Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

The militants recognized the need to bring order into their affairs. If they wanted to join Comintern they would have to demonstrate a capacity to be as dedicated and dynamic as the Bolsheviks. The Communist Party of America laid down its guidelines as follows:

Don’t betray Party work and Party workers under any circumstances.

Don’t carry or keep with you names and addresses, except in good code.

Don’t keep in your rooms openly any incriminating documents or literature.

Don’t take any unnecessary risks in Party work.

Don’t shirk Party work because of the risk connected with it.

Don’t boast of what you have to do or have done for the Party.

Don’t divulge your membership in the Party without necessity.

Don’t let any spies follow you to appointments or meetings.

Don’t lose your nerve in danger.

Don’t answer questions if arrested, either at preliminary hearings or in the court. 28

Gradually a spirit of conspiratorial comradeship was implanted. Recruits were expected to accept the guidelines or risk being shunned or expelled.

The desirability of such precautions was obvious if the communist revolutionaries were going to make any progress in the US. A ‘Red scare’ billowed as newspaper editors united against the spread of ideological contagion from the east. Attorney-General Palmer had displayed his combative disposition, and many groups of employers were delighted. Politicians in the Democratic and Republican parties were equally pleased to support him. Industrial strikes were increasingly treated as tantamount to treason and the police used much violence.

In December 1921 a founding Convention was at last held for the united Workers’ Party of America, bringing together the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party and placing it under Comintern’s authority. Comintern immediately set out its priorities. American communists were to infiltrate and manipulate as many organizations as possible in the US, including associations of farmers and ‘Negroes’ — indeed the line of recruitment was drawn only at the Ku Klux Klan. Moscow stressed that the Workers’ Party had to break out of the confines of the party’s immigrant ethnic supporters. Key matters for agitation were to involve a campaign against the current legal restrictions on organizing strikes. Illegal activity was not to be abandoned by the Workers’ Party — in fact the undercover leaders and militants were to be regarded as ‘the real Communist Party’ and were to have permanent precedence over the broad open party. No duty was to be regarded as superior to the calls for support for Soviet Russia. While revolution in the US remained the dream for American communists, their primary obligation was to do whatever was required to sustain the October Revolution in Moscow. 29Although factionalism continued to plague the Workers’ Party of America, this served only to strengthen the Russian hold on its affairs. Whenever a dispute arose it was Comintern headquarters which gave the decisive ruling.

The Soviet leaders were not as wise about America as they thought they were; ideas that worked for communism in Russia did not always find a suitable environment in New York. Max Eastman, Trotsky’s admirer and confidant, prepared a memo for him and Lenin, pointing out that capitalism was not on the verge of collapse in America and American workers were not in ‘a revolutionary frame of mind’. He asked for Comintern to take better account of this. Eastman had a number of organizational bugbears. He denied that Comintern’s emphasis on conspiratorial methods was a sensible one. He also objected to the national and ethnic associations that were still permitted in the party. The ‘Slavic federation’ was deeply distasteful for him. 30He jibbed at the endless celebrations of Lenin, the October Revolution and the Red Army and called for American specificities to be analysed and acted upon. He was not alone in sensing that the Workers’ Party of America would get nowhere if it was a ‘hip-hip-hurrah society’ for the celebration of the good news from Russia. 31Consequently America had less to fear from American communism than American political leaders thought. It was a paradoxical situation. If he had but known it, Attorney-General Palmer would have been pleased that American communists were doing such an effective job of rendering the Workers’ Party ineffectual.

The Soviet communist leaders in Moscow reinforced the phenomenon. They felt sure that they knew what was best for communism in every country, and they sprayed their advice worldwide. American communists seldom rebelled against Moscow for long. If there was discontent, it was ultimately resolved by forced submission or expulsion from the Workers’ Party. American communism was swaddled from birth in Russian clothing that constricted its growth.

As the world communist movement emerged into the light in Europe and North America, the Cheka steadily discovered how to operate from the shadows. This was slow work as the Chekists felt their way. But the Politburo had a crucial need for a network of secret agents in the West if it wanted to achieve its political and economic purposes abroad. The Chekist leadership had to start their operations almost from scratch. And the fact that Soviet Russia was the declared enemy of absolutely every other state in the world meant that its foreign activity was under constant close scrutiny. In such an environment it is impressive how much the Chekists managed to achieve.

Intelligence agencies are predictably shy about releasing the names of their employees. This has often opened the door to speculation, and one of the enduring controversies from the early Soviet years is about whether Sidney Reilly was a Cheka agent. 1Suspicion enveloped him after the temporary destruction of the Allied intelligence networks in autumn 1918. DeWitt Poole, acting consul-general for the Americans in Moscow, had left Russia with the rest of the American diplomatic personnel in those weeks. He had formed a poor opinion of Reilly and sounded an alarm when talking things over with Sir Mansfeldt Findlay at the UK embassy to Norway. Poole recounted the rumours that Reilly was a Cheka agent provocateur. Although the evidence was no more than circumstantial, it worried Findlay enough for him to place it before the Foreign Office and the Secret Service Bureau. Poole’s concerns had sprouted from the discrepancy between what Lockhart had discussed with him and what Reilly had apparently enacted. He wanted the British to investigate the possibility that Reilly had betrayed Lockhart. 2Kalamatiano, the American secret service leader in Russia, languished in Soviet custody and Poole naturally felt sore about this. Poole had confidence in Lockhart and mistrusted Reilly. It did not cross his mind that Lockhart too might have been less than frank with him in Moscow.

Although Lockhart had private reservations about Reilly’s personal integrity, 3he never queried his political allegiance. Reilly expressed outrage at the insinuations against him and complained to Lockhart, a few weeks after they returned from the Russian capital, about ‘those unfortunate libels’. 4Like Lockhart, he called for a hard line to be taken on Soviet Russia; he described Lloyd George as being soft-headed about Bolshevism and planning to use philanthropy as a ‘panacea for all social evils’. He thought the British cabinet failed to understand the menace to civilization that would soon spread abroad if it was not stamped out in Moscow. 5He rejected the view that the Soviet order was an unworkable or weak one. Having seen it in motion in Russia, he had no doubt that it could be made operational elsewhere. 6

Was this the play-acting of a double agent? Reilly’s patron Mansfield Cumming probed the possibility by asking Commander Ernest Boyce, an old Russia intelligence hand, to conduct an internal enquiry. Boyce’s researches revealed a brash man with a chaotic personal life. Reilly did everything to excess; he was abstemious only with drink. He loved women, and it was rare for him to limit himself to a single girlfriend — and on his return to London he went around with a tart who rejoiced in the nickname of Plugger. 7Reilly was a bigamist, never having divorced his first wife Margaret, who tracked him down and squeezed money out of him in return for her silence. He was a gambler who often risked everything in the casino as in the rest of his life. 8When he had money he spent it ostentatiously, and high society paid him the attention he craved. He bought a flower for his buttonhole daily at Solomons in St James’s Street. He took a suite at the Savoy Hotel and, when this palled, he moved to the Ritz. Reilly seemed the quintessential man about town. 9