Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

The intelligence agencies co-operated with each other, consulting regularly, sharing their findings and sometimes even running the same agents — Alexander and Maria Fride worked simultaneously for the British and the Americans. 32The British and French secret services had plenty of practice in acting together without dropping their guard — each understood that the other might act independently for one reason or another in the national interest. When Noulens had stimulated Savinkov’s ill-fated uprising in Yaroslavl in July he did not tell Lockhart what exactly he was promising to the rebels; and Lockhart was justifiably annoyed that the French had played fast and loose with the anti-Bolshevik resistance, risking and losing Russian lives in an irresponsible fashion. 33The Americans would seem to have been more trusting than was good for them. In early 1918 British agents bought documents purportedly showing that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were the paid employees of the Germans. Reilly and Hill took a close look at them and found that most of the documents were produced on a single typewriter despite the claim of the sellers that they originated in places hundreds of miles from each other. The British, they concluded, had purchased expensive forgeries. So what did they do? They put the documents back on the market and let Edgar Sisson of the American Information Service buy them up — and in this way they recouped the financial loss. All was thought fair in wartime when budgets were tight. 34

Sisson’s ‘revelations’ failed to gain universal acceptance in the American press. The New York Evening Post made savage criticisms, and Santeri Nuorteva of the Finnish Information Bureau as well as John Reed had the opportunity to do the same in the New York Times . 35The Committee on Public Information under George Creel investigated on the administration’s behalf. Creel was already sympathetic to Sisson and, buoyed by support from Professor Samuel Harper and the National Board for Historical Science, pronounced most of the documents to be genuine. The threat to civilization in both Russia and America was said to come from a ‘German–Bolshevik conspiracy’. 36

Not everyone even among the British approved of such tomfoolery. Lockhart had never accepted that Lenin and Trotsky were agents of Germany or any other power. Denying that the Bolsheviks were ‘pro-German’, he reported that he ‘had little faith in documents I have seen which overprove the case for collusion’; 37he also pointed out that the French officials in Moscow shared his suspicions. 38Sisson’s ‘discovery’ interfered with his desire to convince the Allied governments that the Kremlin leadership were acting out of a sense of their own interests. He too wanted to overturn the Bolsheviks but argued that this would best be done in the light of a well-informed analysis. 39The documents bought by Sisson in fact came from former officials of the Okhrana. They had made the forgeries either out of financial greed or because they frantically wanted to steer the Allies away from thinking that any kind of deal could be done with Sovnarkom after the Brest-Litovsk treaty. Lockhart had once been one of those who favoured collaboration, but he quickly abandoned that position. In any case the debate about Sisson’s allegations wasted everyone’s time and energy just when the Allies needed to be clearheaded about what was going on in Russia. All that could be said in favour of Sisson was that he helped to steel US public opinion against unnecessary compromises with the Soviet authorities.

While still pretending to be Trotsky’s best Allied friend, Lockhart himself undertook a number of subversive activities after the Brest- Litovsk treaty — and although he had wide scope to use his initiative, he reported regularly to London and sought the permission of higher authority when he thought he needed it. 40From inside the Bolshevik administration he had a frequent supply of information from Yevgenia Shelepina as well as from a ‘Mr Pressman’. 41He also secretly corresponded with the Volunteer Army in the south and met leaders of the National Centre in Moscow. He even attended an undercover National Centre conference in July and spoke with notable anti- Bolshevik politicians such as Pëtr Struve and with a colonel who represented General Alexeev and the Volunteer Army. Lockhart delivered ten million rubles to the Volunteers, whom he reported as making military progress. He noted that Alexeev was entirely opposed to Pavel Milyukov’s overtures to the Germans. Lockhart now regarded the Volunteer Army as the best option for the Allies to back in Russia so long as the Whites could put aside old political quarrels and foster their political attractiveness to Russian workers. He reported that Struve was intending to travel north to consult General Poole; he also noted that Alexeev expected soon to be able to incorporate battalions of Czechs in his forces. 42

The Allied occupation of Archangel worsened Lockhart’s standing with the Bolsheviks, and on 5 August the British consulate in Moscow was raided and several officials were arrested. The French consulate and military mission suffered in the same way. Lockhart was left free; but he felt the need to destroy his ciphers, which made his further diplomatic work in Moscow impractical. (He had got rid of his written files when Mirbach was assassinated.) He also protested loudly to Karakhan, who apologized. Although the Allied officials were quickly released, they all were denied permission to leave Moscow. 43

It was in this febrile atmosphere that Lockhart, being no longer able to communicate confidentially with London, resolved to undertake drastic measures of his own. He continued to have secret meetings with representatives of the National Centre and the Volunteer Army. This was dangerous enough for him after the Cheka’s recent raid. But on 14 August he went further by confidentially hosting Colonel Eduard Berzin of the 1st Latvian Heavy Artillery Division at his Moscow apartment. The two of them agreed a plot to dislodge the Latvians serving in the Red Army from supporting Sovnarkom. 44In none of his later accounts did Lockhart explain how he came to approach Berzin. The reason for his reticence is fairly clear. He was to find it inconvenient to admit how deeply embedded he had been in British intelligence work in Russia. Privately, however, he gave a fuller account and acknowledged that Sidney Reilly initiated things by bringing representatives of the Latvians to him — and Lockhart then took over the planning and co-ordination. 45

Whereas earlier Lockhart had provided money and encouragement for Russians to carry out subversion, now he was taking a British initiative without consulting any Russian organization. Lockhart arrived at an imaginative agreement with Berzin. The Latvian troops were known as the Soviet government’s praetorian guard. Despite having crushed the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and helped to recapture Kazan, the Latvians felt no debt of allegiance to Sovnarkom. George Hill recorded that they were fed up with being used as ‘executioners’ for the Bolsheviks. 46They were the human flotsam of the Great War since it was impossible for them to return home while the Germans held Riga; but the Latvians were increasingly worried that fighting for the Soviet cause would irritate the Western Allies and cost them dearly if the Allied coalition won the war. In any case, why risk life and limb in the service of the Reds? Lockhart himself always denied that he had instigated anything. He claimed that it had been the Latvians who made the approach to him and not the other way round. He also maintained that his proposal had merely been to move the riflemen from Moscow to the side of the British in Murmansk. 47The Cheka would bluntly reject this. The records of their investigation and interrogations indicated that Lockhart proposed to finance the Latvians to enable them to arrest the Soviet leadership and overthrow Bolshevism — and Lockhart in old age admitted to his son that the Soviet version of the episode was essentially correct. 48