A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (50 page)

Moura’s only account of the whereabouts of Gorky’s archives – including not just the letters but manuscripts as well – was that she left them in Kallijärv, where they were burned when the Nazis invaded the country in 1941. H. G. Wells believed that Moura had dealt with Gorky’s papers in exactly the way she had promised to when she left Sorrento in 1933; despite the pressure on her, she had kept them out of the hands of the NKVD, and thereby preserved dozens, if not hundreds, of lives.

But again Wells was deceived. Shortly after attending the funeral Moura returned briefly to London, but on 26 July she flew abroad again. She let it be known that she was going to Estonia. However, there is evidence that she had returned to Moscow in late September to put Gorky’s archive ‘in order’. This probably meant that she brought another instalment of archive material back into Russia with her, possibly from a cache hidden in Estonia. The evidence is that in March 1937, Yagoda, via Pyotr Kriuchkov, gave her £400 in payment for this work.
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Shortly afterwards, Yagoda was arrested on Stalin’s order, and charged with corruption and spying. Moura did not visit Russia again until after Stalin’s death.

What happened to the rest of Gorky’s archive? Did it really burn in Estonia? Or is it true that when the Soviet Union annexed Estonia in 1940, the NKVD searched for and found the Gorky papers that Moura had secreted there? Whatever went on in Estonia, it seems that much of the archive Moura took out of Italy in 1933 remained in her keeping for the rest of her life.
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22

A Very Dangerous Woman

1936–1939

Saturday 13 October 1936, London

The lobby and staircase of the Savoy Hotel were a carnival of literary eminence that evening. The Poets, Essayists and Novelists Club (PEN) was giving a banquet to celebrate the seventieth birthday of its former president, Mr H. G. Wells. The guest of honour stood at the top of the stairs; on one side of him was J. B. Priestley, performing the office of master of ceremonies; on the other was Baroness Budberg, performing the role of stand-in wife. Priestley’s wife was also there, lending an air of respectability.
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H. G.’s dinner was held in the Savoy ballroom; it seated five hundred, and PEN had received eight hundred applications from its members. Almost every notable British writer had come (J. M. Barrie had sent his apologies; he was too old for such things, he felt, although he was only six years older than H. G.).

Leaving the crush at the head of the stairs, Moura entered the ballroom and walked among the tables. The people responsible for the seating plan had worried over where to place Baroness Budberg; should they treat her as his wife or not? She had done much herself for PEN, trying unsuccessfully to persuade the Russian authorities to allow its writers to join. Her place was marked at the head of the main table, next to H. G. Nearby were name cards marked for J. B. Priestley, Lady Diana Cooper, George Bernard Shaw (who was one of the speakers), Julian Huxley, Christabel Aberconway, Vera Brittain, J. M. Keynes, Somerset Maugham, and dozens of others. It might prove awkward at such a large gathering, with such intense attention focused on H. G., so Moura took her card and swapped it with another, further down the table among the humbler names.

On this one occasion, Moura had no desire to be the centre of attention. This was an evening for H. G. and his friends. The menu for the evening was illustrated with a drawing by the
Evening Standard
political cartoonist David Low, showing Wells leaping youthfully over his seventieth milestone. Everyone knew that it was Moura who kept him on his toes.

Elsewhere in London, Moura was receiving attention of a darker, more sinister kind. A week earlier, David ‘Archie’ Boyle of the Air Ministry’s intelligence section had received a long letter from Air Vice Marshal Conrad Collier, Air Attaché at the British Embassy in Moscow. It was marked
Most Secret
and contained some worrying observations.
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Collier described a recent conversation with Maurice Dayet, the First Secretary of the French Embassy, in the course of which Moura Budberg’s name had been mentioned. Dayet said he thought she was a very dangerous woman. He had heard that she had been in Moscow for Gorky’s funeral, where she met with Stalin on at least three occasions and to whom she presented a gift of an accordion (which Stalin was known to be fond of playing). She had no Soviet visa but had obtained a special
laissez-passer
directly from the Soviet Embassy in Berlin.

Dayet had also heard that earlier that year she had been at a social event where Duff Cooper, the British Secretary of State for War, was a guest. He had discussed many issues of political importance in front of Moura, which Dayet considered to be of great concern to British security. A couple of weeks after Duff Cooper’s indiscretion, Moura had made one of her trips to Moscow, where again she met with Stalin.

Furthermore, Collier added, Dayet had said that although Moura had not been seen in France for the previous three years, her last visit had coincided with an espionage case involving a naval officer who had been charged with the loss of important ciphers. The woman believed to be at the head of this conspiracy had never been caught, but was known as ‘Mary’. In Dayet’s opinion, this woman was Moura Budberg. It is true that Moura had told H. G. that she was taking ‘the cure’ in Brides-les-Bains, a spa town in the French Alps, in October 1934.
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Possibly this was yet another of her cover stories.

Air Vice Marshal Collier added his own observation that he knew Baroness Budberg slightly, as his son had attended her adopted daughter Kira’s wedding.

On 14 October (the day after H. G.’s Savoy dinner) Collier’s letter was passed to Major Valentine Vivien, head of SIS’s Section V, which handled counter-espionage, with a covering memo referring to some case notes from 1935 and noting that ‘I confess that I have always felt very doubtful about Budberg and have never regarded her case as having been satisfactorily cleared up.’ The memo recommended that inquiries be made about Kira, to determine whether she was ‘entirely reliable’.
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The letter and memo prompted a flurry of inquiries in Whitehall’s intelligence sections. They wanted to verify the source and it was suggested that the French Deuxième Bureau should be contacted. One SIS informant, identified only as ‘L. F.’, mentioned that his wife had known Moura for over twenty years, and that he himself had met her for the first time earlier that year. L. F. corroborated much of the detail in Collier’s letter, including her friendship with Duff Cooper, and added that she was an intimate friend of Paul Scheffer, the German journalist. L. F.’s wife had warned him, he wrote, prior to his meeting with Moura, that she liked to be considered the best-informed woman in Europe, that she talked a lot, knew an immense number of people, and that he should ‘watch his step’ when speaking to her. L. F. confirmed that Moura had certainly heard things from members of government that should not have been mentioned in her presence.
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‘L. F.’ was undoubtedly Sir Edward Lionel Fletcher, Liuba Hicks’ new husband. Fletcher was rather older than Liuba – a retired maritime engineer, member of a wealthy shipping family and naval reserve officer who had been manager of the White Star Line (it was probably through the late Will Hicks’ post with Cunard that Fletcher and Liuba had become acquainted). They had married in April 1936; Moura had been at the wedding, naturally, and at the huge reception given afterwards at 15 Wilton Crescent.
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Liuba was also incidentally a mutual friend of Air Vice Marshal Collier and Maurice Dayet.

A meeting was arranged between British intelligence and Maurice Dayet, who confirmed that what had been written in Collier’s letter was true; he added that Moura had been on the French security blacklist and that he believed her to be a ‘letter box’ acting for the Russians. Her role was to pass on snippets of information that she thought would interest them. However, Dayet did not believe her to be anti-English.

Despite all the whispers, there wasn’t enough hard evidence against Baroness Budberg to warrant an arrest. She remained under surveillance by both British and French security services.

Notes and reports accumulated in Moura’s file. A later Special Branch report stated that in 1936 and 1937 she had been observed having regular night-time meetings with an unknown man in the Suffolk seaside resort of Felixstowe.
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The town was rather fashionable at the time – in the autumn of 1936 Wallis Simpson rented a house there while waiting for the outcome of her divorce. The King frequently visited her by plane. She complained that the house was very small and the out of season town too quiet for her liking. Moura knew Wallis and Edward through Lockhart, so she might well have visited them while she was there. She might even have been gathering and passing on information about the development of Britain’s looming constitutional crisis. The town had a regular railway service so she would have found it quite easy to make the trip up from London.

There might have been a more banal reason for her visits. She was still conducting her affair with Constantine Benckendorff, who lived a few miles from Felixstowe, at Lime Kiln, Claydon.

Another fact about Moura came to light during the 1930s, when MI5 obtained a Russian document describing her activities in 1918 as a double agent for the Russian Bolsheviks and the Skoropadskyi regime in the Ukraine. The same source revealed that from 1927 to 1929 she had continued spying on the exiled members of the Hetmanate in Berlin, using her sister Assia’s husband as a source.
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As war in Europe loomed, MI5 believed they detected another German connection in Baroness Budberg’s activities. She had become acquainted with the ex-Nazi defector Ernst Hanfstaengl, an American-educated German businessman who had been foreign press officer for the Nazi Party and a long-time friend of Adolf Hitler. By 1937 his lack of steely commitment to the Nazi cause and his unguarded comments about Nazi leaders caused Hanfstaengl to fall out with Goebbels and lose Hitler’s confidence. His post was abolished and, sensing that the end was nigh, Hanfstaengl quickly defected to Britain in March 1937.

On 29 December that year, MI5 intercepted a letter from Louis P. Lochner, the American pacifist journalist, who was one of Moura’s many publishing contacts from her Berlin days (he was director of the Berlin bureau of the Associated Press and a colleague of Paul Scheffer). The letter was addressed to Hanfstaengl and suggested that he should make contact with Moura, describing her as a ‘very clever Russian’. He gave Hanfstaengl her London telephone number.
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A year later, in December 1938, Lochner wrote to Hanfstaengl again, mentioning that Moura had been to Estonia. He asked Hanfstaengl if he knew when ‘the grand show’ was due to start.

According to the MI5 summary, this letter also made reference to a visit that had been paid by Karl Bodenschatz, a Luftwaffe officer, to Hanfstaengl in London in spring 1937.
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According to Hanfstaengl’s own later account, Bodenschatz had been sent by Goering with a promise that he could resume his former post with his original staff. But with war looming, Hanfstaengl didn’t fancy the idea, and declined.
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The motive for Goering’s proposal was reported in the United States, but not apparently in Britain: when Hanfstaengl arrived in London it had been rumoured that he intended to write a memoir entitled ‘Why I Joined Hitler and Why I Left Him’. The Nazi leadership were desperate to stop him. He was invited by Bodenschatz to a meeting at the German Embassy in London, but ‘on the advice of his lawyer declined to attend,’ said one newspaper report. ‘Later it was learned that all preparations had been made to seize him and take him into Germany.’
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Hanfstaengl’s book, had it been published, would have been immensely powerful anti-Nazi propaganda. Paul Scheffer and Louis Lochner would have been keen to help it come about, and Moura would have the contacts to help it happen. But for reasons unknown, it didn’t surface.

While suspicions darkened in Whitehall and war approached, Moura’s personal life carried on as it had for years.

She was now living semi-permanently in London. She and H. G. had settled into their relationship, having both accepted their respective roles. He accepted (reluctantly) that she would never marry him and never be his permanent companion, and she accepted (quite contentedly) his intermittent sideshows with other women.

In 1937, after a holiday with both Moura and Constance Coolidge, Wells went to the South of France to stay with Somerset Maugham. He was suffering from neuritis in his right arm, possibly caused by his diabetes, which had been giving him a great deal of pain.

The emotional pain that Moura had caused him (or rather that he had inflicted on himself through her) seemed to have subsided at last. H. G. commented that ‘Moura remains what she is; rather stouter, rather greyer, sometimes tiresome, oftener charming and close and dear’. By 1938 he was noting that ‘Moura is Moura as ever; human, faulty, wise, silly, and I love her’.
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