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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

33. Battling the Bolsheviks

Former anarchist and Socialist Revolutionary Fanya Kaplan shot and wounded Lenin, but failed to kill him. Pintrest

In April 1918, Britain’s MI6 sent Sidney 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 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, Reilly tried his hand at a variety of schemes, including an abortive plot to bribe Kremlin guards into launching coup, and a plan to assassinate Vladimir Lenin that wounded but failed to kill the Bolshevik leader. Reilly was forced to flee, escaping the country just a step ahead of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka. The Soviets tried him in absentia, and sentenced him to death.

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.