When Ian Fleming was asked who the inspiration was for James Bond, he is supposed to have said “He’s not a Sidney Reilly.” But in several conversations he did imply that James Bond was in part modelled on Sidney Reilly. Still, James Bond was not Sidney Reilly. And, indeed, Sidney Reilly was not Sidney Reilly. As far as anyone knows, Sidney Reilly, the Ace of Spies, the most famous of all pre-war British agents, a man about whom dozens of legends have been told, was born as Sigmund Rozenblum in Odessa. Though some say he was Shlomo Rozenblum from Kherson in Ukraine. Or perhaps Sigmund Rozenblum from Poland.
As befits any good spy, Sidney Reilly’s life is shrouded in mystery. He has been the subject of several biographies, each one telling different stories about him. He did not remain Rozenblum for long. In 1899, four years after he arrived in London, he was carrying a passport in the name of Sidney George Reilly. Though he didn’t manage to lose his Yiddish accent as quickly as he lost his Jewish name.
Reilly seems to have taken great pains to cover up his Jewish origins. One of the stories he told is that he had been born into an aristocratic landowning family and had only discovered as a young man that in fact his birth was illegitimate; that his father had been his mother’s physician, a Dr Rozenblum from Vienna. Unable to put up with the shame of his birth, he said he stowed away on a ship from Russia bound for South America. He arrived in Brazil where he was recruited as a cook by three British Army officers who were setting off on an expedition to the Amazon. When the group was attacked by cannibals Reilly grabbed a gun, drove off the attackers and saved the officers’ lives. He was rewarded by one of the officers, Major Charles Fothergill, who gave him £1,500, a British passport, a passage to Britain and a job in the Secret Service. It’s a good story, one that he probably told with relish to impress his admirers. Unfortunately it seems to have been a complete fantasy.
The story that Reilly did not tell is more sinister. It is not known how he first came to England but shortly after his arrival he began an affair with Margaret Thomas, the 24 year old wife of Reverend Hugh Thomas, a wealthy man in his mid-60s. Reverend Thomas was in poor health and it was to nobody’s great surprise when he was found dead in a hotel room. It wasn’t even particularly surprising that only a week earlier he had made a will in which he left everything to his wife. The couple were about to travel to Egypt on holiday and he may have thought it foolish, in his condition, to travel without making a will. Nor was it even just happened to be a doctor. The doctor certified the death as heart failure, and no inquest was needed.
There was one surprise though. After the event the doctor could not be found, the medical registers contained nobody in England of that name. And the description of the doctor seemed very similar to that of Sigmund Rozenblum, the future Sidney Reilly. A few months later Sidney Reilly, the man who had until recently been known as Sigmund Rozenblum, married the now very wealthy widow, Margaret Thomas.
One of the earliest sources of information about Sidney Reilly comes from a book written by the diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart, the head of the British diplomatic mission in Moscow during the Russian revolution. In his memoirs, Lockhart described Reilly as a man of great energy and personal charm, very attractive to women, whose courage and indifference to danger were superb. Ian Fleming couldn’t have put it more succinctly. However, Lockhart said that he did not have a very high opinion of Reilly’s intelligence.
Reilly acquired his first taste of espionage when he and Margaret travelled to Port Arthur in Manchuria in in 1903. Reilly took a job with a trading company run by a man named Moishe Ginsburg who supplied the Russian navy with provisions. Tensions were running high at the time between Russia and Japan and when the two countries went to war in 1904 it seems that Reilly began passing information to the Japanese. He may also have passed information back to the Russians. The details are sketchy but when he applied to work for the British government during World War 1, MI5 decided to look a little into his background. They discovered that he was a Greek Jew with a wide network of contacts across the globe, who had made a fortune trading with Russia. MI5 promptly recruited him.
A few days later MI5 received more information. They were told by their colleagues in Ireland that it was all a hoax, that Reilly’s biographical information was fictitious, that he was not Greek but Irish, though the town in Ireland where he claimed to have been born had no record of his birth. But it was too late. Reilly, now codenamed ST1, was already sailing to Russia, on active duty for the Special Intelligence Service.
In April 1918 Reilly sent a cable to C (!), the head of the SIS in London, suggesting that he might be able to persuade the revolutionary Bolshevik government in Moscow to ally with Britain against Germany. He said that he would need one million pounds, in cash, to bribe the Russians. He couldn’t guarantee that he would be successful in his efforts. But if he didn’t do this, he said, the Bolsheviks were likely to join the German side. C declined the offer.
A month later, Reilly dressed up in full military uniform and marched up to the gates of the Kremlin. He told them he needed to see Lenin, that he had been sent by the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, to receive first-hand news about the aims and objectives of the Bolshevik government. Astonishingly, the Russians let him in, and although he didn’t get to meet Lenin he did meet one of his aides.
A short while later, over at the British diplomatic mission in Moscow, Robert Bruce Lockhart received a phone call. It was the Kremlin. They told him that a British officer had arrived, demanding to see Lenin. Lockhart, who had not yet heard of Reilly, summoned him and demanded to know what he had been doing. “The sheer audacity of the man took my breath away . . . but he was so ingenious in his excuses that in the end he made me laugh . . . The methods of Sidney Reilly were on a grand scale, which compelled my admiration.”
Reilly was not put off by Lockhart’s half-hearted rebuke. He returned to the Kremlin where he had several meetings with the Director of the Military Council. He knew that the Bolshevik Government was more sympathetic to Germany than to Britain and the Allies, and he seems to have tried to persuade the Director of the Military Council otherwise. He told his superiors in London that he was succeeding in his efforts, though it was clear to him that he was not.
Unwilling to brook failure, Reilly tried something new. He disappeared from view, vanishing from the Secret Service and from his superiors. He took on an alias as a Greek businessman in Moscow and created a second identity for himself, as a Turk in Petrograd. He obtained forged identity papers, passing himself off as a member of the Cheka, the Russian Intelligence service. He then established a clandestine relationship with Lockhart, who was also working beneath the radar, holding regular secret meetings with disenchanted former revolutionaries and with officers of the Latvian regiments which guarded the Kremlin.
Reilly and Lockhart worked together to devise a strategy that has become known as The Lockhart Plot. Their aim was to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government and install a regime in Russia which would be sympathetic to British war aims. Since then over 100 years have passed, books and academic papers have been written, films and TV programmes made and still nobody really knows all the details of the plot, or even the moment at which Lockhart and Reilly began to collaborate. In simple terms, the plot seems to have been to encourage the Latvian forces guarding the Kremlin to turn against the the government and bring about regime change.
It all went horribly wrong. The Russians clearly knew more about the plot than either Reilly or Lockhart imagined. When an assassination attempt was made on Lenin’s life, Lockhart was arrested. Reilly, true to form, vanished into thin air.
Sidney Reilly had many more adventures; he was even linked to the Zinoviev letter, a forgery published in the Daily Mail which helped bring about the defeat of the Labour government. In 1925, he received an intriguing message. It suggested that he might like to become involved in a business opportunity in California. Reilly realised straightaway that the letter was a cipher, that California stood for Russia and that the business opportunity was to be another attempt to overthrow the Russian government. Quite why Reilly was so fixated on the Bolsheviks has never been fully explained. But he took the bait. He was now approaching 50; his mercurial skills were no longer what they had been. He travelled to Russia and wrote a letter to his contact to tell him that he had arrived. As he posted the letter he was arrested. It was to be the end of his adventures.
From time to time Sidney Reilly’s captors would take him from his prison cell and drive him to the local park so he could go for a walk. He went for his last walk on November 5th,1925. They shot him as he climbed out of the car.
Sidney Reilly lived a colourful life, far more than if he had remained as Sigmund Rozenblum. He let his guard down by returning to Russia to finish the job he had failed to complete. That is why he wasn’t James Bond. 007 would never have been so careless.
The best book about Sidney Reilly, or at least the one that is probably the most accurate is Andrew Cook’s Ace of Spies. Robert Bruce Lockhart’s Memoirs of a British Agent tells the story (among much else) from his perspective. The Lockhart Plot by Jonathan Schneer expands on the plot’s background.