Barnes Carr
Barnes Carr is an American journalist, historian, and author of fiction who has studied the history of US—Russia espionage, influence operations, and covert military actions. He was a journalist for daily newspapers in Mississippi, Memphis, Boston, Montreal, New York, New Orleans, and Washington D.C., and was awarded the Faulkner Gold Medal for fiction for his short story, "Needle Man". His 2020 research into the US-led 1918 assassination attempt on Lenin, "sometimes reads like history, sometimes like a spy novel", and has been called "a well crafted exposé that suggests that the Cold War began half a  century earlier than we've been told." Known by the press at the time as the Lockhart—Reilly plot, after two of its principal agents, other historians have called it the Ambassadors Plot. Following Carr's extensive research into government archives and primary sources, he reveals that U.S. Secretary of state Robert Lansing initiated the plot after Lenin seized power in October 1917 and removed Russia from the World War I. Spymaster and U.S. Consul General of Moscow DeWitt Clinton Poole employed Xenophon Kalamatiano as his main field officer. President Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy was publicly opposed to interference , but he told Lansing the Moscow coup had his "entire approval". In addition to instigating an attempted coup d'état, they laundered money through the British and French to send American troops under British Command by General Edmund Ironside in Operation Archangel, part of the North Russia intervention, an Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War.