Deception

⁸ The Cockpit of Europe

A Hollywood blockbuster would hardly do justice to the stories. A masterspy disguised as a ragged pianist plays in his foes’ canteen – and receives a knighthood for his efforts. A blundering colleague believes his enemies’ tale of a vast underground army just waiting for his visit, and pays for his credulity with his life. Bungling spymasters dismiss espionage scoops that could change history. Souped-up torpedo boats, once the pride of Hitler’s navy, rocket across the sea on moonless nights, their heavily armed passengers bearing ciphers, radios, treasure – and cyanide pills. Hidden in forest bunkers, desperate men risk death by torture in a forgotten and futile war. A star military commander in the Waffen-SS becomes a top man in British intelligence. Among his superiors is an undercover KGB colonel. Neglected and misunderstood, these events from past decades are the background to the spy wars of the present day.

Big countries’ interests collide in the Baltic, often secretly and mostly tragically. In the past hundred years the region has been the front line of two big wars and several small ones, with coups, uprisings, pogroms and guerrilla struggles as footnotes.¹ The tides of history have swept the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians along, just as they have drowned their now-forgotten ethnic cousins.[41] The region was one of the central killing grounds of the Holocaust: Germans and local collaborators murdered around 228,000 Jews, around 90 per cent of the pre-war population.² It is also a spies’ playground. Trade, tourism, culture and family ties make foreign visitors plentiful and inconspicuous, whether they have really come to admire the architecture, do a business deal, see relatives – or empty a dead-letter box. Targets are plentiful and loyalties fluid: locals know from bitter experience that fortunes shift and that many irons in the fire are better than one.

The stories include colourful characters such as Arthur Ransome, better known as a best-selling author of children’s stories in which the plentiful clues to his previous espionage career have long remained unnoticed.³ Among others are Sidney Reilly, Britain’s ‘ace of spies’; Paul Dukes, the only MI6 officer to be knighted for his work in the field, and traitors such as Kim Philby. Shadows still cloak the region’s intelligence history.⁴ Details in an official British account are skimpy and stop in 1947.⁵ American records are mostly still classified. Swedish records were allegedly destroyed, though they later turned up in the basement of a retired general.⁶ But the outlines are clear. The Baltic was the hub of Western spymasters’ botched efforts to topple the Bolshevik leadership in Russia in the five years following the revolution. After the Second World War they backed a bogus underground partisan movement there. In the 1990s they barged back into the region, believing it to be an ideal springboard for intelligence operations against Russia.

The story starts with the Bolshevik revolution. In Britain, France and America politicians wanted Russia’s secretive and fanatical new rulers explained. Could they be enticed back into the war with Germany, or at least prevent the Kaiser’s high command switching forces from the East to frustrate the allied advance in the West? Were the Bolsheviks really hell-bent on fomenting revolution elsewhere, or just prone to verbal flourishes about it? As spies sought answers, Mansfield Cumming, founder of MI6 (and in spy jargon the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service) proposed on 18 January 1918 the creation of a new ‘Baltic area’ division dealing with Russia.⁷ By 1923 the British espionage effort centred on the Estonian capital, Tallinn, with networks of agents run from substations in the Latvian capital Riga, and Kaunas (Lithuania’s ‘provisional capital’ since the loss of the historic capital, Vilnius, to Poland).⁸ The governments of the three newborn states, foreshadowing a similar reaction in 1991, were glad to see the British presence grow.[42] Too weak to manage their own security, they welcomed an outsider with similar geopolitical interests but no direct desire to meddle in their affairs. America, in those days, was an untried newcomer in European security. Sweden was too close and too self-interested, Germany too familiar and too weak. France, though a great power, had no historical ties to the region. The simultaneous weakness of both Russia and Germany gave a unique chance to start, or re-start, a history harshly interrupted by centuries of colonial rule.⁹ But for Russian leaders both then and now the loss of the Baltic provinces seemed an unfair, costly and temporary sacrifice.¹⁰

As initial British, French and American efforts to bribe or browbeat the Bolsheviks into rejoining the war against Germany faltered, attention turned to toppling the regime. Countries that cherished order were turning to subversion.¹¹ (Prevention would have been easier: a British military official posted to Russia in 1917 to monitor political radicals stopped Karl Radek and Fritz Platten, two well-known revolutionaries, from entering Russia; unfortunately he failed to notice that the third member of the party was Lenin.)¹² Officials took an apocalyptic tone. Admiral Sir William Hall, director of British Naval Intelligence, speaking on his retirement in November 1918 at the end of the First World War, said: ‘Hard and bitter as the battle has been, we have now to face a far, far more ruthless foe, a foe that is hydra-headed and whose evil power will spread over the whole world, and that foe is Russia.’¹³ Cumming took a similar view, telling his Stockholm station in late 1918: ‘The only enemy now to be considered are the Bolsheviks.’¹⁴

The communist grip on power in August 1918 was precarious. The Bolshevik-controlled territory – barely bigger than the old sixteenth-century Muscovy – was short of food and chaotically run. Rows blazed about politics, economics and strategy. Anti-Bolshevik forces still presented a lively if fragmented opposition: an uprising the previous month by the ultra-leftist Social Revolutionaries had narrowly failed. A big British expeditionary force under General Frederick Poole had landed at Archangel on Russia’s northern coast, aiming to provide muscle and leadership to the White Russian forces. The Red Army was in disarray. Allied leaders expected a swift victory.

This aspect of the struggle was purely military. Britain played a leading role in the Russian Civil War, intervening to help the White (monarchist) armies on four fronts.¹⁵ A British poster of the time gives a flavour. It shows a British soldier, laden with arms, hastening to help three soldiers in the uniform of the White Army, fighting a hideous gap-toothed Bolshevik monster. It reads:

But that British soldier was representing his bosses, not the masses. Strikes and mutinies showed that many in Britain’s big industrial towns, either war-weary or radicalised, regarded the Russian revolution of 1917 with sympathy and admiration, as did many idealistic intellectuals. Communism seemed merely an advanced and vigorous version of socialism. The murderous and dictatorial side of the Soviet regime, apparent to first-hand observers in the ‘Red Terror’ of August 1918, was yet to become fully visible. Outsiders’ desire to eradicate Bolshevism was both stoked and constrained by fear of its attractiveness. Western rulers worried that efforts to crush the communist experiment might backfire, leading to the radicalisation of their workers – and, worse, their soldiers and sailors. But letting the Bolsheviks stay in power was dangerous too: Lenin, Trotsky and the others had made it clear that world revolution was their goal. If they succeeded in Russia then other countries would soon be facing a communist threat too.

The other front, seemingly less risky, was domestic subversion, which was to fail just as badly as the military intervention. Amidst the pressure and panic of their early months in power, the Bolshevik leadership found the time to manage an elaborate deception operation that would leave British and French spy chiefs humiliated. According to Aleksandr Orlov, later a top Soviet defector, Lenin in the summer of 1918 decided that as the foreign powers were trying to overthrow him, it would be a good idea to catch the plotters red-handed and expose them.¹⁷ The Bolshevik leader gave the task to the fearsome head of the Cheka secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, who decided to centre the deception operation on the regime’s most effective fighting force, the Latvian Riflemen. Conscripted into the Tsarist army, the Latvians had become radicalised by their careless ill-treatment and high casualty rate, but were not fanatical Bolsheviks. Given the choice, many of them might have preferred a socialist Latvia to a communist Russia.

The first thread in Dzerzhinsky’s web involved a short sallow-faced former naval ensign with a complicated name who offered a neat way into the British spies’ plans and thinking.¹⁸ An informer for the Cheka, he had already been approached twice by Commander Leslie Cromie, the British naval attaché in Petrograd.[43] On 7 August he opened the trap by responding to Cromie’s overtures, with the claim that his friend, Colonel Eduard Bērziņš, a senior Latvian officer, wished to cooperate with the allies. This was exactly what British intelligence officers were hoping for, and they were all too willing to believe it. A week later the two men appeared at the Moscow apartment of the British envoy Robert Bruce Lockhart. An intriguing character in every sense, libidinous, extravagant, brainy and moody, Lockhart was a forerunner of Graham Greene’s ‘Quiet American’ – just the sort of person that secret service work most disastrously attracts. Bērziņš explained to Lockhart, who was accompanied by two French colleagues, that the Latvians did not intend to fight the Bolsheviks’ battles indefinitely and wished to go home. If they were sent north to fight General Poole’s forces, they would like to surrender: could Lockhart arrange it? He also requested four million roubles to get to work on his fellow-Latvians’ sympathies. Lockhart countered that it would be better if two Latvian regiments would switch sides at the provincial town of Vologda, opening a second front against the Bolshevik forces there, while those remaining in Moscow would assassinate Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership. But he wrote a laissez-passer to help the Latvians reach General Poole and provided 900,000 roubles as a down payment.

By this the naive and impulsive Lockhart incriminated himself, further endangered Cromie, and confirmed Bolshevik suspicions of British meddling. He added to the disaster by putting the two visitors in touch with Sidney Reilly, a spy based at the British consulate in Moscow. Born Sigmund Rosenblum near Odessa in Imperial Russia sometime in the 1870s, Reilly – later nicknamed the ‘Ace of Spies’ – was a ‘complex, unpredictable and undoubtedly self-serving individual mired in deception and conspiracy’.¹⁹ Like Lockhart he was wildly overconfident. He wrote in his notes:

Reilly was also a womaniser and remarkably careless. He arranged a meeting with Bērziņš at the apartment of one of his mistresses, but turned up late. While waiting, the Latvian noticed an envelope in Reilly’s writing that gave an address that turned out to be the home of an actress, Elizabeth Otten, who had allowed her apartment to be used as a meeting place for Reilly and his spies. The Cheka began arresting all those who visited it. One of them was Maria Friede, sister of a colonel in the Red Army General Staff who was carrying secret documents from him, destined for Reilly. Her brother, duly arrested, confessed his cooperation with an American intelligence officer who was later imprisoned.[44]

In another blunder, Lockhart’s French colleagues confided in René Marchand, the Moscow correspondent of Le Figaro, in the bizarre belief that he was a spy for their government – which like the British and American ones was deeply alarmed by, and hostile to, the revolutionaries. Marchand, being in fact rather sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, immediately informed Dzerzhinsky. This added more details to those provided by the bogus Latvian ‘mutineers’. Dzerzhinsky learned that the coup was planned for 28 August at a Party meeting in the Bolshoi Theatre. The Latvian soldiers were to seize the entrances and train their rifles on the audience. Reilly and a small group concealed behind the curtains would arrest the Bolshevik leadership. One plan was to humiliate them by marching them half-naked through the streets of Moscow. But the plotters thought it safer to shoot them on the spot. Reilly, Marchand revealed, had promised the conspirators senior positions in the government of a future independent Latvia, to be set up under Allied protection.²¹

Armed with the details of the plot, Dzerzhinsky went straight to Lenin. The problem was how to use Marchand’s material. Lenin came up with an ingenious suggestion to protect his source’s journalistic integrity. The French journalist was to write a confidential letter to the French president, Raymond Poincaré: nobody could blame a journalist for warning his head of state that his country’s spies were planning a ludicrously risky stunt. The letter would then be ‘found’ by the Cheka during a search of Marchand’s flat. Helpfully, Dzerzhinsky drafted the letter. For a few days, the Bolsheviks were content to watch the plot developing. But the assassination on 30 August of the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Moisei Uritsky (followed in the evening by a shooting that came within a whisker of killing Lenin himself) prompted the communist leaders to spring the trap. On 31 August eight Chekists raided the British embassy in Petrograd, shooting Commander Cromie, who bravely tried to delay the intruders to allow two of his agents to escape from the building.[45] Lockhart and his assistant as well as the French consul-general were jailed and eventually deported, and 521 hapless Russians were arrested as ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Colonel Friede was shot. Reilly was sentenced to death in absentia, but had already escaped.

The fiasco highlighted a central, persistent, and unrecognised dilemma for Western intelligence services in their dealings with the Soviet enemy. Their mission was well described as ‘a mixture of intelligence-gathering, disruption, sabotage and assistance to British military forces’.²² But those elements are inherently incompatible. Watching in the shadows is one thing; twisting arms is another. It is hard for the same spy to do both. The tension between covert action and intelligence nearly cost the life of probably the most able British spy ever deployed against the Soviet regime.

Paul Dukes, a concert pianist from Bridgwater in Somerset, had honed his skills in evasion, deception and persuasion as a schoolboy, faced with the unpleasant necessity of dodging a predatory paedophile who was both a teacher at his boarding school and a friend of his father. A natural linguist, he had arrived in Russia in 1910 as a music student. Rejected for military service because of a heart condition, he spent much of the war years working for a government-financed information service called the Anglo-Russian Bureau. In 1917, he was summoned to London for a meeting with SIS, in those days an outfit run by eccentric upper-class men with a dilettantish approach to espionage (cynics might say nothing much changed in subsequent decades). Dukes was told:

After brief training in invisible ink and cipher, Dukes was dispatched back to the most dangerous place in the world for a foreign spy, to live and work undercover as an illegal – rather as Donald Heathfield and the others were to do in America seventy years later. But whereas they exploited the vulnerabilities of an open society, he had to work in a police state, under the noses of the fearsome Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka. He was an astonishing success: in 1919 he was the most effective, and quite possibly the only, SIS officer inside Bolshevik-controlled Russia. He was running a network of agents in Petrograd,²⁴ collected in part via a military canteen in which he had installed himself as a part-time pianist (disguised as a tattily dressed and limping tramp). At other times he managed to pass as an official of the Cheka itself, as a member of the Communist Party, and as a Red Army soldier. The result was intelligence of a stellar quality and quantity.²⁵ Dukes had not only established a network of informers, civilian and military, throughout the city and its great port. He had penetrated the top Bolshevik leadership of Petrograd to such an extent that he was able to transmit to London translations of the highly secret minutes of their meetings in full. But the star spy was in increasingly desperate straits. The tightening Bolshevik bureaucratic controls on movements, food supplies and residency made maintaining his aliases and safe houses increasingly difficult: getting the right papers was tricky and having the wrong ones fatal. The Cheka knew the British spy was at large in the city and had on several occasions nearly caught him. Money could help – but SIS had sent him ineptly forged cash: when the fake banknotes got wet, the ink ran. His priceless intelligence was useless unless it could reach the increasingly frantic politicians in London but getting across the border was difficult: in one two-week period in the summer of 1919 no fewer than six couriers had been captured.²⁶

Cumming tasked a young naval lieutenant, Augustus ‘Gus’ Agar, with rescuing Dukes using lightweight torpedo boats. These contraptions, plywood shells powered by aircraft engines, were the forerunners of the vessels that would be used to send SIS agents to the Baltic states twenty-five years later. The ‘eggshells’ (when their delicate engines worked, which was not always) could travel at the then astonishing speed of over 40 knots. The mission was dogged by bad luck, communications breakdowns, security breaches, meddling from other officials, and suspicion from Agar’s Finnish hosts (who had no desire to provoke the Bolsheviks by supporting madcap British raids and spookery). Agar’s main ally against these odds was Admiral Sir Walter ‘Titch’ Cowan, the commander of a British naval squadron that was helping the Estonians beat off their various foes, though its two light cruisers and ten destroyers were outgunned by Russia’s much heavier warships: the Oleg, a heavy cruiser, and two battleships, the Petropavlovsk and Andrei Pervozvanni.[46] In theory, Agar’s mission was solely the clandestine exfiltration of Dukes from Petrograd. He and his crew wore civilian clothes, and turned up in Helsinki pretending to be speedboat salesmen. But they had also taken a couple of torpedoes (launched in a hair-raising manoeuvre over the back of the craft, travelling in the same direction: the helmsman had a few seconds to turn away from their path). And they had naval uniforms on board, to be donned in the event of real warfare.

Dukes reported that the Russian fleet was riven by disputes between the officers and men loyal to the Bolsheviks, those sympathetic to the Whites, and those with loyalties to other factions. One report, citing a senior Bolshevik, said that the men regarded their officers as ‘class enemies’ while the officers were a ‘mass of spies’.²⁷ Dukes also obtained a secret transcript from a commission of enquiry following a failed attack on the British squadron. A sailor from the submarine Pantera answered with remarkable frankness as follows:

Following this debacle, Lenin put Trotsky in charge of reforming the navy. He immediately began replacing ideologically sound but useless officers with experienced Tsarist-era ones. He also banned the practice under which committees of ‘revolutionary sailors’ forced their officers to clean toilets and sweep floors. That restored the fleet’s offensive capability. He also ordered the laying of many thousands of mines, making it far harder for the British to attack. Dukes dutifully reported all this, plus a crucial piece of intelligence for Agar: the one-metre depth at which the mines defending the Kronstadt naval base were to be laid. The ‘eggshell’ boats drew only 2’9” (84cm). With a few inches to spare, they could therefore cross the minefield and use their torpedoes to attack the Bolshevik fleet at anchor.

As Agar waited to rescue Dukes, he watched with despair the Bolshevik fleet pounding the nearby fortress of Krasnaya Gorka (Red Hill) where the garrison had rebelled: this was a tragic miscalculation by its leaders, Ingrian nationalists – ethnic cousins of the Finns and Estonians – who were hoping to make their own bid for freedom. In a daring raid into the heart of Kronstadt harbour, and in defiance of his instruction to concentrate on intelligence work, Agar succeeded in torpedoing and sinking the Oleg. It was too late to save the Ingrians, but a second raid with seven more torpedo boats sank both the Bolshevik battleships, ending the struggle for naval superiority in the Baltic and ensuring Estonia’s and Latvia’s independence – and their lasting, if ultimately misplaced, faith in British integrity and capability. This was to feature in the disasters of the 1940s and 1950s, and in the renewed intelligence ties of the 1990s.

Agar received the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest military honour. But his exploits doomed his mission. Dukes was still stuck in Russia, where Soviet authorities now understood the vulnerability of their defences to the fast British vessels. A later attempt to rescue the master-spy was abandoned under heavy fire. Dukes finally escaped via Latvia, frostbitten, filthy, half-starved and exhausted. SIS showered him with praise – but in a signal piece of mean-mindedness refused to pay his operation’s debts. George Gibson, a leading figure in the dwindling British community in Petrograd, had at great personal risk lent Dukes 375,000 roubles[47] to make up for the poor forgeries supplied by SIS. But when Gibson returned to London, SIS said his paperwork was inadequate and refused to pay. Only when an infuriated Dukes threatened publicly to renounce his knighthood did SIS back down.

A more famous if less impressive British agent in this era was Dukes’s friend Arthur Ransome. To many readers, his name will be inextricably linked with a quite different genre: the ‘Swallows and Amazons’ children’s books. But he was also an expert on Russia, and on the books of SIS as agent ‘S-76’. Ransome moved to the Estonian capital in 1918, tasked with gaining information about Soviet Russia. He was also asked by the Estonian authorities to carry a secret message to the Bolshevik leadership expressing their willingness to strike a peace deal. Ransome saw at once that peace with Estonia would be followed by a similar agreement with Latvia. This would help secure the Bolshevik regime in Russia, which, as a left-winger, Ransome broadly supported. It would also end the fighting that was devastating the region. Not for the first time, a British intelligence agent was finding that local allies’ wishes clashed with the geopolitical interests of his bosses. For London, the aim of the war was to topple the reds, not to promote democracy or freedom (still largely seen as an eccentric American preoccupation).

The Bolsheviks responded coolly. Undeterred, Ransome crossed the Russian–Estonian front line in a journey that he portrayed as hair-raising (other writers and his biographer reckon it was trouble-free).²⁸ His aim was not spying but to rescue Evgenia Shelepina, who was his mistress and Trotsky’s secretary. It is unclear whether she was using Ransome to snoop on the British, providing him with real intelligence, in love with a glamorous Englishman, or some permutation of these three. During stints in Tallinn and then in the Latvian capital Riga, Ransome spent the next few years in a half-world between journalism and intelligence work. Unable to divorce his English wife Ivy, he could not return to England – his private life was as tangled as his political views. He publicly defended the Bolshevik suppression of the Kronstadt uprising in 1921: perhaps sincerely, perhaps to preserve his personal or professional contacts in Russia.

But Ransome was in tune with the spirit of the times. The anti-Soviet cause was in trouble, doomed from the outset by the Whites’ disorganisation and brutality, which alienated even those Russians who disliked the Bolsheviks. By 1919 the British government under David Lloyd George was rapidly losing interest (not least because of a series of naval and military mutinies among war-weary British sailors and soldiers). ‘I would rather leave Russia Bolshevik until she sees her way out of it than see Britain bankrupt,’ he told the House of Commons in April.²⁹ The allied intervention wound up in 1920. But as in future years, the instincts of Western spies dealing with Russia were at odds with their political masters’ instructions. In the summer of 1920³⁰ Cumming sent Reilly, Dukes and a former Tsarist secret policeman Vladimir Orlov (known as Orbanski) to establish an ‘international anti-Bolshevik intelligence service’ in Eastern Europe.³¹ They recruited five agents in Warsaw, eleven in Riga, four in Tallinn, two in Kaunas, as well as fourteen in Berlin. The initiative was stillborn. The British government was negotiating the normalisation of relations with the Bolshevik regime, starting with a trade agreement in March 1921. In July, the Warsaw station chief Malcolm Maclaren, a piratical figure who wore gold ear-rings, was instructed to close down the expensively created network; all that remained was a few contacts in the Baltic. Reilly’s swashbuckling bunch continued their work, without him or official backing from SIS. But that was enough for the Soviet spymasters to bait their next hook.

In November 1921 an official of the Russian waterways authority, A. A. Yakushev, made contact with an old friend in Tallinn, a former officer in the White forces. Both men were sincere anti-Bolsheviks. The visitor was a member of a genuine if flimsy monarchist organisation in Moscow. His host circulated émigré outposts with an enthusiastic account of what he had heard. Having intercepted one of these letters, the Cheka arrested Yakushev on his return to Moscow. After some persuasion in the Lubyanka he agreed in early 1922 to cooperate with the Soviet authorities. With Yakushev’s help, the Cheka steadily began persuading the émigré leadership in the West that a powerful and promising underground movement was developing inside the Soviet Union. The SIS station chief in Helsinki, Harry Carr, a fluent Russian-speaker and fervent anti-communist who was to feature in the even greater debacles of later years, was only too eager to hear this, particularly as the new organisation seemed to have support from the Finnish, Estonian and Polish spy services.³² He was troubled by its failure to produce any usable intelligence, but accepted that its main purpose was insurrectionary and that espionage activity at this stage would be too risky. That mistake was also to be repeated almost exactly in years to come.

A parallel part of the operation was the infiltration of a band of real anti-communist partisans[48] in Belarus by a talented Cheka officer called George ‘Grisha’ Syroyezhkin. Helped by two genuine gunshot wounds from Russian border guards, he succeeded in convincing the guerrillas and their foreign backers of his bona fides. He became firm friends with the émigré leader Boris Savinkov (one of Reilly’s co-conspirators) in the movement’s increasingly miserable Warsaw headquarters. (Poland had signed a peace treaty with Soviet Russia in March 1921, ending Polish support for a planned anti-Soviet uprising in the autumn). In July 1921 the Soviet secret police had rounded up much of Savinkov’s network inside Russia, using details provided by ‘Grisha’.

Dzerzhinsky was careful not to overplay his hand. He left enough embers of the anti-Bolshevik cause smouldering to allow him to play the next round in the game. Savinkov’s cause was doomed; it was now time to destroy him personally. Again a purported anti-communist organisation made contact, this time called the Trust. It purported to be democratic, not monarchist, in outlook: this was far more appealing to Savinkov, a radical liberal who detested Tsarist autocracy and communist totalitarianism in equal measure. After some elaborate bits of play-acting involving his emissaries, and the use of a femme fatale with whom Savinkov had begun an affair, the inspirational anti-communist leader was tempted across the Soviet border, arrested, and brought to Moscow. Skilful interrogation by Dzerzhinsky (who regarded physical torture as a crude and unworthy short-cut), eventually brought Savinkov’s cooperation in a show trial, after which he was given a light sentence and died in a mysterious fall from a window, possibly in suicidal despair, possibly murdered on Stalin’s orders.

The next victim was Reilly. He was no longer formally on the books of British intelligence: SIS records show a series of exasperated telegrams between London and its stations complaining of the masterspy’s adventurism. But Reilly retained friends in the service, including Ernest Boyce, his former boss from Moscow days and now the Tallinn station chief. In 1925, Boyce wrote to Reilly asking for his help in investigating what appeared to be a serious underground operation inside Russia. Again a Russian female agent played a central role: this time an attractive woman called Maria Zakharchenko-Shults, who was both sexually voracious and embittered by ill-treatment from her previous lovers. It is not clear whether Reilly became intimate with her, but she certainly exerted a strong influence on him after he arrived in Helsinki to make contact with the Trust’s leaders. The deception soon deepened, with plenty of supporting evidence of the underground movement’s capabilities. The brother of a local SIS agent, trapped in Russia, was smuggled out. He was a violinist, and needed his precious instrument to earn a livelihood. Obligingly, the Trust arranged that too. Carr was a little dubious: it all seemed too slick for a real bunch of plotters to manage under the noses of the increasingly all-powerful Russian secret police. Unfortunately, he stifled his doubts.³³

The plan was for Reilly to meet Trust leaders in Finland in September 1925. But at the last minute he was persuaded to come to Moscow for a meeting of the anti-communist ‘government-in-waiting’. As bait Maria also presented a newspaper cutting with a photo purportedly showing an emissary of the Trust, Terenty Deribas, whom Reilly had already met in Helsinki, standing next to Lenin.³⁴ What better proof could there be of the organisation’s clout, if it had on board a former lieutenant of the Bolshevik leader? Unfortunately, the photo was a forgery. As a final incentive, Deribas mentioned the lucrative business deals Reilly would be able to do in Russia once the communists were out of the way. The mixture of sex, greed, ambition and adrenalin was irresistible. Reilly swallowed the bait, penned a hasty letter to one of his wives, and crossed the border.

His hosts did not arrest their quarry immediately. Instead, they pumped him for information in the guise of allies. Reilly duly revealed his cupidity, suggesting that the new government could be financed by selling treasures from Russia’s museums and art galleries: he even offered his own services as a broker in this sordid deal. At this point the deception ran into political trouble. Those running the operation thought it would be better to let Reilly return to the West. This was standard practice with other unsuspecting émigré supporters. Reilly’s account of a successful mission would boost the Trust’s credibility, allowing its puppet-masters to play still more games with the Western spy chiefs. But Stalin, by now the Soviet leader, wanted none of it. Even a phoney underground organisation was one too many. The British spy was arrested but gave little away. He probably did not have much to give: he was not on official SIS business, had never worked at its headquarters and his memories of service were several years out of date. He was shot on 5 November.

The ill-fated expedition was just a blip in the British intelligence build-up in the Baltic. As Russia became more isolated, the hunger for information about it grew. Money and men came piling in, with a resulting blizzard of unsatisfactory, confusing and ill-sourced information.³⁵ Specialisations developed: military intelligence in Tallinn, naval in Helsinki, and political and economic in Riga. Kaunas was said to be rather dull in comparison. Yet enthusiasm was not matched by judgement. The British intelligence officers tended to be Anglo-Russians whose lives had been blighted by the revolution. They found Russian émigrés congenial company and recruited them as sources. This mirrors the same mistakes made by SIS in the years immediately after the war, when again under great pressure to produce results, and facing an all but impenetrable target, it relied on anti-communist refugees and insurgents. They too were ardent allies and willing risk-takers; but die-hard opponents of a regime are unlikely to know its secrets. Hatred uninformed by knowledge and fuelled by wishful thinking is about the worst possible basis for successful espionage. It was not until the late 1950s that SIS was to realise this and concentrate on meticulous recruitment and agent running inside the communist establishment.

Émigré and dissident groups always find it hard to vet new recruits effectively. Any publicly identifiable member becomes an easy target for bullying, blackmail or bribery. Once penetrated, such groups become an asset to their foes, not a threat. Only outfits with small memberships based on close personal friendships have a chance of escaping this fate. That was not the hallmark of the amateurish and feuding Russian diaspora in the 1920s and 1930s, or of the Baltic émigrés in the 1940s and 1950s. Add the extra unreliability caused by affiliation, real or imagined, with the secret world, and it is easy to see how Western intelligence services were ensnared in Bolshevik plots. As the official historian of SIS writes, ‘1920s Europe was full of dubious White Russian characters representing themselves as secret agents.’³⁶ They produced little intelligence of any significance³⁷ but sometimes did real damage: asserting, for example, that the Soviet Union was fomenting insurrection in Ireland and India. Britain issued a thunderous protest, only to be embarrassed when a Soviet response proved that the intelligence, far from being drawn straight from the Politburo (as claimed) was entirely fabricated. SIS bosses complained, and vainly introduced new rules designed to prevent the service paying good money for forged documents. As the British purse strings tightened in the 1930s, many agents began diversifying their sources of income, particularly by offering their services to the Abwehr (German military intelligence).

Phoney intelligence particularly affected Riga, the most productive of SIS’s stations in the region. Its best agent was a local Russian journalist who supposedly ran a network of eleven sub-sources. An investigation in 1928 concluded that many if not most were bogus: producing entirely imaginary information, for example, about a Russian ‘death ray’.[49] Reporting from Riga also led to one of the greatest howlers in the history of SIS. Published in the Daily Mail on 24 October 1924, it purported to be a letter from Grigori Zinoviev, president of the Comintern – the organisation through which the Bolshevik leadership coordinated its activities with foreign communist parties – urging the British Communist Party to lead an insurrection. The story came in the run-up to a general election in which Britain’s Labour Party, in office for the first time, in a minority government, was hoping to hold on to power. The letter was not decisive: though the Conservative party won the election, Labour’s vote went up. But many suspect that right-wing elements in SIS cooked up the ‘leaked’ letter, supposedly provided by a sub-agent called FR/3/Moscow, employed in the secretariat of the Comintern (the office which linked the Soviet leadership with foreign communist parties). Riga had filed it to London with a covering note³⁸ flagging the ‘strong incitement to armed revolution’ and a ‘flagrant violation’ of the newly signed Anglo-Russian agreement. SIS also asserted that ‘the authenticity of the document is undoubted’. Worse, when the Foreign Office tried to verify the letter SIS claimed (probably falsely) that another agent had corroborated the content. The most elementary checks were missing. Had SIS obtained the letter in English or in Russian? Who exactly was the sub-agent? SIS was unable or unwilling to give firm clear answers and came close to outright lies.³⁹

The exceptions to this rather unimpressive performance came from British intelligence links with their local counterparts, especially in Estonia (history may not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes). An agent called ‘Baron’, run by Carr, reported the start of secret Nazi–Soviet negotiations in the spring of 1939, and confirmed in June that they were making good progress. But the desk officer at SIS headquarters in London refused to circulate this intelligence further, believing that the agent could not possibly have had the access necessary.⁴⁰ It contradicted the Foreign Office line, that its envoy to Moscow Sir William Strang was making progress on an Anglo-Soviet agreement. The same fate befell another scoop a year later. Although SIS closed its Baltic stations in September 1940 following the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, many of the agent networks remained, mostly run from Helsinki. A British agent codenamed ‘Outcast’, formerly run from Tallinn, presented himself to the Helsinki station in September 1940.⁴¹ A Russian émigré living in Berlin (but with no love for the Nazis), he had escaped from Tallinn with German help, in return for agreeing to work for the Abwehr against Russia. Now he wanted to spy against them, for the British. In November 1940 he reported to his British case officer: ‘German command preparing (June) campaign against USSR.’ Sadly, Carr dismissed this as ‘incredible’ and probably mere propaganda.

Had politicians in London heeded the SIS sources and gained advance warning of the Hitler–Stalin pact, what could they have done? The deal was the culmination of a long period of diplomatic and political failure, in which Britain and France had been outmanoeuvred and Hitler had seen obstacles to his expansion plans melt one by one. It is hard to imagine even the most piercing intelligence insight reversing that. Nor is it easy to see what Britain would have done with the warning of Hitler’s assault on the Soviet Union. Stalin had plenty of warnings from other sources: he usually responded by punishing the messenger. Exercises in speculative history are as unrewarding as they are tempting. Yet it is hard not to feel frustration that such accurate intelligence went unnoticed. The wider lesson, if any, is that espionage is valuable only when decision-makers let the results change their thinking. Spies may provide confirmation only that the currents in the depths and shallows are similar. If they offer a different version of events, or prediction of them, officials and politicians must be willing to act on what they are told.

That is one weakness of Western intelligence even in the present day. Readers trying to understand why Russian spymasters so frequently run rings round their Western counterparts will also find it striking that so many other mistakes of the past are replicated so frequently. The tendency to pay good money for bad intelligence is deeply ingrained. Even after the fiascos of the early years, most intelligence from the interwar Baltic was barrel-scrapings, as this downbeat vignette illustrates.

If the later history of Western intelligence battles with Russia in the Baltic was ill-starred, one can at least say that it was part of a consistent pattern.