British diplomat and legendary spy chief Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart (1887 – 1970) (Image: Getty Images)
Perhaps the most audacious fake news story of all time, that sharks imported from Australia would ‘patrol’ the English Channel to deter a Nazi invasion, it was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to legendary spy chief Robert Bruce Lockhart, as his biographer reveals.
In 1941, a top-secret psychological warfare unit was established by the British government and tasked with finding new ways of gaining the upper hand in the two-year-long war with Germany.
Among other tasks, the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) devised ever more outlandish fake stories intended to undermine German morale.
The concept reached its nadir with a proposed fake news rumour that read: “The British government have ordered 26 sharks from the Australian government for immediate delivery in the English Channel, and woe betide any German soldier who tries to cross that stretch of water!”
This brazen piece of propaganda was just one of many outrageous proposals that came across the desk of PWE’s Director-General, Robert Bruce Lockhart.
In a career as bizarre and wide-ranging as Lockhart’s, however, the idea of disrupting the Nazi war machine with the threat of Australian sharks was far from peculiar.
Lockhart’s winding path to running secret psy-ops against Nazi Germany had begun in 1918 in Moscow, when the then 30-year-old Scotsman sat down with an MI6 spy and a Latvian soldier to discuss an audacious plan – the usurpation of Vladimir Lenin and the obliteration of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Youthful, energetic and cocky, Lockhart had a sharp mind, a head for languages (he spoke Malay, Russian, French and German fluently) and a knack for extracting information from people. He was the perfect candidate to be Prime Minister Lloyd George’s “Agent” in revolutionary . Lockhart’s mission was to convince Lenin to keep fighting the First World War alongside Britain and France. It was a seemingly straightforward task for a charmer of Lockhart’s calibre.
Before joining the Foreign Office in 1911, the adventurous Scot had been a rubber planter in Malaysia where he seduced a princess out of the arms of a Sultan.
As mistress after mistress followed, gathered along with a colourful network of friends that included Daily Express press magnate Lord Beaverbrook, the sci-fi author H.G. Wells, the ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II and the future Prime Minister Anthony Eden.
Lenin, however, proved too tough a nut for even the charismatic Lockhart to crack.
By the summer of 1918, when it was clear the Bolsheviks were not going to rejoin the war and would instead devote themselves to establishing communism in and then, across the world, Lockhart resolved to stop them.
From his office in Moscow, he conspired with American diplomats, French saboteurs and MI6’s self-proclaimed “Ace of Spies”, Sidney Reilly, to back a putsch from the Red Army’s Latvian Riflemen brigade.
So committed to treachery were these supposedly loyal Bolsheviks soldiers, they suggested shooting Lenin. The plan was bold and reckless. It was also doomed.