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Title: Sidney Reilly
Source: BBC
URL Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/breakfast/1976607.stm
Published: Feb 2, 2008
Author: various
Post Date: 2008-02-02 13:34:18 by robin
Keywords: None
Views: 1429
Comments: 10

The Real James Bond

black and white newspaper photograph of Sidney Reilly

The real life James Bond? Sidney Reilly, master spy and bigamist

Sensitive government files which shed light on the life of the master spy Sidney Reilly are finally opened to the public today.

Reilly is credited with providing Ian Fleming with the inspiration for his character James Bond.

historian Andrew Cook live on BBC Breakfast

Cook: doubts Reilly was a double agent

His exploits for British intelligence in Russia made him a household name in Britain in the twenties. But many suspect he may have been a double, triple or even quadruple agent.

Breakfast spoke to Andrew Cook, who's written a book on Sidney Reilly.

To watch his interview in full, click on the watch/listen box at the top right hand side of this story

Reilly disappeared on a mission in Russia in 1925, and today's papers may shed light on whether he was betrayed by a mole inside British intelligence.


He was born Shlomo Rosenblum, in Ukraine, in 1873.

He was recruited by the British intelligence and won the Military Cross for work in Russia.

He was also kept under close observation by the MI5 between his volunteering and actually being enlisted into the service.

His love-life was tangled: it's known that he had at least four wives (three of the marriages were bigamous) and he claimed to have at least ninety lovers.

Reilly disappeared on an undercover mission in Russia in 1925.

Historian Andrew Cook believes that the manner of his death proves he was never a double agent.

Reilly had been working inside Russia with a shadowy organisation called The Trust, which Western Intelligence believed was trying to overthrow the Bolsheviks.

In fact, The Trust was the creation of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Russian KGB: Reilly had been set up.

Andrew Cook told Breakfast:

The manner of his death indicates he was not a double agent.

OGPU (the fore-runner of the KGB) took him for a drive into the country.

The car "broke down" and they took him for a short walk while it was being repaired. Then they shot him in the back.

Compared with how executions were normally carried out, it was a kindness to do it this way.

www.sem20.com/15-minute-interlude/reilly.html

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/breakfast/1976607.stm

www.spyschool.com/spybios/reillys.htm
Sidney Reilly has been falsely glamorised as one of Britain's great secret agents who it was claimed, "Wielded more power, authority and influence than any other spy." He was also a professional assassin, expert at "poisoning, stabbing, shooting, and throttling." Energetic, unpredictable, self-confident, and decidedly ruthless, Reilly loved money, women and power. He possessed, it was reported, "eleven passports and a wife to go with each of them."

Born in Odessa, Russia on March 24, 1874, Reilly was the bastard son of a rich Jewish landowner and contractor in Russian occupied Poland and the wife of a Czarist officer. Though he used his father's name, Rosenblum , he had no official name. Shortly before the Russo-Japanese War broke out in 1904, Reilly travelled to England and in 1909 managed to become a 'free-lance' agent of Cummings Foreign section of the new Secret Service Bureau. The future SIS chief apparently came to admire Reilly but still maintained certain reservations, saying that he was "a man of indomitable courage, a genius as an agent but a sinister man who I could never bring myself wholly to trust." Reilly was a busy and by all accounts, effective field agent for what had now become the Secret Intelligence Service throughout the 1914-1916 period. However, he came into his own with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, travelling widely under a number of disguises in both the Red Army and counter-revolutionary White Army area's of Russia during 1917-18.

Reilly was believed to have been involved in at least one failed attempt on Lenin's life, including according to a secret French intelligence report, an occasion on which "Reilly and a group of Lettish Soldiers were to storm a meeting of the All Russian Congress of Soviets at the Bolshoi Threatre. At a given signal the soldiers would seal the exits and a group led by Reilly, gun in hand, would jump onto the stage, seize Lenin, Trotsky and the other leaders. All would then be shot on the spot!"

Escaping capture on a number of occasions, Reilly finally managed to return to England where he immediately lobbied Cumming to have the British Foreign Office use him to continue the fight against Bolshevism. He was convinced, he said, that he was the one man to bring down Lenin's regime. The Foreign Office was disinclined to add to their muster a man as flamboyant and uncontrollable as Reilly. He stayed on with SIS an occasional agent but never employed as an Officer. In 1919, Reilly allied himself with Boris Savinkov, a conniving, clever anti-communist terrorist. Reilly, however failed to achieve anything of importance either personally or on behalf of his anti-Bolshevik friends over the next few years. Financially ruined and in increasing ill health, Reilly returned to London where he found it almost impossible to raise money for a further expedition to Russia. He had already borrowed heavily from all of his former friends in the SIS and no longer had a useful relationship with British intelligence, Cumming was dead and the new chief, Admiral Hugh Sinclair believed Reilly was little more than a seedy adventurer. In March 1925, Reilly admitted in a letter to Ernest Boyce, his fellow spy in Russia that "my own affairs... as you know, are in a hellish state." He added with a tinge of self-pity: "I was fifty-one yesterday and I want to do something worthwhile, while I can."

Boyce, who was then the SIS chief in Helsinki, wrote to Reilly to tell him that he had been in contact with representatives of the Paris Trust. In reality this was a Communist disinformation and entrapment operation which had already successfully lured Savinkov back to his death in Russia, a fact unknown to Boyce or Reilly. Boyce however, was convinced that the Trust was extremely powerful and had the contacts, money, and secret forces to bring about a radical change in Russia. Through him, Reilly came to meet several of the MUCR representatives, agreeing to go to Russia to confer with the Trust's leading council members. Like Savinkov before him, Reilly was easily hoodwinked. He crossed the Finnish border on September 25, 1925, and was taken to a villa outside Moscow two days later to meet with council members who were really OGPU agents. Reilly was interrogated and then told that the death sentence imposed upon him 'in absentia' in 1918 would now be carried out. The once nerveless spy panicked. He wrote a desperate note to OGPU chief Dzerzhinsky, according to later Soviet accounts, in which he begged for his life in exchange for priceless information he could provide Soviet intelligence. Reilly's note read: "After prolonged deliberation, I express willingness to give you complete and open acknowledgement and information on matters of interest to the OGPU concerning the organization and personnel of the British Intelligence Service. And, so far as I know it, similar information on American intelligence and likewise on Russian ŽmigrŽs with whom I have had business." Dzerzhinsky did not respond. Some time in November 1925, Sidney George Reilly was placed before a villa wall outside of Moscow and executed by a firing squad, his body being later dumped into an unmarked grave.

That Reilly was involved in a direct SIS plot to assassinate Lenin has become clear from a close study of official papers, some of which are still retained by SIS. The embarrassment this caused to the head of SIS in 1998, Sir David Spedding led him to campaign for such documents to remain secret. In 1918 Reilly was sent to Russia as a freelance SIS agent, once there he concocted a plan to murder the Soviet leader. Captain George Hill, Chief of SIS in Russia in a secret CX report to Mansfield Cumming in London, made it clear that both he and Ernest Boyce SIS station chief in Moscow were involved in the failed assassination. He commented that "Boyce had apparently considered the plan risky, but agreed that it was worth trying and that failure of the plan would drop entirely on Reilly's neck"

That the British Liberal Government of Lloyd George nearly became responsible for the assassination of the Soviet Leader or leadership through the good offices of its own Intelligence service is, to say the least, a startling revelation. It also once again highlights that the truth about the world of espionage and clandestine operations is often stranger than fiction.

members.tripod.com/chipress/chipress/reilly.htm

english.pravda.ru/main/18...2/16415_sidneyreilly.html

www.imdb.com/title/tt0085077/usercomments


Felix Dzerzhinsky
Legacy of Dzerzhinsky

Dzerzhinsky is highly regarded as the heroic founder of Cheka by today's SVR and FSB officers in Russia. Political scientist Yevgenia Albats commented:

"Throughout the country, without investigation or trial, the Chekists raged. They tortured old men and raped schoolgirls and killed parents before the eyes of their children. They impaled people, beat them with an iron glove, put wet leather "crowns" on their heads, buried them alive, locked them in cells where the floor was covered with corpses. Amazing, isn't it that today's agents do not blanch to call themselves Chekists, and proudly claim Dzerzhinsky's legacy?"[5]


Poster Comment:

My question, does Dzerzhinsky sound like the sort of person who would just shoot a spy? Why this attempt in 2002 by Cook to exonerate Reilly of being a double agent?

When you meet sheeple who deny govt conspiracies like govt involvement in 9/11, show them this story, as well as the CIA family jewels released last summer.

(5 images)

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#1. To: Horse, JiminyC, wbales, richard9151, Dakmar, aristeides, christine, kiki, castletrash, Cynicom, AllTheKing'sHorsesWontDoIt, ghostdogtxn, Sam Houston (#0)

old intrigue ping

Ron Paul for President - Join a Ron Paul Meetup group today! The Revolution will not be televised!
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.-T Jefferson

robin  posted on  2008-02-02   13:36:36 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#2. To: robin (#0)

Guy was probably shot by someone's husband.

nobody  posted on  2008-02-02   13:52:22 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#3. To: nobody (#2) (Edited)

nice try, but Reilly is a good example of how govts have conspired for centuries

Ron Paul for President - Join a Ron Paul Meetup group today! The Revolution will not be televised!
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.-T Jefferson

robin  posted on  2008-02-02   13:55:43 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#4. To: robin (#0)

He was born Shlomo Rosenblum, in Ukraine, in 1873.

Bwahahahahahaha Sidney Reilly ...

"Give us liberty and give them death" ... noone222 1-10-08

noone222  posted on  2008-02-02   20:13:48 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#5. To: robin (#3)

nice try, but Reilly is a good example of how ...

Rosenblum is a good example of how Jews have infiltrated governments throughout history. I find it odd that he was such a womanizer when Kim Philby and the other sppoks around that time in London were a bunch of fags, like most in the Intel Business still are today.

"Give us liberty and give them death" ... noone222 1-10-08

noone222  posted on  2008-02-02   20:17:23 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#6. To: noone222 (#5)

Check out this monster:

Felix Dzerzhinsky
Legacy of Dzerzhinsky

Dzerzhinsky is highly regarded as the heroic founder of Cheka by today's SVR and FSB officers in Russia. Political scientist Yevgenia Albats commented:

"Throughout the country, without investigation or trial, the Chekists raged. They tortured old men and raped schoolgirls and killed parents before the eyes of their children. They impaled people, beat them with an iron glove, put wet leather "crowns" on their heads, buried them alive, locked them in cells where the floor was covered with corpses. Amazing, isn't it that today's agents do not blanch to call themselves Chekists, and proudly claim Dzerzhinsky's legacy?"[5]

And all he did was shoot Reilly after he "trapped" him? It doesn't pass the smell test. This "Reilly" has all the markings of a double agent, IMO.

Ron Paul for President - Join a Ron Paul Meetup group today! The Revolution will not be televised!
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.-T Jefferson

robin  posted on  2008-02-02   20:22:46 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#7. To: robin (#6)

Throughout the country, without investigation or trial, the Chekists raged. They tortured old men and raped schoolgirls and killed parents before the eyes of their children. They impaled people, beat them with an iron glove, put wet leather "crowns" on their heads, buried them alive, locked them in cells where the floor was covered with corpses.

Some would have us believe that these murderous vermin are "the chosen" or somehow equal with the balance of humanity ...

"Give us liberty and give them death" ... noone222 1-10-08

noone222  posted on  2008-02-02   21:06:39 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#8. To: noone222 (#7)

just remember who the only victims of the world are, or you could face 3.5 years in a German prison

Ron Paul for President - Join a Ron Paul Meetup group today! The Revolution will not be televised!
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.-T Jefferson

robin  posted on  2008-02-02   21:09:12 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#9. To: robin (#3)

How difficult could it be to become a double agent if both sides are controlled by the same group?

nobody  posted on  2008-02-02   21:27:35 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#10. To: robin (#0)

Reilly had been working inside Russia with a shadowy organisation called The Trust, which Western Intelligence believed was trying to overthrow the Bolsheviks.

As a media cynic, I'd say "The Trust" was probably a bunch of bill collectors representing New York funders.

nobody  posted on  2008-02-02   21:31:15 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


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