Read: The Lockhart Plot and the Scottish spy ordered to kill Lenin

A Note To Readers:

THE Lockhart Plot was a conspiracy developed by British, French, and American agents during the spring and summer of 1918, when the outcome of World War I still hung in the balance. Its aim was to murder the Bolshevik leaders Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, to overthrow their recently and precariously established communist regime, and to install another that would continue the war against Germany on the Eastern Front.

The men and women who planned it, and those who thwarted them, worked in the shadows, for obvious reasons. They exchanged no letters or only innocuous ones, they wrote no incriminating diary entries, and at least on the British, French, and American sides, they received no government instructions directly explaining what was to be done. Of course, there is a documentary record, but it contains no “smoking gun” directive proving that any Allied government ordered its agents to overthrow the Bolsheviks.

Perhaps the record has been vetted, that is to say, sanitized. But also, in 1918, Allied governments feared that the Bolsheviks had broken their cyphers, and therefore they wrote to their agents with great circumspection. Sometimes, the agents wrote back with equal guardedness. When they wrote frankly, they often did not understand their own position or motivations, so murky and freighted was the situation.

There may be much pertinent and significant material in the archives of the Russian secret police, today known as the FSB, but it is not available to Western researchers, nor have Russian scholars quoted it much, and what they have quoted is hardly revelatory. Of course,

there are contemporary newspaper reports, but the historian must use them cautiously. Compounding difficulties, once the plot had been broken and became public knowledge, the protagonists who wrote about it did so for self-interested reasons. Their accounts are all unreliable.

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Lockhart, in his memoirs, entirely denied responsibility for the plot, which is what the British government wanted of him; conversely, the self-aggrandizing Sydney Reilly, history’s “Ace of Spies,” claimed primary responsibility for it, quite falsely. On the Russian side, the only major figure to write about the plot at any length purposely mixed up his own role with the more important part played by one of his colleagues—but this was many years later, and the colleague long dead, and therefore unable to contradict him.

DESPITE all this, the plot has not lacked for American, British, French, and Russian historians. But the many authors who have tried to tell the story, in journal articles, chapters of books, and sections of chapters, all had to pick their way through a maze of opaque papers, reports, and cables, and then through a minefield of intentionally misleading accounts and statements, false trails, and outright lies. They have been more or less credulous, more or less creative, more or less successful. To a greater or lesser extent, every historian faces similar difficulties no matter the project; all written histories are imperfect and incomplete—but the Lockhart Plot is a more difficult subject than most.

This is the first book-length account of it. I have had to deal with the same obstacles and pitfalls faced by my predecessors, but I have done so in a different way. Where the evidence is contradictory, as it often is, I say so in the text. Where it is incomplete, I tell the reader. When I have to guess at the motivations of one or another of the conspirators or their opponents because there simply is not enough evidence to be certain, I explain that is what I am doing.

Also, where the documents themselves contain judgements that may or may not be accurate, I note it. For example, agents of the French and British secret services, whose reports many historians accept as gospel, were as likely to make unsubstantiated judgements and statements as anyone else, especially when discussing the main female figure in this book, the alluring, charismatic, Moura von Benckendorff.

She was the object of incessant gossip, rumour, and innuendo, much of it cruel and sexist. That is what the agents were repeating—and some historians too.

This is the most complete account of the Lockhart Plot yet written, but it cannot be definitive, for all the reasons just explained.

Let the reader beware, then—but also let him or her enjoy an attempt to accurately recount in full an extraordinary, even thrill- ing, episode in Russian history, replete with derring-do, intrigue, betrayal, romance, violence, even tragedy. It really happened, and it might have shaken the world. Today, in the time of Putin and Trump, we may, from a long distance, and over the passage of many decades, still perceive its enduring relevance.

PART I

LOCKHART BEFORE THE FALL

JANUARY 11, 1918: a gray and somber day in London during the fourth year of a war that had devastated half the world and whose outcome no one could yet predict. Two Russians representing the Bolshevik regime that had taken power in Russia the previous October, and two Britons representing the government of their own country, sat across from one another at a table in the Lyons Corner House in the Strand near Trafalgar Square. In such modest and incongruous settings the world may be shaped, or undone. The quartet had just finished lunch. Now, in a room barely lit by a few weak bulbs, and by the feeble, slanting rays of an overcast northern winter sky, one of the Russians was writing anletter in Cyrillic characters. He used the table at which they had just dined as his desk. When he finished, his companion quickly provided an English translation. The letter was addressed to “Citizen Trotsky, People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs,” and the first paragraph read:

Dear Comrade, – The bearer of this, Mr. Lockhart, is going to Russia with an official mission with the exact character of which I am not acquainted. I know him personally as a thoroughly honest man who understands our position and sympathizes with us. I should consider his sojourn in Russia useful from the point of view of our interests.

While the two Britons nodded their satisfaction, the author of the letter ordered a French dessert—“pouding diplomate” (diplomat pudding)—but the waiter returned a few moments later to say there was none left. This was a poor augury for the “official mission” referred to in the letter, yet, when the meal concluded and the four men departed the restaurant, at least one of them disappeared down Whitehall into the darkening afternoon with a spring in his step.

Maxim Litvinov had been denied his “pouding diplomate,” but as usual, young Bruce Lockhart, whom the British government was about to send to Moscow to parlay with Lenin and Trotsky, had gotten just what he wanted. This time, it was a reference letter from the only person in England who could smooth his way with the Bolshevik government in Russia. Of course, he had no inkling that also he had set into motion a train of events that would culminate in the audacious plot that bears his name.

In 1918, Bruce Lockhart was 31 years of age. He stood, according to his passport, five-foot seven inches tall (the average height of a British soldier at that date was about five-footfive). He had blue eyes, brown hair above a high forehead, ordinary nose, medium mouth, and square face. He had jug ears and a stocky frame. He stares coolly from the century-old passport photo with an assessing, slightly skeptical, self-assured and intelligent gaze.

It is a true and revealing photograph, the impression it makes only rein- forced by a description of Lockhart’s speaking voice provided later by one of his friends: “assertive and modest, arrogant and humorously depreciative at the same time.” He was born in 1887 in Anstruther, Fife, Scotland, and proudly claimed to have no drop of English blood in his veins. He had spent his childhood in the bosom of a large, happy, close-knit and prosperous family. His mother’s side owned an old established distillery, Balmenach, at Cromdale near Grantown-on-Spey; his father’s side held extensive interests in the rubber plantations of Malaysia. His parents sent young Lockhart to the exclusive Fettes College in Edinburgh, where he distinguished himself not as a scholar but as an athlete. In fact, he inherited outstanding athletic ability. It gave him self-confidence—perhaps too much.

Upon leaving Fettes he did not go to Cambridge as his father had done, and where sports might again have distracted him, but rather to the “Institute Tilley” in Berlin, where he learned German and, finally, “how to work,” and then to Paris where private tutors took him in hand. The results were gratifying: the teenager who bloved sports now found that he could pick up languages easily (henwould claim to “speak some six or seven” only a few years later), displayed a wonderful memory, and discovered a passion for lit- erature, poetry, theater, and art that never left him. Soon he could recite by heart passages from Heine in the original German, and the works of the aesthete and travel writer Pierre Loti in the ori- ginal French.

In 1908 he returned to England to prepare for the Indian Civil Service exam. He buckled down to study for a serious test; he knew now that he could compete with the best students; a real career beckoned. Then one of the rubber plantation uncles visited the family and excited the young man’s imagination with tales of the romantic, mysterious Orient. Lockhart impulsively dropped his books and sailed east with his relative.

He was 21 years old, impetuous but fomidable. He learned the Malay language as he had learned French and German, with ease.

“He has exceptional abilities,” wrote his first employer in Malaya.

Recognizing them, his uncle sent him to open up a new rubber estate near Pantei, in Nigeri Sembilan. The young man made a success of this too. But along with high intelligence, natural authority, and acute perception, he would soon display a dangerous streak of recklessness.

EARLY in 1910, he gave a party. His gaze fell upon the most beauti- ful girl he had ever seen, “a radiant vision of brown loveliness.” Her name was Amai, and he knew that he must have her. That she was about to marry into the highest reaches of local society did not deter him; perhaps the challenge excited him. His campaign of seduction nearly amounted to stalking, but he won her.

Characteristically, he did not consider what might come after; and if he thought about the sacrfices Amai would have to make—and then did make—to be with him, they did not weigh heavily on his mind.

Everyone opposed the match, including some who might take deadly measures to end it. After a period of months characterized by bliss with her and strife with practically everyone else, Lockhart fell desperately ill, probably with malaria, but possibly from poison. His suffering was intense, but he was too proud to seek professional help. Eventually Amai summoned a doctor who prescribed immediate flight, not directly to Lockhart, but on the young man’s behalf to his uncle. The next day this gentleman and a cousin bundled the weakened young Scot into an automobile and conveyed him to the ship that would provide the first leg of his journey home. Lockhart later claimed that he had protested—but could his relatives have overborne him if he truly had been determined to stay?

The elegiac tone of a 1936 memoir suggests that on one level he always regretted the end to this affair.

But also it had been a narrow escape, for the life of a colonial planter never could have satisfied him, which he surely knew. At any rate, here was a pattern thatwould recur: more than once in the years to come, Lockhart would ignore convention and his own better instincts while pur- suing an attractive young woman; would experience initial success and delight; but then would face the disapproval of powerful figures whom he dared not oppose, and to whom, after some heartburning, he would yield. The affair with Amai was a harbinger.

Back in Scotland, momentarily chastened, this time he agreed to take the Consular Service exam. He listed as referees the man- agers of the Malayan plantations on which he had worked, con- dent they would overlook his amorous misadventure. They did.

“At all times honest, sober and well conducted,” wrote one of them. “I have the highest opinion of his character and capacity,” wrote the other.

From his former headmaster he obtained the following testimonial: “R.H.B. Lockhart was educated at Fettes College. He had considerable intellectual capacity and was very prominent in games. I recommended his Father to endeavor to find him a career in the Consular Ofce, in which I think his abil- ities should make him very serviceable.”

With this endorsement in his pocket, Lockhart headed for London to cram for the exam.

This time he really did buckle down, which meant that no one could beat him. When the grades were made public his name appeared at the top of the list. He had come first in every category.

And reaped the reward. His first posting was a plum: vice-consul in Moscow. A week before his departure his parents threw a farewell party in his honour. There he spied another vision of loveli- ness, this time of the Australian variety. Her name was Jean Adelaide Haslewood Turner. As with Amai, he knew immediately what he wanted, and did not think beyond. He had only seven days to gain his objective, but again he mounted an irresistible whirlwind campaign. In this instance no powerful forces intervened, and the pair would marry the first time he came home onleave a year later. But it would not be a happy marriage.

In January 1912, Bruce Lockhart, betrothed, charming, formidably intelligent, adventurous beyond common sense, determined and competitive (not merely on the playing elds), strong-willed but only to the penultimate point, arrived in Russia. He drank his first glass of vodka; ate caviar for the first time. During Moscow’s longwinter nights, he rode in horse-drawn sleighs, their bells jingling, over snow-covered streets, under star-filled skies. During summer, he wandered through the city’s elaborate Hermitage Summer Gardens, marvelling at their splendour. He attended grand dinner in homes like palaces, where champagne owed freely. He played football for a factory team owned by two English brothers whom he met through his consular duties. It must have been very high- level play since it attracted crowds of ten to fifteen thousand. He helped it to win a series of Moscow league championships.

During those two and a half years before the outbreak of World War I, he came to know many Tsarist officials. But also, his Russian language teacher, a liberal dissident, introduced him to critics of the regime, including leading members of the once radical but increasingly moderate Constitutional Democratic, or Kadet, Party, and the Socialist Revolutionary Party, an incarnation of the old terrorist Populist Party dedicated to peasant revolution, now con- taining not only populists but also various unharmonious and therefore fissiparous liberals, urban intellectuals, and socialists of varying stripes. These often-colorful figures appealed to him more than the Tsar’s apologists did, and he appealed to them. He befriended his neighbour, Mikhail Chelnokov, the Kadet Party’s Mayor of Moscow. Convivial and confident, knowledgeable and well connected, young Lockhart circulated among the city’s elite.

Culturally, at least, he was no snob. Gypsy music fascinated him. Cabaret drew him. He quickly learned to speak perfect Russian. When his wife joined him early in 1913, he was complete.

To cap this magical period, Jean became pregnant. Her due- date was June 20, 1914. What followed, however, beggared every expectation. On the 21st, Jean lost her baby during a botched delivery which nearly cost her life too, and from which she recovered slowly in hospital in miserable conditions, a devastating experience for both parents.

Then exactly a week after the death of their infant, a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Gravilo Princip, assassinated Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne. That was the trigger for worldwide tragedy. When Austria decided to punish Serbia, Russia came to the defence of her Slavic “little brother’’. But then Germany backed her Austrian ally. That brought France and Britain into the conflict; they supportedRussia, their partner in the Triple Entente. Thus, Princip’s pistol shots proved to be the first salvo in a war that would wreak unimaginable destruction. The Lockharts’ personal misfortune had been subsumed in a global catastrophe.

* * *

He coped by losing himself in work. Contacts and knowledge gained over three years paid off. As the war ground on, he began sending regular reports on the situation in Moscow to Sir George Buchanan, Britain’s ambassador to Russia, who was stationed in the Russian capital, Petrograd—as Russian patriots had renamed St. Petersburg because it sounded less German. Buchanan judged the reports good and began forwarding them to London.

In fact, they were better than good. They contained astute observations and literary flourishes that bear comparison with those of T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, another British agent working at this time, albeit in a different corner of the world. For example, in June 1917, after witnessing Russia’s new leader, Alexander Kerensky, address an enormous, adoring crowd at Moscow’s Big Theatre, on the theme that “nothing worth having can be achieved without suffering,” Lockhart wrote:

‘‘[Kerensky] himself looked the embodiment of suffering. The deathly pallor of his face, the restless movements of his body as he swayed backwards and forwards, the raw almost whispering tones of his voice, which was yet heard as clearly as a bell in thefarthest gallery of the vast building, all helped to make his appeal more terrible and more realistic. . . . And when the end came the huge crowd rose to greet him like one man. Men and women embraced each other in a hysteria of enthusiasm. Old generals and young praporshicks [ensigns] wept together over the man . . .nWomen gave presents of jewellery. Officers sacrficed their orders.’’

And then the needle to puncture the balloon and his own novelis-tic prose, thereby demonstrating his own perspicacity: “Commonsense, however, makes one hesitate . . .” For both before and after the cheering of the bourgeoisie and Socialist Revolutionaries at the Big Theatre, other voices, socialist voices, more influential voices, at other meetings addressed by Kerensky even on the same day, had been “demand[ing] explanations of his policy of the necessity of attacking,” that is to say, of continuing the war by launching a great offensive.

The doubters would prevail in the end, as Lockhart already suspected they would.

He kept in touch with Moscow’s most prominent men and women during these first three years of the war, in and out of politics, supporters and opponents of the regime. Curious, fearless, determined, he attended private political meetings at which probably he was the only foreigner, providing translations of speeches and resolutions; he joined outdoor demonstrations, strikes, and processions at which probably he was the only non-socialist, describing them in pungent, penetrating prose, includ- ing translations even of the slogans daubed on placards and banners. He delivered employment statistics and production statistics. He assessed the morale of troops stationed in the city.

He recorded the views of reactionaries, liberals, socialists, profes- sors, authors, musicians, economists.

For the most part he kept his political views to himself in his reports. Still, the dispatches reveal him to have been not only remarkably industrious, knowledgeable and literate, but also open-minded and rather idealistic. In a country infamous for anti-Semitism, at a time when many in the British diplomatic and consular services did not hesitate to express anti-Semitic views, and moreover at a time when it was common to assert that “the Jews” dominated not only Russia’s revolutionary movement but the world revolutionary movement—and world nuance as well— he wrote with admirable sympathy and understanding: “A Jewish pogrom [in Russia] is far more probable than a revolutionary movement nuanced and fomented by Jews.”

His cables sided openly with Russia’s “Progressives” in their struggle against “the Blacks” for reform. Only a year into the war, he warned about that struggle: “the triumph of the reactionary party . . . must be regarded with considerable anxiety.”

He often referred admiringly to his liberal friends, Prince Georgy Lvov, a former Kadet, who would try in 1916 to persuade the Tsar to abdicate, and when that failed to organize a bloodless palace coup, and most fre- quently to Mayor Chelnokov (a man “of unimpeachable honor and integrity”), who championed “the Moscow of the refugees, of the hospitals, and of the factories.”

With regret, however, he came to recognize that his Kadet friends lacked political effectiveness. He did not favour revolution in Russia during wartime, but he began warning early on that one was possible, even likely. Who would lead it? Unfortunately, the Kadet Party, and the “intelligenzia” who dominated it, did “not seem to be of the stuff of which revolutions are made.”

When the Tsar fell, not through their efforts alone by any means, and the Kadets nevertheless helped to form a provisional government, he soon realized that the future belonged to parties further left. “One is bound to admit that the Socialists are far more energetic.”

His own sympathies moved leftwards as a result. In July 1917, he wrote: admiringly of M. Urnof, the Socialist Revolutionary president of the Moscow Soldiers’ Council and vice president of the Moscow Duma: “He is a man of great force of character and of very high ideals and is altogether one of the most interesting personalities in Moscow.”14 But he never favored the Bolsheviks “who have for their motto ‘the worse things are, the better for us.’ ”

The Bolsheviks, he charged, were carrying on “a harmful and danger- ous agitation” not only against the “bourgeois and imperialistic” governments of France and Britain,16 but “louder than ever” against the new provisional government, and even against other socialists.

The Foreign Ofce read his cables eagerly. “Mr. Lockhart’s report is . . . well written, convincing,” noted a Whitehall ofcial in September 1915. “I only wish we got as clear and interesting reports from more quarters than Moscow,” wrote another mandarin.

By early 1917, Lockhart’s views were circulating at the highest levels. The Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, regularly passed his cables to Prime Minister David Lloyd George. The young Scot did not know how high his reputation had climbed, but soon had an inkling. When Britain’s Consul General in Moscow transferred to New York City, Lockhart received instructions to stay where he was and to take his place. Not yet 30, he had the attention of Britain’s top men. He had become their eyes and ears at what would soon be the storm centre of world affairs.