The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [105]
‘Intervention’ in Russia began as an effort to shore up Russian forces fighting against the Central Powers, but after the Soviet government signed a peace treaty in the spring of 1918, British and Allied forces found themselves aligned with counter-revolutionary White Russian elements in an escalating Russian civil war.3 This meant that any SIS activities in Russia, however carefully designed for purely information-gathering purposes, could inevitably become identified with direct anti-Soviet operations of one sort or another.
Over the autumn and winter of 1918 one intelligence source was the left-leaning writer and journalist Arthur Ransome. Working as the Petrograd correspondent of the Daily News, Ransome had become friendly with Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders. His mistress, Yevgeniya Petrovna Shelepina (who became his second wife in 1924), was Trotsky’s secretary. As Robert Bruce Lockhart observed to the Foreign Office in May 1919, Shelepina had been ‘working with Ransome in connexion with MI1c and was incidentally instrumental in getting out of Russia the numerous Bolshevik papers and literature which Ransome sent on to you’.4 In December 1918 an officer in MI1(c) told MI5 that Ransome (who was known as ‘S.76’) had ‘done quite good work for us’. The same month Ransome and Major John Scale, the head of station in Stockholm (and SIS Inspector co-ordinating work in the Baltic area), devised a scheme whereby Ransome would leave the Daily News and return to Russia as a representative of the British Museum, with a ‘private mandate’ to ‘collect all the available documents (published and otherwise) bearing on Bolshevism’. Ransome thought that ‘such a request would enormously flatter the Bolsheviks, and enable him to go everywhere and get anything of this sort’. Ransome’s closeness to the Bolsheviks had made him suspect in the eyes of some, but Cumming shrewdly argued that his socialist political sympathies might actually boost his intelligence-gathering potential. Putting the plan to William Tyrrell at the Foreign Office on 19 December 1918, Cumming recognised that he could not ‘expect an unbiassed account of affairs from him. But’, he continued, ‘allowances can be made for his prejudices (and it has to be said that, making this allowance, the information he has provided us with during the last month has been satisfactory)’. Besides, Ransome was ‘probably the one person available to go openly to Moscow and Petrograd, and to give us first-hand information of the condition of things, and at any rate the ostensible policies that are being pursued there’.
Tyrrell approved the scheme, and Ransome spent six weeks in Russia in February-March 1919, but there is no evidence that he was able to supply much – or any – useful intelligence during this period. His main concern seems to have been his eventually successful efforts to get Shelepina out of Russia and into England. Perhaps in the end his political leanings did undermine his value as an intelligence agent. The opinion of one officer in the Stockholm station was that ‘S.76 may be regarded as absolutely honest, ’ and that his reports about Russia could ‘be relied upon absolutely with only the proviso that his view tends to be coloured by his personal sympathies with men like Litvinov and Radek [respectively the Soviet envoy in London and a member of the Bolshevik Central Executive Committee]’. Although he would ‘report what he sees . . . he does not