Sidney Reilly: The Bottom of the Deck

 

Although novelty has its rewards, one of the dividends of leafing through the streaming services, PBS Masterpiece, BritBox, Acorn, MHz, and so on, is rediscovering previous favorites, a few of which have held up pretty well.  One is Lovejoy, still lively and clever, Ian McShane very much a treat, as always; and another, if showing its age a bit, is Reilly: Ace of Spies, first broadcast on PBS in 1983.

Reilly was a risk for Thames Television, they’d never done a mini-series, but they got a good return, selling the show in every major market.  Although it’s been outpaced in the export market by Thomas the Tank Engine, Mr. Bean, and Benny Hill, it was a commercial success at the time, and it made Sam Neill a star. 

Sidney Reilly was a real guy, and while the scripts played a little loose with the facts, the storyline was in many ways less fanciful than the rake’s progress of Reilly’s life.  You could also be forgiven for playing up his charm, and playing down his murderous opportunism.  Reilly was written by Troy Kennedy Martin, based on a book by Robin Bruce Lockhart – Lockhart the son of R.H. Bruce Lockhart, a famous spy in his own right, resident in Moscow after the Bolsheviks came to power, and credibly linked to Sidney Reilly in a 1918 plot to assassinate Lenin.  Half the stuff Reilly got up to never even makes it into the TV show. 

He was born Rosenblum, in Odessa, in 1873.  Or not.  His given name was Sigmund, or Georgy, or Salomon.  He was the illegitimate son of Perla and Mikhail, fathered by the cuckold Mikhail’s cousin Grigory.  Or perhaps the last heir of a Polish-Jewish family with an estate at Bielsk, on the edge of empire, the frontier of Belarus and Poland.  He first shows up in official paperwork in 1892, eighteen or nineteen years old, when he’s arrested by the Okhrana, the secret police, for political indiscretions, and the best guess is that he turns informant to avoid jail time.  This shape-shifting is a pattern that emerges early.  He fakes his death, in Odessa, and beats feet for Brazil.  He claims to have saved the life of a British officer, who rewards him with a passport and 1500 pounds sterling, but when he shows up later in London, in 1895, the money may well have been stolen from two Italian anarchists on the train from Paris to Fontainbleau, who had their throats cut.  How much of this is fiction?  The two Italians are dead enough to make the local paper.  Sidney is clearly inventing himself as he goes along.  In the trade, this is known as a legend, creating a false biography for cover.  It might simply be convenience, but it seems to be a developing habit of mind, Sidney shedding his skin. 

He takes a lover, Ethel Boole, later Voynich, who writes a roman à clef about him, The Gadfly, which goes on to enormous success, in Russia!  Because of her Russian émigré connections, it’s suggested Sidney was actually spying on her for Special Branch.  By this time, he’s gone undercover for Scotland Yard’s intelligence chief William Melville, and it’s Melville who comes up with his new cover identity, Sidney George Reilly.  

He’s also gotten married.  His wife is the recent widow of a clergyman.  They’d been doing the horizontal mambo before the husband’s death; her husband changed his will a week before he died; his death was certified as influenza by a doctor resembling Sidney, and no inquest was held; the rev was buried thirty-six hours after he died.  The young woman inherited £800,000.  Sidney married her four months later. 

Reilly reconnoiters in the Caucasus, and here’s where the series first picks up his story.  He’s working for the Admiralty, but he’s also being paid by the Japanese, and he eventually shows up in Port Arthur, in Manchuria.  This is later on the first strike of the Japanese against the Russian navy – the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.  Reilly has gained the reputation of an international adventurer.  He makes a deal to secure Persian and Iraqi oil concessions for the Brits.  He infiltrates the Krupp works at Essen, and steals German armament plans.  He spends the war years in New York, selling weapons to both Germany and Russia, until the U.S. enters the war and embargoes the German market, and then the Russian Revolution deposes the tsar.  Sidney keeps an eye on American radicals, reporting to British military intelligence, and takes on some industrial espionage.  It gets him recommended to SIS, in London.

1918.  Sidney Reilly had come full circle, when the Secret Intelligence Service recruited him and sent him back to Russia.  His job was to assess and report on a chaotic situation.  Kerensky’s provisional government had fallen to the Bolsheviks six months before, but civil war had blown up between the Reds and the right-wing Whites.  Reilly immediately put his energies into a counter-revolutionary plot to murder Lenin and overthrow the Communists.  He had support from British Naval Intelligence, Lockhart, acting for the Foreign Office, and SIS.  Allied troops had landed at Archangel and Murmansk.  The coup looked plausible.  But it fell apart when a former anarchist, on her own, made a premature attempt on Lenin’s life, and the Cheka struck back savagely.  Feliks Dzerzhinsky, head of state security, had informants everywhere, and it’s been suggested - even by Lockhart – that Reilly could have been a provocateur, in Dzerzhinsky’s pocket.  Reilly, as it happens, bluffed his way out of Petrograd, and got to London by way of Helsinki.  Others weren’t so lucky.

He was back, not long after, assigned to reconnoiter the anti-Bolshevik forces in southern Russia, along with Capt. George Hill.  (Hill was another clandestine intelligence operative with nerves of steel and a price on his head, a celebrated agent in both world wars, who’d worked covert with Reilly in Moscow and Petrograd, and helped him escape to Finland.)  They attached themselves to Gen. Denikin’s army, which along with the Cossack cavalries, made up the White resistance in Ukraine and the Caucasus.  Reilly reported back to London that with Allied military support, the Whites stood a chance, but he probably didn’t have that much effect on British policy.  Reilly is really only a footnote in the White story, which is a sad and complicated narrative – well told, most recently, by Antony Beevor, in RUSSIA: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921 – but the problem for the Whites wasn’t half-hearted and inconsistent help from the West.  The problem was that they had no real internal consistency, themselves.  They opposed the Reds, but they were stitched together out of monarchists, and democratic socialists, and conservative Tsarist army officers, along with fanatic anti-Semitic reactionaries like the Black Hundreds.  It was a marriage of convenience, and an inconvenience to everybody it touched.

The most interesting part of Reilly’s story comes at the end, and his undoing came not through his own perfidy, slippery and unscrupulous as he was, but by keeping the faith.  The triumph of Bolshevism was never a foregone conclusion, they could have been strangled at birth, if their adversaries had been ruthless enough – it was Lenin who turned out to have the necessary iron in his pants – but there were a few who banked the fires, even as late as 1925, when the Communists were securely in control, and Stalin had succeeded to power.  One of these was Winston Churchill, who was at this point in and out of government, and another was Sidney Reilly.  Reilly took a meeting in Paris, accompanied by a representative of SIS, with a small cadre of White partisans.  The counter-revolutionaries in exile were disenfranchised, with little political leverage, and no credible intelligence sources inside Russia, but Reilly somehow convinced himself they could organize a grass-roots guerrilla campaign through their underground movement, the so-called Monarchist Union of Central Russia, known colloquially as the Trust. 

It was, of course, a trap. 

Dzerzhinsky’s OGPU – the Cheka went by many different worknames, over the years – had developed the Trust as a long-term deception, loading it up with backstory, and peopling it with characters, like salting a worthless mine with gold nuggets.  They fabricated an alternate reality, where a stubborn resistance movement, burning with righteousness, held out against the Communist devils to bring back Holy Russia.  Utter poppycock, but it was constructed to lure in anti-Bolsheviks of exactly Reilly’s stripe, the unrepentant, who dreamt of turning back the wheel of history, and he fell for it.  Smuggled across the Finnish border, he was arrested two days later, the mission compromised from the outset.

He was interrogated at the Lubyanka, and after a couple of weeks, he was ready to give up any and all, regarding the American and UK spy services.  Even allowing for embroidery on Reilly’s part – the problem with enhanced interrogation being that the subject tells you what they think you most want to hear – this would have proved useful to Soviet espionage, but in spite of his obvious value to the Russian security apparat, he wasn’t persuasive enough.  There was that luckless conspiracy to assassinate Lenin, back in 1918.  It proved the final nail in his coffin.  Dzerzhinsky was overruled by Stalin.  Reilly was taken out and shot. 

The question most of us would ask is, Why did he go back, that last time?  He was never an idealist.  The answer seems to be that he heard what he wanted to hear.  He must have suspected, he knew he was a marked man, but he thought he still had the moves, that he could dazzle the crowds with his footwork.  And there was always the chance it was real, that the Trust was what they claimed, that the days of the Red Terror were numbered, and Sidney Reilly would be the man who frustrated their Destiny. 

Not every story we wish to be true is false, the fabled spy-hunter James Angleton once remarked.  He meant that a deception, to have legs, needs to be more than simply convincing; it needs an element of the unreachable, of the fantastic.  Reilly was drawn to the flame because he read his own story as myth.  A lesser man wouldn’t have believed it, and been able to save himself.