If this is so, on what evidence is the charge against Boyce made? According to Gazur,
…based on additional facts that Orlov provided at the time combined with independent documentation, I was able to deduce the identity of this key player. Insomuch as Orlov never directly furnished this identity, I originally felt it prudent to do likewise; however, on further reflection I realised that SIS was already aware of the man’s identity and so, as this information was historically relevant, there remained no valid reason to stay silent.65
Gazur gives no details of what these ‘additional facts’ are or to the relevance of the ‘independent documentation’, however. In the absence of such hard and fast evidence, the case against Boyce must remain no more than educated guesswork. This is not to say that the OGPU did not have the co-operation of SIS or former SIS operatives in their quest for Reilly. Before the entrapment operation could begin, a great deal of background research on Reilly must have been carried out. This is clear from OGPU documentation held on him. While a large proportion of the information on Reilly’s personal background is erroneous, it seems clear that this could only be because he himself was the indirect source. It would seem a strong possibility that the information was obtained from an SIS or former SIS colleague, based in part on what Reilly had told that individual or individuals. It should also be borne in mind that these sources may not even have been aware that they were assisting the OGPU, as such back-ground information could well have been sought through cover organisations like the Trust and its supposed anti-Bolshevik agents.
Neither is it likely that Reilly himself volunteered this information about his alter-ego ‘Rosenblum’ during his interrogation, for as we have already seen, he maintained to the very end that he was an ‘Englishman and Christian’ by the name of Sidney George Reilly. To have done anything else would have destroyed what little hope he had of being extradited or swapped on the initiative of the British authorities. Where then could this erroneous information about his Rosenblum background have come from? A key clue lies in the following passage from his OGPU file:
His father was Mark Rosenblum, a doctor who worked as a broker and subsequently as a shipping agent. His mother was née Massino of impoverished noble stock. The Rosenblum family resided at house No. 15 on Alexsandrovsky Prospect.66
The view that 15 Alexandrovsky Prospect was Reilly’s childhood home was the theory of one man, George Hill, who had witnessed Reilly breaking down, as a result of what he believed was an ‘emotional crisis’, outside this house in February 1919. The document also contains most of the other old chestnuts Reilly told Hill about his past. Would it therefore be fair to conclude that Hill was knowingly or unknowingly an OGPU source? Notes written by Vladimir Styrne suggest that Hill, who by 1925 was no longer employed by SIS, may have been collaborating with the OGPU.67 During the Second World War, Hill was seconded to the Special Operations Executive, and posted, at Moscow’s request, to the Russian capital to act as a liaison officer to the NKVD. He later came under suspicion following the 1963 defection of Kim Philby,68 although nothing conclusive appears to have come of this.
In addition to claims that Reilly’s death was a result of betrayal, it has to be said that not everyone accepted that he was dead. Pepita never really came to terms with his death and continued to believe that he was being kept a prisoner.69 Neither in fact did his first wife Margaret believe in his death.70 Whilst their sentiments might be put down to wishful thinking, others have also refused to believe he died for very different reasons. Robin Bruce Lockhart,71 Edward Van Der Rhoer72 and Richard Spence73 have all articulated the view that Reilly defected to the Soviets in 1925 and that his death was a ‘put-up job’ to cover his traces. Indeed, Lockhart devoted a whole book to propounding the thesis, although very little of the book actually relates directly to Reilly himself.74
The whole theory of Reilly’s supposed defection rests entirely on one proposition, however – that he did not die at the hands of the OGPU on 5 November 1925. According to the account of Feduleev, Reilly’s corpse was photographed in the sick bay of the OGPU’s headquarters. This book contains one of the photographs taken that evening. Robin Bruce Lockhart declared that this picture is ‘clearly of someone other than Reilly’ and that the ‘whole story suggests a faked death’.75 He later told this author that the OGPU photographs were clearly fakes as they showed a man, ‘who if not a Chinaman had Asiatic blood’.76 However, this is virtually the same description of Reilly that C himself gave in his cable to SIS Vologda on 29 March 1918,77 when he described his appearance as that of a ‘Jewish-Jap type’. Other official descriptions have also referred to his ‘oriental appearance’.78 Since Lockhart’s dismissal of the mortuary photograph’s authenticity, it has been subjected to forensic analysis by Kenneth Linge, a Fellow of the British Institute of Professional Photography and Head of Photography at Essex Police Headquarters. A veteran of over 200 operational ‘scenes of crime’ cases, Linge has been called upon to give expert testimony in criminal cases throughout the country, and has carried out extensive research into facial identification techniques.
Asked by the author to examine the OGPU photograph of Reilly’s corpse, he compared it with other pictures taken of Reilly over a fifteen-year period, and concluded that ‘the likelihood of the same feature layout and feature form being repeated in another person’s face is so remote as to be virtually negligible. I therefore believe that the person shown on the image, the deceased, is the person shown on the other images’.79 The proposition that the body lying in the Lubyanka Sick Bay is someone other than Sidney Reilly can no longer be sustained.
Reilly’s life ended, as indeed it had begun, shrouded in mystery. He may not, in the words of Robin Bruce Lockhart, have been the ‘greatest spy in history’,80 or even, in the conventional sense, a spy at all. He was, however, certainly one of the greatest confidence men of his time. It is a testimony to his skills of deception that his ‘Master Spy’ myth has outlived him by more than eighty years. In the final analysis, the confidence man’s motto – ‘you can’t cheat an honest man’ – came back to haunt him. Reilly’s own inherent dishonesty had allowed the OGPU to set him up and ultimately to cheat him of his life.
APPENDICES
REILLY MYTHS
Over the years a number of myths about Reilly have gained circulation and passed into folklore. Some were fabricated by Reilly himself and blindly perpetuated by friends, colleagues, journalists and writers. Others have subsequently arisen since his death through wishful thinking and flawed research.