Sidney George Reilly MC, commonly known as the "Ace of Spies", was a secret agent 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 powers.
Background
The true details about Sidney Reilly's origin, identity and exploits have eluded researchers and intelligence agencies for more than 100 years. Reilly himself told several versions of his origins to confuse and mislead investigators. He claimed to be the son of an Irish merchant seaman, an Irish clergyman, and an aristocratic landowner and habitué of the Imperial court of Tsar Alexander III of Russia. According to the Ukrainian newspaper Segodnya, he was born Zigmund Markovich Rozenblum (Rosenblum) on 24 March 1874 in Odessa, then a Black Sea port of the Russian Empire. His father, Mark, was a stockbroker, and shipping agent, and his mother came from an impoverished noble family.
Other sources claim that Reilly was born Georgy Rosenblum in Odessa on 24 March 1873 or 1874. However, in Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly (p. 28), Andrew Cook states that Reilly was born on 24 March 1873 in the Jewish Kherson gubernia of Tsarist Russia, as Salomon (Shlomo) Rosenblum, and that he was the illegitimate son of Polina (or "Perla"), his acknowledged mother, and Dr Mikhail Abramovich Rosenblum, the trusted first cousin of Reilly's putative father, Grigory (Hersh) Rosenblum. There is also speculation that he was the son of a merchant marine captain and the above-mentioned mother. Yet another source states that Sigmund Georgievich Rosen-blum (alias Sidney George Reilly), the only son of Pauline and Gregory Rosenblum, was born on 24 March 1874 into 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.
Education
According to Rosenblum, in 1892 the Imperial Russian Secret Police arrested him for being a messenger for a revolutionary group, the Friends of Enlightenment. After he was released Grigory, his assumed father, told him that his mother was dead and that his biological father was her Jewish doctor Mikhail A. Rosenblum. Renaming himself Sigmund Rosenblum, he faked his death in Odessa Harbour and stowed away aboard a British ship bound for South America.
Career
During World War I, Reilly, then a British agent, enlisted in the German army several times, on each occasion assuming a different identity. On one such mission, while posing as a German colonel, he attended a meeting with Kaiser Wilhelm II and generals Paul von Hindcnburg and Erich Ludendorff where important war plans were discussed.
At the outset of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Reilly was stationed at Saint Petersburg, where he quickly won access to Leon Trotsky’s office in the Foreign Ministry. He rapidly began to despise the communist government and was eager to undertake any plot which would lead to the Bolsheviks’ overthrow.
On august 31, 1918, Dora Kaplan, a Russian socialist, made an attempt on Lenin’s life in which the Soviet leader was seriously injured. The Russians quicly discovered that Reilly was behind the assassination attempt and he had to flee to Britain.
While in England, Reilly continued to contest communism. Politics, however, was not the only activity that occupied his time; he was also known as a womanizer. While still in Russia eight women claimed him as their legally wedded spouse and this reputation followed him to Britain.
In 1925 Reilly agreed to return to Russia to meet secretly with anti-Bolshevik groups. He reached Helsinki on September 25, but was never heard from again. Two weeks later the Russian newspaper, Izvestia, carried a story about the capture and death of three agents on the Russo Finnish border. It is assumed that Reilly was among those captured.
Reilly was considered one of the outstanding British spies of all times. Many legends grew up around his exploits, which have served as the basis for numerous fictional works on espionage. The life of Reilly was serialized by the BBC. Reacting to these programs, the Russians said he had been executed in November 1925, but the famous British agent Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart stated that Reilly was still alive in 1932 when lie was cooperating with the Russians.
Religion
Religion divides people, and is a cause of numerous wars and conflicts throughout the human history.
Views
The emphasis on peaceful coexistence doesn’t mean that the Soviet Union accepted a static world with clear lines. Socialism is inevitable and the "correlations of forces" were moving towards socialism.