18. Telegram from Ernest Boyce to Pepita Reilly, 30 September 1925, Papers of Nelly Haddon Chambers (Pepita Reilly). Also reproduced in Britain’s Master Spy – The Adventures of Sidney Reilly, p.193.
19. Letter from Ernest Boyce to Pepita Reilly, 1 October 1925, Papers of Nelly Haddon Chambers (Pepita Reilly). Also reproduced in Britain’s Master Spy – The Adventures of Sidney Reilly, pp.193–94.
FOURTEEN – A LONELY PLACE TO DIE
1. Boris Gudz – interview with the author, 24 August 2002, Moscow.
2. Report by Vladimir Styrne, 7 October 1925, in ‘Trust’ File No. 302330, Vol. 37, p.241 (Central Archives of the Federal Security Service, Moscow). As we already know, Reilly attended neither Heidelburg nor the Royal Institute. Had he been an active Conservative, he would have been a member of the St George Hanover Square Conservative Association. Although the association’s records still exist they contain no reference to him as a member (Records of the St George Hanover Square Conservative Association, 487/8–9, 487/13, City of Westminister Archives Centre). However, there is no reason to believe that his letter to friend Paul Dukes (see note 27), advocating the Conservative cause is anything less than sincere.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid, 9 October 1925.
5. Mutt was Boyce’s reference for Sidney – Pepita he referred to as Jeff.
6. Letter from Ernest Boyce to Pepita Reilly, 18 October 1925, Papers of Nelly Haddon Chambers (Pepita Reilly). Also reproduced in Britain’s Master Spy – The Adventures of Sidney Reilly, pp.197–98.
7. Britain’s Master Spy – The Adventures of Sidney Reilly, p.199.
8. Letter from Sidney Reilly to Vladimir Styrne, 13 October 1925 (Trust File No. 302330, Vol. 37, Central Archives of the Federal Security Service, Moscow).
9. Letter from Sidney Reilly to Vladimir Styrne, 17 October 1925 (Trust File No. 302330, Vol. 37, Central Archives of the Federal Security Service, Moscow).
10. The OGPU made photographic enhancements of the diary for the period 30 October–2 November 1925, which Reilly wrote in English, with occasional words or abbreviations in Russian. The entries for 3–4 November 1925 were not photographed but translated into Russian with the aid of magnification techniques. English translations of the Russian section of the diary have been published on several occasions during the past decade. The four most noteworthy are: ‘How the Russians Broke the Ace of Spies’, Philip Knightley (The Observer, 12 April 1992, pp.49–50); Deadly Illusions, John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, pp.38–40; ‘Sidney Reilly’s Lubyanka Diary’, Richard Spence, Revolutionary Russia, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp.179–94; and Iron Maze, Gordon Brook-Shepherd, pp.300–04. Of the four, Spence is the most thorough, providing speculative additions where the original text is abbreviated by single or multiple letters. Due to the nature of English/Russian translation, there have inevitably arisen differences of interpretation in the above publications. The method used throughout this book to translate from Cyrillic Russian to English is based on a modified Library of Congress system and names have therefore been translated according to popular usage, i.e. Savinkov instead of Savinkoff, Gorky instead of Gor’kii, Zalessky instead of Zalesskii.
11. Ace of Spies (1992 edition), p.188.
12. Reilly’s ‘diary’ is in ‘Trust’ File No. 302330, Vol. 37, p.366 (Central Archives of the Federal Security Service, Moscow).
13. Ibrahim Abisalov, an expert marksman with a pistol.
14. Pepita Reilly.
15. On the assumption that the diary was written for the consumption of Western eyes rather than the OGPU, this piece of bravado is perhaps not surprising. Although obviously not an ‘Englishman’, it is debatable whether he was, in fact, a Christian either. Caryll Houselander clearly regarded him as a fellow Catholic and from the testimony of Eleanor Toye and others we know that he certainly had a keen interest in the Christian religion and Jesus Christ. However, in the absence of any real evidence, his religious beliefs or lack of them must remain conjecture.
16. ‘Trust’ File No. 302330, Vol. 37, p.300 (Central Archives of the Federal Security Service, Moscow). The letter was first published in Moscow in the Literaturnaia gazeta, No. 51, 20 December 1967, p.2.
17. Iron Maze, Gordon Brook-Shepherd, p.301.
18. Secret Assignment. Edward P. Gazur (St Ermins Press, 2001), p.526.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. ‘Boris Savinkov pered voennoi kollegiei verkhovnogo suda SSSR, Iron Maze, Gordon Brook- Shepherd, p.276.
22. Mikhail Dmitriyevich Kushner was an OGPU doctor and mortician.
23. Veronal is a diethyl-barbituric acid or barbitone. As a white crystalline powder it would have been given to Reilly by Kushner to induce sleep. As we already know, Reilly was possibly subject to severe headaches and mild epilepsy at times of acute stress. In New York he was apparently consulting Dr Anthony Bassler of 21 West 74th Street, who specialised in such conditions (US Bureau of Investigation/ONI, Memorandum of 9 October 1918, p.4).
24. A reference to the American Consulate’s involvement in the 1918 ‘Lockhart Plot’.
25. A reference to the Soviet’s claim that Reilly was involved in sabotaging food trains at Voronezh in 1918. See ‘Sensational Plot discovered to overthrow Soviet Government’ by Greorgi Chicherin (a handbill distributed to Allied troops in Archangel in August 1918). Reilly had always denied this.
26. Alexei Stark, a former naval Tsarist officer employed by the OGPU.
27. Ilya Kurtz had worked with Reilly in 1918 and Paul Dukes (ST25) in 1919. He is thought to have defected to the Bolsheviks in 1920 and become an OGPU agent.
28. Eduard Opperput, an OGPU agent involved in the ‘Trust’ operation. He defected to the West in Finland with Maria Shultz (Maria Zakharchenko) in April 1927 and disclosed that the Trust was an OGPU sham. He returned to Russia on behalf of anti- Bolshevik forces and was shot by the OGPU in Smolensk in June 1927. Richard Spence argues that his death was a sham and that he was re-recruited by the OGPU and sent to China (Revolutionary Russia, Vol. 8, No. 2, December 1995, p.189, note 38).
29. Alexander Yakushev, the OGPU agent who met Reilly on his arrival in Helsingfors on 22 September 1925.
30. Sir Robert Hodgson was a British diplomat assigned to Moscow in May 1921 by Lord Curzon as head of the British Commercial Mission. In March 1924 he was appointed Britain’s chargé d’affaires by Ramsay MacDonald. The OGPU believed Hodgson’s Commercial Mission was a cover for espionage.
31. Paul Dukes was a musician, civil servant and journalist who served as an SIS agent between 1918 and 1920. Knighted for services in the field, he was a friend of Reilly’s during the 1920s. In 1922 Reilly endeavoured to persuade Dukes to stand in the 15 November General Election as a Conservative candidate (Letter from Sidney Reilly to Paul Dukes, 23 October 1922, Robert Bruce Lockhart Collection, Box 6, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, California).
32. Zinovy Peshkov was the adopted son of Maxim Peshkov (Maxim Gorky). He served with the White forces in 1918.
33. A Lycée was a secondary school organised along French lines. Both Christian and foreign, they were objects of suspicion. Jeanne Morans was the headmistress of the Moscow Lycée, a catholic girls’ school, and had been arrested in connection with the Lockhart Plot in September 1918. She was tried but found not guilty.
34. Mikhail Gniloryboff was a member of Boris Savinkov’s People’s Union for the Defence of the Motherland and Liberty.
35. OGPU official working with Dr Kushner.