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1919 he moved between London and Paris ‘on special duty for M.I.1.c’. By the end of the year he was in Prague, supplying ‘much appreciated’ (though unspecified) information for London. Writing to Nathan from Paris in March 1920, Reilly reflected that the ‘counter-revolution in Germany’ (the abortive, reactionary Kapp Putsch, which briefly threatened to bring down the newly established Weimar Republic) would, if successful, have enormous repercussions in Russia and, he predicted, mean ‘a rapid termination of the Bolshevik régime’. He had an agent, well regarded in right-wing monarchist circles, whom he could send to Berlin (which was ‘to-day the navel of the world’), though he advised London that he should not go until the situation in Germany was clearer. But Nathan wanted the agent to be despatched at once and to be paid £300 (£8,600 in current money). Revealing that, towards the end of the financial year, even SIS was prey to British civil service accounting practices, his ‘first and foremost’ reason was that ‘we can afford the money this year and probably shall not be able to do so after the 1st April’. Besides, Head Office was ‘very anxious . . . to find out the inwards of what is going on in Berlin’. But Reilly (perhaps demonstrating a finer sense of priorities than Nathan) successfully counselled delay, ‘being guided mainly by the desire to obtain the most useful results for us and not in any way to waste the limited funds at our disposal for this purpose’.

Although Reilly was himself passionately opposed to the Soviet regime, he had no illusions about the unreliability of some of the anti-Bolshevik groups with whom he associated. He told Cumming that ‘from experience’ he had ‘no faith . . . in the capabilities of the Russian Monarchists’, who were thought to have been involved with the Kapp Putsch. He thought that significant ‘Russian-German activities’ were only possible either with Communists in both countries combining to foment revolution or (and here, remarkably, he anticipated the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939) in the form of an ‘alliance between German militarists and Russian Bolsheviks mainly with the object of attacking Poland’. Reilly’s main value for SIS was his knowledge of Russian affairs. Towards the end of March 1920 he sent Nathan ‘an initial list of 58 Bolsheviks’. Much of the intelligence collected by him was handed on to Sir Basil Thomson at Scotland Yard, including ‘Portraits of Bolshevik Missionaries’, a ‘Card Index of agents of Reds’ and a ‘Map showing location of resident Soviet agents in Europe’.

In the summer of 1920 Cumming launched an ambitious operation suggested by Reilly to form an international ‘anti-Bolshevik intelligence service’ by sending Vladimir Gregorievich Orlov, alias Orbanski, to recruit collaborators across Europe. Orlov had been a Tsarist intelligence officer and general criminal investigator under the Soviet regime before escaping from Russia. With Malcolm Maclaren, whom Cumming had summoned home from Istanbul in April 1920 ‘to take complete charge of our affairs in North Europe’, Reilly, Orlov and Dukes toured east-central Europe spotting potential anti-Bolshevik agents, and signing them either for nothing, or for a regular stipend, or for an exchange of information. In Warsaw they recruited five; in Riga their haul was eleven; in Reval (now Tallinn), four; in Helsinki, three; in Terijoki, two; in Stockholm, ten; in Berlin, fourteen; in Prague, three; and in Kovno (Kaunas), two. Most of these collaborators were exiled Russian former military and intelligence officers, but there was also a selection of officials of the various host countries’ intelligence services, including some based in Berlin. Reporting to Desmond Morton at Head Office in December 1920, Reilly wrote that Maclaren and Orlov had ‘done a tremendous amount of spadework and that everything now depends upon how it will be utilized’. Reilly believed that Orlov, who would be in charge of the new organisation, should be ‘very well supported’ by the British.

Although in the autumn of 1920 Cumming had described Reilly