R.H. Bruce Lockhart

Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, KCMG (2 September 1887 – 27 February 1970) was a British diplomat, journalist, author, secret agent and footballer. His 1932 book Memoirs of a British Agent became an international bestseller and brought him to the world's attention by telling of his failed effort in 1918 to covertly back regime change in Revolutionary Russia, by assassinating Lenin as a prelude to a coup d'etat. After the plot failed, U.S. Consul General to Moscow and spymaster DeWitt Clinton Poole dissembled. It was said at the time that his main co-conspirator Sidney Reilly, and others were double agents working for the Bolsheviks. In the end, the "Lockhart Plot" was revealed as a cunning sting operation controlled by Felix Dzerzhinsky with the goal of discrediting the British and French governments. However, Boris Savinkov and in particular Xenophon Kalamatiano were working for the U.S. State Department under the direction of U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing, as pieced together in recent research by the historian Barnes Carr.