Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution by Giles Milton Read Free Book Online Page B

employment by Mansfield Cumming.
    Hill had lived in numerous different cities, including London, Hamburg, Riga, St Petersburg, Tehran and Krasnovodsk. A broad-beamed individual with a potato-shaped face, he had a military gait and public-school buffoonery that left no one in any doubt as to his nationality. Yet he showed a remarkable talent for blending into foreign cultures.
    In part, this was due to his skills as a linguist. ‘I had half a dozen languages at the tip of my tongue,’ he wrote, ‘[and] had learned to sum up the characteristic qualities and faults of a dozen nationalities.’
    Hill knew that fluency in the language was only the first step to perfecting an undercover existence. A spy could live incognito for a sustained period of time only if he learned to adopt ‘the habits and ways of thoughts of the people among whom his field of operations lies’. He also needed ‘a brain of the utmost ability, able to draw a deduction in a flash and make a momentous decision in an instant.’
    According to Hector Bywater, an expert in professional espionage, the perfect spy could only make such decisions if he kept an icy detachment from the pressures of work.
    ‘Steady nerves were, of course, a great asset, for the Secret Service man was liable at any moment to find himself in an awkward situation which demanded perfect coolness and presence of mind.’
    A photographic memory was also vital, as future operations in Russia were to demonstrate. Agents would often find themselves with only a few minutes to study crucial documents, maps and military plans.
    Above all, a talent for organising – what Hill called ‘the office work of espionage’ – was absolutely essential. ‘Nine out of ten spies who are caught have faulty organisation or communication to blame for their arrest,’ he wrote.
    Arrest for Cumming’s men in the months ahead would spell certain death. No one was so aware of the high stakes as Hill himself. He had witnessed the execution of two Bulgarian spies in the Balkan city of Monastir and left a graphic description of them being killed by firing squad.
    ‘The wall behind, white a moment before, was scarred by bullet marks and bespattered with blood, just as if a paint brush had been dipped into a pot of red paint and flicked on the wall.’
    The grotesque spectacle got the better of him. ‘I hurried off to find a spot where I could be sick without disgracing myself.’
    Mansfield Cumming had started training programmes for his spies in or around 1915. When Samuel Hoare had been recruited into the Secret Service, he had been enrolled on an intensive four-week espionage course. He was not at liberty to reveal any more than the barest outlines of what was taught.
    ‘One day it would be espionage or contre-espionage’, he wrote, ‘another coding and ciphering, another, war trade and contraband, a fourth, postal and telegraphic censorship.’
    Other agents recalled Cumming himself giving twice-weekly lectures on spy-craft, the details of which are sadly lost.
    George Hill was also given a rudimentary training in espionage in the weeks before he left London. ‘Experts from Scotland Yard lectured me on shadowing [people] and recognising the signs of being shadowed,’ he wrote. ‘I was taught the methods of using invisible inks. I learned a system of codes and was primed with all the dodges which are useful to spies.’
    Codes, invisible inks and mechanical gadgets were stock in trade to Cumming. In the rare moments when he was not at his desk, he would invariably be found bent over a lathe in the workshop that he had installed at Whitehall Court. It was equipped with drills, chisels and other instruments, brought specially from his country house in Bursledon.
    Long after the office staff had gone home for the night, Cumming could be found in his workshop knocking together one of the speciality homespun contraptions that he liked to devise for his agents in the field.
    He had heavy hands and