Sidney Reilly

Origins and early life

Sidney Reilly was born about 1873 in the province of Kherson in the Russian Empire, and Britannica states that he was born the illegitimate son of a Jewish doctor at Odessa; the biographer Andrew Cook identifies him as Salomon, or Shlomo, Rosenblum, son of Dr Mikhail Rosenblum and of a mother named Polina.

Work and career

He was therefore born a Jew, and this fiche notes that no formal conversion is documented, only a complete assimilation in adulthood and an identity remade several times, the surname Reilly taken in 1899 from his first wife's Irish father. He left Russia as a young man, surfaced in London and then in Port Arthur and Saint Petersburg as a commission agent, and by 1909 was brokering arms and oil concessions while reporting to British intelligence.

Recruited formally by the Secret Intelligence Service in 1918, he was sent to revolutionary Russia, where he moved through Moscow under several identities and took part in the so-called Lockhart plot to overthrow the Bolshevik government, for which he was sentenced to death in absentia. He worked afterwards for Russian émigré organisations against the Soviet state, and in 1925 he crossed the border on the invitation of a supposed anti-Bolshevik network that was in fact a fabrication of the OGPU, the operation known as the Trust; he was arrested and shot near Moscow on 5 November 1925.

Much of what he told about himself cannot be verified, and this fiche says so; the figure and the legend became the source of the Ace of Spies literature and, by Ian Fleming's own account, one of the models for James Bond.