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part, was enticed back to his death in the Soviet Union in September 1925 by the Trust, a bogus Russian monarchist organisation based in Paris and set up by the Soviet secret police (the OGPU since July 1923) precisely to penetrate and neutralise their anti-Bolshevik opponents. It was an extremely successful operation which also seems to have duped the experienced SIS officer Ernest Boyce, who in the summer of 1918 had briefly been the main Service representative in Moscow, and from 1920 served as head of station in Helsinki and Tallinn in Estonia. From early 1922 SIS had been aware of the Trust, and an agent, ‘21028’, had been deputed to keep an eye on it, with the aim of ascertaining its activities and, potentially, exploiting it for intelligence on the Soviet Union. In 1925 Boyce had the idea of employing Reilly, an old friend, to penetrate the organisation and, evidently without clearing the scheme with his superiors in London, he got 21028 to arrange meetings for Reilly with White Russians in Paris and Trust representatives in Finland. At the latter, on 25 September 1925, Reilly was lured across the Soviet frontier. He never returned, but was imprisoned by the OGPU, interrogated and shot on 5 November. Boyce had to take some of the blame for the tragedy. Back in London, as recalled by Harry Carr, his assistant in Helsinki, he was ‘carpeted by the “Chief ” for the role he had played in this unfortunate affair’.12

The Baltic stations

As the political situation in the Soviet Union stabilised in the early 1920s, the stations in the capitals of Finland, Estonia and Latvia (Helsinki, Tallinn and Riga) worked together on the Soviet target. These three stations comprised SIS’s Baltic Group. In July 1920 Scale was replaced as the Group Inspector by Colonel Ronald Meiklejohn, who had served as an intelligence officer with the British intervention force at Murmansk the previous year. From April 1921 Meiklejohn based himself at Tallinn. Helsinki’s main priority was naval intelligence, since it was best placed to cover the Russian Baltic Fleet; Tallinn concentrated more on military intelligence; while Riga was mainly engaged on political and economic targets. The three stations exchanged copies of the reports they sent to London, but nearly all the military intelligence they produced was sent first to Tallinn for co-ordination. Britain also wanted to keep track of the Communist threat to the security and internal stability of the United Kingdom, especially as represented by the Comintern – the Third Communist International – established by Lenin in March 1919 to promote world revolution. Cumming having established SIS as the primary agency for overseas intelligence-gathering, a fair amount of this work was done for MI5 and the Special Branch. In May 1920, for example, Scotland House (Special Branch) asked SIS to keep an eye on a prominent Communist British journalist, Francis Meynell, who was proposing to visit Rotterdam and Berlin as correspondent of the left-wing Daily Herald. Demonstrating that Sir Basil Thomson wanted information which could be used for counter-propaganda purposes, the brief to SIS observed that Meynell ‘is known to be free with champagne suppers, and any striking contrasts between his way of living and the simplicity enjoined by Socialist principle would be of interest to us’. From the early 1920s a series of roughly biannual ‘Most Secret’ memoranda entitled ‘Review of the Communist Movement’ were compiled for the Foreign Office by Section I of SIS, summarising developments across the world in impressive detail.

The Baltic and other European stations depended almost entirely for Russian intelligence on émigrés, and their most important head agents (for example Vladimir Orlov) were usually former Tsarist officers. Many had fallen on hard times, such as the part-time office cleaner in a Passport Control Office in the Balkans who had been a Russian army colonel. Many of these exiles appeared to remain in contact with informants inside the country and to find it relatively easy to recruit fellow refugees.