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 Pendennis Street 10 Liverpool: ‘Second City of the Empire’ 12 An Englishman in Russia 13 Dazzling St Petersburg 13 A German Education at St Petersburg: the Annenschule 16 Red Sunday: memories of the 1905 Revolution 19 Warning bells and ‘ice-hilling’ 19 The preludes to an expected drama 21 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 A foretaste of the Frontier: the Punjab 28 The Indian Political Service: a caste within the colonial administration 31 A shadow organisation: the Indian Political Intelligence Service 34 The training-ground: the North West Frontier Province 36 Administrative and political frontiers: controlling the hinterland 37 Sherani country 39 The Frontier: a territory for elites? 44 vii CONTENTS 3. The Persian Gulf and the Hunt for ‘Mr Wassmuss’ 49 The Great War and Persia 50 Iran during the First World War: the theory and practice of ‘neutrality’ 51 Jihad and pointed helmets 52 A police force in the South: the South Persia Rifles (SPR) 54 The tribulations of the ‘German Lawrence’ in the Persian Gulf 56 Wassmuss, a model field-agent 57 Reginald Teague-Jones on Wassmuss’s track 60 Persia and the Russian Revolution 63 On the road to Meshed 64 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 First impressions of Transcaspia 75 Transcaspia after the Russian Revolution: from the Red offensive to the emergence of a Turkmen power 79 The brief history of a transient government: the Transcaspian government 82 Reginald Teague-Jones: ‘Political Representative in Transcaspia’ 84 ‘This is a railway war’ 85 A railway government 88 Building an intelligence network in Transcaspia 91 From improvisation to retreat: the Transcaspian episode 94 The Turkmen question: an instrumental strategy? 95 An intelligence service in Yomut country 98 Malmiss: game over 101 5. The Legend of the Twenty-Six Commissars: Teague-Jones, Hero or Villain? 105 Baku: 1918 106 The country before the battle 106 Baku: the geostrategic prize 108 The siege of Baku 110 The drama of the twenty-six commissars: the anatomy of an execution 116 A political drama with a railway ending 116 Passengers for Krasnovodsk 119 Diminished responsibilities 122 ‘A malicious propaganda legend’ (Teague-Jones, November 1979) 125 The origins of the Soviet case: Vadim Chaikin’s inquiry 127 viii