Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

He wanted nothing to intervene between the two combatant sides. Too bad if people in the Volga region were starving. Lenin and Trotsky both believed that the Soviet cause required an unflinching commitment to military practicalities. The Komuch government and its supporters had to be destroyed. Any other priority would be a mere sentimentality. The Bolsheviks were setting Russia on fire and, with German consent, planning to burn out any resistance before it could be consolidated.

Western espionage and subversion in Russia were conducted by some vivid individuals in 1918 and none was more colourful than Sidney Reilly, who arrived in the spring on a mission for British intelligence. Reilly throughout his life told contradictory stories about himself. It is likely — but not absolutely certain — that he came from Ukraine and was at least part Jewish. He was shortish, sallow complexioned and balding. Though his real surname was probably Rosenblum, he ran his commercial affairs under an alias borrowed from his estranged wife Margaret Reilly Callaghan. 1He was attractive to women, and he sought them out with fervour. 2His other passions were fashionable clothes, swanky hotels, good cigars and collecting Napoleonic memorabilia. 3Reilly was a deeply manipulative man and in business was a greedy wheeler-dealer. Commercial partners came and went. They seldom stayed with him for long; many complained of sharp practices and indeed he treated everyone as fair game. No acquaintance ever suggested he had an excess of moral rectitude. Sidney Reilly was a compulsive conman. 4

Mansfield Cumming at the Secret Service Bureau trusted his instincts and took risks, and he was often proved right when choosing recruits whom others regarded as unqualified or unsuitable. He ignored the thick sheaf of warnings sent to him about Reilly. 5The Bureau needed Russian-speakers with audacity and initiative, and Reilly fitted that bill. Cumming sent him to Russia via Archangel as agent ST1. Reilly started as he meant to go on, disembarking in Murmansk against orders and without explanation. The British expeditionary force there threw him into the lock-up of the merchant vessel that had brought him out from England. Admiral Kemp asked an intelligence officer, Stephen Alley, to interrogate him. Alley reported: ‘His passport was very doubtful, and his name was spelled Reilli.’ The peculiar spelling was possibly a deliberate one; it may well have been based on the calculation that a strange English version of the name would attract less suspicion since although Reilly claimed to be from Ireland and spoke with perfect grammar his accent was unmistakably from eastern Europe. 6When challenged about his identity, he pulled out ‘a microscopic message in code, which he had secreted under a cork of a bottle of aspirin tablets’. Alley recognized the message and instructed that Reilly be permitted to proceed south as he wished. 7

On reaching Moscow in April 1918, Reilly avoided contact with British officials and threw protocol aside. Instead he made straight for the Kremlin where he claimed that he was researching a book on the achievements of the Soviet order. This got him an interview with Lenin’s chief of staff Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich. The meeting was an amicable one and Reilly was given use of an official limousine as well as an invitation to attend the May Day celebrations at the Polytechnical Museum where Trotsky was to deliver a speech on the Red Army. The hall was already packed when Reilly and a friend arrived. With their privileged seats on the platform, only a piano separated them from Trotsky. Reilly whispered: ‘This is just the moment to kill Trotsky and liquidate Bolshevism!’ 8But a sense of self-preservation intruded and Reilly stayed his hand. Although he had come to Russia with a rather gentle opinion of Bolshevism, a few days in Moscow changed his mind and he began to talk about the Soviet regime with venom. 9It was only then that Lockhart heard that an unidentified Briton had visited the Kremlin to seek an interview with Lenin. He was furious at being bypassed and hauled Reilly in for a stiff lecture on lines of authority.

After clearing the air in this fashion, Lockhart felt he could take Reilly into his confidence about his current plans to bring down the Bolsheviks. Lockhart had gained greater liberty for himself after the British embassy decamped to Vologda — this was, as he liked to put it, his ‘great luck’. 10When he had moved to Moscow with Trotsky, he had specifically demanded authority from London to remain ‘independent’; he insisted in particular that Oliver Wardrop, who served as consul-general, should render him every assistance without being set in authority over him. 11He wanted to be free to pursue his tasks in diplomacy and intelligence without interference.

He also wanted freedom in his private life. Despite having previously been sent home to avoid scandal over an affair with a married woman, he lost no time in finding another lover in Moscow. He first met Maria Benckendorff (née Zakrevskaya) on 2 February 1918 over a game of bridge in Petrograd. On that occasion they only shook hands, but he was smitten by her glamour and vivacity. 12Moura, as she liked to be known, still moved in the old high society that existed before the October Revolution. She was bored by her husband Ioann, who had retreated with their children to his large Estonian estate some weeks earlier. 13Lockhart was looking for excitement and would confess: ‘I fell desperately in love with her.’ 14Soon they were having an affair. 15She fell pregnant by him and clearly expected that both she and Lockhart would soon divorce their respective spouses. But it is far from certain that Lockhart would have ended his marriage to Jean, and when Moura miscarried the baby in September, her happiness quickly started to sour. 16Subsequently she came under suspicion of informing for Soviet intelligence — something she was certainly doing by the 1930s. 17But there is no evidence that she already worked for the Chekists in mid-1918. At any rate Lockhart had taken a risk in having an affair with her and giving her the run of his apartment. If he was not spied upon, it was not because he took sensible precautions.

Lockhart and others in the British intelligence network in Moscow had an uninhibited lifestyle. But Sidney Reilly outdid them all. Among his many lovers was a young Russian actress, Yelizaveta Otten, who rented a well-appointed apartment in Sheremetev Lane a few hundred yards north of the Kremlin. 18Yelizaveta’s flatmate Dagmara Karozus was, according to George Hill, another of Reilly’s conquests. 19Dagmara was a German citizen who in 1915 had been investigated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs as a possible spy. She had sensibly responded by applying for Russian citizenship. 20Then there was Olga Starzhevskaya, who fell head over heels in love with Reilly and foolishly believed they were about to be married. She knew him as a Russian called Konstantin Markovich Massino. 21Starzhevskaya was a typist in the central administration of the All-Russia Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets — no doubt her potential access to important material was her main attraction for him. 22Reilly handed over the money for her to rent and decorate an apartment for them both on Malaya Bronnaya Street. 23

Reilly was expert at running his amours in parallel and even employed several of the women as his operatives. Probably Maria Fride was the most useful of them. As a single woman in her early thirties, she had worked as a teacher and nurse. 24Her prime asset was access to her brother Alexander, a lieutenant colonel employed in the communications office of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs. 25

There was no uniform pattern of work among the Allied intelligence agencies and the new US network was run noticeably more staidly than the British one. It was centred on the Information Service set up in Russia before the October Revolution and supposedly dedicated to ‘educational and informational work’. 26From March 1918, the head of the Service was the exotically named Xenophon Dmitrievich de Blumenthal Kalamatiano. Kalamatiano was born in the Russian Empire in 1882 and was of Greek and Russian extraction. As a boy he had emigrated with his mother and stepfather to America, where he took a degree in Chicago before returning to his native country for a job with an American tractor company in Odessa. He subsequently moved to Moscow where manufacturing contracts during the Great War made him a rich man. As his business fell off in 1917, he made himself useful to American diplomats trying to understand the situation in Russia. 27The Information Service was the front for a network of thirty-two agents including Kalamatiano. After 1917, apart from gathering intelligence, their task was to make contact with Sovnarkom’s military enemies. 28Kalamatiano started by sending people to the bigger cities adjacent to the vast eastern front, cities stretching from Novgorod in the north to Rostov in the south. He then extended the coverage to Ukraine, Belorussia and the lands of the Baltic coast. When the Allied embassies left for Vologda he stayed behind and registered himself as a Russian citizen, which gave him the cover to continue his operations without going underground. 29And although the American operation was late in getting started, it quickly became an effective one. Kalamatiano obtained material from informers in the Red Army and made contact with the Socialist- Revolutionaries. 30He paid handsomely too — as did the other Allied agencies. Alexander Fride received up to 750 rubles a month from Kalamatiano for his reports. 31