to him, I unfolded some of the details of my conspiracy and asked him whether the collaboration of his Lettish colleagues could be secured. Our meeting took place at the Tramble Café in the Tverskoy Boulevard, and I stressed the money side of the question, promising large sums to the commandants and proportionate rewards to the lower ranks.
Berzin assured me that the task I had set him was easy, that the Letts were full of disgusted loathing for their masters, whom they served only as a pis aller. In consideration of my princely proposals he could positively guarantee the future loyalty of his men to me. Thereupon I handed him over some earnest money instructing him to divide it with his fellow commandants. And from that time Berzin dipped regularly into our exchequer.
I had merely to await my opportunity.
Meantime, starvation increased in Moscow. The patient queues waiting in the streets showed faces daily thinner and more emaciated. The comrades did not stand in queues. Not vainly had Lenin differentiated between ‘We’ and ‘You’. Daily the streets grew more dirty and litter strewn. Horses starved and fell exhausted, whipped to the last ounce of energy that was in them. There was nobody to remove the carcases. There they lay putrescent. Civilisation was losing the battle in Moscow, losing disastrously.
The Tcheka raids went on. People would go out in the morning and never return. Or you would visit the flat of the friend with whom you had talked and eaten yesterday, and find it empty, ransacked, desolate. Who were languishing in the terrible Butyrsky? Nobody knew; nobody dared ask questions.
The position of the representatives in Moscow was daily becoming more precarious. When my conspiracy was approaching fruition the German ambassador, von Mirbach, was shot down, assassinated, it was said at the time, by a White Russian who regarded him as the author of the horrors now being enacted in Moscow.
I shall never forget the comments on the crime which appeared in the Allied newspapers. The tone of them, while professing a proper abhorrence of the crime, was laudatory, congratulatory. Now, at last, a misled Russia was returning to a better frame of mind, had discovered who was her real enemy. Germany, Germany was the enemy. At all costs Germany must be brought to her knees.
Gracious heavens, will people in England never understand? The Germans are human beings; we can afford to be even beaten by them. Here in Moscow there is growing to maturity the arch-enemy of the human race. Here monsters of crime and perversion, to the fact of whose very existence the delicacy of society decreed for centuries that its very eyes should be shut and its very ears closed, are regnant. Here the foulest, most monstrous and most obscene passions, which have been suppressed and bridled by the common decency of people at large and by the strong hand of a most beneficent authority since civilisation first began, gibber and swagger in the seats of government. Here minds, of the like of which decent people were once not allowed to know, rule and control. Here men, who have been under sentence for nameless crimes, administer with a horrible parody of justice a satiric law. Here criminals of every mentionable and unmentionable kind are preparing an unholy war of revenge against civilisation, which has only lasted by suppressing them. The mental perverts of the world, in the extremity of their rage against the forces which have kept them in chains so long, have openly declared war on everything which the world has been taught to consider pure and right and noble.
If civilisation does not move first and crush the monster, while yet there is time, the monster will finally overwhelm civilisation.
As a matter of fact the Bolsheviks wished to drive the foreign envoys out of Russia. They had been saying for some time that the headquarters of the counter-revolution was at the foreign missions. A disastrous fire had occurred at one of the railway stations, in which the Bolsheviks informed us that a quantity of provisions was destroyed. In point of fact the conflagration was started by the Bolsheviks themselves, who had to find some excuse why there should be no food in a starving Moscow. They said that this fire was the work of the French mission.
The Allies themselves were anxious enough to leave Moscow. There was no point in remaining there. The city had sunk into a state of putrescence and stagnation beyond recall. It was fit to excite the disgust of any decent man. The missions were exposed to the insults of mentally and physically unhygienic commissars. The consulates were raided more than once and the Allied representatives treated with the grossest indignity and contumely. Infamy was piled upon infamy until at last the missions, after registering an emphatic protest, prepared to shake the dust of Moscow off their feet.
It was arranged that Captain
Hill should remain in Moscow to assist me in intelligence work. Though he was my superior in rank, Hill unselfishly placed himself under my command and never could man wish for more gallant and devoted a collaborator. Moreover the American agent Kalamatiano and the French agent de Vertemont were to remain in hiding in the city for purposes of espionage, and it was proposed to me that as chief of the British secret intelligence service in Moscow I should meet de Vertemont and arrange for our future co-operation.
I had an uneasy feeling (such as one frequently gets in dangerous situations, when one’s nerves are constantly on the ‘qui vive’) that I should keep myself to myself and not go to the meeting which had already been arranged for me. But in the end I allowed myself to be persuaded.
The meeting took place for safety at the American consulate, the only one which had not yet been raided by the Bolsheviks. M. Grenard, the French consul, introduced me without naming me to de Vertemont, who of course knew who I was, and then, to my surprise to René Marchand (again without naming me) whom he described as a confidential agent of the French government. And here it was that the uneasy feeling, which had been haunting me all along, became acute. Marchand asked me my name, and I mumbled the first that came to my mind. I do not recall it now, but in his letter, as printed in the Isvestia, R. gave it as Rice.
I was by no means favourably impressed with M. Marchand, Moscow correspondent of the Paris Figaro though he was, and discreetly drew de Vertemont into another room and arranged with him some details about liaison. To do so I had to disclose to him some details of our conspiracy. The room in which we were was long and badly lighted. In the midst of an animated discussion I suddenly became aware that Marchand had crept in to the room, and no doubt had already overheard a large part of our conversation.
However there was no help for it now. I could only hope that my intuition had been wrong.
Adventures of a British Master Spy Page 3
