Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Commander Boyce’s enquiry into Reilly extended to having lunch with Robert Bruce Lockhart and his wife Jean at the Langham Hotel in Regent Street in December 1918. He arranged for Jean to arrive earlier than her husband so as to do a bit of judicious questioning. Jean told him that ‘Bertie’ believed that Reilly would always ‘work for the highest bidder’. 10But even this revelation merely suggested that Reilly was nothing more than a money-grubbing rascal rather than a Chekist, and Cumming felt safe in sending him on yet another Russian mission together with George Hill. 11But the whisperings against him continued and it may well have been on his return to London that Cumming called in George Hill and Paul Dukes and set up a separate enquiry. 12Although Reilly was cleared, Cumming refused to grant him a fixed appointment, offering the excuse that the Foreign Office was the source of the hostility. At any rate the Secret Service Bureau continued to use Reilly for foreign assignments and throughout his time in London he continued to fire off tirades against Lloyd George’s softening of Allied policy on Russia. If he had been a Soviet mole, it is difficult to see why his handlers would have approved of this behaviour at a time when Sovnarkom hoped to turn Western public opinion in favour of diplomatic recognition and commercial acceptance. It is still not impossible that Reilly took money from the Bolsheviks at some other time. But whether he did or not, he could never be a reliable double agent: Reilly’s first and last loyalty was to himself and his financial interests.

The Soviet authorities were still finding their way in the activities they promoted abroad. They were juggling two priorities. One was to stir communist parties into life and revolution; the other was to agitate for trade with Russia. At the very time that the Bolsheviks were trying to arrange deals with Western big business they were also sending people and funds to undermine capitalism. This ‘contradiction’ did not worry the Politburo. Communist leaders assumed that if their best hope was fulfilled — revolution — then it would no longer matter what sums had been given or promised to businessmen in the West. And if things went wrong for communism in Europe, at least Sovnarkom would possess signed contracts to facilitate Russian economic recovery from the years of fighting. Often the same agents were stirring up politics while reassuring businessmen. The Politburo lived comfortably with the paradox. Bolshevik leaders accepted that ‘history’ was messy and that twists and turns in policy were essential if communism was to triumph. They thrived on the ‘contradictions’ in world affairs. If Bolsheviks lower down the party did not yet appreciate this situation, surely eventually they would do so — and the prestige and authority of Lenin and his close comrades were deployed to ensure that this came about.

The Soviet agents fostered organizational splits in the parties of the political far left so as to win recruits for Comintern. They sent funds and instructions abroad. They gathered reports on discussions among the great powers. They organized propaganda in translation. As agreements were signed with Western countries, the plenipotentiaries working for People’s Commissariats conducted clandestine activity behind the screen of their legal work. Comintern recruited people from the new communist parties for espionage and subversion on the Kremlin’s behalf. In June 1919 the Cheka at last set up an illegal operations department for work abroad. 13The pace of international activity was steadily being increased. Agents were sent to all continents in the revolutionary cause.

Bolsheviks were expert at spiriting funds across frontiers. They had to be: they had committed themselves to international subversion, and governments and police forces everywhere took them at their word. Russia no longer had diplomatic recognition in any country after the closure of the German, Swiss and Scandinavian missions in the winter of 1918–19. 14This meant among other things that the Russian plenipotentiaries and couriers lost the facilities associated with diplomatic bags. They carried money on their persons for political purposes at their destinations. This was a hazardous undertaking since countries bordering on Russia teemed with policemen under orders to lay their hands on Kremlin agents, who were marked men and women when passing through customs points. The maintenance of the Allied economic blockade around the territory under Soviet rule aggravated the problem, and trade between Russia and its neighbours fell to a small fraction of what it had been before 1914. (During the Great War there had been a substantial exchange of goods even with Germany via neutral Sweden.) Agents who went on foreign trips to buy goods for Sovnarkom had to bring back what they could pack in suitcases because they could not make wholesale purchases for dispatch as rail freight. They restricted themselves to bringing back medicine, saccharine and other easily carried products. 15

Alternative options were quickly found. Since 1917 Sovnarkom had confiscated a huge quantity of extremely valuable jewels that were small, light and easily exchangeable for cash — and they were used even before the withdrawal of diplomatic privileges. Louise Bryant was one of the couriers. She agreed to the work after her baggage had been seized in Finland on a journey from Petrograd in the winter of 1917–18. When she asked at the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs how to avoid such trouble in future, Ivan Zalkind replied: ‘Why, I’ll make you a courier for the Soviet government!’ The advantage was that she could have her bags sealed with wax and the customs men — at least in Scandinavia — would not touch them. This was how she took official material to ‘the Bolshevik minister’ Vatslav Vorovski on her next trip to Stockholm. The only drawback was that hoteliers treated her with suspicion as a Soviet agent and she found it hard to get a room for the night. 16Women were the perfect couriers because they could wear the valuables discreetly round their necks and on their arms. When Yevgenia Shelepina made her final departure from Russia with her future husband Arthur Ransome in 1922 she transported diamonds and pearls worth 1,039,000 rubles by arrangement with Chicherin. 17

Courier work was not an exclusively female occupation. When Francis Meynell, a director of the London Daily Herald , agreed to transport two strings of pearls to the United Kingdom he hid them in a jar of butter; and on one occasion he carried jewels inserted into a box of chocolate creams. 18Meynell advertised his sympathies so widely that Special Branch asked the Secret Service Bureau to keep an eye on him. 19The same authorities were watching over People’s Commissar Leonid Krasin when he entered the United Kingdom with jewels in his luggage to the value of over seven million rubles. 20It was an open secret that many couriers were on assignments that involved more than carrying messages, money or jewellery. Some of them became involved in pro-Soviet organizations; others helped to arrange the circulation of revolutionary literature. 21The difference between a courier, an agent and an activist was often a blurred one. The Special Branch in London knew what was going on but refrained from arguing for stoppage of the courier facilities. British counter-intelligence found it more convenient to use Soviet emissaries as a way of surveying the political left in the United Kingdom than to block their entry into the country.

In January 1920 John Reed received a million rubles’ worth of diamonds for disbursal in the US. His American comrade Kristap Beika (alias Comintern official John Anderson) received a similar amount. The emergent US communist movement would not lack financial support. The record of such assignments kept by the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in 1919–20 referred to several other countries, including Hungary, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Italy and France. 22It was not a perfect system, as the heads of Soviet diplomatic missions made clear in their reports to the Kremlin. Yan Berzin in Switzerland in 1918 was disgusted by the quality of couriers sent out to him, claiming that several of them had given speeches in favour of the Mensheviks as they passed through central Europe. 23Nor was every courier distinguished by basic honesty. Just as they could cross borders in one disguise, so they could abandon their communist errand and run off with the valuables that had been entrusted to them. Lenin huffed and puffed about morality and penalties. But it was difficult at long range to impose discipline on unruly agents until such time as communist parties were able to act as enforcers, and even then the system was vulnerable to abuse.