Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, KCMG (2 September 1887 – 27 February 1970) was a British diplomat, journalist, author, secret agent and footballer. His 1932 book Memoirs of a British Agent became an international bestseller and brought him to the world's attention by telling of his failed effort to sabotage the Bolshevik Revolution in Moscow in 1918, by assassinating Lenin and instigating a coup. After the plot failed, U.S. Consul General to Moscow and spymaster DeWitt Clinton Poole dissembled. It was said at the time that his main co-conspirator Sidney Reilly, and others were double agents working for the Bolsheviks. In the end, the "Lockhart Plot" was revealed as a cunning sting operation controlled by Felix Dzerzhinsky with the goal of discrediting the British and French governments. However Boris Savinkov and in particular Xenophon Kalamatiano were working with State Department under the direction of U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing, as pieced together in recent research by the historian Barnes Carr. Background He was born in Anstruther, Fife, the son of Robert Bruce Lockhart, the first headmaster of Spier's School, Beith, Ayrshire, Scotland. His mother was Florence Stuart Macgregor, while his other ancestors include Bruces, Hamiltons, Cummings, Wallaces and Douglases. He claimed that he could trace a connection back to Boswell of Auchinleck. In Memoirs of a British Agent, he wrote, "There is no drop of English blood in my veins." He attended Fettes College, in Edinburgh. His family were mostly schoolmasters, but his younger brother, Sir Robert McGregor MacDonald Lockhart, became an Indian Army general. On 15 August 1947, the day British India was partitioned into two independent Dominions of India and Pakistan, he was appointed as the last Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army. His brother John Bruce Lockhart was the headmaster of Sedbergh School, and his nephews Rab Bruce Lockhart and Logie Bruce Lockhart went on to become headmasters of Loretto and Gresham's. His great-nephew, Simon Bruce-Lockhart, was the headmaster of Glenlyon Norfolk School. Career Malaya At 21, Lockhart went out to Malaya to join two uncles who were rubber planters there. According to his own account, he was sent to open up a new rubber estate near Pantai in Negeri Sembilan, in a district in which "there were no other white men". He then "caused a minor sensation by carrying off Amai, the beautiful ward of the Dato' Klana, the local Malay prince... my first romance". However,