The World That Never Was (73 page)

Ungern-Sternberg held his nerve as the police began their investigation with the round-up of predictable suspects, remaining in Liège for the moment to ensure that the series of attacks he had initiated and helped plan was seen through. Having already accompanied the anarchist Muller in collecting the casings and fuses from an elegant town house in the rue des Dominicains, it appears probable that on 3 May he joined him in placing the next device outside what was taken to be the home of Monsieur Renson, the president of the Court of Assizes. The explosion this time, in a residential area, was of a similar force to that in St Jacques and caused even more alarm and distress: the facades of buildings all around were ravaged and one old woman reported having been thrown from her bed on to the floor. As for the intended victim, the Monsieur Renson who was badly burned and blinded turned out to be not the scourge of anarchists, but his namesake, a popular local doctor.
‘It is to be doubted that it will bring anarchism many new adepts,’ the social democratic newspaper
Le Peuple
remarked of the attack, with considerable understatement. Before dawn broke the baron had fled, leaving the anarchists of Liège to face the music, the additional bombs still in their possession, should they choose to use them.

Claims that events in Liège provided final proof that the anarchists were involved in a truly international conspiracy appeared to be corroborated when one of the documents left behind by the baron conveniently listed eight Germans, two Dutch and five locals among his accomplices; reports in the German press claimed quite mistakenly that Kropotkin had been arrested in Russia. Meanwhile, under interrogation the Liège anarchists began to divulge more information about the baron himself. He had, the police were told, urged one of the anarchists he knew best to ‘come with me, you can be part of a big spectacular’ before setting off alone for Paris, two days before the Café Foyot bombing. Others testified to how he had planned a similar attack on the Café Canterbury in Liège that had only failed due to last-minute nerves on the part of the assigned bombers; how he had spoken too of his involvement with plots in London, his boasts seemingly borne out by information contained in his private papers. Following a further explosion outside the home of the city’s mayor, bombs were discovered in the Théâtre-Royal foyer and close to a prominent banker’s house, while warnings that the baron had been scouting a local gasworks raised further alarm. Despite the inevitable concern with the safety of Liège’s citizens, however, there remained many awkward questions to be answered.

At the prefecture in Paris, the police tried to join the dots. Information supplied by their London-based agent, Léon, that Henry’s dangerous friend Marocco and others had recently visited Brussels gave substance to the notion of cross-border coordination among the anarchists. Léon even provided the class and number of the carriage in which they had travelled, in support of his theory that so short were the distances to be travelled in Belgium that London-based anarchists might themselves have carried out the attack in Liège and still caught the return train. Marocco himself was said to be quite openly advising visitors that the Liège bombings and that in the Café Foyot in Paris were linked. Meanwhile, there were reports from Geneva that the Russian colony there had known of the Liège attacks in advance. In this case, though, the agent noted that the nihilist suspected of funding them ‘always has a well-filled wallet’: a shorthand signal, in this context, that he was an Okhrana agent.

In the past Rachkovsky had always been able to keep any hard evidence
of provocation at arm’s length, relying on friendly figures in the local police, where such operations were undertaken, to intervene and prevent the exposure of his agents. The Paris prefecture had done so with admirable efficiency in 1890, turning a blind eye to the false passport sent to Landesen from the Russian Embassy and ensuring that he was given enough time to make good his escape before their officers swooped; for his part Chief Inspector Mace of the Sûreté had been generously decorated by the tsar. Melville too had done a good job of silencing David Nicoll’s inconvenient revelations about Walsall, at least for a while: it was only unfortunate that awkward scruples high up the chain of command in England meant that his rewards would have to wait. Rachkovsky must have thought his operations in Belgium were at least as secure, guaranteed by the position of respect that his foremost agent held there.

Rachkovsky had made every effort to provide the new life and identity for which Hekkelman had pleaded while holed up in the Grand Hotel in Brighton, after the sting operation of 1890. The stigma of his Jewish birth had been erased in grand fashion, with Count Muraviev and the wife of Imperial Senator Mansurov drafted in as godparents for his baptism in the chapel of the Russian Embassy in Berlin. But his christening as ‘Arkady Harting’ was only the beginning of the makeover. Rapid elevation to the position of state councillor was followed by an attachment, in 1892, to the Russian legation in Brussels, where the Belgian Sûreté, in full knowledge of his true identity, expressed their admiration for his undercover work. It was the next event in Harting’s life, however, that would have most reassured Rachkovsky that Liège was safe for the Okhrana’s operations: his protégé’s marriage to the local high-society beauty, Marie-Hortense-Elizabeth-Madeleine Pirlot, nine years Harting’s junior and the niece of a key figure in the city’s judiciary. The dowry was 100,000 francs, with twice that sum gifted by her parents to help the newlyweds establish a home on the rue des Dominicains, while the presence of the Belgian attaché to the French ministry of the interior as one of four witnesses conferred on the union the appearance of an official sanction.

Yet all those efforts had been in vain, it now seemed, thwarted by the foolish incorruptibility of the Russian consul in Amsterdam, and the excessive zeal of the Liège police. For while the attention of the press and the police had initially focused on Schlebach and the ‘Academy of Anarchy’ that was said to operate out of his club, papers and letters found in the baron’s rented room there had shifted the emphasis of the official inquiry. And when news had arrived from the police in Amsterdam that the man
known best to his old associates as ‘Le Russe’ had been turned over to them by the Russian consul, on whose mercy he had thrown himself, the Liège authorities had broadened their investigation.

Rachkovsky can have had little warning of the approaching storm when, sitting at his desk on 5 May, only four days after the Saint-Jacques bomb and within hours of the baron being handed over to the Dutch police, he was passed a message that a visitor had asked to see ‘Monsieur Léonard’. Just as great, though, was the surprise of the Belgian official sent to track down the man whom letters found in the baron’s room revealed as the financier of the Liège bomb conspiracy. He would have double-checked the address in his dossier before entering the grand courtyard of the Russian Embassy on rue de Grenelle, and surely paused again before mounting the steps beneath the canopied entrance. However, the momentary but unmistakable flicker of recognition in the face of the doorman at the mention of ‘Léonard’ suggested he was on the right track, while the long interval between his request being passed through and his polite but firm ejection from the building surely confirmed it.

In the Okhrana’s offices in the east wing, Rachkovsky himself may have felt tempted simply to close his eyes tight and hold his breath, in the hope that the awkward reality of the situation would melt away. For ‘Léonard’ was his wife’s maiden name which he, in common with Henry Samuels, regularly borrowed for his double-dealing. Seeing the imminent ruin of his reputation and the collapse not only of the great conspiracy he had woven but the wide network of agents he had constructed, he instead moved swiftly into firefighting mode. With the Ungern-Sternberg family, well-known Baltic aristocracy, telegraphing Amsterdam that their relation, whose passport had recently been stolen in Gibraltar, bore no resemblance to the man described, Rachkovsky’s options were limited. Determined to save his agent Cyprien Jagolkovsky from exposure, he applied pressure on the Dutch police who were holding the ‘baron’ to free him, which they did: tellingly, Jagolkovsky’s route back to Russia involved a period spent in hiding in London with Dumont, about whom Nicoll and Malato had harboured such strong suspicions. At least with the ‘baron’ removed as a source of potential embarrassment, the Okhrana chief could turn his attention to perception management, though with so many secrets out in the open the process would be long and laborious.

By the time of the trial of the Liège conspirators, nine months later, Rachkovsky had comprehensively secured his position, due in part
perhaps to strings pulled by Harting in Liège. In the course of the cross-examination, ‘Le Russe’ was endlessly referred to, and yet ‘Ungern-Sternberg’ was not to be blamed: Monsieur Seny, the
juge d’instruction
, informed the court that he had travelled to St Petersburg in person to question the accused, and declared him wholly innocent. The name of Jagolkovsky was never mentioned.
Le Peuple
reported how the Russian consul in Amsterdam, when ‘interviewed afresh, refused to reply, hiding behind professional secrecy’, while evidence that the bombs had been collected from Harting’s house on the rue des Dominicains was also suppressed. Even Muller changed his story, insisting that he had been mistaken in thinking that the baron had helped him carry out the attack on Renson. And as for Monsieur Léonard, who had channelled the funds for the bombings to Schlebach via an anonymous female sympathiser, the judge ruled that a case could not be brought against a man who did not exist.

The truth about the scope of the Okhrana provocation conspiracy in 1894 that encompassed Liège, London and Paris, and the covert involvement of foreign police services, remains elusive today. The file on Cyprien Jagolkovsky held by the Belgian Sûreté was immediately transferred to the cabinet office, where it soon disappeared into the ether, as did the court transcripts; those of Emile Henry’s private papers that were not spirited away by friends in the hours after his arrest were impounded by the French interior ministry. Later they would be joined in oblivion by the documents relating to the Okhrana’s activities in London at the time, as well as Special Branch ledgers that were said for decades to have been destroyed; since their inconvenient reappearance shortly prior to 2002, their retention has been defended, and heavy redaction undertaken. And yet beneath the whitewash, the fragmentary outline of the relationships that Rachkovsky and his co-conspirators were so eager to conceal can still be discerned.

What is known of events in Liège that spring reveals the modus operandi of Rachkovsky’s agents: a model that conforms closely to that of the 1890 sting operation in Paris, was echoed at Walsall, and surely replicated elsewhere. A charismatic figure like the baron or Landesen or Coulon, burning with idealism and determination, presents themselves as an inspiration to impressionable youths who talk a good fight but lack the means. The material is provided, or else commissioned with detailed instructions for its acquisition or manufacture. Funds are supplied from a distant and affluent benefactor, ideally through an intermediary, of a generosity that dazzles any doubters. Secondary agents provocateurs, recruited locally,
affirm the credulous recruits in their sense of purpose. And if the execution of attacks is part of the plan, the bombers’ own preferences may be solicited but are then refined, to ensure maximum impact on public opinion.

So to what had the counterfeit ‘baron’ been referring when he told a group of cowardly Liégeois anarchists that ‘You should see how we do things in Paris’, or when he alluded to his part in plots in London? His involvement in Fénéon’s attack on the Café Véry seems highly likely; the coincidence of the unfortunate Pauwels’ bombing of churches and the baron’s choice of Saint-Jacques as the first target in Liège, intriguing. And then there was Dumont, Jagolkovsky’s associate in London, who had raised such suspicion in Paris the month before Henry’s bombing of the Café Terminus, and who had been part of Ravachol’s group when their raid on the dynamite store, reminiscent of that at Chevron near Liège, had supplied the large haul of explosives used in any number of the attacks that followed. As for Samuels and Coulon, they were bitpart players at least in the whole mad cycle of violent retribution that Rachkovsky’s wiles had kept spinning. Rochefort, if he had a role, unquestionably had his own agenda too.

A year after the Greenwich bombing, a disgruntled ex-sergeant in Special Branch called MacIntyre would be the first to go public on the use of agents provocateurs against the anarchists. ‘Their intrigues produce conspiracies,’ he wrote in
Reynolds News
, his confirmation of longstanding suspicions about the Walsall Affair eliciting a letter from Coulon confessing to his role. For all Melville’s attempts to discredit him, MacIntyre was surely right to say that when such a provocateur ‘finds the prevailing danger is diminishing in quality…He manufactures more “danger”.’ In 1898, Sir Robert Anderson, the assistant commissioner, would admit as much, acknowledging ‘emphatically that in recent years the police have succeeded only by straining the law, or, in plain English, by doing utterly unlawful things, at intervals, to check this conspiracy’. It would be another two decades before a veteran of the French police would admit the force’s involvement in luring Vaillant into bombing the Chamber of Deputies.

David Nicoll evoked the human cost of such tactics with great pathos. ‘Romance and novelty there are,’ he wrote of the anarchist’s life, ‘though sometimes the delightful vision comes to an abrupt termination, changing suddenly like a lovely face into an opium vision of something horrible and devilish. This was the fate of some friends of ours, who dreamed of regenerating the world, and found themselves, thanks to the machinations
of a police spy, doomed to a long term of penal servitude.’ The fate of others was more abrupt.

The twenty-first of May 1894 was a day of executions. In Paris, Emile Henry was guillotined, while in Barcelona, the six men convicted of the Liceo opera house bombing faced a firing squad. As widely expected, their deaths heralded the next wave of revenge attacks. Three weeks later, an anarchist assassin tried and failed to shoot dead the Italian prime minister, Crispi, whom he held accountable for the imprisonment of over 1,000 socialists after the risings in the south of the country. Eight days after that, in Lyons, another Italian, Sante Geronimo Caserio, would meet with greater success: dashing from the crowd as the French president Sadi Carnot’s carriage passed, he hauled himself up on to the running board and plunged a dagger into his victim’s chest. Few were convinced by the assassin’s insistence that he had acted on his own initiative, having simply caught a train from his home near the Mediterranean and then walked the rest of the distance to carry out the act, nor by the anarchists’ disavowal of all knowledge of him.