DeWitt Clinton Poole
DeWitt Clinton Poole (1885–1952) was an American intelligence officer. He served as U.S. Consul General in Moscow, and acted as America's spymaster in Revolutionary Russia. 1918 Ambassadors plot to assassinate Lenin Poole arrived in Moscow in September 1917, two months before the Bolshevik Revolution, and left via Petrograd in late 1918 for the port of Archangelsk. He was "active in implementing U.S. policy, negotiating with the Bolshevik authorities, and supervising American intelligence operations that gathered information about conditions throughout Russia, especially monitoring anti-Bolshevik elements and areas of German influence." Historian Barnes Carr implicated Poole in the Ambassadors Plot to assassinate Vladimir Lenin in 1918, which the press termed the Lockhart—Reilly plot, after two of its principal agents. Poole employed Xenophon Kalamatiano as his main field officer. Besides Sidney Reilly, the main Russian plotter was Boris Savinkov, who ran an anti-tsarist and anti-communist underground. The group was eventually uncovered by the cheka, and the bolsheviks responded by escalating the red terror. U.S. Secretary of state Robert Lansing allegedly initiated the plot after Lenin seized power in October 1917 and removed Russia from World War I, as part of a secret deal the Bolsheviks had struck with Germany. President Woodrow Wilson's foreign