A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (64 page)
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Authors: Deborah McDonald,Jeremy Dronfield
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Historical
BOOK: A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy
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| 17 | Bainton, Honoured by Strangers , pp. 220–23. |
| 18 | Cromie, letter to Adm. W. R. Hall, Apr. 1918, in Jones, ‘Documents on British Relations’ IV, pp. 551–2. |
| 19 | Cromie, letter to Cdre S. S. Hall, Apr. 1918, in Jones, ‘Documents on British Relations’ IV, pp. 550–51. |
| 20 | Moura’s fascination with gossip, intelligence and politics comes through in many of her letters between 1918 and the early 1920s. |
| 21 | A. E. Lessing, addendum to telegram to Col. Keyes, 17 Mar. 1918, quoted in Kettle, The Road to Intervention , p. 3. |
| 22 | Lockhart, British Agent , pp. 251–2. |
| 23 | Lockhart, entry for 19 Mar. 1918, Diaries , pp. 34–5. Balfour (born 1848) was actually 69 at this time. |
| 24 | Lockhart, unpublished diary entry, 21 Apr. 1918; British Agent , p. 269. |
| 25 | Kettle, The Road to Intervention , pp. 16–17. |
| 26 | Cabinet minute, 18 Apr., quoted in Kettle, The Road to Intervention , pp. 68–9. |
| 27 | Lockhart, unpublished diary entry, 21 Apr. 1918. |
| 28 | In British Agent (p. 263) Lockhart has nothing but praise for Maj. McAlpine (‘a man of first-class intellect’) and implies that the two were in agreement in their opposition to Allied military intervention in Russia. He does, however, mention him in connection with officers who didn’t understand his policy and ‘intrigued against me’. In fact, McAlpine’s view on intervention seems to have been as muddled and indecisive as everyone else’s (e.g. see Kettle, The Road to Intervention , pp. 99–100). |
| 29 | Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably between 16 and 20 Apr. 1918. (Most of the 28 letters Moura wrote to Lockhart prior to October 1918 are undated, and their chronology has had to be pieced together from content and context.) |
| 30 | Lockhart, British Agent , p. 269. |
| 31 | Lockhart, unpublished diary entry, 21 Apr. 1918. |
| 32 | Lockhart, British Agent , p. 260. |
| 33 | Lockhart, British Agent , pp. 261–2. Fittingly, Okhotny Ryad became the site of a Moscow Metro station in 1935, and later still an underground shopping mall. Alexander Vertinsky was a major star in early 20th-century Russia (Stites, Russian Popular Culture , pp. 14–15). He was later alleged to be a Soviet spy. |
| 34 | Lockhart, British Agent , pp. 260–61. |
| 35 | Lockhart’s recollection that Moura ‘was never to leave’ after their reunion in Moscow was figurative rather than literal, referring to the fact that it was at that encounter that their relationship entered a new, unbreakable phase. |
| 36 | In 1918 in Russia Easter began on 5 May. |
| 37 | Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably between 28 and 30 Apr. 1918. |
| 38 | Lockhart, British Agent , pp. 267–8. Lockhart gives credit for this victory to Evgenia Shelepina, Trotsky’s secretary, who later married Lockhart’s friend Arthur Ransome. He repaid the favour by using his position to provide her with an under-the-counter British passport which enabled her to leave Russia with Ransome. |
| 39 | Lockhart, British Agent , p. 268. |
| 40 | Kettle, The Road to Intervention , pp. 71–2. |
| 41 | Swain, The Origins of the Russian Civil War , pp. 139–41; Kettle, The Road to Intervention , pp. 66–7. |
| 42 | Lockhart, telegram to Balfour, 21 Apr. 1918, cited in Long, ‘Searching for Sidney Reilly’, p. 1227. In his memoirs, Lockhart makes no mention of having had contacts with anti-Bolshevik elements this early in 1918. The date of his telegram to Balfour coincides with the arrival of Moura and Le Page in Moscow. |
| 43 | Kettle, The Road to Intervention , p. 83; see also Leggett, The Cheka , p. 280. |
| 44 | Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably between 28 and 30 Apr. 1918. It isn’t absolutely clear whether she feared a German invasion or was anticipating a British one, but her tone in the letter is anxious, so it was probably the former. |
| 45 | Advice by Adm. Reginald Hall and annotations thereon, Foreign Office document FO 371/3332, file 91788, 155–158, cited by Lynn, Shadow Lovers , pp. 192–3. Oddly, Lynn interprets this as evidence that Moura was not trusted by the British. The annotation on the document says ‘I did not know there were other ladies besides Mme Benckendorff. I think all our missions should be warned against employing them.’ The sense of this is clearly that ‘them’ refers to the ‘other ladies’. |
| 46 | Kettle, The Road to Intervention , p. 83. |
Chapter 7: Old Enemies, Strange Alliances
| 1 | Moura, letter to Lockhart, HIA. Undated: probably between 7 May, the day Lockhart summoned Boyce to Moscow, and 9 May, the day appointed to travel. |
| 2 | Lockhart, British Agent , p. 276. |
| 3 | Lockhart, British Agent , pp. 276–7; Robin Lockhart, Ace of Spies , pp. 67–8. |
| 4 | Hill, Go Spy the Land , p. 201. |
| 5 | Opinions differ on Reilly’s origins. Robin Lockhart ( Ace of Spies , p. 22) describes him as a Russian-Ukrainian Catholic called Georgi, whereas Jeffery ( MI6 , p. 136) identifies him as Shlomo Rosenblum, a Ukrainian Jew. Kettle ( The Road to Intervention , pp. 85–6) gives his name as Sigmund Georgievich Rosenblum, the son of a Polish-Jewish landowner. |
| 6 | Lockhart, British Agent , p. 277. |
| 7 | Robin Lockhart, Ace of Spies , p. 68; Hill, Go Spy the Land , p. 239; according to Long (‘Searching for Sidney Reilly’, p. 1229) Reilly’s Cheka post has been taken as evidence for suspecting him of being a double agent. However, there was a surprising degree of covert cooperation between the SIS and the Cheka at this time; also a very wide variety of ethnicities served in the Cheka. Russia had been a cosmopolitan empire and was less sensitive to ‘foreignness’ than most Western European countries. |
| 8 | Dorril, MI6 , p. 193. Tamplin later worked as a banker in Riga, and in the Second World War was a colonel in the Special Operations Executive. He died of a heart attack in 1943 while on active service in Egypt – see ‘War Office: Roll of Honour, Second World War’. Database. Army Roll of Honour 1939–45. Soldiers Died in World War Two. (WO304). CD-ROM. Naval & Military Press. Available online at ancestry.com (retrieved 23 Apr. 2014). |
| 9 | Not to be confused with Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, daughter of the Tsar. |
| 10 | Lockhart, British Agent , pp. 279–80. Lockhart gives the date of this event as the night of 24/25 May, but according to his unpublished diary Moura went back to Petrograd on 20 May. Other dating evidence in the diary (published and unpublished) suggests that the true date was 19/20 May. It’s unusual for him to be so inexact, as he wrote British Agent by reference to his diaries. We do know that Moura insisted that he alter the original text of his memoir in several places where the story concerned her (letter 18 Jun. 1932, LL). This could be one of them. |
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