Spies and Commissars

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.¹⁷ But 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.¹⁸ Nonetheless 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.¹⁹ This 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.²⁰ The 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.²² One 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 1915.²³ After 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.²⁴ By 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.²⁵ A Thames Television series glamorized him as ‘the Ace of Spies’.²⁶ Although 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’.²⁷ In the 1920s he had worked at the Prague embassy where he became close to President Tomas 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,²⁸ though 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’.²⁹ In 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 1943.³⁰ From 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.³¹ When 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 1926.³² As Moura Budberg she lived for a while again with Gorki and then with H. G. Wells in London.³³ But 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.³⁴ But 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

The aviator Merian Cooper — ‘Coop’ — had an even more extraordinary career in cinema than Moura. After Poland he went into the American movie business and in 1933 co-wrote and co-directed one of the most famous films of all time, King Kong. Cooper gave himself a role in the last scene as he piloted the plane that finished off the monster Kong at the end of the story. In the Second World War, despite being too old for conscription, he volunteered for the US air force; he rose to Chief of Staff in the China Air Task Force and witnessed the final surrender of the Japanese on USS Missouri.³⁶ In 1951 he received an Academy Award nomination as the producer of John Ford’s The Quiet Man. He died in 1973.

Others had a less fortunate experience after their time in Russia. Xenophon Kalamatiano languished in Soviet confinement until 1921 when Herbert Hoover obtained the release of all American detainees as a condition of the dispatch of food aid. Until then the US authorities had done little on their leading intelligence officer’s behalf. Some said that the Cheka released him from prison long before he was repatriated because he had agreed to become a double agent. The Department of State itself seems to have wondered about his allegiance. It gave him a less than warm welcome in Washington, refusing to give him a job commensurate with his experience. A mysterious ailment killed Kalamatiano in 1923.³⁷ Boris Savinkov, who perished two years later, had an even grislier end. His volatile temperament had often led him into errors of judgement and none of these was greater than when, in 1925, he felt so demoralized about his ruined political career that he went back to Moscow and gave himself up to the Soviet authorities. He told nobody but Dukes about his decision — and Dukes never explained why he did not try to stop him.³⁸ The Cheka immediately took him into custody. It exploited him for its own propaganda purposes, getting him to write to Reilly about the stability of the Soviet regime.³⁹ As soon as Savinkov had exhausted his usefulness, he was given a show-trial and executed.⁴⁰

All the people mentioned in this book are now dead and few of them are remembered outside the pages of monographs. Among the obvious exceptions are Lenin, Trotsky, Churchill and Wilson. Lenin and Trotsky remain a benchmark for communist doctrines and practices around the world. Churchill is remembered for his leadership in the war against Nazi Germany. Wilson’s creation of the League of Nations is seen as the forerunner of today’s institutions of global governance. Yet the other men and women who analysed and reported and fought over the October Revolution also made their contribution to the history of their times. Each could see that something big and unprecedented had happened in Russia in 1917. As through a glass darkly, they glimpsed the October Revolution’s potential for good or evil in their world. They were excited, appalled or enraptured. Regardless of their attitude to communism, they appreciated that huge, important questions had arisen from the Soviet revolutionary experiment, questions that have not lost their importance today. Although the USSR has been consigned to the waste-paper basket of history, many of the disputes about the year 1917 are still with us.

The disputes range from the peaks of politics and philosophy to the lowly fates of individuals. An unexpected