Reilly - Adventures of a British Master Spy: the Memoirs of Sidney Reilly

MRS REILLY

I T IS ONLY after long and careful consideration that I have decided to publish the truth about my husbands journey to Russia, and his subsequent capture by the Bolsheviks. What his fate was no one knows. The Bolsheviks have maintained the closest secrecy on the subject, and though, indeed, his name was included in a list of executions published about a year after his capture, and though strong reasons have also been given for supposing that he was actually killed by the secret agents of the Tcheka at Allekul when he first crossed the frontier, I am in receipt of information of a considerably later date, of which the purport is that he is still alive in Russia.

Was Sidney killed at Allekul? Was he actually executed a year afterwards in Moscow? Why was it that the Bolsheviks did not broadcast their triumph to the whole world that they had caught the famous Sidney Reilly, their implacable enemy, who almost overthrew them in 1918, whose work against them the whole world knew, who in 1925 prevented them from raising much needed loans in America? Is he still languishing in a Russian prison without trial or conviction? For my part I sincerely believe that he is still alive.

How the Tcheka shrouds its activities in the most complete obscurity sufficiently appears in the ensuing narrative, where is set forth how it has lured the chief enemies of Bolshevism one by one back to Russia. There were three people whom the Bolsheviks feared beyond all others: Savinkoff, Sidney Reilly and General Koutepoff. Sidney admired both Koutepoff and Savinkoff exceedingly and, more particularly, the latter, and in this book will be read how they were lured back to their doom by a force which worked with ghastly and occult frightfulness. Whether my husband was the victim of a plot, and walked into a trap which had been set for him, the reader must judge for himself. All I can say is that after his disappearance, first Marie Schultz and then her husband, both associates of Sidney in the anti-Bolshevik cause, gave their lives in an effort to discover his fate. And both of them undoubtedly were the victims of the Bolshevik provocation agents, who tempted them over the border into that unhappy land where the Tcheka maintains its rule of terror. Nay, I myself received an invitation to go to Moscow to see my husband, and a facsimile of the letter, signed by the notorious Bolshevik agent provocateur, Opperput, is included in this volume. All these matters, however, are dealt with in detail in the latter part of this work.

My husband left behind him a great mass of papers connected with his exploits as an agent of the British secret service, which are now in my hands. Among them is his complete personal narrative of his part in the so-called Lockhart conspiracy, which forms the first part of this work. Here and there the actors in the story are designated by initials only. The identity of some of them is unknown to me, while of others it has seemed to me to be wisest to preserve the anonymity. Where, however, I have known the names of the persons thus disguised and have been convinced that the publicity could not be fraught with any disagreeable consequences to themselves, I have permitted their several identities to be revealed. Then again considerations of public policy have compelled me to suppress certain facts in Sidneys history. But with these reservations what follows is a complete circumstantial and fully documented account of my husbands career as an agent of the British secret service a story which reads like the wildest dreams of the writers of mystery fiction come true.

Who was Sidney Reilly? Already he is becoming a myth and a legend. All sorts of amazing and fantastic adventures in Germany and Russia have been attributed to him. Everything which passed behind the scenes of the whirl of European war politics has been ascribed by somebody or other to the mysterious Sidney Reilly. Everybody who knows anything of secret service operations has heard of him as of a mysterious and potent figure, a man of infinite courage and resource in an amazing variety of disguises. He had become a legend in his own lifetime. A great deal that has been published about him is untrue; though, to be sure, his adventures surpass any fiction. The section devoted to him in Winfried Ludeckes standard work Behind the Scenes of Espionage abounds in inaccuracies. The work of Saugann, widely read in France but forbidden in England, which affects to be an exposure of British secret service methods, is false from start to finish. In typical French style the author represents Sidney as an undergraduate of the University of Oxford, who joined the secret service as the consequence of an unhappy love affair. This, in common with the rest of the account, is pure nonsense.