The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [108]
Sidney Reilly
When Paul Dukes was in Poland in the autumn of 1920, he was joined there by Sidney Reilly. ‘They are’, reported the head of station in Warsaw, ‘as happy as a pair of “sand boys” constructing a perfectly good new Russia’. One of the problems with Reilly, which was to do for him in the end, was his dangerous fusion of espionage with a dedicated personal mission to bring down the Bolshevik government. Not only did the latter generally involve him with counter-revolutionary groups who were (as it turned out) increasingly penetrated by the Communists, but it also appears to have undermined his judgment on matters of security: that essential quality which the successful spy must have of knowing whom to trust and whom not.
Sidney Reilly, the so-called ‘Ace of Spies’,
caught by Crowther Smith in RAF uniform.
After his return from Petrograd in October 1918, Reilly had spent some time in south Russia, where the British were actively supporting White Russian forces under General Anton Denikin. Accompanied by Captain George Hill, another MI1(c) Moscow veteran, and ostensibly attached to the Commercial Department of the Foreign Office, Reilly had been instructed by Cumming to collect political information which was ‘urgently needed from the whole of South Russia’. Reflecting the scarcity of intelligence about Russia in general, Cumming added that if ‘sufficient information’ had been procured about the region by the end of February, the two men might move in the direction of ‘Moscow and the North’. In the event Hill returned home in early February and Reilly stayed only a few weeks longer. But between late December 1918 and late February 1919 he supplied fifteen despatches which were described in the Foreign Office as containing ‘a fund of useful information on the subject of the whole situation in South Russia’.10 The reports were not politically neutral. Reilly strongly favoured Allied backing for Denikin, and, observing that ‘the Bolshevik armies will not stand up to regular troops’, felt that the White forces could defeat their Red adversaries. Reporting that Allied equipment and economic help was not sufficient, but that actual troops were needed too, he was also very critical of the Cossack leader, General Krasnoff, who had only grudgingly accepted Denikin’s supreme command. Reilly remarked, nevertheless, that ‘the trump cards are in our hands and it should not be difficult to persuade Krasnoff that above all we look to him to carry out the agreement with Denikin not only in the letter but also in the spirit’.
Cumming had other representatives in South Russia. Lieutenant Commander Malcolm Maclaren (‘RS/1’) was a Russian (and Polish) expert who had arrived in Odessa via Bucharest in early 1919 by a roundabout route from Archangel. Having previously worked in Petrograd, he was ‘wanted by the Bolsheviks’. Maclaren was accompanied by another Petrograd veteran, Harold Gibson, who was to have a long and varied career in SIS. When Maclaren arrived in Odessa in March 1919 he telegraphed Cumming that Reilly was already there, ‘evidently working for you’. Since he appeared to have ‘established himself very well’, had ‘good agents’ and was ‘obtaining very satisfactory results’, Maclaren offered to resign, but he was instead told to stay in the region, where he settled down to gathering intelligence for about a year before moving to Sevastopol in April 1920. By August he was back in London. Gibson, who was bilingual in Russian (having been brought up partly in Moscow where his father had managed a chemical works), and a qualified interpreter in French, German and Czech, travelled through south Russia and Bessarabia before being posted in mid-October 1919 to the SIS station in Constantinople (later known as Istanbul), where he remained for three years.
During 1919 (and while he pursued his own multifarious business interests) Reilly continued to work intermittently for Cumming. Between September and December