Paul Dukes

Paul Dukes
The Man with a Hundred Faces
Allegiance United Kingdom
White Movement
Service SIS/MI6.
Operation(s) Operation Kronstadt
Award(s) KBE
Codename(s) ST-25
Birth name Paul Henry Dukes
Born 10 February 1889
Bridgwater, Somerset, England, UK
Died 27 August 1967 (aged 78)
Cape Town, South Africa
Nationality  England
Parents Rev. Edwin J. Dukes, Edith M. Dukes (née Pope)
Alma mater Caterham School

Sir Paul Henry Dukes KBE (10 February 1889 – 27 August 1967) was a British author and MI6 officer.

Early life and family

Paul Henry Dukes was born the third of five children on 10 February 1889 in Bridgwater, Somerset, England. He was the son of the Congregationalist clergyman, Rev. Edwin Joshua Dukes (1847-1930), of Kingsland, London, and his wife, the former Edith Mary Pope (1863-1898), of Sandford, Devon. Edith was an academically gifted woman, the daughter of a schoolteacher, who obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree by correspondence course at the age of 20. In 1884, she married Edwin, who had returned from missionary work in China. She died from a disease of the thyroid gland, and in 1907, Edwin remarried to a forty-year-old widow named Harriet Rouse.

Paul's siblings included the playwright Ashley Dukes (1885-1959) and the renowned physician Cuthbert Dukes (1890-1977). He had an elder sister, Irene Catherine Dukes (1887-1950), who led a life plagued by illness, and yet another, younger brother, Marcus Braden Dukes (1893-1936), who died in Kuala Lumpur while working as a government official.

Paul was educated at Caterham School before going on to pursue a career in music at Petrograd Conservatoire, Russia.

Career

As a young man he took a position as a language teacher in Riga, Latvia. He later moved to St. Petersburg, having been recruited personally by Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the first "C" of MI6 (SIS), to act as a secret agent in Imperial Russia, relying on his fluency in the Russian language. At the time, he was employed at the Petrograd Conservatoire as a concert pianist and deputy conductor to Albert Coates. In his new capacity as sole British agent in Russia, he set up elaborate plans to help prominent White Russians escape from Soviet prisons and smuggled hundreds of them into Finland.

Known as the "Man of a Hundred Faces," Dukes continued his use of disguises, which aided him in assuming a number of identities and gained him access to numerous Bolshevik organizations. He successfully infiltrated the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Comintern, and the political police, or CHEKA. Dukes also learned of the inner workings of the Politburo, and passed the information to British intelligence.

He returned to Britain a distinguished hero, and in 1920 was knighted by King George V, who called Dukes the "greatest of all soldiers." To this day, Dukes is the only person knighted based entirely on his exploits in espionage. He briefly returned to service in 1939, helping to locate a prominent Czech businessman who disappeared after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. He was also a leading figure in introducing yoga to the Western World.

Writing

His book Red Dusk and the Morrow chronicles the rise and fall of Bolshevism and he toured the world extensively giving lectures pertaining to this subject.

Personal life

Dukes was married first to Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherford, former wife of Ogden Livingston Mills.[1] Dukes later married Diana Fitzgerald.

Death

He died on 27 August 1967 in Cape Town, South Africa, aged 78.

Works

References

  1. ↑ "Mrs. M. S. Rutherfurd Wed To F. L. Sprague", The New York Times (New York City), 27 November 1939. Margaret was the daughter of Anne Harriman, the second wife of William Kissam Vanderbilt, and her second husband, Lewis Morris Rutherfurd, son of the astronomer Lewis Morris Rutherfurd. After divorcing Dukes, Margaret Rutherfurd successively married Charles Michel Joachim Napoléon, Prince Murat, and Frederick Leybourne Sprague

Further reading

External links

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