Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Another Frenchman, René Marchand, stayed on for a while in Soviet Russia after acting as an informer for the Cheka in 1918. He was by no means as content as Sadoul. Despite living comfortably in the Hotel Metropol with his wife and children, he appeared to be under constant nervous strain, which gave rise to speculation that he regretted throwing his lot in with the Bolsheviks. 10Eventually Marchand left for Turkey where he renounced his ties with Soviet Russia and died in obscurity after years of pamphleteering in support of the Turkish government. 11

Arthur Ransome and Yevgenia Shelepina married in 1924 and they later moved to the Lake District, as far as was possible from the spotlights of English public life. It is unlikely that she ever again worked for the Soviet authorities. For a long time, though, Ransome could not shrug off the suspicions that were directed at him. Surveillance of his activities continued until 1937, when the Passport Office was finally told that ‘this man’s name need no longer be retained on the black list’. 12Although he continued to travel abroad, he had lost interest in Russian affairs and devoted his energies to writing novels for children. Even during the Second World War he refrained from commenting on the USSR. The Swallows and Amazons series brought pleasure to millions of readers who had no idea that the venerable story-teller had shuttled between Lenin and Lloyd George and served as agent S76. The marriage endured but was not entirely harmonious. Trotsky’s ex-secretary grew intolerant of her husband’s eccentricities and tried to make him into a more orderly person than he was ever capable of becoming. He died at the height of his fame in 1967; she survived him until 1975, three years after she had paid a trip to meet her long-lost sisters in Moscow. 13

Other leading British agents of the early Soviet period maintained their links with the intelligence agencies. Sir Paul Dukes served on various missions and Sidney Reilly badgered him to stand for parliament and speak out against communist rule. 14Unusually for a secret agent, he acquired an aura of celebrity. Enjoying the high life, he entered a short but disastrous marriage to a wealthy American socialite. Though he continued to write about contemporary Russia, 15his heart lay in spiritual quest and he steadily felt drawn towards a different way of life. Before the Great War he had read voraciously about Eastern religion and this eventually led him to take up yoga. In his later years, after marrying for a second time, he explored the villages of the Himalayas and studied their religious traditions. He wrote copiously and, returning to his musical interests, composed melodies to accompany his favourite yogic exercises and corresponded with the Dalai Lama. In 1967 Dukes suffered a broken leg when a guest accidentally drove her car into him in snowy conditions outside his house. Although he bore this injury with bravery, there was also irreversible damage to his brain and he died some days later. 16

Like Dukes, George Hill wrote accounts of his intelligence career. He helped some of the ‘girls’ who worked for him to escape Soviet Russia and briefly took one of them, Evelyn, as his second wife. 17But his books involved a breach of the rules of public service, and he was made aware that Mansfield Cumming’s successor Sir Stewart Menzies was displeased with him. 18Nonetheless he was sent back into the USSR in the Second World War as Britain’s liaison officer with the NKVD. He later claimed to have co-written the Soviet training manual on sabotage for partisans. 19This did not discourage the Soviet political police from planting one of his old couriers in the same hotel with mischievous intent; but Hill was too clever for them and wrote a formal complaint to his Soviet counterparts which he copied to London. 20The NKVD under Lavrenti Beria dropped its trickery and soon Hill was meeting Beria himself to discuss how to improve Anglo-Soviet co-operation. Apparently Beria showed keen interest in what Hill could tell him about undetectable poisons and automatic-weapon silencers. 21

The Grand Alliance of the USSR, Britain and the US crumbled soon after the war, and Hill set himself up in business in West Germany. 22One of his money-making plans was to write the biography of Sidney Reilly. In the end it was Robert Bruce Lockhart’s son Robin who did the job using Hill’s detailed notes, and the book became a best-seller. Its closing chapters told a wretched tale. Although Reilly had not divorced his first wife Margaret, who was still alive, he entered into a bigamous marriage with Nadine Zalessky in 1915. 23After abandoning Nadine in 1920, he arranged a wedding (again bigamous) to the blonde Chilean actress Mrs Pepita Haddon-Chambers in 1923. When Reilly disappeared on a trip to Russia in 1925, Pepita wrote up his life story on the basis of a colourful draft he had left behind him. 24By the time the book appeared, Reilly was dead. The Cheka had lured him back to Russia only to arrest, interrogate and execute him in secret. The books by his widow and Robin Bruce Lockhart brought his name to public attention. 25A Thames Television series glamorized him as ‘the Ace of Spies’. 26Although he was often talked of as having been a model for Ian Fleming’s agent 007, truly any one out of that trio of Reilly, Dukes and Hill could have supplied inspiration for James Bond.

Robert Bruce Lockhart was certainly the model for the hero of the 1934 Hollywood movie British Agent , which starred Leslie Howard as ‘Stephen Locke’ and Kay Francis as ‘Elena Moura’. 27In the 1920s he had worked at the Prague embassy where he became close to President Tomáš Masaryk. But despite adoring the night clubs, champagne and beautiful women in Czechoslovakia, he longed to go back to the high life in London and resume an affair with his latest mistress. After switching careers and moving into journalism, he achieved success through his friendship with the Daily Express owner Lord Beaverbrook. Lockhart was as profligate as Reilly. To supplement his income, he wrote an autobiography, taking him through to the end of his Russian period. Memoirs of a British Agent , on which the film was loosely based, earned vast royalties for him but predictably irritated Soviet spokesmen. Although the Moscow chapters centred on his purely diplomatic functions, the title of the book lent weight to the official Soviet claim that he had been involved in activities inappropriate for a diplomat. Lockhart lamented his notoriety in the USSR, 28though it was nobody’s fault but his own: as a master of the written word he had surely calculated that the resonances of the word ‘agent’ would increase his sales.

Lockhart had tried the patience of everyone in Whitehall by selling the film rights of his memoirs to Warner Brothers. Before the movie was released, his friends in Hollywood were alarmed by the depiction of him as the leader of an armed conspiracy against Lenin while Moura appeared as a fanatical Leninist who betrayed him. They sent Lockhart a telegram advising him that the script was ‘libellous and burlesque’. 29In 1918, of course, Lockhart really had been engaged in subverting Soviet rule whereas Moura at that time had been a fanatic only in the cause of love. Lockhart prudently let the matter rest and did not sue. When war broke out with Germany, he was appointed Director of Political Warfare and knighted in 1943. 30From 1945 he found himself without a regular income and wrote frantically about everything from European international affairs to fishing and malt whisky to keep himself in the grand style. He died in 1970 at the age of eighty-two.

After Lockhart left her in Moscow, Moura worked as Maxim Gorki’s personal assistant. 31When in 1921 Gorki left for Italy she returned to her family in Estonia and, after the shortest of courtships, married Baron Nikolai Budberg. The marriage ended in divorce in 1926. 32As Moura Budberg she lived for a while again with Gorki and then with H. G. Wells in London. 33But she and Lockhart had never lost their mutual attraction. She was displeased that his memoirs gave prominence to their affair, but she acknowledged that this had the benefit of making her name known in the West; and Lockhart interceded with officials for a successful result when she applied for a British residence permit. Always attracted by a life of glamour, she found work on the production side in the UK film industry. She had never been conventionally good-looking; it was her zest for life that made her so appealing, and this quality remained with her into her retirement when she continued to turn men’s heads. Yet no one was absolutely sure where her political loyalties lay and it was often mooted that she might be a Soviet agent. Lockhart defended her gallantly against such aspersions. 34But he was wrong. An investigation of the Soviet archives revealed that she indeed became an NKVD informer and almost certainly reported on both Gorki and Wells. 35