Sidney Reilly
Sidney George Reilly , fictionalized as the "Ace of Spies", was a Russian-born adventurer and secret agent employed by Scotland Yard's Special Branch and later by the Foreign Section of the British Secret Service Bureau, the precursor to the modern British Secret Intelligence Service. He is alleged to have spied for at least four different great powers, and documentary evidence indicates that he was involved in espionage activities in 1890s London among Russian émigré circles, in Manchuria on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, and in an abortive 1918 coup d'état against Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik government in Moscow.
Reilly disappeared in Soviet Russia in the mid-1920s, lured by the Cheka's Operation Trust. British diplomat and journalist R. H. Bruce Lockhart publicised his and Reilly's 1918 exploits to overthrow the Bolshevik regime in Lockhart's 1932 book Memoirs of a British Agent. This became an international best-seller and garnered global fame for Reilly. The memoirs retold the efforts by Reilly, Lockhart, and other conspirators to sabotage the Bolshevik revolution while still in its infancy.
The world press made Reilly into a household name within five years of his execution by Soviet agents in 1925, lauding him as a peerless spy and recounting his many espionage adventures. Newspapers dubbed him "the greatest spy in history" and "the Scarlet Pimpernel of Red Russia". The London Evening Standard described his exploits in an illustrated serial in May 1931 headlined "Master Spy". Ian Fleming used him as a model for James Bond in his novels set in the early Cold War. Reilly is considered to be "the dominating figure in the mythology of modern British espionage".
Birth and youth
The true details about Reilly's origin, identity, and exploits have eluded researchers and intelligence agencies for over a century. Reilly himself told several versions of his background to confuse and mislead investigators. At different times in his life, he claimed to be the son of an Irish merchant seaman, an Irish clergyman, and an aristocratic landowner connected to the court of Emperor Alexander III of Russia. According to a Soviet secret police dossier compiled in 1925, he was perhaps born Zigmund Markovich Rozenblum on 24 March 1874 in Odessa, a Black Sea port of Emperor Alexander II's Russian Empire. According to this dossier, his father, Markus, was a doctor and shipping agent, while his mother came from an impoverished noble family.Other sources claim that Reilly was born Georgy Rosenblum in Odessa on 24 March 1873. In one account, his birth name is given as Salomon Rosenblum in Kherson Gubernia of the Russian Empire, the illegitimate son of Polina and Dr. Mikhail Abramovich Rosenblum, the cousin of Reilly's father Grigory Rosenblum. There is also speculation that he was the son of a merchant marine captain and Polina.
Yet another source states that he was born Sigmund Georgievich Rosenblum on 24 March 1874, the only son of Pauline and Gregory Rosenblum, a wealthy Polish-Jewish family with an estate at Bielsk in the Grodno Governorate of Imperial Russia. His father was known locally as George rather than Gregory, hence Sigmund's patronymic Georgievich. The family seems to have been well-connected in Polish nationalist circles through Pauline's intimate friendship with Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the Polish statesman who became Prime Minister of Poland and also Poland's foreign minister in 1919.
Travels abroad
According to reports of the tsarist political police, the Okhrana, Rosenblum was arrested in 1892 for his involvement in political activities and for serving as a courier for a revolutionary group known as "the Friends of Enlightenment." Escaping judicial punishment, he became friends with Okhrana agents, such as Alexander Nikolayevich Grammatikov, and these details might indicate that he was a police informant at a young age.After Reilly's release, his father told him that his mother was dead and that his biological father was her Jewish doctor, Mikhail A. Rosenblum. Distraught by this news, he faked his death in Odessa harbour and stowed away aboard a British ship bound for South America. In Brazil, he adopted the name Pedro and worked odd jobs as a dock worker, a road mender, a plantation labourer, and a cook for a British intelligence expedition in 1895. He allegedly saved both the expedition and the life of Major Charles Fothergill when hostile natives attacked them. Rosenblum seized a British officer's pistol and killed the attackers with expert marksmanship. Fothergill rewarded his bravery with 1,500 pounds sterling, a British passport, and passage to Britain, where Pedro became Sidney Rosenblum.
However, the record of evidence contradicts this tale of Brazil. Evidence indicates that Rosenblum arrived in London from France in December 1895, prompted by his unscrupulous acquisition of a large sum of money and a hasty departure from Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, a residential suburb of Paris. According to this account, Rosenblum and his Polish accomplice Yan Voitek waylaid two Italian anarchists on 25 December 1895 and robbed them of a substantial amount of revolutionary funds. One anarchist's throat was cut; the other, named Constant Della Cassa, died from knife wounds in Fontainebleau Hospital three days later. The French newspaper L'Union Républicaine de Saône-et-Loire reported the incident on 27 December 1895:
Police learned that the physical description of one assailant matched Rosenblum's, but he was already en route to Britain. His accomplice Voitek later told British intelligence officers about this incident and other dealings with Rosenblum. Several months prior to this murder, Rosenblum had met Ethel Lilian Boole, a young Irish woman who was a budding writer and active in Russian émigré circles. The couple developed a rapport and began a sexual liaison, and he told her about his past in Russia. After the affair concluded, they continued to correspond. In 1897, Boole published The Gadfly, a critically acclaimed novel whose central character was allegedly based on Reilly's life as Rosenblum. In the novel, the protagonist is an illegitimate child who feigns suicide to escape his illegitimate past and then travels to South America. He later returns to Europe and becomes involved with Italian anarchists and other revolutionaries.
For decades, certain biographers had dismissed the Reilly-Boole liaison as unsubstantiated. However, evidence was found in 2016 among archived correspondence in the extended Boole-Hinton family, confirming that a relationship transpired between Reilly and Boole around 1895 in Florence. Whether he was genuinely smitten with Boole and sincerely returned her affections or he might have been a paid police informant reporting on her activities and those of other radicals remains unknown.
In London: 1890s
Reilly continued to go by the name Rosenblum, living at the Albert Mansions, an apartment block in Rosetta Street, Waterloo, London, in early 1896. He created the Ozone Preparations Company and peddled patent medicines. He became a paid informant for the émigré intelligence network of William Melville, superintendent of Scotland Yard's Special Branch. Melville later oversaw a special section of the British Secret Service Bureau founded in 1909.In 1897, Rosenblum began an affair with Margaret Thomas, the young wife of Reverend Hugh Thomas, shortly before her husband's death. Rosenblum met the Reverend Thomas in London through his Ozone Preparations Company because Thomas had a kidney inflammation and hoped for a miracle cure peddled by Rosenblum. Thomas introduced Rosenblum to his wife at his manor house, and they began an affair. On 4 March 1898, Hugh Thomas altered his will and appointed Margaret as an executrix; he was found dead in his room on 12 March 1898, just a week after the new will was made. A mysterious Dr. T. W. Andrew, whose physical description matched that of Rosenblum, appeared to certify Thomas's death as generic influenza and proclaimed that there was no need for an inquest. Records indicate that there was no one by the name of Dr. T. W. Andrew in Great Britain circa 1897.
Margaret Thomas insisted that her husband's body be ready for burial 36 hours after his death. She inherited roughly £800,000. The Metropolitan Police did not investigate Dr. T. W. Andrew, nor did they investigate the nurse whom Margaret had hired, who was previously linked to the arsenic poisoning of a former employer. Four months later, on 22 August 1898, Rosenblum married Margaret Thomas at Holborn Registry Office in London. The two witnesses at the ceremony were Charles Richard Cross, a government official, and Joseph Bell, an Admiralty clerk. Both eventually married the daughters of Henry Freeman Pannett, an associate of William Melville. The marriage not only brought the wealth that Rosenblum desired but provided a pretext to discard his identity of Sigmund Rosenblum; with Melville's assistance, he crafted a new identity: "Sidney George Reilly". This new identity was key to achieving his desire to return to the Russian Empire and voyage to the Far East. Reilly "obtained his new identity and nationality without taking any legal steps to change his name and without making an official application for British citizenship, all of which suggests some type of official intervention." This intervention likely occurred to facilitate his upcoming work in Russia on behalf of British intelligence.
Russia and the Far East
In June 1899, the newly endowed Reilly and his wife Margaret travelled to Emperor Nicholas II's Russian Empire using Reilly's forged British passport—a travel document and a cover identity both purportedly created by William Melville. While in St. Petersburg he was approached by Japanese General Akashi Motojiro to work for the Japanese Secret Intelligence Services. A keen judge of character, Akashi believed the most reliable spies were those who were motivated by profit instead of by feelings of sympathy towards Japan and, accordingly, he believed Reilly to be such a person.As tensions between Russia and Japan escalated toward war, Akashi had a budget of ¥1,000,000 provided by the Japanese Ministry of War to gather information on the movements of Russian troops and naval developments. Akashi instructed Reilly to offer financial aid to Russian revolutionaries in exchange for information about the Russian Intelligence Services and, more importantly, to determine the strength of the Russian armed forces, particularly in the Far East. Accepting Akashi's recruitment overtures, Reilly now became simultaneously an agent for both the British War Office and the Japanese Empire. While his wife Margaret remained in St. Petersburg, Reilly allegedly reconnoitred the Caucasus for its oil deposits and compiled a resource prospectus as part of "The Great Game". He reported his findings to the British Government, which paid him for the assignment.
Shortly before the Russo-Japanese War, Reilly appeared in Port Arthur, Manchuria, in the guise of a timber company owner. For four years, he familiarised himself with political conditions in the Far East and obtained a degree of personal influence in the espionage activities in the region. At the time he was still a double agent for the British and the Japanese governments. The Russian-controlled Port Arthur lay under the ever-darkening spectre of a Japanese invasion, and Reilly and his business partner Moisei Akimovich Ginsburg turned the precarious situation to their benefit. By purchasing and reselling enormous amounts of foodstuffs, raw materials, medicine, and coal, they made a small fortune as war profiteers.
File:Shinohara Kiyooki - 1904 - A Righteous War to Chastise the Russians The Destroyer Force's Night Attack.jpg|thumb|right|A 1904 ukiyo-e print of the night attack on Port Arthur by the Japanese Navy. The surprise attack was made possible by the intelligence gathering of Reilly and Ho Liang Shung.
Reilly achieved greater success in January 1904 when he and his Chinese engineer acquaintance, Ho Liang Shung, allegedly stole the Port Arthur harbour defence plans for the Japanese Navy. Guided by these stolen plans, the Japanese Navy navigated by night through the Russian minefield protecting the harbour and launched a surprise attack on Port Arthur on the night of 8–9 February 1904. The stolen plans did not help the Japanese much. Despite ideal conditions for a surprise attack, their combat results were relatively poor. Although more than 31,000 Russians ultimately perished defending Port Arthur, Japanese losses were much higher, and these losses nearly undermined their war effort.
Reilly quickly became an obvious target of suspicion by Russian authorities at Port Arthur. He discovered one of his business subordinates was an agent of Russian counter-espionage and chose to leave the region. Upon departing Port Arthur, Reilly travelled to Imperial Japan in the company of an unidentified woman where the Japanese government handsomely paid him for his prior intelligence services. If he made a detour to Japan, presumably to be paid for his espionage, he could not have stayed very long, for by February 1905, he appeared in Paris. By the time he had returned to Europe from the Far East, Reilly "had become a self-confident international adventurer" who was "fluent in several languages" and whose intelligence services were highly desired by various great powers. At the same time, he was described as possessing "a foolhardy adventurous nature" prone to taking unnecessary risks. This trait resulted in him being described as "reckless" by other agents.