Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (35 page)

In the greatest secrecy, 50,000 M Devices were shipped to Archangel, along with the weaponry required to fire them. ‘Fullest use is now to be made of gas shell with your forces, or supplied by us to [White] Russian forces,’ wrote Churchill to the commander in chief in Archangel, Major-General Ironside.

One member of Britain’s Imperial General Staff expressed concern about the use of such weapons becoming public knowledge. Churchill was also anxious about secrecy, but he was prepared to take the risk. He said that he would ‘very much like the Bolsheviks to have it [a chemical attack], if we can afford the disclosure.’ He believed it to be the quickest and most efficient means to crush the Bolshevik enemy before it was too late.

His head of chemical warfare production, Sir Keith Price, was in full agreement. He declared it to be ‘[the] right medicine for the Bolshevist’ and said that in the forests of Northern Russia ‘it will drift along very nicely.’

Like Churchill, he thought it could lead to the rapid collapse of the Bolshevik regime. ‘I believe if you got home only once with the Gas you would find no more Bolshies this side of Vologda.’

There was considerable hostility in the Cabinet to the use of chemical weapons, much to Churchill’s irritation. He wanted the M Devices used not only in Russia but also against the rebellious tribes of Northern India, to prevent them entering into a pact with the Bolsheviks.

‘I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes,’ he declared in one memorandum written at the time. He criticised his colleagues for their ‘squeamishness’, declaring that ‘the objections of the India Office to the use of gas against natives are unreasonable. Gas is a more merciful weapon than [the] high explosive shell, and compels an enemy to accept a decision with less loss of life than any other agency of war.’

He ended his memo on a note of ill-placed black humour: ‘Why is it not fair for a British artilleryman to fire a shell which makes the said native sneeze?’ he asked. ‘It is really too silly.’

Churchill ignored the concerns of his colleagues and instructed the government’s Chemical Warfare Department to press on with their research into creating weapons suitable for use in the mountainous areas of the North-West Frontier. According to an internal War Office memo, ‘experiments are to continue with a view to discovering a suitable gas bomb for use in India against insurgent tribes.’

India could not be dealt with immediately; Russia could. British aerial attacks using chemical weapons commenced at 12.30 p.m. on 27 August 1919, targeting Emtsa Station, 120 miles to the south of Archangel. Fifty-three M Devices were dropped at lunchtime and a further sixty-two in the evening. The Bolshevik soldiers on the ground were seen fleeing in panic as thick green clouds of toxic chemical gas drifted towards them.

More M Devices were dropped on the next day, followed by a chemical attack on nearby Plesetzkaya Station. One of the devices landed close to a Russian soldier named Private Boctroff of the 49th Regiment. He managed to escape from the looming gas cloud, but not before inhaling some of its poison. Captured by the British, Boctroff described the effect that the gas had on him.

According to his medical notes, he was ‘affected with giddiness in head, running from ears, bled from nose and cough with blood, eyes watered and difficulty in breathing. Said he was very ill for 24 hours.’

Private Boctroff reported that a number of his comrades had been very close to the spot where the M Device had landed. ‘They did not know what the cloud was and ran into it and some were overpowered in the cloud and died there; the others staggered about for a short time and then fell down and died.’

Boctroff claimed that twenty-five of his comrades had been killed. The gas also drifted through the adjacent village and hung in the air for fifteen minutes before eventually dispersing.

The attacks continued throughout the month of September, with chemical strikes on the Bolshevik-held villages of Chunova, Vikhtova, Pocha, Chorga, Tavoigor and Zapolki, along with a number of other places. Some of these attacks used large quantities of M Devices: 183 canisters were dropped on Vikhtova.

As soon as the gas had dissipated, British and White Russian troops (equipped with gas masks) would attack and drive out any remaining Bolshevik soldiers. They were warned to avoid skin contact with the earth and not to drink any water. If they were unfortunate enough to inhale any residual gas, they were told that smoking would bring relief.

One British lieutenant, Donald Grantham, later questioned many Bolshevik prisoners about the attacks. They described their gassed comrades as ‘lying practically helpless on the ground and the usual symptoms of bleeding from the nose and mouth.’ In extreme cases, the men coughed up large quantities of blood.

The use of chemical weapons was said to have caused widespread demoralisation on the battlefield, even among those who had not inhaled the gas. Yet they proved less effective than Churchill had hoped. Chemical attacks did not lead to the collapse of the Red Army, as he believed they would. Nor did they lead to any major breakthrough on the Northern Front. The weather was primarily to blame. Toxic gas proved ineffectual in the damp and misty conditions of an early Russian autumn.

By September, as British forces prepared to withdraw from Archangel and Murmansk, the chemical attacks were halted and then permanently stopped. According to a report written for the War Office, a total of 2,718 M Devices had been dropped on Bolshevik positions; 47,282 remained unused.

It was deemed too dangerous to ship these remaining devices back to England. In mid-September, the decision was taken to dump them in the White Sea. A military tug took them to a position thirty miles north of the Dvina Estuary and they were tipped overboard.

They remain on the sea bed to this day in forty fathoms of water.

Sidney Reilly and George Hill had hurried back to London after their meetings with General Denikin and presented their findings to Mansfield Cumming and other Whitehall officials. ‘A fund of useful information,’ was how one Foreign Office mandarin described their mission.

Their warnings about the failings of the White Army leadership did little to deter Churchill from persisting in supporting those armies throughout the autumn of 1919. There were times when it seemed as if his gamble would pay off. Admiral Kolchak made sweeping westward advances across Siberia and General Denikin’s war machine rolled relentlessly northwards, capturing a string of towns and cities. Before long, he was just 250 miles from Moscow and looked certain to vanquish the Red Army. ‘We were deciding which horses we should ride during the triumphal entry into Moscow,’ recalled a British lieutenant who was serving with the general.

In the North-West of Russia, General Yudenitch also seemed unstoppable. He marched his army towards Petrograd, sweeping all before it: by October 1919 his troops were just twelve miles from the city. Lenin panicked. ‘Finish him off,’ he wrote in a desperate telegraph to Trotsky. ‘Despatch him.’

Trotsky launched his dramatic counter-attack in the third week of October and succeeded in pushing Yudenitch’s army back from the gates of Petrograd. In the same week, General Denikin suffered a series of serious reverses. The Red Army smashed through his front line just a short time after a powerful rebel leader had seized control of three major towns in his rear.

A few days later, the Red Army was also victorious in Siberia, making sweeping advances against Admiral Kolchak. The admiral’s end came shortly afterwards. After being decisively beaten on the battlefield, he was captured by the Bolsheviks at Irkutsk. There he was shot in cold blood, and his corpse ignominiously tipped into the river; it quickly disappeared under the ice.

On the same day as Kolchak’s execution, the Bolsheviks triumphantly entered Odessa on the Black Sea coast, having recovered almost all of the territory seized by General Denikin.

George Hill happened to be back in Odessa when the Red Army rode into the city. He was woken by a breathless friend who urged him to flee before he was captured. ‘The Reds have broken through!’ he was told. There was no time to be lost.

Hill reacted with magnificent calm. He had a leisurely wash and shave before putting on a newly cleaned pair of spats and checking out of his hotel. He made his exit just as the Bolshevik soldiers entered the city.

By the time Odessa was in Bolshevik hands, General Yudenitch had also been defeated in the north-west of the country. He had got tantalisingly close to Petrograd – close enough to catch the glint of the city’s domes and spires. But Trotsky’s Red Army ultimately proved unstoppable. Yudenitch was driven back to the Baltic States from whence he had come.

British military intervention against the Bolsheviks had never been on the scale that Churchill wanted. Nevertheless, his support for the anti-Bolshevik forces had cost 329 British lives. It had also cost the government a staggering £100,000,000. Over the previous year, numerous shipments of munitions had been sent to the three White generals who were fighting Lenin’s regime. The ‘final packet’ to Denikin was more modest than most, yet it nevertheless contained eighty field guns, twenty-five aeroplane engines and a vast quantity of winter clothing, including a million pairs of socks and 85,000 pairs of trousers.

The Chief of Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, surveyed the wreckage of Churchill’s Russian policy and was damning in his assessment. ‘So ends in practical disaster another of Winston’s military attempts . . .’ he wrote. ‘His judgement is always at fault and he is hopeless when in power.’

Churchill himself was unrepentant. ‘I am convinced that very great evils will come upon the world and particularly upon Great Britain,’ he wrote in a letter to the American president, Woodrow Wilson. ‘We shall find ourselves confronted almost immediately with a united Bolshevik Russia, highly militarised and building itself up on victories easily won over opponents in disarray.’ He feared more than ever for the frontiers of British India. But he also feared for the world at large.

Mansfield Cumming had a rather different concern. His finest agent, Paul Dukes, had gone missing. There was every possibility that he had been captured by the Cheka.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

AGENT IN DANGER

Paul Dukes had sent regular despatches to London during his early months in Russia. These had included military and political reports as well as monthly updates on the state of the country. But by the spring of 1919, they were arriving with less frequency and soon they dried up altogether.

There was no explanation for the breakdown in communication. Dukes had not signalled that he was in danger and the regime had given no indication that he had been captured. Nor could the Stockholm bureau shed any light on the matter. Cumming was as mystified as he was concerned. After a few more weeks of no contact, he took the unprecedented decision to send a mission to find out what was wrong.

The person selected to lead this mission was a young naval captain named Augustus Agar. He was on leave and pottering in his room at the Waldorf Hotel in London when he received an unexpected call from his commanding officer.

‘Agar?’ he said, ‘I’ve got a proposition for you and want you back at once.’

Agar was excited by the summons and hoped it would lead to adventure. He was finding it hard to adapt to peacetime after four long years of conflict. ‘I was still keen to take part in more of our war activities . . .’ he wrote. ‘[It] meant excitement, adventure and something out of the ordinary dull routine.’ He packed his clothes and hurried to the train station. By lunchtime, he was back at his base on Osea Island in Essex.