Sidney Reilly
| Sidney Reilly | |
|---|---|
| "Ace of Spies" | |
Sidney Reilly
|
|
| Allegiance |
 United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland United KingdomGermany, Japan, Russian Empire |
| Service |
Secret Service Bureau
|
| Operation(s) | Lockhart Plot D'Arcy Affair Zinoviev Letter |
|
|
|
| Born |
c. 1873 Russian Empire (now in Ukraine) |
| Died |
c. 1925 Possibly Moscow, RSFSR, Soviet Union |
| Sidney Reilly | |
|---|---|
| Allegiance |
United Kingdom
|
| Service/branch |
 Royal Air Force
|
| Rank | Second Lieutenant |
| Unit | Royal Flying Corps |
| Awards | Military Cross |
Sidney George Reilly (c. 1873 – c. 1925), 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.
Reilly's growing fame during the early 1920s was due in part to his friend, the British diplomat and journalist Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, who publicised their thwarted operation to overthrow the Bolshevik regime in 1918. The London Evening Standard published a serial in May 1931, headlined "Master Spy", imparting his exploits. In his novels of the 1950s and 60s, Ian Fleming used Reilly as a model for James Bond. Some historians today consider Reilly to have been the first 20th-century "super-spy".
However, much of what is attributed to him should be treated cautiously, as the stuff of legend rather than fact. 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.
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Wikipedia