Russian roulette: a deadly game: how British spies thwarted Lenin's global plot

278 Pages·2013·2.55 MB·English

by  Giles Milton

Russian Roulette

A Deadly Game: How British Spies Thwarted
Lenin's Global Plot

Giles Milton

www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Sceptre An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Giles Milton 2013

The right of Giles Milton to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 444 73705 9

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For Alexis
‘James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamed up. He’s not a Sidney
Reilly, you know!’

Ian Fleming
CONTENTS

List of Characters
Acknowledgements
Maps

Prologue

Part One
1 MURDER IN THE DARK
2 THE CHIEF
3 THE PERFECT SPY
4 KNOW THY ENEMY

Part Two
5 THE MAN WITH THREE NAMES
6 A DOUBLE LIFE
7 MISSION TO TASHKENT
8 GOING UNDERGROUND
9 VANISHING TRICK
10 THE PLOT THICKENS
11 A DEADLY GAME
12 TOXIC THREAT

Part Three
13 MASTER OF DISGUISE
14 THE LETHAL M DEVICE
15 AGENT IN DANGER
16 DIRTY TRICKS
17 ARMY OF GOD
18 WINNER TAKES ALL

Epilogue
Notes and Sources
Selected Reading
Permission Acknowledgements
Plate Section

About the Author
Also by Giles Milton
LIST OF CHARACTERS
BRITISH
Mansfield Cumming: Head of Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Director of
secret operations inside Soviet Russia.
Samuel Hoare: SIS bureau chief in Petrograd.
Ernest Boyce: SIS bureau chief in Moscow.
John Scale: SIS bureau chief in Stockholm.
Paul Dukes: spy (operating under aliases of Joseph Ilitch Afirenko, Joseph
Krylenko, Alexander Vasilievitch Markovitch and Alexander Bankau).
Arthur Ransome: journalist and spy.
George Hill: spy (operating under alias of George Bergmann).
Sidney Reilly: spy (operating under aliases of Konstantine Markovich Massino,
Mr Constantine and Sigmund Relinsky).
Augustus Agar: special agent.
Somerset Maugham: special agent (operating under name of Somerville).
Oswald Rayner: special agent.
Frederick Bailey: spy employed by government of British India (operating
under aliases of Andrei Kekechi, Georgi Chuka and Joseph Kastamuni).
Wilfrid Malleson: army general and spy-master employed by government of
British India.
Robert Bruce Lockhart: diplomat.
RUSSIAN
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: Russia’s revolutionary leader.
Leon Trotsky: revolutionary and leader of Red Army.
Felix Dzerzhinsky: Director of the Cheka, Russia’s secret police.
Karl Radek: Vice-Commissar for Foreign Affairs.
Yakov Peters: Deputy Chairman of the Cheka.
Grigori Zinoviev: Head of the Comintern.
Evgenia Shelepina: Trotsky’s secretary and Arthur Ransome’s lover.
Maria Zakrveskia (Budberg), known as Moura: Robert Bruce Lockhart’s lover.
INDIAN
Manabendra Nath Roy: Indian revolutionary and leader of the ‘Army of God’.
Acknowledgements

Much of the research material for Russian Roulette is housed in two depositories
of archives: The India Office Records, now kept at the British Library, and the
National Archives at Kew.
Special thanks are due to the ever-helpful staff of the India Office Records.
They proved invaluable in guiding me through the 751 files of Indian Political
Intelligence. They also provided access to Frederick Bailey’s photographic
collection: two of his photographs are reproduced in the plate section of this
book.
The staff of the National Archives proved helpful in locating key documents.
The pictures of the M Device, also reproduced in the plate section, were found in
one of the National Archive’s many files concerning the development of
chemical weapons.
Thank you to the Institute of Historical Research.
The librarians of the London Library, where much of this book was written,
have proved as helpful for Russian Roulette as they were for all my previous
books.
A full list of sources is provided at the end of this book but special mention
must be made of one author whose works have proved particularly inspiring.
The doyen of Great Game specialists is Peter Hopkirk, whose books combine
serious scholarship with page-turning narrative. Although new material has
come to light in recent years, they remain a standard (and invaluable) reference
for the subject of the struggle for control of Central Asia.
I am indebted to those spies who elected to publish their experiences, risking
costly law suits for doing so. ‘There is scarcely a page . . . that does not damage
the foundation of secrecy upon which the Secret Service is built up.’ So reads a
Secret Intelligence Service memo concerning the publication of Compton
Mackenzie’s book Greek Memories, with its account of Mansfield Cumming.
First-hand accounts must be treated with caution: my aim throughout was to
corroborate and balance the sometimes exuberant stories of the spies’ undercover
adventures with the more sober tone of their intelligence reports.
Thank you to my literary agent, Georgia Garrett, for her hard work and ever-