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Churchill, Henry Ford and Sidney Reilly: Anti-Bolshevik Collaborators?
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | June 2, 2022
- Category: Churchill Between the Wars Q & A
Q: Churchill, Ford, and Reilly
My question is on a subject about which I have never seen any commentary. I believe Churchill would have crossed paths with Sidney Reilly, the famous “Ace of Spies,” vividly portrayed by Sam Neill in the 1983 television series. I also believe (but really know little on the subject) that Henry Ford, like Reilly and WSC, was a strong anti-Bolshevik. Do you have any information about whether the three ever met, and whether any efforts were made to coordinate their activities? —Ken Gack via email
A: Connections, but not a threesome
It’s a logical question, but there is no evidence of three-way collaboration between Reilly, Ford, and Churchill. All were stridently anti-Bolshevik, but there their characters diverge. For one thing, Ford was a virulent anti-Semite. This would not have appealed to Churchill, let alone Reilly (the former Sigmund Rosenblum).
Churchill did praise Henry Ford during the Great War in 1918, when WSC ran the Ministry of Munitions. Churchill placed an order for 10,000 “cross-country caterpillar vehicles from several American manufacturers.” Ford’s “vast organization,” he wrote, executed “this contract without detriment to their other obligations.” Some 10,000 vehicles were “guaranteed by the spring.”1 Whether they met personally at the time is doubtful.
A decade later, planning his North American holiday, Churchill had “promised Mr. Ford to see his Works at Detroit.”2 But a search of the Churchill Archives reveals no correspondence between them. Ford was a strong supporter of President Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations; Churchill was critical of Wilson and had little faith in the League. Later, Ford became a passionate isolationist, which would render him no ally of Churchill’s.
Sidney Reilly was a different story. Churchill did have connections with him during the Great War, which continued until the early 1920s. But Churchill later downplayed their relationship. In 1931, Reilly’s wife was preparing to publish his autobiography, and Churchill expressed concern to his intelligence advisor Desmond Morton: “I have for some time heard talk of Reilly’s memoirs and papers being published. It is quite possible they contain some indiscreet stuff.”3 The publisher reassured him: “Captain Reilly included several lofty appreciations of yourself, but I have deleted them on the supposition that you would not care to have your name too frequently mentioned in a book of this nature.”4
Reilly, née Rosenblum…
…was born the same year as Churchill, in either Grodno (Hrodna, now Belarus) or Odessa, Ukraine (sources differ). Like his ally Boris Savinkov, he rebelled against both the Czar and the Bolsheviks. Both fitted Churchill’s colorful description of Savinkov: “a terrorist for moderate aims.…freedom, toleration and good will—to be achieved wherever necessary by dynamite at the risk of death.”5
Reilly landed in Britain in 1895 and was soon involved in clandestine affairs. Before the Russo-Japanese War, he spied for the British and Japanese in Port Arthur. There he stole Russian plans for the harbor defenses, conveying them to the Japanese for a naval attack. Reilly’s actual accomplishments are murky and controversial. One of these was in Germany, where he posed as a welder in the Krupp Gun Works, supposedly stealing German armament plans. Some historians have him playing a double role, such as selling munitions to both the Germans and the Russians during the Great War.
It is established that Reilly was entrusted with espionage in Russia. He had a long relationship with Mansfield Smith-Cumming (“C,” the first head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). After the Bolshevik Revolution Reilly slipped into Russia, attempting to aid anti-Bolsheviks and topple Lenin. Here he met and plotted with Savinkov. In 1925 Savinkov was lured into Russia by an alleged resistance group, “The Trust,” in reality a front for Felix Dzershinsky’s Cheka. Tortured, Savinkov “confessed his crimes” and betrayed his colleagues. Reilly denounced him, but ironically was also lured back and executed the same year. Wikipedia has a lengthy entry on Reilly’s career.
Churchill and Reilly
Churchill’s romantic nature “drew him to mavericks and buccaneers, unorthodox figures who defied convention,” wrote David Stafford.6 “The extravagant plots of Reilly and Savinkov interested Churchill, who gave them all the support he could, and although their plots failed he remained mesmerised by the potential of covert action behind enemy lines to cause mischief and mayhem.”7
Archibald Sinclair, a longtime Churchill associate, was WSC’s liaison to the anti-Bolshevik opposition—White Russians and “wealthy emigres,” writes Ian Hunter. Churchill labored long and hard to prolong British military intervention in Russia. After meeting with Reilly in 1918, Sinclair promised Churchill that, should he resign in protest over British inaction, “irregular German troops [would cross] into Soviet territory, [storm] north to capture Petrograd and then drive south to link up with General Denikin,” the White Russian commander.8
In August 1921, Stafford noted, Reilly wrote “a lengthy assessment of the Russian situation that he passed to Churchill. The two met and Churchill spoke of taking him to meet Lloyd George.” The report predicted “a general uprising against the Bolsheviks that could produce a new and more moderate Russian government.”9 It was, sadly, a daydream.
As the Soviets consolidated their power and the White Russian armies melted away, Churchill took a more resigned view of toppling their regime. David Stafford suggests that Churchill began distancing himself from Reilly to keep clear of controversy surrounding the notorious Zinoviev Letter. Published in 1924 by the Daily Mail, allegedly with Reilly’s connivance, it called for a Marxist uprising in Britain led by communists and the Labour Party. Though it might have influenced the 1924 election, it has since been proven a forgery.10
“The irrepressible Marlborough”
Like Churchill, Cumming happily listened to Reilly’s summaries of Russia. But “he refused to place Reilly on the SIS’s full-time books out of deference to Foreign Office suspicions—in one of its files he was even described as a former German spy.” Churchill’s support, Stafford writes, “was a valuable counterweight to such suspicions.” Sinclair told Churchill that Reilly was “the keenest and ablest of all the ‘anti-Bolo’ [anti-Bolshevik] spade workers in London.” Reilly in turn considered Churchill the only useful British politician in the anti-Bolshevik cause. Shortly before his death he told a friend: “Only one man is really important, and that is the irrepressible Marlborough [WSC]. I have always remained on good terms with him…. His ear would always be open to something sound.”11
For two years after his actual death, nothing was known of Reilly’s fate in the West. In June 1927 the Soviets finally revealed it. “One Sidney George Riley [sic],” they claimed, had been caught illegally crossing the Finnish frontier. He had subsequently confessed to coming to Russia “for the special purpose of organising terrorist acts, arson and revolts…. He had seen Mr. Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who personally instructed him as to the reorganisation of terrorist and other acts calculated to create a diversion.” Later Reilly was described as Churchill’s “confidential agent.” No evidence exists that they met before Reilly’s final trip to Russia, Stafford writes. “…but it is not implausible given Churchill’s long-standing relationship with him. It could equally have been a complete fabrication.”12
Backing away
By 1927 “Churchill was denying everything.” In December that year, Pepita Bobadilla Reilly appealed to Churchill for information. The reply came from his private Secretary, Eddie Marsh:
[Your letter] of the 13th December…appears to have been written under a complete misapprehension. Your husband did not go into Russia at the request of any British official, but he went there on his own private affairs. Mr. Churchill much regrets that he is unable to help you in regard to this matter, because according to the latest reports which have been made public Mr. Reilly met his death in Moscow after his arrest there.13
It was “a classic letter of deniability,” writes David Stafford, “as though Churchill hardly knew who Reilly was, never mind had been a willing and active party to his anti-Bolshevik plans. Clearly he wished to keep this episode in his shadow life hidden.” (Thus also his 1931 apprehension, to Desmond Morton, that the Reilly book might contain “some indiscreet stuff.”) Nevertheless it was a heartless letter, untypical of Churchill’s usual magnanimity. But no one, Stafford concludes, “ever had Churchill in his pocket.”14
Hearts and minds: Savinkov, Reilly, Churchill
Rather than Henry Ford, Savinkov would have made a more likely triumvirate with Reilly and Churchill. The evidence is that they consulted, though probably not together, and were united in their wish for a free Russia. Anti-Bolshevist to the core, Reilly and Savinkov symbolized Churchill’s affinity for cloak-and-dagger operators. “Yet his respect for personal heroism and his taste for unreliable adventurers must be distinguished from his sometimes ruthlessly pragmatic use of special operations where realpolitik was never far from the surface.”15
Of the two, Churchill was more taken with Savinkov. When the latter was arrested, tried and “confessed,” many Britons including Reilly denounced him. Not Churchill, as he wrote to Reilly himself:
I do not think you should judge Savinkov too harshly. He was placed in a terrible position; and only those who have sustained successfully such an ordeal have a full right to pronounce censure. At any rate I shall wait to hear the end of the story before changing my view about Savinkov.16
***
He never did. In Great Contemporaries WSC pondered Savinkov’s fate should he have come from more civilized lands:
All would have been spared to him had he been born in Britain, in France, in the United States, in Scandinavia, in Switzerland. A hundred happy careers lay open. But born in Russia with such a mind and such a will, his life was a torment rising in crescendo to a death in torture. Amid these miseries, perils and crimes he displayed the wisdom of a statesman, the qualities of a commander, the courage of a hero and the endurance of a martyr.17
Reilly too was born in Russia, with all that meant for his own life. Yet Reilly is mentioned neither in Great Contemporaries nor The World Crisis, Churchill’s memoir of the Great War. “Like Clare Sheridan’s adventures in Moscow,” concludes David Stafford, “here was an episode of secret war that he wished to keep quiet.”18
Endnotes
1 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), The World Crisis, vol. 3, part 2 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1927), 488-89.
2 WSC to Bernard Baruch, 7 July 1929, in Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 12, The Wilderness Years 1929-1935 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2008), 16.
3 WSC to Desmond Morton, 31 October 1930, in The Wilderness Years, 216.
4 Ibid., 220. The book included two letters from WSC to Reilly on Boris Savinkov, who betrayed the anti-Bolsheviks under torture. Churchill forgave him; Reilly never did. See Sidney Reilly & Pepita Bobadilla, The Adventures of Sidney Reilly: Britain’s Master Spy (London: Elkin, Mathews & Marrot 1931), 150-53.
5 WSC, “Boris Savinkov,” in Nash’s Pall Mall, February 1929; reprinted in Great Contemporaries (1937; London: Leo Cooper, 1990), 76.
6 David Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service (London: John Murray, 1997), 5.
7 David Stafford, Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets (London: Little Brown, 1999), 15.
8 Ian Hunter, ed., Winston and Archie: The Letters of Sir Archibald Sinclair and Winston S. Churchill, 1915-1960 (London: Politico’s, 2005), 57.
9 Stafford, Secret Service, 121.
10 Richard M. Langworth, “An Antidote to Fairytales,” review of Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service, in Finest Hour 96, Autumn 1997, 36.
11 Stafford, Secret Service, 120.
12 Ibid., 122.
13 Reilly & Bobadilla, Adventures of Sidney Reilly, 238.
14 Stafford, Secret Service, 344.
15 Ibid.
16 WSC to Sidney Reilly, 15 September 1924, in Reilly & Bobadilla, Adventures of Sidney Reilly, 152-53.
17 WSC, Great Contemporaries, 76.
18 Stafford, Secret Service, 122.
Further reading
Robin Bruce Lockhart. Reilly Ace of Spies (1967, reprinted 1984).
Sidney Reilly & Pepita Bobilla, The Adventures of Sidney Reilly: Britain’s Master Spy (1931).
David Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service (1997).
David Stafford, Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets (1999).