The Greatest Spy

Discover the life and daring exploits of the real-life model for the world's most famous spy, James Bond: Sidney Reilly!

When a twenty-year-old Ukrainian arrived in London as a candidate for the position of secret agent in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Bureau, the chiefs of what would one day become MI5 were wise to hire him, as he would become Britain’s greatest spy, a man known by several names.
His ingenuity and his mastery of the trade, and his audacity and coolness when in danger, were highly praised. To penetrate the Irish Republican Army (IRA), he was given the code name of Sidney Reilly. He was tasked with kidnapping Lenin and Trotsky during the Russian Revolution, and visited the major battlefronts across Soviet Russia during the civil war, sending back proposals to defeat the Reds. He stole Germany's naval plans from Krupp and the harbor plans in Mongolia for Britain’s allies, and he posed as a German officer to engage in discussions with the Kaiser and his chiefs of staff about their U-boat tactics against the Allies. He also helped to obtain oil from Persia to modernize Britain’s Naval Fleet when Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty.

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. Find out what really happened to the man who inspired the creation of the world's most famous spy in The Greatest Spy. But Bond’s adventures were fantasies, whereas Reilly’s were real.