Sidney Reilly

Sidney Reilly was a Russian-born adventurer and intelligence agent who worked for British services before and after the First World War. His missions, business schemes and anti-Bolshevik plots made him a model for the modern ‘master spy’, but much of his reputation was enlarged by his own inventions and later legend.

Reilly’s best-documented activities included intelligence work in London, the Far East and revolutionary Russia, although later accounts embroidered many episodes of his career. In 1918 he became involved with Robert Bruce Lockhart and other anti-Bolshevik schemes in Moscow, after which he operated among Russian émigré networks. In 1925 Soviet security services lured him back into the USSR through the deception known as Operation Trust; he was arrested and subsequently executed, circumstances that helped turn an already self-created reputation into the legend of the ‘Ace of Spies’.

Giles Milton’s Russian Roulette follows Sidney Reilly as one of the adventurers and intelligence agents operating against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution and Civil War. His covert meetings and anti-regime schemes unfold alongside the work of R. H. Bruce Lockhart, amid Cheka surveillance and confused British policy. Rather than simply repeating Reilly’s later legend as the ‘Ace of Spies’, the book places his audacity inside a world of unreliable information, departmental rivalry and improvised intervention.