Reilly’s proposals hinged on three points of attack from within Russia: persuading the Red Army leaders to make a deal with Denikin to overthrow the Bolsheviks; positively enrolling the help and support of the Orthodox Church; and persuading the Ukrainians to link up with Denikin against the Bolsheviks. Although Reilly’s memorandum was favourably received by Rex Leeper in the Political Intelligence Department, Sir Ronald Graham of the Russian Department was distinctly cool about it. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, was more inclined to back Graham’s view than Leeper’s and the proposals were therefore scotched.
That same month Nadine and Reilly parted for the last time when she returned to New York.26 Within a year, Reilly was to strike up a new relationship, this time with a girl nearly thirty years his junior. Caryll Houselander27 had recently left St John’s Wood Art School, and was introduced to Reilly by another former student, Della Clifford, who had met him through friends in the Russian émigré community. Della showed Reilly Caryll’s sketches as she was ‘too shy, and despised her drawings too much to take them to him herself’.28 Caryll was fascinated by religion, art, mysticism and Russia, and found herself immediately attracted to a man who seemed to embody all these. Being a devout Catholic, she found herself struggling to reconcile her feelings and her religious beliefs. In her 1955 autobiography she recalled this inner turmoiclass="underline"
I was driving myself to a dangerous state of psychological, as well as spiritual starvation, and becoming more and more driven by my own emotions. I had emptied myself of almost everything that was essential to me, and now felt the necessity of filling that emptiness. I did not define this, but obviously it added a fierce intensity to every natural temptation and complicated all my emotional relationships with other people.29
Eventually Caryll succumbed to temptation and began a two-year affair with Reilly:
In spite of my infidelity I still regarded myself as a Catholic and still regarded my sins as being sins… now I was tempted to turn my back on the Church once and for all, and to take what happiness life seemed to offer me outside it… the simple truth was that I was being swept by temptation as dry grass is swept by a flame of fire.30
As with Beatrice Tremaine, Reilly was content to support Caryll and have her at his beck and call. Unlike Beatrice and the other women he had known, however, she had comparatively simple tastes. As Dermot Morrah recalled, ‘I myself knew Caryll from 1919 and saw her constantly… she was living as the mistress of a man… who made her a weekly allowance, small but quite adequate to her simple manner of life’.31 True to form he seems to have regaled her with his usual ‘Master Spy’ stories, including an account of his ‘friend’ Rasputin. In 1950 Caryll recalled that:
…a man who was a very great friend of mine and who was… at one time a spy… became a friend of Rasputin’s and, strange as it is, really did have mixed feelings for him, part loathing and part liking. At all events he lived with him for about a year, travelling about Russia with him, and Rasputin confided his own spiritual history to him, and told him that he had formerly and of his own choice surrendered his soul to the devil and from that time had been able to work many more cures.32
While Reilly certainly had connections and contacts with Rasputin and his circle, his claim to have lived and travelled with him for a year is easily refuted by Ochrana records. Rasputin’s activities and associations were probably the best documented of anyone in Russia bar the Tsar himself. Reilly’s name is nowhere to be found in the Ochrana’s vast record of Rasputin and his movements.
Another friend of Caryll’s from her days at the St John’s Wood Art School was Eleanor Toye.33 Eleanor became Reilly’s secretary for approximately two years, and later confided to Jean Bruce Lockhart (Robert Bruce Lockhart’s wife) her experiences of the darker side of his compelling personality. Reilly, she said, ‘suffered from severe mental crises amounting to mental delusions. Once he thought he was Jesus Christ’.34
On the business front, Reilly was far from idle. Recognising a kindred spirit in Leonid Krasin, the corrupt head of the newly established Soviet Economic Mission in London, he suggested a scheme of mutual benefit, whereby the Soviet government and Marconi signed a deal for the supply of a wireless service in Russia.35 Reilly and Krasin were to work together on a number of other deals from which they were to line their own pockets. Some months after the Marconi deal, for example, Krasin was involved in smuggling a hoard of diamonds out of Russia to be secretly sold in the West. Lenin’s government was in dire need of foreign currency and such covert deals were one of the ways in which foreign trade missions obtained it. This was, however, to be a deal with a difference. According to Georgi Solomon, a Russian colleague of Krasin’s, the diamonds were sold by Krasin at below the best obtainable market price to a third party, the proceeds of which went back to Moscow. The third party then had them recut and resold in Paris for a significantly higher price with Moscow none the wiser. This windfall was then, no doubt, shared with Krasin. In 1930, Solomon recalled that the third party with the Parisian connections was a British officer of the rank of captain who was an Anglicised Russian Jew.36
According to Reilly’s SIS file, other allegations about his conduct were also coming out of Paris at this time. On 3 September SIS received a note from the Naval Intelligence Division:
Sidney Reilly, Paris
This man is reported from a reliable source to be wearing naval uniform in Paris and his conduct is not satisfactory. Is he still working for C?37
C replied to the DNI on 7 September in his usual bluff manner:
With reference to the attached report, Mr Sidney Reilly is employed by me and is engaged at present on a highly important and confidential mission. Will you cause further enquiries to be made from the reliable source as to the precise respect in which this ex-officer’s conduct is not satisfactory. I feel confident that the statement that he has been wearing naval uniform is not correct and I think it, therefore, at least possible that the accusation as to his conduct is also incorrect.38
The DNI replied that the source was a Russian who had left Paris two weeks previously and had stated that Reilly had been boasting of being in close touch with the Secretary of State for War, and confirmed that Reilly had indeed been wearing naval uniform.39 C wrote a dismissive note boldly across the bottom of the page – ‘The further information does not give anything sufficiently definite to bear out the original accusation’.40 This incident, while a minor one, was no doubt remembered unfavourably by the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair. Within three years he would suceed Cumming as chief of MI1c, and would not prove to be so tolerant of Reilly and his antics as Cumming had been.
After a brief respite in London following his return from Paris, Reilly was called in by C to be briefed about a new mission. While the Treaty of Versailles had redrawn the map of Europe, there was still a good deal of unfinished business to be settled in Paris. Poland’s frontier with Russia was a prime case in point. The Poles themselves favoured the frontier of 1772, while the Council of Ambassadors in Paris proposed on 8 December 1919 a border closely resembling the old eastern frontier of Poland when she had been part of the Russian Empire.