Sidney George Reilly (; – 5 November 1925), known as the "Ace of Spies", was a Ukrainian-born adventurer and secret agent employed by Scotland Yard's Special Branch and later by the Foreign Section of the British Secret Service Bureau, the precursor to the modern British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6/SIS). He is alleged to have spied for at least four different great powers, and documentary evidence indicates that he was involved in espionage activities in 1890s London among Russian émigré circles, in Manchuria on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), and in an abortive 1918 coup d'état against Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik government in Moscow.
Reilly disappeared in Soviet Russia in the mid-1920s, lured by Cheka's Operation Trust. British diplomat and journalist R. H. Bruce Lockhart publicised his and Reilly's 1918 exploits to overthrow the Bolshevik regime in Lockhart's 1932 book Memoirs of a British Agent. This became an international best-seller and garnered global fame for Reilly. The memoirs retold the efforts by Reilly, Lockhart, and other conspirators to sabotage the Bolshevik revolution while still in its infancy.
The world press made Reilly into a household name within five years of his execution by Soviet agents in 1925, lauding him as a peerless spy and recounting his many espionage adventures. Newspapers dubbed him "the greatest spy in history" and "the Scarlet Pimpernel of Red Russia". The London Evening Standard described his exploits in an illustrated serial in May 1931 headlined "Master Spy". Ian Fleming used him as a model for James Bond in his novels (set in the early Cold War). Reilly is considered to be "the dominating figure in the mythology of modern British espionage".
Birth and youth
The true details about Reilly's origin, identity, and exploits have eluded researchers and intelligence agencies for more than a century. Reilly himself told several versions of his background to confuse and mislead investigators. At different times in his life, he claimed to be the son of an Irish merchant seaman, an Irish clergyman, and an aristocratic landowner connected to the court of Emperor Alexander III of Russia. According to a Soviet secret police dossier compiled in 1925, he was perhaps born Zigmund Markovich Rozenblum on 24 March 1874 in Odessa, a Black Sea port of Emperor Alexander II's Russian Empire. His father Markus was a doctor and shipping agent, according to this dossier, while his mother came from an impoverished noble family.
Other sources claim that Reilly was born Georgy Rosenblum in Odessa on 24 March 1873. In one account, his birth name is given as Salomon Rosenblum in Kherson Gubernia of the Russian Empire, the illegitimate son of Polina (or "Perla") and Dr. Mikhail Abramovich Rosenblum, the cousin of Reilly's father Grigory Rosenblum. There is also speculation that he was the son of a merchant marine captain and Polina.
Yet another source states that he was born Sigmund Georgievich Rosenblum on 24 March 1874, the only son of Pauline and Gregory Rosenblum, a wealthy Polish-Jewish family with an estate at Bielsk in the Grodno Province of Imperial Russia. His father was known locally as George rather than Gregory, hence Sigmund's patronymic Georgievich. The family seems to have been well-connected in Polish nationalist circles through Pauline's intimate friendship with Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the Polish statesman who became Prime Minister of Poland and also Poland's foreign minister in 1919.
Travels abroad
According to reports of the tsarist political police the Okhrana, Rosenblum was arrested in 1892 for political activities and for being a courier for a revolutionary group known as the Friends of Enlightenment. He escaped judicial punishment, and he later was friends with Okhrana agents such as Alexander Nikolayevich Grammatikov, and these details might indicate that he was a police informant even at this young age.
After Reilly's release, his father told him that his mother was dead and that his biological father was her Jewish doctor Mikhail A. Rosenblum. Distraught by this news, he faked his death in Odessa harbor and stowed away aboard a British ship bound for South America. In Brazil, he adopted the name Pedro and worked odd jobs as a dock worker, a road mender, a plantation laborer, and a cook for a British intelligence expedition in 1895. He allegedly saved both the expedition and the life of Major Charles Fothergill when hostile natives attacked them. Rosenblum seized a British officer's pistol and killed the attackers with expert marksmanship. Fothergill rewarded his bravery with 1,500 pounds sterling, a British passport, and passage to Britain, where Pedro became Sidney Rosenblum.
