Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly

^NINE THE REILLY PLOT

Four days after his departure, C sent a cable to the British mission in Vologda, alerting them of Reilly’s arrival:

Instead of following orders and disembarking at Archangel, Reilly left the ship at Murmansk. The port itself was in the hands of a company of British marines, who had been sent in on 6 March to guard Allied war materials thought to be at risk since the Bolshevik’s treaty with Germany. On leaving the merchant ship Queen Mary, Reilly was stopped for a routine inspection of documents and promptly arrested. He was confined aboard HMS Glory, where Maj. Stephen Alley of SIS, who was on his way back to London, was summoned by Admiral Kemp to examine him. ‘His passport was very doubtful, and his name was spelt REILLI. This, together with the fact that he was obviously not an Irishman, caused his arrest’, said Alley.²

Within days of his interview with C, Reilly had made contact with Litvinov, the Russian Plenipotentiary, who had a small office at 82 Victoria Street, Westminster. Making an appointment to see Litvinov proved easier said than done. After two unsuccessful attempts, Reilly’s third telegram finally managed to secure an interview on 23 March:

As a result of the meeting, Reilly, or rather ‘Sidney George Reilli’, was issued with travel documents that permitted him to enter Soviet territory. Whether Litvinov had misspelled the name or whether this was the name by which Reilly identified himself to Litvinov is open to question.⁴ A list of persons who had been issued with visas by Litvinov would certainly have been sent back to Russia on a regular basis, and Reilly may not have wished to encourage any comparison between himself and the Reilly of St Petersburg who had had such close connections with the Tsarist regime.

As soon as Alley appeared, Reilly produced a microscopic coded message from under the cork of a bottle of aspirins. Alley immediately recognised this as an SIS code and Reilly was quickly released.⁵ Interestingly, Cumming’s telegram also reveals that it was originally intended that Reilly would return in late June, as indeed Beatrice Tremaine had told US investigators he would.⁶

The reason Reilly was sent to Archangel seems quite clear, in that from there he could catch an express train directly to Moscow via Vologda. It seems equally apparent that he never had any intention of going straight to Moscow as ordered. One possible reason for leaving the ship at Murmansk might have been the fact that he could get a direct rail connection to Petrograd from there, which he could not have done had he gone on to Archangel.

As it turned out, he spent the best part of four weeks in Petrograd before finally journeying to Moscow. If the purpose of his return to Russia had some connection with the family referred to by Norbert Rodkinson, or to possessions of his located somewhere in the city, this could well explain the delay.⁷ Whatever it was that was occupying him in Petrograd, he found the time to send C a detailed report on 16 April, outlining his own home-grown solutions to the situation he found himself in the midst of:

Building up to the point of his communication, Reilly states that the most potent factor in the equation is money. Only hard cash could effectively deliver all the other objects. Attributing German successes to their preparedness to use money, he coolly proposes to C that:

Almost without batting an eyelid and with ten out of ten for sheer audacity, Reilly was effectively asking for at least one million pounds in cash, to be sent to him personally, post haste, without any guarantee that such action would actually achieve its objective. Needless to say, the canny C was having none it. Although Reilly was to be entrusted with funds later on, they were for specifically targeted objectives and certainly not in the region of the sums that Reilly was asking for here. What would have happened to the £1 million had C been gullible enough to agree is best left to the imagination.

In almost prophetic terms, Reilly concludes his report by saying that, ‘in any case, we have arrived at critical moment when we must either act or immediately and effectively abandon entire position for good and all’. As it would turn out, he took his own advice too literally.

On 7 May he arrived in Moscow in full dress uniform and headed immediately for the Kremlin. On reaching the main gates he informed the sentries that he was an emissary from the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and demanded to see Lenin personally. Remarkably he was actually admitted, although he got no further than Lenin’s aide Vladimir Bonch Bruevich. Reilly explained that he had been sent to the Kremlin as the Prime Minister wanted first-hand news concerning the aims and objec-tives of the Bolshevik government. He also claimed that the British government was dissatisfied with the reports that he had been receiving from Robert Bruce Lockhart, the head of the British Mission in Moscow, and had instructed him with making good this defect. It would seem that Reilly’s interview was a very brief one. At 6 p.m. Robert Bruce Lockhart received a telephone call ask-ing him to come over to the Kremlin.¹⁰ On arrival he was asked if a man called ‘Relli’ was really a British officer or an impostor. Lockhart was incredulous when told the story of Relli’s visit that afternoon. He had never heard the name Relli, and diplomatically said that he would need to look into the matter and get back in due course.

On leaving the Kremlin Lockhart immediately sent for Ernest Boyce, the head of SIS in Moscow, and angrily demanded an explanation.¹¹ Boyce confirmed that Reilly was a new agent sent out from London, but had no knowledge of his dramatic debut at the Kremlin. Boyce said he would send Reilly to Lockhart the following day to offer a personal explanation. Unsurprisingly, Reilly denied everything apart from the fact that he had been at the Kremlin on the afternoon of the seventh. Lockhart did not believe a word of Reilly’s account but said many years later that his excuses were so ingenious that he had ended up laughing. It is unlikely that Reilly took any great heed of Lockhart’s threat to have him sent home and merrily carried on going his own way. It is also clear from this event that Lockhart had not had sight of Cumming’s telegram and was essentially in the dark about what was going on in London. Although Reilly’s story was a bold bluff, he was actually correct about London’s view of Lockhart, who the Foreign Office considered was providing inconsistent and ill-judged advice.¹²

While the story of Reilly marching up to the Kremlin gates is vividly recited by several Reilly biographers,¹³ the impression given is that this was his first and last attempt to deal directly with the Bolshevik authorities before going underground. A series of telegrams to London marked ‘Secret’ tell a very different story, however. They reveal that the day after his dressing down by Lockhart, he was, in fact, back at the Kremlin for what turned out to be one of several in-depth meetings with Vladimir Bonch Bruevich’s brother, Gen. Mikhail Bonch Bruevich. In a report headed ‘Miscellaneous Military’, Reilly referred in particular to two aspects of the meeting which had taken place on 9 May:

Despite the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the report clearly confirms that all was not well between the Bolsheviks and the Germans. This is further amplified by Reilly’s report of 29 May in which he relates details of a meeting between Bonch Bruevich and Georgi Chicherin, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, at which new demands made by the German Ambassador Count Mirbach were discussed. The Germans wanted, in particular, three things:

Bonch Bruevich was very much opposed to the proposals Chicherin had already conceded, and apparently told Reilly that he did not know whether Chicherin, ‘in agreeing to them, did so in fear of or because he was bought by the Germans’.¹⁶ Bonch Bruevich concluded that the only way to counter-balance the Germans was for an immediate understanding with the Allies. Reilly quotes him as exclaiming, ‘cannot the Allies see that by keeping aloof, they give a free hand to Germany… if they wait much longer there will be no Russia to save. Our Chicherin will have given it away’.

By the time Reilly met with Bonch Bruevich again on 31 May, the Bolsheviks had formulated some response to the situation. In particular, Reilly refers to a decision that has been made to ‘issue a proclamation to the people calling for a massed rising against the Germans’. The chief points of the proclamation are reported to be that:

Reilly claims Bonch Bruevich asked him for his own views as to other steps that could be taken, to which he proposed ‘a circular telegram to be sent to military directors in the provinces ordering them to mobilise their resources and prepare troops and population for struggle with Germany’. Bonch Bruevich then, according to the report, telephoned Trotsky in Reilly’s presence and read him the proposals, which were apparently approved on the spot. Bonch Bruevich told Reilly that, ‘the time was fast approaching when the Commissars would begin to realise that that the only safeguard for the Soviet government was open war with Germany’.¹⁷

Whatever the perceived direction of Bolshevik policy towards Germany was, Reilly himself seems to have already taken the view that the regime was vulnerable from within and no doubt saw opportunities for himself in such a situation. Without any official guidance or instructions on the matter, he promptly shed the identity of Lt Reilli of the RFC, and went underground, simultaneously adopting two new guises. In Moscow he became Mr Constantine, a Greek businessman, living at 3 Sheremet’evsky Lane, where he shared the apartment of actress Dagmara Karozus.¹⁸ Contrary to the views expressed by Robin Bruce Lockhart and Edward Van Der Rhoer (who refers to her as Dagmara Otten), it was not with her that Reilly formed a romantic attachment, but her flatmate Elizaveta Emilyevna Otten.

Elizaveta was a twenty-two-year-old blonde with a lifelong ambition to be an actress. However, her father, a manager at the tea company Gubin & Kuznetsov, had forbidden it and encouraged her to consider becoming a mathematician instead. He died just as she was about to leave school, and she therefore entered the First Arts Theatre Studio unhindered, making her acting debut in the play A Green Ring in December 1916. Apart from her obvious beauty, she could also speak English, German and French, making her ideal for the type of work Reilly had in mind.¹⁹ According to Elizaveta’s later testimony, he moved into the apartment in late June and left on 7 August.²⁰

In Petrograd he became Konstantin Markovich Massino, a Turkish merchant, sharing an apartment with Elena Mikhailovna Boyuzhovskaya, a pre-war acquaintance, at 10 Torgovaya Street. Reilly had also used another old contact, the former judge Vladimir Orlov,’²¹ to obtain identity papers in the name of Sigmund Rellinsky, which identified him as a member of the Cheka’s criminal investigation department. (The Cheka was the secret police organisation created, on the orders of Lenin, by Felix Dzerzhinsky in December 1917. ‘Cheka’ stood for the All Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter Revolution and Sabotage, and later became the KGB.) The stage was now set for a plot that Reilly may well have been planning for some time.

The so-called ‘Lockhart Plot’, or to be more accurate the Reilly Plot, has raised much controversy over the years. Did the Allied powers really hatch a plot to overthrow the Bolsheviks? If so, was it really the case that the Cheka discovered the conspiracy at the eleventh hour or had they penetrated it from the very outset? Some have even suggested a development of this theory, namely that the Cheka had stage managed the whole thing from beginning to end, and that Reilly was really a Bolshevik agent provocateur.²²

From mid-May Lockhart had convened several meetings with Boris Savinkov’s Union for the Defence of the Fatherland and Freedom (UDFF) organisation. Savinkov, a Social Revolutionary, had been War Minister in the Provisional Government, and was now one of the Bolsheviks’ most vociferous opponents. A former member of the Social Revolutionary Party, he had now formed his own underground movement, the UDFF, for which he claimed a fighting force of some 2,000 men. In July, Lockhart was reporting on contacts with an anti-Bolshevik group called ‘the Centre’, who had links with both Savinkov and the Volunteer Army of Gen. A.V Alekseev in the south of Russia. Lockhart followed up these contacts with large sums of money and became more deeply involved in fermenting and encouraging anti-Bolshevik groups. Contacts were also being developed with Fernand Grenard, the French Consul General, De Witt C. Poole, the US Consul General, and their respective intelligence functionaries, Col. Henri de Vertement and Xenophon Kalamatiano.

In June two Chekists by the names of Jan Buikis and Jan Sprogis, both ex-Latvian army officers, began the process of infiltrating themselves into opposition circles in Petrograd. Posing as disaffected Letts, it did not take long for them to come across Capt. Cromie, the British Naval Attaché and ‘Mr Constantine’. As a result of this positive development and the possibility that the Lett Regiments might be open to revolting against the Bolsheviks, Reilly arranged for Schmidkhen and Bredis to meet Lockhart at the British Mission in Moscow in August. The Letts were seen as the Bolsheviks’ praetorian guard and were entrusted with the security of the Kremlin and other centres of government. It could now be argued that Lockhart was thus entering realms for which he had little if any official clearance. If this were so, then Reilly, who had already gone well beyond his brief, was now, in effect, seeking to trump Lockhart by planning a coup d’état.

His longstanding idolisation of Napoleon and his borderline megalomania had convinced him that the time was now ripe for a strong man to emerge, just as it had been for Napoleon Bonaparte a little over a century before. It is doubtful whether C had ever intended Reilly to become directly involved in any covert actions against the Bolshevik regime, let alone in actually taking the initiative and attempting to install a new regime into power! Reilly had already begun the process of drawing up a list of ‘shadow ministers’ who would be ready at a moment’s notice to assume responsibility for their portfolios on the fall of the Bolshevik government. Among those on Reilly’s list was Gen. Nikolai Yudenich, who was to be Minister of War, and several old cronies such as: Alexander Grammatikov, Internal Affairs; Vladimir Orlov, Minister of Justice; and Vladimir Shubersky, Minister of Communications.

On 4 July Reilly attended the meeting of the 5th Congress of Soviets at the Bolshoi Theatre, along with Robert Bruce Lockhart and other Allied representatives. It was during a break from the proceedings that he first noticed Olga Dmitrievna Starzhevskaya in the theatre lobby. Olga was an attractive twenty-five-year- old typist who worked for the VTsIK (Vserossyiskiy Tsentralniy Ispolnitelniy Komitet – the All Russia Central Executive Committee). According to Edward Van Der Rhoer, Reilly introduced himself to her as Konstantin Georgievich Rellinsky of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and brought her a glass of Georgian champagne.²³ Her own recollections of the meeting are somewhat different in that she knew him as Konstantin Markovich Massino who worked for an unspecified Soviet organisation. An affair began shortly after their first meeting, and ‘Massino’ gave her 20,000 roubles to buy an apart-ment and furniture and they began living together there.²⁴ The third day of the Congress also marked the outbreak of a brief rebellion by the left wing of the Social-Revolutionary Party, who assassinated the German Ambassador, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, in the hope of sabotaging the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Letts were sent in to crush the revolt and cordoned off the Bolshoi Theatre, the Kremlin and other important locations. Fearing a search, Reilly apparently tore up several compromising documents he had in his possession and swallowed them. No search, however, took place and he was eventually able to leave the building unhindered.

While his plans for a coup were taking shape, an Allied force had landed at Archangel on 4 August. Its objectives were not to actually lock horns with the Bolsheviks, but to prevent the Germans from obtaining unused Allied military supplies that were stored in the area. Besides, this token force of 5,000 men was far too small to actually take offensive action. When the Bolsheviks learned the true size of the force they must have breathed a huge sigh of relief. This did not, however, stop them from raiding and closing the British and French diplomatic missions on 5 August as an act of retaliation.

This would mean that the meeting which Reilly arranged between the Letts and Lockhart at the British Mission must have taken place during the first four days of August, as the mission was closed after the Cheka raid on 5 August. Lockhart, although sceptical, was certainly intrigued by this development and asked to be introduced to a Latvian commander. The Cheka therefore arranged for Lt-Col. E.P. Berzin, the commander of the Special Light Artillery, who guarded the Kremlin, to make contact with Lockhart. Berzin was not a Chekist, but was known to be a loyal supporter of the Bolsheviks.

Buikis, Sprogis and Berzin therefore presented themselves at Lockhart’s apartment at the Hotel Elite on 14 August.²⁵ Lockhart, still somewhat unsure about becoming involved in a Lettish rebellion, discussed his meeting with the French and American Consuls later that day. The following day he met Berzin again, only this time ‘Mr Constantine’ and the French Consul, Grenard, were in attendance. It was at this meeting that the fateful decision was made to entrust all further liaison with Berzin to ‘Mr Constantine’. This effectively meant that Reilly was now in the driving seat of the plot. Berzin raised the matter of other Lettish regiments, who he believed could be recruited to assist the Allies in liberating Latvia. This, he estimated would cost something in the region of 4 million roubles. Lockhart and his colleagues promised to consider this.²⁶

On 17 August²⁷ the first of several meetings between Reilly and Col. Berzin took place. Reilly informed Berzin that the requested funding had been approved and would be paid to him in several instalments, the first being 700,000 roubles which Reilly handed over there and then. Reilly then proposed something that had never been raised before by Allied representatives. Why, he asked, could there not be a Lettish rebellion staged in Moscow to coincide with further Allied intervention? Achieving his own ends by exploiting his role as an intermediary was a tactic Reilly had used successfully time and again in business.²⁸

According to Lockhart, Reilly reported that his negotiations with the Letts were going smoothly, and suggested that he might be able, with the Letts, to stage a counter-revolution in Moscow. Lockhart, in his book, Memoirs of a British Agent, states that he consulted Gen. Lavergne and the French Consul Grenard, which resulted in Reilly being told in no uncertain terms to have nothing to do with ‘so dangerous and doubtful a move’.²⁹ A detailed memorandum written to Foreign Secretary Balfour on 5 November 1918,³⁰ seeking to set the record straight on the ‘alleged Allied conspiracy against the Soviet Government’, however, makes no reference to so instructing Reilly. In this version, Reilly is merely told that, ‘there was nothing to be gained by such action’, which could hardly be described in anyone’s language as a veto.

At this point Reilly promptly disappeared, not to be seen again by Lockhart until they met up again in England some months later. Liaising with Capt. George Hill, another British intelligence operative who was also working underground,³¹ a series of meetings was held between Reilly and Berzin, at which two further instalments of 200,000 and 300,000 roubles were handed over. It was also agreed that the coup itself would be staged on 6 September during a joint meeting of the Executive Council of the Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars) and the Moscow Soviet at the Bolshoi Theatre. Reilly’s plan was that Lenin and Trotsky would be humiliated rather than shot, by being led through the streets without their trousers. In a further example of Cheka provocation, Berzin now proposed that both Lenin and Trotsky should be shot. Although Reilly objected to this on the grounds that it would make martyrs of them, official Soviet accounts of the ‘Lockhart Plot’ have asserted that Reilly’s plan was indeed to have them shot immediately on arrest.³²

On 25 August, the French journalist René Marchand accompanied the French Consul Grenard to a meeting at the US Consulate. The meeting had been convened by Consuls Poole and Grenard to bring together their respective intelligence contacts – Reilly, Kalamatiano and de Vertement. Marchand, who was later exposed as a Bolshevik sympathiser, passed on an account of what he had heard to the Cheka. To preserve Marchand’s cover it was suggested to him by Dzerzhinsky that he write a letter to French President Raymond Poincare, describing the conspiratorial discussions he had witnessed. Before this could be posted, the Cheka would search his room and find the letter. This discovery would then act as the pretext for uncovering the plot.

Matters were pre-empted in a dramatic and totally unforeseen way, when, on 30 August, Leonid Kannegiser, a Workers’ Popular Socialist Party activist, shot dead Moisei Uritsky, head of the Petrograd Cheka. That same day, in a completely unconnected incident, Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Social Revolutionary Party, shot Lenin as he left a meeting at the Michelson factory in Moscow. Lenin survived, but only just. Of the two shots fired at point-blank range, one missed his heart by less than an inch and the other missed his jugular vein by a similar margin.

These unconnected events were now knitted together by the Cheka to implicate and link Bolshevism’s many opponents into one giant conspiracy that warranted the unleashing of a full retaliatory response. The ‘Red Terror’, as it came to be known, resulted in over a thousand political opponents being summarily rounded up and shot. The Cheka raid on the British Embassy in Petrograd resulted in the death of Cromie, who apparently put up resistance. Using a list supplied by Berzin, the Cheka also rounded up those who were involved in the ‘Lockhart Plot’ and more besides. Lockhart was arrested, although later released in an exchange for Litvinov, who had been arrested in London in reprisal. Elizaveta Otten, Reilly’s lover and chief courier, was also arrested, along with his other mistress Olga Starzheskaya. Maria Fride, one of Kalamatiano’s couriers, was also arrested at Otten’s flat with a set of papers she had brought for Reilly. Olga later related the story of her arrest in a petition to the Red Cross Committee for the Aid of Political Prisoners:

Elizaveta Otten also petitioned the committee:

Although both statements should be read with a pinch of salt in terms of their exaggerated naïvety concerning Reilly’s actions, they do reflect the genuine shock both women felt on learning of his nefarious and duplicitous exploitation of them on a personal level.

On 3 September, details of the ‘Lockhart Plot’ were sensationally published in the Russian press.³⁶ Reilly was named as one of the principal plotters and a dragnet was put out for him. The Cheka raided his flat, but once again Reilly had, in the nick of time, vanished into thin air.