When
the guns of August 1914 put an end to Vera Olcott's dream vacation in
Paris and abruptly halted her Foxtrot lessons with a dark and handsome Russian
count, she said yes to a very strange proposal.
Above: Vera Olcott, the "Aphrodite in Ermine." Photo taken from her 1922 passport application, a government document that is now in the Public Domain.
By September 1914, when she stepped off the S.S. La Touraineonto
the docks at New York City, Vera Olcott, 21, was married, alone, dazed,
confused -- and a Russian agent on a secret mission.
Vera had
certainly hoped for a big adventure, when she departed New York in May.
She cheerfully told the clerk at the passport window that the purpose
of her trip was "pleasure." She wanted to see the Eiffel Tower, shop
for clothes, visit the Louvre and dance at the Casino de Paris -- just
like many other people boarding the transatlantic steamships waiting for
them at the pier that day.
But she had never expected to return from vacation
as a married woman, much less the wife of a Russian count, trailed by
U-boats and a sinister network of German spies!
Back in May 1914, the only real secret Vera had
hidden from the passport authorities was her occupation. She had said
"actress" but in fact she was an experienced burlesque dancer at
Florence Ziegfeld's theatre in New York -- a seasoned veteran of the
vaudeville stage.
Romance was not exactly at the top of her
agenda. Vera hoped to make this a business trip, to see if she could
rent a flat in Paris and land an acting job.
In fact, as a Ziegfeld girl,
she had successfully survived for more than three years in one of New
York's most competitive chorus lines. Avoiding romantic entanglements
and fending off wolves was practically part of the job!
The only
prince charming Vera really wanted to meet during the summer of 1914 was
some cigar-chewing French theatre manager in a derby hat who had enough
manners not to slam a door in her face. She was absolutely certain that,
with a fair try-out, she could land something at a small theatre on
the West Bank -- maybe even an audition at the Folies-Bergère.
Moving
to Paris had been a dream of hers since she was a kid growing
up in Philadelphia. If she had any time off, after looking for work all
day, Vera wanted to visit some of the more fashionable night clubs: The
Folies, the Casino de Paris or the Moulin Rouge. She had read all about
them in the picture magazines . . .
As
her steamship blasted its horns and pulled away from New York, she
stood on the promenade deck, gazing out at the open sea. The fresh sea
air elated her, and seemed to whisper that she was finally on her way:
Her childhood dreams were about to come true! She had sighed with satisfaction.
So
what was she doing back in New York now, standing on the desolate docks
in a cold September rain, with ashes in her heart and one small,
battered suitcase that held only three rumpled dresses, a gun,
blueprints in German, and about $10 million dollars in Russian stock and
bearer bonds? What went wrong?
Only everything.
Watch Your Step
The Foxtrot was the big dance craze of 1914. It was made famous by Vernon
and Irene Castle in the musical "Watch Your Step," and by Harry Fox, who first introduced the Foxtrot at Flo Ziegfeld's Jardin de Paris, the rooftop dining area at the New York theatre where Vera worked.
Above: Irene Castle, wearing a costume from Watch Your Step (December 1914), a musical that made the Foxtrot popular. The dance was actually first presented by Harry Fox at Flo Ziegfeld's dinner theatre in early 1914.
When
her friends in Paris heard about the Foxtrot, they had asked Vera to
demonstate the seductive two-step -- and the crowd went mad. They loved it!
Vera just laughed and rolled her eyes. She was a splash. In fact, that night at the Casino de Paris, Count Alexis von Zarnekau and the Grand Duke Boris had practically fought a duel to dance with her!
Well, okay, they had actually flipped a coin.
As Alexandre Tarsaidze later wrote in his 1958 book Czars and Presidents: The Story of a Forgotten Friendship
(p. 315) Vera Olcott “armed with
nothing but a toothbrush and a talent for dancing" had permitted her
friendship "to become the object of a toss of a coin, between Grand Duke
Boris and her future husband, Count Alexis von Zarnekau, grandson of
Nicholas I, and great-great-grandson of Catherine the Great.”
Permitted
herself to be treated like a toy? Well, sure, why not? She had once
seen two comedians in vaudeville pull almost exactly the same stunt:
They chose a woman from the audience at random, and then made a big show
of fighting over her, all for the amusement of the surrounding crowd.
Perhaps
they had titles, but Vera had recognized almost immediately that Boris
and Alexis were actors, playing a feisty game with her. It was flattering and
amusing to watch a Russian count and a Grand Duke shouting "I saw her
first!" like two schoolboys fighting over a prize Kewpie doll at the
Penny Arcade.
They had their routine down pat -- and it was
clearly meant for laughter. So Vera had played along. The coin flip,
she thought, was actually a nice touch.
Not once did she think
that this was a real romance in the making. They had to be kidding!
Members of the Russian Imperial Family might flirt with ladies who
dance, but they never married them. Everyone knew that.
Still,
from the way Alexis held her when they began to dance, she had to
wonder: Did he want to learn the Foxtrot, or was he after something
else?
Above: Count Alexis von Zarnekau, ca. 1910, in uniform of the Tsar's Guard.
A Real Prince
While
they were dancing, Alexis had cheerfully apologized for the business
with the coin toss. They had done it to -- how you say? Break ice? Make
the laughs? Could she forgive?
Vera frowned, put her nose in the air and her hands on her hips and played the role of an offended contessa. She said she hadn't made up her mind whether to forgive the count or not. Would he please to toss the coin again?
"Heads?
Ah, monsieur, your lucky night . . . You are forgiven. But . . . ! " she
said wagging her finger at him, "forgiveness will be your only reward
this evening!"
Alexis laughed, bowed and kissed her hand. Vera dimpled and took his arm. That’s how it began.
They
met each other often for the rest of the season -- they enjoyed
chatting over champagne, and flirting and dancing together (he was
actually a splendid dancer!) and sometimes Alexis politely dropped her
off at her hotel on the Rue de Londres at the end of the evening.
Nothing more.
After
their third evening together, when Alexis warmly squeezed her hand and
gently kissed her cheek good night, but made no attempts to mash her,
Vera was duly impressed. Was she detecting signs of some genuine
respect?
Alexis charmed her, and he rapidly became her favorite
dance partner. His stories of life in St. Petersburg, serving as an
officer in the Tsar's guard, were fascinating.
Admittedly, Vera
wasn’t entirely sure how to read the man. He spoke in odd Russian and
broken French, and the casino was always so crowded and so loud. But
from the way he held her, and looked at her, and all the thoughtful
attentions he gave to her, she began to suspect that he was falling in
love.
She liked him too. For all of their differences, she was
150 percent comfortable with this man. They were a natural match. As
she sat in booking offices during the day, filling out applications, she
sometimes found herself doodling his picture.
Still, she wasn’t
prepared -- she was genuinely stunned -- when Alexis and Boris finally
invited her to a private dinner in late July and told her what they
really had in mind.
Above: Mata Hari from a 1906 post card. One of the most famous female agents of World War I, she was shot as a spy in 1917.
The Proposal
War was coming, and they needed a "special agent" -- someone exactly like her.
Specifically,
Russia needed an American agent who could travel to New York and San
Francisco for them. They needed someone they could trust, someone who
could help them move money -- millions of dollars in Russian gold. This
person must be able to open bank accounts, legally, in the name of
Count Alexis von Zarnekau.
Would Vera consent to marry him? Would
she be willing to travel to St. Petersburg to sign all the required
banking documents? Once the documents were signed, would she be willing
to travel all the way to San Francisco, to open the corresponding
accounts there?
In return they would reward her handsomely. They
had contacts in Paris, London, New York -- she would be protected
anywhere she chose to go. Money, transport, lodgings, would be no
object. She would have whatever she needed. She would be free to choose
her own methods.
But the goal was inflexible: The gold credits
and bank accounts must. absolutely must be put into place at San
Francisco on time, in order to buy a huge shipment of arms needed
desperately by Russia.
The fate of an entire nation -- the lives of millions -- hung in the balance.
Could she help them?
Wide-eyed, Vera stared at them for a long time. Then she exhaled and said: "Millions of dollars in gold? You're going to trust me with millions of dollars in gold?"
Alexis nodded solemnly.
Vera blinked. "Alexis," she asked quietly, “do you still have that coin?"
A Puzzling Past
The
story of what happened next to Vera Olcott, modern Cinderella, lies
hidden in a scattered collection of New York newspaper files.
Most
of the stories were first published in the 1920s, when Vera returned to
Europe in search of Alexis. No one seems to have taken the time to
connect all the pieces.
Today one may reassemble the overall arc
of Vera's career with surprising ease, by simply typing the name “Vera
Olcott” into the search engines at the Old Fulton NY Post Cards website, or Chronicling America, the free Library of Congress newspaper database.
There, we find the first hint that something very wrong was going on. Count Alexis von Zarnekau had a dark past.
The previous summer, on August 7, 1913, Alexis had made headlines in the New York Herald. (Vera probably missed the story because it was buried on page 9).
The young Count von Zarnekau was connected with the shocking suicide of a friend, Emil Kratzmann, at a luxury hotel in Carlsbad.
When
a Viennese beauty, a certain Mme. Spingler, told Mr. Kratzmann that she
-- how shall we say? loved another? -- Kratzmann had quietly returned
to his room, penciled a suicide note to Alexis and shot himself
“through the brain.”
Quizzed by the Herald’s ace correspondent
about rumors that the count himself had been responsible for the
“disagreement” that ended Kratzmann’s life, von Zarnekau said there was
“no truth to the story” -- and quickly left town for Ostend.
How
honorable were the intentions of Count Alexis von Zarnekau when he took
Vera back to St. Petersburg, and introduced her to his family as “Vera
Ivanovna”?
At first glance: Not very.
As we shall soon see, Alexis was playing a double game. He was in fact a double agent.
Married in St. Petersburg?
Years later, Vera would very definitely insist that Count Alexis had married her.
She
made this assertion in a 12 September 1926 wire story that ran in
several newspapers, headlined “A Yankee Girl’s Romantic Hunt for Her
Romanoff Husband.”
Vera told the reporter simply that she "took a
trip to Europe and there met and married Count Alexis Zarnekau, a cousin
of the Czar’s . . . "
Vera does not say where or when they
married. She says only that she “fled Russia during the World War at
the Count’s direction,” and found refuge in America.
This implies that Vera and Alexis married in Russia -- probably at St. Petersburg. But proof of that marriage cannot be found on the official record.
Indeed,
if one looks at Burke’s Peerage or searches for the name of Count
Alexis von Zarnekau in genealogical authorities for Russian nobility,
Count Alexis died unmarried in 1918.
There’s no trace of Vera Olcott.
Of
course, an American show-girl tagged “the Aphrodite in Ermine” by
newspaper reporters is not the sort of woman who would be listed by the Almanach de Gotha, a book that tersely says the best that it can say about a gentleman, or says nothing at all.
Russian
nobles frowned on Vera Olcott, dismissed her as some sort of fling, and
erased her from the official record. Royal genealogists have
stubbornly left her off the record ever since.
The Other Woman
What one does find, in the Gotha,
is evidence that Count Alexis married another woman. He put Vera onto a
boat back home in 1914, then turned right around and seduced Anna Behrs
Djamgaroff, a banker's wife and a member of the Russian nobility.
Above: Anna (Behrs) Djamgaroff, second wife of Count Alexis von Zarnekau
They were married only ten days before Count Alexis met his mysterious death in 1918. To
fully appreciate Vera's feelings, when she received this news after the
war, one must understand that she was genuinely in love with Alexis
when she left Europe. By September, their summer flirtation had become a
serious commitment.
At least, it was serious on Vera's part.
On
the basis of records from the years 1914 to 1918, it appears Vera
willingly undertook at least two missions on behalf of Count Alexis,
acting as his agent in France and the United States, placing her own
life in grave danger along the way.
Return to the United States
Ships
passenger lists and passport records show that Vera left France through
the port of Le Havre, arriving New York in mid-September. These may
seem to be small details, but they carry great implications.
By
mid-September the war was fully underway. Germany had invaded both
Belgium and France. Nearly 250,000 Belgian refugees crowded the city of Le Havre from mid-August to early September 1914. The rail lines were jam-packed with soldiers on
their way to the front, and shipping offices had undoubtedly turned into
madhouses as civilians fought for tickets out of the war zone.
In
order to get from St. Petersburg to Le Havre, Vera must have managed
somehow to obtain all the required papers and passes, and then nimbly
threaded her way through the back alleys of Europe, with battles raging
all around her.
The notorious "rape of Belgium" by the German army
made travel by car nearly impossible. Anyone following the same road
to France, in the wake of the army, saw bombed out houses and the bodies
of citizens carelessly strewn along the sides of roads. It wasn't
safe.
If she carried ciphered messages or military intelligence of any kind, Vera stood a good chance of being shot as a spy.
We may therefore deduce that she traveled by ship through the Baltic sea, under Russian
protection. That wasn't safe either. The Baltic was a naval war
zone.
The choice of Le Havre as a final port of departure is also
significant. Le Havre was a major staging ground for troops arriving with the British Expeditionary Forces, and a British command post. It was the temporary HQ for British military intelligence and also the site of one of the largest weapons
factories in France, the Schneider-Creusot works.
In other words, Le Havre was a high-priority target for German spies.
Above: Soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force arrive at Le Havre, France, 16 August 1914. Arrivals and departures were carefully watched by German spies. Photo Credit: Imperial War Museum
Is it possible that Vera stopped at Schneider-Creusot to speak with
officers of the munitions company, or to act as a courier for important papers
sent to New York? If Vera undertook such a mission for Count Alexis, it
was certainly a dangerous one.
Another, even more disturbing possibility presents itself: Was Vera
Olcott herself a German agent? If she had no concept of the true nature
of the package which she was given by Alexis for delivery to New York,
then she may have been used as an unwitting dupe, a clever means to get
through the French and British lines.
Either way, Vera made an ideal agent.
On the surface she would seem to be a frightened and disheveled
American actress, with a perfectly valid reason for wanting to return
from Europe to her home in New York. Her cover was solid.
Once safely on board the S.S. La Touraine,
however, she was still in danger. By September of 1914, no form of travel from
Le Havre to New York was safe. German U-boats were mining the harbors of
France, prowling the north Atlantic and sinking any ship from France or
Britain considered to be an enemy vessel.
By the time Vera
finally arrived safely back on American soil on September 13 -- her
lucky day -- she undoubtedly had seen many nightmarish scenes of war.
Vera's Russian Passport
With
regard to the question of a valid marriage between Vera Olcott and
Count Alexis von Zarnekau, one must ask: Did Vera travel on her original
American passport, under the name Olcott?
The author of this
article has successfully located her Russian passport photo (below),
which may be found amongst the Russian Consular Records kept in America.
They are government documents, now in the public domain.
Vera
was indeed traveling on a Russian passport issued in St. Petersburg
under the name Vera Zarnekau -- which lends great credence to the
marriage story she later told in 1926. The passport authorities would
not have issued papers to her, as a U.S. citizen, without clear proof of
her marriage to a Russian national. Neither would they have issued the
passport in the name Zarnekau without provision of a marriage
certificate.
What is most remarkable about Vera’s passport is the
absence of any supporting documentation. There is only a photograph,
and a handwritten name in Russian: “Vera Zarnekau.”
The rest of the file was apparently pulled by security services.
Visit with family?
After
arriving safely in New York on 13 September 1914, Vera probably
traveled home to visit her family in Philadelphia before beginning the
next leg of her journey, a trip to San Francisco.
She indicates on
the ship’s manifest that she was born 24 December 1893 at Philadelphia.
She gives her address as 1423 N. Van Pelt St., Philadelphia, PA, and
lists her parents as John H. and Sarah Louise Olcott.
Vera may have been a chorus girl, but she did have family. And what a family!
The Olcott Family
The
Olcott family were so powerful and interconnected with Wall Street
banks and secret societies, that one begins to wonder: Who was playing
whom? Did Count von Zarnekau use Vera, or was it actually the other way
around? Was it the Olcott family who were using Count Alexis?
The
Olcotts began their rise to power in the 19th century, with Thomas W.
Olcott, of Albany, NY, a banker who served on the Eerie Canal
Commission. He was part of a political machine known as the "Albany Regency" that included such men as President Martin Van Buren,
Secretary of Treasury Salmon P. Chase, U.S. Senator Charles E. Dudley,
and Civil War Gen. John Adams Dix, who later served as an ambassador to
France during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1873.
Franklin P. Olcott, a son of the banker, served under Dix as a vice consul in the French embassy during this period. His brother Frederic P. Olcott
(1849 - 1909) went on to become a powerful Wall Street banker, a man
who helped to finance many of the railroad lines that connected New York
City to Albany, Buffalo and Lockport.
The same Olcotts of New
York played a key roles in financing the construction of the Reading
Railroad and the Panama Canal. Financing of the Panama Canal was done
in cooperation with the French banking firm of Lazard Freres.
It has
often been said that the gentlemen of the Albany Regency who were
involved in these complex (and corrupt) banking schemes were also
involved in the 1901 shooting of President William McKinley at the Pan
American exhibition in Buffalo, NY. The death of McKinley made Teddy Roosevelt president, and Roosevelt, a former police commissioner of New York City, seized Panama on behalf of his friends on Wall Street in a trumped-up invasion that still stands as a bully example of "gun boat diplomacy."
By 1901, the Olcott family boasted several celebrities, including: Dudley Olcott (1838 - 1919), a vice president at the Central Trust
corporation, Chancellor “Chauncey” Olcott (1858 - 1932), a tenor who
made his name on Broadway by composing and singing Irish ballads, and
Col. Henry Steel Olcott (1832 - 1907), a co-founder of the Theosophical
Society with Madame H.P. Blavatsky.
Darling Dudley and the Men Who Brought Us World War I
Dudley Olcott, Vera’s cousin, lived at 20 E. 79th Street,
not far from Vera's own residence on west 79th. He had connections to
almost everyone who was anyone on Wall Street. Dudley was a vice
president of the Central Trust, and sat on corporate boards opposite men like J.P. Morgan, E.H. Harriman and Jacob Schiff.
Dudley’s
branch of the Olcott family ran the Reading Railroad from Philadelphia
to New York. They seem to have once employed Vera’s father, John H.
Olcott, which is why Vera’s family were living in Philadelphia.
Like
Morgan, Harriman and Schiff, the Olcotts were railroad men very
interested in the possibility of making huge profits from the war that
was now taking shape in Europe.
That’s why Vera had run away from
home at age 15 -- she wanted precisely nothing to do with railroads or
the business world. She wanted to live a brilliant and creative life of
color and drama, in the theatre.
In 1914, J.P. Morgan Jr.
made a loan of $12,000,000 to Russia. In 1915 he made a loan of
$50,000,000 to France. By 1917 he had organized a syndicate of more
than 2200 banks that made more than $500 million in war loans to Britain
and its allies. The Morgan firm acted as Britain’s American agent for
buying everything from rifles to beans, bullets, howitzers, cotton,
steel, chemicals, coal and railroad cars. It’s worth noting that Col. Henry
Steel Olcott had actually married into the Morgan family: He married
Mary Epplee Morgan on 26 April 1860.
Edward H. Harriman’s
family owned the Union Pacific and other Pennsylvania railroads. Like
the Olcotts and the Reading Railroad, they were ideally placed to help
the British, French, Germans or Russians buy coal, replace railroad parts,
transport supplies and build cargo ships. W. Averell Harriman, E.H.
Harriman’s son, started his career by building Lend Lease ships at the
docks of Harriman, Pennsylvania. The Harrimans had forged close ties to
the Hamburg-Amerika shipping line (HAPAG), which was used by Germany as cover for its espionage activities in New York during World War I.
Jacob Schiff,
owner of the Equitable Trust building at 120 Broadway, was a German-speaking Wall
Street trader well-known for his hatred of Russia and Tsar Nicholas II. Born at Frankfurt, Germany in 1847, Schiff migrated to New York after the American civil war. Over the next 40 years, he "became the director of many important corporations, including the National City Bank of New York, Equitable Life Assurance Society, Wells Fargo & Company, and the Union Pacific Railroad. In many of his interests he was associated with E.H. Harriman. "
In 1904-1905, Schiff had floated millions in loans to Japan, to help
the Japanese finance their war against Russia. He was willing to be
equally generous to the German enemies of Russia in World War I.
Back in 1904, Schiff had reportedly employed Shlomo Rosenblum (better known as Sidney Reilly
the “Ace of Spies”) to run arms to Japan, and to steal the plans of the
Russian Navy. This explains how the Japanese fleet managed to sink
half of the Russian fleet in 1905 -- thanks to Reilly, they knew where
the Russian ships would be, and when, and they had Japanese battleships
in place when the Russians arrived.
Reilly and his friends on Wall
Street then turned around and offered to help Russia rebuild its navy.
That's how Reilly started his network in Russia.
With
associations like these, one can’t help wondering whether Vera Olcott
herself was a spy. Her family certainly had a dark side -- an
association with the occult through her great-uncle Henry Olcott, the
partner of Madame Blavatsky.
As
detailed below, the Olcotts established strong links to Russia through
Col. Henry Steel Olcott, one of the original founders of the
Theosophical Society.
Col. Olcott became the lover and business partner of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky when she moved to New York City in 1873.
H.P.
Blavatsky, in turn, was a first cousin to Count Sergei M. Witte, the
Tsar's Minister of the Interior in 1905. Both she and Witte were
one-time residents of Tiflis, known today as Tbilsi, the capital of
Georgia. Russia had conquered Georgia during the Russo-Turkish War
of 1877-78, and many of the Russian general officers who fought that war settled in and around Tiflis.
One of those generals was Duke Constantine Petrovich of Oldenburg, the father of Count Alexis von Zarnekau.
Blavatsky and Witte both knew the von Zarnekau
family, who kept a large palace at 6 Kargarateli Street in downtown
Tiflis. In fact, Witte very clearly mentions the Counts and Countesses
von Zarnekau in his memoirs.
Col.
Henry S. Olcott was thus part of a social network that included the
family von Zarnekau and a former head of the Russian secret police. Vera's meeting with Alexis was no accident!
Vera's Dad
Exactly
how Col. Henry S. Olcott was connected to Vera Olcott and her family in
Philly is made crystal clear by a family tree that Col. Olcott himself
published in 1874: The Descendants of Thomas Olcott.
Vera’s
father, John H. Olcott, appears to be a nephew of Col. Henry Steel
Olcott and Mary Morgan. Specifically, Henry’s brother George Olcott had a
son named John Henry Sheldon Olcott who was born in 1867 -- exactly the
right age to be Vera’s father.
The 1900 census records for
Philadelphia do not show anyone named John H. Olcott living in Philly
that year, but they do show George P. Olcott (John's father, Vera's
grandfather and Col. Olcott's nephew).
In either case, Vera seems to broken off relations with her father in 1907 or 1908, when she ran away from home and moved to the Big City.
When
Vera moved to New York as a young girl, she became almost entirely dependent upon the good graces of some very powerful men. Therefore, when she went to Paris in 1914, and "accidentally" bumped into Count Alexis von
Zarnekau and the Grand Duke Boris there, it is highly likely that she was
acting on the instructions of Dudley Olcott, or
one of Dudley's business partners.
Like Sidney Reilly, ace of spies, Vera Olcott appears to have been one of Jacob Schiff’s secret agents. In fact, a closer examination suggests she was not working for Russia so much as she was working as an agent for the Olcott family's German friends on Wall Street.
The key to Vera lies in the complex web of friends that she made when she ran away to New York City in 1908.
At first glance, when
we trace Vera’s social network, as reflected in the newspapers between
1908 and 1914, she looks exactly like a simple chorus girl with a love for drama and adventure, and
no real interest in business or cloak-and-dagger work.
At first, she seems to be beyond the reach of Wall Street and much more at the beck and call of Chauncey
Olcott and his circle of friends in the Broadway theatre district. Certainly it was Chauncey Olcott
who first inspired Vera and helped her to launch her acting career, when
she ran away from home at age 15.
Above: Chancellor "Chauncey" Olcott and a stage friend
Irish Eyes
Chancellor
“Chauncey” Olcott, a Broadway star of the late 1880s, was born in
Lockport and raised in Buffalo, NY, not far from Olcott Beach on Lake
Ontario -- within easy shouting distance of Dudley Olcott’s family, who
were originally based in Albany, NY.
Did Chauncey have any
proximity to Vera’s family, the Olcotts of Philadelphia? Indeed, his
second wife, Miss Carrie Armstrong, lived in Philadelphia, and they were
married there in January 1884. To this day, an archive of Chauncey
Olcott’s records are kept at the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia.
Chauncey’s career on Broadway received a big boost
from Lillian Russell, the great comical opera singer who appeared in
many popular Gilbert & Sullivan musicals from the period.
Above: Lillian Russell
Lillian
Russell’s rendition of Chauncey Olcott’s songs “My Wild Irish Rose” and
“When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” made him famous, and together they netted
a small fortune on the sale of sheet music.
The Internet Broadway database also lists Vera Olcott as a member of the chorus in two shows starring Lillian Russell: Hokey-Pokey and Bunty Bulls and Strings (1912). In fact, Hokey-Pokey was
Russell’s swan song, her last Broadway appearance with the famous Weber and Fields comedy team (a stunt duo famous for their portrayal of German immigrants). A
great hit, Hokey-Pokey ran for more than 100 performances at the Broadway
Theatre between February 8 and May 11, 1912.
In other words, Lillian Russell gave a career boost to both Chauncey and Vera Olcott. This show was Vera's lucky break.
Hokey-Pokeyexplains how Vera wound up in Paris. She was already known and
well-liked in New York’s theatre community, and probably given a shot
at an audition in Paris, with letters of recommendation from Lillian Russell and her friends
on Broadway.
Dancing with the Devil
The problem
is, a thoroughly modern Cinderella like Vera Olcott could not escape
the financial and political side of life entirely.
During the
years before the war, the Olcotts who trod the boards in the theatre
district of New York were more than just a little connected to the
sinister shenanigans of the Olcotts on Wall Street.
This was
true for many actors: To work in the theatre, especially the Burlesque
theatres of vaudeville, meant dancing with the Devil.
Lillian Russell, for example, was a kept woman.
Her
notoriously extravagant lifestyle was financed by men like James “Diamond Jim” Brady (1856 - 1917) -- a Wall Street stock investor who
had made more than $5 million dollars in a classic “pump and dump”
scheme when the Reading Railroad was reorganized in 1896-97.
The
Reading Railroad Company president who had overseen the railroad’s
re-organization was none other than Frederic P. Olcott, Dudley Olcott’s
father. The Olcotts were most likely the main source for Diamond Jim’s
inside information -- which helps to explain why Brady’s mistress,
Lillian Russell, suddenly became so helpful to both Chauncey and Vera
Olcott.
Freak Show
In fact, Vera
herself was not exactly a naïve ingenue when she arrived in Paris --
she’d been kicking up sawdust on the floor of New York stages since
1908.
Vera created a small sensation in 1908 at Huber’s 14th
Street Museum and Flea Circus when she debuted as an exotic “Salome”
dancer in an abbreviated Tarleton skirt.
Located at 106 E. 14th
Street, Huber’s was a colorful penny arcade and freak show that charged
only a dime for admission. Heavily made up and wiggling beneath a wig
and coin-beads, Vera was one of many variety acts enjoyed by gawkers.
Her
competitors for attention included a jangling piano, a dozen
“penny-in-the-slot machines groaning popular songs," a Fat Lady, a
Tattooed Man, a snake charmer, dancing bears, a calf with two heads,
nickleodeon pictures made by Edison -- and a dark-eyed magician named
Harry Houdini.
In August 1908, affecting a low-class cockney
accent, Vera gave a lively and amusing interview to reporter Rose
MacRae, who did a feature on the new Salome dance craze headlined
“Behind the Scenes with Five Salomes.”
Vera was smart enough to
play dumb. She wore a blonde wig and pretended to have no idea who this
“Salom-y” was, but when read the story of Salome, MacRae observed
“Huber’s Salome has a brain that photographs an idea and develops it in
half a second . . . . She began and retold the story, leaving out not
the minutest detail. She had digested and appropriated it, and it was
hers forever.”
Ziegfeld Girl or Mata Hari?
In 1909,
Vera joined the Gaiety Theatre‘s “Joy Riders” and other theatres began
to notice her original interpretation of the oriental “dance of the seven
veils” -- she headlined as the star of the Joy Riders and won a rep for
very good box office.
One of Florence Ziegfeld’s scouts
apparently liked what he saw. Vera got the nod, and became one of the
chorus girls in Ziegfeld’s “Follies of 1910.”
After their success
in New York, Ziegfeld took his show on the road. The U.S. Census for
1910 lists one Vera Olcott, age 18, living in Chicago. Unfortunately,
she’s listed in a local hospital. It seems she went alley-oops during
one of their big numbers, and took a hard fall.
By 1914, Vera was a
seasoned professional. An excellent mimic, expert in hair-styling, wigs, make-up and costume, she could create startling transformations of personality and appearance with ease. She took directions well, and given lines to memorize, she mastered them with effortless grace.
So bright and professional was Vera, in fact, that she
may have caught the eye of a different kind of scout -- someone scouting
for a New York version of Mata Hari.
It
may have been the Great Houdini himself who spotted Vera’s potential as
a spy. It is said that Houdini once worked as a spy for Britain’s
Scotland Yard – he was recruited by William Melville (1850 - 1918), the very same
Scotland Yard man who had first recruited Sidney Reilly. It was Melville
who had recommended Sidney Reilly’s services to Jacob Schiff back in
1904.
Houdini
had a famous obsession with proving that spiritualists and
table-tippers like Madame Blavatsky were frauds. If he met Vera Olcott
while they were both working at Huber’s Museum and Flea Circus in 1908,
and if he learned that Vera Olcott was related to Col. Henry S. Olcott,
the famous founder of Theosophy, it's a sure bet that the Great
Houdini’s magical gaze fell with great interest upon little Vera, the
talented dancer of the seven veils.
A word to William Melville or
Jacob Schiff, a wave of the magic wand, and Hey Presto! Our wide-eyed
Ziegfeld Girl may have suddenly become a hired femme fatale.
Friends in Spooky Places
The
suggestion that Vera Olcott gained employment as a secret agent in 1914
may not be so far-fetched as it sounds. She had all the right
connections.
Indeed, Vera’s great-uncle, Col. Henry S. Olcott (1832 - 1907) was himself a member of the secret service.
Above: Col. Henry Steel Olcott, the brother of Vera's grandfather
During
the Civil War, Col. Olcott had served as legal counsel for the War
Department in Washington D.C. He was stationed in Philadelphia between
1864 and 1865 while helping the Navy to investigate corrupt contractors.
Olcott’s investigations of corrupt gun-runners, smugglers and
blackmarket schemes grew and grew until, by the war’s end, he headed a
network of military detectives that rivaled the Pinkerton agency for
stealth and cunning.
Consequently, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton
called upon Col. Olcott for a very important task: Olcott and his agents
served as the War Department’s chief investigators during the trials
that followed the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
In
fact Col. Henry Steel Olcott led the four-man military tribunal that
interrogated Mary Surratt before she was sent to the gallows. See
Robert Redford’s film Conspirator.
Olcott’s investigation
of the Lincoln Assassination led him to make the acquaintance of
several Knights of the Golden Circle -- a Masonic secret society
recently portrayed as a group of arch-villains in the movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007).
Col.
Henry Olcott was not terribly close to Vera’s family, but it seems that
John H. Olcott, Henry’s nephew and Vera’s father, worked within the
same sphere of influence: Both men were involved with Masonic circles in
Washington D.C.
A New York Times article dated 12
October 1889 reports John H. Olcott of Washington D.C. was suspended as
an Eminent Commander of a local Masonic lodge for “illegally” knighting
one of its members. John H. Olcott is also mentioned in Kenton N.
Harper’s 2003 book History of the Grand Lodge and Freemasonry in the District of Columbia (available through Google Books).
After
the Civil War, when Colonel Olcott and Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
founded the Theosophical Society, the Olcott family made the
acquaintance of many “spiritualists” and celebrities in the occult
salons of London, Paris and St. Petersburg.
Even if Vera was not
consciously serving her family as a secret agent, the seemingly random
meeting and romance between Vera Olcott and Count Alexis von Zarnekau in
1914 may not have been so random as Vera thought: There were only a few
degrees of separation and some very dark forces working in the
background.
Count Witte and the Holy Brotherhood
Count
Sergei M. Witte seems to be the man who connects all the pieces to this
puzzle. Witte was once the head of a secret society called The Holy
Brotherhood: A group of deeply conservative Russian nationalists allied
with the Tsar’s secret police.
The Holy Brotherhood was formed shortly after Tsar Alexander the II was killed by an anarchist bomb in March 1881. As a secret society it wasn't exactly secret: For a few months it was a wildly popular fad amongst the Russian nobility to join this group, a strange mixture of wizened old secret agents from the Tsar's "Third Section" and enthusiastic young cadets from elite families who liked the idea of joining a secret society and making a very public show of support for the royal family by vowing to strike the anarchist dragon dead.
Above: Count Sergei M. Witte, Russia's Minister of Interior ca. 1905.
A secret
society of extremely devout monarchists and royalists who believed
themselves to be locked in an international war against anarchists and
terrorists, the Holy Brotherhood vowed to defend the new Tsar and destroy
the network of bomb-throwing revolutionaries who were killing royalty all
over Europe.
Their mission was very much like the modern-day "War Against Terror" -- with a twist.
"Credulous as to the existence of a vast, international terrorist network, comprising myriad small self-sufficient cells in order to inhibit enemy penetration, the progenitors of the Holy Brotherhood structured their own organisation on the same model, with an added dash of the Masonic occult. At the apex of the Brotherhood stood a five-strong council of elders, each the contact for a subsidiary group of five, and so on, down to the sixth and eight tiers of more than 3,000 cells, boasting such assertive and esoteric names as Talmud, Success or Genius."
Officially, the Holy Brotherhood ceased to exist
after 1882. But many signs indicate that, in fact, it went underground, and finally became a truly secret organization -- one with international reach.
Under
the influence of Pyotr Rachkovsky (1853 - 1910), station chief of the Tsar's secret
police in France, the Holy Brotherhood seems to have moved its base to
Paris in the mid-1880s. Their network merged with Blavatsky's Theosophical
society, and also attracted members of the Synarchist movement in France (see Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre et al.)
More importantly, the Holy Brotherhood's crusade against anarchists and communists was apparently taken up by the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem, better known as the Russian Knights of Malta.
Above: Grand Duke Boris' brother, Andrew Vladimirovich, in vestments of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta
In return for his protection,
Tsar Paul I became the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, and his
descendants, down to Tsar Nicholas II, served as hereditary commanders
and protectors of the order.
As an online history of the Knights
informs us (Chapter IV), "In the Struggle Against International
Anarchists The SOSJ [Added] An American Grand Priory." Specifically, in
1901 the Grand Duke Vladimir, who served as Grand Prior of the
hereditary Russian Knights of Malta, sent his son the Grand Duke Boris
to New York and Chicago to establish an American priory."
In other words, Boris, the man who had tossed the coin with Alexis von Zarnekau to see who got to dance with Vera Olcott that fateful night in June 1914 was the head of a powerful secret society: One with an intelligence network of its own, tons of money and strong ties to the Olcott family's friends on Wall Street.
"Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich, son of the Russian OSJ Grand Prior,
assisted Richard Teller Crane of Chicago with plans to organize the
American White Cross in New York City. It is believed that they created
the American International Academy, and named explorer and geologist
Francis C. Nicholas as its first president. This pan-American
organization was designed for intelligence gathering operations."
Francis C. Nicholas had some very clear ties to the "Albany Regency" on Wall Street, men who helped finance the construction of the Panama Canal between 1904 and 1914. Dr. Nicholas, a mining engineer and explorer, did "research" in Central and South America for Archer Huntington and Col. William Lamb, two industrialists who were also supplying fuel coal to the Russian Navy.
Above: William Nelson Cromwell, the Wall Street attorney who became Grand Master of the American Priory of the Knights of Malta in 1911.
Francis C. Nicholas is also the man who did the original Panama Canal construction feasibility studies for William Nelson Cromwell, a Wall Street attorney who was very active in promotion of the Panama Canal project.
Known to be adept at regime change, William Nelson Cromwell of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP has been identified by several historians as one of the key players behind the assassination of President William McKinley and the subsequent invasion of Panama by Theodore Roosevelt.
In 1911, Cromwell was named Grand Master of the newly formed American Priory of the (Russian) Knights of Malta.
American Knights of Malta
The Knights of Malta website goes on state that the corresponding American Priory of the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem (Knights of Malta) was formally established in New York in 1911.
"The American Grand Priory constitution was accepted by the membership in 1912. The new Grand Priory included the Grand Priory of Russia . . . .
"The headquarters of the knights was initially the meeting hall of the Knights of St. John and Malta at Wurzler's Building, 315 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, New York. Most early meetings were held at Joseph Burrows' office at 56-58 Pine Street, near Wall Street. Wall Street lawyer William Nelson Cromwell became American Grand Prior in 1912, and meethings thereafter were usually held at his offices in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel."
Some of the most prominent families in New York society joined the American Grand Priory of SOSJ "and thereby developed the first American civilian foreign intelligence network."
Original American members of the order in 1912 included:
William Nelson Cromwell, Grand Master
J.P. Morgan Sr.
J.P. Morgan Jr.
J.J. Astor (who died on board the Titanic in April 1912)
Cornelius Vanderbilt
Richard T. Crane and the Crane family of Chicago
Francis C. Nicholas
Nicholas M. Butler, president of Columbia University
To a surprising degree, these names match the names of members of the Central Trust Company who were sitting on boards opposite Dudley Olcott.
German influence on American Knights of Malta
Despite the efforts of this intelligence network, in 1905 anarchists
succeeded in assassinating Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the
Military Governor General of Moscow. Grand Duke Sergei was the brother of Grand Duke Vladimir, the head of the Russian Knights of Malta.
At the time of his death, Grand
Duke Sergei Alexandrovich had been working "to uncover the cells of anarchists who
were assassinating government officials which included his own father
Czar Alexander II. His wife Grand Duchess Elizabeth, sister of Czarina
Alexandra, was involved in the research to unmask the anarchists and
this interest brought them both into contact with an Orthodox spiritual
writer named Sergei Alexandrovich Nilus."
Sergei Nilus was one of the earliest men to produce a copy of the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion
and "Grand Duchess Ella introduced him and the Protocols to her sister
and to Czar Nicholas II.
"Major General Arthur Cherep-Spiridovich,
President of the Slavonic Society, was thereby one of the earliest
members of any Intelligence Service to see the Protocols. He was given
the mandate by the Russian Imperial family to investigate the matter
fully and to spread the alarm about 'the hidden hand' of international
Zionism and its plan to gain global control through the elimination of
the Christian Church."
The Slavonic Society later played a key role in smuggling arms to the Balkans, and they themselves appear to be the "hidden hand" that secretly organized and financed the assassination of the Archduke and the Archduchess of Austria at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.
The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand caused an immediate rupture between Russia and Germany, and because the Russian Knights of Malta had very close ties to a similar order of knights in Germany (the "Johanniten Order"), the SOSJ itself became seriously split. Individual knights had to choose between supporting their military brethren in Russia or Germany.
For the Grand Duke Boris and his cousin, Count Alexis von Zarnekau, the choice was fairly simple and clear: They both descended from German royalty, and for Grand Duke Boris it was simply a matter of supporting the wishes of his father and brothers, who were very strongly inclined toward Germany.
Boris had a reason to dislike Tsar Nicholas II and back his enemies: the Tsar's secret police had utterly failed to protect his uncle and his father.
In 1909, anarchists had succeeded in killing Boris's father, the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich. As a direct result, Boris' brother, Grand Duke Cyril became Grand Prior of the OSJ Russian Grand
Priory. Cyril also held a grudge against Tsar Nicholas II. In October of 1905, Cyril had secretly married his first cousin, Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (known as "Ducky"), the daughter of Vladimir's sister Maria. When the Tsar found out about the incestuous marriage, he immediately stripped Cyril of all his imperial titles and sent the couple into exile. The Orthodox church absolutely forbids marriage between first cousins, and Victoria had also been married, between 1894 and 1901, to the Tsarina's brother, Ernest, the Grand Duke of Hesse. That marriage had ended in a scandalous divorce in 1901. For Cyril, an heir to the throne, to marry his cousin Ducky, a divorcee, without the Tsar's permission was certainly offensive to all the rules of church and court. But Cyril's family did not see it that way. Grand Duke Vladimir loudly protested this treatment of his son, and immediately resigned all of his posts in a rage. Thus began a serious feud between the Tsar and the leaders of the Russian Knights of Malta. Vladimir began opening back channels to some of the Tsar's German enemies.
Above: The family of the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, the uncle of Tsar Nicholas II. (L to Right) Grand Duke Andrew, Grand Duke Vladimir, Grand Duchess Elena, Grand Duke Cyril, Grand Duke Boris, and Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna.
"Grand Duke Vladimir had cultivated relations between the SOSJ in
Russia, the German Order of St. John and the Spanish Order of St. John the
Baptist. The German and Spanish orders were branches of the original Order. He
had also encouraged the American members of the White Cross to further develop
those relationships."
"German influence on the new OSJ American Association
through the Johanniter Orden Protector Emperor Wilhelm II and his brother
Prince Henry of Prussia was evident before World War I with exchange visits by the
industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt and President of Columbia University
Nicholas Murray Butler, Director of OSJ Education from 1912 to 1928."
"German
influence also came from the Czarina and her sister Ella who were both members
of German royalty. That relationship, which developed with both the Protestant
Johanniter Orden and with the Catholic Malteser Orden, continued from joint
efforts in the Baltic during the Russian Civil War . . . "
Count Alexis von Zarnekau: Secret Agent
In 1905, Count Sergei M. Witte became the Tsar's new Minister of
Interior. The founder of the Holy Brotherhood thus became the boss of
Pyotor N. Durnovo, the head of the Tsar’s Okhrana or secret police, which certainly had a large and active bureau of spies in Paris.
Rachkovsky, an early member of the Holy Brotherhood and Durnovo's man in Paris, thus became Count Witte's underling, both in the Holy Brotherhood and in the Okhrana. To say that Witte carried weight within Okhrana circles in Paris would be an understatement.
To repeat: Count Witte and his cousin, Madame Blavatsky, knew the von Zarnekau family well, having met them often in Tiflis.
We also note with great interest that Peter Petrovich Durnovo, the
spy chief’s son, was a friend of Alexis von Zarnekau -- one of his
classmates in the elite Garde a Cheval regiment from which Alexis had graduated. The Okhrana often drew its members from Guard units, and there is every reason to believe that Alexis himself was recruited by the secret police.
Finally, we note that Count Sergei Witte, once pushed out of power in
Russia, retired to Biarritz, and he received the news of the shooting at Sarajevo at Paris in June 1914. Witte was in Paris during the July Crisis, at the same time as Count Alexis von Zarnekau and Vera Olcott.
In his memoirs (Chapter V), the French diplomat Maurice Paleologue records an interesting conversation with Witte, held at his offices in Paris in July 1914, in which Witte characterizes Russia's headlong rush toward war as "madness" and accurately predicts a very bad outcome for Tsar Nicholas II.
As
Russia’s former Finance Minister and a former head of its Russian
railway network (essential to troop movements), Witte was undoubtedly giving equally perceptive advice to the French bankers and military men who were scrambling to
improve French and Russian railway systems as they prepared for war.
In
other words, in 1914 Witte was talking to some of the key diplomats and railroadmen
who were doing business with the Bank de Paris et Pays Bas, the J.P.
Morgan firm in New York, and Jacob Schiff at Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New
York -- men who were business partners with Dudley Olcott.
During
the July crisis of 1914, Witte sent several telegrams to St. Petersburg advising Tsar Nicholas II not to become involved in a war with
Austria and Germany.
His advice was completely ignored by the Tsar, who blamed Witte's policies for the nightmarish revolution of 1905-06. The Tsar's advisors viewed Witte as a Germanophile, a crazy old man who was clearly voicing Germany's strong interest in keeping Russia out of the war.
But
Witte's advice was taken very seriously by bankers in Paris and New York: How
could the French and the Russians transport the gold they needed to pay bankers in New York for American armaments and supplies?
One thing they clearly needed: More informants, trusted couriers, and useful agents in America.
Queue Entrance: Vera Olcott. Queue Entrance: Sidney Reilly, Ace of Spies.
Between
1904 to 1914, Sidney Reilly led the life of Rosenblum. That is to say,
he was not a spy. Worse -- he was a businessman. He was working for what he called "the occult Octopus" -- a dark, secretive and supra-national intelligence network whose day-to-day business operations were handled by men like New York Banker Jacob Schiff and Paris-based arms dealer Basil Zaharoff.
One may recall that in
1905, Reilly had overseen the delivery of arms and supplies to the
Japanese, many of the weapons supplied by the United States via ports like San
Francisco.
By late July 1914, when it became clear that
there was soon to be a Great War, Reilly knew exactly what to do. He cut
short his vacation on the Cote d’Azur, dumped his mistress at a luxury
hotel there, boarded a train and departed immediately for Paris.
In
Paris, Reilly most likely made contacts with his old Scotland Yard boss, William Melville (who was now head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence
Service) and the notorious arms merchant Basil Zaharoff, who owned a chateau in France.
They, in
turn, were chatting up Sergei Witte and the Tsar's secret police in
Paris. That put Reilly only a small step away from Count Alexis von
Zarnekau and Vera Olcott. For all we know, he may have been watching
them do the Foxtrot at the Casino de Paris.
In his book The Hunt for the Czar (p. 119) Guy Richards tells us how Sidney Reilly got his start in the Russian spy business:
“He
laid the groundwork for his personal intelligence service as a pre-war
naval armaments representative of the Mandrochovitch and Count
Tchubersky combine at St. Petersburg. Before August 1914, he had enjoyed
as many German contacts as Russian through his connections with the
Hamburg shipyards at Bluhm and Voss. He had obligingly passed along to
the British Admiralty valuable information about the Kaiser’s
submarine-construction program, and it was the Admiralty, having
discovered his wily and extraordinary resources, that eventually started
him on his ascent to the post of director of British Secret
Intelligence operations in Russia.”
In a strange parallel to the movements of Vera Olcott, in September 1914 Reilly moved to New York City. He made the dangerous trip in order to serve Jacob Schiff as an arms broker and arms
merchant, just as he had served Schiff during the Russo-Japanese War of
1905. He took offices in the Equitable Trust Co. building at 120
Broadway (Schiff was head of the Equitable Trust company).
Reilly moved to New
York "where he contacted the resident financial agent for the
Russo-Asiatic Bank (RAB), D.L. Kopperman, who knew Reilly from his work at
Medrokovich and Shuberskii. Once again
establishing himself in businesss, Reilly opened offices in the Equitable
Building at 120 Broadway, a structure that housed many legal, finanical and
brokerage businessses, as well a number of smaller independent agents. Here Reilly easily made acquaintances with like-minded
entrepreneurs,
"More relevant
to his present business were M.S. Friede, U.S. agent for the Chinese Eastern
Railway (a subsidiary of RAB), The most
important of these [American businessmen with whom Reilly came into contact] was
Samuel MacRoberts, vice president of National City Bank (NCB) and a trustee of
the Russian Insurance Company.
MacRoberts made Reilly managing officer of the Allied Machine Company
(AMC), an NCB-controlled export firm conveniently located at 120 Broadway. Reilly would use AMC to further his front
company ambitions.
From
this point onward, Reilly’s activities parallel those of Vera Olcott and
Alexis von Zarnekau. In a strange way, he seems to have become their
shadow.
Even as Vera Olcott prepared to travel to San Francisco on behalf of Count Alexis and the Grand Duke Boris, Sidney Reilly did the same.
But for whom was Reilly working?
Reilly's Mission to San Francisco
We are not entirely sure what particular mission Vera was given, but we know Reilly's mission in great detail. In early 1915, says Champion:
"Reilly
temporarily relocated to San Francisco, and while there met with the Kaiser's
chief intelligence officer for Russia, Captain (later Admiral) Paul von Hintze. Von Hintze knew of the German
intelligence network then operating in America, under the direction of Dr.
Heinrich Albert, using diplomatic cover in the German embassy to hide his true
intelligence mission.
"Von Hintze wished
to create a small and separate intelligence organization and Reilly seemed a
perfect partner for his plans, which included a plot to have Mexico attack the
United States and divert attention and military assests from the European
war.
"Using Reilly and AMC, von Hintze
had Reilly negotiate, acquire and ship weapons and military materiel to the
forces of the deposed Mexican dictator, General Victoriano Huerta. These contracts were easily disguised from
American scrutiny under the cloak of AMC's Russian deals."
Vera's Mission to San Francisco
Having seen in
person the opening salvos of the World War and having narrowly escaped
with her life, one would not have blamed Vera for sitting out the war on
the sidelines, holding her head in her hands.
But, after
arriving safely in New York in September 1914, she charged right back
into the scrum. As Sidney Reilly set up shop at 120 Broadway and made
contact with Schiff, Morgan and other key players on Wall Street, Vera
took off on an unexplained mission to San Francisco.
Passport
records indicate one Vera Olcott, born about 1895 in Philadelphia,
departed Cristobal in the Canal Zone and arrived at New Orleans, LA, on
18 March 1915. She gives her U.S. address as San Francisco.
In other words, Vera was returning to New York in March 1915 after having spent the winter in San Francisco. She stayed long enough to rent an apartment there.
She must have left the East coast in the autumn, perhaps within a month of her September 13, 1914 arrival in New York.
Vera’s Cruise Past Veracruz
There
were no airlines from New York to San Francisco in Autumn 1914 and no
paved interstates. There were no gas stations, motels or fast food
restaurants lining Route 66 or any other highway to California -- the
highway system was not built until the 1920s and 1930s. In 1914, when
it snowed, the dirt roads out west turned to mud, and when deep snows
buried the railroad tracks and blocked passes in the Rocky Mountains,
there was no passage at all.
To get from Philadelphia to San
Francisco in the late autumn of 1914 required going south by sea, along
the coast of Mexico, and through the newly opened Panama Canal (it opened August 15, 1914).
Then one had to sail back north, along the western coast of Mexico.
That
means Vera’s 1914 - 1915 journeys to San Francisco and back required
sailing along the coast of Mexico at a time when Mexico was in a state of
violent revolution, and the scene of some dramatic military and espionage
activities.
What was Vera doing in San Francisco, and why was she
putting her life in danger by sailing along the coast of Mexico to get
there?
We don’t know exactly. It’s a mystery.
But we do
know a bit about her social network in San Francisco: She had
connections to a secret society called the Bohemian Grove.
Above: A famous photograph of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 by Arnold Genthe: "San Francisco seen from Sacramento Street."
Genthe
How
Vera knew people from San Francisco is made clear by a small photograph
contained on the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online
Catalog: “Miss Vera Olcott, 1916” by Arnold Genthe.
A well-known
society photographer, Arnold Genthe was a member of the Bohemian Grove
Club and an acquaintance of the powerful politicians and artistic
“Bohos” who made up its numbers.
Genthe left behind him a fascinating memoir titled I Remember which
gives colorful accounts and photographs of many personalities living in
San Francisco and New York at the turn of the century.
After the
great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 (which Genthe photographed in
amazing detail) he moved to New York. By 1911 he had set up a studio in
the city, and it appears that he became one of the photographers
favored by Florence Ziegfeld and his actresses. This explains how Vera
first met Genthe, and made contacts with key people in San Francisco.
Guns for Gold
Why was San Francisco so important? We find some hints in The Lost Fortune of the Tsar by William Clarke (New York: St. Martin’s Press 1994, p. 177).
When
Sergei M. Witte was Finance Minister in Russia, he had placed its
monetary system on the gold standard. By 1914, Russia had one of the
largest gold supplies in the world.
“Within weeks of the
outbreak of war,” says William Clarke, “the best way to finance the
supply of munitions to Russia had been discussed and decided. Peter
Bark, the Russian Finance Minister, in the interests of insuring
British war supplies to Russia agreed the terms on which the first
consignment of gold would be sent to London.”
In October 1914, only three weeks after Vera‘s return to New York, “two British warships, the cruiser HMS Drake and the military transport HMS Mantois (formerly the P&O liner Mantois)
secretly dropped anchor in the open sea 30 miles offshore. Then in
complete darkness at night heavily laden Russian lighters and barges
brought bullion worth close on 8 million [pounds] (300 million pounds at
today’s values) out from Archangel and transferred them to the British
ships.”
Russia’s agent, Mr. Alexandre Timcovsky, “was
accompanying 979 cases of bullion, made up of roughly 4,500,000 [pounds]
in gold bars and 3,500,000 [pounds] in gold coins.”
The gold was
to be transported to Liverpool, taken by trucks with armed escort to
London, held in the vaults of the Bank of England and Baring Brothers
bank, then “exchanged” for British credits which could be used to buy
weapons from Vickers and other military supply companies.
There was only one hitch in these arrangements.
“In
spite of all the secrecy, Germany had become aware of what was going
on and had sent mine-laying submarines to intercept the ships in the
Arctic Ocean. The submarines quickly detected the two ships but their
mines were only partially successful and the ships finally docked in
Liverpool with only minor damage.”
A grim lesson had been learned.
As early as October 1914, the Russians began using their back door --
the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
Russia’s Back Door
In
other words, rather than watch a fortune sink to the bottom of the
North Atlantic, tons of gold were sent half way around the world, from
St. Petersburg across Asia to Vladivostock, where the gold was
transferred to warships and sailed across the Pacific to the
Philippines, Hawaii, and finally Vancouver, Seattle or San Francisco.
From
these ports, the payments were sent by railway across the American
continent, to Ottawa and New York, where the British had correspondent
banks that would grant credit for the gold. The British correspondent
bank in New York was the J.P. Morgan company, which acted as England’s
purchasing agent throughout the war.
Thus J.P. Morgan Jr., the
Harriman family (owners of the Pennsylvania Railroad), Remington Arms
(run by Samuel Bush) and some extremely influential businessmen on Wall
Street took a sudden interest in Russian railroads, shipping and news
from the Russian consulate in San Francisco.
As gold from Russia
poured into San Francisco, all manner of weapons and supplies --
including tanks, machine guns, howitzers, uniforms, food supplies,
medical supplies and railroad parts -- were shipped out. They went
across the Pacific and all the way across Siberia to finally reach the
soldiers on the Russian front.
Over night, San Francisco and its Russian consulate became the new Mecca for money men, arms dealers -- and spies.
Vera’s
abrupt decision to move to San Francisco in Autumn 1914 and return to
New York in Spring of 1915 was apparently the result of a request from
someone who wanted a trusted agent and informant in place.
What
they wanted most of all was information, and under such circumstances, a
beautiful and charming actress with a photographic memory was very
useful indeed.
It seems Vera Olcott was not sent to San
Francisco to smuggle gold, guns or diamonds -- they had people like
Sidney Reilly on hand for heavy lifting like that.
It is far
more likely that Vera Olcott was used to winkle information out of some
very important men in San Francisco, most likely men connected to the
Bohemian Grove or the Russian consulate.
For whom was she working?
Her father? Her husband, Count Alexis von Zarnekau? The Grand Duke
Boris? Count Witte? Or perhaps for her cousin, Dudley Olcott and his
banker friend Jacob Schiff?
As it turns out, one needn’t choose
amongst these candidates, because they were all working together, as a
team with a single goal: to destroy Tsar Nicholas II.
The Plot to Overthrow the Tsar
When
one examines the backgrounds of Count Alexis von Zarnekau and the Grand
Duke Boris -- the two men who contacted Vera in Paris in the summer of
1914 -- it soon becomes clear that both men had reason to hate Tsar
Nicholas II, and both were actively involved in plots to have him
removed from the throne.
Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich Romanov
was the brother of the Grand Duke Cyril, and according to several
histories of the Romanovs, the “Vladimirovichii” branch of the Romanov
family had been actively conspiring to overthrow Nicholas II and place Cyril on the throne since 1905.
Count Alexis von Zarnekau was the
cousin of Grand Duke Boris, and he agreed with the Vladimirovichii that
Nicholas had to go. But Alexis' motives were much more personal:
Tsar Nicholas II had destroyed and exiled the young count’s father, Duke
Constantine Petrovich of Oldenburg.
Duke Constantine’s crime? He
had enticed the Tsar’s brother, George, to marry a Georgian princess,
and then, in 1903, had tried to promote George’s three children (the
“Nakachidze claimants”) as heirs to the Romanov throne.
Profoundly
angered, the Tsar had declared Constantine Petrovich to be insane, had
stripped him of his titles and all his lands, had placed his fortune in
the care of a brother, and had exiled the duke to France.
Heartbroken, the Duke died at Nice in 1906.
His
father’s exile and death had been hard on Alexis. For the Tsar had
destroyed not only his father’s fortunes, but the names and fortunes of
the Counts and Countesses von Zarnekau as well.
Since 1906, Alexis
had therefore been quietly working in France with a network set up by
Jacob Schiff and Sidney Reilly -- men who wanted to remove Tsar
Nicholas, and replace him on the throne with the Grand Duke Cyril, the
brother of Grand Duke Boris.
When Vera had met Count Alexis in the
company of Grand Duke Boris at Paris in summer 1914, she had, perhaps
accidentally, stumbled into a group of conspirators who were working
tirelessly with banker Jacob Schiff to unseat Tsar Nicholas II.
The Schlieffen Plan for Russian Conquest
In
this overall goal, Count Alexis and Grand Duke were clearly backed by
the German General Staff and Franz von Papen’s German spy network in New
York.
In fact, under the Schlieffen Plan for war with Russia, the
Germans had given a great deal of thought to the problems involved in
defeating the Russian war machine, the mighty “steam roller” that
threatened their eastern front. The Germans had long ago concluded that
winning a war with Russia became much simpler if one first planted
agents in St. Petersburg.
Consequently, between 1887 and 1914 they
had carefully created a fifth column of pro-German agents who could
destabilize the Tsar’s government from within, sowing confusion and
division among its ranks.
Count Alexis and Grand Duke Boris were
exactly the kind of men that the Germans wanted: Members of the Romanov
family who held deep grudges against the Tsar, and who fancied
replacing him with another member of the Romanov family.
Count
Alexis and Grand Duke Boris may have disagreed on the means or methods
by which Nicholas should be removed, and the ideal candidate to replace
him as Tsar, but in principle, at least, they very much agreed with the
Germans that Tsar Nicholas II had to go.
Apparently, it never
occurred to them that Schiff and the Germans had a slightly different
plan: The complete annihilation of the Romanov family -- all of them.
Divorce?
In
1918, on the grounds that Vera had “abandoned” him, Count Alexis von
Zarnekau divorced Vera Olcott and married to a woman named Anna Behrs
Djamgaroff, the wife of a banker.
Whether Vera was ever served
fair notice or hearing for this divorce proceeding is an interesting
question. Given the fact that a vast battlefield lay between them, it
was a bit difficult for Vera to respond, even if she was given notice.
In
Russian law at that time, such niceties as giving notice to one's wife were not even
necessary. All that was required for a man to divorce his wife was her
absence from his household for a given length of time. The timer on the
Count's marriage to Vera had run out.
Alexis and Anna were married at Tsarskoe-Selo in August 1918, according to the Almanach de Gotha.
The
Gotha recognizes Anna Behrs, perhaps because she was related to Sonya
Behrs, wife of the famous Russian author Count Leo Tolstoy. Anna was
accepted as a member of the Russian nobility.
Mysterious Death of Alexis von Zarnekau
Only 10 days after his second wedding, Count von Zarnekau disappeared. He was reportedly shot by the Bolsheviks.
The
newly minted Countess Anna von Zarnekau told newspapers that Alexis was
shot “in my presence” at the gates of the Winter Palace. Yet other
accounts list him as having died in battle, having been shot while
attempting to escape, having been held a prisoner, or having been
executed at the St. Peter and Paul fortress in St. Petersburg.
Why was Alexis shot?
The
Cheka claimed that Count Alexis had participated in the “Lockhart Plot”
or “British Embassy Plot” -- an English effort led by Bruce Lockhart
and Sidney Reilly to overthrow the Bolshevik regime.
This coup
attempt took place between August 29 and August 31, 1918, a few weeks
after the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family.
Vladimir Lenin was shot and very nearly killed.
Alexis
was suspected of having participated in the successful August 30
assassination Moses Uritsky, the head of the dreaded Cheka or Secret
Police -- the man who had most likely ordered the murder of the Tsar and
his family.
The Lockhart Plot
The heroic efforts
made by Count Alexis to participate in a plot to overthrow Lenin and the
Bolshevik regime went largely unrecorded, but they were certainly part
of the very same plot made famous by Bruce Lockhart’s book Reilly: The Ace of Spies.
The
disappearance of Alexis von Zarnekau did indeed involve the famous spy
Sidney Reilly -- the man who had been in Paris in July 1914 when Vera
was there with Alexis, the man who had traveled to New York in September
1914 when Vera traveled to New York, and the man who made a beeline for
San Francisco in 1915, when Vera herself traveled to San Francisco.
How
very strange that Reilly now had a hand in the St. Petersburg operation
that allegedly killed Vera’s husband, count Alexis von Zarnekau!
Alexis
disappeared during the chaotic days of the “Red Terror” -- the days of
mass reprisals that followed the attempt to assassinate Lenin.
But was he actually killed?
The
stories are contradictory and confused. Most accounts agree that he was
shot on August 31 or September 1 (September 13 in the old style
calendar -- Vera‘s lucky day?)
Sidney Reilly, of course, landed on
his feet and managed to escape. Lockhart reports that, when they
returned to London, Reilly and the veterans who survived this escapade
used to meet once a year for drinks.
They called their group the
BOLO (short for Bolshevik Liquidation Operation) and called themselves
“Bolos.” Perhaps Reilly chose this name because he remembered that the
members of the exclusive Bohemian Grove club in San Francisco called
themselves “Bohos.”
Or was it Vera who suggested the name? The
Internet Broadway data base gives no listing for Vera Olcott in the year
1918 -- apparently she was not working in the theatre that year.
Where was Vera in 1918? Had she used her passport to return to Russia?
Did
Count Alexis von Zarnekau really remarry in early August 1918, only 10
days before dying? Or is it possible that Vera arrived in St.
Petersburg under the cover identity of Anna Behrs?
Vera Vanishes
In
1926, after telling reporters that she had received a letter from
Alexis, her lost husband, stating that he was still alive, Vera simply
vanishes into thin air.
All records of her abruptly end.
Did she find Alexis? Were they reunited? Did they return to America with a Tsarist fortune in tow?
The world may never know.
Apparently from her friends Sidney Reilly and Harry Houdini, Vera learned her lessons well.
She vanished without a trace.
It was a freak show worth leaving!
THE END
Above: Vera takes a bow.
Editor's Note: It seems Vera did not disappear entirely from the American press. After a silence of five years, the photo above appeared very briefly on April 1, 1931 in the photogravure of the Buffalo New York Courier. The caption indicates that one Vera Olcott, "Modern Cinderella," has won a silver slippers beauty contest for the daintiest feet in all of Paris.
One cannot help but wonder if this photo, on some Sunday morning in the distant past, caused the Countess Anna Behrs von Zarnekau to suddenly inhale and choke upon her morning tea. According to the accompanying article, as a direct result of winning the Modern Cinderella beauty contest, Miss Olcott signed a contract that made her one of the most highly paid and sought-after dancers on the Paris stage . . .
