The Allied so-called 'Ambassadors' Plot

By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Illustrating the secrecy that still surrounds the so-called 'Ambassadors' Plot, a conspiracy developed by British, French, and American agents during the spring and summer of 1918, earlier this year Nick Clegg the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom urged to lift a 90-year ban on secret documents related to the Plot to kill Lenin which implicated one of his ancestors.

At the time, it seemed like a good idea to invade Russia, defeat the Red Army, stage a coup in Moscow, and assassinate party boss Vladimir Ilych Lenin. An Allied-friendly dictator would then be installed to get Russia back into the World War against the Central Powers.

Ever since the trial in 1918 that was first exposed due to a sting operation in Russia, the plot participants had been seen as near demonic figures in Soviet history textbooks - and a popular Soviet movie Hostile Whirlwinds, which was released in 1953, followed by the 1966 "The Conspiracy of Ambassadors" reinforced this image.

Following the publication  of books like Gordon Brook-Shepherd, Iron Maze: The Western Secret Services and the Bolsheviks, 1998, the work of Michael Occleshaw, Helmut Roewer, Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl, Lexicon of the Secret Services in the 20th Century, in 2003, and whatever we could find in French and also Canadian sources, we posted a six-part in-depth study seen underneath:

When Spies invaded Russia p.1: British Spies from Persia to North and South and Eastern Russia.

The secret mission of the three interventions against Russia was to establish a signals intelligence support group, which was meant not only to guarantee British access but also to serve as a relay for intelligence gathered within Russia and the surrounding areas to London, where it would serve as an informed and reliable basis for further action. Without such signals intelligence presence, the War Office was blind. When Spies invaded Russia p.2. To mold irregular warfare into a method which honored the Imperial myth.

While the intervention in North Russia was based primarily on commercial and military imperatives and secondarily on Imperial great power politics, not of little importance here was that on 1 March 1918, the Murmansk government informed Petrograd that they wanted to accept the Allied offer to assist in the defense of the city. The Soviets acting on a positive reply by Trotsky placed regional military authority into the hands of a council-controlled by Allied officers. Defense of the port passed to the Allied forces with Russian cooperation. When Spies invaded Russia p.3. The alleged protecting of supplies propaganda.

As we have seen in the previous parts of this investigation the initial interventions in Russia were not, until their very end, monitored by traditional military or political chains of command. Their planners were primarily intelligence-operations specialists whose objectives were to preserve and expand the Empire by reconstituting Russia "to withstand German economic penetration after the war." This is why, in the beginning, there were so few troops sent to either of the two areas: there was no need for them. Their purpose was to extend intelligence; that was a technological matter, which required a small supporting military group. But this was soon going to change. When Spies invaded Russia p.4. How North Russia evolved into its military phase.

When General Poole saw the need to get various goods (including Oil that came via the British-controlled part of the Middle East) out of Russia it drove Poole and Captain Proctor (Intelligence Archangel) to suggest that a few troops be moved into Archangeltroops which could provide logistical security for the transport effort. It is uncertain whether they knew about MIO’s operational intentions for that area, or for the similar plans and problems in the south. Given the circumstances and priorities of immediate supply and subsequent commercial advantage, it was reasonable that what Poole suggested, what the Cabinet considered, and what Military Intelligence- operations-MIO provided, made up an acceptable strategic response. Thus hence the objectives of all the interested Imperial parties started to coalesce. When Spies invaded Russia p.5. What must develop into a civil war.

When Spies invaded Russia p.6: Spycraft in Bolshevist Russia.

 

At one point we were contacted by a retired Colonel of the KGB and FSB. Who wrote:

From: ...

Sent: Friday, 5 March 2010, 08:22:01 pm GMT+7

Subject: Greetings from Moscow!

Hi, Eric!

Is it your fascinating historical paper on Russian revolution and Civil war mentioning  Reilly, Dukes, Cromie, Gerhardie and some other British personalities of that period?  I’d like to have some more data on Bell, Hall and Litch. Thank you!

Yuri

He later also wrote us that he was working on a book about the subject in Russian during which several years in a row we had online conversations discussing a large number of related subjects.

We agreed that it started with the “Convention entre la France et l’Angleterre au sujet de Faction dans la Russie méridionale,” leading to the establishment of both the presence and the principle behind the use of “unofficial agents” which also included that Foreign Office and MI1representative Bruce Lockhart was sent back to Russia in February 1918.

We also concluded that in 1918, Allied governments feared that the Bolsheviks had broken their ciphers, so they wrote to their agents with great circumspection. Sometimes, the agents wrote back with equal guardedness. When they wrote frankly, they often did not understand their position or motivations, so murky and freighted was the situation.

Through the years, the Plot has not lacked for historians who by now have referred to it. But the many authors who have tried to tell the story, in journal articles, chapters of books, and sections of chapters, all had to pick their way through a maze of opaque papers, reports, and cables, and then through a minefield of intentionally misleading accounts and statements, false trails, and outright lies.

We also agreed that counterrevolutionary forces already were grouping in the Don region and the northern Caucasus, led by an imposing array of former Tsarist generals:  Don Cossack Cavalry Alexey Kaledin, Lavr Kornilov (who attempted military coup d'état also known as the Kornilov affair),  Mikhail Alekseyev (who played a principal role in founding the Volunteer Army), Anton Denikin, the successor of Admiral Alexander Kolchak.

Most of the peasantry, which constituted the vast majority of the population, likewise despised the new regime. It just had voted overwhelming for Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) in elections to a Constituent Assembly that would replace the Duma and rival the government of soviets favored by Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks, who garnered 24 percent of the vote, as opposed to the SR’s 46 percent, hastily dispersed this body early in January, with the support of the left SRs, who had hived off from the old SR Party at the start of the  First World War. The call to reconvene the Constituent Assembly would reverberate and worry the Bolsheviks for years.

In these circumstances, non-Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik Russians, some of them Lockhart’s Kadet friends, opposed any effort that might legitimate or strengthen the new regime (e.g., his mission). Many would welcome a German invasion to overthrow it. Most of the diplomats and officials Lockhart interviewed said they wanted the Bolsheviks gone, although they did not want the Germans to make them go. They, too, thought his undertaking a fool’s errand, as did half the remaining British embassy staff. Lockhart discovered to his dismay that the British navy, army, and intelligence departments had sent agents into Russia, and almost all had been offering to support counterrevolutionary movements. 

Soon he discovered that the very British government he represented held mixed views of his assignment. Lloyd George and Milner backed him in London, but the elusive Balfour remained lukewarm. Simultaneously, most cabinet ministers and Foreign Office and War Office mandarins, including Robert Cecil, opposed him outright. To win the war, they aimed not to propitiate Bolsheviks but to occupy three Russian ports, Vladivostok, Archangel, and Murmansk, by invitation if possible, but by force. This might cause difficulties for the Bolsheviks, but at this point, the primary goal was to keep caches of Allied weapons and supplies in those towns from German hands (mainly as an excuse). Moreover, two ports held strategic importance: Vladivostok was the terminus of Russia’s railway in the Far East; Archangel was the terminus of her railway from Moscow to the northwest. There were additional reasons to keep the Germans out of them.

But there was more to it, even that. On February 9, merely a week after Lockhart set to work in Petrograd, the Russia Committee of the British government met at the Foreign Office to discuss the three ports and their significance. Captain Proctor (Intelligence Archangel), recently returned from Archangel, told assembled committee members that although the Bolsheviks would object to Allied occupation, the mass of Russian people would not because they despised Bolsheviks as Jews and German instruments. Proctor had more significant ideas than the mere occupation of ports, however. He explained from Vladivostok that Japanese troops could “advance along the Siberian Railway, leaving guards as required at stations, bridges, etc., and finally reach Vologda [northern point of a triangle linking. Petrograd and Moscow] without anyone knowing of their coming before their actual arrival.” From Murmansk and Archangel, French and British troops could travel south, also to Vologda. Then, joined with the Japanese and tens of thousands of re-enthused Russian soldiers, ex-deserters who would flock to their banners, they could head west to confront the Germans.

We know from analyzing the available information that in 1918, Lockhart had known that Anglo-Bolshevik cooperation would suit both parties. A friendly Russia would be suitable for Britain in the war against Germany and for economic reasons. A close Britain would be ideal for Russia, not only at present when Russia lacked everything, but in the future, when she might temper the Bolshevik sense of beleaguerment and help to moderate Bolshevik policies. Lockhart also understood that the Russian counterrevolutionary movement was disunited, reactionary, ineffectual, and even unworthy. He ignored what he knew.

Whereby after the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, he joined the interventionist camp.  Bolshevik excesses made opposition to the regime easier, but the possibility of self-advancement also moved Lockhart and his colleagues. The chance to wield power and, having wielded it successfully, to be in a position to wield it again was a great aphrodisiac. But the cost of it! As Reilly said, the plotters would win only if they employed methods as subterranean, as secret, as mysterious, as ferocious and inhuman as those used by their opponents. That is what they planned to do.

The story of the Ambassadors’ Plot thus is also a story of debasement on all sides then and of fear, cynicism, opportunism, and futility. Men and women make their history, but not in conditions of their choosing, and therefore rarely as they wish it. Lockhart and his colleagues hoped their Plot would represent a turning point in Russian and even world history, but it was a turning point that failed to turn. Dzerzhinsky and his colleagues thought they were building paradise, but that is not what they created. History is not unknowable, except while it is being made.

At a historical moment when everything in Russia was in the melting pot, all the protagonists on both sides understood what was at stake, but no one understood his inconsequence. Perhaps Lenin had an inkling when he realized that the forces at work in Russia in 1918 were too vast for anyone to harness or channel, let alone divert into another channel as Lockhart and Rilley wished to do. With Lenin’s guidance, the Bolsheviks managed to ride the raging torrent, but that was not preordained, as they well knew.

In conclusion, the Bolsheviks were stronger than Lockhart, and his colleagues thought. Cold War histories represent the Bolsjevists as a small, unpopular gang who carried out a coup d’état and then kept control by terror. But it’s more apparent now that their internal support was massive and reliable, albeit nothing like a majority. 

Also, the Red Army had not yet been adequately organized. For security, the Bolsheviks relied on the Latvian Rifle Brigade, which was shot through with defeatism and mainly wanted to go home to a newly independent Latvia. Lockhart was in contact with senior Latvians who, he hoped, would storm the Kremlin and arrest Lenin and Trotsky. This would coincide with a move south by the British forces in the northern ports and a move north to Moscow by Russian counter-revolutionaries.

But the Lockhart plot, as it is often referred to, thanks in unintended part to Fanya Kaplan, a former anarchist who supported the Socialist Revolutionaries, fired shots at Lenin as he left a gathering of workers in Moscow. Two of the bullets struck Lenin, nearly killing him. In the process, Lockhart was also arrested, taken to the Cheka headquarters in the Lubyanka, and interrogated. As a diplomat, he got VIP treatment and was even moved to detention in comfortable rooms in the Kremlin, where his lover Moura was allowed to visit him.

One way or another, Lockhart’s plan did not stand a chance. Lockhart and his colleagues hoped their plot would represent a turning point in Russian and even world history, but it was a turning point that failed to turn.

 

 

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