Books in Brief: Master Spy: A True Story of Allied Espionage in Bolshevik Russia

Master Spy: A True Story of Allied Espionage in Bolshevik Russia, by Edward van der Rhoer (Scribner’s, 260 pp., $14.95). Take a man who was “to many people a hero,” whose “courage and indifference to danger were superb,” who spoke four languages fluently (each with an accent), who could pose as a Greek merchant or a Turkish trader, who had been awarded the British Military Cross, who was an expert forger, who resembled Humphrey Bogart and was admired by Ian Fleming, who could, when called for, foam at the mouth. About such a man one would think it almost impossible to write a dull book. Well, Edward van der Rhoer—about whom we are told only that he did cryptographic work for the United States during World War II—has managed to turn this trick. The subject was a Russian adventurer of Polish extraction and Catholic persuasion named Sigmund G. Rosenblum, better known to students of espionage annals as a British agent operating in the new Soviet nation under the monicker of “Sidney Reilly.” In tracing his man’s elusive course the author employs a pedestrian style, is vague in giving chronology, offers only meager annotation and bibliography, gives nary an illustration, and depends far too much on Reilly’s posthumous memoirs (1931) and on the only previous biography (by Robin Bruce Lockhart, in 1969). If, however, one contemplates Reilly’s career as a case study for aficionados in plumbing the motivations of spies, especially those to be found at crucial turns of international events, then this book merits attention. By updating the Lockhart study in several minor particulars it displays to a slightly more extended view the perambulations of a master manipulator, one of whose mistresses, the writer Caryll Houselander, was sure he was “an archangel sent by God to save Russia from the Devil . . .”

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Curtis Carroll Davis

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Master Spy: A True Story of Allied Espionage in Bolshevik Russia, by Edward van der Rhoer (Scribner’s, 260 pp., $14.95). Take a man who was “to many people a hero,” whose “courage and indifference to danger were superb,” who spoke four languages fluently (each with an accent), who could pose as a Greek merchant or a Turkish trader, who had been awarded the British Military Cross, who was an expert forger, who resembled Humphrey Bogart and was admired by Ian Fleming, who could, when called for, foam at the mouth. About such a man one would think it almost impossible to write a dull book. Well, Edward van der Rhoer—about whom we are told only that he did cryptographic work for the United States during World War II—has managed to turn this trick. The subject was a Russian adventurer of Polish extraction and Catholic persuasion named Sigmund G. Rosenblum, better known to students of espionage annals as a British agent operating in the new Soviet nation under the monicker of “Sidney Reilly.” In tracing his man’s elusive course the author employs a pedestrian style, is vague in giving chronology, offers only meager annotation and bibliography, gives nary an illustration, and depends far too much on Reilly’s posthumous memoirs (1931) and on the only previous biography (by Robin Bruce Lockhart, in 1969). If, however, one contemplates Reilly’s career as a case study for aficionados in plumbing the motivations of spies, especially those to be found at crucial turns of international events, then this book merits attention. By updating the Lockhart study in several minor particulars it displays to a slightly more extended view the perambulations of a master manipulator, one of whose mistresses, the writer Caryll Houselander, was sure he was “an archangel sent by God to save Russia from the Devil . . .”