The Greatest Spy: The True Story of the Secret Agent that Inspired James Bond 007

by John Harte

Overview

Audacious, brilliant, chameleon. All these words could be used to describe the man that became Britain’s greatest spy, a man known by several names and who came from many places, depending on who was asking and when. Was he from Poland? Or was he the son of an Irish clergyman? Many believe he was born in Odessa, Ukraine, a place hot in today’s headlines. He certainly had the ability to be convincing to anyone he met, including the head of Britain’s intelligence services. 

Sidney Reilly, one of many names he was known by, was the most successful spy in history. His adventures first came to light during the Russian Revolution in 1917 when he was tasked by Britain’s Secret Service with overthrowing the Bolsheviks after they had formed a new government. He had already succeeded in stealing the plans of the Kaiser’s new and modern fleet of battleships from Krupp, to help Britain and her allies win World War I, and was awarded the Military Cross in 1919.

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. Apparently not!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781951082611
Publisher:	Cune Press
Publication date:	11/08/2022
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

John Harte wrote four previously published books. His account of the Second World War was published in New York in 2017 with the title of How Churchill Saved Civilization. His description of the First World War was published in 2018 as Churchill the Young Warrior. In The Greatest Spy he describes the not-so-well-known situation of a century of world crises from 1896 to the collapse of Soviet Russia in 1991.

The author’s postwar experience included undercover work as an investigative journalist on political extremism. In 1948 he uncovered a Fascist plot to take over Great Britain, and spent a year investigating different splinter groups in major cities in the British Isles. He compiled a dossier on their activities which he managed to have presented in the House of Commons by a Member of Parliament—simultaneously providing a scoop for The Sunday Pictorial and Picture Post. His public exposure of Sir Oswald Mosley’s postwar British Union of Fascists resulted in the end of Mosley’s political career.

He also observed the political situation in Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia, and in South Africa during apartheid where he spent ten years working in his main capacity as a top business executive, while continuing his freelance career as a journalist. As a result of his close contacts with the shadowy world of espionage, he became increasingly familiar with the personal characteristics and special skills required by successful spies like the hero of The Greatest Spy.

Table of Contents

The Great Game

1 The Great Game 7

2 The League of Enlightenment 13

3 The Amazon Misadventure 16

4 Home is the Hunter 19

5 Young Sparks 24

6 The Siege 29

7 The Fox Knows Many Things 36

8 A Race for Naval Supremacy 39

9 A Man of Property 45

10 Oil Mania 50

11 Anna 55

12 The Royal Fleet 62

13 The Cote d'Azur 66

14 Rumors of War 68

Air Superiority

1 The Flying Club 71

2 Reilly's Mistresses 75

3 War 82

4 No-Man's Land 87

5 Revolution 92

6 Riff-Raff 98

7 Comrade Relinsky 103

8 The Lockhart Plot 107

9 "The Extraordinary Commission" 111

10 Blood-Lust 112

11 Sentenced to Death 116

12 End of an Era 121

13 The Life of Reilly 124

14 Savinkov's Champion 128

15 The Next Attempt 131

Hard-Up in London

1 Hard-Up in London 137

2 "The Trust" 143

3 Guilty Men 149

4 The Loner 150

5 Commander Boyce's Story 155

6 Double-Cross 160

7 Pepita's Version 162

8 The Hunt for Sidney Reilly 168

9 Soviet Russia in a Hole 172

10 A Marked Man 176

11 Reilly's Odyssey 180

12 The Russian Version 185

13 Reilly's Downfall 189

14 The Lubianka Prison 194

15 Dark Loneliness 199

The Gadfly

1 The New 'C' 205

2 Sidney Reilly's Narrative 207

3 Diplomacy 211

4 Civilian Spy 212

5 Parting of the Ways 216

6 The Dystopian City 220

7 A Search for Melnikoff 227

8 Captain Zorinsky 230

9 The Gadfly 234

10 Felicia 240

11 The Soviet Mole 242

12 The Emotional Threshold 245

13 The Fate of Prisoner Number 73 250

14 A Hall of Distorting Mirrors 252

15 Hunted Down 256

Acknowledgments and Bibliography 262

Index 265

Cune Press 273

About the Author 274

Editorial Reviews

...a true espionage mystery that reads like a detective story... timely reading, especially now when the world balance is at risk and forces of discontent are rising from every quarter. 

—Arianna Dagnino, author of The Afrikaner

From the Publisher