HILL, GEORGE• 239venture began when he accepted a commission from the Romanian
ambassador to rescue the Romanian crown jewels, which had been
deposited in the Kremlin for safekeeping together with most of Bu-
charest’s treasury, and return them to Jassy, the temporary seat of
government in war-torn Romania. Thus Hill found himself escorting
a train of treasure across the newly declared Soviet republic and over
five or six battle fronts to the Romanian frontier, an epic journey last-
ing nine days. After receiving the thanks of the Romanian prime min-
ister, Hill returned to Moscow to help organize Leon Trotsky’s
intelligence apparatus along the German front. During this period
when chaos ruled, Hill teamed up withSidney Reilly, theSecret In-
telligence Service(SIS) spy that had previously been known to him
only by the cipher ‘‘ST 1.’’ Hill did not fully approve of Reilly’s
commitment to the anti-Bolshevik Boris Savinkov and preferred to
concentrate his resources on fighting the Germans in a guerrilla cam-
paign waged in the Ukraine.
The Allied occupation of Archangel in August 1918 abruptly
ended Hill’s relationship with the revolutionaries, and he went into
hiding just before theChekaarrived with warrants to arrest him and
Reilly. By discarding his uniform and growing a beard, Hill success-
fully evaded the Cheka and was evacuated with the rest of the Lock-
hart mission toFinlandin October 1918. Hill undertook one further,
brief undercover assignment back into Soviet Russia, lasting three
weeks, and was back in London by Armistice Day, 11 November
- Upon his return, Hill was welcomed by the Chief and Colonel
Freddie Browning of SIS and in the coming months was decorated
with the Military Cross and MBE and mentioned in dispatches three
times. In 1919 he was awarded the coveted DSO, appropriate recog-
nition for an intelligence officer who survived the most astonishing
adventures at a turbulent moment in history.
Hill spent a further three years in the Near East either operating
for SIS or, briefly, on Sir Halford Mackinder’s staff. Upon his return
to London, Hill found that SIS was no longer in a position to finance
his escapades, so he took his wife Dorothy to live in a caravan parked
in a farmer’s field in Colemans Hatch, Sussex. There he managed to
survive, as a technical adviser to film companies making movies
about Russia and by living off the generosity of his friends. It was
while he was acting in this capacity onDennis Wheatley’s first