The greatest spy | The true story of Churchill's secret agent who became the model for James Bond

Discover the life and adventures of the real model for the world's most famous spy, James Bond: Sidney Reilly! When a twenty-year-old Ukrainian young man arrives in London as a candidate for the position of undercover agent in Britain's Secret Intelligence Office, the heads of what will one day become MI5 were right to hire him, because he would become Britain's greatest spy, a man known by many names. His ingenuity and mastery of the craft, and his courage and calm in times of danger, won wide acclaim. To infiltrate the IRA, he was given the code name Sidney Reilly. Tasked with kidnapping Lenin and Trotsky during the Russian Revolution, he visited major battlefronts across Soviet Russia during the Civil War, sending proposals to defeat the Communists. He stole German naval charts from Krupp, charts of ports in Mongolia for Britain's allies, and posed as a German officer for discussions with the Kaiser and his chiefs of staff about German submarine tactics against the Allies. He also helped obtain oil from Persia to modernize the British naval fleet when Churchill was Secretary of the Navy. In 1953, novelist Ian Fleming used Reilly's secret Admiralty Intelligence Office file to write his novel about a fictional secret agent he called James Bond 007. But Riley's real adventures were more exciting and wonderful than those of the fictional James Bond. Reilly was Britain's best spy, but was he also a Soviet double agent? Writer John Hart retells Reilly's story as it actually happened, with a quick and precise narrative style, focusing on minute details, and he presents us with a surprise: he reveals to us what really happened to Reilly after he disappeared in Soviet Russia in 1925, where he was thought to have been killed by Stalin's secret police. Discover the truth behind the man who inspired the character of the world's most famous spy in the book "The Greatest Spy". But Bond's adventures were fictional, while Riley's were real.