538 • TEAGUE-JONES, REGINALD
and in 1936 was posted toPalestineas an intelligence officer. In
1942 he was appointeddefence security officerin Iraq and in 1945
succeeded Teddy Smith-Ross as director of theInter-Services Liai-
son Department. In 1953 Teague was theSecret Intelligence Ser-
vice’s controller, Middle East, and in his retirement was director of
passport control.TEAGUE-JONES, REGINALD.In 1917 Captain Reginald Teague-
Jones was transferred from the Indian Police to GHQ in Delhi to head
a section of military intelligence monitoring developments in the Per-
sian Gulf. Although only 28, he was exceptionally well qualified,
having been brought up and educated in St. Petersburg. He spoke
several languages fluently, including Russian, French, German, and
Hindi, and his assignment to General Malleson’s forces in Trans-Cas-
pia would have been uncontroversial except for one incident. After
the fall of Baku in September 1918, a group of 26 important Bolshe-
vik prisoners was executed by the victorious socialist revolutionaries,
and when the news of their deaths reached Moscow there was consid-
erable anger among the Communist leadership. A lawyer, Vadim
Chaikin, was appointed to investigate the affair and one of those he
interviewed, a participant in the affair, named Teague-Jones as hav-
ing instigated the murders.
For his part Teague-Jones denied complicity in the deaths but con-
firmed, in a detailed report written in November 1922 for the Foreign
Office, that he had been present for part of a meeting at which the
fate of the prisoners had been debated by their captors. He had been
asked to accept the prisoners and escort them to internment in India,
but when the request had been relayed to Malleson, it had been de-
clined with the ominous suggestion that ‘‘the Trans-Caspian authori-
ties find some other way of disposing of them.’’
Teague-Jones’s supposed involvement in the executions soured
Anglo-Russian relations for many years, and it was a topic that Stalin
would never drop. The bodies of the 26 were exhumed from their
common grave beside a railway line and moved to a huge memorial
square in the center of Baku. The Soviets followed in 1922 with a
demand for an international tribunal to prosecute Teague-Jones,
which prompted the British government to issue a rebuttal to the
charges laid by Chaikin. In the formal British statement, it was al-