On leaving the Kremlin Lockhart immediately sent for Ernest Boyce, the head of SIS in Moscow, and angrily demanded an explanation.11 Boyce confirmed that Reilly was a new agent sent out from London, but had no knowledge of his dramatic debut at the Kremlin. Boyce said he would send Reilly to Lockhart the following day to offer a personal explanation. Unsurprisingly, Reilly denied everything apart from the fact that he had been at the Kremlin on the afternoon of the seventh. Lockhart did not believe a word of Reilly’s account but said many years later that his excuses were so ingenious that he had ended up laughing. It is unlikely that Reilly took any great heed of Lockhart’s threat to have him sent home and merrily carried on going his own way. It is also clear from this event that Lockhart had not had sight of Cumming’s telegram and was essentially in the dark about what was going on in London. Although Reilly’s story was a bold bluff, he was actually correct about London’s view of Lockhart, who the Foreign Office considered was providing inconsistent and ill-judged advice.12
While the story of Reilly marching up to the Kremlin gates is vividly recited by several Reilly biographers,13 the impression given is that this was his first and last attempt to deal directly with the Bolshevik authorities before going underground. A series of telegrams to London marked ‘Secret’ tell a very different story, however. They reveal that the day after his dressing down by Lockhart, he was, in fact, back at the Kremlin for what turned out to be one of several in-depth meetings with Vladimir Bonch Bruevich’s brother, Gen. Mikhail Bonch Bruevich. In a report headed ‘Miscellaneous Military’, Reilly referred in particular to two aspects of the meeting which had taken place on 9 May:
A. Bonch Bruevich’s official position is that of ‘Military Director of the Supreme Military (?Council)’, where he is the brain centre of the whole organisation, originating reforms and new schemes for (?military) organisation.
His relationship toTrotsky and Podvoiski, the Military Commissars, he defines as being those of military adviser to political (?administrator).
The Military Commissars see to his proposals being carried out, and see that such proposals do not clash with their own political views. (He gives the impression of being a student rather than a man of action.)
B. He considers that a marked change for a more rational and common sense outlook among Bolshevik leaders is noticeable. Regarding the reorganisation of the army, he has drawn up a plan, more or less on the old military lines.
The elective principle – the chief cause of the destruction of the old army – he insists should be abolished and regimental committees are to have a say only in matters of supplies, (?entertainments) and recreation.14
Despite the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, the report clearly confirms that all was not well between the Bolsheviks and the Germans. This is further amplified by Reilly’s report of 29 May in which he relates details of a meeting between Bonch Bruevich and Georgi Chicherin, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, at which new demands made by the German Ambassador Count Mirbach were discussed. The Germans wanted, in particular, three things:
1. The demarcation of the line of the Don district leaving Bataisk in German hands.
2. The removal of any portion of the Black Sea Fleet at Novo Rosiisko to Sebastopol, with the promise to return the vessels after the conclusion of a general peace.
3. The cession to Finland of West Murman, and German/Finnish control of the Rybatchi Peninsula.15
Bonch Bruevich was very much opposed to the proposals Chicherin had already conceded, and apparently told Reilly that he did not know whether Chicherin, ‘in agreeing to them, did so in fear of or because he was bought by the Germans’.16 Bonch Bruevich concluded that the only way to counter-balance the Germans was for an immediate understanding with the Allies. Reilly quotes him as exclaiming, ‘cannot the Allies see that by keeping aloof, they give a free hand to Germany… if they wait much longer there will be no Russia to save. Our Chicherin will have given it away’.
By the time Reilly met with Bonch Bruevich again on 31 May, the Bolsheviks had formulated some response to the situation. In particular, Reilly refers to a decision that has been made to ‘issue a proclamation to the people calling for a massed rising against the Germans’. The chief points of the proclamation are reported to be that:
1. Every German crossing the frontier is liable to be shot.
2. Population of localities invaded by the Germans must conceal or destroy all food stuffs, metal etc., break up roads, blow up bridges etc.
Reilly claims Bonch Bruevich asked him for his own views as to other steps that could be taken, to which he proposed ‘a circular telegram to be sent to military directors in the provinces ordering them to mobilise their resources and prepare troops and population for struggle with Germany’. Bonch Bruevich then, according to the report, telephoned Trotsky in Reilly’s presence and read him the proposals, which were apparently approved on the spot. Bonch Bruevich told Reilly that, ‘the time was fast approaching when the Commissars would begin to realise that that the only safeguard for the Soviet government was open war with Germany’.17
Whatever the perceived direction of Bolshevik policy towards Germany was, Reilly himself seems to have already taken the view that the regime was vulnerable from within and no doubt saw opportunities for himself in such a situation. Without any official guidance or instructions on the matter, he promptly shed the identity of Lt Reilli of the RFC, and went underground, simultaneously adopting two new guises. In Moscow he became Mr Constantine, a Greek businessman, living at 3 Sheremet’evsky Lane, where he shared the apartment of actress Dagmara Karozus.18 Contrary to the views expressed by Robin Bruce Lockhart and Edward Van Der Rhoer (who refers to her as Dagmara Otten), it was not with her that Reilly formed a romantic attachment, but her flatmate Elizaveta Emilyevna Otten.
Elizaveta was a twenty-two-year-old blonde with a lifelong ambition to be an actress. However, her father, a manager at the tea company Gubin & Kuznetsov, had forbidden it and encouraged her to consider becoming a mathematician instead. He died just as she was about to leave school, and she therefore entered the First Arts Theatre Studio unhindered, making her acting debut in the play A Green Ring in December 1916. Apart from her obvious beauty, she could also speak English, German and French, making her ideal for the type of work Reilly had in mind.19 According to Elizaveta’s later testimony, he moved into the apartment in late June and left on 7 August.20
In Petrograd he became Konstantin Markovich Massino, a Turkish merchant, sharing an apartment with Elena Mikhailovna Boyuzhovskaya, a pre-war acquaintance, at 10 Torgovaya Street. Reilly had also used another old contact, the former judge Vladimir Orlov,’21 to obtain identity papers in the name of Sigmund Rellinsky, which identified him as a member of the Cheka’s criminal investigation department. (The Cheka was the secret police organisation created, on the orders of Lenin, by Felix Dzerzhinsky in December 1917. ‘Cheka’ stood for the All Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter Revolution and Sabotage, and later became the KGB.) The stage was now set for a plot that Reilly may well have been planning for some time.
The so-called ‘Lockhart Plot’, or to be more accurate the Reilly Plot, has raised much controversy over the years. Did the Allied powers really hatch a plot to overthrow the Bolsheviks? If so, was it really the case that the Cheka discovered the conspiracy at the eleventh hour or had they penetrated it from the very outset? Some have even suggested a development of this theory, namely that the Cheka had stage managed the whole thing from beginning to end, and that Reilly was really a Bolshevik agent provocateur.22