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.
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| Sam Neill |
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.
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| Sidney Reilly |
He
takes a lover, Ethel Boole, later Voynich, who writes a roman Ã
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.
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| Lenin, Stalin |
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.
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| Dzerzhinsky |
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.
