MOST SECRET AGENT OF EMPIRE TALINE TER MINASSIAN Most Secret Agent of Empire Reginald Teague-Jones Master Spy of the Great Game Translated by Tom Rees A A Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2014 Taline Ter Minassian Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd. www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title Minassian, Taline Ter ISBN 9780190210762 (alk. paper) Most Secret Agent of Empire: Reginald Teague-Jones Master Spy of the Great Game Printed in India on Acid-Free Paper To the memory of Brian Pearce (1915–2008) To the memory of my father, Levon Ter Minassian (1926–2009) CONTENTS Acknowledgments xi List of Abbreviations xiii Introduction 1 1. Childhood in Liverpool and St Petersburg 9 Liverpool: birthplace and departure point 10 â Pendennis Street 10 â Liverpool: ‘Second City of the Empire’ 12 An Englishman in Russia 13 â Dazzling St Petersburg 13 â A German Education at St Petersburg: the Annenschule 16 Red Sunday: memories of the 1905 Revolution 19 â Warning bells and ‘ice-hilling’ 19 â The preludes to an expected drama 21 â Caught in the crowd: Teague-Jones, witness to the massacre 23 2. From the Punjab to the North West Frontier: The Making of a Gentleman of the Raj 27 An ambition: joining the Indian Political Service 28 ââA foretaste of the Frontier: the Punjab 28 ââThe Indian Political Service: a caste within the colonial administration 31 â A shadow organisation: the Indian Political Intelligence Service 34 The training-ground: the North West Frontier Province 36 â Administrative and political frontiers: controlling the hinterland 37 â Sherani country 39 â The Frontier: a territory for elites? 44 vii CONTENTS 3.âThe Persian Gulf and the Hunt for ‘MrWassmuss’ 49 The Great War and Persia 50 ââIran during the First World War: the theory and practice of ‘neutrality’ 51 â Jihad and pointed helmets 52 â A police force in the South: the South Persia Rifles (SPR) 54 The tribulations of the ‘German Lawrence’ in the Persian Gulf 56 â Wassmuss, a model field-agent 57 â Reginald Teague-Jones on Wassmuss’s track 60 Persia and the Russian Revolution 63 â On the road to Meshed 64 â Meshed: Teague-Jones at the Turkestan frontier 68 4. Ashkhabad and the Transcaspian Episode 73 A Secret Mission at the gates of Central Asia in 1918 74 â First impressions of Transcaspia 75 ââTranscaspia after the Russian Revolution: from the Red offensive to the emergence of a Turkmen power 79 ââThe brief history of a transient government: the Transcaspian government 82 Reginald Teague-Jones: ‘Political Representative in Transcaspia’ 84 â ‘This is a railway war’ 85 â A railway government 88 â Building an intelligence network in Transcaspia 91 From improvisation to retreat: the Transcaspian episode 94 â The Turkmen question: an instrumental strategy? 95 â An intelligence service in Yomut country 98 â Malmiss: game over 101 5. The Legend of the wenty-SixT Commissars: Teague-Jones, Hero or Villain? 105 Baku: 1918 106 â The country before the battle 106 â Baku: the geostrategic prize 108 â The siege of Baku 110 The drama of the twenty-six commissars: the anatomy of an execution 116 â A political drama with a railway ending 116 â Passengers for Krasnovodsk 119 â Diminished responsibilities 122 ‘A malicious propaganda legend’ (Teague-Jones, November 1979) 125 â The origins of the Soviet case: Vadim Chaikin’s inquiry 127 viii CONTENTS â Shot or decapitated? 130 â The culprit on stage: Teague-Jones in Soviet iconography 134 6. The Retreat of the White Armies: From Constantinople to the Caucasus (1919–21) 139 A nest of spies in Constantinople 140 â In the ruins of the Ottoman Empire: Constantinople in 1919 141 â ‘Beefsteaks à la Hoover-Nansen’ 143 â A meeting with General Wrangel 146 The Caucasian imbroglio 149 â Back to Baku 150 â Georgia on the eve of the Red invasion 154 â The view from Mount Ararat (February 1921) 160 Teague-Jones and the Soviet–Turkish Entente 163 â A confluence of interests 163 â Ajaria: a strategic position on the Soviet–Turkish frontier 166 ââPlans for a Muslim policy: an Alliance counter-strategy against Russia 168 7. Ronald Sinclair, Imperial Traveller 173 ‘Zobeida and I’: A Persian Odyssey 174 â An opaque mission in Iran for a combination of partners 175 â Levantine encounters 178 â Across the Syrian Desert 180 Persian adventures: to India by the back door 182 â Kurdistan to Iranian Azerbaijan: assessing Soviet influence 182 â Iran from north to south: Tehran to Bushire 186 â Iran from west to east: return to Baluchistan 191 The colonial eye behind the camera 193 â A Cairo idyll … 194 â A passenger of Imperial Airways 198 â A season in Tibet 202 8. Ronald Sinclair in America (1941–60) 205 âBritish Security Coordination at the heart of Anglo-American relations during the Second World War 207 â Rockefeller Center, 38th Floor, Room 3801 207 â June 1941: an emergency mission to Bermuda 210 â Major Sinclair, BSC Coordination officer 216 The Anglo-American relationship and the test of India 218 â The IPI: from imperial security to Anglo-American collaboration 218 ix CONTENTS â The India League of America: the rising power of a pressure group 222 â Counter-propaganda in the land of democracy 227 The transfer of power 230 â The other side of the mirror 231 â ‘Sahib! Sahib!’ 233 â Return to the North West Frontier 236 Epilogue 243 Note on the Sources 249 Notes 251 Index 269 x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The first version of this, the first biography of Teague-Jones, was in French. The present account is offered to the English-reading public to whom in a sense it prop- erly belongs. Tom Rees’s elegant translation and Teague-Jones’s own writings now presented in their original vigorous English make for a better book, not just a transla- tion but in many respects a work of restoration. It will not, however, escape the reader that some of the details picked out here as examples of the exoticism of British culture derive from the French lens through which this historian has examined them. The product of a meeting beyond the grave between the descendant of a Dashnak revolutionary and a British agent pursued by a Bolshevik fatwa, the book owes a debt of gratitude to Brian Pearce for his assistance and to the historian Anahide Ter Minassian for her patient and painstaking scrutiny of the text. It would not have seen the light of day as an English version without the friendships I made during my adventures in pursuit of Reginald Teague-Jones. My translator Tom Rees, David Burnett, the publisher of Teague-Jones’s Persian memoir and diary at Gollancz, Gill Boyes and Ann Randall who nursed him at Charlton House all provided invaluable help. I am grateful too to Antony Wynn, Matthew Lee, Christian Lequesne and Michael Dwyer, my editor at Hurst. And lastly my warm thanks go to Séverine Bézie for her vital contribution to the maps that feature in the book. xi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS BSC British Security Coordination CIA Central Intelligence Agency DIB Delhi Intelligence Bureau GPU/KGB Russian Secret Police; Intelligence Service of the USSR IPI Indian Political Intelligence; British intelligence agency in India ISI Inter-Services Intelligence; Pakistani intelligence agency MI5 British domestic security service NWFP North West Frontier Province OSS Office of Strategic Services, United States intelligence agency formed during the Second World War and predecessor of the CIA PWE Political Warfare Executive SIS, MI6 Secret Intelligence Service, British intelligence agency SOE Special Operations Executive xiii Map 1: Central Asia, Persia and Transcaspia (1918) Map 2: The North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Sherani Country Map 3: The Caucasus Campaign of World War One. Offensive of the Army of Islam (1918) Map 4: The Battle of Baku (June–September 1918) Map 5: From Beirut through Iran to India: Reginald Teague-Jones’s journey with Zobeida (1926) INTRODUCTION An inscription on a tombstone can often serve as a useful starting point for a biogra- phy. But one would look in vain for an epitaph to Reginald Teague-Jones in Plymouth, where he died on 16 November 1988 at the age of ninety-nine. The ‘spy who disappeared’ had long since swapped his identity for that of Ronald Sinclair, yet there is no funerary monument with this name on it either. It is not that Reginald Teague-Jones, alias Ronald Sinclair, wished to depart this world without leaving any traces. On the contrary, he took care, within the authorised limits of a rigid profes- sional code—that of a British secret service agent—to leave a profusion of clues behind, not for the descendants which his two marriages had failed to provide him with, but for ‘some historian of the future’.