Ace of Spies (37 page)

Asked by the author to examine the OGPU photograph of Reilly's corpse, he compared it with other pictures taken of Reilly over a fifteen-year period, and concluded that ‘the likelihood of the same feature layout and feature form being repeated in another person's face is so remote as to be virtually negligible. I therefore
believe that the person shown on the image, the deceased, is the person shown on the other images'.
⁷⁹
The proposition that the body lying in the Lubyanka Sick Bay is someone other than Sidney Reilly can no longer be sustained.

Reilly's life ended, as indeed it had begun, shrouded in mystery. He may not, in the words of Robin Bruce Lockhart, have been the ‘greatest spy in history',
⁸⁰
or even, in the conventional sense, a spy at all. He was, however, certainly one of the greatest confidence men of his time. It is a testimony to his skills of deception that his ‘Master Spy' myth has outlived him by more than eighty years. In the final analysis, the confidence man's motto – ‘you can't cheat an honest man' – came back to haunt him. Reilly's own inherent dishonesty had allowed the OGPU to set him up and ultimately to cheat him of his life.

To SGR Killed in Russia,
by Caryll Houselander –
⁸¹

Pure Beauty, ever-risen Lord!
In wind and sea I have adored
Thy living splendour and confessed
Thy resurrection manifest.
Not now in sun and hill and wood,
But lifted on this bitter rood
Of man's sad heart, I worship Thee
Uplifted once again for me.

For now the Jews cast lots again
On thy raiment, mock Thy pain,
And make Thy torments manifold,
Selling Thee again for gold.
I bow to Thee in this new shrine,
This later calvary of thine;
And in the soul of this man slain
I see Thee, deathless, rise again.

A
PPENDICES

R
EILLY
M
YTHS

Over the years a number of myths about Reilly have gained circulation and passed into folklore. Some were fabricated by Reilly himself and blindly perpetuated by friends, colleagues, journalists and writers. Others have subsequently arisen since his death through wishful thinking and flawed research.

It is tempting to think that a longer book could be written about the person Reilly was not and the things he did not do, as opposed to who he really was and what he actually did. The following six appendices typically illustrate how such myths have arisen over the last century.

A
PPENDIX
O
NE

T
HE
G
ADFLY

He was not at all angry when she later published a novel, much praised by the critics, which was largely inspired by his early life.
Ace of Spies
by Robin Bruce Lockhart
¹

Published in 1897,
The Gadfly
was a great success in Britain and the United States, where it was actually first published, due to Heinemann’s fear that it might attract adverse public reaction due to the inflammatory emotions they believed it contained. The
Daily Graphic
reviewer said that ‘One does not often come across a story of as notable power and originality as
The Gadfly’,
while the
Daily Chronicle
hailed it as ‘a novel of distinct power and originality’.
²
It was in Russia, however, that
The Gadfly
had its biggest success. Its anti-clerical and revolutionary theme appealed enormously to those who were opposed to the Tsarist regime and who later supported the Bolshevik revolution. It was subsequently translated into thirty languages worldwide. A dramatic version was staged in Moscow for many years from 1920, taking on a
Mousetrap
-like run. The Russians produced two full-length film versions of the book, the first in 1928 and the second, in colour in 1955, which won an award at the Cannes Film Festival. There have also been at least three operatic versions produced. By the time of Ethel Voynich’s death in 1960, at the age of ninety-six, the book had sold well over 5 million copies in Russia alone and over a million copies in China and Eastern Europe.

The Gadfly
is set in Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century and tells the story of Arthur Burton who, unbeknown to himself, is the illegitimate son of Montanelli, an Italian priest, and Gladys Burton, an English woman. It bears a striking resemblance to the ‘Georgi’ story Sidney Reilly told George
Hill and others in the 1920s. Before the death of his mother, Arthur like Georgi is under the spiritual care of his real father, who is in charge of a seminary in Pisa. The young man is gentle and devout and even has thoughts of entering the priesthood until he becomes involved in a conspiratorial group called the Young Italy Society, devoted to freeing Italy from Austrian rule. In Reilly’s story, Georgi is at university under the care of Dr Rosenblum, where he, likewise, becomes involved in the ‘League of Enlightenment’, a radical political group.

After Montanelli is elevated to a bishopric, Arthur confesses his association with the Young Italy Society to his father’s successor Father Cardi, who immediately betrays him to the authorities. He is imprisoned, and when released is shattered to learn for the first time that Montanelli is his real father. Reeling from the shock, he fakes suicide by throwing his hat into the water at the docks and stows away on a ship bound for Buenos Aires. Georgi, also reeling from the shock of being revealed as a bastard, fakes his suicide in Odessa Harbour and stows away on a ship bound for South America. Once in South America, Arthur wanders about aimlessly, his heart filled with hatred for everything and everybody. He allows himself to be maimed and mutilated and to suffer all kinds of indignity; stuttering horribly, he ends up as a hunchback in a travelling circus, a pathetic figure of tortured ridicule. He spends thirteen years in South America before returning not just to free Italy, which was his boyhood desire, but to rid her of priests in general whilst undertaking a vendetta against Montanelli in particular. Now involved in violent action he changes his name to Felice Rivarez. He is eventually arrested and finally confronts Montanelli, now a cardinal. Arthur tells Montanelli who he really is and presses him to choose between him and God. Montanelli chooses the latter, as he must, and Arthur is condemned to be shot.
³
The whole affair, however, unhinges the cardinal’s mind and while carrying the host in solemn procession, he raises it then smashes it to the ground in a symbolic identification of himself with God the Father, sacrificing his only begotten son for the salvation of mankind.

Since the publication of Lockhart’s
Ace of Spies
in 1967, other authors and journalists have taken his assertions about
The Gadfly
as sacrosanct and have repeated them as received fact.
⁴
First off the mark was Tibor Szamuely’s
Spectator
article,
⁵
which appeared some months after the publication of
Ace of Spies.
‘Is it possible to imagine’, asked Szamuely, ‘anything more weird than the fact of Soviet Russia’s most revered literary hero [Arthur Burton] being based upon the real-life character of their greatest enemy?’

Szamuely was not alone in being unable to resist this line in Cold War irony. The BBC World Service dedicated one of its Russian language programmes to
The Gadfly.
⁶
Not only did it feature the ‘sensation’ that the prototype of
Ethel Voynich’s
The Gadfly
was none other than the famous spy Sidney Reilly, lynchpin of so many anti-Soviet plots, but went one step further. Reminding listeners that
The Gadfly
was the inspiration for the deeds of Pavka Korchagin, the hero of Nikolai Ostrovsky’s classic Civil War epic
How the Steel Tempered,
it took great delight in raising the spectre of the young fighter for the Soviet Republic in reality following the bitter enemy of Soviet power.

Desmond McHale’s 1985 biography of Ethel’s father, George Boole,
⁷
also unquestioningly adopted the Lockhart line, although he did concede that Voynich never admitted any Reilly connection with the book or its central character.
⁸
Tibor Szamuely, however, casts a shadow of doubt on the matter by implying that she had deliberately remained tight lipped on the issue of who Arthur Burton’s prototype was. He relates an episode in 1955 when a delegation of Soviet journalists was in New York for the first time since the onset of the Cold War. One morning a Russian diplomat burst into the hotel room of journalist Boris Polevoi. Almost incoherent with excitement he related that he had, that very morning, seen Ethel Voynich, assumed by the Russians to be long dead. The journalists commandeered a car and raced off to her home at 450 West 24th Street. Arriving unannounced on her doorstep, they proceeded to interview her about
The Gadfly
and the inspiration for Arthur Burton. Szamuely quotes her response to the Burton question as being, ‘No, I’m afraid I can’t remember… it was all so long ago’.

Szamuely’s source for this answer is unclear, as the quote certainly does not appear in Russian press stories which followed the 1955 publicity. In fact, both Boris Polevoi and Eugenia Taratuta corresponded at length with Ethel after the 1955 meeting in New York. Taratuta’s correspondence and interviews with her were a major contribution to her biography of Ethel Voynich,
⁹
the only one to be published to date. As a result of the 1968 BBC broadcast, both Polevoi and Taratuta published their correspondence with Ethel Voynich in a rebuttal article published in
Izvestia
on the subject of Arthur Burton and the characters in
The Gadfly.
¹⁰
For example, in a letter to Taratuta, dated 25 April 1956, Voynich elaborates on the conception of the book:

For a long time in my youth I was imagining a man who voluntarily sacrificed himself to something. Partly, this image might have appeared under a strong impact of Mazzini’s
¹¹
life and activities. In autumn 1885, for the first time in my life I turned up in Paris and spent a few months there. In the Louvre’s Square Salon I saw a well-known portrait of a young Italian known as
A Man in Black,
ascribed to Francia, Fracabijo and Rafael. This is how
The Gadfly
story somehow took shape in me.

In the same letter she refers again to characterisations:

Gemma is the only true-life character in the novel. You can recognise in her more or less closely a portrait of my friend Charlotte Wilson whom I called Gemma when I was writing the book.

The following year, Voynich wrote on 14 January 1957 a letter to Boris Polevoi, who had specifically asked her about the Arthur Burton character: ‘You ask me whether the real prototype of Arthur ever existed… indeed, the characters in the novel do not necessarily have, as prototypes, people who actually existed’. She went on to say that ‘The origin of Arthur’s image comes from my old interest in Mazzini and a portrait of an unknown young man in black in the Louvre’.

Polevoi and Taratuta were not the only ones to dispute and challenge Lockhart’s theory. The actor Hugh Millar, a long-time friend, confidante and neighbour of Ethel Voynich’s in New York, wrote privately to Robin Bruce Lockhart shortly after the publication of
Ace of Spies
in November 1967, taking him to task over his claims. Lockhart’s reply, dated 8 December 1967,
¹²
is most revealing in more ways than one and has, to date, never been published.

When asked by Millar about his source for the statement that Ethel was Reilly’s mistress and that Reilly was the inspiration for Arthur, Lockhart replied:

…the original source of the ‘affair’ with Reilly was Reilly himself. This was checked later directly with Mrs Voynich herself before the last war by another author who had intended to write a book on Reilly but never got round to it as he did not have enough material.

Over and above the fact that Reilly is hardly the most reliable or truthful of sources when it comes to his own past (or virtually any other matter come to that), it seems certain that the ‘other author’ referred to by Lockhart was none other than Reilly’s SIS colleague George Hill. It is clear from the papers Lockhart deposited with the Hoover Institution, that Hill was actively researching his Reilly book in 1935.
¹³
In terms of Hill allegedly checking Reilly’s claim directly with Ethel Voynich, it has to be said that some considerable doubt exists as to whether this was ever the case. There is no record of Hill ever having written to Ethel Voynich, or indeed of her ever having written to him. Bearing in mind that she lived in New York City between 1920 and her death in 1960, Hill could, of course, have taken the opportunity to visit New York to interview her. However, US immigration records show no sign of Hill entering the United States at any time during the inter-war period.
¹⁴

Curiously, as a further justification for his view, Lockhart also stated in his letter to Hugh Millar: ‘Incidentally, a point that I did not mention in my book was Reilly’s stutter from which he suffered in his youth – a handicap also of the ‘Gadfly’.

Of the countless people who knew or had recollections of Reilly over a considerable period of time, not one has ever mentioned a stutter. The only reference on record to any kind of peculiarity in Reilly’s speech refers to his accent and pronunciation rather than to such an impediment.
¹⁵
It could be, of course, that Reilly told Hill that he had a stutter as a child in order to further authenticate his claim to be the inspiration for Arthur Burton.

Over and above the compelling evidence of Ethel Voynich’s own statements and the gaping holes in Lockhart’s theory, the fact remains that the chronology simply does not add up. Ethel Voynich conceived the idea of
The Gadfly
in 1885/86 and started writing it in 1889. How could Rosenblum, who was eleven or twelve years old at this time have possibly had any influence in the creation of the story? By the time Rosenblum arrived in England at the end of 1895 the book was virtually finished. It must therefore be concluded that Arthur Burton was not based on Sidney Reilly, but Sidney Reilly was based upon Arthur Burton. Whether he would so readily have adopted Arthur’s mantle had he known he would ultimately share Arthur’s fate is a moot point.