Communists lured to their deaths by MI6 with promise of sex
Cossacks, commies, luscious blonde honey traps, an exotic secret villa, orgies, an Oxford don; this one’s got it all.
An MI6 agent became a serial killer as he used pretty young women to lure Russians to their deaths with the promise of sex, new documents reveal.
Sidney Reilly, nicknamed the ‘Ace of Spies,’ planned to kill the whole of the Soviet leadership during a meeting at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1918
A Cossack colonel called Mohammed Bek Hadji Lashet, and his gang used the women to attract communists to a lakeside villa where they were tortured and then killed, according to a new history of the intelligence service.
The book, Six, by former military intelligence officer Michael Smith, reveals that there was a culture of assassinations within the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, during the First World War.
Despite the fictional “licence to kill” of James Bond, the agency protests that it does not kill off those it considers a threat.
But the book reveals that in its early days, MI6 officers and their adversaries were more than willing to spill blood for their country.
One officer, Jack Lawson, an Oxford Don based in Crete, wrote: “’Thou shalt not kill’ does not veto the extermination of the enemy.”
Rasputin, the hypnotic adviser to the Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra, was assassinated by an MI6 officer who fired the fatal shot, while Sidney Reilly, nicknamed the “Ace of Spies,” planned to kill the whole of the Soviet leadership during a meeting at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1918.
One MI6 officer, Lt Stephen Alley, was apparently sacked when he refused to assassinate Joseph Stalin, according to passages in his unpublished memoirs.
But the case of Mohammed Lashet, who was being run as an agent by Captain John Dymoke Scale, appears to be that of an agent who set out on a mission of his own.
He was recruited by what was then MI1c while working at a British propaganda unit called the Anglo-Russian Commission in St Petersburg before the Russian revolution of 1917.
After moving to Stockholm he offered himself as an agent to the Americans but they were so worried by what he offered to do for them that they thought he was an “agent provocateur” and turned him down.
Lashet and 15 of his compatriots appear to have lured four Bolsheviks to their deaths, two of them Soviet embassy officials in Stockholm, which had become a hotbed of Western spies.
They used women who included a blonde and a dark-haired “exotic” woman from central Asia, to attract their targets.
One of their victims, Nickolai Ardashev, a commercial agent, was enticed to the villa on a lake north of Stockholm by a beautiful sixteen-year-old Russian girl called Dagmara de Gysser, who took him there in a chauffeur-driven car.
Despite posing as a communist, she was in fact the daughter of a general in the White Russian army that had fought for the Tsar during the revolution.
The villa, on an island in the middle of the lake was “fitted out in brightly coloured extravagant Caucasian, semi-Oriental style” according to a Daily Telegraph report, and owned by Lily Strindberg, a Swedish opera star, whose sister was Lashet’s mistress.
Lashet and his mistress were living in the villa which became renowned within the Russian community for the regular orgies that occurred there.
When he arrived Ardashev was set on by members of the so-called “Murder League”, chained to a wall and left for 26 hours, before being brought before a “court marshal” of gang members, interrogated and condemned to death.
That would be “court martial,” Telegraphists.