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By Root 2517 0

as SIS’s Baltic area Inspector (or co-ordinator), he began to build up a team, using officers who had, like him, served in Hoare’s mission. Scale told Cumming that he was sending Leo Steveni (a fluent Russian-speaker whose father had been a timber merchant in the country) to Canada ‘to enlist & instruct agents for Russia’. In March 1918 they discussed trying to exploit some of the estimated twenty thousand sailors on sequestered Russian ships who were about to be repatriated. On 15 March he ‘introduced Mr. Reilly who is willing to go to Russia for us’ to Cumming, who noted in his diary that Reilly was ‘very clever – very doubtful – has been everywhere & done everything’. Reilly was to ‘take out £500 in notes & £750 in diamonds’, but Cumming felt it ‘a great gamble as he is to visit all our men in Vologda, Kief [sic], Moscow &c’. Reilly, the so-called ‘ace of spies’ – brilliant, audacious and uncontrollable – was to work for Cumming over the next few years. He had been born Shlomo Rosenblum in (or near) Odessa in the early 1870s. In the late 1890s, having moved to England, he married an Irishwoman and reinvented himself as ‘Sidney George Reilly’. By 1918 he had travelled extensively in Asia, made money in various business ventures and lived in France, England, Russia and the USA, where in 1917 he met Norman Thwaites, who appears to have provided the link to Scale and the opportunity to work for MI1(c). He did not, however, come particularly well recommended from New York, whence a series of cables described him as ‘untrustworthy and unsuitable’; ‘a shrewd businessman of undoubted ability but without patriotism or principles and therefore not to be recommended for any position which requires loyalty as he would not hesitate to use it to further his own commercial interests’; and a ‘Greek Jew; very clever; entirely unscrupulous’. He was, indeed, another of Cumming’s scallywags.45

Employing Reilly was perhaps a high-risk strategy, but, with the code-name ‘ST/1’, he set off for north Russia before the end of March 1918. On 16 April, having gone to Petrograd, he reported that the Bolsheviks were ‘the only real power in Russia’, and that some sort of agreement would have to be made with them in order, for example, to secure the Allied bases at Murmansk and Archangel and to prevent ‘the [Russian] Baltic fleet from passing to the Germans by their destruction or rendering it unserviceable’. At the same time, opposition to the Bolsheviks was ‘constantly growing and, if suitably supported’, would ‘finally lead’ to their overthrow. Between October 1917 and the spring of 1918 attempts had been made by the remaining British diplomatic representatives in Russia, notably Robert Bruce Lockhart, to broker some sort of modus vivendi with the new regime. But opinion in London (and other Allied capitals) had been hardening against the Bolsheviks and increasingly moving towards active intervention in the country, providing political and military support for anti-revolutionary elements. Reilly’s report, therefore, provided useful ammunition for the hard-line interventionists, whose views came to dominate British policy in 1918 and 1919. Moving on to Moscow in early May, Reilly first courted the Bolshevik leaders (claiming to have marched directly up to the Kremlin in British uniform) and then their opponents, in particular Boris Savinkov, who had already moved from political opposition to plotting a coup. Reilly, though working under several aliases and moving his lodging frequently thanks to the complaisance of various mistresses, was soon marked by the Cheka (the Bolshevik secret police), who correctly identified him as a prime mover in what became known as the ‘Lockhart plot’ to overthrow the regime, though Lockhart himself was not one of the conspirators.46

Cumming’s Russian dispositions in 1918 reflect the growing commitment to intervention, though there is little hard evidence of the extent to which intelligence was actually gathered, or how it may have informed British policy. In April Cumming and colleagues had a ‘long talk’ about sending