[Scenario Seed] The Lives of Reilly.

[Catsmate]

"James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamed up. He's not a Sidney Reilly, you know!"
                                                                                                          Ian Fleming

He came out of nowhere and back to nowhere he disappeared fifty years later. In the meantime while some of his activities are known, most are not. An ideal character to drop into a Who game set in the 1890s to 1920s or later.
He was Sidney Reilly, the 'Ace of Spies'.

Many biographies of Reilly still give his "real name" as Zigmund Markovich Rozenblum and place his birth on 24MAR1874 in Odessa, the son of a stockbroker and an impoverished noblewoman. However this is highly unreliable, being based on the statement of Reilly himself and the Soviet OGPU, neither exactly reliable sources.

• The OGPU (All Union State Political Directorate) was the third Soviet secret police/internal security apparatus, from 1923 to 1934, succeeding the GPU and Cheka (themselves the successors of the Tsarist Okhrana) and being succeeded by the NKVD. It was led, until his death in 1926 (heart attack, probably natural causes), by the infamous ‘Iron Felix’; Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Other sources (notably Richard Spence’s Trust No One) suggest ‘Reilly’ was born Salomon Rosenblum somewhere in Russian Poland (Grodno is favoured), probably in 1874. However there is no solid evidence for Reilly's existence anywhere before he turns up in 1895 on a dock in Portsmouth, under the name Sigmund Rosenblum, carrying a small fortune, and with professional training in chemistry. Oh, and an uncanny skill with a pistol…

• It’s just as possible that ‘Rosenblum’ was another identity that Reilly (who probably was a Russian Jew of some sort) ‘borrowed’ from one of the millions of refugees from Tsarist Russia who could be found around Europe in the late nineteenth century. Unless he was actually the son of a Irish merchant mariner.

Reilly had just supposedly returned from a spell in Brazil (unfortunately a few years too early to meet Percy Fawcett) where (according to him) he’d worked various jobs and ended up as cook for an expedition organised by the British government. After saving the life of the expedition’s leader, Charles Fothergill, he was rewarded with money, a passage to England and a new identity. He’d ended up in Brazil after fleeing the Okhrana.     However this story probably isn’t true.

Another account (by Andrew Cook) has some more supporting evidence (though not much); in it Reilly (as Sigmund Rosenblum) arrived in London from France in December 1895 on the run from a double murder and robbery. He and Yan Voitek had ambushed two Italian anarchists on Christmas Day 1895, knifed them, and stolen a substantial sum of revolutionary funds (mostly the proceeds of other crimes).
A third has the money coming from the Okhrana, with Reilly working as a double agent for them, monitoring revolutionaries, and stealing the money from them.

However he got to Britain Reilly (still as Sigmund Rosenblum) acquired a flat in Rosetta Street, in the Waterloo district of London, and set up a company named the Ozone Preparations Company which made and sold quack patent medicines. He also began his career as a spy, monitoring the Russian émigré community for the police. He was also an associate of the antiquarian and bookseller (and former revolutionary) Wilfrid Voynich whom he assisted (so it’s said) in forging manuscripts. He also had an affair with Voynich’s wife, Ethel. Reilly himself was a collector of artworks and rare books and manuscripts (especially those connected to Napoleon Bonaparte) all his life.

• Which is an interesting way to mix the Voynich Manuscript into a game.

Oh, and he also was mixed up in the murder of another mistress’s husband.

He’d met Margaret Thomas through her husband, the much older, far richer and somewhat unwell, Reverend Hugh Thomas. The Reverend died on 12MAR1898, a week after changing his will to leave his estate (the then huge sum of £825,000) to his young wife. The death occurred in a hotel and a death certificate was issued by a Doctor T. W. Andrew listing influenza as the cause of death.

• Curiously, but perhaps to no-one's surprise, there was no doctor of that name then registered in the UK. The ’doctor’ strikingly resembled one Sigmund Rosenblum…

The body was buried less than two days later, with inquest or enquiry. On 22AUG1898 Sigmund Rosenblum and Margaret Thomas were quietly married.

• For even more intrigue both witnesses at the wedding had links to William Melville then the head of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch and Reilly’s employer.

Reilly then adopted, with assistance from Melville, the identity of Sidney James Reilly, born in Clonmel in Ireland.
So far, and it’s only 1898, we have adultery, three murders, espionage and forgery. A good start.

Over the next decade and a half Reilly travelled extensively; continual Europe, Tsarist Russia, China and the Far East, and the United States. His known activities include espionage, bigamy, arms deals (involving Basil Zaharoff) and double dealing. In 1890 Reilly spied on German arms purchased by the Boers in the Netherlands. He reconnoitered the Caucasus oil deposits for Britain, and the defences of Port Arthur for Britain and Japan, while dabbling in war profiteering as a sideline.

• It’s said that the easy passage of Japanese forces through the harbour defences was down to plans stolen by Reilly and a Chinese engineer (Ho Liangshung)

He returned to Britain in 1904, via Japan and Paris. Just in time to become enmeshed in the D'Arcy Affair.
This was a successful attempt by the British Government to acquire control of oil rights in Mesopotamia from the Ottoman Empire. The Royal Navy was planning to move from coal to oil mas it’s primary fuel and a secure source was needed.

After his intrigue against de Rothschilds Reilly spent some time on the Côte d'Azur (with another new mistress) before travelling to Brussels and thence back to St. Petersburg as the Russo-Japanese War was coming to an end and Russia was looking to re-arm.
The next few years are sparse but in 1909 Reilly was in Germany engaged in more spying. He may have stolen and duplicated plans for new German artillery in Essen (killing a foreman who interrupted a burglary) and may have been involved in the theft of an advanced magneto in Frankfurt.

• Or perhaps it was a different kind of aerial vehicle…

Early in the Great War Reilly was again in the USA, where he sold obsolete weapons to Russia, and arranged for German agents to destroy them, profiting from both sides. He also sold munitions to Germany. In 1917 (after US entry to the war disrupted his profitable arms double-dealing) Reilly joined British Intelligence, MI-1c under Mansfield Smith-Cumming (‘C’) and was sent to Russia to monitor the situation after the revolutions of 1917.
There Reilly initiated what’s known as the Lockhart Plot (also called the Ambassadors' Plot); an attempt to end the Bolshevik Government and assassinate Vladimir Lenin. Unless it was actually a Soviet plot, and Reilly a Cheka double-agent of course.
Certainly Reilly and Lockhart, in collusion with French and US diplomats, attempted to corrupt the Latvian Riflemen who guarded the Kremlin. However the coup fell apart and led to the ‘Red Terror’ with thousands of arrests (including a least three of Reilly’s mistresses). Lockhart was arrested and imprisoned, but released while Reilly escaped (in a German Embassy railway car; either a monumental bluff, an owed favour or another layer to the plot). Both men were sentenced to death in absentia. In Britain Reilly was awarded the Military Cross "for distinguished services rendered in connection with military operations in the field".
But in 1919 Reilly was back in Russia, with another British agent (George Hill,), studying defences and bases in the Black Sea region and gathering information on anti-Bolshevik groups.

For the next few years there is a gap but in 1924 Reilly was linked to the infamous "Zinoviev letter", a forged letter published by the Daily Mail newspaper just the 1924 general election, which purported to link the British Labour Party with Russian plans for a communist revolution in the UK. The election led to a Conservative landslide. Reilly, with a past history of forgery, is claimed by some to have created the letter, perhaps at the instigation of Winston Churchill (for whom he did engage in various counter-Bolshevik plots in Poland and the Crimea in the early 1920s).

In September 1925 Reilly was in Germany, probably liaising with anti-Bolshevik groups, when he departed for Finland. There he met a group of men, ostensibly an anti-Communist organisation that called itself The Trust. According to history it was an OGPU deception ('false flag') to capture foreign agents. When he crossed into the Soviet Union Reilly was arrested and ended up in Moscow, in the infamous Lubyanka Prison. There he was interrogated but maintained his cover of a British subject born in Clonmel, and denying any connection to espionage or counter-revolutionary activity.

• He also kept a secret diary, tiny notes kept on cigarette papers hidden in his cell. He analysed the interrogation techniques of his captors. The diary was found after his apparant death and archived by the OGPU.

On Wednesday 05NOV1925 Reilly ("Prisoner 73") was shot in a forest near Moscow, the execution personally ordered by Stalin.
Unless of course he'd escaped, or was relased and another prisoner shot in his place (his head has bagged at the mortuary) or had never been captured, or was shot crossing the Finnish border, or defected and worked as a Soviet agent or advisor, or was still in prison and was executed in 1927, or any one of a dozen or more other accounts. One account has him still alive in the Lubyanka in 1932, while another puts him in Shanghai in 1938 (Doing what? For whom? Was he investigating certain unusual events in China?). Others have him running confidence games in South America as late as 1947 (he'd have been around 73). Or working for Mossad, or the KGB. Or both.

Certainly that last trip to the Soviet Union seems strange; the British government always maintained that he wasn't working for them (it's saved a lot in pensions) and the OGPU scheme seems too crude to entangle the experienced Reilly.



The Man.
An approximation of a more-or-less mundane Reilly for AITAS.
A man of medium height(1.75m), slim, with slick black hair and a charming manner. Almost always immaculately dressed.

Attributes:
Awareness: 5
Coordination: 4
Ingenuity: 4
Presence: 4
Resolve: 5
Strength: 4

Skills:
Athletics 3
Convince 5
Craft 1
Fighting 3
Knowledge 4
Marksman 4 [Pistol]
Medicine 2
Science 3
Subterfuge 4 [Infiltration]
Survival 2
Technology 3
Transport 2

Traits:
Adversary (Bolsheviks and others), Arrogant, Attractive, Charming, Crack Shot, Dark Secret (there's always something), Eccentric (amoral), Face in the Crowd, Friends, Indomitable, Lucky, Linguist (spoke at least seven), Owed Favour (several), Owes Favour (several), Quick Reflexes, Ruthless, Selfish, Tough, Wealthy.

Suggestions and ideas welcome.




The Myth.
So how could "Sidney Reilly" appear in a Who game? Well given the amount of travelling he did in the 1890-1925 period he could pop up anywhere, as a background character, an antagonist or even an ally.
There's the mystery of his death, did he die in Russia in 1925? If not, why not? Was he in Russia to convince the communists that there was a greater menace than the capitalist powers, something alien that they should ally against? Did he succeed?

• He could be running a Soviet version of Torchwood in the Pulp era, on the trail of alien incursions and weird happenings for the Greater Good.
  
• Or for himself; he'd have been in his sixties. Did the spectre of death convince him to acquire some advanced technology to prolong his own life?
  

Then there's the other great mystery of Reilly's life; where did he come from? Is there any truth to the story of his adventures in Brazil? Did he perhaps come from somewhere much further than Odessa or Grodno?
Or somewhen else. Was he another Temporally Displaced Person, a Soviet or Russian agent dropped back in time by Mad Science/Natural Phenomena, who stole an identity and money and used his limited knowledge to create a new life for himself. Or was he sent deliberately, either to aide the Bolshevik rise to power or stop them?

• And if he was supposed to stop them, why did he fail? Was it deliberate?
  

Or did Reilly come from farther in the future; dropped back centuries in time by a desperate plan to stop the Dalek invasion (making 'Reilly' perhaps a fugutive from another timeline)? Or a thief on-the-run from the Alexandrian Society who stole one of their crude time machines? Or a soldier/spy from World War Six caught up in one of the time travel experiments of the 51st century?

Just remember Reilly's motto: "Mundo nulla fides"
                            Trust No One




Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?