Most Secret Agent of Empire: Reginald Teague-Jones, Master Spy of the Great Game

304 Pages·2015·6.1 MB·English

by  Taline ter Minassian

MOST SECRET AGENT OF EMPIRE

TALINE TER MINASSIAN
Most Secret Agent of Empire
Reginald Teague-Jones Master Spy
of the Great Game
Translated by
Tom Rees
A
A
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Minassian, Taline Ter
ISBN 9780190210762 (alk. paper)
Most Secret Agent of Empire: Reginald Teague-Jones Master Spy of the Great Game
Printed in India
on Acid-Free Paper
To the memory of Brian Pearce (1915–2008)
To the memory of my father, Levon Ter Minassian (1926–2009)

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments xi
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
1. Childhood in Liverpool and St Petersburg 9
Liverpool: birthplace and departure point 10
Pendennis Street 10
Liverpool: ‘Second City of the Empire’ 12
An Englishman in Russia 13
Dazzling St Petersburg 13
A German Education at St Petersburg: the Annenschule 16
Red Sunday: memories of the 1905 Revolution 19
Warning bells and ‘ice-hilling’ 19
The preludes to an expected drama 21
Caught in the crowd: Teague-Jones, witness to the massacre 23
2. From the Punjab to the North West Frontier: The Making of a
Gentleman of the Raj 27
An ambition: joining the Indian Political Service 28
A foretaste of the Frontier: the Punjab 28
The Indian Political Service: a caste within the colonial
administration 31
A shadow organisation: the Indian Political Intelligence Service 34
The training-ground: the North West Frontier Province 36
Administrative and political frontiers: controlling the hinterland 37
Sherani country 39
The Frontier: a territory for elites? 44
vii
CONTENTS
3. The Persian Gulf and the Hunt for ‘Mr Wassmuss’ 49

The Great War and Persia 50
Iran during the First World War: the theory and practice of
‘neutrality’ 51
Jihad and pointed helmets 52
A police force in the South: the South Persia Rifles (SPR) 54
The tribulations of the ‘German Lawrence’ in the Persian Gulf 56
Wassmuss, a model field-agent 57
Reginald Teague-Jones on Wassmuss’s track 60
Persia and the Russian Revolution 63
On the road to Meshed 64
Meshed: Teague-Jones at the Turkestan frontier 68
4. Ashkhabad and the Transcaspian Episode 73
A Secret Mission at the gates of Central Asia in 1918 74
First impressions of Transcaspia 75
Transcaspia after the Russian Revolution: from the Red offensive
to the emergence of a Turkmen power 79
The brief history of a transient government: the Transcaspian
government 82
Reginald Teague-Jones: ‘Political Representative in Transcaspia’ 84
‘This is a railway war’ 85
A railway government 88
Building an intelligence network in Transcaspia 91
From improvisation to retreat: the Transcaspian episode 94
The Turkmen question: an instrumental strategy? 95
An intelligence service in Yomut country 98
Malmiss: game over 101
5. The Legend of the Twenty-Six Commissars: Teague-Jones, Hero
or Villain? 105
Baku: 1918 106
The country before the battle 106
Baku: the geostrategic prize 108
The siege of Baku 110
The drama of the twenty-six commissars: the anatomy of an execution 116
A political drama with a railway ending 116
Passengers for Krasnovodsk 119
Diminished responsibilities 122
‘A malicious propaganda legend’ (Teague-Jones, November 1979) 125
The origins of the Soviet case: Vadim Chaikin’s inquiry 127
viii