DeWitt Clinton Poole

DeWitt Clinton Poole (1885—1952) U.S. Consul general in Moscow, was America's spymaster in Revolutionary Russia. He arrived in Moscow in September 1917, two months before the Bolshevik Revolution, and left via Petrograd in late 1918 for the port of Archangelsk.[1] He was "He was active in implementing U.S. policy, negotiating with the Bolshevik authorities, and supervising American intelligence operations that gathered information about conditions throughout Russia, especially monitoring anti-Bolshevik elements and areas of German influence."[1]

Espionage historian Barnes Carr implicates Poole in the Ambassadors Plot to assassinate Vladimir Lenin in 1918, which the press misnamed the Lockhart—Reilly plot, after two of its principal agents. Poole employed Xenophon Kalamatiano as his main field officer.[2] Besides Reilly, the main Russian plotter was Boris Savinkov, who ran an anti-tsarist and anti-communist underground. which was eventually uncovered by the cheka, and the bolsheviks responded by escalating the red terror.

U.S. Secretary of state Robert Lansing allegedly initiated the plot[2] after Lenin seized power in October 1917 and removed Russia from the World War I, as part of a secret deal the Bolsheviks had struck with Germany. President Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy was publicly opposed to interference, but he told Lansing the Moscow coup had his "entire approval".[2]

In addition to instigating an attempted coup d'etat, they laundered money through the British and French to send the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) on the Polar Bear Expedition under British Command by General Edmund Ironside in Operation Archangel, part of the North Russia intervention, an Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. General Jean Lavergne, chief of the French military mission to Russia was aided by Consul General fr:Joseph-Fernand Grenard, who attempted to recruit resistance armies to march on Bolshevik Moscow, and dispatched agents across Russia.[3]

After the invasion failed, inquires were met with "evasive avoidance" in America, with FDR in 1933 inirectly denying the matter in claiming a "happy tradition of friendship for more than a century". Reagan again denied it in the 80's in public address to the Russian people that "our governments have had serious differences, but our sons and daughters have never fought each other in a war."[4]

1918 Ambassadors Plot to Assassinate Lenin

The Ambassadors' Plot, later misnamed in the press as the Lockhart-Reilly Plot,[5][6] has sparked considerable debate over the years: did the Allies launch a clandestine operation to overthrow the Bolsheviks in the later summer of 1918 and, if so, did Felix Dzerzhinsky's Cheka uncover the plot at the eleventh hour or did they know of the conspiracy from the outset?[7][8] At the time, the dissembling American Consul-General DeWitt Clinton Poole publicly insisted the Cheka orchestrated the conspiracy from beginning to end and that Reilly was a Bolshevik agent provocateur.[lower-alpha 1][11][9]

Planning a Coup
See also: Sidney_Reilly § Planning_a_coup

The Plot Unravels
See also: Sidney_Reilly § The_plot_unravels

See also

Notes
  1. The persistent myth that Sidney Reilly was a Soviet agent originates in speculative remarks made at Oslo on 30 September 1918 by Dewitt C. Poole, the former U.S. Consul-General in Russia.[9] Both R. H. Bruce Lockhart and George Hill later rejected Poole's remarks as risible. Their confidence in Reilly's anti-Bolshevism was confirmed in 1992 following access to OGPU interrogation reports preceding Reilly's execution.[10]
  1. Lees 2014.
  2. Carr 2020, p. vii, preface.
  3. Carr, p. viii, preface.
  4. Carr 2020, p. ix, preface.
  5. Hill 1932, pp. 241–242.
  6. Long 1995, p. 1225.
  7. Long 1995, p. 1226.
  8. Spence 2002, pp. 187–191.
  9. Lockhart 1932, pp. 277, 322–323.
  10. Ainsworth 1998, p. 1466.
  11. Debo 1971.

Bibliography and Further Reading
  • Carr, Barnes (2020). The Lenin Plot: The Unknown Story of America's War Against Russia. Pegasus Books. ISBN 978-1-64313-317-1.
  • Lockhart, R. H. Bruce (1932). Memoirs of a British Agent. London and New York: Putnam. ISBN 978-1-84832-629-3.
  • Long, John W. (November 1995). "Searching for Sidney Reilly: The Lockhart Plot in Revolutionary Russia, 1918". Europe-Asia Studies. 47 (7): 1225–1243. doi:10.1080/09668139508412316.
  • Spence, Richard B. (2002). Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly. Feral House. ISBN 978-0-922915-79-8.
  • Hill, George Alexander (1932). Go Spy the Land. London: Cassell. ISBN 978-1-8495-4708-6.
  • Lees, Lorraine M.; Rodner, William S., eds. (2014). An American Diplomat in Bolshevik Russia: DeWitt Clinton Poole. History Faculty Bookshelf. Vol. 17. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 9780299302245.
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