The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [106]
While Ransome operated in Russia openly under his own name, others working for Cumming did not. One such was agent ST/25, Paul Dukes. When he was recruited in the summer of 1918, Dukes recalled that he had been told: ‘we want someone to remain there [in Russia] to keep us informed of the march of events’. Sir Robert Nathan instructed him to ‘report on changes of policy, the attitude of the population, military and naval matters, what possibilities there might be for an alteration of regime, and what part Germany was playing’. Briefed in Stockholm by Major Scale, and with forged documents cheekily identifying himself as ‘Joseph Ilitch Afirenko’, a Ukrainian clerk of the Cheka, Dukes returned to Petrograd through Finland in December 1918.
Displaying great courage and a real gift for undercover work, for most of a year he based himself in Russia under a number of disguises. For a while he was a post office clerk named ‘Alexander Markovitch’. With the help of a doctor friend he posed as an epileptic, and later he became ‘Comrade Alexander Bankau’, a soldier in the ‘Automobile Section of the VIIIth Army’. Dukes reported mostly low-level, though accurate, information about conditions in Russia which he managed to send out by courier. In March 1919 the Naval Intelligence Department described him as ‘the only reliable & regular source of information about happenings in [the] Baltic Fleet, and everyone who knows [the] conditions under which he works can have nothing but admiration for him’. One of his reports, from the end of April 1919, had been ‘written on tissue paper’ and ‘carried out of the country by a Russian officer who hid it in his boot’. It described factory strikes, disturbances in the Russian fleet, inflation and the desperate food situation. Predicting ‘coming inevitable change’, it asserted that there was ‘little hope of any lasting settlement, or comfort other than that any system of administration will be less intolerable than the present’.5
In order to keep in touch with Dukes, Cumming personally organised two high-performance shallow-draft motor boats under Lieutenant Augustus Agar (‘ST/34’) to be stationed (with the permission of the Finnish authorities) at the Terijoki Yacht Club on the Gulf of Finland close to the then Russian frontier, only some twenty-five miles from Petrograd and the adjoining island naval base at Kronstadt. The twenty-nine-year-old Agar, who had served aboard HMS Iphigenia in north Russia in 1917 and 1918, was a brave and independent-minded man of action who took enthusiastically to ‘special operations’. Admiral Walter Cowan, commanding the British naval forces in the Baltic whose task was to prevent Soviet domination of the sea, was out of the same mould as Agar, and, by allowing the vessels to be equipped with torpedoes, evidently contemplated something more than just ferrying couriers in and out of Russia. It took Agar and the motor boats some time to reach Finland, as they were held up for a while by Swedish customs, who questioned their implausible cover story that the vessels were the latest type of pleasure boats and the crews (in plain clothes) were actually salesmen. The Finns were more accommodating, and within three days of his arrival at Terijoki in mid-June Agar had successfully negotiated his forty-knot vessel through the minefield of the Kronstadt defences, landed a courier near Petrograd and made it back safely to his base.6
Because of the short nights of the northern summer, Dukes himself sent instructions not to attempt another sortie until mid-July. Meanwhile an anti – Bolshevik demonstration in one of the garrisons on the Russian shore of the Gulf of Finland was being crushed by a Soviet naval bombardment and Agar resolved to take what action he could. According to his memoirs, Agar signalled Cumming in London asking permission to attack the Soviet fleet. The reply, ‘Boats to be used for Intelligence purposes only – stop – Take no action unless specially directed by S.N.O. [Senior Naval Officer] Baltic’,7 was enough for Agar, who without waiting