He carried at least 11 passports, spied for up to four superpowers at once, and the press called him the Ace of Spies and the Scarlet Pimpernel of Red Russia. Yet we do not know his real name or even the year he was born. This episode profiles Sidney Reilly, the ghost in the machinery of early 20th-century history who helped inspire the James Bond archetype.

We trace his murky origins as Rosenblum in the Russian Empire, his early turn as a police informant, and the suspicious deaths and marriages that funded his reinvention as a wealthy British subject. We follow his war profiteering during the Russo-Japanese War, his audacious infiltration of the Cheka, and the ambitious plot to overthrow Lenin that ended in the Red Terror.

• How loose passport bureaucracy let an intelligence handler invent a whole new person
• Why Japanese spymaster Akashi preferred a rational mercenary over an emotional patriot
• The debate over which of Reilly’s famous exploits were real and which were self-mythology
• The Trust, the OGPU honeypot that finally lured him back into Soviet territory
• His final days secretly documenting his interrogators on cigarette papers before his execution