A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (65 page)

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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
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11
   
Lockhart,
British Agent
, pp. 277–8.
12
   
Manchester Guardian
, 27 Jun. 1918, p. 4.
13
   
Leggett,
The Cheka
, p. 62.
14
   
Lockhart,
British Agent
, p. 280.
15
   
Lockhart,
British Agent
, p. 280.
16
   
Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably 21 or 22 May 1918.
17
   
Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably 21 or 22 May 1918.
18
   
Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 22 May 1918.
19
   
Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 22 May 1918. According to Cook (
Ace of Spies
, pp. 187–8), General Poole was having affairs with two women; it’s possible that Moura was alluding to this as well.
20
   
Kettle,
The Road to Intervention
, p. 83;
Churchill and the Archangel Fiasco
, pp. 428–9.
21
   
Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: late May 1918.
22
   
Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably 22 or 23 May 1918.
23
   
Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably 22 or 23 May 1918; and letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 22 May 1918.
24
   
Jeffery,
MI6
, p. 102. Even his obituary (
The Times
, 16 Aug. 1952, p. 6) noted that Cudbert Thornhill’s attitude ‘was sometimes mistaken . . . for lack of judgment’ and implied that his later service with the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War was marred (unfairly) in the same way. No evidence has survived to indicate the specific cause of dislike between him and Moura.
25
   
Subtelny,
Ukraine
, ch. 19.
26
   
Subtelny,
Ukraine
, ch. 19.
27
   
Hill,
Go Spy the Land
, pp. 182, 202–3; see also Swain,
Origins of the Russian Civil War
, pp. 149–50.
28
   
Lockhart, diary entry for 15 May 1918,
Diaries vol. 1
, p. 36.
29
   
Lockhart,
British Agent
, p. 271.
30
   
Hill,
Go Spy the Land
, pp. 88–9, 202–4; see also Kettle,
The Road to Intervention
, pp. 81–2. The Irish-Canadian Joseph W. Boyle was an adventurer and privateer who travelled in Europe and Russia during the First World War. For Hill, Trotsky and the GRU, see Deacon,
A History of the Russian Secret Service
, pp. 160–61.
31
   
Lockhart makes no mention of Moura being involved in any kind of espionage in his memoirs. However, it appears that he did put it in his original draft (which has apparently not been preserved). We don’t know what he wrote, but we do know that Moura, who had a veto on the text, insisted that he remove ‘the bit about the spying business’, which she claimed gave the book a ‘Mata Hari touch’ that would be ‘quite impossible for me’ (Moura, letter to Lockhart, 18 Jun. 1932, LL).
32
   
Leggett,
The Cheka
, p. 293.
33
   
Lockhart,
British Agent
, p. 278. When he arranged for Kerensky’s exit from Russia in mid-May, he didn’t dare telegraph London about it until he was certain that the fugitive was safely out of the country, because he suspected that his encrypted messages were being decoded by the Bolsheviks.
34
   
For example, Berberova,
Moura
, pp. 44–7; Lynn,
Shadow Lovers
, pp.193–4. It is far from clear whether this allegation has any truth. Neither author had any notion of Moura’s involvement in espionage in the Ukraine (or the Cheka/SIS cooperation), and both seem to have overlooked the fact that Lockhart would not be the only British diplomat who used the same cipher.
Diplomatic ciphers at this time were usually of the code-book or ‘dictionary’ type, in which words had predetermined four- or five-digit number substitutes, listed in a ‘dictionary’. The numbers were not sequential, so a coded message could not be read without a copy of the dictionary (which depending on the system could be pocket-size or a very substantial volume containing tens of thousands of words and their number equivalents). Some systems used an additional step which further encrypted the encoded message by altering the numbers mathematically according to a further, separate cipher (see Gannon,
Inside Room 40
, ch. 4; Beesly,
Room 40
, ch. 3). A code + cipher system is much more secure. Properly speaking, a code involves disguising words according to predetermined word/letter/number equivalents; a cipher disguises words on the fly, using an alphabetical or numerical algorithm where the substitutions are unpredictable. Ciphers are thus much more efficient and capable of being more secure (because the cipher key is easier to hide and easier to change), but can be vulnerable to mathematical deciphering.
Cryptography in most diplomatic services in 1918 was very lax, both in coding/ciphering procedures and security (e.g. see Andrew,
Secret Service
; Plotke,
Imperial Spies Invade Russia
). If the Bolsheviks had the British diplomatic code dictionary by May 1918 (and/or the cipher, if one was used), it could have come from a wide variety of sources in Petrograd, Moscow, Vologda or Murmansk.
35
   
Moura’s movements throughout most of 1918 are accounted for, either in her letters or the diaries and memoirs of others. The only blank is in June. Throughout most of that month she did not write to Lockhart, and was not with him. This is the most likely time for her to have made her trips between Russia and Kiev. Coincidentally, there are two week-long gaps in Lockhart’s diary during the second half of June. It is possible (though less likely) that she made short trips to the Ukraine in July and August.
36
   
Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably 31 May 1918. Lockhart was in Vologda from 29 to 31 May (
British Agent
, pp. 281–4).
37
   
Katchanovski et al.,
Historical Dictionary of Ukraine
, pp. 347–8.
38
   
Moura Budberg MI5 file, document 16.Y, 1932, translation of original Russian document.
39
   
Kyril Zinovieff, interview with Andrew Boyle, CUL Add 9429/2B/125. As a young man in 1929, Zinovieff dined with Pavlo Skoropadskyi in Berlin, and asked the former Hetman if he knew Moura Budberg. After a moment’s thought, Skoropadskyi recalled her: ‘He had known her in the Ukraine after the revolution and had taken her to be an agent working for him. Later he came to realise that all the time she had been spying for the Bolsheviks.’
 

Chapter 8: A Hair’s Breadth from War

  
1
   
Lockhart,
British Agent
, pp. 285–6.
  
2
   
Lockhart, message to Foreign Office, 6 June 1918, cited in Hughes,
Inside the Enigma
, p. 132.
  
3
   
Swain,
Origins of the Russian Civil War
, p. 151.
  
4
   
Subtelny,
Ukraine
, ch. 19.
  
5
   
Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 5 Jul. 1918.
  
6
   
Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 5 Jul. 1918.
  
7
   
Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably mid-Jul. 1918.
  
8
   
Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 6 or 7 Jul. 1918.
  
9
   
Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 21 May 1918.
10
   
Cromie, letter to Adm. W. R. Hall, 26 Jul. 1918, in Jones, ‘Documents on British Relations’ IV, p. 560.

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