THE MEMOIRS OF Sidney Reilly, the so-called Ace of Spies, make for intriguing reading. The first half is Reilly’s own account of his operations in Bolshevik Russia on behalf of MI1c, the organisation now known as the secret intelligence service (SIS), or more colloquially, MI6. The second half is an account of the fallout from his final fatal mission to Russia by Pepita Bobadilla, an actress who married Reilly in 1923. The marriage was bigamous, although she was unaware of this until some years after Reilly’s death.
Reilly’s reputation as a British spy was badly tarnished by historians dismissive of some of the stories written about him. But his account here of British espionage operations in Petrograd and Moscow during 1918 match up to that given in an official dispatch to the Foreign Office by George Hill, who operated alongside him (see Appendix One). This led to suggestions when the book was first published that Hill, rather than Reilly, was the author, but it includes details that Hill clearly did not know and could not have known and which we now know to be true. According to Pepita, the story is told from Reilly’s own accounts of his operations. Certainly, Hill, the author of another Dialogue Espionage Classic, Go Spy the Land, was involved in the compilation of the book, but that is unsurprising given Reilly himself was dead, Hill was better informed about Reilly’s exploits than anyone else, and the publishers had employed a journalist to ‘ghost’ Pepita’s account.
Pepita’s description of Reilly as ‘the ideal husband’ might stretch credulity but she gives a very credible account of her own experiences following Reilly’s disappearance. These are all the more convincing given the involvement of the mysterious ‘Commander E.’, Ernest Boyce, the MI1c Head of Station in Helsingfors (Helsinki), and his supposed contact with the Trust, ‘Bunakoff’ (actually Nikolai Bunakov, Boyce’s chief agent runner and a long-standing British secret service officer). Their attempts to persuade Pepita to hand back documents that showed their involvement in Reilly’s final mission are entirely credible given the insistence of SIS chiefs that the disastrous mission was nothing to do with them.
It is easy to understand the cynics’ views of this book. Getting to the truth is difficult with Reilly. His activities – in government service, in business, and in love – have been exaggerated over the years, but there is no doubt that he led an extremely colourful life and believed very strongly, arguably too strongly for an intelligence officer, in the anti-Bolshevik cause. A former SIS officer who looked after the service’s archives once told me:
He’s been written off by historians by and large. But he has been greatly underrated. He was very, very good – a very able agent and a far more serious operator than the impression given by the myth. Historians do have this tendency to write off something that has been made to appear glamorous. He was unusual but I don’t think he was glamorous. He was a bit of a crook, you could almost say, certainly sharp practice. But as an agent he was superb.
Michael Smith
Editor of Dialogue Espionage Classics
July 2014