Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Dukes did not stay for long. On 12 August he left again for Archangel on a Russian trip that lasted till early October, when he made for Britain’s intelligence base in Stockholm. After a brief respite it was back into Russia for another assignment until early December. A trip to Helsinki followed before he went on yet another Russian mission. 51One of his jobs was to support the National Centre in Moscow. Its leaders were at first reluctant to accept British money since they wanted their efforts to stay strictly in Russian hands, but the financial assistance from Kolchak had broken down and they agreed to take Dukes’s cash. Dukes also met with the Tactical Centre, a clandestine political body which had formed itself to challenge Bolshevik rule throughout Russia, and made contact with Yudenich’s North-Western Army. Although none of these organizations was effective in its subversive activity, each supplied him with valuable intelligence about conditions in Soviet Russia. This partnership came to an end when the Cheka penetrated the National Centre and the Tactical Centre and arrested many of the leaders. 52His informants obtained illicit material for him from the offices of Sovnarkom. 53

Dukes showed physical courage and, doubtless helped by his theatrical experience, a talent for disguise. Piecing together the stories he told her, his widow later called him the Scarlet Pimpernel of the October Revolution. He even enlisted in the Red Army. By volunteering, he knew he could join a regiment led by a commander who was a secret anti-Bolshevik. 54This was not the quixotic move it might seem:

Apart from greater freedom of movement and preference over civilians in application for lodging, amusement, or travelling tickets, the Red soldier received rations greatly superior both in quantity and quality to those of the civilian population. Previous to this time I had received only half a pound of bread daily and had had to take my scanty dinner at a filthy communal eating house, but as a Red soldier I received, besides a dinner and other odds and ends not worth mentioning, a pound and sometimes a pound and a half of tolerably good black bread, which alone was sufficient, accustomed as I am to a crude diet, to subsist on with relative comfort. 55

Dukes travelled about Russia under the alias of artillery commander V. Piotrovski. 56The runaway pianist became a Red Army officer who filed regular reports to London from whatever place he was moved to.

He had just as many adventures as Hill. Whereas Dukes was modest and discreet in his memoirs, it would seem that he personally rescued two of the former emperor’s nieces, making himself into a human bridge across a dyke at one point. A couple of Englishwomen also owed their lives to him, as did a merchant called Solatin who had tumbled from wealth and influence to destitution after 1917. Dukes and his couriers ran fearful risks — at least one of them was trapped and shot by the Cheka. He was once pursued so hotly that he hid in a tomb in a graveyard. The sight of him emerging from it next morning terrified a passer-by. 57But he was not just the Pimpernel. His couriers helped him finance counter-revolutionary enterprises and gather information that was urgently needed in London — and one of his subordinates fondly recorded him as having been a person of great decency. 58The reports that Dukes relayed to the Secret Service Bureau were concise and vivid. He treasured the spectacle of striking workers who sang the Marseillaise while carrying a banner that read: ‘Down with Lenin and horse meat, up with the Tsar and pork!’ 59

Whatever may explain the disarray of Western policy and activity in Russia, it was not the absence of efficient spying networks. In 1918 the British were already picking up Soviet cable traffic to Europe — and when in June they came across a message from Trotsky to Litvinov, they kept it for their own information and prevented it from reaching Litvinov. 60In the following year a Government Code and Cypher School was created on Lord Curzon’s recommendation and quickly proved its worth. Among its employees was the leading former Russian Imperial cryptanalyst Ernst Fetterlein, who provided his services after escaping Soviet Russia. Fetterlein was the first director of the School and scarcely any wireless traffic from Moscow was invulnerable to his attention and that of his Russian colleagues. 61

Although it had been the American spy network that suffered worst in the Cheka raids of September 1918, the US never let up in its activity in wireless interception. Chicherin conducted a lively traffic with Baron Rosen in Berlin seeking a rapprochement between Germany and Soviet Russia; he had no inkling that the Americans were regularly scrutinizing these exchanges. 62The German Foreign Office was divided into two factions, one supporting an alliance and the other wanting to postpone any decision. The first faction saw the communist governments of Russia and Hungary as offering good trading opportunities for Germany; its advocates supposed that this was achievable on the agreed basis that communism would not be exported into German cities and that Lenin would come to terms with a ‘social-democratic or democratic government’. At a time when Denikin’s forces were trampling Red resistance in southern Russia and Ukraine it was not implausible to think that Sovnarkom might come to such an accommodation. Against this proposal for foreign policy stood the second faction, which contended that Germany’s future interest lay in supporting the Whites and earning their permanent gratitude for making life difficult for the Bolsheviks. 63

Western intelligence agencies generally offered a sound analysis of conditions in Soviet Russia. They reported that the Red Army, weak in its early months, was getting stronger. This came through the reports of all the British agents. It was also the opinion of people in French intelligence like the wonderfully named Charles Adolphe Faux-Pas Bidet who had helped to expel Trotsky from France in 1916. He was therefore a marked man when undertaking a mission to Russia in 1918 and was swiftly arrested. Trotsky enjoyed the opportunity of interrogating him, using sarcasm rather than threats against his former tormentor. When released on 17 January 1919, Faux-Pas Bidet at his debriefing duly emphasized the growing strength of Soviet rule. 64

While most agents agreed on this burgeoning strength, Arthur Ransome went further and insisted that the Bolsheviks were nowhere near as bloody as they were painted. This caused controversy in British governing circles, and Bruce Lockhart wrote in the London Morning Post that he should keep quiet because he had been out of Russia for half a year. 65Lockhart went round claiming to be a diplomat pure and simple and Ransome — agent S76 — affected to be just a journalist: neither disclosed their work for the Secret Service Bureau. As it happened, the Secret Service Bureau shared Lockhart’s reservations about Ransome but concluded, on balance, that he did ‘quite good work for us’. Ransome was therefore sanctioned to return on the pretext of collecting Bolshevik pamphlets for the British Museum. His British handlers assumed they could filter out the pro-Soviet bias from his reports and obtain something useful for themselves since no one else could get as close to the Kremlin leaders. 66Ransome, resourceful as ever, made the best of a bad job by using Lockhart’s criticism as a sort of passport to secure interviews with the supreme party leadership. He had missed the October Revolution, but no correspondent after 1917 shuttled quite so easily between Russia and the West. 67

The results of Western intelligence activity were mixed, through no fault of the agents themselves. There is in fact no evidence that Churchill or Curzon took up the anti-Soviet cause because they were decisively influenced by the secret reports of Dukes, Reilly and Hill or by the Times articles of Harold Williams. Churchill and Curzon were political militants against the Bolsheviks from the moment they heard of the October Revolution, and their belligerence was only reinforced by material forwarded to them as ministers. Similarly it is impossible to show that Lloyd George softened his treatment of Russia as the result of Ransome’s purrings. Undoubtedly the energetic secret agents and decryption experts of the Allied powers supplied their political masters with information of high quality. In trying to influence politics, they were motivated by patriotism and a sense of adventure (and, in Reilly’s case, by financial greed). All of them but Ransome detested communism — and even Ransome did not want it for Britain. But although they often tried to be backseat drivers, the holders of supreme public office — Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau — took little notice unless the received advice conformed to what they themselves wanted.