In the first decade of the 20th century, he apparently spied promiscuously on England’s imperial rivals Germany and Russia, though the particulars are disputed. Like much of Reilly’s life, the story is unverifiable, but by hook or by crook - and possibly by way of a murder in France - he arrived in London in 1895, hitched himself to a wealthy woman a few months after the suspicious death of her husband (discarding the inconvenient surname Rosenblum in the process), and became entangled with British intelligence. However, even at the word of less sensational biographers - such as Andrew Cook - Reilly lived a life almost too extraordinary for belief.Ī Jewish child of tsarist Russia born in what is now the Ukraine, Reilly claimed to have escaped Odessa by faking his death and hopping a ship bound for Brazil. On this date in 1925, legendary British spy - and subsequent James Bond inspiration - Sidney Reilly was shot in a forest outside Moscow for his efforts to overthrow the Soviet government.įact blends insensibly into fiction in Reilly‘s biography much of what is known or believed about him is conjectural or colored by his posthumous valorization, such the 1967 book Reilly: Ace of Spies written by his onetime cloak-and-dagger collaborator Robin Bruce Lockhart - who was himself a close friend of Bond author Ian Fleming.
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