Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

After the Allies had seized Archangel, Hill heard that Trotsky had given the order for his arrest. 14He went undercover. Until then he had worn uniform but now he burned his English clothes. He had several young women working for him. He appreciated their skill in using ciphers and sewing messages into clothing — the messages were produced with the use of a dictionary and coding card. Hill kept a bottle of petrol within reach in case of a Cheka raid when he would need to destroy evidence. 15Along with three of his women he rented premises as the supposed owner of a sewing business and assumed the false identity of George Bergmann, pretending to be a Russian of Baltic-German descent. 16For some days he stayed indoors to let his beard grow and told the neighbours he was recovering from a bout of malaria. Then he found a job at a cinematograph studio as a film developer. With a ginger beard and hands discoloured by chemicals, he could easily walk around Moscow unidentified. Regular employment entitled him to a ration card, which meant that he could get food without flaunting his money and attracting undesirable attention. The hours of work — from six in the evening till eleven at night — enabled him to work as a spy during the hours of daylight. 17The other bonus of the job was that he was able to view the latest official newsreels before release. 18

Throughout the summer of 1918, Hill created two chains of informers and couriers: one stretched south to the Black Sea, the other went north to the White Sea. 19In Moscow, he maintained eight clandestine apartments for his operatives. 20By the autumn he was running a hundred couriers. 21For his northern chain he organized a route out to Vyatka from Moscow on the Trans-Siberian railway, then up the branch line to Kotlas and beyond. 22Although this quickened the delivery of reports, it still took twelve to fifteen days to get a message to the British base in Archangel. 23Hill also paid acquaintances at the Khodynka radio station north of Moscow to send marconigrams direct to the War Office in London for onward transmission to the Russian north — it was not the Cheka but German counter-intelligence which put an end to this dodge. 24

In October 1918, Hill left with the Lockhart party for Finland but was ordered to go back into northern Russia to help repair the recent organizational damage instead of returning immediately to the United Kingdom. Mission completed, he reached London on Armistice Day. 25Despite his tiredness, he received an assignment to go to southern Russia with Sidney Reilly in December. Reilly had been running his own separate operation concurrently with Hill’s earlier in the year. Now they joined forces. Their instructions were to make for the Volunteer Army’s headquarters at Rostov-on-Don disguised as merchants seeking to restore international trade. 26Arriving shortly before the New Year, they bridled at the condescension shown them by British military officers. 27Hill and Reilly had a lengthy discussion with Generals Denikin and Krasnov; but since the telegraph system was in some chaos at the time, Hill went down to Odessa to communicate with London before leaving for England with the written report. 28He thought poorly of Denikin’s political set-up and felt he had a lot to learn about ruling a country. On the military side, Reilly was damning about the Volunteer Army’s readiness. The equipment and provisioning left much to be desired, and Reilly predicted a hard struggle ahead for Denikin. 29Hill’s mood fell further in Odessa. The French high command had signalled the city’s low point on their global priorities list by garrisoning the city with troops from their Senegalese colony. 30When he got back to London, Hill conveyed his impressions in person to the Foreign Office and the War Office and to the many MPs who contacted him. 31

He returned yet again to southern Russia after his stay at the Peace Conference, visiting General Denikin in Yekaterinodar. 32Reilly went back to tending his business interests while paying attention to the Soviet scene from afar. Seeing a chance of making money if the Whites won the Civil War, he wrote to John Picton Bagge in Odessa claiming that the British were being left behind by the French in preparing for this. He commented on how the French government had helped to set up a Paris agency for future commercial, industrial and financial activity in Russia. 33Reilly wrote a lengthy memorandum on ‘The Russian Problem’, arguing the need to bang together the heads of Denikin and the leaders of Finland, Poland and the other ‘bordering states’ with a view to bringing down Bolshevism in Moscow. 34

Mansfield Cumming’s willingness to gamble in selecting agents for the Secret Service Bureau was not confined to Maugham, Hill and Reilly. One of his inspired choices was Paul Dukes, who until 1914 had worked as a répétiteur at the Imperial Mariinski Theatre and helped conductor Albert Coates with preparations for Stravinsky’s Nightingale . 35Dukes’s father was a Congregational minister and staunch anti-Papist who often had to change incumbencies because deacons objected to his authoritarian style of leadership. 36Paul, a sickly child, showed an early talent for music. The Rev. Dukes had a future in mind for him as a chapel organist, but Paul rebelled in his mid-teens and ran away from home with less than four pounds in his pocket. He worked his way from Holland to Poland by teaching English, and his earnings enabled him to enrol as a student at the St Petersburg Conservatoire. 37Young Dukes lodged for a while with Sidney Gibbes, tutor to the Imperial family, who sometimes took him to Nicholas II’s residence at Tsarskoe Selo. When war broke out, the British embassy employed him to produce daily wartime summaries of the Russian press for Ambassador Buchanan. 38

In February 1917, according to his own account, Dukes became ‘a fiery revolutionary’ and took to the streets against the Romanovs. 39Evidently his friendship with Gibbes had not turned him into an admirer of Nicholas II. Soon afterwards he returned to London to work for the novelist John Buchan at the Department of Information. One of his assignments was to go to Paris under the alias of Dr Robinson to examine Bolshevik correspondence intercepted by the French secret services. 40

Steadily the scope of his ambition was widening and Buchan proved an understanding boss, allowing Dukes to return to Russia to report on the general situation under cover of a job with the YMCA in Samara and another with the Boy Scouts on the Siberian border. 41(The YMCA worked closely with the American authorities and set up facilities for the US military expedition to Siberia.) 42Dukes discharged his tasks impressively and, when Buchan recommended him for more serious clandestine work, a message was sent calling him back to London. 43As yet he was unaware of what awaited him at the interview in Mansfield Cumming’s office in July 1918. 44The office was like nothing Dukes had seen before. On his desk Cummings kept a bank of six telephones, numerous model aeroplanes and submarines, various test tubes and a row of coloured bottles. 45Dukes talked so nervously that Cumming was going to fail him as an effete musician until he expressed an interest in the collection of firearms displayed on the wall. Cumming sat him down again and restarted the interview. 46The outcome was that Dukes received twenty-four hours to think over the invitation to become an agent. 47When he accepted, Cumming brightly enjoined him: ‘Don’t go and get killed.’ The Secret Service Bureau expected its men to learn on the job, and Dukes was disconcerted to find that the training course lasted no longer than three weeks. 48

His first task was to go to Russia and gather information on ‘every section of the community’, on the scale of support for the communists, on the adaptability of their policies and on the possibilities for a counter-revolution. No Briton knew the streets of Petrograd better and he was raring to go. Cumming let his new agent ST25 decide for himself the best way of getting back on to Russian soil. 49He started his journey on 3 January 1918 by boarding an American troopship bound for northern Russia. Trying to make his way on foot to Petrograd, he found that the Soviet authorities were guarding the roads to the south. So instead he went to Helsinki, from where he took a train across the Russian border. Having visited Moscow, he moved to Smolensk and Dvinsk near the German front. In February he went to Samara, where the Socialist-Revolutionary leadership had established their anti-Bolshevik government. In his diary he mentioned Arthur Ransome, Yevgenia Shelepina and Harold Williams as being among his acquaintances — a politically broad bunch of people. By the end of June he was in Vologda for a few days before going up to Archangel, Kandalaksha and Pechenga and making his way back to London on 15 July. 50