Instead of following orders and disembarking at Archangel, Reilly left the ship at Murmansk. The port itself was in the hands of a company of British marines, who had been sent in on 6 March to guard Allied war materials thought to be at risk since the Bolshevik’s treaty with Germany. On leaving the merchant ship Queen Mary, Reilly was stopped for a routine inspection of documents and promptly arrested. He was confined aboard HMS Glory, where Maj. Stephen Alley of SIS, who was on his way back to London, was summoned by Admiral Kemp to examine him. ‘His passport was very doubtful, and his name was spelt REILLI. This, together with the fact that he was obviously not an Irishman, caused his arrest’, said Alley.2
Within days of his interview with C, Reilly had made contact with Litvinov, the Russian Plenipotentiary, who had a small office at 82 Victoria Street, Westminster. Making an appointment to see Litvinov proved easier said than done. After two unsuccessful attempts, Reilly’s third telegram finally managed to secure an interview on 23 March:
Regret not having heard from you in reply to my second wire. Will you kindly wire me when and where I can see you tomorrow Saturday morning. I shall wait for your telephone message to Regent 1332 from eight till ten thirty o’clock tomorrow morning.3
As a result of the meeting, Reilly, or rather ‘Sidney George Reilli’, was issued with travel documents that permitted him to enter Soviet territory. Whether Litvinov had misspelled the name or whether this was the name by which Reilly identified himself to Litvinov is open to question.4 A list of persons who had been issued with visas by Litvinov would certainly have been sent back to Russia on a regular basis, and Reilly may not have wished to encourage any comparison between himself and the Reilly of St Petersburg who had had such close connections with the Tsarist regime.
As soon as Alley appeared, Reilly produced a microscopic coded message from under the cork of a bottle of aspirins. Alley immediately recognised this as an SIS code and Reilly was quickly released.5 Interestingly, Cumming’s telegram also reveals that it was originally intended that Reilly would return in late June, as indeed Beatrice Tremaine had told US investigators he would.6
The reason Reilly was sent to Archangel seems quite clear, in that from there he could catch an express train directly to Moscow via Vologda. It seems equally apparent that he never had any intention of going straight to Moscow as ordered. One possible reason for leaving the ship at Murmansk might have been the fact that he could get a direct rail connection to Petrograd from there, which he could not have done had he gone on to Archangel.
As it turned out, he spent the best part of four weeks in Petrograd before finally journeying to Moscow. If the purpose of his return to Russia had some connection with the family referred to by Norbert Rodkinson, or to possessions of his located somewhere in the city, this could well explain the delay.7 Whatever it was that was occupying him in Petrograd, he found the time to send C a detailed report on 16 April, outlining his own home-grown solutions to the situation he found himself in the midst of:
Every source of information leads to definite conclusions that today BOLSHEVIKS only real power in RUSSIA. At the same time opposition in country constantly growing and if suitably supported will finally lead to overthrow of BOLSHEVIKS. Our action must therefore be in two parallel directions. Firstly with the BOLSHEVIKS for accomplishment of immediate practical objects; secondly with the opposition for gradual re-establishment of order and national defence.
Immediate definite aims are safeguarding MURMAN; securing ARCHANGEL; evacuation of enormous quantities of metals, ammunition and artillery from PETROGRAD which liable to fall to Germans within month; preventing Baltic Fleet from passing to Germans by their destruction or rendering it unserviceable; and possibly substitution of moratorium for final repudiation of foreign loans. All above objects can be accomplished only by immediate agreement with BOLSHEVIKS. For minor ones, such as MURMAN-ARCHANGEL a sort of semi-acknowledgement of their Government, better treatment of their ambassadors in Allied countries may be sufficient.8
Building up to the point of his communication, Reilly states that the most potent factor in the equation is money. Only hard cash could effectively deliver all the other objects. Attributing German successes to their preparedness to use money, he coolly proposes to C that:
…this may mean an expenditure of possibly one million pounds and part of this may have to be expended without any real guarantee of ultimate success. Work must be commenced in this direction immediately and it is possibly already too late. If outlined policy should be agreed to, you must be prepared to meet obligations at any moment and at shortest notice. As regards opposition, imminent question is whether support to them comes from the Germans or from us.9
Almost without batting an eyelid and with ten out of ten for sheer audacity, Reilly was effectively asking for at least one million pounds in cash, to be sent to him personally, post haste, without any guarantee that such action would actually achieve its objective. Needless to say, the canny C was having none it. Although Reilly was to be entrusted with funds later on, they were for specifically targeted objectives and certainly not in the region of the sums that Reilly was asking for here. What would have happened to the £1 million had C been gullible enough to agree is best left to the imagination.
In almost prophetic terms, Reilly concludes his report by saying that, ‘in any case, we have arrived at critical moment when we must either act or immediately and effectively abandon entire position for good and all’. As it would turn out, he took his own advice too literally.
On 7 May he arrived in Moscow in full dress uniform and headed immediately for the Kremlin. On reaching the main gates he informed the sentries that he was an emissary from the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and demanded to see Lenin personally. Remarkably he was actually admitted, although he got no further than Lenin’s aide Vladimir Bonch Bruevich. Reilly explained that he had been sent to the Kremlin as the Prime Minister wanted first-hand news concerning the aims and objec-tives of the Bolshevik government. He also claimed that the British government was dissatisfied with the reports that he had been receiving from Robert Bruce Lockhart, the head of the British Mission in Moscow, and had instructed him with making good this defect. It would seem that Reilly’s interview was a very brief one. At 6 p.m. Robert Bruce Lockhart received a telephone call ask-ing him to come over to the Kremlin.10 On arrival he was asked if a man called ‘Relli’ was really a British officer or an impostor. Lockhart was incredulous when told the story of Relli’s visit that afternoon. He had never heard the name Relli, and diplomatically said that he would need to look into the matter and get back in due course.
