A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (63 page)

Read A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy Online

Authors: Deborah McDonald,Jeremy Dronfield

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Historical

BOOK: A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy
10.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
13
   
Lockhart,
British Agent
, p. 231.
14
   
Cabinet minutes quoted in Kettle,
The Allies and the Russian Collapse
, pp. 226–30.
15
   
Hughes,
Inside the Enigma
, p. 130.
16
   
Lockhart,
British Agent
, p. 236.
17
   
Kettle,
The Allies and the Russian Collapse
, pp. 220–21, 262–3; Hughes,
Inside the Enigma
, pp. 130–31.
18
   
Lockhart,
British Agent
, pp. 236–8.
19
   
Lockhart,
British Agent
, p. 238.
20
   
Bainton,
Honoured by Strangers
, pp. 198–9.
21
   
Bainton,
Honoured by Strangers
, pp. 201 and
passim
. Her real forename was Sonia, but friends knew her as Sophie.
22
   
Cross, ‘A Corner of a Foreign Field’, p. 353.
23
   
Some of Moura’s personal letters during this period (LL and HIA) were written on Leech & Firebrace headed notepaper, indicating the close connection between the branches of Leech’s business and propaganda enterprises.
24
   
The name actually used at this time was ‘Secret Service Bureau’, under the cover name ‘MI1c’. But the name Secret (or Special) Intelligence Service came into use around the end of the First World War, and both terms were used concurrently for a while. The cover name ‘MI1c’ was replaced by ‘MI6’ during the Second World War. (See Jeffery,
MI6
, pp. 50, 162–3, 209.) The abbreviation SIS is generally used by non-specialist historians, and is accordingly adopted here.
25
   
Kettle,
The Allies and the Russian Collapse
, pp. 136–7, 152, 256–7.
26
   
The fact that Moura was employed in this way (not to mention her long-standing closeness to the embassy people) seems to confirm that the popular reputation she supposedly had at this time for being a German spy must be a later addition to the Moura mythology. It doesn’t rule out the (unlikely) possibility that she might have been a spy for the Germans, but it argues against the idea that she was widely
believed
to be a spy (which is the claim made).
27
   
Kettle,
The Allies and the Russian Collapse
, pp. 260–61.
28
   
Lockhart (
British Agent
, p. 244) describes this event as a birthday party for Cromie, which is repeated by Cromie’s biographer (Bainton,
Honoured by Strangers
, p. 139). In fact Cromie’s birthday was on 30 January (17 January OS). Maslenitsa, which is held seven weeks before Easter, ran from 11 to 17 March 1918 (NS), and the party was held on Monday the 11th (Lockhart, unpublished diary entry for 11 Mar. 1918). It’s possible that it was in fact a belated birthday for Moura herself (usually 6 March). Equally likely, the ‘birthday’ might have been misunderstanding or faulty memory on Lockhart’s part. It isn’t clear from his account whether there were any Russian guests, but it appears not.
29
   
Cromie, letter to Cdre S. S. Hall, 1/19 Feb. 1918, in Jones, ‘Documents on British Relations’ IV, p. 550. In 1918 £2 was equivalent to about £100 now.
30
   
Gen. Finlayson, quoted in De Ruvigny, ‘Garstin, Denys Norman’, p. 66.
31
   
Garstin, letter, 14 Feb. 1918, reproduced in Walpole, ‘Denis Garstin’, pp. 600–01.
32
   
Lockhart,
British Agent
, p. 244.
33
   
Lockhart,
British Agent
, pp. 245–6.
34
   
Tania describes this journey sketchily (Alexander,
Estonian Childhood
, p. 5). The date isn’t given, but it was said to be early spring, and there was snow still on the ground. Tania also doesn’t specify where Micky’s passport was obtained. Possibly Moura used her secret service connections; alternatively Lockhart might have used his influence with Trotsky. Tania implies that the journey was done in a day, which in a horse-drawn vehicle over a distance of more than 200 miles is highly unlikely.
 
 

Chapter 6: Passion and Intrigue

  
1
   
Lockhart,
British Agent
, pp. 258–9. Lockhart identifies the house as belonging to someone called Gracheva, but gives no further information. It is possible that the owner was Maria Gracheva, an art collector who was among the wealthy émigrés who fled Russia after the Revolution. Her collection (or the part which survived) was seized by the state and ended up in the Rumantsyev Museum (Senenko, ‘Late 19th Century Private Collections’, pp. 19–21).
  
2
   
Moura, letter, 16 Apr. 1918, LL. This is one of her occasional letters written on the headed notepaper of Hugh Leech’s firms, this one headed ‘Farran Farranovich Leech’ in Cyrillic. The ‘red sweater’ is probably a garment he had left with her; there are occasional references in Moura’s letters in which she has been asked by him to bring him some article he has left behind in one of his various moves.
  
3
   
The Elite Hotel (named at various times the Rossiya and the Aurora) is now the Hotel Budapest, in Ulitsa Petrovskiye Linii, off Petrovka Street.
  
4
   
Lockhart,
British Agent
, pp. 262–3.
  
5
   
Lockhart,
British Agent
, pp. 256–7. Lockhart refers to the Metropol as the ‘First House of Soviets’; in fact it was the Second, the First being the former National Hotel.
  
6
   
Lockhart,
British Agent
, p. 257.
  
7
   
Often mistranslated as ‘man of steel’, the name Stalin has no literal English translation; it would be more akin to ‘Steelman’ or ‘Steelson’, made up of the Russian for ‘steel’,
stal
, with the standard surname suffix -
in
.
  
8
   
Avrich,
The Russian Anarchists
, p. 184.
  
9
   
Lockhart (
British Agent
, p. 258) gives the number killed as ‘over a hundred’, but Avrich (
The Russian Anarchists
, p. 184) states 40 killed or wounded. Possibly some of the bodies seen by Lockhart were Chekists.
10
   
Werth, ‘A State Against Its People’, p. 64.
11
   
Deacon,
A History of the Russian Secret Service
, p. 168; Leggett,
The Cheka
, pp. 118–19. In an interview with a Moscow paper in November 1918, Peters insisted, ‘I am not as bloodthirsty as they say’ (quoted in Werth, ‘A State Against Its People’, p. 75). Peters’ surname is sometimes rendered as Peterss, and his forename variously as Yakov, Iacob or Jan.
12
   
Lockhart,
British Agent
, pp. 258–9.
13
   
Lockhart seems to imply that it was the former, but since prostitutes did good business inside the Cheka headquarters in both Petrograd and Moscow (Figes,
People’s Tragedy
, pp. 683–4), it seems unlikely that Peters took this view.
14
   
Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably Jun. 1918. (Most of the 28 letters Moura wrote to Lockhart prior to October 1918 are undated, and their chronology has had to be pieced together from content and context. She makes frequent reference to current events, which is helpful in dating.)
15
   
Cromie, letter to Cdre S. S. Hall, Apr. 1918, in Jones, ‘Documents on British Relations’ IV, pp. 550–51. Cromie didn’t specify whether the ‘five million’ was pounds, roubles or marks; however, as it follows just after his mention of ‘£50,000’, one can infer that it was pounds. In 1918 £5 million would be equivalent to about £300 million today – a bargain price for a flotilla of submarines.
16
   
Downie report, quoted in Bainton,
Honoured by Strangers
, pp. 214–15.

Other books

Aelred's Sin by Lawrence Scott
A Deadly Grind by Victoria Hamilton
Boy Still Missing by John Searles
Face the Music by Melody Carlson
One in a Million by Abby Gaines