Dancing with Death

Sidney Reilly was the most audacious, courageous, and successful spy in history. His adventures first came to light during the Russian Revolution in 1917 when he was tasked by Britain’s Secret Service with overthrowing the Bolsheviks after they had formed a new government. He had already succeeded in stealing the plans of the Kaiser’s new and modern fleet of battleships from Krupp, to help Britain win World War I, and was awarded the Military Cross in 1919.

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. Apparently not!