The Story of Isabel Streater, my maiden aunt:
Every now and then, I cannot resist walking to the Espionage section at the back of the British Museum Library in London. I take down a book about the first defectors from the Soviet Union, look at the back of the dust-jacket – and gaze at the photograph of my Aunt Isabel.
All during her life, I knew Isabel as my maiden aunt who lived a solitary, peripatetic life as a secretary in the British Diplomatic Service. She died in service as PA to the Permanent Representative to the UN. She died tragically young, refusing medication for a routinely curable illness because of her Christian Scientist beliefs. She would come to us for Sunday lunch when in London, smiling sweetly at all around the table. Yet there is her same sweet smiling face pictured in Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s The Storm Petrels, the first Soviet defectors 1928-1938, published in 1977. My gentle aunt is placed next to Boris Bajanov, Stalin’s Secretary, who became the first important defector in 1928, and Alexander Orlov, head of the NKVD, who caused the Kremlin apoplexy when he came over in 1938. Her photograph is labelled with two names. The first, Isabel Streater, was how we always knew her. But there is another name in the caption: Madame Agabekov.
My surprise on discovering the facts about Aunt Isabel would not have surprised Brook-Shepherd. In a footnote about my father, he writes: “The only surviving member of the Streater family who could be traced was Jasper, younger brother of Isabel’s. He told the author in December 1976 that he could not bring himself even today to discuss his sister’s ‘tragic romance’. In view of his youth at the time, he learned little anyway, and was forbidden by his parents even to raise the subject.”
A little background. The Streaters were originally modest Sussex farmers and millers (the ‘a’ in the spelling is a Sussex variant). In the 1860s, English farming hit a crisis. Many farmers emigrated. As I now know, all the other Streaters went with their families to Australia and New Zealand. But “the lost Constantinople branch”, as they labelled us when I established contact through the Internet, chose instead to travel in 1864 to Turkey. Don’t ask me why Turkey – nobody knows. They built a mill, but it was burnt down by rival Armenian millers (who, soon afterwards, had theirs burnt down by rival Turkish millers). After that, they settled for safety, working for others in modest office jobs. They came back to England during the First World War, although the Turkish government of Enver Pasha, which had foolishly entered the war on the German side, told them that they could uniquely stay if they wanted. This was in acknowledgement of the fact that the Streater women, during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, had done what no Turkish woman was prepared to do: risk their lives nursing and comforting Turkish soldiers dying of cholera in an isolation hospital. They were back in Istanbul by 1920, at which time Isabel was 10. It was also in 1920 that her future husband Georgi Agabekov was recruited into the Cheka at Ekaterinburg. He was 24.
Now forward to 1929. Late in that year, Isabel joined her elder sister Sybil as a shorthand typist in the British Embassy in Istanbul. The magnificent 1845 building by Sir Charles Barry, architect of the Houses of Parliament, had technically been downgraded to Consulate-General when Ataturk moved the capital to Ankara, but was still preferred as a working place by British diplomats. And it was also at that time that Georgi Agabekov, sometimes known as Arutyunov, and born Ovsepian, arrived in Istanbul as head of the ‘illegal’ Cheka or OGPU network in the region. His cover was that of a merchant selling bicycles and typewriters.
It is impossible to list here the number of experiences or ‘achievements’ which Agabekov had crammed into his life as a Chekist, so one will have to do: in 1922, aged 26, he had organised the killing near Bokhara of Enver Pasha, who had escaped there from Turkey in 1918 and was then leading the Basmachi Turkomans in rebellion against the new Soviet Union. The extent of his remit in Istanbul reflected this experience. He was responsible for Syria, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and all of Turkey except Istanbul, which came under the ‘legal’ OGPU resident. Agabekov’s overall task was to begin the process of replacing British and French influence in the region with that of the Soviet Union.
His meeting with Isabel came about through another aspect of his approach to his work. Agabekov believed deeply in the importance of speaking foreign languages. He already spoke Russian and his native Armenian, as well as French, Turkish, Uzbek and Iranian. Now, Agabekov wanted to learn English. So he advertised for an English teacher – and Isabel replied.
The English lessons started. They soon turned into what has been described as “one of the most baffling and most tragic love-affairs of their, or any other, generation”. Whatever sparked Isabel’s love, Agabekov’s physical appearance was unlikely to be the reason: his appearance was unappealing, people particularly noting that his two eyes disconcertingly looked in different directions. To describe what followed, I cannot do better than to quote Gordon Brook-Shepherd:
“Miss Streater was the youngest daughter of an Englishman who worked in the Constantinople offices of the Blair and Campbell Shipping Company. Neither rich nor remarkable in any way that is apparent from the records of the case, the Streaters appear almost as the prototype of the middle-class expatriate businessman’s family of the day. They were solid, patriotic, respectable; and also determined, in an age where commerce was still not regarded as an ideal career for gentlemen, to hang on to the status they had deservedly won for themselves as long-standing local residents of unblemished reputation. It is difficult therefore even to imagine the force of the shock-wave which hit this unsuspecting family when, by Christmas of 1930, it became clear that the twenty-year-old English girl was having a love-affair with her thirty-four-year-old Armenian pupil and was, in fact, completely besotted with him.”
Events then moved quickly. Isabel’s parents and her elder sister Sybil tried to pressure her into giving the affair up. Her more practical-minded father locked up her passport. For Agabekov, the man of action, the arrival of an Odessa-bound Soviet ship in Istanbul gave the opportunity for an all-or-nothing solution. He would tell Isabel the truth. He would describe to her who he really was and what he really did. He would then propose marriage and offer to go over to the British. If she reacted with horror, it would all be over and he would return to the Soviet Union aboard the ship.
Isabel did not react with horror. She did not bat an eyelid, and accepted Agabekov’s proposal.
Agabekov immediately approached the British authorities in Istanbul. However, he was puzzled by their very slow reaction. After three months, he was asked to provide a CV. He did so. More silence followed. When summer arrived, and with Agabekov getting increasingly desperate, the equally despairing Streater parents decided on action of their own. Their eldest daughter Joyce was married and living in Paris. She agreed to take Isabel under her care and put her under lock and key. On 22 June 1930, Isabel was met by Joyce and her husband Charles Lee off the Orient Express at the Gare de Lyon. It did not work. Agabekov left for Paris by sea on the same day that Isabel left by train, and on arrival went straight to Isabel’s sister’s house. This resulted in the British pressing the French to do something, as a result of which Agabekov was ordered to leave France. He went to Brussels, where he contacted the Belgian Sûreté. In the course of their discussions, he pulled off an impressive trick. And this led in due course to his desired outcome with the British.
Agabekov had many skills. On the one hand, he was a ruthless and effective operative – “I buy men like you buy rugs”, he told one of his eventual interrogators. But on the other, he was a master of field-craft techniques, at a time when his opposite numbers would perhaps have spurned studying such things as un-officer-like. He soon provided a dramatic demonstration.
In 1930, much Western classified material was sent by post. The reason was the total faith that Western intelligence had in sending classified information through the post in sealed envelopes. No Easterner, certainly no Russian, was considered capable of opening a sealed and stamped envelope without the results being all too visible. In the course of his conversations with the head of the Belgian Sûreté Baron Verhulst, Agabekov had been describing how, in Iran, he had routinely opened British diplomatic correspondence, read and noted the contents, and then re-sealed each envelope and sent it on its way. When the Baron said this was quite impossible, as his re-sealing would have been easily noted, Agabekov presented him with a challenge. “Write whatever you like on a piece of paper,” he said. “Then seal it in an envelope without showing it to me. Then leave the envelope with me until our next meeting tomorrow.”
You can guess what happened the next day. Agabekov asked Verhulst to examine the seal. “Untouched” was the Belgian’s unhesitating verdict. Then Agebekov told Verhulst in detail what he had written on the piece of paper inside the sealed envelope. Verhulst blenched. And then he lost no time in contacting his British opposite number.
The news from Belgium arrived at a time when the Security Service was feeling pressure from another of Agabekov’s talents, his Public Relations skills. On 26 August 1930, the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune had published an interview he had given them. In it, he said that British indifference towards him was putting off other leading OGPU agents who wanted to follow him. This was picked up in the British press the next day. Pressure mounted in and around Whitehall to ‘do something’.
On 17 September 1930, a French-speaking member of the Security Service had his first meeting with Agabekov in Brussels. He introduced himself as ‘Captain Denis’, pronouncing it ‘Denny’. He moved straight to the main point as he saw it. How much money did Agabekov want, what information did Agabekov have, and how was the Captain to know if he was worth the doubtless vast fortune he demanded?
Agabekov’s reply made the Captain sit up and take notice. He was not interested in money – not even £100,000, £5 million in today’s money. What he wanted was the hand of Isabel Streater in marriage. If the British were to arrange for the two of them to get together again, he would tell them everything he knew, point out where British security was deficient, and advise them on future problems. He added that he could reveal the identity of the Soviet agent known as ‘B.3’, who was currently reporting classified information from inside the Foreign Office. And finally, he pointed out that, as Isabel was now 21, her family had no right to detain either her or her passport.
One way or another, it did the trick. The British Consul-General was instructed to visit Isabel’s father and tell him that, if he really wanted to do his duty by King and Country, he should let Isabel marry Agabekov. What my poor grandfather must have thought of this is unrecorded, but on 2 November 1930 Agabekov received the telegram he longed for: “All is well. Happy. Isabel.” They were soon married. Early in 1931, they set up their marital home at 188 Grande Rue au Bois in Brussels.
Agabekov kept his word. In Spring 1931 he presented the Security Service with its first ever detailed insider’s guide to how the OGPU worked and what it was capable of. Even more to the point, he produced information about current penetration. However, there really was a Smersh. It really did exist to hunt down and kill Soviet defectors. And it lost no time in making Agabekov a priority target.
Smersh was soon onto Agabekov’s weak point: money, or the lack of it. The Security Service had taken Agabekov’s scorn for financial rewards at its face value, and given him very little. Yet now he found himself a married man, living in a smart part of Brussels, anxious to look after his new wife. Smersh soon started dangling tempting money-making business propositions in front of Agabekov, using agents such as the mysterious Albert Stopford, a rich, 72-year-old gay Englishman living in Paris. These lured him to Austria, Bulgaria and Romania. In all of these countries, the authorities knew exactly who Agabekov was and grilled him for information as their price for letting him carry on, and also it would seem for protecting him from Smersh (the Romanian Siguranza’s records are mentioned by Brook-Shepherd as a key source).
In 1931 Isabel took a hand. She had always wanted her husband to work for the British. Indeed, she had begun to feel guilty about the fact that her husband was running around on odd missions which were patently not to do with the British. So the Security Service was again contacted. A useful area of operations was identified in Germany, where there were many Soviet agents, some of them known to Agabekov. In return for this, the Security Service would provide Isabel with £20 a month.
It didn’t really work in espionage terms, for reasons which are so far unknown. Where it did work was in personal terms. Isabel was left alone in Brussels, where she knew nobody. Her family, needless to say, had cut off all contact with her. Finally, in April 1936 she could stand it no longer. She separated from Agabekov, returned to England and went back to calling herself by her maiden name. She established tentative contact with her sister Sybil, still in Istanbul, and started earning a modest living as a shorthand typist.
Early in 1937, Smersh finally got Agabekov. With the Civil War in progress, they were well established in Spain. Dangling large sums of money, they lured him twice into Spain and let him return. On the third occasion, they threw his body down a ravine in the Pyrenees. No confirmation was available of his death at the time, or for some years to come. My father, who was in RAF Intelligence during the Second World War and was Ultra’s contact officer at British Forces GHQ in North Africa, eventually used his contacts to confirm what had seemed pretty clear. Agabekov’s remains were never identified, but he had died a violent death.
Isabel spent the War in the WAAF, rising to the dizzy heights of Corporal. And then, after the War, the Foreign Office took her back as if nothing had happened. She served in London as well as at British Embassies in Lisbon, Saigon, Mexico City and Tokyo, before her final posting to the United Nations Mission in New York. Nobody she worked with, any more than her younger relatives such as me, knew anything about her past. Nobody heard her comment on politics, let alone Soviet politics. All, however, remember her as demure and quietly charming. They also remember one little eccentricity. Wherever she went, Isabel only travelled with one little trunk. It contained all her clothes and other possessions. She did not, as she would say, want to be bothered with “a lot of clutter”.
And that is how my gentle Aunt Isabel’s photograph got to feature on the cover of a book about Soviet agents in the Espionage section of that book.
Every now and then, I cannot resist walking to the Espionage section at the back of the British Museum Library in London. I take down a book about the first defectors from the Soviet Union, look at the back of the dust-jacket – and gaze at the photograph of my Aunt Isabel.
All during her life, I knew Isabel as my maiden aunt who lived a solitary, peripatetic life as a secretary in the British Diplomatic Service. She died in service as PA to the Permanent Representative to the UN. She died tragically young, refusing medication for a routinely curable illness because of her Christian Scientist beliefs. She would come to us for Sunday lunch when in London, smiling sweetly at all around the table. Yet there is her same sweet smiling face pictured in Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s The Storm Petrels, the first Soviet defectors 1928-1938, published in 1977. My gentle aunt is placed next to Boris Bajanov, Stalin’s Secretary, who became the first important defector in 1928, and Alexander Orlov, head of the NKVD, who caused the Kremlin apoplexy when he came over in 1938. Her photograph is labelled with two names. The first, Isabel Streater, was how we always knew her. But there is another name in the caption: Madame Agabekov.
My surprise on discovering the facts about Aunt Isabel would not have surprised Brook-Shepherd. In a footnote about my father, he writes: “The only surviving member of the Streater family who could be traced was Jasper, younger brother of Isabel’s. He told the author in December 1976 that he could not bring himself even today to discuss his sister’s ‘tragic romance’. In view of his youth at the time, he learned little anyway, and was forbidden by his parents even to raise the subject.”
A little background. The Streaters were originally modest Sussex farmers and millers (the ‘a’ in the spelling is a Sussex variant). In the 1860s, English farming hit a crisis. Many farmers emigrated. As I now know, all the other Streaters went with their families to Australia and New Zealand. But “the lost Constantinople branch”, as they labelled us when I established contact through the Internet, chose instead to travel in 1864 to Turkey. Don’t ask me why Turkey – nobody knows. They built a mill, but it was burnt down by rival Armenian millers (who, soon afterwards, had theirs burnt down by rival Turkish millers). After that, they settled for safety, working for others in modest office jobs. They came back to England during the First World War, although the Turkish government of Enver Pasha, which had foolishly entered the war on the German side, told them that they could uniquely stay if they wanted. This was in acknowledgement of the fact that the Streater women, during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, had done what no Turkish woman was prepared to do: risk their lives nursing and comforting Turkish soldiers dying of cholera in an isolation hospital. They were back in Istanbul by 1920, at which time Isabel was 10. It was also in 1920 that her future husband Georgi Agabekov was recruited into the Cheka at Ekaterinburg. He was 24.
Now forward to 1929. Late in that year, Isabel joined her elder sister Sybil as a shorthand typist in the British Embassy in Istanbul. The magnificent 1845 building by Sir Charles Barry, architect of the Houses of Parliament, had technically been downgraded to Consulate-General when Ataturk moved the capital to Ankara, but was still preferred as a working place by British diplomats. And it was also at that time that Georgi Agabekov, sometimes known as Arutyunov, and born Ovsepian, arrived in Istanbul as head of the ‘illegal’ Cheka or OGPU network in the region. His cover was that of a merchant selling bicycles and typewriters.
It is impossible to list here the number of experiences or ‘achievements’ which Agabekov had crammed into his life as a Chekist, so one will have to do: in 1922, aged 26, he had organised the killing near Bokhara of Enver Pasha, who had escaped there from Turkey in 1918 and was then leading the Basmachi Turkomans in rebellion against the new Soviet Union. The extent of his remit in Istanbul reflected this experience. He was responsible for Syria, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and all of Turkey except Istanbul, which came under the ‘legal’ OGPU resident. Agabekov’s overall task was to begin the process of replacing British and French influence in the region with that of the Soviet Union.
His meeting with Isabel came about through another aspect of his approach to his work. Agabekov believed deeply in the importance of speaking foreign languages. He already spoke Russian and his native Armenian, as well as French, Turkish, Uzbek and Iranian. Now, Agabekov wanted to learn English. So he advertised for an English teacher – and Isabel replied.
The English lessons started. They soon turned into what has been described as “one of the most baffling and most tragic love-affairs of their, or any other, generation”. Whatever sparked Isabel’s love, Agabekov’s physical appearance was unlikely to be the reason: his appearance was unappealing, people particularly noting that his two eyes disconcertingly looked in different directions. To describe what followed, I cannot do better than to quote Gordon Brook-Shepherd:
“Miss Streater was the youngest daughter of an Englishman who worked in the Constantinople offices of the Blair and Campbell Shipping Company. Neither rich nor remarkable in any way that is apparent from the records of the case, the Streaters appear almost as the prototype of the middle-class expatriate businessman’s family of the day. They were solid, patriotic, respectable; and also determined, in an age where commerce was still not regarded as an ideal career for gentlemen, to hang on to the status they had deservedly won for themselves as long-standing local residents of unblemished reputation. It is difficult therefore even to imagine the force of the shock-wave which hit this unsuspecting family when, by Christmas of 1930, it became clear that the twenty-year-old English girl was having a love-affair with her thirty-four-year-old Armenian pupil and was, in fact, completely besotted with him.”
Events then moved quickly. Isabel’s parents and her elder sister Sybil tried to pressure her into giving the affair up. Her more practical-minded father locked up her passport. For Agabekov, the man of action, the arrival of an Odessa-bound Soviet ship in Istanbul gave the opportunity for an all-or-nothing solution. He would tell Isabel the truth. He would describe to her who he really was and what he really did. He would then propose marriage and offer to go over to the British. If she reacted with horror, it would all be over and he would return to the Soviet Union aboard the ship.
Isabel did not react with horror. She did not bat an eyelid, and accepted Agabekov’s proposal.
Agabekov immediately approached the British authorities in Istanbul. However, he was puzzled by their very slow reaction. After three months, he was asked to provide a CV. He did so. More silence followed. When summer arrived, and with Agabekov getting increasingly desperate, the equally despairing Streater parents decided on action of their own. Their eldest daughter Joyce was married and living in Paris. She agreed to take Isabel under her care and put her under lock and key. On 22 June 1930, Isabel was met by Joyce and her husband Charles Lee off the Orient Express at the Gare de Lyon. It did not work. Agabekov left for Paris by sea on the same day that Isabel left by train, and on arrival went straight to Isabel’s sister’s house. This resulted in the British pressing the French to do something, as a result of which Agabekov was ordered to leave France. He went to Brussels, where he contacted the Belgian Sûreté. In the course of their discussions, he pulled off an impressive trick. And this led in due course to his desired outcome with the British.
Agabekov had many skills. On the one hand, he was a ruthless and effective operative – “I buy men like you buy rugs”, he told one of his eventual interrogators. But on the other, he was a master of field-craft techniques, at a time when his opposite numbers would perhaps have spurned studying such things as un-officer-like. He soon provided a dramatic demonstration.
In 1930, much Western classified material was sent by post. The reason was the total faith that Western intelligence had in sending classified information through the post in sealed envelopes. No Easterner, certainly no Russian, was considered capable of opening a sealed and stamped envelope without the results being all too visible. In the course of his conversations with the head of the Belgian Sûreté Baron Verhulst, Agabekov had been describing how, in Iran, he had routinely opened British diplomatic correspondence, read and noted the contents, and then re-sealed each envelope and sent it on its way. When the Baron said this was quite impossible, as his re-sealing would have been easily noted, Agabekov presented him with a challenge. “Write whatever you like on a piece of paper,” he said. “Then seal it in an envelope without showing it to me. Then leave the envelope with me until our next meeting tomorrow.”
You can guess what happened the next day. Agabekov asked Verhulst to examine the seal. “Untouched” was the Belgian’s unhesitating verdict. Then Agebekov told Verhulst in detail what he had written on the piece of paper inside the sealed envelope. Verhulst blenched. And then he lost no time in contacting his British opposite number.
The news from Belgium arrived at a time when the Security Service was feeling pressure from another of Agabekov’s talents, his Public Relations skills. On 26 August 1930, the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune had published an interview he had given them. In it, he said that British indifference towards him was putting off other leading OGPU agents who wanted to follow him. This was picked up in the British press the next day. Pressure mounted in and around Whitehall to ‘do something’.
On 17 September 1930, a French-speaking member of the Security Service had his first meeting with Agabekov in Brussels. He introduced himself as ‘Captain Denis’, pronouncing it ‘Denny’. He moved straight to the main point as he saw it. How much money did Agabekov want, what information did Agabekov have, and how was the Captain to know if he was worth the doubtless vast fortune he demanded?
Agabekov’s reply made the Captain sit up and take notice. He was not interested in money – not even £100,000, £5 million in today’s money. What he wanted was the hand of Isabel Streater in marriage. If the British were to arrange for the two of them to get together again, he would tell them everything he knew, point out where British security was deficient, and advise them on future problems. He added that he could reveal the identity of the Soviet agent known as ‘B.3’, who was currently reporting classified information from inside the Foreign Office. And finally, he pointed out that, as Isabel was now 21, her family had no right to detain either her or her passport.
One way or another, it did the trick. The British Consul-General was instructed to visit Isabel’s father and tell him that, if he really wanted to do his duty by King and Country, he should let Isabel marry Agabekov. What my poor grandfather must have thought of this is unrecorded, but on 2 November 1930 Agabekov received the telegram he longed for: “All is well. Happy. Isabel.” They were soon married. Early in 1931, they set up their marital home at 188 Grande Rue au Bois in Brussels.
Agabekov kept his word. In Spring 1931 he presented the Security Service with its first ever detailed insider’s guide to how the OGPU worked and what it was capable of. Even more to the point, he produced information about current penetration. However, there really was a Smersh. It really did exist to hunt down and kill Soviet defectors. And it lost no time in making Agabekov a priority target.
Smersh was soon onto Agabekov’s weak point: money, or the lack of it. The Security Service had taken Agabekov’s scorn for financial rewards at its face value, and given him very little. Yet now he found himself a married man, living in a smart part of Brussels, anxious to look after his new wife. Smersh soon started dangling tempting money-making business propositions in front of Agabekov, using agents such as the mysterious Albert Stopford, a rich, 72-year-old gay Englishman living in Paris. These lured him to Austria, Bulgaria and Romania. In all of these countries, the authorities knew exactly who Agabekov was and grilled him for information as their price for letting him carry on, and also it would seem for protecting him from Smersh (the Romanian Siguranza’s records are mentioned by Brook-Shepherd as a key source).
In 1931 Isabel took a hand. She had always wanted her husband to work for the British. Indeed, she had begun to feel guilty about the fact that her husband was running around on odd missions which were patently not to do with the British. So the Security Service was again contacted. A useful area of operations was identified in Germany, where there were many Soviet agents, some of them known to Agabekov. In return for this, the Security Service would provide Isabel with £20 a month.
It didn’t really work in espionage terms, for reasons which are so far unknown. Where it did work was in personal terms. Isabel was left alone in Brussels, where she knew nobody. Her family, needless to say, had cut off all contact with her. Finally, in April 1936 she could stand it no longer. She separated from Agabekov, returned to England and went back to calling herself by her maiden name. She established tentative contact with her sister Sybil, still in Istanbul, and started earning a modest living as a shorthand typist.
Early in 1937, Smersh finally got Agabekov. With the Civil War in progress, they were well established in Spain. Dangling large sums of money, they lured him twice into Spain and let him return. On the third occasion, they threw his body down a ravine in the Pyrenees. No confirmation was available of his death at the time, or for some years to come. My father, who was in RAF Intelligence during the Second World War and was Ultra’s contact officer at British Forces GHQ in North Africa, eventually used his contacts to confirm what had seemed pretty clear. Agabekov’s remains were never identified, but he had died a violent death.
Isabel spent the War in the WAAF, rising to the dizzy heights of Corporal. And then, after the War, the Foreign Office took her back as if nothing had happened. She served in London as well as at British Embassies in Lisbon, Saigon, Mexico City and Tokyo, before her final posting to the United Nations Mission in New York. Nobody she worked with, any more than her younger relatives such as me, knew anything about her past. Nobody heard her comment on politics, let alone Soviet politics. All, however, remember her as demure and quietly charming. They also remember one little eccentricity. Wherever she went, Isabel only travelled with one little trunk. It contained all her clothes and other possessions. She did not, as she would say, want to be bothered with “a lot of clutter”.
And that is how my gentle Aunt Isabel’s photograph got to feature on the cover of a book about Soviet agents in the Espionage section of that book.