Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution (14 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

THE MAN WITH THREE NAMES

Sidney Reilly emerged from the Savoy Hotel into the bright spring sunshine. He was accustomed to taking the occasional luncheon in the Savoy’s dining rooms whenever he was in London. There was a club-like atmosphere that perfectly suited his persona. He liked to play the role of a well-bred English gentleman.

Reilly stepped into the Strand and awaited a passing taxi, not pausing to look around at the people in the street. He had no reason to expect anything suspicious or untoward on this beautiful March afternoon in 1918.

But had he glanced over his shoulder, he might have noticed that he was being followed. Someone had been tracking him and making notes on his movements for several hours. His pursuer had even questioned the Savoy’s staff about his behaviour.

The man following Reilly was an agent from MI5 – the Home Intelligence Service – and he had been charged with gathering information on the places that Reilly frequented.

Mansfield Cumming himself had asked for Reilly to be tailed. He was on the point of offering him employment as a spy and wanted to be absolutely sure that Reilly could be trusted. He needed to know that he had the right man for an espionage mission whose aim was to gather intelligence from the heart of the new regime in Russia. It was certain to be both difficult and dangerous.

Cumming had found himself with no shortage of recruits for his Secret Intelligence Service over the previous four years. Espionage offered a welcome break for bright young officers weary of the monotony of war.

‘There was from the outside point of view, a glamour, an air of romance and adventure about the whole idea which led dozens of young men to think they would try their hands at it,’ wrote the espionage expert, Hector Bywater.

Cumming had started to pay increasingly close attention to the agents he intended to employ for his operations in Russia. The time would surely come when the remaining members of Samuel Hoare’s bureau would be expelled from the country, along with Arthur Ransome, George Hill and the other British military officers who had been posted to Russia. Cumming needed to find agents who would be able and willing to work undercover.

An obvious recruiting ground was the British expatriate community of Petrograd. The families who had established businesses in the city were fluent Russian speakers and they also had good connections. A number of them would indeed become actively involved in espionage. But Cumming began to cast his net wider, looking for anyone who spoke perfect Russian and could blend into the crowd. His search for potential candidates had led him to Sidney Reilly, a flamboyant entrepreneur with a polyglot background and a seductive charm.

Reilly had spent much of the war in New York where he had set up business as an arms dealer and amassed a fortune of at least two million dollars, selling munitions to the Imperial Russian Army.

His moneymaking eventually preyed on his conscience – or so he claimed – and he decided to offer his services on the battlefront. According to Norman Thwaites, one of Cumming’s operatives in New York, Reilly had approached him in the autumn of 1917 and said that ‘he felt that he ought to be doing his bit in the war.’

Thwaites would later confess to having been bowled over by Reilly’s imposing character and striking good looks. ‘His appearance was remarkable,’ he wrote. ‘Complexion swarthy, a long straight nose, piercing eyes, black hair brushed back from a forehead suggesting keen intelligence.’ To Thwaites, he was ‘a man that impressed one with a good deal of power.’

Reilly’s mastery of languages amazed all who met him, as did his ability to change identity at the flick of a switch. He could pass himself off as both a native Russian and a native German and he was able to blend seamlessly into a crowd. ‘Not only had he charming manners,’ wrote Thwaites, ‘but he was a most agreeable companion with a fund of information in many spheres.’

Reilly was already being tipped as a possible agent when he was brought to the attention of Major John Scale, Cumming’s bureau chief in Stockholm. Scale, in turn, proposed him to Mansfield Cumming, suggesting that Reilly might be just the sort of person needed for work inside Russia.

Cumming was cautiously enthusiastic; before offering Reilly employment he asked for a full briefing from his operatives in New York. He soon found himself with a picture of Reilly that was very different from the one drawn by Thwaites. Those who had known Reilly during the early years of the war described him as unscrupulous, disloyal and greedy.

‘[He] has made money since the beginning of the war through influence with corrupted members of the Russian purchasing commissions,’ read one report. ‘We consider him untrustworthy and unsuitable to work suggested.’

A second telegram from New York described Reilly as ‘a shrewd businessman of undoubted ability but without patriotism or principles and therefore not recommended for any position which requires loyalty as he would not hesitate to use it to further his own commercial interests.’

Cumming was so unsettled by this information that he decided to have Reilly trailed by MI5 in the days prior to their meeting at Whitehall Court. The officers who observed his movements were able to reveal little new information. Reilly always travelled by cab and his would-be pursuers kept losing him in the city traffic.

Even if they had managed to stay on his trail, it would have revealed little of interest. Reilly rarely strayed beyond the Savoy, the Ritz and Solomons in St James’s Street, where he bought his daily buttonhole.

Reilly’s chimerical nature was perfectly encapsulated in the contradictory nature of the surviving MI5 reports. One described him as ‘very respectable, pays bills quite regularly and dines at the Savoy and Berkeley hotels’. The other concluded that he was ‘one of a gang of confidence men of an international character.’ It added that he was ‘believed to have been born in Russian Poland.’

Reilly’s place of birth was a subject of much speculation, partly because Reilly himself had invented numerous stories about his origins. He claimed at various times to have been fathered by an Irish sea captain, an Irish clergyman and a Russian aristocrat. His first wife had been told a rather different tale: she believed him to be descended from a wealthy family of landowners in Russian Poland.

Reilly was not, in fact, from Russian Poland and nor was his original name Reilly. He was born in 1874 in Odessa, in Southern Russia, and given the name Sigmund Georgievich Rosenblum. Both his parents were Jewish, although they had converted to Catholicism.

Rosenblum fled Odessa in his late teens for reasons that remain obscure. No less obscure are the next two decades of his life. He would later spin tales about how he had been a cook, a dockworker, a railway engineer in India and a brothel doorman in Brazil, but there is no certainty that he did any of these jobs. He was also said to have worked as a spy for the Japanese government and there are many unverified stories of his early forays into espionage.

At dinner parties with friends he would enliven the evening with derring-do accounts of a British Army expedition that he had accompanied into the steaming Amazonian rainforest. When natives ambushed the party, Reilly had single-handedly fought them off and saved all of the officers’ lives. Like so many of Reilly’s stories, it is almost certainly exaggerated and quite possibly untrue.

He was in London by the summer of 1899; he married his first wife, Margaret, at Holborn Register Office. It was from her that he took the name Reilly, discarding once and for all his birth name, Rosenblum.

When war broke out, Reilly took himself to New York where he lived with the first of his bigamous wives, Nadine Massino. (Margaret, who had taken to drink, was shipped back to England.)

All accounts agree that he had a seductive charm, loving women as he loved himself. A string of mistresses would fall under his spell. Monogamy did not come naturally to Reilly and although he was usually fastidious in his choice of women, it did not prevent him from cavorting around London on one of his visits with a common tart named Plugger. How she acquired her
nom de travail
can only be imagined.

Reilly’s third wife, the vaudeville actress Pepita Burton, recalled being mesmerised by his languid chestnut-brown eyes when she first met him in the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. ‘For a moment his eyes held mine and I felt a delicious thrill run through me.’ She, like so many others, was instantly hooked.

But there was a darker side to Reilly’s personality, one that was to haunt Mansfield Cumming for many years. He was a compulsive gambler and a reckless one to boot. He spent his money with great ostentation, staking all on a hand of cards.

What struck everyone was Reilly’s vaunting ambition. He detested the Bolsheviks and was already dreaming of toppling Lenin’s government. When he had come to consider who might replace Lenin, he looked no further than the mirror.

‘Behind all Reilly’s efforts lay the conviction that some day he was destined to bring Russia out of the slough and chaos of Communism,’ wrote Norman Thwaites. ‘He believed that he would do for Russia what Napoleon did for France.’

Reilly had long identified himself with Napoleon. It was an alarming comparison in one who was preoccupied with turning fantasy into reality. Such was his fascination with his historical hero that he amassed a large collection of memorabilia – a collection he would eventually sell for the considerable sum of $100,000.

Cumming had been fully briefed on Reilly’s dubious background when he called him in for a meeting on 15 March 1918. His interviews with potential agents were usually cordial but perfunctory and there is no reason to doubt that his meeting with Reilly was any different. He must surely have asked him about his contacts in Russia and his political affiliations, but the content of their conversation remains unknown for Cumming recorded only a brief mention of their encounter in his diary. He found Reilly charming, yet he clearly had concerns. ‘Very clever,’ he wrote, ‘very doubtful – has been everywhere and done everything.’

His resourcefulness was an important point in his favour: Reilly was exceptionally good at adapting himself to unfamiliar surroundings. Hector Bywater said that ‘the good intelligence man had to dig himself in and stick it, bearing loneliness and fear and excitement and triumph in complete silence.’

Reilly fitted this mould so exactly that Cumming was prepared to turn a blind eye to Reilly’s defects and send him into Russia, although he confessed that employing him was ‘a great gamble’.

‘[He] will take out £500 in notes and £750 in diamonds, which are at a premium,’ wrote Cumming in his diary.

The British government were playing with high stakes: Reilly was being given the modern equivalent of £50,000.