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The Ace of Spies and Other Significant Espionage Figures

Khalid Elhassan December 20, 2019 33 min

Detective - Mystery — Throughout history, spies have aroused mixed feelings of fear, loathing, and admiration. Mixed Matches

39. From Guarding Brothels to Shooting Cannibals

A 19th-century Amazon explorer. Wikimedia

In his youth, Rosenblum’s politics got him in hot waters with the Tsarist police, the Okhrana. So he fled Odessa at age 19, stowing away in a ship bound for Brazil. It was the beginning of years of years of international travel, during which he claimed to have worked as a dockworker; a dishwasher; a whorehouse doorkeeper; a railway engineer in India; and a spy for the Japanese government. While in Brazil, he served as cook for some British explorers, and reportedly saved them from hostile cannibals by grabbing a revolver and shooting several attackers dead.

The grateful explorers invited their cook to return with them to England, and steered him towards British intelligence. He arrived in London in 1895, got married three years later, and in 1899, took out a British passport with the name Sidney George Reilly. Over the years, he would take out eleven different passports, each bearing a different name.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.