Edward Lucas - Deception

As initial British, French and American efforts to bribe or browbeat the Bolsheviks into rejoining the war against Germany faltered, attention turned to toppling the regime. Countries that cherished order were turning to subversion. 11(Prevention would have been easier: a British military official posted to Russia in 1917 to monitor political radicals stopped Karl Radek and Fritz Platten, two well-known revolutionaries, from entering Russia; unfortunately he failed to notice that the third member of the party was Lenin.) 12Officials took an apocalyptic tone. Admiral Sir William Hall, director of British Naval Intelligence, speaking on his retirement in November 1918 at the end of the First World War, said: ‘Hard and bitter as the battle has been, we have now to face a far, far more ruthless foe, a foe that is hydra-headed and whose evil power will spread over the whole world, and that foe is Russia.’ 13Cumming took a similar view, telling his Stockholm station in late 1918: ‘The only enemy now to be considered are the Bolsheviks.’ 14

The communist grip on power in August 1918 was precarious. The Bolshevik-controlled territory – barely bigger than the old sixteenth-century Muscovy – was short of food and chaotically run. Rows blazed about politics, economics and strategy. Anti-Bolshevik forces still presented a lively if fragmented opposition: an uprising the previous month by the ultra-leftist Social Revolutionaries had narrowly failed. A big British expeditionary force under General Frederick Poole had landed at Archangel on Russia’s northern coast, aiming to provide muscle and leadership to the White Russian forces. The Red Army was in disarray. Allied leaders expected a swift victory.

This aspect of the struggle was purely military. Britain played a leading role in the Russian Civil War, intervening to help the White (monarchist) armies on four fronts. 15A British poster of the time gives a flavour. It shows a British soldier, laden with arms, hastening to help three soldiers in the uniform of the White Army, fighting a hideous gap-toothed Bolshevik monster. It reads:

My Russian Friends! I am an Englishman. In the name of our common cause I ask you just to hang on a bit longer, like the good chaps that you have always been. I have delivered, and will deliver in unlimited amounts, all that you need; and most importantly I will deliver you new weapons with which to destroy those disgusting, bloodthirsty red monsters. 16

But that British soldier was representing his bosses, not the masses. Strikes and mutinies showed that many in Britain’s big industrial towns, either war-weary or radicalised, regarded the Russian revolution of 1917 with sympathy and admiration, as did many idealistic intellectuals. Communism seemed merely an advanced and vigorous version of socialism. The murderous and dictatorial side of the Soviet regime, apparent to first-hand observers in the ‘Red Terror’ of August 1918, was yet to become fully visible. Outsiders’ desire to eradicate Bolshevism was both stoked and constrained by fear of its attractiveness. Western rulers worried that efforts to crush the communist experiment might backfire, leading to the radicalisation of their workers – and, worse, their soldiers and sailors. But letting the Bolsheviks stay in power was dangerous too: Lenin, Trotsky and the others had made it clear that world revolution was their goal. If they succeeded in Russia then other countries would soon be facing a communist threat too.

The other front, seemingly less risky, was domestic subversion, which was to fail just as badly as the military intervention. Amidst the pressure and panic of their early months in power, the Bolshevik leadership found the time to manage an elaborate deception operation that would leave British and French spy chiefs humiliated. According to Aleksandr Orlov, later a top Soviet defector, Lenin in the summer of 1918 decided that as the foreign powers were trying to overthrow him, it would be a good idea to catch the plotters red-handed and expose them. 17The Bolshevik leader gave the task to the fearsome head of the Cheka secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, who decided to centre the deception operation on the regime’s most effective fighting force, the Latvian Riflemen. Conscripted into the Tsarist army, the Latvians had become radicalised by their careless ill-treatment and high casualty rate, but were not fanatical Bolsheviks. Given the choice, many of them might have preferred a socialist Latvia to a communist Russia.

The first thread in Dzerzhinsky’s web involved a short sallow-faced former naval ensign with a complicated name who offered a neat way into the British spies’ plans and thinking. 18An informer for the Cheka, he had already been approached twice by Commander Leslie Cromie, the British naval attaché in Petrograd. [43] aq Previously St Petersburg, soon to be Leningrad. On 7 August he opened the trap by responding to Cromie’s overtures, with the claim that his friend, Colonel Eduard Bērziņš, a senior Latvian officer, wished to cooperate with the allies. This was exactly what British intelligence officers were hoping for, and they were all too willing to believe it. A week later the two men appeared at the Moscow apartment of the British envoy Robert Bruce Lockhart. An intriguing character in every sense, libidinous, extravagant, brainy and moody, Lockhart was a forerunner of Graham Greene’s ‘Quiet American’ – just the sort of person that secret service work most disastrously attracts. Bērziņš explained to Lockhart, who was accompanied by two French colleagues, that the Latvians did not intend to fight the Bolsheviks’ battles indefinitely and wished to go home. If they were sent north to fight General Poole’s forces, they would like to surrender: could Lockhart arrange it? He also requested four million roubles to get to work on his fellow-Latvians’ sympathies. Lockhart countered that it would be better if two Latvian regiments would switch sides at the provincial town of Vologda, opening a second front against the Bolshevik forces there, while those remaining in Moscow would assassinate Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership. But he wrote a laissez-passer to help the Latvians reach General Poole and provided 900,000 roubles as a down payment.

By this the naive and impulsive Lockhart incriminated himself, further endangered Cromie, and confirmed Bolshevik suspicions of British meddling. He added to the disaster by putting the two visitors in touch with Sidney Reilly, a spy based at the British consulate in Moscow. Born Sigmund Rosenblum near Odessa in Imperial Russia sometime in the 1870s, Reilly – later nicknamed the ‘Ace of Spies’ – was a ‘complex, unpredictable and undoubtedly self-serving individual mired in deception and conspiracy’. 19Like Lockhart he was wildly overconfident. He wrote in his notes:

I was confident that the terror [Bolshevism] could be wiped out in an hour and that I myself could do it. And why not? A Corsican lieutenant of artillery trod out the embers of the French Revolution. Surely, a British espionage agent with so many factors on his side, could make himself master of Moscow? 20

Reilly was also a womaniser and remarkably careless. He arranged a meeting with Bērziņš at the apartment of one of his mistresses, but turned up late. While waiting, the Latvian noticed an envelope in Reilly’s writing that gave an address that turned out to be the home of an actress, Elizabeth Otten, who had allowed her apartment to be used as a meeting place for Reilly and his spies. The Cheka began arresting all those who visited it. One of them was Maria Friede, sister of a colonel in the Red Army General Staff who was carrying secret documents from him, destined for Reilly. Her brother, duly arrested, confessed his cooperation with an American intelligence officer who was later imprisoned. [44] ar Xenophon Kalamatiano was caught trying to scale the wall of the Norwegian embassy, which represented American interests. His interrogator examined his hefty walking stick and found it stuffed with roubles and receipts from his agents. He survived a spell in the Lubyanka and was exchanged for American food aid in August 1921.