A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (51 page)

She continued to see Lockhart. He was now a single man. In 1937 Jean had finally reached the end of her tolerance; she left him and began divorce proceedings. Her lawyers combed Lockhart’s published memoirs, taking note of all the references to his romance with Moura. Lockhart discussed it with her over lunch, though Moura had heard the gossip already. She was more interested in the fact that the writer Aleksei Tolstoy, who had arrived in London for the National Congress of Peace and Friendship with the USSR (an event sponsored by Britain’s left-leaning writers and politicians), was in a constant state of terror, accompanied everywhere he went by a ‘Cheka man’.
¹⁴

Lockhart’s career path had changed again. He had been writing the regular ‘Atticus’ column in the
Sunday Times
, but had been persuaded to return to the Foreign Office after an absence of more than twelve years. With the start of the war he joined the Political Warfare Executive, and soon became its head. He was responsible for radio broadcasts, leaflet drops, postcards and documents designed to lift the morale of people in German-occupied countries and lower morale of the Germans.

If Moura still harboured hopes that Lockhart, free of his wife, might finally give himself to her completely, she didn’t show it. They continued to dine regularly, often consuming too much food and alcohol. Moura passed him titbits of information for use in his gossip column and later in his propaganda work, for Moura still had strong and regular links to the Baltic and to Russia. But by late 1937, when she returned from a trip to Estonia, Lockhart realised that since Gorky’s death and the arrest of Yagoda, she had been ‘cut off’ by the Bolsheviks. She was concerned about the show trials, which were sweeping up people she knew who were still in the country, and feared that Lockhart’s old acquaintance Maxim Litvinov might be the next to fall.
¹⁵
Everyone was watching their back. Perhaps that was the reason for Aleksei Tolstoy’s terror during his visit to London. (If so, he had no need to fear – his star was rising, with appointment to the newly created Supreme Soviet.)

Wells too was concerned about what was going on in Russia. His friends Beatrice and Sidney Webb had written a book,
Soviet Communism
, in which they gave their view that the ultimate result of the Moscow trials would be a better civilisation in Russia. Many left-wing writers in Britain shared this opinion. Wells, who had seen Stalin in the flesh, was not so optimistic. He wrote to Beatrice, saying that although both he and Moura largely agreed with Beatrice’s assessment of the situation, they felt she was underestimating the personal power of Stalin. What everyone agreed on at the time was that Stalin’s reconstructed Soviet Union was a new and better order, which needed to be preserved at almost any cost.

In 1938 the Moscow trials intensified. Kriuchkov, Gorky’s secretary and former member of the Kronverksky commune, was tried for his alleged role in Gorky’s death, and was executed by firing squad in March. The file on Kriuchkov included a list of eight people who had been compromised by him.

Moura’s name was on the list.

It said that she had been a ‘participant in an anti-soviet Rightist organisation’.
¹⁶
A reference to her relationship with Scheffer, perhaps, and his alleged anti-Soviet work for the Nazis. Of the eight people on the list, seven were arrested and put to death. Moura was the only survivor. She was also the only one living in London, but that needn’t have been sufficient protection. Two years later, the NKVD went all the way to Mexico to assassinate Trotsky. And Moura was a frequent traveller; it would have been quite simple to arrest or kill her in Estonia. And yet nothing was done. There may be many explanations, not least the fact that some of Gorky’s archive was still in her keeping. Or perhaps, as in 1918 and 1921, the Soviet regime concluded that her value outweighed her alleged crimes.

On 21 February 1940
The
Times
carried a small notice in its Forthcoming Marriages column:

M
R
B. G. A
LEXANDER
AND M
ISS
T. B
ENCKENDORFF

The engagement is announced between Bernard G. Alexander . . . and Tatiana von Benckendorff, daughter of Baroness Marie Budberg, 11, Ennismore Gardens, London, S.W., and the late Johan von Benckendorff, Jendel, Estonia.
¹⁷

Moura hadn’t liked the look of Bernard Alexander when Tania introduced him to her. ‘He is intelligent,’ Moura admitted, ‘but he is not for you. He has a cold analytical lawyer’s mind and a temperament too different from yours.’
¹⁸
Bernard was a newly qualified barrister, the son of a textile tycoon. Smitten by Tania in London, he had pursued her to Tallinn and holidayed with her at Kallijärv. Tania hadn’t liked him at first; he was politically right-wing, a strict Roman Catholic, reserved, and, as Moura observed, a cold, dispassionate thinker.
¹⁹
Tania’s friends didn’t like him either. But he intrigued her at the same time as he infuriated her, and he had hidden romantic depths. Showing the same unwisdom as her mother, Tania fell in love.
²⁰

H. G. had long since abandoned any hope that Moura would marry or even consider living with him. Indeed, it had become a private jest between them. When he went on his one and only trip to Australia in the English winter of 1938/39, he wrote to her, ‘Dear Moura, darling Moura. Don’t forget you belong to me’.
²¹
He told her that the Australians were not at all as he had expected – no billy cans, kangaroos or wallabies were in evidence. The people rose early, around 6.30 am, and went to bed at half past ten: ‘No place for Moura,’ he commented. ‘Are you being a good Moura goodasme? And is your weight falling and falling?’
²²
The answer to both his questions was quite likely an emphatic
no
.

Moura spent that last summer of peace at Kallijärv with Paul and Tania. It had been here, in the bliss of Yendel, that she had spent that other golden summer twenty-two years earlier, swimming and sporting with Meriel, Cromie and Garstino and all the rest while Petrograd boiled and threatened revolution. Everything was different now. The children were grown up, Tania was being wooed by Bernard, Moura was deep into middle age. And Micky was no longer with them. Moura’s oldest and dearest friend, her second and best-loved mother, had fallen ill and died earlier that year. In the last twenty years, Micky had grown to
be
Yendel in the children’s minds – the focus of their visits. But when she died they were all in London, unable to be with her – ‘on the day she died,’ Tania would recall, ‘my mother and I hung on to the phone to Estonia and wept’.
²³

This would be their last ever visit to Yendel. Estonia was enjoying its last year of independence; it was about to fall under the darkest shadow in all its troubled history. The Wehrmacht was driving into the west of Poland, and soon the eastern states would fall to the Soviet Union.

From Estonia Moura flew to Stockholm, where she was due to meet H. G. at a PEN conference. They were there on 3 September when the United Kingdom and its allies declared war on Germany. Moura and H. G. had some difficulty finding a plane to take them to Amsterdam, where they were stuck for another week until they managed to get a passage on the last boat to leave for England.

23

‘Secretly Working for the Russians’

1939–1946

H. G. was seventy-four, but neither age nor war could curtail his travelling habit. In September 1940, with the Battle of Britain at its height and the Blitz about to start, he sailed from Liverpool aboard the Cunard ship
Scythia
, bound for one of his regular speaking tours of the United States. The North Atlantic was U-boat territory; the
Scythia
was delayed in port, waiting for a place in a convoy, and was caught in an air raid on the docks. Fortunately, she was unharmed, and sailed on without mishap.

Touring the States, from the snows of New York to the heat of Florida, by way of Dallas, Detroit, Birmingham and San Francisco, Wells was periodically asked by acquaintances where Moura was, and he wrote a bitter letter telling her that he had to make the usual excuses for her non-appearance at his side. (She had come to Liverpool to wave him off, but that was the limit of her wish to travel with him.) He met his friend Charlie Chaplin and ‘everybody in New York’, and probably managed to see some lady friends. He had ongoing friendships with Margaret Sanger, the leader of the birth control movement, and Martha Gellhorn. He also spent a good deal of time with his tour agent, Harold Peat, who organised celebrity lecture tours through his company, Management of Distinguished Personalities (on Wells’ recommendation, Winston Churchill had undertaken lucrative speaking tours with Mr Peat). Wells was pleased to note that Peat attracted young women to his side, and he managed to enjoy a ‘last flare of cheerful sensuality’.
¹

Back in England Moura often stayed away from London, where the air raids kept her awake. She spent time with Paul on his farm at Crayke in Yorkshire, which he rented from a family friend. She also stayed with Tania, who was living in Oxfordshire. She had married Bernard in spite of Moura’s objections, and moved to Great Haseley. By the end of 1940 she was pregnant and Bernard was in the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry. Tania took in evacuees, and by 1943 she had a son and daughter of her own.

Despite the raids, Moura still spent time in London. After Liuba’s marriage, Moura had moved from Cadogan Square and began sharing a flat in Ennismore Gardens, Kensington, with another old friend, Molly Cliff, whose son Tony owned the farm in Yorkshire that Paul rented. Molly, who was a part-time air raid warden, had the upper floor of the house, and Moura the ground floor.
²
Ennismore Gardens would be her home for the next two decades – first at number 11, later at number 68. Wherever Moura lived, her domestic environment was always the same; her sitting room resembled a rather down-at-heel salon, where she received her evening guests, and her bedroom, where she did the bulk of her work from her single bed, resembled the back office of a busy publishing house, shelves crammed with books and papers, every surface bearing a tower of dog-eared manuscripts.

At the start of the war, Moura’s old friend (and H. G.’s nemesis) Hilda Matheson contacted her. Hilda had left the BBC and spent several years compiling a survey of Africa. During Chamberlain’s period of appeasement, it had been realised that it would be helpful if pro-British propaganda could be sent out to friendly nations as well as potential enemies. At the beginning of 1939 Hilda had been approached by Section D of the SIS (or MI6, to give it its new wartime codename) and asked to run a secret propaganda organisation, the Joint Broadcasting Committee. She jumped at the chance to return to broadcasting.

During the lead-up to the war, the JBC spread positive information illustrating Britain’s strength and resources. The plan was to display British life, its culture and war activities, depicting a country that didn’t necessarily want war but was prepared for it should it come.
³
Time was bought on various European radio stations and the programmes were styled as travelogues, highlighting the wonders of Britain. Hilda built up a roster of foreign émigrés who had a good command of languages and knowledge of Europe. Moura joined the team in September 1939. Hilda neglected to have MI5 vet her employees; had she done so, Moura would undoubtedly have been barred from working with the JBC.

She wasn’t the only person of doubtful loyalties taken on by Hilda. Guy Burgess, who had been a member of the BBC Talks department since 1936, was also invited to join. He was already working for the Soviet Union as a Comintern agent. Working inside the British propaganda machine was an ideal opportunity for him.

Ways and means of reaching as large an audience as possible were thought up. As Hilda commented, there were no problems with accessing countries such as Sweden, Spain and Portugal, Turkey was reached by cable, Cairo by diplomatic bags and recordings were sent to both South and North America by ship and plane. By ingenious means most countries were soon being sent regular messages. They included Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, the Middle East, parts of Africa, Ceylon, the West Indies and even Germany itself. About one hundred and fifty discs were recorded each month from which around three and a half thousand pressings were made. Subjects ranged from innocuous frippery to serious military matters – ‘Kew Gardens’, ‘George Eliot’, ‘London’s Dress Collection’, ‘Girls of the London Blitz’ and ‘Britain’s Allies in the Air’.
⁴