A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (27 page)

Where was Lockhart? Where was her love, her life, her darling boy? She had seen him led out of the flat, and hadn’t heard anything since. He might have been shot for all she knew. They had come back with another car and taken her and the servants. Nobody would tell her anything. She wouldn’t be able to bear it if anything had happened to her Lockhart – the Baby-Boy whose baby boy she was carrying inside her this minute.

She had been in this wretched, filthy place four days now, and still no news came. It seemed to Moura that her courage was a frail thing, which would give way sooner or later. If she could only have her beloved, she could stand anything. She hoped he was still alive.

Lockhart had bought a newspaper on the way home from the Lubyanka. Between the bulletins about Lenin’s condition were furious imprecations against the bourgeoisie, the counter-revolutionaries and the Allies.

Over the next few days, the papers sang the same shrill refrain. Some were openly calling for the murder of British and French citizens. Official reports claimed that some five hundred people – mostly Russian men and women of the bourgeois classes, including shopkeepers, army officers and businessmen – had been summarily executed in the three days since the death of Uritsky, and more were to follow.
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Dozens of foreign prisoners – mostly British and French, plus a few Americans – were being held in Moscow and Petrograd. Among them was Moura.

After shaving and cleaning himself of the stink of the Lubyanka, Lockhart went in search of information, making the rounds of the foreign agencies that still clung on in Moscow.
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The Allies had been revealed as enemy conspirators; as a result, all further responsibility for their citizens had been placed in the hands of the representatives of the neutral nations – which for Britain meant the Norwegian and Dutch Legations. Lockhart met W. J. Oudendijk, the Netherlands Minister, who was visiting from Petrograd. He was an amiable, generous man, and Lockhart found him in a terrible state of anxiety; from him Lockhart first heard the dreadful, shocking news of the raid on the British Embassy and the death of Cromie.

His anxiety redoubled, Lockhart went to the head of the American Red Cross, Major Allen Wardwell, to ask if he could find out about Moura and, if possible, plead for her release. Wardwell was a calm, assured fellow, and Lockhart was comforted by his promise that he would do what he could. He had been promised an interview with Chicherin the next day, and would bring the subject up then.
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The feeling of reassurance didn’t last long. By the next day, Lockhart could no longer bear the suspense. He wasn’t used to relying on others to negotiate with the government, so he went to the foreign ministry himself and demanded to see Lev Karakhan. Despite being officially a pariah, he was granted admittance right away. Regardless of what they had against him, he pleaded, it was inhuman of the Bolsheviks to strike at him using Moura as a hostage. He begged Karakhan to have her released. All the commissar was able to give him was another
I’ll-do-what-I-can
promise. It counted for little, but it was better than nothing.

Despondently, Lockhart made his way home through the quiet streets. The atmosphere was like the days leading up to the Revolution the previous year – soldiers guarded every street corner, and the few citizens who were out and about went with their heads bowed and didn’t linger. Terror was in the air.

Back at the flat, Hickie made them both a supper of black bread, sardines and coffee. It was Lockhart’s birthday; he was thirty-one years old and had never felt less like celebrating.

The next day he sat with nothing to do but read the papers, which were now full of the most lurid accounts of what was already being called the ‘Lockhart Plot’. Not only was he said to be trying to stir up mutiny among the Latvian troops; he and his agents were also planning to help the White and Allied armies conquer Russia by blowing up key bridges and subjecting the Russian people to starvation. Once they had taken control they would appoint a new imperialist dictator.
Pravda
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led the way in calling for the Red Terror to be applied to all enemies of the Revolution, including the British.
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By the next day Lockhart was unable to sit still any longer. He decided to go straight to the source of the problem. If the Dutch and the Red Cross and even the Bolshevik foreign ministry couldn’t help Moura, he had no choice but to go directly to the Cheka. The thought of going back within their orbit was terrifying, but he must do it. He saw Karakhan again, and asked him to set up an immediate one-to-one meeting with Yakov Peters. Karakhan consented, but wasn’t hopeful of the outcome.
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The encounter took place at the Lubyanka headquarters. Moura had now been in prison for four days. All the while the Terror was rising. Just the day before, Fania Kaplan had been taken from the Lubyanka to the Kremlin, where without trial or further questioning she was shot – a single revolver bullet to the back of the head, in the Cheka style – and her remains destroyed without burial. Her executioner was the man who had brought Lockhart and Moura to the Lubyanka – Commandant Pavel Malkov. In this climate, nobody was safe.

Yakov Peters regarded Lockhart impassively. Before stating his business, Lockhart insisted on a gentlemen’s agreement – the meeting must be treated as unofficial, off the record and entirely secret. Peters agreed. Lockhart launched immediately into an impassioned plea for Moura’s release. He claimed that the reports about the Latvian conspiracy were untrue – but even if there was
some
truth in it, Moura was completely innocent.

Peters listened patiently, and promised to give Lockhart’s words due consideration.
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Then he changed the subject.

‘You have saved me some trouble in coming here,’ he said. ‘My men have been looking for you for the past hour. I have a warrant for your arrest.’

By the next day, everyone was saying that Lockhart was going to be shot. Moura heard the news of his release and re-arrest from Major Wardwell, the heroically kind American Red Cross man who came regularly with food for the Allied captives in the Butyrka prison.
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The Bolsheviks, he said, were executing people in their hundreds, and Lockhart was likely to be among them.

Her love, her life, her all was going to die.

It would always be a mystery how she survived those days without going mad with worry. Moura was nothing if not tough – for all her pampered upbringing, she was capable of withstanding physical discomfort (although not without complaint if she had someone to complain to). But mental anguish was different. This period of gnawing worry would age her and alter her, take away some vital element of her personality that she would never quite recapture. Believing that she was about to lose Lockhart forever would leave a wound that would never heal. She would do anything to see him, to keep him, and if that failed, at least to save him from death or confinement in a dreadful Cheka prison.

Lockhart was kept in a room in the Lubyanka headquarters, a grubby, ill-furnished office used by junior clerks. It contained a dilapidated sofa on which he was sometimes allowed to sleep while the clerks worked and two sentries watched over him.
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At all hours of the night, Peters would have him brought to his office for interrogation. The questioning was persistent but calm. Lockhart was exhorted to confess to his crimes, as some of his fellow conspirators allegedly had; otherwise he would be handed over to the Revolutionary Tribunal for examination. Lockhart denied that he had done anything other than what his government had ordered him to do and insisted that the claims that he was the instigator of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy were false. But the Cheka had the hard evidence of espionage and the witness evidence of conspiracy, and Lockhart was in it over his head.

Oudendijk, the Netherlands Minister, lobbied the foreign ministry and the Cheka to spare Lockhart’s life. He reported to his British contacts that the Russian government had ‘sunk to the level of a criminal organisation’. It seemed to him that the Bolsheviks ‘realise that their game is up and have entered on a career of criminal madness’.
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Oudendijk warned Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin that Britain was more powerful than Russia, and would not be deterred even if hundreds of Britons were executed.

In his report on his negotiations, Oudendijk gave his views on the political situation in Russia, and on Bolshevism. He was regarded by everyone as a kindly, honourable and good man, and what he had to say wasn’t at all out of step with the times; but it was a chilling foreshadowing of Europe’s future. He felt it his duty to tell the governments of the world that ‘if an end is not put to Bolshevism in Russia at once the civilisation of the whole world will be threatened . . . I consider that the immediate suppression of Bolshevism is the greatest issue now before the world.’ He believed that the infection was ‘bound to spread in one form or another over Europe and the whole world, as it is organised and worked by Jews who have no nationality, and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things. The only manner in which this danger could be averted would be collective action on the part of all Powers.’
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Oudendijk noted that the Germans and Austrians were thinking it too. What none of them could have imagined was the solution that would eventually be conceived to tackle the imagined threat.

While the Dutch and Swedish diplomats negotiated with the Bolsheviks, the neutral Norwegian Legation became a refuge for Moscow’s Allied outlaws. Will Hicks and Lockhart’s assistants Tamplin and Lingner, along with many other British, American and French fugitives, had gone into hiding there. The building was besieged by the Cheka; unwilling to force an entry into neutral diplomatic territory this time, they hoped to starve the criminals out. It would be a long siege – the building had previously been the headquarters of the American Red Cross, and its basement was well stocked with food supplies.

Unhappily, the same couldn’t be said for the prisoners in Petrograd – confined in the dungeons of the Petropavlovskaya fortress, they were being slowly starved to death in cells without functioning toilets; many were suffering chronic diarrhoea but were refused medical care.
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When Oudendijk returned to Petrograd after two days of bargaining, he had been promised that Lockhart would be released, but he wasn’t reassured – ‘his position is precarious in the extreme,’ he reported.
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And then, quite suddenly, everything changed.

The cause of the change would never be entirely clear, because those who were involved – Lockhart, Yakov Peters and Moura – took steps to blur the record.

First the circumstances altered. On 6 September it was announced that Lenin was out of danger. The mood of vengeance among the Bolsheviks gave way briefly to one of relief. At the same time, a deal with the British was being considered. In reprisal for the death of Captain Cromie, the British had arrested the Soviet Ambassador in London, Maxim Litvinov. He and his staff were being held in Brixton prison. An exchange of prisoners was being talked about. Lockhart might be one of them. But whatever the mood, and regardless of the diplomatic situation, there was no getting around the enormity of the crimes Lockhart was accused of – espionage, counter-revolutionary sabotage, and an implicit threat to the lives of the heads of the Soviet government. The author of such a plot couldn’t possibly be let go, could he?

Lockhart had been in custody for three days when he was told that he was to be moved from the Lubyanka to the Kremlin. Peters had summoned Pavel Malkov and ordered him to prepare accommodation for the prisoner. The last person Malkov had taken there from the Lubyanka had been Fania Kaplan, whom he had executed five days earlier. Lockhart’s fate would be different – for the time being, at least. He was to be held until a decision had been made about what to do with him.

Malkov wasn’t particularly pleased about having to take responsibility for Lockhart again. He set aside a suite of rooms in the Freylinsky corridor of the Grand Kremlin Palace, which was still mostly empty. The rooms appeared to have been some kind of lady-in-waiting’s quarters – small and with no windows. With unconscious irony he selected guards from the Kremlin’s Latvian regiment – the very ‘Praetorian Guard’ whom the Lockhart Plot had tried to suborn.
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Lockhart was alarmed to find that he had a companion living in his apartment: Smidkhen, the Latvian officer who had come to him from Cromie just over a month ago – the man who had led him to get involved in the plot, and who had brought Colonel Berzin to see him. Lockhart guessed that this was an attempt to prise some indication of guilt from him, and for two days he didn’t dare speak a word. Eventually Smidkhen was removed. Lockhart never learned his fate, and suspected that he had been shot. He never knew that the Latvian had been a Cheka plant from the beginning.
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