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The Spy Who Led an Army to its Doom With Fake Newspapers and Letters

Khalid Elhassan December 5, 2021 37 min

The execution of captured American spy Nathan Hale. Painting and Frame

11. The End of a Master Spy

After the failed attempt to assassinate Lenin, Sidney Reilly was forced to flee the USSR, and he made it out of the country just a step ahead of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka. The Reds tried him in absentia and sentenced him to death. Reilly’s endeavors to topple the Bolsheviks had not met with success, but Britain’s MI6 appreciated the effort and awarded him a Military Medal. However, the failure gnawed at Reilly, whose time in Red Russia had turned him into an implacable anti-Bolshevik, and he begged for an opportunity to have another go at the Soviets. His bosses declined, so the master spy decided to wage his own anti-Bolshevik campaign.

Unfortunately for Reilly, he had found his match in the Reds, whose deviousness was equal to his own. Soviet intelligence created an anti-Bolshevik organization known as the Trust, which was actually run by their own secret police, the Cheka. Trust members met Reilly, and lured him to Russia, under the pretext of a secret summit meeting with its anti-Bolshevik leaders. When he crossed the border in 1925, Reilly was arrested and taken to Moscow’s dreaded Lubyanka Prison for interrogation and torture. He was eventually executed on November 5^th, 1925.

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.