by Stephen Grey
* * *
These were the early days of what became British intelligence. In 1909, the Secret Service bureau (referred to simply as SS) had been founded as the world’s first intelligence agency in response to a media-led campaign of panic about imperial Germany’s supposed espionage activities. (The CIA did not follow for another thirty-eight years.) The bureau’s foreign section was founded two years later, with an annual budget of a mere £7,000 (the equivalent of just under £300,000 in 2014 prices).5 During the First World War it was absorbed into the War Office and known as department MI1c, but for most of its existence it has been officially called the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and is known to insiders simply as the Service. By the late 1930s it would become popularly known by one of its cover names, MI6.
From its inception until 1923, SIS was led by an eccentric, Captain Mansfield Smith-Cumming, who went by Cumming or ‘C’. He insisted on signing his letters with a big capital ‘C’ in green ink – the initial and green ink still being used today by the current chief – and his men were a collection of mostly upper-class, ruthless mavericks.
It was the era of amateurs and audacity. After a preliminary interview in the Whitehall attic that Cumming had made his lair, his new recruits were dispatched abroad with little or no training and with few instructions.
* * *
Cumming’s agency was a break with tradition. For centuries Britain’s greatest spies had not been part of a separate bureaucracy. Certainly, intelligence networks were not unknown – whether Sir Francis Walsingham’s informers in Tudor England, or Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger’s all-source intelligence organization, established in the 1790s to combat French-inspired revolutionaries in Europe, or more recently British India’s security apparatus.6 But politicians believed that the British public had come to abhor such things, except as an expedient in an emergency. ‘Nothing is more revolting to Englishmen than the espionage which forms part of the administrative system of continental despotisms,’ wrote Erskine May in the second volume of his 1863 Constitutional History of England.7 The spies who were respected had been the nation’s explorers and adventurers who learned foreign tongues, mixed in with the ‘natives’ and revelled in all the danger (and, more often than not, in the loot). Even as Cumming plotted a new order, there were men like T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) in Jordan and the future Saudi Arabia, as well as the intrepid Gertrude Bell in Iraq, who continued that tradition. Before them there were spy-diplomats like Captain Arthur Conolly of the East India Company (beheaded in Bukhara, in modern-day Uzbekistan, for spying in 1842) and Captain Sir Alexander Burnes (murdered in Kabul in 1841). Both had trekked over the mountain passes of the Hindu Kush, playing their part in the so-called ‘Great Game’ made famous by the writer Rudyard Kipling. Mostly volunteers, they were hardly ‘secret agents’. While many operated under a flimsy disguise – as surveyors, for instance – their activities were neither secret nor discreet. As a more recent ‘incremental’ (to use one term for such a person) put it to me, ‘I was recruited before I was even born.’ But they were still spies. In the Great Game, they were gathering information about the extent of Russian encroachment and trying to elicit details of the secret intrigues between Russian envoys and local tribes.
Spying from the start of the twentieth century was more closely defined. Article 29 of the 1907 Hague Convention was clear that spying involved skulduggery:
A person can only be considered a spy when, acting clandestinely or on false pretences, he obtains or endeavours to obtain information in the zone of operations of a belligerent, with the intention of communicating it to the hostile party. Thus, soldiers not wearing a disguise who have penetrated into the zone of operations of the hostile army, for the purpose of obtaining information, are not considered spies.
In this new era, the mostly aristocratic, mainly amateur and adventurous tradition of spying did linger on in Cumming’s new agency. But the bureau’s early experiences showed the need to reinvent methods.
In the First World War, the secret service had not proved itself a great success. While the navy had cracked the German cipher codes, Cumming had been unable to recruit any agents inside Germany, with the notable exception of a Dutch-based itinerant naval engineer, Dr Karl Krüger. The service’s main success, instead, had been in the Netherlands and Belgium, with a network of train-spotter agents who tracked the movements of troops and supplies and helped describe the German order of battle. A post-war history of intelligence on the western front records ‘the bulk of the work of the Secret Service in occupied territory was devoted to train watching’.8 After the war, Britain made the mistake of authorizing the issue of medals or other honours to over 700 Belgian agents, putting them all in danger when the Germans invaded again in 1940.9
It was in revolutionary Russia, after the fall of the Tsar in 1917, that British intelligence not only found an enemy that would obsess it for decades but also took on a new shape. Stories of the derring-do of the men involved – people like Cromie and, in particular, three of his comrades in secret intelligence who then operated in Russia, Sidney Reilly, Paul Dukes and George Hill – have been told before in many colourful ways. But what the storytelling typically omits is just what failures their operations were, and how these failures demonstrated why espionage needed to adapt. Against an emerging modern state like the early Soviet Union, these missions established what worked and, more critically, what did not.
Despite their failures, Cromie and his generation also helped to establish the myth of espionage. Their amateur-style, action-man heroics created a potent, enduring and largely false idea of the intelligence officer as a ‘master spy’. It was a myth that endured – and still does – partly because it was useful. It has been exploited ever since to recruit spies and expand budgets.
Lenin’s tightly knit Bolshevik party, the communist faction that had taken over in the October Revolution of 1917, was a worthy foe, along with their intelligence outfit, the Cheka.10 After years of organizing secretly against the repressive regime of the tsars, the Bolsheviks were masters of conspiracy. Not only did they watch all foreigners and undertake intense surveillance of suspected spies, they also introduced double agents and provocateurs, and made use of elaborate ruses. In this high-pressure world of spy versus spy, Western intelligence had to rethink its approach, become professional and – contrary to the myth – outsource the actual spying to others.
* * *
A spy intrigue that is blown open to public scrutiny is known by American intelligence as a ‘flap’. In Britain’s first ever flap, in 1918 Petrograd, the protagonists, Captain Francis Cromie and Lieutenant Sidney Reilly, were rather different characters.
Born in Ireland in 1882, the son of a British Army officer and diplomat, Cromie had a commanding but slightly aloof bearing. He joined the Royal Navy Submarine Service at the age of twenty-one and in 1915 torpedoed and sank the German cruiser Undine, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order the following year. He was dispatched to Russia in 1915, leaving behind a young wife and child. His task was to command a flotilla of British submarines that patrolled and fought in the Baltic, and he was decorated a number of times by Tsar Nicholas II. After the Revolution, when the imperial Russian navy withdrew from the war and disbanded, Cromie’s initial role ended, but in January 1918 he was reassigned to the embassy in Petrograd as naval attaché. He may have engineered this, as one admiral later put it, because of a ‘romantic interest’: a young aristocrat, Sophie Gagarin, became his lover.
Cromie’s new role was primarily in intelligence. His boss was Admiral Sir William ‘Blinker’ Hall, the Royal Navy’s legendary chief of intelligence (then by far the most powerful of the Empire’s mushrooming secret services). Among Hall’s functions was the running of the navy’s message decryption service, which was named Room 40 after its original base at the Admiralty. When Cromie began his job in January he still had naval assets to protect, but as the German army drew closer, he arranged the s
cuttling of the Royal Navy’s six submarines and blew up supplies. And by the start of the summer that year he engaged himself – with others in British intelligence – in a far more grandiose scheme: to subvert Bolshevik power.
In August 1918, two men, Jan Buikis and Jan Sprogis, walked into the embassy in Petrograd. This was just after British troops had landed to the north in Archangel. The visitors claimed to be officers from an elite Lettish regiment that formed the praetorian guard of the Soviet leadership (Latvians were then called ‘Letts’). Buikis and Sprogis told Cromie that their comrades did not want to fight the British; instead they wanted help to change sides and cross to the British lines.
Cromie sent the men on to Moscow and it was there that the Lettish defectors met Bruce Lockhart, Britain’s first official envoy to the Bolshevik government, and were introduced to the man who worked as agent ST1 of the British secret service: Sidney Reilly. The Letts knew him as ‘Mr Constantine’. With Reilly, the Letts went from talking of defection to plotting an armed counter-coup. Meanwhile, in Petrograd, Cromie was equally involved in conspiracies. Many of his objectives were purely military: with the Germans now only 100 miles away, he hatched a plan with tsarists to find a way to blow up Russia’s Baltic fleet, by then under the control of the Bolsheviks and based in nearby Kronstadt, to avoid its being captured by the Germans and to destroy bridges ahead of German advancing columns.11 But, along with Reilly, he also had hopes of something more. As he telegraphed to London in June 1918, ‘Intervention on a thorough scale is the only thing that will save the situation and Russia.’12 A fellow diplomat in Russia noted, ‘Cromie wished to unite the large number of Russian organisations to work together under British instruction.’13
At this time Britain was still embroiled in the Great War, with thousands dying daily on the western front. In August 1918, the British suffered 80,000 casualties, and on one day alone – 8 August – 6,500 Allied soldiers were killed.14 The Bolsheviks, meanwhile, had made peace with Germany, signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918. This gave the Western Allies an interest in confronting the Bolsheviks and supporting the pro-tsarist White Russian forces, who rejected the peace deal.
As Britain moved closer to outright war with the Bolsheviks, Cromie knew that he was under close scrutiny. The Cheka followed him around and, after his flat was turned over, he moved to a ‘safe house’. He had to abandon this – escaping over the rooftops in his pyjamas – after another Cheka raid one night.15 He then moved into the embassy compound, along with Sophie Gagarin.
Cromie still believed that there was a chance of influencing the course of history. He kept in close touch with the two men he knew as ‘Tsarist officers’, Steckelmann and Sabir, who had promised to help him. Both claimed to be Russian White Guards based in nearby Finland. On the morning of Cromie’s death, Steckelmann had sent a message to the embassy before he came in person, saying that the ‘time for action is ripe and cannot be delayed’.16 In fact, as the British were to discover later, he and Sabir were secret agents of the Cheka.
The Cheka had come to believe, correctly, that Cromie was plotting against them and this may be why he was killed. As the Times correspondent George Dobson, who was present in the embassy, reported soon afterwards, Cromie ‘was evidently regarded by the raiders as the arch-conspirator amongst all the plotters … He often said that he would never be taken alive by the Bolsheviks, and [the] pointing of their revolvers at him was a provocation which he naturally resented.’17
That day, unaware that Lenin had been shot and of the growing jeopardy of his own situation, Sidney Reilly had made his way to Petrograd. While all the drama at the embassy was taking place, Reilly was waiting for Cromie in the flat of the MI1c station chief, Commander Ernest Boyce. After hearing of the shoot-out, Reilly slipped quietly away to Moscow on a sleeper train.
* * *
While the story of Cromie and his death in Petrograd was quickly forgotten, Sidney Reilly’s activities came to be regarded as probably Britain’s most famous tale of espionage. It was first publicized in 1931 in a posthumous – and largely fictional – ‘autobiography’ written with his wife and was then published as a book and a limited edition of the London Evening Standard.18 Further accounts of his life were published, including some by former intelligence officers. Together they created a popular icon for SIS that persisted. Strange, then, that he really had little in common with what the agency became.
Reilly did epitomize some of the qualities of a master of espionage. An arch-con man, he was a gifted linguist able to blend in almost everywhere, with the beguiling ability to move intransigent minds, make friends and steal secrets. He was also, along with his friend and successor in Russia, Sir Paul Dukes, one of the last intelligence officers sent into Russia in order to spy themselves. In SIS, lone operators like him were a short-lived phenomenon, and perhaps the fact that his story was an aberration explains why he and the so-called Lockhart Plot merited only a handful of lines in the agency’s official history.19
Reilly was born in 1873 into a Jewish family near Odessa, Ukraine, as Shlomo Rosenblum. After moving to London in the 1890s, he married an Irish woman and took her maiden name. From then on, as he turned into a businessman and professional con man, he claimed to be Irish. Travelling frequently to Russia over subsequent years, Reilly mainly seems to have acted as a freelance agent, stealing or gathering information that he could sell to another party. He gave the British information about oil prospects in the Caucasus and stole Russian defence plans that he sold to the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese War. He was also involved in selling war materiel – from buying large amounts of gunpowder in Japan to organizing the purchase of munitions in New York for the Russians. His last pre-revolutionary appearance in Russia was in the summer of 1915.20
Shortly after the October Revolution in 1917, Reilly asked to join the British military. He had been in New York, working on war contracts, and after enlisting in Toronto in the Royal Flying Corps, he arrived in London on 1 January 1918.
According to his most recent and thorough biographer, Andrew Cook, Reilly was probably pursuing a path to get him back to Russia for private motives: ‘He hoped to recover a fortune that he had left behind in St Petersburg.’ Reilly had left paintings and valuables in the country and he was looking for a chance to repatriate them.21
SIS’s original files on Reilly demonstrate that even before he was hired and dispatched to Russia on 18 March 1918, Cumming had no illusions about Reilly’s character. Background checks by MI5 had reported he was a confidence trickster, and a telegram from the SIS station in New York said, ‘We consider him untrustworthy and unsuitable to work suggested.’ An SIS officer called Norman Thwaites also quoted a banker who described Reilly as a ‘shrewd businessman of undoubted ability but without patriotism or principles and therefore not to be recommended for any position which requires loyalty’.22
But ‘C’, whom Reilly visited on 14 March, thought he was the man for the job and recorded in his diary: ‘Scale introduced Mr Reilly who is willing to go to Russia for us. Very clever – very doubtful – has been everywhere and done everything. Will take out £500 in notes and £750 in diamonds which are at a premium. I must agree tho’ it is a great gamble as he will visit all our men in Vologda, Kiev, Moscow etc.’23
Only after Reilly set sail did MI5 discover and inform SIS that, in contradiction to what their new officer claimed, there were no records of his birth in Clonmel, Ireland.24
* * *
No one ever called Reilly handsome. A telegram from ‘C’ to operatives in Russia described him as a ‘Jewish-Jap type, brown eyes very protruding, deeply lined sallow face, may be bearded, height five foot nine inches’.25 But he proved attractive to women and did little without the aid of scattered mistresses. In Moscow, he had two: Elizaveta Emilyevna Otten, an actress, and Olga Starzheskaya. According to their later testimonies, they never knew he was anything but a Russian.
Though ably promoted by his friends, Reilly was hardly the
‘master spy’. He was, it is true, gifted at living undercover and adopting different guises. As a polyglot and native Russian speaker, he came to be known in Petrograd as Konstantin Markovich Massino, a Turkish merchant. In Moscow, he was Mr Constantine, a Greek businessman. Elsewhere he boldly called himself Sigmund Rellinsky, a member of the Cheka’s crime investigation department. But while Reilly had mastered disguise, he lacked the detachment of a reliable observer – someone who could quietly merge with the shadows. His instinct was always to act, to provoke, to interfere, and in this he was impetuous. He lacked sound judgement.
Though he was not born an Englishman, Reilly had the gifts and the flaws of the stereotypical upper-class Brit. He was brave, far too persuasive for his own good, successful with the opposite sex, but also dim to the point of incompetence.
Landing first in Murmansk in April 1918, Reilly went to Petrograd for a month. He did not waste time in forming a judgement. He telegraphed ‘C’: ‘We have arrived at critical moment when we must either act or immediately and effectively abandon entire position for good and all.’26 On 7 May, Reilly reached Moscow. At first he was brazen with the Bolsheviks. He marched into the Kremlin and demanded to see their leader, Vladimir Lenin. He got as far as an aide, General Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, who immediately complained about him to Lockhart, then the official British liaison to the Soviets.27
After that, Reilly went undercover and began scheming with those plotting to block Bolshevik power. Among the leaders of opposition to Lenin was a General Boris Savinkov, a former minister in the first revolutionary government, which had been led by Alexander Kerensky. That regime had replaced the Tsar but been overthrown in turn by the Bolsheviks, with their slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ – committees of workers and peasants. Both Lockhart and Reilly met Savinkov’s underground group, and the French gave Savinkov money. According to a later official Soviet account, Savinkov, who returned to Moscow in 1924 and surrendered, admitted that he had supplied a weapon to Dora Kaplan, the woman who shot Lenin. Judging by their other inventions, that claim was probably a lie, but even Britain’s minor support to Savinkov demonstrated to the Cheka that the Western powers were their mortal enemies.
