“I was not anxious to accost these strangers,” Rawlinson later reported, “but on cantering past them, I saw, to my astonishment, men in Cossack dresses, and one of my attendants recognised among the party, a servant of the Russian mission.”2 Rawlinson knew immediately he had stumbled onto something. There was no good reason for a party of armed Cossacks to be on these remote desert tracks heading for the Afghan frontier, and at this particular moment there was every reason for a British intelligence officer to be suspicious of any Russian activity in these crucial border marches.
