INTRODUCTION TO THE
SECOND EDITION

When the first edition of this book was published in October 2002, it received a great deal of media coverage, not only in Britain but around the world. Since then, the first edition has been reprinted in this country and translated into several foreign editions. When the idea of writing a revised and updated second edition was suggested by my publisher Jonathan Reeve, I saw it as an ideal opportunity to follow up several further lines of enquiry that were still outstanding at the time of submitting the manuscript for the first edition. As a result, a wealth of new evidence has been uncovered that sheds new light on significant episodes in Reilly’s life.

For example, photo-forensic work by Ken Linge, which was still being undertaken at the time the first edition was being printed, is now concluded and has made a major contribution to establishing Reilly’s parentage and family lineage. Another mystery concerning his involvement in a crime that forced him to flee from France to England in 1895 is also solved thanks to new research in France by Michel Ameuw. Other new discoveries include German files on Reilly’s shady commercial dealings in the Ottoman Empire before the First World War, letters he wrote in 1917 which clear up the mystery of his whereabouts in the autumn of that year, and the discovery of a repository of papers belonging to Major J.D. Scale, the intelligence officer who recruited Reilly to the Secret Intelligence Service (better known today as MI6) in 1918.

In Moscow, new finds include the personal testimonies of Reilly’s mistresses Olga Starzhevskaya and Elizaveta Otten, written during their captivity in Butyrka Prison. These previously unpublished accounts not only provide a glimpse of their personal relationships with Reilly but give a unique insight into the secret life he was living in Russia during the spring and summer of 1918. Perhaps the most astonishing new account, however, is that of Boris Gudz, a former OGPU officer who took part in the 1925 ‘Trust’ operation that resulted in Reilly’s arrest and execution. Gudz, who celebrated his 100th birthday shortly before I met him in Moscow in August 2003, was able to provide first-hand recollections that were invaluable in piecing together the last few weeks of Reilly’s life.

Taken together, these and other new sources, many of which are published in this book for the first time, make a unique contribution to this definitive work of reference on the life of the Ace of Spies, Sidney Reilly.

The idea of writing a spy novel had apparently been in Ian Fleming’s mind for a decade before he finally decided to commit the book to paper. Little did he know the phenomenon he was about to create when he sat down behind his typewriter on the morning of 15 January 1952 to start the first chapter of Casino Royale. Working at ‘Goldeneye’, his Jamaican holiday home, he completed the 62,000-word manuscript in a little over two months.¹ On the shelf in his study was the book that had gifted him the name of his hero, Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies, by the ornithologist James Bond.² Not long after its publication in April 1953, Fleming told a contemporary at the Sunday Times, where he worked as foreign manager, that he had created James Bond as the result of reading about the exploits of the British secret agent Sidney Reilly in the archives of the British Intelligence Services during the Second World War.³