…While ordinary, garden variety spies are copying trivial documents in obscure embassies and botching routine break-ins at political headquarters, others are out playing the game as it should be played.
One legendary master of the craft was Wilhelm Stieber. In preparation for the Franco-Prussian War, he deployed throughout France forty thousand French speaking Swiss agents, enough to keep a close eye on every man, woman, and truffle in the country.
Sidney Reilly above; Rasputin, the hypnotic adviser to the Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra, was assassinated by an MI6 officer who fired the fatal shot, while Sidney Reilly, nicknamed the “Ace of Spies,” planned to kill the whole of the Soviet leadership during a meeting at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1918.
One MI6 officer, Lt Stephen Alley, was apparently sacked when he refused to assassinate Joseph Stalin, according to passages in his unpublished memoirs.
But the case of Mohammed Lashet, who was being run as an agent by Captain John Dymoke Scale, appears to be that of an agent who set out on a mission of his own. click image for source…
Another was Reinhard Gehlen, the Germans’ top World War II intelligence officer, who, when the war ended, managed to ease himself into an equally exalted spot as chief of West Germany’s CIA-supported federal intelligence agency. Perhaps in spying, as elsewhere, a good man is hard to find.
And then there was the all but invisible Sidney Reilly, a Russian born British agent of such fanatical dedication that for more than a quarter of a century, roughly 1897 to 1925, he spied, undetected, on nearly everyone who aroused British curiosity.
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…Sidney Reilly spent most of his life in the shadows of international intrigue and counted among his legion of friends, victims and accomplices the likes of Rasputin and Churchill. He often is portrayed as a master spy, a “man who never made a mistake”—the living prototype of James Bond. But Reilly’s real exploits exceeded anything credited to fictional Bond. Born into a Polish Jewish family as Salomon Rosenblum, he embarked on an amazing, daring and often bewildering career in which he assumed the persona of an Irish-named British gentleman along with many other identities. He was a slightly different person to every man who knew him and every woman who loved him.
Using “the System” (betting on all sides while manipulating the odds to maximize his own profit), Sidney Reilly was as much a master criminal as spy and amassed a fortune through the ruthless bartering of influence and information. He was employed and feared by capitalists and commissars alike. Was he a dedicated anti-communist, the Soviet’s first “mole,” or simply an unscrupulous con man? Even his end is an enigma: did the Soviets shoot him in 1925, or did he live to scheme on for many years to come? Reilly’s career offers a window into the pre- and post-WWI era’s secret underworld of political and economic intrigue and reveals a side of recent history that most works overlook or avoid.Read More:http://www.wingtv.net/trustnoone.html
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