Adventures of a British Master Spy

by Sidney Reilly

  Please believe, dear Madam, that the death of your husband will be avenged, but to this end your valuable co-operation is indispensable to us. It is with the most lively interest that we have learned of your intentions and the activity which you are employing. We beg you, then, to continue the work for our common cause.

  Although we regard you already a member of our great family, we are very happy, Madam, to learn of your desire to enter the fold of the orthodox church, a thing which will unite us even more.

  It would be excellent, if you could learn our language a little, a thing which would not give you much trouble after what Mme Schultz has told us of your astounding talents as a linguist. We should then ask you to come to us so that you could take an active part in the work and so that we could introduce you to the members of our group. We would be able at the same time to prove to you our sincere devotion and to work with you to the same final goal. May God come to your aid in your grief and give you consolation in the work which you desire to share with us.

  Your distant friends,

  Klein, Levine, King

  Klein and Levine were names adopted by Jekoffleff and Opperput; the latter betrayed Savinkoff and Marie Schultz

  The letter is written on lined paper in a vertical and rather undeveloped hand and bears three signatures, none being in the same handwriting as that of the writer of the letter. The names are of course noms-de-guerre, and the very greatest secrecy was maintained about the real identity of our heads in Moscow. It was understood however that they were all men of standing, and that one at least held high office under the Bolsheviks.

  Oh, if I had only known, if I had only known. Klein stood for Jekoffleff, a high Bolshevik official, and Levine was Opperput, Opperput the Russian Iscariot, who had betrayed Savinkoff, who had betrayed Sidney, who was to betray Marie Schultz, when the ‘Trust’ had exploited her enough. But of course I knew nothing of this at the time. Not yet had I reason to doubt the honesty and sincerity of the organisation.

  This was the only communication I received direct from the heads of our organisation in Moscow. Their other instructions came to me through Marie, and now and again an emissary of the organisation would visit me in Paris. They were very insistent that I should learn the language and go to Russia as soon as possible. Indeed Marie did not wish me to wait until I had really mastered the language, but advised me to secure a foreign passport as soon as I had a working knowledge of it. One of the American republics at once occurred to me, and I was successful in securing a false passport from one of my friends in a South American legation in London.

  And meantime Marie was devoting her life to finding out what had really happened to Sidney Reilly. She wrote to me now from Moscow, now from Petrograd, now from Helsingfors, now from Warsaw. Her letters were very innocent on the face of them, but they contained messages written in invisible ink, which I developed and read in Paris. True to her promise she was leaving no stone unturned.

  ‘What a woman,’ said George Nicholaivitch, following her with adoring eyes. ‘She can do anything, anything. I give you my word, Madame Pepita, my wife is the most wonderful woman on earth.’

  One side of Marie’s life remained a complete mystery to me, that which concerned itself with the heads of the organisation in Russia. Beyond the fact that one at least was a highly placed Bolshevik official I knew nothing about them. Mysterious, masked figures they worked behind the scenes of politics. Of course all the heads were in Moscow. General K.’s relations with the ‘Trust’ were purely incidental. But his authority over all the anti-Bolsheviks outside Russia was absolute. When I told him of the message I had received from the Moscow centre, and that I was busy learning Russian so as to proceed to join them, his orders were blunt and to the point.

  ‘Don’t go.’

  I remembered how he had given the same advice to Sidney, and on the very night of my conversation with him I had a dream. I thought we were back in our room in London, and Sidney came and stood by my bed, saying, ‘Whatever you do, however great the inducement held out to you, however plausible those that ask you, never let yourself be tempted into Russia.’ The words were so clear, pronounced in his dear voice, that I awakened with them still ringing in my physical ear. I could still hear the echo of his well-remembered tones. It was some minutes before I realised that he had not suddenly come back to me, and had not actually been in my room and spoken to me. When realisation came that it had only been a dream and that I was in very deed alone, I broke down and wept there in the darkness.

  And Marie was then in Russia. Marie was in the very jaws of the trap. Marie was in the uttermost danger. I suddenly longed for her to come back. I had grown very fond of Marie. I relied very much on her, as did everybody else who came into contact with that amazing woman. I was never allowed to pierce the arcana of her Russian life. The ‘Trust’ was like a great lodge of Freemasonry, in which there were degrees of initiation, and I was as yet a neophyte. I did not even know the real names of the signatories of the letter I had received from Moscow. If I had but known at that time, I might have saved Marie from going to the doom, to which she had already unwittingly sent so many of the brave and the true.

  Meantime I sought to ingratiate myself with my chiefs in Moscow, so that they should put all their efforts into the enquiry they were making for me. Various commissions reached me from time to time. Thus I was to obtain a poison, which would mix with food or drink without taste and would make people ill for a week without killing them. This, they explained, was needed to give the soldiers on the day when the ‘Trust’ would make its final attempt to overthrow the Soviet regime. The instructions for me to secure a passport and go to Moscow became more and more pressing, but General K.’s counter-instructions were uncompromising.

  On another occasion I was asked to proceed to Warsaw, where a German paper manufacturer had succeeded in exactly counterfeiting Russian money. The motive of the scheme was to discredit and bankrupt the Bolshevik government. I refused to have anything to do with the scheme, and the event proved that I was right. It is needless to recall how several prominent anti-Bolsheviks were drawn into the net, and suffered through being victimised by this insidious provocation.

  But by now I was beginning to have doubts of the ‘Trust’. I had been assigned so many ludicrous tasks, led up so many blind alleys. Moreover it was difficult to believe, if Marie were right in ascribing such powers to her chiefs, that they should after such a length of time still have failed to find out anything about Sidney. The most contradictory reports came through about him. Now I was positively assured that he was dead: now they told me that he was alive, and were certain that before long they would be able to trace his place of confinement.

  Was it possible that there were traitors in the ‘Trust’? If news coming through to me was intentionally misleading, it pointed to traitors highly placed in the organisation.

  When next Marie came to Paris I taxed her with my suspicions. I can see her now as she rose and walked up and down the room in anxiety and mental perturbation.

  ‘Marie,’ I said to her, ‘promise me one thing, that you will not repeat my suspicions to your chiefs in Russia.’

  ‘No, no,’ cried Marie with a shudder, ‘I cannot give that promise. They must know everything. If anything occurs which makes you suspect, please do not tell me. Tell General K., but not me, not me.’

  ‘And why not you?’

  ‘Because I must report it. You do not know the heads of the “Trust”. Besides, we are bound by an oath – yes, we are bound by an oath.’

  Then I feared for Marie. I felt the cold fingers grip my heart. She was perturbed. She had doubts of her own. I knew it at that moment. I begged her to stay in Paris. I begged her not to return to Russia. Marie smiled calmly.

  ‘I have promised you not to rest until I have found out what happened to Sidney,’ she told me.

  Poor Maroussia! She returned to Russia, and her letters began to get stranger and stranger. She seemed to be afraid of her own
words. She wrote, one would think, under some restraint, as if some unseen watcher were peering over her shoulder. I was terrified. I had grown very fond of Marie. I ached for the time when she should come back to Paris. I felt that some hideous danger were impending over my dear friend in Russia. In peril of course I knew she was, but it was not the danger from the Bolsheviks I feared. Some frightful menace, obscene and hideous, sat beside her elbow as she wrote. And she knew it. I could see from her letters that she knew it.

  At last to my infinite relief she returned to Paris. I need not say how overjoyed I was to see her. She was the last of my friends. But oh! What a different Maroussia it was that came back from Russia. Her eyes had a desperate, hunted look. Her face was worn and emaciated. Even her old self-reliance seemed to have broken down. Marie was afraid.

  Of what? She tried to explain. She had left Russia contrary to the direct instructions of her chiefs, in order to put certain facts before General K. It was the act of insubordination which disturbed her. But I was not satisfied with her explanation. I was sure that she had discovered some act of treachery in the ‘Trust’, and I put my suspicions directly to her.

  Marie’s denial was not nearly so confident as it had been before. She said that she did not think that there was actually any treachery. Her views did not quite coincide with those of her chiefs, that was all. She was all for action. She had managed to have a difference of opinion with them, and she was afraid they suspected her of double dealing.

  ‘My coming here at all is an act of insubordination,’ she confessed, ‘and I must return to Moscow as soon as possible. When I said that I was going to Paris to confer with the General, they flatly ordered me to remain. My lodgings in Moscow were watched. I gave the watchers the slip and reached the station. A message was brought to me there to return. I disregarded it, and here I am.’

  ‘You will not go back to Russia,’ I said.

  ‘I must, I must.’

  ‘Don’t you think, Maroussia,’ I went on, ‘that the whole organisation might be a provocation on the part of the Bolsheviks, to enable them to get hold of all the counter-movements, and to draw the anti-Bolsheviks into the net?’

  ‘Oh no, no,’ cried Marie. ‘I have worked with the “Trust” for over four years. In it are some of my oldest and most valued friends. For it I have pledged my honour again and again. It cannot be a provocation.’

  My mind went unhappily to the ‘Greens’, the organisation of which Savinkoff had been the titular head. The ‘Greens’ had been so called because they were supposedly a peasant party, neither ‘White’ nor ‘Red’. In actual fact they had been a provocation on the part of the Bolsheviks. A man called Opperput had played a large part in them.

  As Marie was speaking I thought I detected a noise outside the door. I turned round and walked over to it quietly and as I advanced I heard footsteps on the other side rapidly retreating. Nobody was in the passage when I opened the door. Our conversation had been overheard. Some spy unknown knew that Marie suspected the ‘Trust’. If Marie returned to Russia she was doomed.

  Marie had hardly time to confer with General K. when an urgent message arrived for her from Moscow, instructing her to return at once on a matter of the gravest importance, and she immediately prepared her departure. I was now thoroughly alarmed. Marie went to bid farewell to General K. and to receive his final instructions. His instructions were unexpected. He ordered her to stay in Paris.

  But Paris was too far from the centre of those affairs which were all her life to Marie Schultz. Once again she was guilty of insubordination.

  The morning came and Marie was gone. I received a letter from her written on the train to Stettin. She told me that she was going to wait at Helsingfors subject to General K.’s permission.

  And then from Helsingfors I received the following alarming letter.

  My dear Pepita,

  The catastrophe has arrived, all is lost, all is over, nothing remains but death. It is impossible to go on living with what I have just learned after four years’ work during which I gave so much with so much joy. Now I know that all was false, that I was a dupe like so many others, that I have been fooled from day to day.

  Our organisation was full of provocateurs, playing always the chief part and never giving opportunity to honest folks to penetrate to the bottom of our work. Whenever I wanted to clear up anything or to have an opinion of my own I was always accused of acting against discipline. And every time I smothered my doubts and submitted. But the moment has come, when one of those, who was taken by force and remained in their camp hypnotised by their omnipotence, has revolted and revealed everything to me. He has just escaped from Russia and now uncovers all the treachery, all the baseness of these people. You will read all this in the papers. You will know at last the truth of that, which has tormented us for so long a time. But my task is to carry my cross to the bitter end and confess all to you myself.

  Your husband was killed in a cowardly and ignoble fashion. He never reached the frontier. All this comedy has been staged for the benefit of us others. He was captured at Moscow and imprisoned in the Loubianka for a month in the position of a privileged prisoner. Every day he was taken out for exercise in a car, and during one of these drives he was stabbed in the back by the order of the chief of the GPU – Artanzoff, an old personal enemy of his, who thus took his revenge in this base manner. He was killed without conviction, without accusation, like a brigand. For the rest, the departure of Sidney Georgevitch to Petrograd, his journey to the frontier, the ambush at Allekul were all lies and acting. A volley was fired near the frontier, four persons were taken, were painted and carried like corpses to the station, where our agents saw them. An article was afterwards printed in the Soviet papers to the effect that four people were killed near the frontier of Finland.

  The fact that I did not know does not diminish my responsibility. His blood is upon my hands, it will remain there all my life. I will wash them in avenging him in a terrible manner or dying in the attempt.

  I dare say nothing to you, to whom I have brought so much unhappiness; I only want you to know that I shall not live if his blood is not avenged.

  Always thine,

  M

  P.S. I ask you one more favour: write to me under the name of S. All that you can find out in the letters bearing on the Savinkoff case about a man called Alexander Lepeliuz-Opperput. What part did he play in Savinkoff’s past and what character is given him?

  Marie Schultz’s last letter

  It must have been terrible for Marie to have the realisation forced upon her that for all these years she had been the dupe of the Soviet and that through her so many people, including the husband of her dearest friend, had been killed or captured, that the men with whom she had shared good fortune and ill, pleasure and peril, were traitors all and had been living a lie all these years.

  As for the story about Sidney’s death I simply did not believe it, and for the best of reasons. I had come into contact with some other people in Moscow in no way connected with the ‘Trust’, who informed me that in December 1926 Sidney Reilly was in the prison hospital of the Tcheka, that he was not badly treated and that he was out of his mind. The news came through somebody in no way connected with any organisation, who obtained it from one of the nurses in charge. Who this person is I dare not reveal, as he is still in Moscow. His last report was that Sidney had practically recovered and had been removed to another hospital, where it was absolutely impossible for him to get through to him.

  The dangerous position of poor Maroussia alarmed me terribly. Reading between the lines it becomes obvious that her informant was the man named Opperput to whom she refers in her post script. Opperput was the man who had told her all the lies about the death of my husband.

  I did not need to refer to the Savinkoff papers to give Maroussia a warning with regard to Opperput, whose treachery had been one of the most marked features of the Savinkoff case. He had been one of Savinkoff’s Russian correspondents. He had us
ed the ‘Greens’ as now he seemed to have used the ‘Trust’.

  I sent Marie a telegram at once to the following effect:

  ‘Marie take no heed of all new lies. Distrust O., a person suspect and entirely without confidence. Dossier follows in a few days.’

  And at the same time I posted to her an account of Master Opperput’s past activities, which would have surprised the worthy gentleman had he known it.

  However I received a reply from Marie dated 25 May 1927.

  My dear Pepita,

  I have just received your letter, in which you report to me all the evil-doing of this man who was associated with us. Now I know all his past from his own lips – he has hidden nothing: he confirms many of the things that have been said of him: he states that he was forced by torture to tell all that he knew when he was taken prisoner in 1921, but he states in addition that he was never a provocateur before his arrest. Where the truth lies I don’t know. Now he is unfolding everything, he is helping the representatives of the other countries who are being fooled and surrounded by Bolshevik agents to escape from this terrible position, and he is wrecking the result of five years’ work of the GPU.

  It is so easy to charge him with his past: all my soul revolts against him. But when I think that he is the only one of all those thousands and thousands, who has dared to revolt against his masters, who has had the strength to break through the hypnosis of their omnipotence, I feel that I shall behave like a coward if I turn my back on this man at this moment. You must fight against your enemy when he is strong and not when he has rendered himself of his own free will into your hands.

  I do not wish to justify him, I do not wish to speak of his past which disgusts me but I have an idea which nothing can alter that we ought to give him the chance of rehabilitating himself by putting between himself and his past his blood or that of his masters. He says that is what he wants and I am going to put it to the proof. If I am fooling myself again, so much the worse for me. If I am right, we will acquire an ally who knows them better than we do and who will always find a means of over-reaching them.