Overview

When a twenty-year-old Ukrainian arrived in London as a candidate for the position of secret agent in Britain's Secret Intelligence Bureau, the chiefs of what would one day become MI5 were wise to hire him, as he would become Britain's greatest spy, a man known by several names. His ingenuity and his mastery of the trade, and his audacity and coolness when in danger, were highly praised. To penetrate the Irish Republican Army (IRA), he was given the code name of Sidney Reilly. He was tasked with kidnapping Lenin and Trotsky during the Russian Revolution, and visited the major battlefronts across Soviet Russia during the civil war, sending back proposals to defeat the Reds. He stole Germany's naval plans from Krupp and the harbor plans in Mongolia for Britain's allies, and he posed as a German officer to engage in discussions with the Kaiser and his chiefs of staff about their U-boat tactics against the Allies. He also helped to obtain oil from Persia to modernise Britain's Naval Fleet when Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty. In 1953, novelist Ian Fleming used Reilly's secret Admiralty Intelligence file to write his novels about a fictional secret agent he called James Bond 007. But Reilly's true exploits were even more thrilling and fantastic than those of the fictional James Bond. Reilly was Britain's best spy but was he also a Soviet double-agent? Author John Harte retells Reilly's story as it really was, in fast-moving prose with an eye for telling detail and provides a twist: He tells us what really happened to Reilly after he vanished in Soviet Russia in 1925 and was assumed to have been murdered by Stalin's secret police. Find out what really happened to the man who inspired the creation of the world's most famous spy in The Greatest Spy. But Bond's adventures were fantasies, whereas Reilly's were real.

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9781510784819

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John Hartewas born in London, midway between two world wars, so his descriptions of both of them and the Russian Revolution and civil war (19171923), and Winston Churchill's life and leadership, tend to be closer to an eye-witness account than academic books written long after by authors who did not know the times. Several of his books describe how the biggest catastrophes for the West were communist, fascist, and Islamist fanatics. He had written three books about the Middle East, two about the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany, one on Russia, and eight about Winston Churchill, including two with Skyhorse Publishing, Churchill The Young Warriorand How Churchill Saved Civilization. No other historian has written as many books about Churchill except his official biographer, Sir Norman Gilbert.

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