An Article for American Academics

‘Nicholas Was Not Killed in Siberia’ by Ben Everidge

“Nicholas was not killed in Siberia.”  Those are the stunning words of a former U.S. Army soldier, Martin Van Buren Hutson, who spent two extraordinary weeks aboard an American Red Cross train, he reports, with Nicholas Romanov, sixteen months after the former monarch was said murdered in the rustic village of Yekaterinburg deep in the heart of Russia. 

“Three other people were killed,” the eyewitness soldier continues in a never-before-revealed 45-minute audio account of his encounter with the late Tsar aboard an American Red Cross train, “and their bodies chopped up with broad axes, dumped in a lime pit, poured crude oil on them, and burned, which was a very, very good camouflage to throw the Red Army off. 

“That was done by the Tsar’s own home guards before they fled,” Hutson explained.

History, on the other hand, has recorded that one hundred years ago this summer, as the world harkens back to Yekaterinburg for the 2018 World Cup, Nicholas II, the recently deposed Tsar of Russia, was allegedly murdered in the basement of the notorious Ipatiev House by Bolshevik Revolutionaries loyal to their gritty leader, Vladimir Lenin. 

Nicholas’ wife, the Empress Alexandra, a treasured granddaughter of England’s iconic Queen Victoria, all five of their photogenic children, and four assistants were said killed, too.  Executed to secure power for the new revolution that would give rise to the intimidating Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – the fabled Soviet Union.

For over three hundred years, the Tsars ruled Russia.  Nicholas II would be the last.  After missing for seven decades, despite intensive searches, Romanov remains were finally discovered in a hidden grave deep in a conveniently remote forest known as the Koptyaki Wood.  Forensic science of the day would controversially conclude the bones were indeed those of the Imperial family – with 98.5% certainty it was declared.  Russian President Boris Yeltsin would authorize a state funeral for the martyred family on the 80th anniversary of their purported murder at the Cathedral of Saint Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg.

History needed the Romanovs dead.  Award-winning books and movies would chronicle over the Romanovs’ demise.  Historians would speculate on and debate the truth of their final days.  But rumors of their survival lived on.  A seemingly endless cast of characters would lay claim to being lost children of the Tsar and Tsarina only to be later discredited as pretenders. 

Lies.  Loyalty.  Family.  War.  Mystery.  Power.  Bribery.  Bloody murder.  This story had it all.  And, it still does a century later!

For the first time ever perhaps, in the Romanov mystery, there now comes forward evidence of an first-hand participant to those final days.  An 18-year-old private first class from Knoxville, Tennessee, who spent that memorable two weeks with the Romanovs aboard the hospital evacuation train a year-and-one-half after they were whispered brutally assassinated.  A credible eyewitness, who would be honorably discharged after his military service, who tells a very different side to the Romanov lore than what history now embraces. 

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A credible eyewitness … who tells a very different side to the

Romanov lore than what history now embraces.

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Did Nicholas live after all?  Did anyone in the corridors of Washington power know?  What would the world have been like for generations of our globe’s citizens if the “late” Tsar had been restored to power?  Would there have been a Soviet Union, an arms race, or even a Cuban missile crisis, had Nicholas lived and ruled Russia again?  What would have been the ramifications for American foreign affairs and political science in the 20th century?  Or, for that matter, even the 21st century? 

The Romanov Rescue Cast of Characters

ENCOUNTERING A GHOST

Martin Hutson was recruited in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in August 1919 to join the Army.  World War I had ended the previous November.  More than fourteen million souls were lost in the “war to end all wars,” a war unlike any that Europe had seen in the previous 100 years.  Twenty-eight countries were involved in battle.  Four monarchies fell.  Seven million were permanently disabled by war-related injuries.  Martin’s older brother, George, was already distinguishing himself in the Black Forest of Germany under the command of the chiseled American commanding general, Black Jack Pershing, when Martin was inducted.  In fact, George Hutson, would earn the Distinguished Service Cross for his valor, and the Purple Heart, too, for being exposed to Mustard Gas, an exposure that would disable George for the rest of his life.

Martin was told by his recruiter that he would be going to Mexico, but what he was not told was that his older brother had recommended him for a secret mission yet to come.  George had vouched for Martin’s trustworthiness when discretion for a special mission was most needed by his superiors.  Now a member of the 31st Infantry, Company H, Martin was instead on his way to Vladivostok, via San Francisco, and Honolulu aboard the U.S. Army Transport, Great Northern.

In the 1970 audio of his mission, produced shortly before he himself would die from lung cancer, Martin says that he first met Nicholas aboard the American Red Cross train - Special Train #28 - in the rail yards in Irkutsk, Russia.  The train was actually an Imperial coach disguised to look like a medical evacuation train with big, bold letters spelling out the word: “Amerikanski.”  After guarding the train car for several days, Martin’s immediate officer, Lt. Humphries, took him aboard one day for “a special job.”  An assignment that Martin was told would lead to a court martial if he ever breathed a word of it to another.

Martin said the Lieutenant took him back “to the car I left before,” the car Martin said he had been guarding for the preceding few days.  In the car, Martin explained, there was “a Japanese General, an English Colonel, an Italian Colonel, a Czech Colonel, and my Lieutenant.” Amazingly, Martin says, “the Lieutenant ordered all of them to leave the train.  They offered no resistance,” and, he says, “gave no argument.  They left.

“All this time I was watching them,” Martin says.  He thought it was strange that an American Lieutenant was ordering a General and three Colonels what to do, even if the officers came from another country, they were still ranking members of the Allied Forces, he noted.  “When I turned around there was a man sitting in the center of the train wearing civilian clothes,” Martin recalls.  “I think he weighed about 150 pounds, but, I never saw him stand up.  The Lieutenant said to me, ‘your job is to talk to him every day for two hours.  I will come and get you.’”

Martin says, “This man asked my name and I could have dropped to the floor.  I had never heard a man speak perfect English like that before.  He could have been an Oxford professor.  His English was clear as a bell.  He had no accent at all,” Martin further explained.  “For seven days I went to this train at 2 o’clock and stayed and talked to him for two hours.  On the seventh day, he said that we were going to move to a small town. ‘I want you to pick up any newspaper you can, bring them back, and I will read them to you,’” says Martin of his instruction from the well-spoken gentleman.  Martin informs us that his orders were to teach the former Russian monarch a Southern accent so that he might better blend into his new life in obscurity.

During the second week of the train trip that ended for the Romanovs in Harbin, China, Martin was introduced to Alexandra in a second car where he was to have tea and crumpets with the former Empress, a French-speaking attendant, and an unnamed Grand Duchess.  A fun-loving, blondish, gregarious Grand Duchess about his same age.  Harbin was the headquarters of the Russian Railway Services Corporation who was contracted by the U.S.-recognized Russian Provisional Government to operate the Trans-Siberian Railway in the post-Tsarist era. 

When the group arrived in Harbin, Martin says, they were joined by a “contingent of English soldiers, the Consul-General of England, and the Consul-General of the United States.”  The Tsar was hidden, Martin says, in a burial box aboard the Imperial train.  AEF Siberia records in the National Archives mention that soldiers would practice transferring burial boxes from time-to-time.  At one point, an incredulous Martin remembers, “Our Consul-General raised his foot and put it up on top of a big box and the Lieutenant jumped up and said, ‘Sir, remove your foot from that box – that is his Imperial Highness!’”

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‘Sir, remove your foot from that box – that is his Imperial Highness!’

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After a short period of time passes, Martin says three wagons were brought up to the train and three boxes were off-loaded to the wagons and handed over to British officials.  It was the last time Martin would see the three Romanovs.  Martin would say later that he understood from his Lieutenant that the Romanovs were on their way to Vladivostok and would be sent on to San Francisco.  Their ultimate destination, he would learn from his Lieutenant, was London after a cross-country trip from California to Chicago and then New York City.

Wilson's Boys

MISSION GENESIS

Of course, the first major question that comes to mind about the mission is:  why Martin?  The second major question is: what about that DNA 98.5% probability result announced by British and Russian forensic scientists in 1995?  Subsequent DNA tests in 2009 and 2015 would conclude authenticity again.  Nevertheless, there remained significant unresolved issues surrounding the various testing results.

On the first question, we already know that Martin’s job was to guard the former Tsar and teach him a Southern accent. We also know that George Hutson, who worked intelligence for General Pershing, recommended Martin for the mission.  The commander of AEF Siberia was Major General William Sidney Graves, like Pershing a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.  Graves and Pershing had come to know and trust each other during the Pancho Villa Expedition 1916-1917, in which the U.S. Army, led by Pershing and Graves, countered the paramilitary forces inspired by the Mexican revolutionary.  Villa had, among other infractions, launched a raid into New Mexico that required a direct U.S. response.  In a page straight out of a James Bond movie, Graves was given his marching orders for the Siberia mission by U.S. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker.  Baker met Graves in a Kansas City, Missouri, train station on August 6, 1918, so that mission secrecy could be maintained.  Baker would hand Graves a document President Woodrow Wilson had personally typed, called an Aide-Mémoire. 

Writing in his own memoire years later, Graves said that in handing him the Wilson letter, Baker said, “This contains the policy of the United States in Russia which you are to follow.  Watch your step; you will be walking on eggshells loaded with dynamite.  God bless you and goodbye.” 

Wilson’s Aide-Mémoire laid out three specific objectives for General Graves to follow:  1) protect and defend American military equipment and supplies sent to support Russia’s war against Germany prior to the Bolshevik Revolution that was now stockpiled in Vladivostok; 2) help liberate the “Czecho-Slovaks” legion who had been caught behind German enemy lines in western Russia; and, 3) discourage Japanese expansion in the region as a result of the deteriorating conditions in-theater.

Ironically, by the time AEF Siberia troops would arrive in Vladivostok a few months later, all three of the Wilson objectives appeared to have been realized.  The Czech Legion had already escaped the war zone, the military armaments and supplies in Vladivostok were now reasonably safe in the allied-controlled port city, and Japan was behaving itself on its expansion ambition.  So, why did President Wilson not call off the mission?  Congress was not supportive of being in Russia in the first place, having reluctantly authorized Wilson’s Declaration of War in the aftermath of the Germans sinking the H.M.S. Lusitania with 128 America citizens aboard on May 7, 1915.  World War I had ended the previous November.  Kaiser Wilhelm II had been vanquished to the Netherlands.  Peace had, for the most part, returned to western democracies.  Only Russia still seemed in peril.  What was Wilson thinking standing by the AEF Siberia mission? 

Was a fourth Wilson objective for Siberia shared by Baker with Graves in that Kansas City train station?  Was that fourth objective to rescue Nicholas and either return him home or restore his monarchy, if possible?  Why was a clandestine meeting needed to share the three pretty standard objectives of Wilson’s Aide-Mémoire, if not?  And what about any of those three objectives really constituted “walking on eggshells loaded with dynamite,” as Baker warned Graves?

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‘He died, so that he could live.’

-  Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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A deep dive into the American archives and elsewhere to test the validity of Martin’s story as told to his family over the years has yielded some interesting facts about the Siberian mission:

AEF Siberia records at the National Archives outside Washington, DC, do validate the existence of special trains commanded by the U.S. Consul-General in Siberia, in this case Ernest Harris, including surprisingly a Special Train #28 that was observed by Colonel Benjamin O. Johnson to be in the Harbin rail yard around the time that Martin said he was to meet the Tsar in Irkutsk.  The designation, “Special Train #28,” is interesting to note in that Woodrow Wilson was the 28th president of the United States.  Coincidence or intentional?  In addition to having an Army role, Colonel Johnson also happened to be the second in command of the Russian Railway Services Corporation that ran the Trans-Siberian Railway.  The same railway that was used to spirit the three Romanovs Martin said were aboard his train from Irkutsk in the west to Harbin in the east.  Many of the records related to special trains are marked “destroyed” having been burned, it is rationalized, in a fire at the American embassy in Japan following an earthquake a few years after the end of the rescue mission.

In December 1918, in the immediate weeks following the Armistice, Woodrow Wilson traveled to England and met with King George V at Buckingham Palace.  Ernest Harris, the American Consul-General in Irkutsk reportedly sent a cable during this visit in which he relayed news that “family times seven” were safe.  Was this cable in reference to news that the Americans had the Romanov family safely held and ready for evacuation?  Did King George, the Tsar’s second cousin and the Tsarina’s first cousin, ask President Wilson to manage the Romanov rescue from Siberia?  Did Wilson now have an important ally in his effort to establish the League of Nations, thanks to his critically important favor?  Prime Minister David Lloyd-George was strongly counseling the King that he could not give sanctuary to the Romanovs for fear of inciting anti-monarchy sentiments in his own kingdom in return.  Did President Wilson help solve the King’s dilemma, and did they plan the rescue mission in person during that Christmas-time Buckingham Palace visit?

At the time of the actual evacuation, American officials in Siberia realized it would not be possible to return the Tsar to power.  Nicholas was hugely unpopular among his people.  Starvation and a lack of general supplies plagued local markets.  He was perceived indecisive when decisiveness was required.  Russia had incurred great losses during the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War, which led to still-more violent repressions of following the unsuccessful 1905 Revolution.  Although Nicholas was able to strengthen the vital Franco-Russia alliance during his reign, and mitigate an arms race that allowed for a pacifist period, World War I changed Russia and resulted in more than 3.3 million Russians dying.  Put simply, Nicholas would not be accepted back as Emperor by his people, even in a changed system that would have permitted a parliamentary monarchy similar to that enjoyed by King George V in England.

An article in the Montreal Gazette, published December 30, 1930, interviewing former Siberian Consul-General Harris, confirmed that Harris had the Tsar aboard his “special” train in early 1920 in a box for three weeks.  The article by veteran New York Times reporter John MacCormac led with what would be today an explosive headline: “American Diplomat Partly Confirms General Janin’s Story.  Tells How Czarist Remains Were Given Protection of U.S. Flag.  Had Trunk 21 Days.” 

In the article, Harris, however, contended that the Romanovs were dead and that the boxes, which he admits never looking into, contained only their ashes and some other human parts.  Consistent with Martin’s story, Harris also says that he handed the remains over to the British, specifically Sir Miles Lampson, the then-acting Consul-General for England.  MacCormac was reported to have had close ties to American and Allied intelligence.  Janin was a French General and Romanov court confidant intimately involved in the Allied expedition in Siberia.

On May 12, 1935, now President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had dinner with a few friends at the White House, including Fulton Oursler, the editor of the popular weekly magazine, Liberty.  FDR shares an idea he has for a mystery story, but he tells his assembled guests that he has not yet figured out the ending.  The principal character in FDR’s story is a man of considerable wealth who is tired and fed up with his surroundings, so the man plans to disappear.  The man, who FDR names Jim Blake, “wants to find a new world for himself, one in which he will no longer be bored.”  Blake, FDR expounds, “wants to start life afresh,” but his dream will cost money to achieve and help from others to ensure.  But Blake’s wife, a domineering woman of Russian background, is having an affair so Blake will need to leave her behind.  In FDR’s story, which is published as, The President’s Mystery Story, Blake reasons his fate this way:

“First, when he ran away, he must get himself a new personality, make a complete physical transformation.  Second, he must manage to carry off five or six million dollars, leaving Ilka [his wife] a million or two to keep her quiet.”  And, third, “he must select a new residence where he could carry on an important life, doing philanthropic work without having his connections with the old life traced.” This new personality, FDR reports, includes “a new voice.”  So, Blake hides out for two long months while he undergoes his transformation and then he fakes his death, “so that he could live.”  In his PBS epic, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, Ken Burns says in episode six that, “All his life, FDR loved knowing secrets no one else knew.”   Was FDR that knowingly deceptive and secretive?  Could FDR have been telling the story of Nicholas II and his death so that he could live, too?

In addition to these findings and background on Graves, Harris and Johnson, a network of Wilson loyalists appear from records to have been operating in support of Special Train #28 during the rescue mission.  These loyalists, who would be required to pull off a rescue mission of the Romanov magnitude, included:

Rail expert and Chattanooga, Tennessee, attorney William Gibbs McAdoo, most recently the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under Wilson and as such, also head of the United States Secret Service.  Gibbs was now serving as head of the American Red Cross in Siberia, a significant reduction in prestige from his previous post in the Wilson cabinet.  He was, splendidly, also Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law.  McAdoo’s daughter would even marry the Second Secretary to the Ambassador of the Russian Provisional Government.

Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy was coordinating Allied naval activity in and around Vladivostok, and for that matter, Honolulu and San Francisco for the Americans and the British.  His name?   Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the first civilian Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

Charles Crane, a wealthy industrialist from Chicago, and close personal friend of the President.  Crane, whose son worked in a senior role for Wilson’s State Department, was fluent in Russian and was a respected visitor to the Tsar’s court.  Crane’s daughter, Frances, would marry Jan Masaryk, son of a Czech General during the Siberian excursion, Thomas Masaryk.  Thomas would later become Czech president.  Crane is credited with being the architect of President Wilson’s Russia policy.

Colonel Edward Mandell House, Wilson’s de facto Secretary of State and most-trusted confidant. 

Sir William Wiseman, head of British intelligence in the United States.  A close personal friend of Colonel House, the two would often collaborate on projects together.  Wiseman and House spent a notable week on vacation with Wilson in August 1918.

HRH Prince Connaught, a trusted cousin and emissary of Britain’s King George V.  He was also a treasured emissary of President Wilson’s during World War I.

Ralph Van Deman, known as the father of American intelligence.  Van Deman was reported operating in and around Yekaterinburg during the time of the Tsar’s alleged assassination.

Breckinridge Long, third Assistant Secretary of State for Wilson beginning in 1917.  A lawyer, Long was a strong proponent for Wilson’s League of Nation’s initiative and was deeply involved in the President’s 1916 re-election campaign.  In World War II, Long was a trusted courier for FDR between Colonel House, Sir William Wiseman, and former British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour during the Tsar’s abdication and imprisonment in Yekaterinburg.  Long was demoted, however, for falsifying records during FDR’s presidency.

On the second question pertaining to the Romanovs’ DNA testing, there were many still highly-controversial facts as we know them today:

First, the burial ground where the Romanovs were discovered in 1979, was forensically unsound and violated on at least three documented occasions by amateurs, including once when the Tsar’s alleged skull was taken from the site and stored under an apartment bed for a period of time before being replaced. 

Second, the collection of remains and artifacts were not properly conducted by authorities once “officially” discovered in 1991. 

Third, assassin accounts of the destruction of the bodies are inconsistent with written reports around the time of the murder. 

Fourth, the Romanov remnants were improperly stored in the morgue once removed from the grave site and were often laid out on open gurneys. 

Fifth, the bones attributed to Anastasia were measured at a height too tall to have been Anastasia, according to U.S. forensic scientists who examined her remains.  Those same scientists, led by the late Dr. William Maples, also concluded that the bones were also too old to have been Anastasia’s as well. 

Finally, bones identified as being Nicholas’ were also too large for his reported size. They also did not exhibit evidence of a head wound the future Emperor received in an assassination attempt in 1891, in Japan, that became known as the Ōtsu Incident, which nearly mortally wounded him in the process.

Windsor's Team

IMPACTING AMERICAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS & POLITICAL SCIENCE

The third major question this recently revealed Romanov rescue mission raises, is what impact does or did all of this have on American foreign affairs and political science as we know it?  Assuming based on the evidence found to date that Nicholas lived, as Martin posts, there are a number of consequences worth considering:

Woodrow Wilson, consistent with what biographers A. Scott Berg and John Milton Cooper have written, deeply distrusted members of his own Cabinet and party.  The most obvious examples are his Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, and his Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, who were supplanted with apparently more trustworthy Secretary of War Baker and FDR, respectively.  Wilson’s penchant for secrecy clearly led to a foreign incursion that neither Congress, nor Parliament, appear to have been aware of according to official records.  A congressional committee did look without consequence into the AEF Siberia mission in the early 1920s, after Wilson had left office, debilitated by two serious strokes.  The success of such presidential versus congressional secrecy, had it been known, would not have boded well for future presidential-congressional initiatives from Wilson forward.  Wilson’s secrecy may very well have resulted in the Allied Forces abandoning Russia as they did in early 1920 and may have been the reason there was an absence and failure to secure a lasting peaceful resolution of the dispute between Red and White Russian interests.  Despite the new dominance of the U.S.-British-Canada-France-Italy-Czech alliance, why was no peace-keeping force ever established in Siberia, or Russia as a whole?  Could there have been a Marshall Plan for Russia that would have prevented more mass starvation and suffering?

Had the Tsar been restored to power, especially with the support of the United States and England, Lenin would have obviously failed in his revolution.  Would Marxism have faded as a viable alternative political theory?  The Soviet Union, as we came to know and loath it in the west, would never have existed, most likely.  Would America have become the leading industrial power it did in the aftermath of World War I and the brief unilateral superpower after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991?  Would democracy have more readily flourished elsewhere?

The Josef Stalin atrocities would not have materialized because Stalin most likely would never have been General Secretary.  On the other hand, had Stalin not risen to power, what would that have meant to the Allied effort between FDR, Winston Churchill and Stalin in World War II.  Would Nicholas II have been strong enough to replace Stalin’s critical role in managing Hitler, Mussolini and Emperor Hirohito?  Would the Marshall Plan have been unnecessary for rebuilding Europe in the aftermath of World War II?  Would Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been a foreign afterthought, too?  What would have come of the Great Depression, Holocaust, Korean Conflict, or Vietnam?

Without the Soviet Union would America have put a man on the moon or embargoed Cuba when Nikita Khrushchev tried to place nuclear weapons on that small island some 90 miles off the Florida coast, in an event that John F. Kennedy foreshadowed as facing “the nuclear sword of Damocles?”

Would the League of Nations have succeeded with Nicholas’ support thus making less necessary its successor organization, the United Nations?  What impact would this development have for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, or the World Trade Organization?  Would they have ever existed?  Would the European Union, a federation impacting more than 500 million citizens following the Treaty of Rome in 1957, have materialized?

Would an Imperial Russia have been as expansionist as Soviet Russia?  Would George F. Kennan’s Doctrine of Containment have been necessary?  How about the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty?  Would Russia have become more isolated or less isolated under a second Romanov II era?  Would the soft balancing of power in the global order up to World War II have vanished, as well.

What would Congress have done had they known about the Romanov rescue mission?  Impeached Wilson?  Because of FDR’s active role in supporting the Romanov rescue mission, would FDR have been barred from serving his powerful and influential four terms as U.S. President?  What would have been the consequences of no FDR?

The Intelligencia

FALSE TRAILS OF EVIDENCE

Clearly, the AEF Siberia mission and the rescue of Tsar Nicholas II had its ramifications for American foreign affairs and political science nonetheless.  The Allies, under the joint directive of President Woodrow Wilson and Britain’s King George V, pulled off one of the most astonishing rescue missions in world history, if recently uncovered eyewitness testimony from Martin Hutson is to be believed.  Only deeper digging into the clues of the Romanov mystery will yield more definitive answers on what did or did not happen in Russia ten decades ago. 

In the meantime, we do know that a pooling of our joint resources and the strategically-wise and -clandestine deployment of our intelligence assets in a volatile region of the world, without obvious concern for domestic political stability or Wilson’s earlier concern for the principle of self-determination, which kept him and the United States out of the war until 1915, can only be classified in today’s context, an overwhelming success.  The false trails of evidence about the Tsar’s murder, his successful evacuation, and subsequent repatriation through royal England we were told, worked as designed.

The President of the United States and the King of England, with a strong assist from allies Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, and Japan, did not callously leave Nicholas to die in Siberia as history now claims.   Instead, George V brought Nicholas secretively to peaceful exile, free of the burdens of leadership that he so desperately wanted to abandon.  The intelligence agents of that time were brilliant in executing the Allied rescue plan behind fronts of two warring giants.  Their planning was superb, the coordination exceptional, and their devotion to duty above-and-beyond the call, without question.

The diplomatic shell game 100 years ago this July is a useful reminder of the nature and exercise of power that occurs within our global system.  It effectively illustrates the often rapidly changing character of state and non-state actors who participate in or greatly influence international decision-making when it comes to foreign affairs and political science.  Our national sovereignty can be overturned in the blink of a moment.  Our national interests and interactions with other countries can become unstable and challenged with little notice when we are no longer aware or attuned.

The Romanov rescue mission is also a lesson in history, in American foreign affairs and political science, that shows how well our intelligence services work when the mission is clear and our political leadership resolute in their dedication to achieving a desired outcome.  It was right for the Allies to rescue the Romanov family.  Intelligence necessarily traffics in false trails of evidence.  Their secret mission was an example that we can and should use in future endeavors where American and British, or other allied intelligence, working together, ensure the peace for all of our citizens.

The only questions that really now remain from this episode in Martin Hutson’s life is; if Nicholas lived, where did he go? 

And, does history care?