A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (69 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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Chapter 12: Sacrificial Offering
| 1 | Berberova ( Moura , p. 79) claims she was told by Moura that when she was first interrogated she denied the affair. The Chekist interrogator then showed her a collection of compromising photos of herself with Lockhart, whereupon Moura fainted. Aside from the dubious melodrama of this scene, there is the anachronism of covert long-lens surveillance photography in 1918, plus the fact that the relationship was well known at the time (even Moura’s mother in Petrograd knew about it). This appears to be one of the flourishes with which Moura liked to embellish her life story. |
| 2 | Leggett, The Cheka , pp. 193–4. |
| 3 | Reports by ministers of neutral nations, 3–9 Sept. 1918, in Foreign Office, White Paper on Russia , pp. 2–5. |
| 4 | Lockhart, British Agent , pp. 320–21. |
| 5 | Lockhart, British Agent , p. 321. Wardwell had replaced Lockhart’s friend Raymond Robins, who had doubled as Red Cross chief and unofficial diplomatic agent. |
| 6 | Lockhart, diary entry for 3 Sept. 1918, Diaries vol. 1 , pp. 40–41. |
| 7 | Lockhart, British Agent , p. 324. |
| 8 | Lockhart, British Agent , p. 324; Peters, ‘The Lockhart Case’, p. 514. In his report, Peters states that he only agreed to a secret meeting on condition that Lockhart didn’t say anything slanderous about Soviet Russia – presumably an addition to cover his own back. |
| 9 | Lockhart, British Agent , pp. 340–41. |
| 10 | Lockhart, British Agent , pp. 326–7; Diaries vol. 1 , pp. 41–2. |
| 11 | Report by W. J. Oudendijk, 6 Sept. 1918, in Foreign Office, White Paper on Russia , p. 5; also Ullman, Intervention , p. 293. |
| 12 | Report by W. J. Oudendijk, 6 Sept. 1918, in Foreign Office, White Paper on Russia , p. 6. |
| 13 | Letter from Petrograd prisoners, 5 Sept. 1918, in Foreign Office, White Paper on Russia , pp. 6–7. |
| 14 | Report by W. J. Oudendijk, 6 Sept. 1918, in Foreign Office, White Paper on Russia , p. 5. |
| 15 | Malkov, Reminiscences , p. 327. According to Lockhart ( Diaries vol. 1 , p. 42; British Agent , p. 329), his rooms were in the Kavaliersky Korpus. But Malkov, as Kremlin Commandant, probably knew the geography of the place better than Lockhart. Also, Lockhart’s remark that the rooms had been a lady-in-waiting’s apartment is consistent with Malkov’s account. |
| 16 | Lockhart, British Agent , pp. 329–30. Lockhart’s fears are reflected in his diary entry for 8 September ( Diaries vol. 1 , p. 42), in which, presumably fearing that it would be read, he implied that he hadn’t the faintest idea who Smidkhen was (‘I have been put in with a Russian(?) called Smidchen who is said to be my agent!’). |
| 17 | Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 9 Sept. 1918. Note: British diplomatic etiquette at the time accorded Russian officials the French-style honorific ‘M.’ – hence ‘M. Peters’. |
| 18 | Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 10 Sept. 1918. |
| 19 | Lockhart, British Agent , pp. 331–2. |
| 20 | Some 20 letters sent by Moura to Lockhart during his time in the Kremlin have survived; of these, 6 are in English, and the rest in Russian. The latter are mostly very brief notes. Some of the longer, more significant, Russian letters have translations interpolated in a different (?Lockhart’s) hand. |
| 21 | The claim that Moura became Peters’ lover comes from a summary report on Moura by SIS officer Ernest Boyce (11 Jul. 1940, Moura Budberg MI5 file). Kyril Zinovieff (interview, 1980, Andrew Boyle archive) believed that her favoured treatment indicated that she had become a Soviet agent. |
| 22 | Berberova, Moura , p. 63. |
| 23 | In the first part of his memoir, British Agent , Lockhart narrated the events of September 1918 more or less in the order in which they occurred, and didn’t try to explain Moura’s release. But in Retreat from Glory (p. 5) he claimed falsely that ‘I had secured her release at the cost of my own re-arrest’. Moura had more editorial control over this volume than over its predecessor and was concerned to strike out anything that made her look mercenary (letters to Lockhart, 1933–4, LL). |
| 24 | Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably about 12–15 Sept. 1918. |
| 25 | The sequence of these events given by Lockhart in his memoir appears to differ from that in his diary, which in turn is slightly different from the sequence of Moura’s letters. The version given here resolves the contradictions, taking the letters and diary as the more reliable evidence. |
| 26 | Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 18 Sept. 1918. |
| 27 | Lockhart, British Agent , p. 337. |
| 28 | Moura, letter to Lockhart, LL. Undated: probably 18 Sept. 1918. |
| 29 | Lockhart, diary entry for 23 Sept. 1918, Diaries vol. 1 , p. 44. |
| 30 | Moura, letter in Russian to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably 23 Sept. 1918. |
| 31 | Moura, two letters to Lockhart, LL. Both undated: probably 23–30 Sept. 1918; one Russian, one English. |
| 32 | Lockhart, diary entry for 28 Sept. 1918, Diaries vol. 1 , p. 45. |
| 33 | Moura, letter to Lockhart, 29 Nov. 1918, LL. |
| 34 | Peters, ‘The Lockhart Case’, p. 489. This version was promoted by the Soviet authorities until the 1960s, when the publication of an account written in 1918 by the political commissar of the Latvian Rifle Division revealed that the plot had been an agent provocateur operation, orchestrated from the beginning by Dzerzhinsky and Peters (see Long, ‘Plot and Counter-Plot’, pp. 130ff). Peters also compressed the timescale of his investigation to give the impression that the Cheka had acted more promptly than it had. The publication of Pavel Malkov’s Reminiscences of a Kremlin Commandant , first in 1961, then in a more detailed 1967 edition, also exposed some of the falsehoods in Peters’ report, such as the location of the arrest of Maria Fride. |
| 35 | Peters’ account was the official version, and went unchallenged until the publication of Malkov’s account of the interrogation of Maria Fride, and continued to be accepted even afterwards. |
| 36 | The breach was realised immediately, and Izvestia was told (and promptly reported) that Lockhart had been arrested mistakenly and released as soon as he was identified ( Izvestia , 3 Sept. 1918, quoted by Berberova, Moura , p. 71), a lie contradicted by both Lockhart’s and Malkov’s accounts. |
| 37 | Ullman, Intervention , pp. 290–91. |
| 38 | Peters, ‘The Lockhart Case’, p. 516. |
| 39 | Peters, ‘The Lockhart Case’, p. 516. |
| 40 | Peters, ‘The Lockhart Case’, p. 516. |
| 41 | Moura remarked twice in her letters that she expected to be able to get money from the Ukraine (letters to Lockhart, 26 Jan., 14 Feb. 1919, LL and HIA), and it is presumed that this must have been from her father’s estate. Some doubt is cast on this by the fact that although at the time the plans were first made the Hetmanate government was still in place, by the time of the letters it had fallen and the Red Army was recapturing the Ukraine, so there would certainly have been no property to inherit. |
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