A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (16 page)

One person who had known in advance was Moura. She had talked about it with Lockhart during her stay in Moscow, and referred to it in that halting letter to him after returning home – ‘One expects all kinds of things on the 1st,’ she wrote anxiously, apparently fearing that a German invasion might result from an anti-Bolshevik uprising.
⁴⁴
At about this time, one or two members of the British mission in Petrograd – none from among her circle of friends, of course – began to wonder again about the trustworthiness of Madame Benckendorff. Nothing was done, and she continued in her job. Almost all British officials trusted her, and she was regarded by the Foreign Office as reliable. Although the head of Britain’s naval intelligence was appalled by the use of Russian women as clerks (having learned of it from Cromie) and advised that the practice be halted immediately, the Foreign Office suggested that the ban should only apply to ‘other ladies besides Mme Benckendorff’.
⁴⁵

Whoever the informant had been, with his coup stillborn, Boris Savinkov evaded capture, and went on to conspire again. Another man who fled Petrograd at this time was Hugh Leech, financier, SIS agent and Moura’s main employer. Not only had he been helping to channel money to the anti-Bolshevik conspirators, he had been losing their trust through some shady financial dealings. Also, the Cheka were on his tail. How his name came to their attention was another obscure matter. Perhaps through disenchanted White rebels, perhaps through somebody inside the British mission . . . Leech grew a beard, hid out for a while at Tsarskoye Selo, and then escaped to Murmansk, where he took refuge with the British military mission.
⁴⁶

While British operations in Russia appeared to be unravelling, the Germans, with Count Mirbach to the fore, made the most of Savinkov’s failed coup, seeing the possibilities of levering apart the British and the Bolsheviks and securing for themselves a controlling interest in Russia. The war being fought in Europe had acquired a new front – its trenches were in Moscow, and Mirbach and Lockhart were the combatants. And in keeping with the spirit of the war, it was a contest in which one of them would end up dead.

Notes

*
Now Leningradsky station.

^†
Lit. ‘underground’.

7

Old Enemies, Strange Alliances

May–June 1918

Their lives were defined by impatience and anxiety. Moura in Petrograd, Lockhart in Moscow, lived for their next meeting. Letters and telegrams flew back and forth between them, hasty notes scribbled in the moments between meetings and reports, letters brooded over in the long hours of the night. Their bond was still uncertain – far beyond ordinary intimacy, into the realm of obsession, but still not something that Moura knew how to put a name to. He had become ‘Locky’ and she sent him kisses rather than the ‘best love’ that her friends received, but she was still struggling to untangle her feelings. She cared for him deeply and spoke of a special friendship, but the word ‘love’, having disappeared from her greetings, had yet to reappear in a more meaningful form.

She simply didn’t know quite how she felt about her British lover, other than that she wanted to be with him.

In May they had a chance to meet again, and seized it gladly. Commander Ernest Boyce, head of the SIS section in Petrograd, was travelling down to Moscow for a meeting with Lockhart. Moura took the opportunity to travel with him,
¹
and on Thursday 9 May, two anxious weeks after their last meeting, she boarded the train. Her old friend Miriam went with her.

Perhaps Moura had a shrewd idea of what she was involving herself in by taking Lockhart as her lover, and perhaps it affected her feelings – heightened her trepidation, enhanced the exhilaration and her feeling of self-worth. Whether she suspected it or not, the train speeding towards Moscow was carrying her to the greatest peak in her life. Intense emotion and intense danger would be her constant companions from now on.

When she and Lockhart were reunited in Moscow, the passion that reignited marked the beginning of a new phase in their affair, and in her life. She began learning how to love.

Lockhart had awaited the arrival of the Petrograd train with acute anxiety. His eagerness to see Moura – the emotional flutter and the physical yearning – was only a part of it. Matters were approaching a crisis in Moscow, with almost every day bringing a new and unsettling surprise. He was impatient to see Boyce, whom he had magisterially summoned two days ago to explain the sudden arrival of a new British secret agent in Russia.
²

Earlier that week, Lockhart had been disconcerted to learn from a member of the Bolshevik foreign ministry that an Englishman apparently calling himself ‘Reilli’ had turned up at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be an envoy of Lloyd George and demanding to see Lenin.
³
‘Reilli’ had been interviewed, and the Bolsheviks wanted to know whether Lockhart could vouch for him. Presuming that ‘Reilli’ must be some itinerant madman – but also aware that there was no nonsense that could be put beyond the British secret services – Lockhart summoned Boyce, who came on the next train.

To Lockhart’s astonishment, Boyce confirmed that the man, codenamed ST1, was an SIS agent. In fact, as of his arrival, he was
the
principal field agent in Russia, alongside Captain George Hill. He had arrived in the country a few weeks ago, settling initially at Petrograd before heading for Moscow. His name, misspelt as ‘Reilli’ on the pass he’d been given by Litvinov (the very same diplomat with whom Lockhart had lunched at Lyons), was Sidney Reilly. His mission, ostensibly, was to be an unofficial envoy in the same vein as Lockhart. In reality he had been sent to take charge of Britain’s covert efforts against the Germans. At least, that seemed initially to be his mission. As time went by, it became increasingly unclear just what Sidney Reilly was doing in Russia, and whether it matched up with what he had been officially briefed to do (which in itself was equally unclear). He was, apparently, yet another of the miscellaneous roulette chips that the British government was scattering on the Red baize.

When Lockhart met him, he hardly knew what to think. Reilly was middle-aged and dark-eyed, with a slight build and thin face; some thought him Greek, others Jewish. His fellow secret agent George Hill found him ‘well-groomed, very foreign-looking’ and noted his foreign-sounding accent.
⁴
Wherever he came from, Sidney Reilly was clearly not Irish.
⁵
Lockhart, furious with him for the trouble he’d caused at the Kremlin, ‘dressed him down like a schoolmaster and threatened to have him sent home’.
⁶
Reilly took it well, fending off the hostility with a barricade of preposterous excuses. Lockhart couldn’t help liking Sidney Reilly, although if he’d had an inkling of the deadly trouble he would get him into before the year was out, he might have tolerated him less. But he’d still have admired the man’s sheer brass-necked audacity.

Having failed in his attempt to penetrate the Kremlin via the front door, Reilly assumed his regular disguise – a Levantine Greek called ‘Mr Constantine’ – and went back to Petrograd. There, through an old Russian acquaintance, he managed to get himself a post as an agent in the criminal investigation branch of the Cheka. Thus equipped, he had total freedom to move around Russia and engage in whatever covert activity took his fancy.
⁷

Meanwhile, Lockhart turned his attention to his proper business, and to Moura. The two strands of his life – love and intrigue – were slowly, insensibly becoming entangled, and Moura was willingly binding herself up in the cords.

20 May 1918

Just outside the city, the Moskva river took a great bend to the southwest. Lining the river’s edge was a band of low, wooded hills, known as the Vorobyovy Gory – the Sparrow Hills. In the dark before sunrise, the first twitters of the dawn chorus were interrupted by the whine of an engine. The lights of a motor car glanced among the trees as it climbed the gentle, winding slope.

At the summit it parked and two figures got out. Arm in arm, they walked into the woods. On the far side, under the trees, they stood in the chilly air, drowsy with love and lost sleep, and waited for the sun to come up.

Lockhart and Moura were both tired and more than a little drunk. They had been up all night celebrating with their friends – the little circle of Britons who clustered around Lockhart in the increasingly unsettled environment of Moscow. Lockhart had a young fellow he’d taken on to his staff, an artillery lieutenant called Guy Tamplin, who’d been born in Russia and spoke the language perfectly.
⁸
The previous day had been Tamplin’s twenty-first birthday, and Lockhart had decided to throw a party. The venue was the Strelna night-restaurant in Petrovsky Park, outside the city. The Strelna, one of several such establishments in the park, was an incredible place – a great glass conservatory in which tropical plants grew, even in the depths of a Moscow winter, where customers dined in grottoes and cabins built within the glazed enclosure. It had been a favourite haunt of Lockhart’s in his days at the Moscow Consulate. It was presided over by Madame Maria Nikolaievna,
⁹
a beautiful middle-aged lady who was a captivating singer of gypsy songs – the very music most inclined to stir Lockhart’s blood. Somehow her cabaret-restaurant had escaped closure by the Cheka.

Her days were numbered, though, and everyone knew it. So too were the days of the British in Moscow, it seemed. Tamplin’s birthday party was – or so it seemed at the time – a valedictory hurrah for the Lockhart mission. And for Lockhart himself it was also a farewell for Moura, who was travelling back to Petrograd the next day, after ten days with him.
¹⁰

It had been an intense ten days, for a multitude of reasons. Shortly after Reilly had stolen away, another mysterious individual surfaced in Moscow and made contact with Lockhart. This time it was a person known to both Lockhart and Moura. Fearing for his life after his efforts to raise a military resistance to the Bolsheviks, the surprise visitor was none other than the former premier of all Russia and darling of the people, Alexander Kerensky. He was travelling disguised as a Serbian soldier, and was desperate to get out of Russia before the Bolsheviks could catch and murder him.

His only hope was through the British route, via Vologda and Murmansk. He had approached old Wardrop, the Consul-General (the last sagging remnant of the British ambassadorial presence in Russia), to ask for a visa, but without success; Wardrop would take no action without consulting London. Lockhart wasn’t authorised to issue visas, but he cobbled one together anyway, marking Kerensky’s false Serbian passport with a signature and a rubber stamp.
¹¹

It was enough. Kerensky, with his handful of loyal companions, headed north for the bleak British outpost on the Barents Sea coast. A few weeks later, with a blaze of publicity, he surfaced in London, claiming to have come ‘straight from Moscow’ but refusing to elaborate how.
¹²

As Kerensky left the shores of his homeland, the Bolsheviks were overturning one of the most popular measures of his provisional government – on 16 June the government newspaper
Izvestia
announced the reintroduction of the death penalty, a measure Lenin had been pushing for for months. Trotsky had noted Lenin’s reaction upon learning of Kerensky’s abolition: ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘How can one make a revolution without firing squads?’
¹³

Lockhart’s relationship with Trotsky was falling apart also. During the period of Moura’s visit, Cromie came down twice from Petrograd, and the two men met with Trotsky to discuss the destruction of the Black Sea fleet. These were to be Lockhart’s last meetings with the man himself; from now on he would see only deputies.

Britain’s star seemed to be falling, and so the mood in the Strelna restaurant that night was that of the eve of departure. Madame Nikolaievna’s gypsy songs filled the summer night with melancholy longing, the rhythm of the guitars and the depths of her contralto voice having their everlasting effect on Lockhart. ‘How it all comes back to me,’ he would write, ‘like every experience which we cannot repeat.’
¹⁴
Aside from himself and Moura, there were five people at that party. Young Tamplin, the birthday boy, was one. Hicks was another – back from his long trip to Siberia – as well as another assistant of Lockhart’s called George Lingner. Denis Garstin added good cheer as always, and Captain George Hill, the extraordinary SIS agent, was there, taking a moment out of his life of espionage.