September 25, 2025, marks the 100th anniversary of the arrest of Sidney Reilly , the renowned British spy. The “King of Spies” was apprehended during Operation Trust, a secret operation carried out by the OGPU from 1921 to 1927. It became one of the most significant counterintelligence operations of the 1920s.
The Trust’s main goal was to create a fictitious underground organization called the “Monarchist Association of Central Russia,” through which the White Guards, emigrants, and Western intelligence agencies were controlled.
Sidney George Reilly (real name Zigmund (Solomon) Georgievich Rosenblum) was born on March 24, 1873, in Odessa. He began his career in the 1890s, infiltrating Russian political émigré circles in London. In the early 1900s, he found himself in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, working for both sides in the conflict and passing information on Russian military activities to both British and Japanese intelligence.
During World War I, Reilly was actively involved in espionage, passing vital information about German plans to the British. He gained greatest notoriety for his attempt to overthrow the Bolshevik government in 1918, when he played a key role in the plot against Lenin, known as the Lockhart Plot. However, the plot failed, and Reilly was forced to flee Soviet Russia.
In 1925, as part of a covert operation with British intelligence, the spy was lured from Finland to the Soviet border. The Chekists outmaneuvered their seasoned enemy and apprehended Reilly. To cover up his arrest, the Soviet press reported the deaths of two smugglers at the border. Sidney Reilly himself was taken to Moscow.
On November 5, 1925, a British spy was shot in Sokolniki under a sentence handed down to him in 1918 for anti-state activities against Russia.