Dan Snow's History Hit - The British Agent Who Tried to Kill Lenin

Episode Date: October 1, 2024

Robert Bruce Lockhart was one of the most extraordinary and unconventional agents of the 20th century. A British diplomat, spy, and propagandist, his life was one of scandal and deception - from the jungles of Malaysia to the streets of Moscow, he bore witness to some of history's most pivotal moments. He even took part in a plot to kill Vladimir Lenin and bring down the Communist regime.Today we're joined by James Crossland, Professor of International History at Liverpool John Moores University and author of 'Rogue Agent'. James tells us how this gifted yet flawed character went from a teenage upstart to a crucial Cold War intermediary and a master of psychological warfare.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. He had the blood of the Bruces and the Wallaces in his veins. He detested the English. He was proud they'd visited several other countries before he ever set foot in England. And he always wanted to die in his native Scotland. But he served the British Empire at great personal cost in some of its darkest times. He was once run out of Malaya for falling in love with a princess. He thrived in the bloody chaotic scene that was Russia after the revolution.

He wrote bestsellers and he fought in the intelligence battle against Hitler's Germany in the Second World War. He was a rogue. He was respected by prime ministers, but perhaps never entirely trusted by the British establishment. His name was Robert Bruce Lockhart. And in this podcast, I'm going to tell the story of Lockhart's life with particular focus on one episode in Russia that meant he very nearly changed the course of history dramatically. I'm very glad to say that I can call upon James Crossland, he's a professor of international history at Liverpool John Moores University, and he's just written Rogue Agent, From Secret Plots to Psychological Warfare, The Untold Story of

Robert Bruce Lockhart. It's a brilliant book, everyone, go and get it. And in this episode, we're going to focus on a moment when he was the British agent, the sort of British, not ambassador, but the representative of the British government in revolutionary Russia. And he was trying to get rid of Lenin. He was trying to get Russia back in the war against Germany. He was trying to defeat Russian communism. And he hurled himself headlong into an assassination plot. An assassination attempt did take place,

just not the one he'd helped organise. You'll see. It's a great story. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. time did take place just not the one he'd helped organize you'll see it's a great story enjoy no black white unity till there is first and black unity never to go to war with one another again and lift off and the shuttle has cleared the tower james thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. Tell me, where does Sir Robert, where does he hail from? Is he a typical member of the British diplomatic elite? He is the product of two great Scottish families, the Bruce Lockhart's and the McGregor's. He comes from a bit of money. The McGregor are big into the whiskey business. And he's set up at an early age, in theory at least, to become a rubber planter in Malaysia with his uncle. That ends disastrously because Lockhart gets involved with a local princess who happens to be a ward of a sultan, which becomes a bit of a scandal.

He's also not very good with the books. ward of a sultan, which becomes a bit of a scandal. He's also not very good with the books. So in some ways, yes, he is set up for success early in life, but he's a very individualistic kind of person. There's a rebellious streak in him, I think, that's there from the very start. He likes to buck convention, and that sets him apart from quite a few people in his class. So he's early 20s. He's in love with a Malay princess. This is already getting, it's already quite unusual at this point. Does he have to be whisked out of that colony and put somewhere else or how does he get away? Well, a couple of things happen. One, he's obviously under a lot of pressure locally because of the scandal. Two, he contracts malaria and

nearly dies. And three, the rubber business isn't going very well because of the aforementioned. So yes, his uncle does kind of spirit him away. But even his retreat is quite exotic. He goes via Singapore to Tokyo, then to San Francisco, and he goes across, ends up in Canada, I think, for a bit. And eventually he ends up in Liverpool and then returns to the family heartlands in the highlands where he is given quite a telling off by his grandmother. It's so extraordinary, this period of British imperial hegemony. You just think of all these largely sons spread all across the world and these dramas being played out on these extraordinary backdrops,

which are denied to, say, most other cults in the world. So here's this Scottish lad having this astonishing adventure, if you like. Yeah, and he's barely into his 20s and he's already done all this. Do you think all that that we've just talked about, do you think that sets him up or fire his ambitions for a career in foreign climes, in diplomacy? Almost definitely. From the earliest age, he thinks of himself as a world traveler. He's very proud of the fact, he says in his memoir, he boasts that, I have no drop of English blood in my veins. I am pure Scottish.

And to him, to be Scottish is to be adventurous, to be intrepid. And he loves the fact that he, as a student, he studies in Germany and France before he even sets foot on English soil. He loves that about himself. He loves the exoticism of that. And so the adventure in Malaysia really does set him up for this idea that his life is going to be windswept and interesting. One way or another, he's going to make it that way. Yeah, not the first, Scott, despite apparent anti-Englishness, to find, to seek his path through the institutions of the British state,

be they military or diplomatic. It's so interesting. It's a fascinating path, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. After the fiasco in Malaysia, he is very contrite to his parents, signs himself up to the foreign office, passes the entrance exams. But when he gets to White Hall, from the minute he's there, he realizes he's a square peg in a round hole. He's looking around and saying, you know, these stuffy old institutions, these genteel types, these aren't for me. I need to get out of there into the world and see more of it. So he always has this restlessness built into him, which, as I say, I think sets him apart from a lot of his contemporaries. Tell me about his career. How does it go? Tell me about his career. How does it go?

Well, he's meant to be a very standard issue vice consul, junior diplomat sent out to Moscow just before the First World War. And he's meant to stay in his lane and just stamp passports or whatever. But Lockhart being Lockhart, he gets out there into Moscow society. He makes friends both high and low. He's hanging around with quasi-revolutionaries. He's drinking long into the night with all manner of people. And he develops this knack for, and I think it's God-given in some respects, he is a very perceptive person. And he's very open to conversation with whomever wants to converse with him. And that sets him up really well to gather information. And he compiles these really quite beautifully written intelligence reports.

That's an oxymoronic sentence. Most intelligence reports are very dry. But he writes these prose-like evaluations of the final days of Zardom. And he notes the sort of festering anxiety and aggression over the need for change in Russia during the First World War. And these reports get back to Whitehall, and he kind of makes his name as this very astute observer of Russian society

who senses that the revolution is coming and who has a very stark appraisal of how it's going to go. So he does make his name really by his aptitude and his willingness to step outside his otherwise pretty limited role in the consular service. And obviously, extraordinary time to be in Russia. Does he sense, even before the war has broken out in 1914, what's the tenor of his messages to the homeland, back to the UK? Well, he understands that there's raging inequalities in Russian society. He understands also that you've got a new, more educated class emerging that is not going to stand for the Tsar

putting off long overdue reforms. He also understands not long into the First World War that the war is not going to go well for Russia and that that is only going to fuel tensions. And he makes notes of everything from strikes in munitions factories to gossip amongst the wives and mothers of soldiers on the front line, to the kind of things that are being said in the highest society within Russia about the Tsar and about his stewardship of the war. So he takes intelligence from all corners. And he compiles this together, as I say, into these very holistic assessments that are very honest as well. He doesn't try to sugarcoat what is going to happen and the vibe on the ground, which is, to say the least, quite anxious.

There's a moment in your book that I love when he goes back to Britain and gets an audience with the King. Tell me about that. Yeah, that's after he's been serving in his diplomatic capacity, making evaluations of what's been going on in his time as British agent in Russia. evaluations of what's been going on in his time as British agent in Russia. When he has this audience with the King, it's quite astonishing because A, Lockhart was suffering from what was most likely Spanish flu at the time. So he's there in an audience with his monarch coughing all over him. And B, he is presenting a very, I think, from what we can gather from the record, and we only have Lockhart's side of the story, obviously, but he presents a very honest reflection on that the revolution is going to stick and that really British society has to accept that this is going to happen. And according to Lockhart, the king sort of goes, well, I see that that might be the case. And according to Lockhart, the king was very interested in all this and had a very astute opinion of it. And again, we only have one side of the story, but to be a fly on the wall with that meeting would have been quite fascinating. I mean, he does say we hear this from other

sources as well, and it's pretty predictable, but the king had an absolute horror of Bolshevism, of what we might now call Russian communism. Yeah. And he was not alone. And when Lockhart gets back to Britain, he blots his copybook in further than it already had been. When he starts telling people, look, I don't care if you dislike the Bolsheviks, you have to accept they're not going anywhere because there's no credible alternative to them, particularly after the Romanovs are slain in July of 1918. He says, you know, there's no going back now and we have to accept this.

And that puts him in the bad books with quite a few people. But again, pragmatic, honest, and quite well-informed assessment of what's happening on the ground. Can you sense his politics? I mean, does he have some sympathy with Bolshevism? He sounds like he's a bit of a rebel, or is he becoming slightly more conservative as the years go by? Small C. Sounds like he's a bit of a rebel, or is he becoming slightly more conservative as the years go by? Small C. Well, this is why he was such a fascinating figure to study, because he is as close as you can get to a political agnostic in these times as you're going to find.

Particularly when you contrast the fact that he's living through the period where we have the rise of extreme left politics in the form of communism, and then later on, of course, the rise of fascism. politics in the form of communism, and then later on, of course, the rise of fascism. He is able throughout his career to see both sides. When he initially gets to Russia, particularly when he comes back after the revolution has taken place, he's hanging out with Trotsky. He's taking it all in. He sees some merits in Bolshevism, though he is very cautious about his excesses. And his reports are, as you suggest, certainly more generous than a lot of his contemporaries were towards this new

dangerous ideology. And that earned him the ire of a lot of people in Whitehall. But then later on, there's a fascinating MI5 report on him in the late 1930s, I think, where they say, oh, on the one hand, this man was a communist, but then we've also seen that he's been meeting with Oswald Mosley recently. And that kind of sums it up because he was, he was on the dinner circuit with Mosley before the British Fascist Party, the Union of British Fascism was founded. And he was willing to mix with whoever he found interesting, whoever he wanted to glean information from. And that's what made him so very unique in this time period. Okay. So amazingly, and I didn't realize this, the British government does establish, if not embassy level and pastoral level links with the new Soviet regime. It gets people in there straight away. And that person is Lockhart. He goes

really pretty immediately after the October,November revolution, doesn't he? Yeah. So he's barely 30 years old. He is dispatched on the personal orders of Prime Minister Lloyd George himself, who interviews Lockhart personally, says this is the guy. He's had experience in Russia. He can speak Russian fluently. Lockhart had an amazing head for languages, just picked them up almost instantly. And understands Russian culture. He's compiled these excellent intelligence reports on who the Bolsheviks are. He seems to understand things. We're going to send him back. And the status we're going to give him is that of British agent. Now, an agent is a really weird title. It doesn't mean that you're a spy,

but it does mean you get involved in some spy stuff. You're also a quasi-diplomat, and you are basically the man on the spot, to put it in Victorian terms. You're there to troubleshoot any kind of diplomatic problems that arise. And because the British government was not going to formally recognize Lenin and co. as the rulers of Russia, he being Lockhart was there to establish unofficial diplomatic relations and to act as a conduit. And his primary mission from the British perspective was to, first of all, keep the Russians in the war. But after the Bolsheviks negotiate the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and extract themselves from the war in March of 1918, Lockhart's mission

turns to get the Bolsheviks back in the war, some way or another. And it's that some way or another, it's the latitude he's given that's the real story here. And just before we get to that real story, he's very successful, isn't he? I mean, he forges good relationships at high levels with the Bolsheviks. He goes on a raid, an anarchist stronghold. Describe the scene he discovers there. It's an extraordinary moment in your book. Well, it's a really keen insight into both his status amongst the Bolsheviks and the extent to which they suspect him of perhaps not being on the level. So in April of 1918, he is summoned from his hotel where he's set up an office by a man named Jakob Peters, who is the deputy head of the

Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police. And he is taken on this tour of an old mansion house in Moscow that has been occupied by anarchists since the revolution, and which has been made into a house of slaughter by the Cheka, who've gone in and shot up the place, killed everyone. And they take him on this tour, and it's there to do two things. One, it's there to impress upon Lockhart that the Bolsheviks are serious about consolidating their rule. There's also, as you suggest, a bit of, well, we're letting you see behind the curtain, if you like, we trust you. But then there's also an undeniable menace there. This is Peter saying to Lockhart, look, this is what we do to

enemies. Are you an enemy or are you a friend? There's a bit of that going on as well. So he does enter into this quite bizarre relationship with the Bolsheviks. He's on quite friendly terms with Trotsky for at least a couple of months, never quite cracks Lenin. Lenin was not the most friendly person in the world. Even a charmer of Lockhart's caliber struggled there. But there's other high-ranking Bolsheviks who really do seem to genuinely like Lockhart. Some indeed even trust him. So he does have this bizarre relationship with the regime, which is unique amongst British officials in Russia at the time. This is the Dan Snow's History? We're talking about Britain's agent

in Russia and the attempt to kill Lenin. More coming up. details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a world which has just changed so much. I mean, the house in Moscow, there was sort of priceless paintings on the wall that had been slashed.

There were bodies everywhere, evidence of criminal behaviour, sexual crimes. It's like a sort of Mad Max-style hellscape. And it seems to me that Lockhart has probably got the mental toolkit to deal with this kind of radically upended world in a way that perhaps lots of British foreign office diplomats don't. Completely. To be honest, he loves it.

He writes extensively in his diaries about the lawlessness, and you can tell there's a relish there. He loves the fact that he's having to walk around Petrograd as was and Moscow with a revolver under his jacket. And he's walking in the middle of the street because that's the most secure place in the street to walk so that you won't get seized and dragged into an alleyway and whatever else. He loves the fact that he's attending a play. The theater's still running. And they sit down, him and his cohort sit down, and the lights go down and it's about to start. And then gunmen burst in and start holding the place up and asking for everyone to empty their pockets

and ladies take off your jewelry, et cetera. And he does relish this sense of danger. And he is, as you say, very well equipped for this in a way that, I mean, the former Russian ambassador, who was his boss before his recall in 1918, he doesn't speak Russian, the British ambassador to Russia. He speaks French because in Tsarist times, you only needed to speak French because the nobility spoke French. You didn't need to learn Russian. And this is why Lockhart comes in, able to grasp Russian in a few months,

willing to chat to revolutionaries, anarchists, ne'er-do-wells, various descriptions, this really puts him in a different place. And this is part of the reason why Lloyd George looks at him and says, yeah, this is the guy. Tell me about the astonishing story. It reads like a James Bond narrative, the attempted assassination of Lenin. So it's gone down in history as the Lockhart plot, which is perhaps a little disingenuous because it was a more collaborative effort. What basically happens is, back to what I was saying before about Lockhart's mission to get

the Russians back in the war by whatever means necessary. By the summer of 1918, he realizes that an Allied intervention is going to happen. There are going to be Allied landings in Russia, and they're going to be landings ostensibly for the purpose of marching across Russia and setting up the Eastern Front to fight the Germans. But he knows that beneath that, there's going to be a push amongst the Allied troops being landed in Russia to execute a regime change and to kick the Bolsheviks out. And he looks at that situation and he looks at his mission and what he's meant to accomplish. And he comes to the conclusion that he should get in on that quest for regime change. And it just so happens that

as he's thinking about this, a compatriot of his, a man by the name of Francis Cromie, who is the British military attaché in Petrograd, he meets two Latvians who are part of the Latvian Rifle Brigade, which is an elite detachment of the Red Army. And they say to him, you know, we're fed up with the Bolsheviks. We don't like being their errand boys. We want our country back, which was ceded as part of the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Germans. And, you know, we hear that you guys would like the Bolsheviks gone as well. And from those first conversations, you get British, American and French intelligence officers and diplomats getting involved. One of the key figures in this is a quite notorious figure and

the man who later calls himself Lockhart's faithful lieutenant, that's Sidney Riley, the so-called ace of spies. He gets involved in this plot. And they all come up with this idea that they can basically subvert the Latvian rifle brigade, get them to turn their guns on Lenin and Trotsky and either arrest or in some versions of the story, flat out execute the pair. And there is some controversy over which way they wanted to go. But either way, the idea is to use these Latvians to try to bring down the Bolshevik regime ahead of an Allied landing in Russia. So it's a very, very audacious plan. And as you say, it reads like something out of a thriller. You say there are lots of different people

involved. I guess it's impossible to know to what extent Lockhart is the driving force behind this. Well, he is and he isn't. I mean, he leaves behind a very sanitized account in his memoirs, which released in 1932, became a bestseller memoirs of a British agent. And historians have tended to rely on that memoir, I think, a little bit too much, as indeed they've relied on his edited diaries, which were published later in the 20th century. But I went to some of the handwritten notes he had from this era. I looked at correspondence later in his life when he's an old man and he's a little less encumbered by official secrecy acts and so forth. And he's writing to his son about what really went on. And when you piece it all together, it does seem that he had an awful lot more to do with this than perhaps he

let on, but that he told this half truth about his involvement for so long that it kind of became the truth. But in reality, I think that he did have a big part to play in the plot. The problem was he perhaps ceded too much authority to Sidney Riley to direct the mechanics of the plot. The problem was he perhaps ceded too much authority to Sidney Riley to direct the mechanics of the plot. And Sidney Riley, despite his moniker of being the ace of spies, was actually a pretty rubbish spy in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not very good on operational security. He left notes around his apartment detailing where his informers were, where his safe houses were. And most importantly of all, at no stage in proceedings did Lockhart, Riley, or anyone else involved vet these Latvians who first reached out to Francis Cromey in Petrograd

and started this whole thing. And that really was the reason or one of the main reasons why this plot did not turn out the way it was meant to. Fill me in, what happened next? Well, basically what happens is there is a raid on Lockhart's apartment in the early hours of the morning of the 31st of August, where he is arrested, detained for crimes against the state. And he is sent first to the Lubyanka, the Czechoslovakian headquarters, and then eventually he's imprisoned in the Kremlin. in the Kremlin. He's one of many allied diplomats who is collared in the latter half of August and early September. And this includes British intelligence networks, which are basically run into the ground by the Cheka. And the reason why is because the Latvians who initiated this plot were actually plants. They were agent provocateurs sent by the head of the Cheka, a man by the name of Felix Jasinski, who's a very intelligent chess master level, spy master. And he is able to basically feed these plotters the idea that the Latvians will indeed turn.

It's all just a big setup, really. It's a big setup to try and net the British, French, and Americans who are opposed to Lenin's regime. And it works a treat. I mean, you can understand why the Checo are feeling jumpy because the day before, Lenin had in fact been shot. Well, this is what really launches Jaczynski into action. Depending on how you want to read it,

and personally, I think this was probably the case. I think Jaczynski was close to wrapping up this plot anyway. He had kind of caught as many of the fish in the net as he was going to. But when Dora Kaplan fires a couple of shots at Lennon when he's inspecting an armaments factory on 30th of August, it sets off this chain reaction. Juszynski sees that assassination attempt and then says to himself, right, she's probably working with them. And so I'm going to bring the hammer down and I'm going to wrap up all these people. And that's what leads to the raids the next day. And these raids are quite spectacular. It's not just Lockhart's apartment that's raided. The British embassy in Petrograd is actually

stormed by gunmen, which is a complete breach of international law and convention. And a gunfight ensues during which Francis Cromey, who started this whole thing, is actually killed. So it's a major international incident that transpires out of this. And yet, actually, that assassination attempt by Fanny Kaplan, she was a disgruntled fellow traveller, a socialist revolutionary, right? She was not working with any of these Western diplomats. Is that correct? No. And there's actually a moment when Lockhart is imprisoned in the Kremlin where they bring her in because she was detained after the attempted assassination of Lenin. And his jailers,, Jacob Peters, the man who took him to the House of Anarchy where he saw the fallout from the butchering of the anarchists, he's Lockhart's jailer. And he brings Dora Kaplan

in and says, basically just puts her in the cell with him and lets them sit there. He's looking for a flicker of recognition. He's looking for Lockhart to see, oh God, they got her too, or for her to acknowledge him and nothing happens. And they conclude from that that, well, she's probably not in on it. And then the Cheka go and execute her. But they do work on this assumption that yes, she's involved. And there is a basis of truth for that belief because Lockhart in the months leading up to this, he and Riley and others, they are passing substantial amounts of money to socialist revolutionaries, which is the faction that Kaplan belongs to. And not just socialist revolutionaries, they're passing money to priests, through more with the conservative opposition to the Bolsheviks. Anyone who is putting up their hand and saying, yes, we'd like

to get rid of Lenin, there's a lot of money being funneled to these people. So there is a basis for believing from Jashinsky's point of view that there's something to this. But as I say, there's no evidence linking Kaplan directly to Lockhart's plot. This is the Dan Snow's History. We're talking about Britain's agent in Russia and the attempt to kill Lenin. More coming up. agent in Russia and the attempt to kill Lenin. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions and crusades.

Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Kaplan came very close to killing Lenin, right? Lenin was terribly injured, arguably never recovered poorly, and it was the start of a horrific wave of violence against the opposition, clampdown, many things we associate with the Soviet Union. The expression is that they opened the jaws of terror. Yeah, completely. And I think that narrative of the first Red Terror being born out of that assassination attempt, which, as you say, brings Lenin very close to the point of death, that sometimes

consumes the fact that whilst this is going on, a part of the Red Terror is actually being unleashed on the British, the French, and the Americans. I mentioned that Francis Cromey loses his life trying to defend the British embassy, but there's an American spy by the name of Xenophon Calamatiano, who is actually arrested trying to sneak into the American embassy. Sneak is probably too generous a word. Very crassly bluff his way in saying that he's a tourist who lost his passport. He was not, again, a very great trade craft.

So he gets arrested and he is detained and he is most likely tortured. He's certainly interrogated and he's eventually executed, I think, in December of 1918. So he suffers quite a lot and he's one of many who do suffer, who are party to Lockhart's plot, who get caught up in the Red Terror. So it's not just these more, there's Russian enemies, there's foreign enemies as well. Does Lockhart experience torture, do you think? No, it doesn't seem that way. He's actually treated quite well. He's given psychological torture in that his mistress, who's another fascinating character who weaves her way throughout his life, infamous seductress and spy, Mura Budberg,

she is arrested at his apartment at the same time as him. She is sent to a separate prison. And after a few weeks of Lockhart being threatened with summary execution, if he doesn't spill the beans, he receives a letter from Mura that has been written in her hand. It's a genuine letter. And this is the start of the more psychological part of the torture where Jacob Peters, his jailer, goes to Murrah and says, look, you can send him gifts and you can send him letters and I'll even arrange for you two to meet together. And, you know, he tries to sort of kill them with kindness, sort of break them down in that way. So he does get put through an emotional ringer, but they're aware of his status.

The Bolsheviks get a lot of international backlash for the murder of Francis Cromey. Even the Germans condemn them. So they do get into a lot of bother there. I think they're mindful that they don't want to put Lockhart in a similar situation, and that he is a valuable hostage. How does he get out? He gets out via a prisoner exchange. And the matter of him being a hostage comes into play when the British government take their own hostages. Russian diplomatic staff in London

are taken prisoner. And an exchange is arranged about a month or two after Lockhart is detained, which is very heavily orchestrated. They have to call through, the ship has left Norway, which means the train carrying the Russians has left Norway, which now means the train can leave Moscow carrying not just Lockhart, but a lot of the other Allied personnel who've been caught up in Chesinski's dragnet. And it's somewhat anticlimactic in some ways for Lockhart, because I think he's thinking to himself throughout this whole period that he is going to get a bullet at any time. He's actually tried in absentia after he comes back to Britain. And that trial, he is found guilty. And he's told, if you set foot on Russian soil again,

we will kill you. And for that reason, he never gets to go to Russia again for the rest of his life, which is a personal tragedy for him because he loves Russia, despite all the danger he experienced there, or perhaps because of the danger and how it excited him. Russia is a place he loves. It's a place he cares for deeply, and he's never allowed to go back there. So he does pay dearly on a personal and professional level for the failure of the Lockhart plot. Quite good for your street cred in the foreign office if you've got a death sentence against you in Russia. Well, the way he's received when he returns to Britain is interesting. A lot of historians have tended to ignore what happens to him after 1918 because the theory is that he gets back to Britain and he's looked at as this failure, this misbehaving schoolboy, I think was one of the notes that was made on him by an aged Mandarin saying, you know, this guy is reckless and he gets dismissed. And I

think historians have tended to dismiss him as well. But again, if you actually look at how he's treated, he's got friends in high places. They find him a job. They find him a job at the, and it's not comparable to being British agent in Russia, but he does get a gig in Prague at the legation there as a diplomatic staffer, in which capacity he continues to work with British intelligence. He's working with Riley into the 1920s up until Riley is himself caught by the Russians and executed in 1925. he is still in the game, despite the fact that he is written off for the plot. There are still a lot of people who look at him and say, well, this doesn't negate the fact that he is a Russia expert. He speaks the language fluently. He's the only guy that we've got who's been shaking hands with Trotsky and knows how Lenin's mind works. So for the rest of his life, in fact, he is drawn upon as a resource. As late as the 1950s, Anthony Eaton is asking him, so what do you think about Stalin? as a resource. As late as the 1950s, Anthony Eaton is asking him, so what do you think about Stalin?

Tell us how Stalin's brain works. So he does get a significant rep out of this. He writes, as you say, the bestseller Memoirs of a British Agent. And in fact, they make a movie out of it in the mid 1930s. But what about World War II? Does he get back into the game? During the 20s and 30s, he continues, as I say, to be consulted on all matters Russia, but he also carves out a niche as an observer of the rise of fascism as well. And that sets him in good stead, along with his career on Fleet Street, which is a whole other story. He becomes the right-hand man of Lord Beaverbrook, one of the most powerful press magnets of the era. And through his work there, he also develops a reputation for being a good propagandist, as would be the case. And so by the time we get to the Second World War,

he's got the combination of foreign office experience, intelligence gathering experience. He's a propagandist. He's got a gift of gab, a gift with words. And so he gets recruited into Britain's nascent psychological warfare campaign against the Third Reich. And eventually, through various tussles and restructures of that campaign, in 1942, Churchill appoints him head of the Political Warfare Executive, which is a top secret outfit tasked with using fake news and misinformation and disinformation to try to undermine morale, not just in Nazi Germany, but across all the occupied territories. So he does get back in the game in a very significant way. He's able to liaise throughout the war with the likes of Anthony Eden, Brendan Bracken, and other very important figures. Just what an extraordinary career. Was he recognised by the time of his death? I mean, there are so many extraordinary people knocking about, I suppose, in the 1970s, it's hard to tell them apart. But I mean, how did the last

years of his life go? He's made Sir Lockhart, Robert Bruce Lockhart, in 1943. And that, ironically, despite the fact that he's again dismissed for being this reckless so-and-so in 1918, that's apparently as a reward for his efforts in 1918, this delayed recognition of that. I think he's still respected by a number of people in Whitehall into the 1950s. He's still called upon in the early stages of the Cold War to help out with the psychological warfare against the Soviets. He's a broadcaster for the BBC, broadcasts propaganda into Czechoslovakia after the revolution there in 1948. He is always

on the minds of some important people. Beaverbrook is a backer of his until the day Beaverbrook dies. Eden remains a confidant. But in terms of wider recognition, no, he, and there's two things working against him here. On the one hand, Lockhart wants to shuffle away into retirement. He wants just to write books. He wants to be in a little cottage in the Highlands, writing books, being left alone. But he's also being pulled back in because of his wealth of experience and lifetime of everything he's been through. And so he's both still around, but fading to the periphery with each passing year.

It doesn't help that throughout his life, he never manages to figure out how money works. He is constantly in debt. And it doesn't matter how many books he sells or how good a job he gets with the foreign office. He never has any money. So he actually ends up quite poor in the end, trying to live by his pen. And yeah, his ending is a somewhat bittersweet one. He has this lifetime of astonishing experiences and God knows what memories and correspondence with all manner of people, fascinating people who he maintains correspondence with until he dies in 1970. But on the other hand, there is this sense that,

and Beaverbrook said it himself, he said, you know, if not for women and wine, Lockhart would have been prime minister. And that kind of says it all about the guy. Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure women and wine ever stopped anyone in Britain becoming prime minister, but anyway, I get the sentiment. What an extraordinary life. Thank you very much indeed for coming and sharing it with us. Tell us about the book. The book is Rogue Agent, From Secret Plots to Psychological Warfare, The Untold Story of Robert Bruce Lockhart.

And it is out now wherever books are sold. I mean, did he ever actually go rogue? His entire life is the life of a rogue. Yeah, he was a rogue. From the moment he first steps foot in Malaysia to the day he dies, he's a rogue. Brilliant. I love it. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Cheers, Dan. Pleasure. you