Video: Legendary Odessa: How Sigismund Rosenblum became an English spy and one of the prototypes of James Bond
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
He was called the king of espionage, and about himself he said:. Some consider him an outstanding intelligence officer, while others consider him an equally outstanding adventurer. One thing remains certain - he was indeed a very talented and desperate person who, according to one version, served James Bond prototype.
In the biography of Sigismund (according to other sources - Solomon) Rosenblum there are more white spots than reliable facts. This is due to the secret nature of his activities and his tendency to embellish realities and exaggerate his role in the historical process. According to most sources, he was born in Odessa in the family of an impoverished noblewoman and Jewish broker Rosenblum. What reasons made him fake suicide and leave his hometown is a mystery. According to one version, he joined a Marxist circle and fled from political persecution, according to another, the reason was a family conflict. Be that as it may, one day he left a note advising him to look for his body at the bottom of the sea and never returned home.
Rosenblum went to South America and changed several jobs there. Once he got a job as a cook in the team of English geographers and during the expedition saved the life of the commander. As it turned out, British intelligence was working under the guise of a geographical expedition, and Rosenblum was offered to become one of them. This is how a man named Sydney Reilly appeared.
He arrived in Port Arthur disguised as a timber merchant. There he managed to gain confidence in the command of the Russian troops and steal from them the defensive plan of Port Arthur and other fortifications. He sold the obtained information to the Japanese, after which he arrived in St. Petersburg, where he received the position of assistant military attaché. After the outbreak of the First World War, he went to America, from where he supplied weapons to Russia. In fact, it is difficult to verify these facts. It is only known for certain that Sidney Reilly worked for British intelligence in 1918, and whether he collaborated with them before that is impossible to say with certainty.
In 1917, he returned to Russia again to establish an English agent network here and overthrow the power of the Bolsheviks. He managed to recruit many influential people. According to some reports, he even achieved a secret meeting with Lenin, during which he handed him a letter from the Prime Minister of England. In 1918, he helped Kerensky leave Russia in an English destroyer. In Moscow and Petrograd, Reilly continued to plot against the Bolsheviks, calling them "the midnight horror of civilization."
Reilly planned to carry out a coup, bribing the Kremlin guards and Lenin's bodyguards, and then eliminate the Bolshevik leaders. This plan went down in history as a "conspiracy of ambassadors." But Reilly fell into a trap set up by the Cheka: the conspirators did not suspect that the Chekists were pushing them into terrorist actions. The conspiracy failed, Reilly narrowly escaped being shot. In the clothes of a priest, he fled to Riga, and from there - abroad.
In 1925, the venerable spy again fell for the bait of the Soviet special services. The Chekists created a fake underground anti-Soviet monarchist organization as bait. Sydney Reilly allegedly believed in the illusion of an anti-Soviet underground and began to cooperate with them. So the British intelligence officer ended up in the hands of the Chekists. On November 5, 1925, he was taken to the forest and shot.
There is also a version according to which the British spy Sidney Reilly never existed, but there was a Soviet spy Sidney Rellinsky who exposed the ambassadors' conspiracy. And in 1925 he simply received an order to return to his homeland, where his death was staged. However, all information about the legendary spy is in the nature of guesses and assumptions.
It is known for sure that Sydney Reilly was very popular with women and easily conquered the most inaccessible beauties. And even after he left them, they remained faithful to him. He was even married several times. So, he received the surname Reilly from his first Irish wife. Not having filed a divorce with her, he married again in St. Petersburg. And then, again without breaking the bonds of marriage, he married an English actress. He explained to the British that he professes Islam and can afford several wives at the same time.
However, in this whole story there are too many reasons for doubting its reliability. Books by different authors about Sydney Reilly differ so much in the described facts, as if they are talking about different people. Probably, only the "king of espionage" himself knew the whole truth about himself. Of all his plans, he succeeded indisputably - the legendary Odessa citizen went down in history and continues to arouse interest among our contemporaries. Like other versions about who was the real prototype of James Bond.
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