Britain's Agent | Historical
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That's Airwave History Plus, available now on Apple Podcasts. Airwave History Plus, the essential audio destination for history lovers. This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know?

What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I'm Rhianna Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Britain's agent. Vladimir Lenin once said that there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen. At the end of August 1918, the father of the Bolshevik revolution finds himself in the midst of one of those weeks.

Lenin is all too aware of the low rumble of discontent threatening to boil over.

And so, on August 30th, he makes a public appearance in Russia's new capital city of Moscow. He goes to an armaments factory and tries to basically rally support for the cause. At the factory, Lenin delivers a characteristically rousing speech, celebrating the role these men and women are playing in arming the still young revolution. He finishes to cheers and applause before walking towards a waiting car at the factory's gates.

But as he goes, he hears a jeer from the crowd. He turns to see a woman step forward, a pistol raised in her hands. He shot three times and is in a really terrible state. As his guards leap on the assailant, the Bolshevik leader collapses to the ground. Bullets have torn through his neck and lungs. Fighting for his life, he is rushed to the Kremlin for treatment. Soon, word of the attack spreads like wildfire.

Panic grips the city. And it's in that context where there's a feeling amongst the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, that there might be a wider conspiracy being hatched against the entire Bolshevik regime, that a series of raids are carried out on the 31st of August and into the days ahead in Moscow and in St. Petersburg. And these raids are targeting suspected enemies of the state.

The British Embassy in Petrograd is raided by armed Czechists. There's a gunfight there with the British military attaché. This is a gross violation of international law. This is Russian troops going onto British territory. And on top of that, they murder a British Embassy staffer. Amidst this chaos, there is one target deemed to be of extraordinary significance.

a British diplomat called Robert Bruce Lockhart. Barely out of his 20s, Lockhart has already made quite the name for himself in the opening act of the Russian Revolution. He is a mover and shaker, as likely to be seen at lunch with Leon Trotsky as he is listening to gypsy ballads in some watering hole of ill repute. And now he is on the checkers list.

Lockhart is one of the big fish that they hope to land and they do so by going through his front door in his Moscow apartment. They arrest him, they arrest his deputy, Captain Hicks, they arrest his lover, Mura Budberg, and they cart them off to prison. In a stark cell in the Lubyanka, pale dawn light breaks through the window. Sleep is impossible.

And so the diplomat has time to chew over his prospects. Being arrested by the Cheka is never a good thing at the best of times, but particularly in this moment where there is this real suspicion that there is a conspiracy, an attempted coup d'etat about to happen. You've also got the fact that allied armies have been landing troops in Russia for the preceding weeks and this sense that the enemies of the revolution are coming to snuff out the revolution once and for all.

Lockhart knows that plenty of innocent men have died in the crosshairs of Bolshevik paranoia. He also knows that he is far from innocent. It's a time where there's a lot of paranoia, a lot of suspicion, and quite rightly so because this is the period where Lockhart is in the midst of a plot to try and alter the course of Russia's history. That plot will see Lockhart's name go down in history.

He will forever be associated with a brazen effort to decapitate the fledgling Bolshevik state, an ill-fated attempt to stop this most monumental of revolutions in its tracks. And yet the story of Lockhart himself, of the bold and charismatic adventurer who charmed his way to the heart of Russia, has never truly been told. Until now.

My name is James Crossland. I'm a professor of international history and I have just written the first biography of Robert Bruce Lockhart entitled Rogue Agent: From Secret Plots to Psychological Warfare: The Untold Story of Robert Bruce Lockhart. In Rogue Agent, James Crossland provides a compelling and honest account of a man who has stayed too long in the shadows.

Lockhart's is a story of epic proportions, and it begins a very long way from that bleak Russian cell. So Lockhart was a proud Scot, the product of two families, the Lockhart's and the McGregor's. He's raised well in a loving environment.

Born in 1887 to a school headmaster and the heiress to one of Scotland's oldest whisky distilleries, Lockhart would later say he arrived on this earth with a Scotsman's instinct for adventure. He always liked to read stories of adventures in far-off lands and foreign exotic cultures when he was younger.

And to be honest, I don't think he ever really grew out of that. I think he was always this inherently curious person who really looked at the world as a plaything. He saw there's a whole world out there. Go figure it out. Go have adventures. Go be curious. Go poke your nose in things you shouldn't poke your nose into. That was always his mindset. And it was a mindset that the good fortune of circumstance allowed him to indulge from a young age.

He has a family that's reasonably wealthy. I wouldn't say massively wealthy, but wealthy enough to send him off to the colonies, as men of his class often were at this time, to make his fortune. At 21 years old, Lockhart set sail for Malaysia, where his uncle owned a rubber export business. He had been drawn by the idea of immersing himself in a strange land, or going native, as colonialists of the day would have put it.

But when he arrived, he found himself cooped up in a port side office, surrounded by other expats. It was only a couple of years later, when his uncle entrusted Lockhart with running a plantation further inland, that he got his first taste of true adventure. He got involved in a quite scandalous relationship with a Malay princess there, which led to all kinds of problems with the local sultan.

Caught up in the danger and excitement of his first great romance, Lockhart let his attention slip from the rubber plantation and risked upending his uncle's entire operation. When he came down with a life-threatening case of malaria, his uncle took his opportunity to swiftly remove Lockhart from the precarious situation he had created for himself. His exit from Malaysia marked a bitter disappointment.

He somehow manages to not make money on a rubber plantation in the middle of a rubber boom. He returns to Britain with disgrace hanging over him, not just because of his failures as a businessman, but also some of his moral failings. Chastened by those failures, Lockhart resolved to grow up and find suitable employment for a young man of his station. To redeem himself, he sits civil service entrance exams

which he passed with flying colors. A steady life of pencil pushing awaited. He also banished all thought of the princess he left behind in Malaysia. - He gets engaged to a woman called Jean Turner, who is the daughter of a wealthy mining magnate. - Lockhart was trying to do right by his concerned family.

But fate had other plans. He ends up at a job with the Foreign Office. He gets an overseas deployment to Moscow as a junior vice consul. The missing child is Lucia Blix, nine years old. Please, let her come back home safely. Thursdays, the kidnappers plundered meticulously. If money is what it takes to get her back, we're going to pay it.

The secrets they hide... You can't talk about this. You can't write about it. ...are the clues... The mother's hiding something, I know it. ...to find her. Tell me where she is. The Stolen Girl, new episodes Thursdays, stream on Hulu. If Lockhart's inner flame of adventure had been dampened by his experience of Malaysia, his arrival in Moscow at the beginning of 1912 proved it had not been entirely extinguished.

The moment he gets to Russia, he realizes there's a whole lot more to do than just be a buttoned down husband in this life, because this is Tsarist Russia at its excess. You know, this is getting into the First World War. This is lots of champagne, lots of caviar, lots of parties that last for days. This exotic, exciting, crass and indulgent place that he's been thrown into, and he absolutely loses himself there. He always had a bit of a party animal streak in him, and during

During his time in Tsarist Russia, he indulges that to its full. He also has a head for languages, which is always useful. Picks up Russian in about six months and is able to converse freely with all class and all manner of Russian. Very quickly, Lockhart built a reputation as a new breed of diplomat, one quite determined to get in amongst it.

The diplomatic corps in Tsarist Russia is old and stale, not to put too fine a point on it. The ambassador doesn't even speak Russian fluently. He's never had to. He's spoken French because you can get by speaking French at the Tsar's court.

You've got this very uptight, very regimented, very, well, you know, the Tsar's always going to be here. Russia's always going to be like this mentality. And Lockhart, he doesn't mind talking to people with some weird political ideas. He is a very different type of diplomat to the traditional buttoned down diplomats that exist amongst the British Corps in Tsarist Russia.

As Lockhart immerses himself in all of the spectacle and excess of Tsarist Moscow, he begins to notice something that has so far evaded his diplomatic colleagues. He can taste change in the air. As much as he enjoys the excesses of Tsarist Russia, he also understands that it's a faulty system. Since 1914, Russia has been allied with Britain and France in their gruelling war against Germany.

In this state of dramatic unrest and distraction, Lockhart divines a gathering storm. And it's during that time he really carves out a reputation in Whitehall as a guy who's good at gathering intelligence. He has a knack for extracting information from people. He's very gregarious. He doesn't mind getting out into the clubs where the subversives, the revolutionaries, the radicals are.

And the reports he writes as Russia's steaming towards the revolutions of 1917 are really insightful. He shows a grasp of the situation on the ground. He doesn't try to sugarcoat how bad things are going. He is under no illusions that the Tsar is going to be able to keep control of Russia. He does in many ways forecast what's going to happen and how badly it's going to go.

With his increasingly frantic dispatches to London, Lockhart was dismissed by some as a doomsayer.

And his well-known appetites for excess did little to contradict the picture of an erratic and unreliable source. These kind of indulgences do get him into trouble pretty much from the moment he's in Russia. He's getting involved with women he shouldn't be getting involved with as an engaged and then eventually married man. But he won't be restrained. He sees life as this thing to grasp with both hands and to enjoy to its fullest.

And yet, it's because of those appetites that Lockhart is destined to miss the seismic event that he himself had prophesied. Though he does, at least, catch its prelude, in which Russia's Tsar, Nicholas II, is forced to abdicate his throne at the beginning of 1917.

He's there for the February revolution. He misses the Bolshevik revolution because in the intervening period, he's got himself involved with a woman whose identity has never been fully confirmed, but supposedly she had some affiliation with the Bolsheviks. And this was seen as, well, it was seen as a no-no for one thing because he's a married man. It was also seen as a bit of a no-no because he's

now tied to and possibly in a compromising position with the new regime, which the British government has not got a handle on yet. All they know is that they're revolutionaries. So he's recalled in disgrace just before, in fact, the Bolsheviks take power. And so the young diplomat returns to the UK once again with his tail between his legs. He expects his standing at the foreign office to be diminished by scandal, but instead he

He is greeted as something of a savant. After all, he alone saw this monumental revolution approaching. And this is a big part of the reason why, when the time comes in 1918, for the British government to find a liaison to this new Bolshevik regime, someone who's unorthodox, someone who doesn't mind breaking bread with revolutionaries, someone who has a grasp of the language, the culture and the situation on the ground,

That's when Prime Minister Lloyd George says Lockhart's the guy, even though he's barely 30 years old. You know, he's a young man and he has a reputation for being quite cavalier. But given the circumstances, he seems like the perfect person for this rather unorthodox time. When Lockhart returns to Russia, he is to do so with a new title. From this point on, he shall be Britain's agent.

It is a role with a rather opaque mandate. Well, the term British agent is an interesting one. It has existed since about the 1880s, but it was never properly defined. It is a term that basically means you are a... You are part diplomat, you are part spy, you are a fixer. It's born of this Victorian mentality of British governance of the empire, which is we invest in the man on the spot. You get a man who knows Britishness,

The region knows the language, knows the culture. You send him to the trouble spot and he will just figure it out, whatever the problem is, revolution, insurrection, political instability, whatever it is. And at the dawn of 1918, there is one very big problem facing Great Britain.

It's something that I think we can often forget about when we analyze the Bolshevik revolution is that the First World War is still going on at this time. And it's a war which is reaching an absolutely pivotal point because the Americans have not arrived en masse yet. The possibility of the Bolsheviks extracting themselves from the war, which was one of Lenin's key platforms when he was coming to power, that he was going to bring peace to Russia.

That is worrying because that then means that all the German troops on the Eastern Front are going to move west and make a mauling of the French and the British. So it's a really tenacious time. And the top of Lockhart's things to do list when he arrives in Russia in January 1918 is to ensure that the Bolsheviks stay in the war. When Lockhart returns to Russia, he's only been away for a matter of months.

And yet, as Vladimir Lenin would no doubt concur, it seems as though decades have passed. He's shocked and depressed when he's wandering the streets of St. Petersburg, which he has such fond memories of as this magical place with its grand boulevards and everything else. And he's walking along and the roads haven't been swept. They're covered in snow.

There's a dead horse frozen to the side of a bridge. No one's lighting any of the braziers to melt the snow. The streets are deserted. If there are people on the streets, they're shuffling around trying to see if shops are open. And if those shops are open, the shelves have got very little on them.

All of this comes as a great sadness to a man who had fallen in love with the grandeur and decadence of Tsarist Russia. It's a real shock to Lockhart and it's interesting that even though he gets this first impression of what's happening, he doesn't immediately switch to this idea of, well, the Bolsheviks are completely wrong and they're doing this wrong and this is going to end badly. He keeps this, I wouldn't say faith, but he does keep this idea in mind that maybe the Bolsheviks can

and consolidate this and turn this into something. - It is here that Lockhart distinguishes himself. Where other agents might turn their nose up at the prospect of cozying up to a violent revolution,

Lockhart understands that his primary job is a pragmatic one, not an ideological one. I think that's what makes him ideal for the role. And it's one of the more fascinating things about researching him is that in this era where you've got people either swinging violently to the left or later on swinging violently to the right, Lockhart remains pretty politically agnostic.

He understands that these ideologies have not grown out of nothing. He understands that they exist for a reason. He understands that there are grievances in the world that are driving these ideologies. And I think back to that innate curiousness, he wants to figure out why people believe these things and where these beliefs are going to take the world. That's the thing that drives him. And so, in Lockhart's first weeks back in Russia, he wastes no time getting to know the new regime. ♪

The primary target of his intrigue is one of the great intellectual drivers of the Bolshevik revolution, one Leon Trotsky. He is interested in people. That's the thing about Lockhart. He is curious about everyone. And that means that he can sit down and see someone like Trotsky who might otherwise be regarded as this...

totemic ideological figure, and he will evaluate him as a person. He will look at his hands, he will look at how he dresses, he will think about how he speaks, and he'll assess him on his merits, as well as thinking about where he sits in the pecking order. And this is where Lockhart turns the charm on. He knew that Trotsky was a very important person, and so he charms him. He turns up with a copy of Das Kapital, a

In his assessment of Leon Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, Lockhart is fundamentally driven by one question. Are these people we can work with?

His answer to that question will surprise anyone with a basic grasp of 20th century history. He believes that he can figure out a way to bring Britain and the Bolsheviks together, that he can negotiate some kind of mutually beneficial relationship that will see the Bolsheviks stay in the war, continue helping out until such time as the Germans are defeated.

And in the process, he's hoping that the British government will recognize the Bolsheviks. His assessment of this opportunity ruffles plenty of feathers back in Whitehall.

But unlike his colleagues in the Foreign Office, Lockhart is clear-sighted about the realities of this new political situation. This is another area where Lockhart differs from some of the power brokers in Whitehall in that he is pretty confident that the Bolsheviks are going to stick around. He does not think that they're a flash in the pan. And with the gift of hindsight, we can look at what happens after 1918. We can look at the Soviet Union and its existence into the rest of the 20th century and

say, "Well, this was inevitable." But at this period, nothing is inevitable. And there are plenty of people looking at the Bolsheviks saying, "Well, this isn't going to last, is it? These guys are going to fall apart." The so-called Whites, the Tsarist forces that had regrouped in certain parts of southern and eastern Russia to try to fight back against the Bolsheviks. And there's a lot of people who think, "Yeah, we can back these people and we will eventually get rid of these revolutionaries."

Lockhart doesn't really buy into that. He is quite confident that despite the state that Russia's in when he arrives in 1918, and despite his misgivings over particularly some of the violent excesses of the revolution, which he sees firsthand in 1918 in Moscow, he nonetheless has it in his head that these guys are going to be sticking around and that the best thing the British government can do is to learn how to live with them.

And so Lockhart makes it his personal mission to broker an understanding between Britain and the Bolshevik regime, the basis of which would be Russia's continued involvement in the Great War.

And it's only a few weeks later that the Bolsheviks completely ruin his mission by extracting themselves from the war by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Germans. So Lockhart is instantly on the back foot. The mission parameters change to don't keep the Bolsheviks in the war, but make them get back into the war, which is a really, really difficult prospect, given how staunchly the Bolsheviks are opposed to getting involved in this imperialist war.

This new development is far from ideal for Britain's agent. He knows he is walking a tightrope. It makes things just all the more difficult because now he has to convince Whitehall that he can convince Trotsky to get the Bolsheviks back in the war. Trotsky is war commissar, is in charge of the fledgling Red Army. And...

And he's basically having to, on the one hand, say to his bosses back in London, "These guys still want to fight the Germans. They just need a bit of time to consolidate, but don't you worry, they're going to get back in the fight." And on the other hand, he's saying to Trotsky, "Well, you need to help us out here, otherwise there's going to be Allied intervention. The Allies are going to land troops on Russian soil so that they can restart the Eastern Front themselves."

which is something that Trotsky and Lenin are completely opposed to for obvious reasons. They don't want imperialist Western boots on the revolutionary soil. They know the danger there. Lockhart is caught between the old world and the new, one of the very last threads keeping them together. His reputation hinges on his ability to broker this most unlikely agreement. And yet, it would be fair to say that his eyes are not exclusively set on this prize.

So, Lockhart's time in Russia in 1918 is the defining moment in terms of his career. It is also, I think, the defining moment in terms of his personal life, because shortly after he arrives in Russia, he meets a woman by the name of Mura Bekendorf, as she was known then. She goes on to be known more widely as Mura Budberg, who is a fascinating figure in her own right.

She is a noblewoman. She is a seductress. She is a spy. She, like him, is a very adventurous soul. They fall instantly for each other, despite the fact they are both married.

And Murat spends more and more time with Lockhart over the spring into the summer of 1918. She becomes increasingly estranged from her husband, who is vehemently anti-Bolshevik and practically pro-German. She believes that Lockhart offers her a life of adventure. She loves the fact that he is this dashing Briton. She's an Anglophile, so that helps as well. In Murat, Lockhart meets a true kindred spirit.

someone who is likewise drawn to risk and excitement. There's this parallel that happens where they are in the midst of this very intense, very passionate courtship. And a big part of that is that they are coming together through their love of the clandestine, through their love of plotting, through their love of being in the know, of gathering intelligence. There's this adventure that is just heightening the romance there.

Perhaps it is this budding romance, above all else, that motivates Lockhart's next move. Or maybe it's something simpler. The slow dawn of realization that his plan is destined to fail. Lockhart's original mission of having to keep the Bolsheviks in the war is something that he believes he can do for a short time. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he believes he can convince Trotsky to get back in the war.

But that only lasts two months or so. By the time we get to the early summer, he realizes this is not going to happen. He also realizes that that mission failure is going to impact on him.

And he, by this stage, has gathered around him not just Murat, but a whole network of spies, diplomats, and various other adventurous souls who are looking at the situation and thinking to themselves, "Well, the only way that we can get Russia back in the war," and it's important to stress that Russia back in the war, not necessarily the Bolsheviks, but the Russian state back in the war, is to put someone else in charge of that state.

So while Lockhart continues to publicly court the Bolsheviks and promote opportunities for collaboration, he begins to privately invest in the very opposite scenario. He gathers around him a network of counter-revolutionaries of all stripes.

This network of people are also mindful that an allied intervention is coming. There are going to be troops landing on Russian soil at some point. And so the idea that if this force of British, French, Japanese troops are going to land on Russian soil en masse...

You can back them up with some kind of counter-revolutionary action in the cities, something that attacks in the Bolshevik heartlands, something that attacks the leadership, something that undermines them, something that stirs up local counter-revolutionaries, in particular the socialist revolutionaries, who despite the name are oppressive.

bitter enemies of the Bolsheviks. So this network of allied agents start working with the socialist revolutionaries and other forces like the Whites, these other counter-revolutionary forces over the summer in particular of 1918 to try to come up with this plot to support an allied intervention. And it's from that web of plotting and conspiracy and intelligence gathering that Lockhart develops what becomes known as the Lockhart Plot.

It's April of 1918, and Britain's agent in Russia, Robert Bruce Lockhart, has begun secretly conspiring to overthrow the Bolshevik regime.

An opportune moment for a surprise visit from one of that regime's most notorious enforcers. Jacob Peters is the deputy head of the Cheka. He and Lockhart have a curious relationship. They are friendly, but then there's also this underlying menace there. And in April of 1918, Peters arrives at Lockhart's hotel suite. He says, get in the car. We're going to go for a drive, which is never a good thing to hear from a Chekist.

Lockhart has got no option but to comply. And what ends up happening is he's taken on this murderous tour through these various sites of massacre across Moscow where the Chekists have gone in. They've shot up these houses that were full of anarchists or socialist revolutionaries, other counter-revolutionary forces that were deemed to be criminal elements plotting against the state. And Peters is showing Lockhart the bodies of

This gruesome demonstration is a warning to Lockhart. One that says, "Tread carefully."

He's, you know, showing how indiscriminately these people have been massacred. And he's doing it as a form of threat. And what's curious is Lockhart doesn't question why at this time he's being targeted. And one of the reasons why we can figure out from going back and looking through the material is that it does seem that at about this time, the checker do start tapping his phone.

and tapping his communications. So at the precise moment when he's starting to pass information to these counter-revolutionary groups, starting to pass money to some of these counter-revolutionary groups, the Cheka are onto him. And this was a warning to knock it off, which of course he did not. Quite the contrary, in fact. Because already, Lockhart's story was on a collision course with history.

A trajectory that would accelerate rapidly with the arrival, that very same month, of another mysterious British agent. One who would come to be known as the Ace of Spies.

Search for the True Spies episode of the same name to learn more about him. So Sidney Riley arrives in Russia not long after Lockhart and he, like any good spy, announces his arrival by going up to the gates of the Kremlin and saying, I am here to see Lenin. He's in a uniform as well. I think it's a Royal Air Force uniform. He says, I am here to see Lenin. Let me in.

But Lockhart would soon find out.

Indeed, his name would be tied to Riley's, for better or worse, for decades to come. Unbeknownst to Lockhart, Riley's been dispatched by the head of MI6 on this mission to basically do something not too dissimilar to what Lockhart's trying to do, trying to figure out the situation.

Riley is, on the surface of things, a very different breed of agent to Lockhart. Where the Scotsman is pragmatic, fluid and charming...

Riley is a brazen and egotistical crusader, afflicted with a clear case of Walter Mitty syndrome. His arrival should set off alarm bells for Britain's agent. Riley crashes into his world completely out of the blue.

With all of his eccentricities and all of his big ideas, his sort of egomaniacal ideas about being the savior of Western civilization and destroying the Bolsheviks and all this. And again, to that point about Lockhart and how he's fascinated by people, he does seem to like Riley. He does seem to be kind of charmed by him, perhaps swept up in the dashing madness of Sidney Riley. I don't know how really to understand it.

But he does seem to fall into Riley's orbit. And I think that Riley has quite an influence on him. I think Riley provides a bit of confirmation for the way that Lockhart's mind is already trending towards looking at the Bolsheviks and saying, well, you know what? So long as they're in power, this situation won't be resolved. And so Lockhart finds an unlikely ally in the ace of spies, an eccentric figure with no shortage of bold ideas, the one that will stick...

...and determine both of their fates in Russia... ...centres around an important component of the Bolsheviks' revolutionary forces... ...known as the Red Latvian Riflemen

Riley, in particular, hones in on this elite brigade of the Red Army called the Latvian Riflemen, two members of which have offered to defect and to help out any Allied landing by encouraging their units to lay down arms and let the Allies roll on through. They give this information to Riley. Riley takes this information to Lockhart, and the two of them enter into this series of meetings with these Latvian Riflemen

No military unit is more respected and trusted in Bolshevik Russia than the elite Latvian riflemen. Indeed, they are often entrusted with personally guarding the leaders of the revolution. That privileged access offers an unbelievably valuable opportunity. The answer to both Riley and Lockhart's prayers could be contained within the Latvian riflemen plan.

which evolves from this idea of, well, we'll just lay down our arms and help the Allied advance into Russia when there's an interventionist force landed, into, well, maybe we could take up arms against the regime. Maybe we could arrest Lenin and Trotsky at gunpoint. Maybe we could kill them. It's here that things get murky.

Because the specific details of this plot, how drastic its designed outcome and the extent to which each party was involved, are all fiercely contested. They all have different versions of what this plot was and how it was meant to go and who was involved.

Lockhart claimed that he basically handed the plot over to Riley and that it was really the Riley plot and that he didn't know what the grand plans were for Counter-Revolution. He basically said this was all Riley. And Riley, self-absorbed as he is, did much the same in his later works where he claimed that actually he was the center part to it and Lockhart was kind of peripheral. In this version of events, Riley was the rogue agent taking the bull by the horns.

And Lockhart was just a bit player, scarcely even aware of the scheme that the ace of spies was cooking up. And yet... The documentary evidence tells a different story. James Crossland has spent untold hours poring over the various conflicting accounts and reports of this series of events. He says there is only one conclusion that can be drawn...

When you look at all that together, it does seem that what actually happened was Lockhart was far more involved in this plot than he ever let on. He did give the go-ahead for Riley to basically shepherd the operation, and Riley himself seems to have been an accelerator of this idea or moving the plot in this direction of something more aggressive than simply letting the riflemen lay down their arms. And

And Lockhart, I think, approved of that. He backed it. He thought it was the only way to go. And that's the thing that when you piece together all these bits of evidence and look at the story in the main, that's an inescapable conclusion. But a question does remain. Why exactly would Lockhart commit to this outlandish plan after witnessing the brutality of the Bolshevik regime firsthand? It's not as though he had no other options.

Well, Lockhart has three opportunities, at least from the spring until the summer, the late summer of 1918, to leave Russia. There are a number of Allied diplomats who leave at this time because they see that the situation is worsening, that the Bolsheviks are getting more radical, particularly after the Romanovs are murdered in July 18th.

The cold-blooded execution of Russia's imperial family had sent what remained of the diplomatic corps scrambling to get out while they still could. But Lockhart had stayed on. Again, we must ask, why? Lockhart stays on for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he stays on because professionally he has to complete his mission. He knows that if he goes back...

to Britain having accomplished nothing that his career might well be over. He wants to stay on in a personal sense because by this stage, Murat is pregnant with his child. Keep in mind, his wife is back home in Britain, so there's layers to this. But he does have this idea in mind that he wants to stay in Russia with Murat.

And then the third reason which kind of ties these two together is that he is looking at the situation and thinking to himself, you know, this is my moment. This is my moment of destiny. This is me rising above all my failures, going back to my failures in Malaysia and all the people who doubted me and everything else. This is my moment where I can prove everyone wrong.

He is fortified in many respects by the belief that his mission is righteous, that it's going to serve him well. He must know that the chances are slim, but the potential gains are monumental.

And it all ties together with this idea that if this all goes well, the Bolsheviks are gone, some new Britain-friendly regime is installed, Lockhart's the hero who made it all happen, and he's got the girl and he's got his child, and maybe Russia, which he loves just as much as Murrah. It is that prospect that seems to have kept Lockhart invested in Riley's machinations.

And whether the architect of the idea was Riley or Lockhart is, in any case, something of a red herring. Because there is a third figure at play here too. One unseen by either agent. There are three titles given to this plot. One is the Lockhart plot, one is the Riley plot, and another is the Jasinski plot.

And the third one is a reference to Felix Jasinski, the head of the Cheka, who appears to have, back to my previous point about Lockhart's communications being tapped, he seems to have known the inklings of this plot from the start. He certainly knew that Lockhart and Riley were in the business of trying to find people who could turn on the Bolsheviks. And it's Jasinski who sends these two men, these two members of the Latvian Rifle Brigade as agent provocateurs, basically, to make contact with the British.

In their excitement at the prospect of finding turncoats so close to the heart of the revolution, both Riley and Lockhart had failed to thoroughly vet the riflemen offering up their services, an oversight for which they would be punished.

These two men are working for the Cheka. And it does seem that what Jasinski was trying to do was to tease out how large a network the Allies had formed against the Bolsheviks. How many spies there were, how many informers there were, what other plans there were beyond this. Were there plans, for example, to execute or assassinate members of the Bolshevik regime? How much was this operation coordinated with the intended Allied landings in Russia?

Jasinski was on a fact-finding mission and he was trying to use these men to find those facts. A scenario that he may well have let play out indefinitely, were it not for the dramatic events of August 30th, 1918, a day that begins with the public assassination of the head of the Petrograd Cheka, Mozai Oritsky.

Zamoza Irytsky, who is a head Bolshevik official, he is killed not long before there's an attempt on Lenin's life at the armaments factory south of Moscow. These two events are drawn together by the Cheka. They look at them as being related.

They then compare this to what the intelligence that's being gathered through the Latvian riflemen about the size and reach of Lockhart and Riley's network and their intent, their idea of subverting entire battalions of the Red Army. And Jasinski reaches the conclusion that these assassinations, these targeted killings are the precursor to a wider coup and that that coup is imminent. In reality, neither of the attacks have been organized by the British spies.

Though each of them must know that this minor detail will not protect them in the manhunt to follow. In this moment of crisis, the Cheka must shut down as much anti-revolutionary activity as it possibly can.

And so that's what leads to the decision to try to wrap up Lockhart's network. That's why his apartment is raided only a few hours really after the attempt on Lennon's life. That's why the British Embassy is raided the next day. And that's why all the indiscretions that Riley has made during this period

all the information he's let out about where his contacts are, where his safe houses are, who's passing his intelligence around, all of that is weaponized by the Cheka and they go out and they round up these networks. Which brings us back to where we started, with Britain's agent sat in a Lubyanka jail cell, separated from his pregnant Murat, staring down the barrel of Bolshevik retribution.

After his guided tour of Czechist atrocities, Lockhart must expect the worst as he heads into his interrogation.

On this front at least, he is happily surprised. Well, as interrogations go, it's quite pleasant. Again, it's Jacob Peters, his frenemy. They have an open conversation. There's a bit of menace there, but there's also charm, you know, sharing of cigarettes, casual conversation, all that. But Peters makes it very clear to Lockhart that he knows what he's been up to and there's no point lying. And yet Lockhart sees that ploy for what it is.

an effort to trick him out of a confession. He suspects that the Cheka have much less on him than they're suggesting.

Lockhart himself has kept himself rather aloof from the plot. Rather ingeniously, Lockhart manages to cover up a lot of the documentary evidence, which, and I say that's ingenious because this is a man who is a compulsive writer, writes everything down. He destroyed some key documents that could have incriminated him, managed to destroy them actually in the Lubyanka without the guards seeing. And so Lockhart stays tight-lipped.

A tactic that is rewarded the following day when he is informed that he's free to go. He's let out for a couple of reasons. The first is that they don't really have much on him. The second is that they most likely are trying to see who he talks to, where he goes.

And then the third reason is I think they also want to see if he does try to escape. I think they wanted to see whether or not they could catch him red-handed trying to flee the country. Regardless of the reasoning behind it, Lockhart's surprise release is perhaps his last opportunity to cut his losses and get out of Russia.

He would not be alone in that decision. At this time, the rest of the network are scattering. Riley is donning all kinds of disguises and moving from safe house to safe house trying to get out. George Hill, another part of the network, has gone to ground. I think he goes to Ukraine. There are various other people who are trying to get themselves either into or out of the American embassy, which becomes a bit of a haven for some of the plotters. But for Lockhart, escape is out of the question.

at least while the fate of his lover and his unborn child hang in the balance. He does have Mura in mind. She is still incarcerated. He wants to know where is she? And that's what leads to him eventually going back to the Kremlin and basically saying, look, you need to tell me where she is. By which time, the Cheka have decided that Lockhart is too valuable a catch to simply let go.

The British agent is thanked for handing himself in and promptly imprisoned at the Kremlin just three days after being released from the Lubyanka.

The comparative luxury of his new prison does little to ease his sorrow. The Kremlin already had a reputation as a place from which you did not return if you were incarcerated there. People who went to the Kremlin wound up buried in its gardens, basically. That was the reputation. So Lockhart is in a very scary situation. And during his time in the Kremlin, he is subjected to what today we would call psychological torture. He is threatened physically.

with a bullet in the back of the head. He is taunted by the guards who say, we have a pool going on how long you're going to last. There are a lot of mind games played on him during his time there. And he does have a genuine fear, I think, that he is going to be executed. So for him personally, this is an absolute life and death scenario that he's got himself into. Lockhart endures weeks of this torment before Peters tries a new tact in his interrogations.

carrot rather than stick. Finally, in late September, Murrah is brought to the Kremlin. The expression on her face as she enters his room says everything to the imprisoned spy. When Murrah is brought in by Peters to see him, she has to tell Lockhart first and foremost that through the trauma of being arrested, incarcerated, and the pretty vile conditions in which her and other inmates were kept, she's lost the baby.

So this is a real crushing moment for both of them, both Lockhart and Murrah. But she's able to also bring some intelligence about what she knows about who's been arrested, the whispers she's picked up. This is a feature of their relationship where she is constantly gathering intelligence. She was more adept at this even than he was and passing it on to him. And she says, look, you know, all will be well. Just stand your ground.

I'm working on something. It is this meeting with Moura that gives Lockhart the fortitude to hold on, even as he grieves for the child they will never meet. He's able to get intelligence there, which then gives him a bit more insight into what's happening out there and gives him the required knowledge to assess the situation and realise that actually Peters is running against the clock here because there is public pressure out there

particularly in Britain, diplomatic pressure for his release. And if Lockhart can hold on and not confess to anything, eventually Peters is going to have to let him go. But Peters has one final gambit up his sleeve, a compelling one at that.

Peter's in the midst of this sort of polite psychological torture that he's subjecting him to says, look, if you go back to Britain, your career is finished. The Lockhart plot, the storming of the embassy, his detention, the accusations in the Russian press about all the things he was going to do, the sabotage, the killing of Lenin, all that, that's all in the papers across Europe, if not the world. And so Peters is saying, look, you know, you're going to return to London in disgrace forever.

You're going to be a failure. People are going to look at you and think you're the guy who humiliated the government by letting this secret plot out of the bag. Your career's over. You love Russia. You've been pretty open-minded about us Bolsheviks. Your woman's here. Why don't you stay? It's a tantalizing offer for a man who found a home, a calling, and the great love of his life on the streets outside his window.

But Lockhart also understands that throwing in with the Bolsheviks would gift his oppressors a potent victory. If he stays,

he will be nothing more than a tool of propaganda. Lockhart knows that's precisely what he's going to be, so he doesn't go for it. Some historians have looked at this episode actually and been a bit curious about whether or not he does take the deal and he later on becomes almost like a sleeper agent for the Bolsheviks, which I'll just say I've found no evidence of that whatsoever.

From what I can tell, it does seem that Lockhart rejects that, tempting as it is in context, and he decides instead that he's going to, when the inevitable happens and he gets a chance to be exchanged and returned to Britain, that he's going to take it. Lockhart will not have to wait long for that opportunity. His exchange is arranged for 1 October 1918. Murat accompanies him to the train station.

He's put on a platform and he has this incredibly emotional farewell with Murat because she has to stay in Russia. She is regarded as a citizen of what is soon going to become the Soviet Union. She has family there. She has children from her marriage. She has a sickly mother and she's being watched by the Cheka. So she's not going anywhere. Lockhart is. And so they have this tearful farewell.

And I get this sense from the way Lockhart describes it and the way the two recounted in their letters that they exchanged with one another later into the 1920s, that he seems to understand that this is the end, that they will probably never see each other again. For Lockhart, this is more than just a farewell to Murat. It is goodbye to a long-held dream of heroism. It is farewell to Russia...

the magnificent and maddening land that he will be doomed to love for the rest of his days. For deep down, Lockhart knows he will never return. Lockhart is confirmed in his assumptions when shortly after arriving back in Britain, he, Riley and various other conspirators are tried in absentia in Russia and they are all found guilty and they are told if you ever step foot back on Russian soil, you will be shot.

which Riley infamously does, or he is lured back onto Russian soil to make it more precise in 1925 and summarily executed. Lockhart never tempts fate that way. In the years that follow Lockhart's return, Jacob Peter's premonition hangs heavily over his head. To Lockhart's despair...

the Cheka leader was right about what this life would entail. It's a fall from grace. He ends up working back at the Foreign Office in a less glamorous position than a British agent. He's working principally in Prague, but in other cities in Eastern Europe. And he drinks quite heavily. He parties long into the night. His marriage suffers. He feels listless. Just like in show business, there are seldom second acts in espionage. And yet...

Against the odds, Lockhart will leave further marks on history. He doesn't really get back on track until the 1930s when he starts getting involved in anti-fascist propaganda and it's through that that he ends up getting a chance at redemption by running Britain's psychological warfare campaign against the Nazis during the war. And what of Murat Budberg, the cunning spy who had been at his side during the most exciting chapter of his life?

What fate befell her? Murat has a much better 1920s than Lockhart does, even though she spends a good part of it up until 1924 still within the Soviet sphere.

She manages to survive the Bolshevik regime. And keep in mind that Mura is a woman who likes the finer things in life. She's noble. She is not used to the sort of privations of a classless society, let's say. She's also not particularly happy about being watched by the Cheka all the time. She does manage to get through all this, first by becoming a muse and then later basically the business manager of Maxim Gorky.

the famous literary giant of whom Lenin is a big fan. That offers her a lot of protection. Mura ultimately managed to leverage that protection to extract herself from the Soviet Union. And it is on this point that Lockhart's premonitions would be proven wrong. Because while he would never see Russia again...

he would reunite with the woman who, for him, had embodied all of its charm and promise. When she finally reunites with Lockhart in Austria, it is in 1924, he is in a pretty wretched state. His health is bad. He's drinking too much. He's quite depressed. And she is bubbling with life.

She's got all these different projects going on. She remains very well connected to a lot of the movers and shakers in European life. She remains that way for decades to come. And he does realize that there is this real separation between them. But what's intriguing and what I found kind of poignant and sobering was that

They remain together. They're no longer in a relationship, not this sort of passionate affair that they were involved in in 1918, but they've matured together into something which is more like a lifelong partnership. A partnership that would somehow last the rest of Lockhart's days.

right up to his death in 1970. Murrah outlives him. She's there, communes a funeral for him by herself in an Orthodox church in West London, which is how she figured he would want to be commemorated.

It is this wonderful story of these two people who kind of meet in the passion and fire of revolution and they grow old together still with that bond and that almost mischievous, almost childlike yearning for adventure and to pass intelligence to each other and to work together. It's a wonderful story. And it's one that you can experience in all of its compelling detail in James Crosland's book, Rogue Agent.

In his final estimation of Lockhart, Crossland locates the nuance that has often evaded accounts of this most ill-fated of spies. He was so much more than a failed coup. And I think when you step back and you look at the lingerie of his career, you cannot call him a hero. I'd never call him a hero.

But I also don't think that he was a complete waste of space either. I don't think he was as big a screw-up as perhaps historians have said. I think he was very tenacious. I think he has moments of extreme bravery. I think he has moments of extreme cowardice. I think he was incredibly gifted, highly intelligent, but he had his demons and he had his flaws. I think he was an exceptionally human person, and that's what made him so fascinating to write about.

Tune in next time for another secretive encounter with true spies. Disclaimer. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the subject. These stories are told from their perspective and their authenticity should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

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Josephine Baker, she knew how to cultivate a celebrity culture. She would wander down the Champs-Élysées with this cheetah in a diamante collar. And this comes back to why she was such a superb and unsuspected spy. Although she was a celebrity, quite the opposite of the ordinary spy who would hope to pass unnoticed, her own personality was sort of hidden very deep. She made the

feel that she was giving them insight into a very intimate involvement when in reality this was a projection. True Spies The Debrief from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.