Ace of Spies (27 page)

These wives of Reilly are rather tiresome. About two months ago one came to the Air Ministry and asked for his address. I passed her on to Carrington. She gave an address at Brixton Hill, 2 Maplestead Road. However, I don’t think it will do the Bolsheviks or the Germans any good to let MI1c’s man have a little licence.
⁵⁹

She was, however, given the address of Capt. Spencer at the War Office, to whom she wrote on 4 February:

Dear Sir,
I have been advised at the Air Ministry – by Capt. Talbot, room 443 – to address myself to you by letter in order to have information of my husband, Lt S.G. Reilly, technical air officer. I appeal to you most earnestly to let me know where he is and how I can communicate with him.

When the war broke out my husband was in Petrograd where he was established as Naval Agent and Ship Broker. The outbreak of hostilities surprised me in Brussels where I remained on hoping to receive a message there from Mr Reilly. None came, and eventually it was impossible to communicate with my husband. Trusting in your courtesy and kindness for an early reply,
I remain dear Sir
Yours truly
Margaret Reilly
⁶⁰

This, at last seemed to do the trick. Capt. Talbot had clearly established who Reilly was and noted that he was seconded to SIS. He therefore gave her the name of Capt. Spencer, a non-existent officer, whose name was used by senior SIS personnel when dealing with persons outside the department. As a result, a letter was sent to Reilly in Odessa. Whatever Margaret said to him in the letter it had the desired effect. Within days of receipt he cabled SIS in London as follows:

19 February 1919
Please pay Mrs REILLY from my account £100. Please inform her that I shall [group indecipherable] further provision when I return.
⁶¹

This reply was written at the London Hotel, Odessa, where he had checked in on 9 February. Now operating alone, his final dispatches were chiefly about the situation he found in Odessa. Southern Russia was divided into two Allied operational zones, the eastern zone British, the western zone French. The city of Odessa therefore had a French garrison of some 60,000 men, whom Reilly criticised for their ‘decidedly unfriendly’ attitude towards the Volunteer Army. He was particularly critical of Col. Henri Freydenberg, who he accused of deliberately obstructing the Volunteers’ efforts to supply, mobilise and operate their own forces. In particular he accused the French of ‘treating Russian staff officers with a total lack of elementary courtesy and even
with insulting rudeness’, and of converting Odessa ‘into one of the worst administered and least safe cities in the world’.
⁶²

On 21 February Reilly requested, ‘that I be ordered to return home as my further stay here is a waste of time and only verbal reports can elucidate this intricate situation’.
⁶³
By 10 March he was in Constantinople for a conference with John Picton Bagge and the Assistant British High Commissioner to Constantinople, Rear Admiral Richard Webb. Reilly’s reports were described by Webb as ‘disquieting’ and he immediately arranged for Reilly to leave for London so that he could give a full personal account at the Foreign Office. Walford Selby of the FO’s Russian Department concluded that Reilly’s reports contained ‘a fund of useful information on the subject of the whole situation in South Russia’.
⁶⁴
He also marked a copy of Reilly’s dispatch 13, concerning the state of affairs in Odessa, ‘Circulated to the king and War Cabinet’.

In comparison to his first Russian mission the previous year, one might be tempted to conclude that he took a comparatively passive, indeed neutral, reporting role in the south of Russia. In reality he used his position in a very proactive way in support of Denikin, whose role as prime Bolshevik challenger he promoted unashamedly in his reports. As we shall see in the following chapter, true to form, he was also using the opportunity to make personal contacts and obtain commercial information that he would shortly seek to make capital out of in more ways than one.

Having briefed the Foreign Office, Reilly was now reunited with Hill for a further short assignment. Hill recalled:

Suddenly, I was instructed to go to Paris, and Reilly, who had by now returned from Odessa, was to go with me. We were to hold ourselves in readiness to give expert information should it be required, to observe what was happening in Paris, particularly in connection with Russian affairs, and possibly to act as liaison officers with the newly formed Council of Ambassadors.
⁶⁵

From London Reilly and Hill travelled with a party of Admiralty officials and Sir William Bull, Conservative MP for Hammersmith South and a close friend of C. The party booked into the Hotel Majestic, where Bull introduced them to the Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, his aide Sir Archibald Sinclair, and Lord Northcliffe, the proprietor of the
Daily Mail.

After a few days at the hotel, Reilly and Hill were compelled to leave and move to the Hotel Mercedes, as the Foreign Office felt it was not appropriate for them to be staying at the same hotel as members of the official British delegation.
⁶⁶
At the Mercedes they found that the Greek Prime Minister, Eleutherios Venizelos, and his delegation were occupying two floors of the hotel. Hill was already acquainted with Venizelos, having met him on an earlier intelligence mission to Salonica in 1916, shortly after the Greeks entered the war on the Allied side. As a result of this and several rounds of late night drinks, Reilly and Hill learnt of Venizelos’ territorial ambitions for Greece,
⁶⁷
which they passed on to the Foreign Office. It was also here that they picked up a rumour that the Soviet government might, after all, be recognised and invited to send a delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. At lunch with a journalist by the name of Guglielmo, they were told that two envoys, William Bullitt and Lincoln Steffens, had been sent to Moscow by the American delegation to parley with the Bolsheviks. Bullitt had apparently telegraphed the text of the Bolsheviks’ proposals for potential recognition to President Wilson, who was supposedly much impressed. The next day, 25 March, Reilly and Hill breakfasted with Foreign Office officials Walford Selby and Harold Nicolson at a hotel in the Rue St Roque, which Reilly took great delight in volunteering had been Napoleon’s headquarters in 1795.
⁶⁸
Having been appraised of the ‘recognition’ rumours, Selby and Nicolson were then apparently treated to an encyclopaedic rendition by Reilly of almost every building in Paris which had any historic link to Napoleon.

According to Hill they were later joined at the table by ‘an acquaintance on the staff of the American military delegation’,
who told them that Bullitt ‘would be breakfasting with Mr Lloyd George the following morning’.
⁶⁹
What happened next is not so clear, as both Reilly and Hill claimed sole responsibility for taking the story to Henry Wickham Steed, the editor of the
Daily Mail,
who was in Paris at the time.
⁷⁰
The following day, 26 March, the
Mail
ran a sensationalist exposé of the proposal to recognise the Bolsheviks, under the headline ‘Peace with Honour’. In it, Wickham Steed attacked anyone in the Allied camp who would ‘directly or indirectly, accredit an evil thing known as Bolshevism’.
⁷¹
As a result, Lloyd George backed away from the American proposal, and the possibility of recognition was scuppered, for the time being at least.

Following the
Daily Mail
exposé, Hill was sent back to South Russia and Reilly returned to London, where he was briefly reunited with Nadine, who had left New York for London on 26 March on the SS
Baltic.
It had been eighteen long months since he had last seen her, during which time their lives had both moved on. It could not have taken him long after arriving back in London to realise that his relationship with Nadine had changed irrevocably. Months of separation and a host of mutual infidelities had undoubtedly taken their toll. The fact that within a fortnight of their reunion, Reilly journeyed alone to Southampton, where on 15 April he boarded the New York-bound SS
Olympic,
would seem to reaffirm this assumption.

I
nstead of heading for New York as scheduled, the captain of the SS
Olympic
docked at Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 21 April, due to propeller trouble.
¹
Although most Olympic passengers completed their journey by transferring to the SS
Adriatic,
Reilly was in no mood to wait and took a train to New York’s Pennsylvania Station via Boston.
²

The object of his visit was to meet Samuel MacRoberts and as many other bankers as he could, in order to persuade them of the virtues of his latest ‘grand plan’. Working as an intermediary for Polish banker Karol Jaroszynsky,
⁴
an old acquaintance from his pre-war St Petersburg days, Reilly was clearly seeking to lay the foundations for an Anglo-American syndicate to invest in a post-Bolshevik economy.

Confirmation of his intentions are to be found in a cable dated 10 May to John Picton Bagge at the Department of Overseas Trade, in which he emphasised his belief that American business was looking for new export markets and saw Russia as a place of some potential.
⁵
In Reilly’s view, MacRoberts in particular was keen to form a syndicate involving American and British interests to exploit the opportunities that a Denikin victory might bring. In an echo of the rivalry over munitions contracts during the war
years, MacRoberts was keen to press ahead in order to gain an advantage over J. Pierrpont Morgan. On 15 May Reilly departed for England on board the White Star Line’s SS
Baltic.
⁶
Arriving in Liverpool on 25 May, he stayed overnight at the Adelphi Hotel before heading back to London.

Bagge also saw the potential of the Jaroszynsky proposals, recognising that their success would not only bring about new market places for British-made goods, but might eventually lead to economic and political control of Russia. Ultimately, however, British banks like Lloyds, the London County and Westminster Bank and the National and Provincial Bank were reluctant to make major commitments while the success of the White forces was still in the balance. Indecisiveness and the snail-like progress of discussions within the Foreign Office, the Treasury and the Department of Overseas Trade meant that by the time consensus appeared to have been reached, it was a matter of ‘too little, too late’ to be of any benefit to Denikin.

Despite the fact that Reilly’s assignment to South Russia had ended in March, this did not stop him from continuing to correspond with the likes of Rex Leeper and John Picton Bagge on a personal basis, sending them a stream of memorandums and handwritten missives from his Albany apartment in London’s exclusive Piccadilly. Someone else high on Reilly’s address list was Churchill’s aide Sir Archibald Sinclair, MP, who he had first met the previous month at the Hotel Majestic in Paris. Reilly seems to have used the same tried and tested methods of achieving access and influence in British circles as he had utilised so effectively in St Petersburg a decade earlier. This was essentially done by cultivating the aides and associates of the influential, who once secured as acquaintances could then act as a pipeline to their lords and masters. By this method he had forged an association with Admiral Gregorovitch, the Minister for Marine, through his aide Lt Petr Zalessky. In like manner, he now went to considerable trouble to befriend and cultivate Archibald Sinclair.

One can only guess at how Reilly’s extra-curricular activities were viewed by SIS top brass. By October 1919, the first tell
tale signs that Reilly had blotted his copybook were becoming apparent. Having only recently become the recipient of the Military Cross, it would seem that Reilly felt that his ‘distinguished service’ should be further acknowledged by promotion. On enlistment in November 1917 he had been commissioned as a second lieutenant,
⁷
but now, over a year later, clearly felt that he was more than due for further recognition. After all, George Hill, who had enlisted as a lieutenant, was now a captain, and to Reilly, a superior officer. Reilly therefore took his case to Maj. D.J.F. Morton, head of SIS Production Section
⁸
and his immediate superior. As a consequence, Morton wrote on 3 October 1919 to Col. Stewart Menzies, head of SIS Section II, which dealt with military matters:

Would you consider forwarding the name of Lt Reilly for an honorary commission as major. At present he holds a temporary commission as lieutenant in the Air Force. He is now engaged on important work for the Foreign Office which necessitates his conferring with soldiers and civilians of high rank, and finds his low rank a great hindrance. I am certain the Foreign Office would back this up, and if you will consider the matter, I would try and obtain a written statement from them to that effect.
⁹

Replying on 16 October, Menzies wasted few words in rejecting the matter out of hand:

Lt Reilly is in the Air Force so how can we help? In any case the WO [War Office] are adamant in their refusal to give even honorary promotion as in the event of this officer becoming a casualty, ‘finance’ are responsible for paying the widow a pension etc. There is, however, no harm in first sounding the Air Ministry.
¹⁰

While Menzies’ offhand response was a correct reflection of War Office policy, it is equally the case that had he wished to assist in getting Reilly promotion, he most certainly could have done. The rebuff was a sign that while Morton might be behind him
for the time being, others in SIS were most certainly not, either seeing Reilly as an overrated upstart or as a loose cannon. Never being one to accept no for an answer, Reilly seems to have opted for unilateral action. From here on it would appear that to those outside the service he referred to himself as ‘Captain Reilly’, and has been styled as such by Winfried Ludeke,
¹¹
Pepita Bobadilla (later Reilly),
¹²
and a host of other writers down the years. By 1932, even his old adversary Norman Thwaites referred to him as ‘Captain Sidney Reilly MC’ in his autobiography.
¹³