Operation Kronstadt: The True Story of Honor, Espionage, and the Rescue of Britain's Greatest Spy, The Man with a Hundred Faces
384
Operation Kronstadt: The True Story of Honor, Espionage, and the Rescue of Britain's Greatest Spy, The Man with a Hundred Faces
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Overview
Paul Dukes, a thirty-year-old concert pianist, was a master of disguise—dubbed ‘The Man with a Hundred Faces’—and an English spy in Russia. As the First World War was drawing to a close, and as the revolutionaries sought to consolidate their newfound power, Dukes was cut off in Petrograd after infiltrating the Bolshevik Government and stealing top-secret information. With the government in London desperately in need of the documents in Dukes’s possession, and the Bolshevik secret police closing in, a seemingly suicidal plan was hatched to rescue him.
Young naval lieutenant Gus Agar and his handpicked team of seven men boarded plywood boats—the fastest naval vessels in existence, most armed with only two machine guns and a single torpedo. They set out for the island fortress of Kronstadt, the most well-defended naval target in Russia—and into the jaws of the Soviet police.
Written by a former MI6 officer, Operation Kronstadt tells the full story, making for an extraordinarily gripping nonfiction thriller.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781468303148 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ABRAMS, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Sales rank: | 488,373 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Man with the Punch-like Chin
In Parliament Square in London, Big Ben struck a quarter past eleven.
Just a short distance away, Lieutenant 'Gus' Agar RN was becoming increasingly uneasy. He had been standing for some time in front of the large oak desk in an attic room just off Whitehall watching a thickset elderly man in civilian clothes read through an official-looking file of papers. The old man had not even acknowledged his presence yet and Gus had no idea why he had been summoned so urgently from his weekend leave on that morning in May 1919. He certainly did not know the identity of this strange individual with his horn-rimmed spectacles and comically jutting chin – rather like the Mr Punch character in a seaside puppet show.
But as Gus stood there feeling awkward, it gradually dawned on him that he had met this strange man somewhere before. He remembered being briefly introduced to an elderly naval captain just a few weeks ago by his commanding officer at their base on Osea Island in Essex. The old officer had walked with a pronounced limp and had used a silver-topped cane to support himself. Gus had assumed that the visit had simply been some routine naval inspection and the meeting had been so brief that he could not even recall the officer's name. But although the old man was now out of uniform and wearing a grey three-piece suit, this was definitely the same person. Gus could see the walking stick leaning in a corner of the room behind the desk.
As the old man continued to read, Gus took the opportunity to glance around the room. His commanding officer at HMS Osea had ordered him to report to the Admiralty that morning where he would have a meeting with a Commander Goff of the Naval Intelligence Department about 'Special Service'. However, once he had finally found the commander's office amidst the warren of passages at the Admiralty, Gus had been surprised to be taken back out of the building and then on a deliberately confusing route through the side streets of Whitehall. They had entered another building which housed, amongst other things, the Royal Automobile Club and had taken the lift to the top floor. They had then taken the stairs to the roof where they proceeded to walk up and down through a disorientating maze of temporary offices and gantries. Finally the pair had arrived at the ante-room of this office where, after a brief word with the Commander, an attractive secretary had ushered Gus straight inside. Since then he had been left to wait with nothing to do but watch this old man reading through the file slowly and methodically. He wondered why on earth he was there.
At long last, the grey-haired officer removed his spectacles and slipped a gold rimmed monocle into his right eye. He looked up for a moment. Then, dramatically slapping the desk hard with his hand, he suddenly addressed Gus for the first time:
'Sit down, my boy – I think you will do!'
The greatest rescue operation in the history of the British Secret Intelligence Service had begun.
Augustus Willington Shelton Agar was the youngest of thirteen children. He had been born in 1890 and was orphaned by the age of twelve. His mother, who was Austrian, had died shortly after his birth and his father, an Irish tea planter based in Sri Lanka, died of cholera during a business trip to China in 1902. 'Gus' (as he was understandably known to his family and friends) had been sent away to boarding school in England at the age of eight and in 1904, at the suggestion of his beloved eldest brother Shelton, Gus had joined the Royal Navy as an officer cadet. He was to remain with the Navy for the next forty years.
By 1919 Gus was skipper of one of the fastest pieces of naval weaponry in the world. Officially it was designated simply as a 'Coastal Motor Boat' or 'CMB'. Unofficially it was known as a 'skimmer'. Developed in great secrecy in 1916, the skimmers were the brainchild of three young naval officers which had been transformed into reality by the boat builder Sir John Isaac Thornycroft. The skimmers possessed revolutionary hydroplane hulls which enabled most of the craft to leave the water and to almost literally fly above the waves. They could achieve speeds of up to forty-five knots, fast even by today's standards but astonishing for 1919. Gus's boat was forty feet in length and carried a crew of three: captain, gunner and engineer. It was armed with twin Lewis machine guns and a single torpedo which weighed three-quarters of a ton and contained a charge capable of sinking a battleship. Some later CMBs were fifty-five feet long and could carry two torpedoes. However, the CMBs also had an Achilles heel: they were constructed with a skin of thin plywood in order to make them as light as possible and there was little room in their tiny hulls for anything other than weapons, ammunition, the massive engines and their fuel tanks. One shot, even landing close to a CMB, could blow the entire boat to smithereens. Sheer breathtaking speed was a skimmer's only defence.
Following their successful development and deployment, a flotilla of CMBs had been formed by the Royal Navy for special duties in 1918. They had been intended for a secret mission in the Baltic aimed at the destruction of the German High Seas Fleet. The unit had the pick of all the best young officers in the Royal Navy. Each of them was desperate for command of one of these craft with the speed and freedom of a fighter plane, plus the punch to put a capital ship out of commission. Only the best had been selected for the intensive training that the mission required. They spent their time roaring up and down the English Channel, sinking small enemy craft and generally making things unpleasant for the Germans. They had already achieved their first major combat honour when they helped in the operation to sink blockships in the approaches to Zeebrugge harbour on St George's Day, 1918.
But before their plan to attack the German High Seas Fleet could be put into effect, the war had come to an end. The unit now kicked its heels on a dreary base on Osea Island in Essex at the mouth of the river Blackwater. Some CMBs had been sent abroad on other duties but for the rest of the flotilla there was nothing to do except watch the rain pelt steadily onto the mudflats that ringed the island and dream about the Wrens who were billeted in the neighbouring facility. Occasionally, a few officers were granted leave in London, a chance to see a West End show and sink a few drinks, but that was as exciting as it got.
Gus Agar felt particularly hard done by. In 1913 he had qualified as a fighter pilot for the Royal Naval Air Service, but there had been a shortage of aircraft so he had been forced to give that up. In 1916 he had missed the Battle of Jutland, the only major naval battle of the Great War, because the battleship on which he was serving was too slow to join the British fleet in time. Finally, he had been tricked into joining the CMB flotilla at Osea simply because they needed a torpedo and mining specialist. Now, with the war over, it seemed that any chance of glory had gone for ever.
It was then that he was abruptly summoned from his few days' leave and ordered to report to London immediately.
The elderly gentleman behind the desk was Captain Mansfield Cumming RN, the head of MI1C, the foreign section of the British Secret Service Bureau, the organisation which we know today as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) or, more commonly, as MI6. Gus later described this meeting as '... like one of those strange and vivid dreams where every detail stands out with startling and unforgettable clearness. It seemed to me as if I was living in a George Henty short story specially written for the Boys' Own Paper of my childhood days in the nineties, but in which I was to play a part.'
It is hardly surprising that the meeting had a dreamlike quality for Gus because Mansfield Cumming appears to us today like an intelligence-service chief straight out of the pages of a cheap thriller. Within Whitehall he was known simply as 'C', a tradition which has persisted to this day for every head of MI6. His office was secreted amidst a warren of passages and temporary offices which had been built high amongst the rooftops around Whitehall. Looking through the dormer windows of Cumming's office, Gus would have gazed across the plane trees of Victoria Embankment to the grey waters of the River Thames. The room itself was like an alchemist's laboratory: one table was covered with parts of various intriguing machines, another with bottles of chemicals and apparatus for creating secret inks (one of Cumming's personal favourites was an invisible ink made from his own semen). Another table was littered with detailed maps of far-off parts of the world and along one wall there stood a row of telephones ready to connect Cumming with the various parts of his mysterious organisation. Most of these were links to different rooms in the rooftop labyrinth, but we know that one connected him directly to the Director of Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty.
Cumming loved gadgets of any kind and carried a sword stick whenever he travelled abroad on missions. He was always eager to obtain an example of any invention which might be useful for espionage. He kept a fully equipped workshop both at his headquarters in London and at his home in the village of Burlesdon, Hampshire. His other great passion was speed, an urge which was so strong in him that Gus later referred to it as a 'mania' having been driven across London by Cumming on a terrifying journey. In his early life Cumming rode fast horses and was a keen huntsman. But following a bad fall in which he broke both his arms he turned to the brand new sport of motor racing, taking part in many semi-professional races on the Continent such as the Paris-Madrid rally of 1903. He described his 50 h.p. Wolseley motor car as 'almost human – far more so than many folk of my acquaintance.' Meanwhile, at sea, he owned a series of fast motor boats which he raced. They had names such as: Commander, Communicator, Competitor and Comely. He even took to the air in his quest for speed and exciting new machinery: he became a founder member of the Royal Aero Club in 1906, just three years after the Wright brothers' first flight, and like Gus he had qualified as a pilot – in 1913, at the grand old age of fifty-four.
Cumming's other great weakness was women. According to the playwright Edward Knoblock, who was an MI6 officer during the Great War, Cumming kept a book of erotica (Le Nu au Salon) in a secret drawer in his desk which he liked to show to selected officers. He would then extol the virtues of 'the female form divine'. This disclosure was considered a singular, if rather weird, honour. At lunchtimes Cumming would often take off in his Rolls-Royce (swerving onto the wrong side of traffic islands for the sheer excitement of it) and drive along Regent Street just so that he could 'have a look at the girls'. He used his position as head of the Secret Service to employ a succession of pretty private secretaries. Many visitors to his office commented on them. He selected these young women for their looks and it is hardly surprising that those who knew him well described him as 'a notorious womaniser'.
There was one other thing which was distinctive about Mansfield Cumming – his wooden leg. Cumming's only child, Alastair, had been killed on 2 October 1914, shortly after the outbreak of war. Alastair had been attached to the Intelligence Corps in France and Cumming had stopped off to visit him – he often visited France for meetings in the first few months of the war. They had been speeding through woodland near Meaux in Cumming's Rolls-Royce when a tyre suddenly burst and the car span out of control. It careered into a tree and was wrecked. Alastair was thrown some distance from the car whilst Cumming was trapped under the wreckage by his right leg. Hearing his dying son's fading cries for help, Cumming used his penknife to saw through the remains of his shattered limb and then hauled himself across the ground to lay his coat across Alastair. But it was no good. A few hours later, Cumming was found unconscious next to the body of his dead son. A large portrait of Alastair in military uniform dominated one wall of the office. Early press reports stated that Cumming was driving at the time of the accident, although later writers have said that Alastair was at the wheel. In any case, there is some evidence that Cumming's wife never forgave him for the loss of her beloved son.
If Cumming felt that he was to blame for the crash, he never discussed it with anyone and although he had walked with a wooden leg ever since that day he did not let it slow him down. In keeping with his mildly eccentric character he travelled around the corridors of MI6 on a child's scooter which had been specially imported for him from America. He had also developed a habit of suddenly driving a paperknife into the wooden leg during meetings to test the nerve of prospective agents. On one occasion he even used it as a club to attack Vernon Kell, the head of MI5, during an interdepartmental argument.
Over the course of the next hour this rather bizarre character presented Gus with a seemingly intractable problem. The primary post-war intelligence target for MI6 was the former Russian empire which had been suffering under the rule of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks since their coup in November 1917. The country was locked in a bloody civil war between the Bolsheviks (known as the 'Reds' from the colour of their banners) and a loose coalition of former Tsarists and nationalists supported by the West (known as the 'Whites' from the colour of the flag of the former Russian empire). The struggle was delicately balanced and it was unclear if the Bolshevik government would survive. If they did not, it was equally unclear which of the many contenders would rule in their place. At one point it had even seemed possible that the new government might be formed by an MI6 officer: Lieutenant Sidney Reilly, a Russian Jew and conman, who had begun to organise a daring coup. But his plans had been ruined following the attempted assassination of Lenin in August of that year. The Bolsheviks had retaliated with a period of brutal reprisals known as the 'Red Terror'. Thousands of their political opponents were simply rounded up and shot – including most of those who would have supported Reilly's scheme. Reilly and every other British intelligence officer in Russia had been forced to flee the country in order to avoid capture.
The entire future of the Russian empire was now at stake. All that was required to seize control was determined action. But the governments of Western Europe and the United States dithered, knowing that although they could send armies to ensure that the victors were favourable to them, their electorates would be reluctant to undertake another conflict so soon after the horrors and losses of the Great War. If Western governments were to make the right decision, then accurate intelligence was vital – yet all the Western embassies in Russia had been closed in February 1919. This meant that the task of providing all this badly needed information fell upon the intelligence services and, with Britain as the dominant power in Western Europe, on MI6 in particular. Despite this desperate need for intelligence, conditions in the country were now so dangerous that MI6 had only one agent there. A man who would be known to Gus only by his code name: ST-25. The ST designation was because all Russian operations were run out of MI6's regional headquarters at Stockholm in Sweden.
Gus was told that ST-25 was based in Petrograd, which, until a few months before, had been the capital of Russia. From there he had been producing vital information including copies of key documents right from the heart of the Bolshevik government. But now communications with him had broken down completely. ST-25 had been using a system of couriers crossing the northern border between Russia and Finland on foot and ST-25 himself had left Russia twice during his mission using this route. But on the second journey he had barely escaped with his life and the border was now so closely guarded by the Bolsheviks that it was almost impossible for couriers to get through. It was believed that his two most recent couriers had been captured and shot. The only other route out by land was to the south through the Baltic republics of Estonia and Latvia. But this area was now being fought over by the Red and White armies and security was even tighter than in the north as the Cheka, the dreaded Bolshevik secret police, hunted for deserters and infiltrators.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Operation Kronstadt"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Harry Ferguson.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
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Table of Contents
Praise for OPERATION KRONSTADT,
Copyright,
Author's Note,
Acknowledgements,
Illustrations,
Prologue,
1. The Man with the Punch-like Chin,
2. The secret that 'C' couldn't tell,
3. Froggy chooses Sinbad,
4. Very special measures,
5. Peter Sokolov,
6. The Zorinsky Enigma,
7. The Commandant of Terrioki,
8. Melnikov's Marvellous Uncle,
9. Too late the hero,
10. Failure to communicate,
11. Gefter,
12. The Kronstadt Raid,
13. Lucky Number Thirteen,
14. Run for home,
15. The boat they couldn't sink,
Epilogue,
Postscript: What happened afterwards,
Appendix A: The Kronstadt Raid (Personnel),
Appendix B: Agar and Erskine Childers,
Notes,
Select Bibliography,
Maps,
Index,