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’s work as ‘highly important’, there were some indications that the ‘ace of spies’ was starting to prove troublesome for the Service. Reporting that Reilly had been ‘boasting of being in close touch with the Secretary of State for War’, the Admiralty complained that he had been ‘wearing Naval Uniform in Paris’. He upset the Foreign Office by sending a telegram from Warsaw through the British legation, an impropriety which threatened to implicate the regular diplomats with intelligence work. His flourishing contacts with White Russian émigrés, such as Boris Savinkov, who promoted an anti-Bolshevik congress in Warsaw in June 1921 and who constantly needed funds to support his grandiose plans for bringing down the Soviet regime, threatened to leave Reilly (and potentially his British Secret Service associates) politically exposed. Towards the end of 1921, when Reilly wanted to bring Savinkov to London, proposing that he should meet Winston Churchill (at this time Colonial Secretary) and the Prime Minister’s private secretary, Sir Edward Grigg, among others, Cumming declined to help organise a visa for him after the Foreign Office had refused to issue one.11 Changes at Head Office following the unexpected death of Sir Robert Nathan in June 1921, the constant pressure to reduce expenditure and, most important of all, the British government’s efforts to normalise relations with the Soviet Union, marked by the Anglo-Soviet negotiations culminating in the trade agreement of 16 March 1921, powerfully combined to restrict any enthusiasm Cumming and his colleagues might have had for ambitious, expansionist and expensive anti-Bolshevik schemes with the capacity to develop from straightforward intelligence-gathering exercises to full-scale political operations aimed at bringing down the Soviet government.

At the end of July 1921 Maclaren in Warsaw was instructed by London to close down his operation, although for some years a few of the contacts he and Orlov had made remained in touch with SIS through the Baltic stations. In the meantime, Orlov, Savinkov and Reilly continued their anti-Bolshevik crusade throughout Europe, but their links to SIS grew less close. In January 1922 the SIS head of station in Vienna asked Bertie Maw in London whether ‘Reilly, who occasionally blows into this office, and says he is part of our London show, is really your representative and should be talked to in all confidence’. Remarking that ‘personally’ he thought Reilly ‘knows far too much about our show’, Maw passed the enquiry on to Desmond Morton whose response indicated that Reilly’s time with SIS was coming to an end. Vienna was to ‘give Reilly no more information than is absolutely necessary’ and Maw was instructed to tell Vienna ‘that Reilly is not a member of our office and does not serve C. in that he is not receiving any pay from us’. Morton added, however, that Reilly had ‘worked at one time during the war for C’s organisation’ and was ‘now undoubtedly of a certain use to us’. Nevertheless, ‘we do not altogether know what to make of him’. Since Reilly was ‘a political intriguer of no mean class’ (and Boris Savinkov’s ‘right hand man’), Morton argued that it was ‘infinitely better for us to keep in with him, whereby he tells us a great deal of what he is doing, than to quarrel with him when we should hear nothing of his activities’. ‘Whatever may be Reilly’s faults,’ added Morton, ‘I personally would stake my reputation that he is not anti-British, at the moment at any rate, and never has been. He is an astute commercial man out for himself, and really genuinely hates the Bolsheviks.’

Although SIS kept track of Reilly over the next couple of years, there is no evidence that the Service made any real efforts even ‘to keep in with him’ as Morton had suggested. Increasingly involved with Savinkov’s machinations, Reilly was to suffer the same fate. In August 1924 Savinkov was lured back to Russia, convicted of ‘counter-revolution’ (among other crimes), and in May the following year died in prison – perhaps having committed suicide. Reilly, for his