by Andrew Cook
While his plans for a coup were taking shape, an Allied force had landed at Archangel on 4 August. Its objectives were not to actually lock horns with the Bolsheviks, but to prevent the Germans from obtaining unused Allied military supplies that were stored in the area. Besides, this token force of 5,000 men was far too small to actually take offensive action. When the Bolsheviks learned the true size of the force they must have breathed a huge sigh of relief. This did not, however, stop them from raiding and closing the British and French diplomatic missions on 5 August as an act of retaliation.
This would mean that the meeting which Reilly arranged between the Letts and Lockhart at the British Mission must have taken place during the first four days of August, as the mission was closed after the Cheka raid on 5 August. Lockhart, although sceptical, was certainly intrigued by this development and asked to be introduced to a Latvian commander. The Cheka therefore arranged for Lt-Col. E.P. Berzin, the commander of the Special Light Artillery, who guarded the Kremlin, to make contact with Lockhart. Berzin was not a Chekist, but was known to be a loyal supporter of the Bolsheviks.
Buikis, Sprogis and Berzin therefore presented themselves at Lockhart’s apartment at the Hotel Elite on 14 August.25 Lockhart, still somewhat unsure about becoming involved in a Lettish rebellion, discussed his meeting with the French and American Consuls later that day. The following day he met Berzin again, only this time ‘Mr Constantine’ and the French Consul, Grenard, were in attendance. It was at this meeting that the fateful decision was made to entrust all further liaison with Berzin to ‘Mr Constantine’. This effectively meant that Reilly was now in the driving seat of the plot. Berzin raised the matter of other Lettish regiments, who he believed could be recruited to assist the Allies in liberating Latvia. This, he estimated would cost something in the region of 4 million roubles. Lockhart and his colleagues promised to consider this.26
On 17 August27 the first of several meetings between Reilly and Col. Berzin took place. Reilly informed Berzin that the requested funding had been approved and would be paid to him in several instalments, the first being 700,000 roubles which Reilly handed over there and then. Reilly then proposed something that had never been raised before by Allied representatives. Why, he asked, could there not be a Lettish rebellion staged in Moscow to coincide with further Allied intervention? Achieving his own ends by exploiting his role as an intermediary was a tactic Reilly had used successfully time and again in business.28
According to Lockhart, Reilly reported that his negotiations with the Letts were going smoothly, and suggested that he might be able, with the Letts, to stage a counter-revolution in Moscow. Lockhart, in his book, Memoirs of a British Agent, states that he consulted Gen. Lavergne and the French Consul Grenard, which resulted in Reilly being told in no uncertain terms to have nothing to do with ‘so dangerous and doubtful a move’.29 A detailed memorandum written to Foreign Secretary Balfour on 5 November 1918,30 seeking to set the record straight on the ‘alleged Allied conspiracy against the Soviet Government’, however, makes no reference to so instructing Reilly. In this version, Reilly is merely told that, ‘there was nothing to be gained by such action’, which could hardly be described in anyone’s language as a veto.
At this point Reilly promptly disappeared, not to be seen again by Lockhart until they met up again in England some months later. Liaising with Capt. George Hill, another British intelligence operative who was also working underground,31 a series of meetings was held between Reilly and Berzin, at which two further instalments of 200,000 and 300,000 roubles were handed over. It was also agreed that the coup itself would be staged on 6 September during a joint meeting of the Executive Council of the Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars) and the Moscow Soviet at the Bolshoi Theatre. Reilly’s plan was that Lenin and Trotsky would be humiliated rather than shot, by being led through the streets without their trousers. In a further example of Cheka provocation, Berzin now proposed that both Lenin and Trotsky should be shot. Although Reilly objected to this on the grounds that it would make martyrs of them, official Soviet accounts of the ‘Lockhart Plot’ have asserted that Reilly’s plan was indeed to have them shot immediately on arrest.32
On 25 August, the French journalist René Marchand accompanied the French Consul Grenard to a meeting at the US Consulate. The meeting had been convened by Consuls Poole and Grenard to bring together their respective intelligence contacts – Reilly, Kalamatiano and de Vertement. Marchand, who was later exposed as a Bolshevik sympathiser, passed on an account of what he had heard to the Cheka. To preserve Marchand’s cover it was suggested to him by Dzerzhinsky that he write a letter to French President Raymond Poincare, describing the conspiratorial discussions he had witnessed. Before this could be posted, the Cheka would search his room and find the letter. This discovery would then act as the pretext for uncovering the plot.
Matters were pre-empted in a dramatic and totally unforeseen way, when, on 30 August, Leonid Kannegiser, a Workers’ Popular Socialist Party activist, shot dead Moisei Uritsky, head of the Petrograd Cheka. That same day, in a completely unconnected incident, Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Social Revolutionary Party, shot Lenin as he left a meeting at the Michelson factory in Moscow. Lenin survived, but only just. Of the two shots fired at point-blank range, one missed his heart by less than an inch and the other missed his jugular vein by a similar margin.
These unconnected events were now knitted together by the Cheka to implicate and link Bolshevism’s many opponents into one giant conspiracy that warranted the unleashing of a full retaliatory response. The ‘Red Terror’, as it came to be known, resulted in over a thousand political opponents being summarily rounded up and shot. The Cheka raid on the British Embassy in Petrograd resulted in the death of Cromie, who apparently put up resistance. Using a list supplied by Berzin, the Cheka also rounded up those who were involved in the ‘Lockhart Plot’ and more besides. Lockhart was arrested, although later released in an exchange for Litvinov, who had been arrested in London in reprisal. Elizaveta Otten, Reilly’s lover and chief courier, was also arrested, along with his other mistress Olga Starzheskaya. Maria Fride, one of Kalamatiano’s couriers, was also arrested at Otten’s flat with a set of papers she had brought for Reilly. Olga later related the story of her arrest in a petition to the Red Cross Committee for the Aid of Political Prisoners:
I was arrested at VTsIK where I had worked at the Administrational Section since May. A day before, at night, my flat was searched but nothing was confiscated, and nobody was arrested. The reason for my arrest is known to me and is as follows: my groom Konstantin Markovich Massino, who I deeply loved and intended to share my life with, proved to be Englishman Reilly, who participated in the Anglo–French plot. Throughout our acquaintance he gave himself out for a Russian, and it was shortly before his disappearance that he told me who he really was. Until that moment I had no doubts he was Russian. I believed him and loved him, regarding him as an honest, noble, interesting and exclusively clever man, and in the deep of my heart I was very proud of his love. Therefore I was horrified by what I discovered about him during the interrogation. There proved to be two completely different persons. The deception, dirt and mean behaviour of this man pained me enormously. I have learnt about this ploy only from the papers. He never told me anything about it. Moreover, he seemed to me to be a supporter of Soviet power, though we never had any serious political discussions, as I was exclusively engaged in the settlement of my personal life, a new flat, household and work matters. My interest in politics was merely superficial. Throughout my stay in Moscow, and before that, I was never involved in any illegal organisations and made no statements against the existing order; moreover, I always supported Bolshevism and Communism as I understood it, and all those who knew me used to call me a Bolshevik.33
Elizaveta Otten also petitioned the committee:
I was arrested on 1 September for my acquaintance with British officer Sidney Reilly, who was involved in the Anglo–French plot. I h
ad known Reilly over four months, as from the very beginning of our acquaintance he could bind me to himself. He never talked to me about his political motives, I only knew that he served at the British Legation. He shared a flat with us and when repression against the British officers began, he left us saying he would depart from Russia forever. Shortly before his leave he asked me to do him a favour and pass on to him any letters that may arrive at his former address while he was staying in Moscow. I promised to do that being unaware that these letters may have political meaning, otherwise I would not have agreed to do that, as I had never been involved in politics. At the interrogation I discovered that Reilly had been foully deceiving me for his own political purposes, taking advantage of my exclusively good attitude to him, and by his seeming departure from Moscow he wanted to veil a change of his attitude towards me, intending to move to one divorced lady34 he had promised to marry.35
A Russian propaganda leaflet issued to Allied troops in Murmansk, naming Reilly as a conspirator in the plot to ‘overthrow the Russian Revolution’.
Although both statements should be read with a pinch of salt in terms of their exaggerated naïvety concerning Reilly’s actions, they do reflect the genuine shock both women felt on learning of his nefarious and duplicitous exploitation of them on a personal level.
On 3 September, details of the ‘Lockhart Plot’ were sensationally published in the Russian press.36 Reilly was named as one of the principal plotters and a dragnet was put out for him. The Cheka raided his flat, but once again Reilly had, in the nick of time, vanished into thin air.
TEN
FOR DISTINGUISHED SERVICE
With Cheka raids taking place throughout Petrograd, Capt. George Hill sent Lockhart a message using SIS ‘dictionary’ code: ‘I have’, he reported, ‘been over the network of our organisation and found everything intact’. ‘There was undoubtedly a fair amount of nervousness among some of the agents’, however.1 Hill, under the impression that Reilly had been arrested by the Cheka, assured Lockhart that, ‘I have got all of Lt Reilly’s affairs under my control, and provided I can get money it would be possible to carry on’.2 Lockhart was never to receive the message, for when Hill’s courier arrived at Lockhart’s flat, she found that it had shortly before been raided and Lockhart arrested. The message was therefore diverted to Lockhart’s assistant, Capt. Will Hicks. Hicks replied that it was important to lie low for some days to come, and that to the best of his knowledge there would be no more money for Hill as the source for obtaining it had completely dried up. Hicks too was of the view that Reilly had been arrested, although he had no news to confirm this. On receipt, Hill sent a further message to Gen. Poole informing him of the day’s events in Moscow.
At midday on 4 September, ‘a girl of Lt Reilly’s’ brought Hill a message to say that he was safe in Moscow, having travelled by train in a first-class compartment from Petrograd. On arrival at the Nicolai Station in Moscow, he had been informed that his chief courier and mistress, Elizaveta Otten, had been arrested. Hill immediately went to see Reilly, who was now in hiding, occupying two rooms in a flat ‘at the back end of town’.3 When Hill arrived there he found that Reilly had changed his name but was not going out during the day or even at night, as he had no identity papers to match the new name he was using. Reilly wanted a passport, some new clothes and another place to stay, as his present abode was ‘entirely unsuitable’.4 Although Hill makes no direct reference to whose flat this was, the transcript of the so-called ‘Lockhart Trials’ reveals testimony by Olga Starzhevskaya, who states that Reilly stayed with her between 3 and 4 September, which coincides exactly with the two days he spent at ‘the back end of town’.5
When Hill proposed that Reilly should make his escape by the safest route, heading westwards via the Ukraine, using a network of agents in that area for safe houses and assistance, Reilly refused. This route, he felt, would take far too long, and instead chose the more dangerous option of travelling north to Finland, from where he hoped to make his way to a neutral port. In the meantime, Hill moved Reilly to new accommodation the following day, 5 September. Intriguingly, although Hill was not specific as to the location, it would seem from his report that this was an office of some description.6 His dramatised version of these events, published in 1932, however, gives a slightly different account. According to this, Hill lodged Reilly with a prostitute who ‘was in the last stages of the disease which so often curses members of her profession’. Hill claimed that Reilly ‘was the most fastidious of men and while being caught by the Bolsheviks had little terror for him, he could hardly bring himself to spend the night on the couch in her room’.7 In another clue that suggests that he spent 3 and 4 September with Olga Starzhevskaya, Hill states that Reilly’s change of apartment was a good thing, ‘for the place where he had spent the previous night was raided by the Cheka the next evening’.8 This would therefore be the night of 5 September, the date of Olga’s arrest. That same evening six or seven of Hill’s couriers were arrested and summarily executed by the Cheka.
The key to the SIS dictionary code used by Reilly and Hill to communicate with each other while in hiding.
As Hill was not suspected of involvement in the Lockhart Plot, Capt. Hicks decided that he should drop his cover of George Bergmann, resume the identity of Capt. George Hill, and leave Russia with the British Mission, who had been given clearance to leave by the Bolshevik authorities. This was most fortuitous for Reilly, for Hill was now able to give him the George Bergmann identity papers that would enable him to make his escape. According to Hill’s report, Reilly left Moscow aboard a sleeper train bound for Petrograd on Sunday 8 September,9 although Reilly’s own recollection some seven years later was that the date was Wednesday 11 September.10 Hill’s account, being recorded at the time, is more likely to be the correct one. The date of his departure aside, the chronology of Reilly’s recollections coincide pretty much with accounts given by other participants. Reilly’s account states:
Having finished the liquidation of my affairs in Moscow, on 11 September, I departed for Petrograd in a railway car of the international society in a compartment reserved for the German Embassy, accompanied by one of their legation secretaries and using the passport of a Baltic German. I spent about ten days in Petrograd, hiding in various places, to liquidate my network there and also search for a way to cross the Finnish border – I wanted to escape to Finland. I was not able to do this, so I then decided to go through Revel [now Tallinn]. I departed Petrograd for Kronstadt, after receiving a ‘Protection Certificate’, which was issued to natives of the Baltic. I had, in addition to this document for exiting Petrograd for Kronstadt, a pass issued to one of the Petrograd workers committees in a Russian name. There was a launch with a Finnish captain already waiting for me at Kronstadt, on which I spent the night. I set off for Revel… In Revel I took up residence in the Hotel Petrograd using the name of George Bergmann, an antiquarian who had left Russia after a misunderstanding with the Soviet authorities… After ten days I departed secretly on the launch for Helsingfors, and from there to Stockholm and London, where I arrived on 8 November.11
Passing through Revel before crossing the Gulf of Finland to Helsingfors was not an option without risk, for Estonia was then under German occupation and the port was a major naval base teeming with officers and ratings of the German Baltic fleet. Fortunately, on disembarking, the Germans found ‘Herr Bergmann’s’ identity papers to be in order and he was able to walk away unhindered. At the hotel in Harju Street he mixed freely with the German officers staying there and dined with them on several occasions, as well as with the captain and his wife.
It was probably with some relief on Reilly’s part that the little boat eventually left Revel for Helsingfors a few days later. On arrival he bade the captain farewell and gave him a sealed, handwritten letter (in German):
I feel that after everything you have done for me, I must not leave you here clothed in all the lies I had to use, and that I owe it to you to say who I r
eally am. I am neither Bergmann nor an art dealer. I am an English officer, Lt Sidney Reilly, RFC, and have been for about six months on a special mission in Russia, and have been accused by the Bolsheviks of being the military organiser of a great plot in Moscow… I believe it is not necessary to stress that I consider it my duty towards you not to interest myself in anything military here, and not to pump the officers who were introduced to me. I believe that I played the role of the art dealer Herr Bergmann quite well, only once or twice did I catch myself using an English expression; for the rest, I imagine your lady wife was a little suspicious of me! It would be useless to offer you my gratitude – it is too big.12
Despite the self-created myths of daring missions behind German lines, this was his only genuine encounter with German personnel during wartime. That aside, it should equally be acknowledged that he was taking no risks at Revel. Had he been exposed as a fleeing British spy, he would certainly have faced a firing squad.
While Reilly was on his way back to London from Helsingfors, the US Consul, De Witt Poole, en route to America, called into the British Embassy in Christiania (now Oslo) on 30 September. His interview with the British Ambassador resulted in a ‘personal and most secret’ telegram to the Foreign Office in London from Ambassador Sir Mansfeldt Findlay:
There is strong suspicion that an agent named Reilly, whose wife appears to be living in New York, has either compromised Lockhart, who employed him in propaganda among Letts, by exceeding his instructions and endeavouring to provoke a revolt against the Bolsheviks, or has even betrayed him.
Reilly advocated encouraging a revolt, but Lockhart, after consulting the United States Consul General and the French Consul General, refused to do so, and instructed Reilly to limit his efforts to propaganda with a view to deterring the Letts soldiers from resisting Allied forces. It appears that Reilly was in communication with a certain Russian strongly suspected of being an agent provocateur, to whom he had given an address at which he still remained some days ago. Lockhart is now arrested. Neither Reilly nor the Russian has been arrested, and they are still at large. Hence suspicion.13
