The Spy Who Wanted to Pants Lenin

Sidney Reilly, born Sigmund Rosenblum somewhere in the Russian Empire around 1873, was British agent ST1, the man Ian Fleming kept insisting James Bond was not based on. He spoke seven languages. He carried eleven passports. His personal stationery bore the motto Mundo Nulla Fides, Trust no one. The first wife brought £800,000 and a dead husband whose death certificate was signed by a Dr. T. W. Andrew, whom biographers suspect was Reilly.

In the summer of 1918, in Moscow, Reilly devised a plan to end the Bolshevik Revolution. He would not shoot Lenin and Trotsky. Martyrs were bad publicity. He would, in the precise words of his biographer, march them through the streets bereft of trousers and underpants, shirt-tails flying in the breeze. Power destroyed by ridicule. The plot was funded with 1.2 million rubles of British money.

His private collection ran to 1,049 Napoleonic items: a lock of the Emperor's hair, the purple satin from his funeral casket, six silver-handled knives from St Helena. He told colleagues he would do for Russia what Napoleon had done for France. What his colleagues made of this is not recorded.

The Latvian colonel he handed the 1.2 million rubles to was a Cheka double agent. The trouser money went straight to the Soviet secret police.

Seven years later, the same secret police shot him in a forest outside Moscow.