foreign correspondent Arthur Ransome was arrested in 1919 for spying for the Bolsheviks, Lockhart spoke out for him, saying Ransome had been a valuable intelligence asset amid the worst chaos of the revolution. Lockhart also helped Trotsky's secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, with whom Ransome had fallen in love, to leave Russia in 1919; she married Ransome in 1924. Arrest and imprisonment In 1918, Lockhart and British agent Sidney Reilly were alleged to have plotted to assassinate Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Lockhart and British officials condemned that as Soviet propaganda. He was accused of leading the "Lockhart Plot" against the Bolshevik regime and, for a time during 1918, was confined in the Kremlin as a prisoner and feared being condemned to death. However, he escaped trial via an exchange for his counterpart, Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov, the Bolshevik government's representative in London, who had been arrested for engaging in propaganda activities. Lockhart was tried in absentia before the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal in a proceeding, which opened 25 November 1918. Some 20 defendants faced charges in the trial, most of whom had worked for the Americans or the British in Moscow, in the case levied by procurator Nikolai Krylenko. The case concluded on 3 December 1918, with two defendants sentenced to be shot and various others sentenced to terms of prison or forced labour for terms up to five years. Lockhart and Reilly were both sentenced to death in absentia, with the sentence to be executed if they were ever found in Soviet Russia again. Lockhart wrote about his experiences in Malaya and Russia in his 1932 autobiography, Memoirs of a British Agent, which became a best seller, and whose chapters on the Revolution were turned into the 1934 film, British Agent, by Warner Brothers. Finance In November 1919, Lockhart was appointed commercial secretary of the British legation in Prague. In late 1922, with the personal debts he ran up exceeding his official salary and feeling the need for change, he resigned from the Foreign Service to accept a position in Prague with the Anglo-Czechoslovakian Bank, on whose creation he had worked. In 1925, Lockhart moved to a job with the Anglo-International Bank, based in London but specializing in central European affairs. By 1928, however, again indebted and bored, he sought a new career in journalism. Lockhart turned his experiences in central Europe during these years into his second volume of autobiography, Retreat