Richard B. Spence
Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003 , $29.95, h/b
Boasting over 1800 footnotes and a magnificent bibliography (including texts published in Turkmenistan) this would be awarded A for Application if such a prize existed in academia. The author, Professor of History at the University of Idaho, appears to be something of an authority on espionage matters. He says that his research changed the way that he looked at the Russian Revolution. Unfortunately he doesn’t precisely state how or why.
The name Sidney Reilly is still encountered in Sunday papers on a fairly regular basis, in the same way and in a similar category to the Mitfords, Wallis Simpson, Philby and T. E. Lawrence. Beyond the legend, Spence confirms that Reilly was probably one Solomon Rosenblum, from Tsarist Poland, who arrived in the UK, aged 21 in 1895. Whatever his initial circumstances Rosenblum/Reilly rapidly became a highly successful commercial middleman. Much of his trade was in political information acquired using his impressive linguistic skills. He happily sold this to all and sundry: the Okrana, Scotland Yard, foreign governments.
Despite his connections and apparent similarities to many of the key émigrés from Tsarist Russia, he had no qualms about providing information on anarchist and socialist groups to the authorities – provided he could earn a living or clinch a deal in exchange. By 1904-1905, in the Far East, he was simultaneously wheeling and dealing with the intelligence services of Russia, Japan, Britain, France and the USA. In due course his abilities and official connections in various countries made him a natural for the international arms trade. Between 1914 and 1918 Reilly profiteered massively, earning huge commissions from all sides in the war and adding Germany to his list of client nations.
After 1918 he spent some time trying to reverse the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, alternately getting back in touch with some ex-colleagues within the Bolshevik camp (and trying to persuade them to trade with the West and enter into a coalition government) whilst, despite his own origins, keeping in with the various anti-semites of the right including the pedlars of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
Spence shows convincingly that throughout 1919-21 Reilly was a very influential figure in British diplomatic circles, mixing quite easily with the likes of Balfour and Churchill, as ‘Special Consultant on Russian Affairs’ to the Secret Intelligence Service. The longevity and depth of his dealings with Churchill are of particular interest and seem to have been neglected by his recent biographers.
After 1921 he became a freelance operator whilst still trying to persuade people that he could engineer a counter coup in the Soviet Union. Hearing about an alleged anti-Bolshevik group, ‘the Trust’, that was awaiting assistance from the West he crossed into the Soviet Union in 1926, and was never convincingly reported alive again. This book shows that he most probably walked into a Bolshevik trap – there was no ‘Trust’ – spent some time in the Lubianka under varying degrees of interrogation and was then executed.
It was quite a life – though, like most spies’ lives, it had little lasting influence on international events. One recognises similarities with the career of Ignascz Trebitsch (who appears on several occasions in this book) and parallels – if one cares to draw them – with Robert Maxwell
There are a couple of segments within the book that are of interest in a broader context. Spence demonstrates convincingly that up until the point Imperial Germany thought it might be helpful to let them run amok in Tsarist Russia for six months or so, the Bolsheviks, and other Russian revolutionaries generally, really had no significant membership base, financial support or following. They had invariably been in exile for decades, were splintered into many factions, did little more than produce a mound of paper, and were unable to get elected to anything anywhere. They were also completely penetrated by agents provocateurs and government agents. This is demonstrated here in the account of the Latvian anarchists whose activities led to the Siege of Sidney Street in London in 1911. This group contained Yakov Peters, later a highly placed figure in the NKVD/KGB. He was also, apparently, an informer for both Scotland Yard and the Tsarist secret police.(1) There appear to be many other examples of this capacity to serve more than one master among the revered founding fathers of the USSR.(2)
The author’s voluminous researches are also of great value in the sketching in the connections pre-1920 between the British secret state and Lloyd’s, the Board of Trade, and various industrial combines (Vickers etc). It becomes clear that the Secret Intelligence Service had a distinct penchant for literary figures: Harley Granville-Barker, W. Somerset Maugham, Hugh Walpole, A.E.W. Mason and Aleister Crowley all crop up in one type of espionage role or another.(3) Clearly a classical education and an ability to use the correct knife for fish counted for more than formal qualifications.
Unfortunately a number of other episodes that Spence records tend to unravel when subjected to cross referencing with other published works. On p.158 he records that in 1917 Commander Mansfield Cumming (the fabled ‘C of the Secret Intelligence Service) used as cover the name and address ‘2 Whitehall Court c/o Captain Spencer’. There was indeed a Captain Harold Spencer operating as a British intelligence agent at this time. He later cropped up in 1918 peddling the allegations of sexual deviance in the British establishment that Pemberton-Billing used in his libel trial.(4) But there is no proof that ‘Captain Spencer’ was the non de plume of Commander Cumming
On p.365 we are told that Reilly/Rosenblum was ‘….one of the early architects of the international drugs trade….’. This is advanced because one Arnold Rothstein – a significant New York gangster in the ’20s – organised shipments of poppy seeds (5) from Manchuria to Latvia (with passage across the Soviet Union facilitated by Bolshevik functionaries) and onward to Germany where they were processed into morphine or heroin before prior to sale across Britain, Europe and the US. Hold the front page! Jewish-Gangster-Bolsheviks smuggling drugs to corrupt youth and ruin civilisation! Alas, a second, closer reading yields no clear evidence that Reilly was an ‘architect’ of this or that he had a particularly meaningful relationship with Rothstein.
One area where greater flesh could have accompanied the narrative bones were the manoeuvres in 1918 – by both Britain and Germany – to release the Tsar and his family from Bolshevik custody. Reilly is considered by most commentators to have played a role in this episode. Curiously, given the volume of material in this book on other matters pursued by Reilly, or deemed to be associated with him in some way, there is little on this subject.
In so far as the narrative has any conclusions Spence points out that Jewish radicals and freemasons did indeed play a significant role in the Russian Revolution.The device (M) is used to signify a freemason and there are rather a lot of (M)s in the narrative. But what does this tell us? In Tsarist Russia liberalism of any form was dangerous, many liberals met in secret, a good place to meet was the Masonic lodge. As a result some Masonic Lodges had a membership of liberally inclined, even radical individuals. And some of these were Jews, a group under severe pressure, penalties and discrimination generally. But this leads us nowhere in particular. We have already been told as early as p.66 that there were only 2000 freemasons in Russia in a population of 150 million.(6)
Appearing throughout the book is Abram Zhivotovski, a business associate of Reilly’s, who made a fortune from the Baltic timber trade and war profiteering. Like Reilly, Zhivotovski was Jewish and a freemason. US Intelligence had him under observation for some time, stating in 1918 that ‘….he was on some sort of Bolshevik mission to the Germans….’; and saying in 1919 that he was ‘regarded’ as ‘Trotsky’s uncle’. Spence says that Trotsky and Zhivotovski were ‘thought to be’ related by marriage and that Trotsky was also ‘reputed’ to be a freemason – in other words nothing that would stand up in a court of law.(7)
Spence floats these details and passes on. Does the author want us to believe that there just might, after all, have been something in the notion that the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century were largely Jewish and that the reaction to this by the European and US right could be understood in this context? No smoke without fire?
The studding of known and lesser known names through the narrative is fascinating. Many of these will be known to Internet browsers – particularly those with a conspiratorial bent. Sergius Riis can be found on the ‘David Icke – Telling the Truth Archive’. On the Red Flame web site (not the libertarian Trotskyists! – the Thelemic Research Group) is some material about Sir Guy Gaunt, friend of Aliester Crowley, and in this book clearly a British intelligence agent. There is Boris Brasol, who peddled the ‘Protocols’ junk to Henry Ford, and wrote a biography of Oscar Wilde; Sir Paul Dukes, British agent and close associate of Reilly, who was an advocate of the Hindu mystic Gurdjieff; and Vladimir Styrne, a Bolshevik who had his own parents shot as reactionaries, who has just been rehabilitated by President Putin and is now duly celebrated with his own postage stamp. The ability of these figures to live on, via the Internet, is one of the technical marvels of the age.
Notes
1 Peters was arrested after the Siege of Sidney Street but never brought to trial. One wonders if is the source of the ‘Peter the Painter’ urban myth, the key figure who survived the gun battle and fire at the site only to ‘disappear’ without trace.
2 According to Spence, Stalin was a Tsarist secret police informer on other left and anarchist groups – hardly surprising news to anyone familiar with the modus operandi of many in revolutionary politics.
3 Conspicuous by his absence from the author’s list is Arthur Ransome, recently revelealed to have been been working in the Soviet Union for MI6.
4 See Wilde’s Last Stand by Philip Hoare (1997), reviewed in Lobster 38.
5 Yes, seeds. This seems odd but this is what the author says.
6 But does this prove the opposite? Are events being secretly determined by a tiny elite?
7 Trotsky did ferry funds to them from the German military in 1917. There are also indications in this book that both the UK and the US sent money to the ‘principal Jewish leaders’ in Petrograd, after the fall of the Tsar and before the Bolshevik coup (March-October 1917) with the US end of the operation assisted by Colonel House and Jacob Schiff, an exile from Tsarist pogroms who rose to be a major corporate figure in the US.