In his memoirs, not generally regarded as entirely reliable,[2] he described how he took the Romanian crown jewels from the Kremlin to Iași, helped Leon Trotsky to organise a military intelligence service and the Red Air Force, ran guns to Ukrainian nationalists, and recruited German agents for counter-intelligence work.
According to Hill he personally blew up an enemy gasworks, overpowered an assassin who attempted to kill him with a grenade by striking him in the head with a brick and ran one of 2 men who had followed him from secret meeting through with his swordstick.
[3] He eschewed carrying firearms whilst undercover as he considered them impossible to explain if searched and improvised having a bottle of acid to hand whenever writing his dispatches so that he could quickly destroy his secret documents if necessary.
[4] Rather than physical force Hill preferred bribery noting that 'I had always found the value of including in my kit a certain amount of good plain chocolate, half a dozen pairs of ladies silk stockings and two or three boxes of the more expensive kind of Parisian toilet soap.
My experience was that, presented at the right psychological moment they would unlock doors which neither wine nor gold would open'[5] When the British landed in Murmansk he was obliged to flee to Finland with the Soviet secret service, the Cheka in hot pursuit.
These agreements did not lead to much genuine activity, though Hill did manage to help infiltrate some Soviet agents into occupied Europe, in an operation codenamed Pickaxe.
There were more Pickaxe operations in 1942, though the Foreign Office began to worry that about Britain's allies finding they had dropped Soviet agents into their countries.
Hill replied that the problems resulted from 'sand in axle box tactics' in London; he was supported by the ambassador to Moscow, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr.