12. A Star Secret Agent’s Return to Espionage
With his business as an arms dealer in decline, Sidney Reilly returned to Europe and his British spy masters. They sent him behind German lines on various missions to carry out espionage in occupied Belgium or Germany. He used a variety of disguises and forged identity papers. He sometimes presented himself as a peasant, and at other times as a wounded German soldier or officer on sick leave from the front. In April 1918, Britain’s MI6 sent Reilly to Russia, whose new Bolshevik government had signed a peace treaty that took the country out of the Entente and out of the war against Germany.
The British hoped to overthrow the Bolsheviks, and replace them with a new and more sympathetic government that might rejoin the war on Britain’s side. To that end, Reilly got involved in a variety of plots intended to destabilize the Reds. That spring and summer, he tried his hand at a variety of failed schemes. They included an abortive plot to bribe Kremlin guards and get them to launch a coup, and a plan to assassinate Vladimir Lenin that wounded but did not kill the Bolshevik leader.