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to hear from Cowan, correctly assumed that retrospective permission would be given. On 16 June a first attempt was abandoned after one of the motor boats broke down and had to be towed back to base. The next night, despite problems with the torpedo mechanism, which had to be repaired as they approached the Soviet naval base, Agar again penetrated the Kronstadt defences, sank the heavy cruiser Oleg and under heavy fire got safely away. Following this, two attempts by Agar to get Dukes out failed: one when Dukes’s courier was spotted by a Soviet patrol, and the second when their rowing boat foundered near the rendezvous point. On 17-18 August, Agar, with a flotilla of seven motor boats, launched another attack on Kronstadt in which two Soviet battleships were sunk, thus securing Allied naval command of the Baltic. On 25 August he made a final effort to exfiltrate Dukes, but in attempting to evade the Kronstadt searchlights at full speed he rammed his boat into a breakwater and had to nurse his badly damaged vessel back without completing the mission.8

Scale evidently disapproved of Agar’s actions. The attacks on the Soviet fleet, although (and perhaps because) they were so spectacular and successful, by alerting the enemy to the presence of British units made it much more difficult for a motor boat to slip past the port defences to deliver a courier or pick up an agent. In August 1919 Scale described Agar to Cumming as ‘very “difficile”’, and asked Admiral Cowan to replace him. The potential conflict demonstrated here between ‘special operations’ and ‘secret intelligence’ was a constant concern for intelligence practitioners. It was an issue, moreover, which was to crop up during the Second World War, especially in the relations between SIS and its sibling service, SOE (Special Operations Executive).

Dukes eventually escaped through Latvia and, on his return to England, was rewarded with a knighthood – the only member of the Service during its first forty years to be thus rewarded for work in the field. Although, apparently, ‘sufficient evidence [was] available to justify ST/25 being recommended for V.C.’ he was found, ‘as a civilian’, not to be eligible for a military decoration. Agar, however, brought home at about the same time, was awarded the VC for his part in sinking the Oleg and a DSO for the second attack. Dukes’s vivid eyewitness accounts of conditions in Soviet Russia were much in demand after he got back to London on 17 September, and this surely helped to secure Cumming’s reputation as the country’s most important intelligence chief. On 18 September Dukes reported in person to both the Director of Military Intelligence and Sir Basil Thomson. Cumming also took him to see the Secretary for War, Winston Churchill, who gave him a ‘long interview over 1½ hours’. On 20 September Cumming brought him to meet Lord Curzon at his private residence, 1 Carlton House Terrace.

Dukes left the Service the following year, but he was obviously very taken with his experience, and he stayed involved on an occasional basis. In May 1920, when the Foreign Office official Rex Leeper, who had been working in the Political Intelligence Department, was going to Poland on a ‘fact-finding’ mission, as well as to review the work of Cumming’s representative at Warsaw ‘and make suggestions for the future’, Dukes was to accompany him on behalf of SIS, ostensibly as his secretary, and offered to work only ‘for bare expenses’. In the end Dukes went out independently, and stayed in Poland for six months, attempting (without apparently much success) to establish a network of agents to work on Russia, but nevertheless sending back what Nathan described as ‘very interesting’ reports about the anti-Bolshevik side in the Russian Civil War.9 He got back to England in November 1920, and over the next few years evidently nursed ambitions to return to Russia as an agent. But his high profile as a ‘Russian expert’ (for example, he toured the United States giving lectures on the topic), his contacts with increasingly unreliable White Russians, and the Bolsheviks