Edward Lucas - Deception

Dukes reported that the Russian fleet was riven by disputes between the officers and men loyal to the Bolsheviks, those sympathetic to the Whites, and those with loyalties to other factions. One report, citing a senior Bolshevik, said that the men regarded their officers as ‘class enemies’ while the officers were a ‘mass of spies’. 27Dukes also obtained a secret transcript from a commission of enquiry following a failed attack on the British squadron. A sailor from the submarine Pantera answered with remarkable frankness as follows:

Judge: Will you attack the British?

Sailor: If the commander orders it, we will.

Judge: But will you fire on them?

Sailor: Yes.

Judge: Will you hit them?

Sailor: No.

Following this debacle, Lenin put Trotsky in charge of reforming the navy. He immediately began replacing ideologically sound but useless officers with experienced Tsarist-era ones. He also banned the practice under which committees of ‘revolutionary sailors’ forced their officers to clean toilets and sweep floors. That restored the fleet’s offensive capability. He also ordered the laying of many thousands of mines, making it far harder for the British to attack. Dukes dutifully reported all this, plus a crucial piece of intelligence for Agar: the one-metre depth at which the mines defending the Kronstadt naval base were to be laid. The ‘eggshell’ boats drew only 2’9” (84cm). With a few inches to spare, they could therefore cross the minefield and use their torpedoes to attack the Bolshevik fleet at anchor.

As Agar waited to rescue Dukes, he watched with despair the Bolshevik fleet pounding the nearby fortress of Krasnaya Gorka (Red Hill) where the garrison had rebelled: this was a tragic miscalculation by its leaders, Ingrian nationalists – ethnic cousins of the Finns and Estonians – who were hoping to make their own bid for freedom. In a daring raid into the heart of Kronstadt harbour, and in defiance of his instruction to concentrate on intelligence work, Agar succeeded in torpedoing and sinking the Oleg . It was too late to save the Ingrians, but a second raid with seven more torpedo boats sank both the Bolshevik battleships, ending the struggle for naval superiority in the Baltic and ensuring Estonia’s and Latvia’s independence – and their lasting, if ultimately misplaced, faith in British integrity and capability. This was to feature in the disasters of the 1940s and 1950s, and in the renewed intelligence ties of the 1990s.

Agar received the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest military honour. But his exploits doomed his mission. Dukes was still stuck in Russia, where Soviet authorities now understood the vulnerability of their defences to the fast British vessels. A later attempt to rescue the master-spy was abandoned under heavy fire. Dukes finally escaped via Latvia, frostbitten, filthy, half-starved and exhausted. SIS showered him with praise – but in a signal piece of mean-mindedness refused to pay his operation’s debts. George Gibson, a leading figure in the dwindling British community in Petrograd, had at great personal risk lent Dukes 375,000 roubles [47] au Very roughly, around £250,000 or $400,000 in modern money. to make up for the poor forgeries supplied by SIS. But when Gibson returned to London, SIS said his paperwork was inadequate and refused to pay. Only when an infuriated Dukes threatened publicly to renounce his knighthood did SIS back down.

A more famous if less impressive British agent in this era was Dukes’s friend Arthur Ransome. To many readers, his name will be inextricably linked with a quite different genre: the ‘Swallows and Amazons’ children’s books. But he was also an expert on Russia, and on the books of SIS as agent ‘S-76’. Ransome moved to the Estonian capital in 1918, tasked with gaining information about Soviet Russia. He was also asked by the Estonian authorities to carry a secret message to the Bolshevik leadership expressing their willingness to strike a peace deal. Ransome saw at once that peace with Estonia would be followed by a similar agreement with Latvia. This would help secure the Bolshevik regime in Russia, which, as a left-winger, Ransome broadly supported. It would also end the fighting that was devastating the region. Not for the first time, a British intelligence agent was finding that local allies’ wishes clashed with the geopolitical interests of his bosses. For London, the aim of the war was to topple the reds, not to promote democracy or freedom (still largely seen as an eccentric American preoccupation).

The Bolsheviks responded coolly. Undeterred, Ransome crossed the Russian–Estonian front line in a journey that he portrayed as hair-raising (other writers and his biographer reckon it was trouble-free). 28His aim was not spying but to rescue Evgenia Shelepina, who was his mistress and Trotsky’s secretary. It is unclear whether she was using Ransome to snoop on the British, providing him with real intelligence, in love with a glamorous Englishman, or some permutation of these three. During stints in Tallinn and then in the Latvian capital Riga, Ransome spent the next few years in a half-world between journalism and intelligence work. Unable to divorce his English wife Ivy, he could not return to England – his private life was as tangled as his political views. He publicly defended the Bolshevik suppression of the Kronstadt uprising in 1921: perhaps sincerely, perhaps to preserve his personal or professional contacts in Russia.

But Ransome was in tune with the spirit of the times. The anti-Soviet cause was in trouble, doomed from the outset by the Whites’ disorganisation and brutality, which alienated even those Russians who disliked the Bolsheviks. By 1919 the British government under David Lloyd George was rapidly losing interest (not least because of a series of naval and military mutinies among war-weary British sailors and soldiers). ‘I would rather leave Russia Bolshevik until she sees her way out of it than see Britain bankrupt,’ he told the House of Commons in April. 29The allied intervention wound up in 1920. But as in future years, the instincts of Western spies dealing with Russia were at odds with their political masters’ instructions. In the summer of 1920 30Cumming sent Reilly, Dukes and a former Tsarist secret policeman Vladimir Orlov (known as Orbanski) to establish an ‘international anti-Bolshevik intelligence service’ in Eastern Europe. 31They recruited five agents in Warsaw, eleven in Riga, four in Tallinn, two in Kaunas, as well as fourteen in Berlin. The initiative was stillborn. The British government was negotiating the normalisation of relations with the Bolshevik regime, starting with a trade agreement in March 1921. In July, the Warsaw station chief Malcolm Maclaren, a piratical figure who wore gold ear-rings, was instructed to close down the expensively created network; all that remained was a few contacts in the Baltic. Reilly’s swashbuckling bunch continued their work, without him or official backing from SIS. But that was enough for the Soviet spymasters to bait their next hook.

In November 1921 an official of the Russian waterways authority, A. A. Yakushev, made contact with an old friend in Tallinn, a former officer in the White forces. Both men were sincere anti-Bolsheviks. The visitor was a member of a genuine if flimsy monarchist organisation in Moscow. His host circulated émigré outposts with an enthusiastic account of what he had heard. Having intercepted one of these letters, the Cheka arrested Yakushev on his return to Moscow. After some persuasion in the Lubyanka he agreed in early 1922 to cooperate with the Soviet authorities. With Yakushev’s help, the Cheka steadily began persuading the émigré leadership in the West that a powerful and promising underground movement was developing inside the Soviet Union. The SIS station chief in Helsinki, Harry Carr, a fluent Russian-speaker and fervent anti-communist who was to feature in the even greater debacles of later years, was only too eager to hear this, particularly as the new organisation seemed to have support from the Finnish, Estonian and Polish spy services. 32He was troubled by its failure to produce any usable intelligence, but accepted that its main purpose was insurrectionary and that espionage activity at this stage would be too risky. That mistake was also to be repeated almost exactly in years to come.