The New Spymasters (6 page)

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.
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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'.
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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*   *   *

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'.
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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.'
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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.
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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.

*   *   *

History, it is said, is told by the victorious. In the case of the Soviets, it was particularly distorted. But while Britain's role as a conspirator was deliberately exaggerated, there was no question that the British secret service was plotting to destroy the Bolsheviks.

After seeing Cromie in Petrograd, around 15–16 August the two Lettish officers, Buikis and Sprogis, went to see Lockhart. He, according to a Soviet account, told Buikis, ‘Your first and most important task is to arrest and kill Lenin. Yes, yes, kill him because if he escapes that will be the end of the cause.' Lockhart denied fomenting any such violence. His official reports suggested that he approved of Reilly's plan to get the Lettish regiments to change sides, but ‘when he referred again to the necessity of a movement in Moscow [i.e. an attempted coup] we all demurred and pointed out there was nothing to gain by this'.
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Lockhart did give the Letts a laissez-passer to cross the British lines. But, he said, it wasn't until Reilly started getting involved that a conspiracy developed. He claimed at one point to have warned Reilly to have nothing to do with ‘so dangerous and doubtful [a] move' as a coup attempt.
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But, whether with official backing or not, Reilly, as an employee of SIS, took matters into his own hands. He began to develop a much more elaborate plot, hoping to use the Lettish regiments to take on Soviet power in both Petrograd and Moscow. Reilly later told Soviet interrogators, ‘From passive intelligence work, I, like other members of the British mission, gradually switched to a more-or-less active fight against Soviet power.'
30
Lockhart recorded in his official report:

After my release I discovered from Captain George Hill, R.F.C., who was Reilly's assistant in Moscow, that the Bolshevik accusations were substantially true and that in spite of the advice of [the French general] Lavergne, myself and the other Allied representatives a coup d'état had been planned … The charges of bridge and railway destruction were also true.
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Reilly even started preparing a list of the new ministers he wanted in power, many of whom were old cronies of his. The Lettish officers, Buikis and Sprogis, were now joined by a Lieutenant-Colonel E. P. Berzin, the commander of the Lettish regiment guarding the Kremlin, to give their tale credibility. Reilly's deputy in Moscow, Captain George Hill, recorded that Berzin had suggested ‘that men like Trotsky and Lenin should be assassinated' but Reilly had opposed the idea, not wishing to ‘make martyrs of the leaders'.
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By 17 August, Reilly was meeting Berzin alone. He gave him 1.4 million roubles to carry out the plot. Lockhart wrote in a telegram that they had agreed to give Berzin financial support and to leave the money with Reilly, ‘who is an extremely able man and in my opinion by far the cleverest of our agents in Russia'.
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The plan was that all British diplomats should be evacuated, but the two secret service officers in Moscow, Reilly and Hill, should stay behind. They could shoulder the blame for whatever happened. ‘In the event of failure and our being found in any plot, Reilly and myself should have simply been private individuals and responsible to no one … the whole brunt would have been borne by us.'
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That message was reinforced in Petrograd by Commander Boyce, the secret service chief of station, who told Reilly that his Lettish coup plan was ‘extremely risky but … worth trying, and that failure of the plan would drop entirely on the neck of Lt Reilly'.
35

On 3 September, three days after the raid on the British Embassy, the Bolsheviks announced the shocking details of what they called the Lockhart Plot, claiming that the British had conspired to overthrow Lenin. Soviet newspapers and pamphlets described the discovery of a ‘sensational plot' to overthrow their government: ‘Allied complicity in counter-revolutionary plot proved,' screamed one bulletin.
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Much of the detail – eagerly repeated by pro-Soviet writers in the years ahead – was invented. As the Bolshevik revolution descended into terror, the plot became Exhibit A of conspiracy. In truth, the Letts never did plan to revolt. Evidence of a connection between what Reilly, Lockhart and Cromie had been plotting and the shootings of Lenin and Uritsky was tenuous. And the reason for that was that the British secret service had been entirely tricked: almost all of the British contacts proved to be provocateurs – agents of the Cheka. As Lockhart discovered when confronted in his cell by the Bolshevik chief of counter-revolution, Yakov Peters, when the Lettish officers had first come to him they had been acting on Peters's instructions.
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For British spying it was a disaster. They had tried to plot and, unluckily for Reilly, there had been many witnesses. He had wanted to capture Lenin and defeat the Revolution. But the men they recruited for their mission were all in the pay of ‘Iron Felix' Dzerzhinsky, founder and chief of the Cheka. In a farce of the first order, a fictional plot – spun together by British agents and Cheka provocateurs – had been overtaken by a real plot, so that the shootings of both Uritsky and Lenin came as a genuine surprise.

The aftermath of the fake and real plots was terrible. The shooting of Lenin was followed directly by the events of the Red Terror, in which tens of thousands were to perish. On 1 September, the Red Army journal
Krasnaya Gazeta
declared, ‘Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritsky … let there be floods of blood for the bourgeois – more blood, as much as possible.' The same day the Bolshevik Commissars for Justice and Internal Affairs issued a decree stating, ‘It is absolutely essential to safeguard the rear by means of terror.'
Isvestia,
the Bolshevik party's newspaper, printed a letter from Joseph Stalin demanding ‘open, mass, systematic terror'. His orders were carried out and between 50,000 and 200,000 people were executed.
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