Sidney Reilly

Sidney Reilly ( Sidney George Reilly , actually: Georgi Rosenblum , called Ace of Spies ; born March 24, 1873 or 1874 probably in Odessa ; † November 5, 1925 near Moscow ) was a Russian - Jewish adventurer and spy .

Life and activity

Origin and early years

Reilly's origins are entwined with legends and there is information about them, some of which is strongly contradicting one another: he himself has created different versions of different sections of his biography: he once claimed that he was the son of an Irish trader who went to sea ( or merchant captain), once the son of an Irish clergyman and another time the son of a noble landowner and member of the court of Tsar Alexander III. to be.

The sources available so far give partly March 24, 1873 and partly March 24, 1874 as the date of birth of Reilly. The alleged birth names of Reilly are sometimes Zigmund Markovich Rozenblum (Rosenblum), sometimes Georgy Rosenblum and sometimes Salomon (Shlomo) Rosenblum. Odessa is usually considered his birthplace . His parents are identified in some sources as Mark Rosenblum, a shipbroker in Odessa, and his wife, the daughter of an impoverished aristocratic family. Andrew Cook, on the other hand, gives Cherson in the Ukraine as the place of birth and describes Reilly as the illegitimate child of a certain Polina and a Dr. Mikhail Abramovich Rosenblum, a cousin of Grigory (Hersh) Rosenblum, who later became his official father.

At the beginning of the 1890s, Rosenblum claims to have acted as a courier for a revolutionary group in Russia and was therefore temporarily taken into custody by the tsarist secret police. After his release, according to some accounts, he went to South America under the name Sigmund Rosenblum, where he took the name Pedro and made his way as a port worker, plantation worker and cook. Other versions claim he was in France in the early 1890s and participated in the murder and robbery of two Italian anarchists in December 1895. It can be proven that he came to London in December 1895 , where he appeared under the name Sidney Rosenblum. There is evidence that he lived there in early 1896 in the Albert Mansions apartment block on Rosetta Street, Waterloo, London. In London, Rosenblum founded the Ozone Preparations Company, which was dedicated to the sale of patented drugs. He also worked as a paid informant for William Melville, the head of the Special Branch of the London Police (Scotland Yard), d. H. the intelligence service of the London capital police, which he supplied with news about emigrants living in London.

In 1897 Rosenblum met the priest Hugh Thomas and his wife Margaret, with whom he soon began a violent affair and whom he finally married a few months after the death of her husband in 1898. A number of inconsistencies in connection with Hugh Thomas' death led to the suspicion repeatedly being expressed in the specialist literature that Rosenblum and Margaret Thomas were responsible for this: Hugh Thomas was found dead in a hotel on March 12, 1898. Less than a week earlier, he had changed his will and appointed his wife as executor, who subsequently inherited a fortune of around £ 800,000 from him. A certain Dr. TW Andrew, who appeared in the death room to fill out and sign off the official documents, noted the consequences of generic influenza. He also noted in the documents that since the cause of death was obviously a natural one, a judicial review and determination of the cause of death by a medical officer was not necessary. Suspiciously, however, apart from Thomas' death records, there are no documents from which it appears that in 1898 a Dr. TW Andrew existed in the UK. Since the appearance of Dr. Andrew fits the look of Rosenblum, some authors have assumed that the supposed doctor was actually Rosenblum, who appeared under a false identity, one of him, Rosenblum, and Margaret Thomas (and possibly other accomplices) in to conceal the murderous death of Thomas by, as a false doctor, creating evidence of a natural cause of death for the clergyman without outside interference, in order to prevent an examination of the corpse by another doctor (and the possible determination of a death caused by outside interference). The London police investigated the inconsistencies that the doctor who officially established Thomas 'death and declared Thomas' death to be natural death then disappeared without a trace, and that apart from the death certificate he had issued, it was not even possible to establish that he actually existed as a person, but neither like the fact that Thomas' personal nurse had already been suspected of being linked to the poisoning of one of her previous employers. Margaret Thomas also insisted that her husband be buried within 36 hours of his death. Her marriage to Rosenblum followed on August 22, 1898.

The marriage to Margaret Thomas made Rosenblum a rich man. He also took it as an opportunity to give up his identity as Sigmund Rosenblum and to acquire a new identity with the help of William Melville: henceforth he was called Sidney George Reilly.

Stays in Russia and the Far East (1899 to 1904)

In June 1899, Rosenblum / Reilly, together with his wife and under his new name, with a British passport, began a trip to Tsarist Russia. While his wife stayed in Saint Petersburg for a few months, he went on a reconnaissance trip to the Caucasus to gather information about the oil reserves there, which he then passed on to the British government, which paid him for the service.

In 1901, Reilly and his wife made their first trip to the Far East from Port Said, where he is said to have come into contact with the Japanese secret service. A few years later Reilly stayed in the port city of Port Arthur in Manchuria , which was then under Russian administration , where he worked as a double agent for both the British and the Japanese. In anticipation of the Russo-Japanese War, which would soon break out, he and a business partner Moise (Moses) Akimovich Ginsburg bought large quantities of food, raw materials, medicines and coal at low prices, which the two of them were able to sell at considerable profit during the war.

According to some sources, it was Reilly who, together with the Chinese engineer Ho Liangshung, stole the Russian plans for the defense of the port of Port Arthur in January 1904 and passed them on to the Japanese Navy. The Japanese used these plans, regardless of whether they actually received them from Reilly, to use the information they provided to find out the location of the minefields that the Russians had created to protect the port. In this way, during their surprise attack on the port on the night of February 8th to 9th, 1904, they were able to bypass the surrounding minefields and reach the port unscathed in order to be able to begin the actual attack on it: despite With this advantage the attack ended with heavy losses for the Japanese. As evidence for the role ascribed to Reilly is u. a. his visit to Japan soon thereafter, which is believed to have served the purpose of receiving his remuneration for the espionage services rendered.

In June 1904 Reilly returned to Europe, where he now chose Paris as his place of residence.

Intelligence activity

During the International Airship Exhibition in Frankfurt in 1909, according to his biographer Robin Bruce Lockhart, Reilly is said to have been involved in the theft of a newly developed magneto ignition for aircraft: After the fatal crash of a demonstration pilot participating in the exhibition, it was Reilly together with one British SIS agents managed to get closer to the wreck, to take the state-of-the-art machine part and to replace it with another, older, model that they used as a placeholder. After they had made detailed drawings of its structure, according to Lockhart, they secretly put the part back in its place in the aircraft, which had meanwhile been moved to a hangar, in order to give the mechanics who were later assigned to examine the wreck the impression that everything was still going on in its place so that the technical espionage they carried out would go unnoticed. Reilly's biographer Andrew Cook does not consider this incident historical, which he justifies, among other things, with the fact that, according to contemporary documents, there was no crash at the airship exhibition.

Reilly served as a double agent for at least four countries. As a secret agent he was active for the British Scotland Yard , the Secret Service Bureau and later for the Secret Intelligence Service . According to his own statement, Reilly worked as a spy in the Second Boer War , the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War .

Files published by the British foreign intelligence service SIS in 1998 show that Reilly was sent to Moscow in March 1918 by George Smith-Cummings, the first director of the SIS, with the task of destabilizing and ultimately overthrowing the building after the Russian October Revolution of 1917 To advance Bolshevik rule in Russia. To this end, after his arrival in the Russian capital, Reilly worked out a plan that provided for the elimination of the leadership group of the Bolsheviks around Vladimir Lenin: If this were liquidated, the new regime, according to his calculation, would be beheaded and, as a result, in itself to collapse. In detail, Reilly intended to attack a meeting of the All-Russian Council Congress in the Moscow Bolshoi Theater scheduled for the end of August 1918 by a raiding party of renegade Latvian Red Army soldiers and to arrest the assembled Soviet leaders: Lenin and the then War Commissioner Trotsky were to be shot on the spot. The attack was no longer carried out because of Fanny Kaplan's assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30, 1918. Since some of the people involved by Reilly in the planning - as later archival finds show - were Bolshevik shop stewards and agents provocateurs, it is also extremely questionable whether the company (which in the literature is mostly based on Reilly's formal superior in Moscow, the British quasi-ambassador Bruce Lockhart is referred to as the Lockhart plot), even if it had not been carried out because of the Kaplan assassination, or if it had not been thwarted by the intervention of the Russian secret police, who were lying in wait. While the outlines of the Lockhart company had been known for decades, the file releases of the 1990s made it known that - contrary to earlier claims by British government agencies - it was not an unauthorized action by Reilly, but that he was dedicated to acts of sabotage of this kind had been sent to Moscow.

Reilly had to give up his plan due to the mass arrests and executions that followed the Kaplan assassination - known as the Red Terror -: he managed to go into hiding and flee across the Finnish border. He then traveled back to London via Sweden. In Russia he was sentenced to death in absentia by a revolutionary court.

death

In September 1925, undercover agents of the Soviet secret service OGPU, a counter-espionage operation of the GPU posing as anti-Soviet émigrés, succeeded in luring Reilly to the Soviet Union on the pretext of meeting representatives of an anti-communist underground organization there that was promoting the overthrow of the Bolshevik Systems operate. After crossing the border from Finland into the Soviet Union, he was met by an OGPU agent who posed as a leading member of the opposition and soon afterwards arrested: he was first transferred to the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow , where he subjected to lengthy interrogations was subjected. In the literature, the view is mostly taken that he was not (physically) tortured while in custody, but that he was subjected to sham executions in order to break his nerves and induce him to divulge information. While he was still in captivity, the Soviet authorities officially declared that Reilly had been shot while illegally crossing the Finnish-Soviet border. He was not actually killed until a few weeks later. According to British intelligence records released in 2000, Reilly was shot dead in a forest near Moscow on November 5, 1925. The order for this measure is said to have gone back to Josef Stalin personally.

Afterlife

Despite its announcement by the Soviets, Reilly's death in 1925 was often questioned for many years: For example, the rumor circulated that it had only been faked and that he had actually defected to the Soviets and served them as an advisor on intelligence matters.

For example, the police in Nazi Germany assumed in 1940 that Reilly was still alive and classified him as an important target: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin - which thought he was alive and assumed he was in Great Britain - Reilly with the description "British news agent" on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people whom the National Socialist surveillance apparatus regarded as such important opponents of the Nazi system or such important knowledge carriers that they would in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of Great Britain by the Wehrmacht SS special commandos who were supposed to follow the occupation troops were to be located and arrested with special priority.

Adaptations and processing of Reilly's life and activities

Reilly's biography and individual elements of it, as well as individual adventurous processes in which he was involved, have found rich artistic expression in the form of processing in books, films and television productions.

In 1983 the twelve-part British miniseries Reilly was produced for television . Ace of Spies of the material, with the historical events on the basis of the controversial Reilly biography by Robin Bruce Lockhart ( Ace of Spies ) heavily dramatized. Reilly was played by Sam Neill . The reworking of Lockhart's book into a script was done by Troy Kennedy Martin . In Germany, the series was first broadcast in 1986 under the title Reilly - Spion der Spione .

In various studies on the James Bond novel and film series , Reilly is cited as one of those real people who are said to have served as role models for the protagonist of the James Bond stories, the British secret agent of the same name. Reilly's friend and biographer Robert Bruce Lockhart worked for many years in the British secret service with the later creator of the Bond character and novels, Ian Fleming , and during this time he shared much of his knowledge about the mysterious man: elements of real people Reilly, who are said to be found in the Bond figure, and which the Bond figure allegedly ascribed to Reilly von Fleming, are the two common multilingualism, the fascination for the Far East, their preference for a dignified way of life and an obsessive one Preference for gambling.

Fonts

• Britain's Master Spy: The Adventures of Sidney Reilly , 1933. (Autobiography, published posthumously and completed by his third wife, Pepita Bobadilla)

literature

Biographies :

• Andrew Cook: Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly , 2004.
• Michael Kettle: Sidney Reilly: The True Story of the World's Greatest Spy , 1986.
• Robin Bruce Lockhart : Reilly: Ace of Spies , 1986.
• Richard B. Spence: Trust No One: The Secret World Of Sidney Reilly , 2002.

Short sketches :

• Margret Sankey: "Sidney George Reilly", in: Rodney Carlisle (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Intelligence and Counterintelligence , 2015, p. 528.
• Max Fram: The Motherland of Elephants , pp. 443-458

Other literature :

• Natalie Grant: "Deception on a Grand Scale", in: International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence , Vol. 1, Issue 4, Winter 1986, pp. 51-77.
• Andrew Lycett: Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond , 1996.
• David Stafford: Churchill & Secret Service , London 2001, pp. 132-147.

Web links

Commons : Sidney Reilly  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ^ Richard B. Spence: Trust No One. The Secret World Of Sidney Reilly , 2002, pp. 2-6; Robin Bruce Lockhart: Reilly: Ace of Spies , 1986, pp. 21-23; Richard Bennett: Espionage: Spies and Secrets , 2012 cites in his entry to Reilly a letter from him from 1925, in which he mentions that he had turned 51 the day before, which was March 24, 1874 as the most likely birthday speaks.
2. ↑ Eliminate Russia , in: Der Spiegel, October 19, 1998.
3. ^ Andrew Cook: Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly 2004, pp. 238ff.
4. ^ Entry on Reilly on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .
5. ↑ Andrew Lycett: Ian Fleming. The Man Behind James Bond , 1996, pp. 118 and 132; Andrew Cook: Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly , 2004, p. 12.