Russian Roulette

The activities of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, Crowley’s network of occultist spies, and the Round Table, centered around advancing the cause of Zionism, while also simultaneously pursuing the conflicting objectives of fomenting the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and promoting the cause of global capitalism. The further purpose of World War I was to create the preconditions for the Russian revolution of 1918, which, according to State Department Decimal File (861.00/5339), in a document entitled Bolshevism and Judaism, dated November 13, 1918, was financed and orchestrated by Jacob Schiff through Kuhn, Loeb. & Co. With the creation of the Soviet Union, they purported to implement a form of communism as outlined by Karl Marx, eventually elevated as a threat to the Western powers.

In an article titled “Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” Winston Churchill attributed these upheavals to those he referred to as “International Jews.” First, Churchill notes, “There can be no greater mistake than to attribute to each individual a recognizable share in the qualities which make up the national character.” He then goes on to describe the character of what he categorizes as Bible-believing Jews, National Jews, and lastly:

In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus Weishaupt [founder of the Illuminati], Karl Marx, Trotsky, Bela Kun, Rosa Luxemburg, and Ema Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.[1]

Illustrating Churchill’s point is an observation shared by Crowley’s friend was Kuhn Loeb banker Otto Kahn, who according to Sir William Wiseman’s right-hand man, Norman Thwaites, was “whole-heartedly pro-Allied and especially pro-British.”[2] In his book Geneva Versus Peace (1937), the Comte de St. Aulaire, who was the French ambassador to London from 1920-24, recalled a dinner conversation with Otto Kahn—a friend of Aleister Crowley and a partner of Jacob Schiff and Paul and Felix Warburg in Kuhn, Loeb & Co.—who detailed the nature of the dialectical process of pitting two apparent opposites against each other, by backing the Russian Revolution while also advancing the cause of global capitalism:

You say that Marxism is the very antithesis of capitalism, which is equally sacred to us. It is precisely for this reason that they are direct opposites to one another, that they put into our hands the two poles of this planet and allow us to be its axis. These two contraries, like Bolshevism and ourselves, find their identity in the International. These opposites, which are at the antipodes to one another in society and in their doctrines meet again in the identity of their purpose and end, the remaking of the world from above by the control of riches, and from below by revolution… Our mission consists in promulgating the new law and in creating a God, that is to say in purifying the idea of God and realizing it, when the time shall come. We shall purify the idea by identifying it with the nation of Israel, which has become its own Messiah. The advent of it will be facilitated by the final triumph of Israel, which has become its own Messiah.[3]

As explained by Carrol Quigley, the Round Table sought to weaken the League of Nations and destroy all possibility of collective security to rebuild Germany as a buffer against the Soviet Union and a counterpoise to France, and to build up an “Atlantic bloc” of Great Britain, the British Dominions, and the United States.[4] While the central battles of the Great Game had raged in Central Asia, a key component in the control of Europe was Germany, whose alliance was sought in competing interests between Russia and Britain. According to Halford Mackinder:

The oversetting of the balance of power in favor of the pivot state, resulting in its expansion over the marginal lands of Euro-Asia, would permit of the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would then be in sight. This might happen if Germany were to ally herself with Russia. The threat of such an event should, therefore, throw France into alliance with the over-sea powers, and France, Italy, Egypt, India and Korea would become so many bridgeheads where the outside navies would support armies to compel the pivot allies to deploy land forces and prevent them from concentrating their whole strength on fleets.[5]

As described by Giles Milton in Russian Roulette: A Deadly Game: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin’s Global Plot, with the success of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Britain sought to undermine the Russians through internal subversion by seeking to create an alliance between Germany and the anti-communist forces inside the Soviet empire. The key was to prevent at all costs a potential alliance between the communists and the Germans, which would have created a Eurasian union guaranteeing Russian control over the continent. This policy was pursued by Lord Curzon, who named Mackinder as High Commissioner in “South Russia,” where a military mission assisted the White Russian counter-revolutionaries and obtained from them the de facto recognition of the new Republic of Ukraine.

As reported by Richard Spence in Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult, soon after the Russian Revolution, Otto Kahn’s associate, Sir William Wiseman, head of British intelligence and future employee of Kuhn, Loeb & Co.—“decided to ‘guide the storm’ in Russia, using money, secret propaganda and hand-picked agents.”[6] As found in the Sir William Wiseman Papers, Wiseman described one part of his plan as “endeavor[ing] to do in Russia what we have done successfully elsewhere; namely to place Germans who are working for us among the real German agents…,” and use agents who “have special facilities for getting into the confidence of German agents.” Among Wiseman’s concerns were that “the Germans have managed to secure control of the most important secret societies in Russia.” “It is necessary that this German influence should be exposed,” he noted, “and counter-Societies organized, if necessary.”[7]

Working for Wiseman were “Ace of Spies” Sidney Reilly, Somerset Maugham and, according to Spence, likely Aleister Crowley.[8] Maugham was also closely associated with Crowley. Arriving in Paris in November 1902, Crowley befriended the painter Gerald Festus Kelly, and through him became a member of the Parisian arts scene. He authored a series of poems, published as Rodin in Rime, on the work of his acquaintance, the sculptor Auguste Rodin.[9] One of those frequenting this milieu was Maugham, who after briefly meeting Crowley later used him as a model for the character of Oliver Haddo in his novel The Magician.[10]

Reilly’s friend, former diplomat and journalist Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, was a close acquaintance of Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels, for many years and recounted to Fleming many of Reilly's espionage exploits.[11] Reilly became a secret agent of the British Secret Service Bureau, the precursor to the modern British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6/SIS). Although Reilly was originally employed by Wiseman, the SIS formally dropped Reilly and supposedly viewed him as untrustworthy and dangerous. Similar doubts applied to Wiseman as well. About this time, a “reform element” in British intelligence, became suspicious of Wiseman’s wartime activities and was secretly investigating him. Wiseman had been brought into Kuhn, Loeb and Co. by Crowley’s friend Otto Khan. Simultaneously, SIS began looking into Reilly’s wartime activities, especially his relations with German firms and agents. The suspicion was that Reilly and Wiseman, as agents for New York bankers, were working against British interests, possibly channeling money to the Soviets.[12]

Old Odessa

Reilly began his espionage career on behalf of the Friends of Enlightenment, a movement of the Haskalah that sought the right of the Jewish community to fully integrate into society. Jewish leftism has its philosophic roots in the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, led by thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn, a claimed successor of Sabbatai Zevi. Like Trotsky, Sidney Reilly, who was born Georgy Rosenblum in 1873, came from Odessa, in what is now Ukraine, on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea, which for a time was the third largest Jewish city in the world. The city, which was founded by the Russian Empress Catherine the Great, centers on the site of the Ottoman fortress Khadzhibei, which was occupied by a Russian Army in 1789. Its early growth owed much to the work of the Duc de Richelieu (1766 – 1822), who served as the city's governor between 1803 and 1814. His contributions to the city are mentioned by Mark Twain in his travelogue Innocents Abroad: “I mention this statue and this stairway because they have their story. Richelieu founded Odessa—watched over it with paternal care—labored with a fertile brain and a wise understanding for its best interests—spent his fortune freely to the same end—endowed it with a sound prosperity, and one which will yet make it one of the great cities of the Old World.”

Odessa became home to an extremely diverse population of Albanians, Armenians, Azeris, Bulgarians, Crimean Tatars, Frenchmen, Germans (including Mennonites), Greeks, Italians, Jews, Poles, Romanians, Russians, Turks, Ukrainians. Its cosmopolitan nature was documented by the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, who lived in internal exile in Odessa between 1823 and 1824. H.P. Blavatsky also spent many years of her childhood in Odessa, where her maternal grandfather Andrei Fadeyev, a civil administrator for the imperial authorities, had recently been posted. In 1905, Odessa was the site of a workers uprising supported by the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin and the Menshevik’s Iskra, portrayed in Sergei Eisenstein’s famous movie The Battleship Potemkin.

Forbidden to reside in Saint Petersburg, Moscow or Kiev, Jews poured into the southern Russian cities of Odessa, eventually constituting a third of their population before the Second World War.[13] Odessa traditionally had an ancient culture of banditry, dating back to its large and impoverished Jewish population. Old Odessa, explains Jarrod Tanny in City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the myth of old Odessa, was also a “Judeo-kleptocracy,” a city overrun and governed by Jewish gangster, smugglers, thieves, pimps and swindlers. According to Tanny, “Old Odessa is Russia’s Great Southern Babylon, and successive generations of mythmakers have commemorated it in literature, film, humor, and song.”[14] Isaac Babel wrote Odessa Tales (1931), about tales of the Jewish gangsters of Odessa, for which he has been hailed as the greatest Russian Jewish writer that ever lived. Their legendary exploits created the myth of the Jewish gangster of Odessa, in stark contrast to the stereotype of the meek scholarly Jew dominant elsewhere.[15]

As one historian put it, “the Jewish community of Odessa continued to stand in the vanguard of nearly every modernist Jewish movement developed in the Russian empire.”[16] The Jewish community of Odessa was made up of Jews from all over Russia and also from other countries. The influence in Odessa of the Maskilim, exponents of the Jewish Enlightenment movement know as Haskalah, was considerable and also reached other parts of Russia. While the Haskalah achieved successes in Germany and Austria, the movement was largely rejected inside Russia, where members were often ostracized and persecuted.[17] Nevertheless, their numbers increased, and soon there were attempts to found schools to offer secular education to Jewish children. Hirsch (Hyman) Baer Hurwitz opened such a school in Uman in the Ukraine, in 1822, “after the system of Mendelssohn.”[18] Similar schools were established in Odessa and Kishinef, and later in Riga and Wilna. The Haskalah in Odessa began with a group of settlers who migrated to the city from Brody, a town in Austrian-controlled Galicia, who started arriving in the 1820s. In 1840 they opened up the Brodskii Synagogue, the first “modern” synagogue in Russia whose service was patterned on the reforms then taking place in Germany.[19] The Friends of Enlightenment was founded in 1879 by Rabbi Abraham Danon from Edirne, who later became director of the seminary founded by the Alliance Israélite Universelle at Constantinople.[20]

Pogroms were carried out in 1821, 1859, 1871, 1881 and 1905. Many Odessan Jews fled abroad after 1882, particularly to the Ottoman region that became Palestine, and the city became an important base of support for Zionism. From the inception of the Hibbat Zion movement Odessa served as its chief center.  Hovevei Zion (“Lovers of Zion”), also known as Hibbat Zion, refers to a variety of organizations which were founded in 1881 in response to the Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire and were officially constituted as a group at a conference led in 1884 by Leon Pinsker (1821 – 1891), who gained the backing of Baron Edmond de Rothschild. Pinsker, who had been influenced by the Haskalah, no longer believed that mere humanism and Enlightenment would defeat antisemitism. Many of the first groups were established in Eastern European countries in the early 1880s with the aim to promote Jewish immigration to Palestine, and advance Jewish settlement there. The Benei Moshe Society founded by Achad Ha-Am in 1889, which attempted to organize the intellectuals and activists of the movement, was established in Odessa. In 1897, when First Zionist Congress established the World Zionist Organization, most of the Hovevei Zion societies joined it.

Ace of Spies

According to reports of the tsarist political police the Okhrana, Reilly was arrested in 1892 for political activities and for being a courier the Friends of Enlightenment. After his release, Reilly’s father revealed to him that his mother was dead and that his biological father was her Jewish doctor Mikhail A. Rosenblum. Distraught by the news, he faked his death in Odessa harbor and stowed away aboard a British ship bound for Brazil. In 1895, Reilly had a sexual liaison in Italy with author Ethel Lilian Voynich, who in 1897 published The Gadfly, one of the most popular English-language novels of the twentieth century. Reilly, who supposedly “bared his soul” to her, served as a model for the novel’s central character, who is a bastard who feigns his suicide to escape his illegitimate past, and then travels to South America, and then later returns to Europe and becomes involved with Italian anarchists and other revolutionaries. Reilly apparently also modelled himself on the hero of Voynich’s novel, which loosely based on Giuseppe Mazzini and the Risorgimento in Italy.[21]

In 1896, he became a paid informant for the émigré intelligence network of William Melville, superintendent of Scotland Yard's Special Branch, and a friend of escape artist Harry Houdini.[22] In 1897, Reilly began an affair with Margaret Thomas, the young wife of Reverend Hugh Thomas, shortly before her husband’s death. In 1898, a week haver he appointed Margaret as an executrix to his well, Hugh Thomas was found dead. She inherited roughly £800,000, and Reilly married her four months later. In June 1899, Reilly and Margaret travelled to Emperor Nicholas II's Russian Empire using Reilly's forged British passport purportedly created by Melville.[23]

In 1905, Reilly appeared in Paris, having returned to Europe from the Far East, and “had become a self-confident international adventurer” who was “fluent in several languages” and whose intelligence services were highly desired by various great powers.[24] During the brief time Reilly spent in Paris he renewed his close acquaintance with Melville, who had become chief of a new intelligence section in the War Office. Melville was to use Reilly’s expertise in what would later become known as the D’Arcy Affair.

In 1904, as the Board of the Admiralty projected that petroleum would replace coal as the primary source of fuel for the Royal Navy, it was perceived to be necessary to secure sufficient supplies overseas. The British Admiralty had learned that an Australian mining engineer William Knox D’Arcy, who founded the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), had obtained a valuable concession in southern Persia and was negotiating a similar concession from the Ottoman Empire. The Admiralty initiated efforts to entice D’Arcy to sell his newly acquired oil rights to the British Government rather than to the French de Rothschilds. Dressed as a Catholic priest, Reilly entered the private discussions on board the Rothschild yacht and secretly informed D'Arcy that the British would provide him a better financial deal. D’Arcy promptly terminated negotiations with the Rothschilds and returned to London to meet with the British Admiralty.[25]

Black Hundred

Reilly hinted of his connections to international business and finance as the “Occult Octopus.”[26] Reilly is alleged to have spied for at least four different great powers.[27] Reilly worked closely with Russian double-agent Boris Brasol (1885 – 1963), a member of the Black Hundred, and founder of the Union of Czarist Army and Navy Officers, who was chiefly responsible for the dissemination of the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Brasol and Reilly were both members of the Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem (SOSJ), part of the Russian Tradition of the Knights Hospitaller, which evolved from the Knights of Malta, which would go on to have an important role in the creation of the Council of Foreign Relations. And although he would simultaneously collaborate with Soviet agents, Brasol also worked as an operative of American War Trade Intelligence and then the Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID). According to Richard Spence, “Over a span of at least four decades, Boris Brasol would work like a diligent spider weaving a far-flung web of hatemongering, intelligence peddling, and outright espionage, a kind of mirror image or, perhaps, unconscious parody of the worldwide conspiracy he claimed to combat.”[28]

According to study by Rita T. Kronenbitter, one of Brasol’s associates, Casimir Pilenas, was a spotter for Scotland Yard and was recruited as an informant for the Russian Okhrana by Pyotr Rachkovsky.[29] Rachkovsky was a supporter of the activities of the Union of the Russian People, a new right-wing organization formed in 1905, in the midst of socialist revolutionary upheaval, by members of the Russian Assembly in Saint Petersburg. The Union was the most important among the Black Hundred monarchist political organizations in the Russian Empire between 1905 and 1917. The Black Hundred were staunch supporters of the House of Romanov and were also noted for extremist Russo-centric doctrines, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and incitement to pogroms against the Jews.

It is widely suspected that it was under Rachkovsky’s authority that the Protocols of Zion were produced, which presented the impending Russian Revolution of 1905 as a part of a powerful global Jewish conspiracy.[30] According to Victor Marsden, it was Yuliana Glinka, an agent Rachkovsky and an associate of Blavatsky, who hired Joseph Schorst-Shapiro, a member of Maurice Joly’s Misraim Lodge, to obtain sensitive information, and purchased from him a copy of the Protocols which she then shared with Sergei Nilus, who produced the first Russian translation.[31] The purported forgers in Rachkovsky’s circle were also said to have made use of an earlier version of the Protocols discovered by Papus.[32]

Although Brasol was one of the key agents involved in the dissemination of the Protocols of Zion, outlining a “Judeo-Masonic” conspiracy, there were recurring rumors that he had Jewish ancestry. Pilenas claimed that “It has come to light that Brasol is of Hungarian Jewish descent, which fact I expect will be described fully in the press.”[33] Despite his anti-Semitism, Brasol didn’t seem to mind living around Jews. The 1920 U.S. census reveals he and his wife Eleanor dwelling in a boarding house on West 84 Street in New York, where fellow residents and neighbors included Walter Herzberg, Solomon Berkowitz, Moses and Joseph Bachrach, and Maurice and Marion Kaufman.[34]

Brasol served in the Imperial Russian Ministry of Justice, where he took part in the prosecution of the Beylis blood libel case, the most famous investigation of the Russian Empire. The body of 13-year-old Ukrainian boy Andrei Yushchinsky had been found on March 12, 1911, in a cave, having been stabbed 47 times and his blood drained. The evidence showed that the boy had been killed by one of many gangs that flourished in Kiev, but the Black Hundred sent word to Ivan Schleglovitoff—Minister of Justice, under whom Brasol worked as assistant that—that Andrei had been killed by a Jew for ritual purposes.[35] The murder revived Jews the age-old “Blood Libel” accusation, which claimed that Jews committed ritual murder of Christian children in order to obtain their blood. Vera Cheberyak, the mother of Andrei’s friend, gave the first testimony and blamed the Jews for the death of the child. Investigators blamed Mendel Beylis, a non-observant Hasidic Jew who worked in a nearby factory. Beylis spent two and a half years in jail awaiting the verdict, which concluded that Andrei had been killed in a ritual murder, but that Beylis was innocent.

During the pre-trial, the investigation was conducted by Nikolay Krasovsky, the foremost investigator of the Kiev Police Department, who only pretended to support the blood libel accusation, under the insistence of his superiors. After the verdict, Krasovsky continued his investigation privately, assisted by his former colleagues who were eventually able to determine that the actual killer was Vera Cheberyak, who was the leader of a criminal gang in Kiev that the police believed was responsible for scores of robberies. Cheberyak, it had been rumored, had taken advantage of the 1905 pogrom to loot fabulous amounts of property during the chaos. She was widely believed to have killed her own son to keep him quiet about her role in the boy’s killing. Evgeny Mishchuk, “chief of Kiev’s investigative police, or chief detective,” formulated a hypothesis that Andrei’s murder was committed “with the goal of simulating a ritual murder and inciting a pogrom.”[36]

Bolshevik Revolution

In 1917, Somerset Maugham undertook a mission to Russia for Sir William Wiseman. Dispatches from Russia, including those of Maugham, described “Jewish socialists” as the main tools of German intrigue in Russia, financed by Jewish financiers such as Max Warburg.[37] In 1913, less than a year before World War I officially began, a British intelligence agent Casimir Pilenas, a close associate of Brasol, had been sent to the to New York city to work under Wiseman. Casimir and his brother Peter emigrated from Russia to London, and around 1898 were recruited by Scotland Yard as “spotter-informants” to spy on Russian revolutionary expatriates.[38] A couple of years later, they began spying for the Okhrana and remained on its payroll until 1913, without ever quitting Scotland Yard. When World War I broke out, Pilenas was enlisted as a translator and informant and aided British intelligence with information about German intrigues among Russians in America.[39]

In August of 1916, after a brief stint in London, Brasol arrived in New York, where he became connected with the Russian Supply Committee. At the end of 1917, Pilenas came under the employ of the US Army’s Military Intelligence Division, as a result of a positive recommendation from Sir William Wiseman. On March 25, 1917, three days after Pilenas informed Wiseman of Trotsky’s plans, Trotsky appeared at the British Consulate—which was under Wiseman’s direct supervision—and received authorization to sail home for Russia to join the Revolution.[40] Trotsky later acknowledged the helpfulness of British officials who placed no obstacle on his travels.[41] In that same month, Wiseman himself cabled to London that Trotsky was about to sail for Russia backed by “Jewish funds… behind which are possibly German.”[42]

Maugham described “Jewish socialists” as the main tools of German intrigue in Russia, financed by Jewish financiers such as Max Warburg.[43] According to State Department Decimal File (861.00/5339), in a document entitled Bolshevism and Judaism, dated November 13, 1918, the Russian Revolution was financed and orchestrated by Jacob Schiff through Kuhn, Loeb & Company of New York. According to Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern in Lenin’s Jewish Question, Lenin’s great-grandfather was also Jewish, though the truth of his ancestry was suppressed by the Soviets until the 1980s.[44] Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein to a Ukrainian Jewish family. Trotsky, who did not receive a religious education, and probably never went to the synagogue, was partly educated in a Russian-German gymnasium in Odessa, inspired by the Haskalah.[45]

The French Freemason Rozie of the Jean Georges lodge in Paris hailed his Masonic brothers Lenin and Trotsky.[46] Lenin was a freemason of the 31º degree and a member of the French lodge Art et Travail.[47] Lenin was a member of the most notorious lodge of the Grand Orient, the Neuf Sœurs, in 1914.[48] Lenin, Grigori Zinoviev, a lifelong collaborator of Trotsky, (Grand Orient), Karl Radek (Grand Orient) and Yakov Sverdlov were also members of B’nai B’rith.[49] Explaining the reason for his interest in Freemasonry, Trotsky wrote, “In the eighteenth century Freemasonry became expressive of a militant policy of enlightenment, as in the case of the Illuminati, who were the forerunners of the revolution; on its left it culminated in the Carbonari… I discontinued my work on freemasonry to take up the study of Marxian economics… The work on freemasonry acted as a sort of test for these hypotheses… I think this influenced the whole course of my intellectual development.”[50]

Ludendorff had wanted Russia badly out of the war, especially so he could move his armies to the Western front to fight the British, French, and Americans, the latter of whom, days earlier, had officially entered the conflict. And so, Ludendorff, with the Kaiser’s financing and blessing, arranged to facilitate Lenin and his cohort’s famous return in a sealed train to St. Petersburg. The Kaiser even financed it.[51] The people who travelled with him included Gregory Zinoviev, Karl Radek, Inessa Armand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Georgi Safarov, Zinaida Lilina and Moisey Kharitonov. Ludendorff later admitted his involvement in his autobiography, My War Memories, 1914-1918 (1920), that he told senior officials: “Our government, in sending Lenin to Russia, took upon itself a tremendous responsibility. From a military point of view his journey was justified, for it was imperative that Russia should fall.”[52]

Double-Agents

According to his FBI file, Sidney Reilly, like Brasol, was also suspected of being double-agent. As reported by Richard Spence, the association between Brasol and Reilly almost certainly dates back to 1916-17, when Reilly was a war contractor doing business with the Russian Supply Committee in New York and Brasol was in charge of vetting those contractors. Reilly briefly managed to convince the British to engage one of Brasol’s allies, suspected Soviet spy Vladimir Orlov, as an asset. Orlov initially served the Bolsheviks before ostensibly moving over to the Whites, though there were many who always suspected him of being a Soviet agent, or at least a double agent. Orlov’s partner, Mikhail Pavlunovsky, alias Sumarokov, was himself a long-time OGPU (Soviet secret police) officer who had “defected” in Berlin, and another of Orlov’s closest collaborators, Nikolai Kroshko, was later revealed to be a secret Soviet agent as well.[53] Researcher Natalie Grant compiled a survey of Orlov’s career that makes a convincing—though largely circumstantial—case that Orlov was a conscious Soviet agent as of 1918.[54]

Reilly’s fame was created during the 1920s when Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart publicized their failed effort to overthrow the Bolshevik regime in 1918. In January of that year, Lockhart had been personally handpicked by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George to undertake a sensitive diplomatic mission to Soviet Russia.[55] As demonstrated in Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin’s Plot for Global Revolution by Giles Milton, Reilly was part of a British intelligence plot that supported White Russian forces fighting the Bolsheviks, as part of a larger effort to defeat the Red Army and support regional resistance leaders in states trying to establish themselves after the war.[56]

Lockhart and Reilly were alleged to have plotted to assassinate Lenin. Lockhart ordered Reilly to pursue contacts within anti-Bolshevik circles to sow the seeds for an armed uprising in Moscow. In May 1918, Lockhart, Reilly, and various agents of the Allied Powers repeatedly met with Boris Savinkov, head of the counter-revolutionary Union for the Defence of the Motherland and Freedom (UDMF), Savinkov was a key opponent of the Bolsheviks and was receptive to Allied offers to help depose the Soviet government. Lockhart, Reilly, and others then contacted anti-Bolshevik groups linked to Savinkov and Socialist Revolutionary Party cells affiliated with Savinkov’s friend Maximilian Filonenko. Lockhart and Reilly supported these factions with SIS funds.[57] On 30 August, Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, shot and wounded Lenin as he departed the Michelson arms factory in Moscow. The attack was widely covered in the Russian press, generating much sympathy for Lenin and boosting his popularity. The papers attributed credit for the coup to Reilly and, when he was identified as a key suspect, a dragnet ensued. Reilly was sentenced to death in absentia by a Bolshevik court in November 1918.[58]

Reilly was ultimately snared by Operation Trust, a counterintelligence operation of Soviet GPU which ran from 1921-1926. It created a phony anti-Bolshevik underground organization, the Monarchist Union of Central Russia (MUCR), in order to help the Soviets identify real monarchists and anti-Bolsheviks.[59] The MUCR’s purpose was not to overthrow Communism, but to manipulate real anti-communist organizations into misleading the West. The deception succeeded in neutralizing most of the anti-Communist exile groups, and luring back into the Soviet Union leading anti-Communists, such as Reilly and Savinkov, who were arrested and executed. According to Spence, “Whether he ended up dead or whether it was a disguised defection remains uncertain.”[60]

Moscow Purge Trials

Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Joseph Stalin had formed a ruling triumvirate in early 1923 after Lenin had become incapacitated from a stroke. The triumvirate was able to marginalize Trotsky over the issue of Stalin’s theory of Socialism in One Country. It was Trotsky, the prime force behind the Left Opposition, who most clearly represented the wing of the Communist Party leadership which claimed that the survival of the revolution depended on permanent revolution, through the spread of communism to the advanced European economies especially Germany.[61] A few years later, Zinoviev and Kamenev joined the United Front in an alliance with Trotsky which favored Trotskyism and opposed Stalin. Consequently, Stalin allied with Nikolai Bukharin and defeated Trotsky in a power struggle. Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and Kamenev and Zinoviev temporarily lost their membership in the Communist Party.

Bukharin eventually became critical of Stalin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), and lost his position in the Comintern and the editorship of Pravda, and he was expelled from the Politburo in 1929. International supporters of Bukharin, Jay Lovestone of the Communist Party USA among them, were also expelled from the Comintern. They formed an international alliance to promote their views, calling it the International Communist Opposition, though it became better known as the Right Opposition, after a term used by the Trotskyist Left Opposition in the Soviet Union to refer to Bukharin and his supporters there.

The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials held in the Soviet Union at the instigation of Joseph Stalin between 1936 and 1938 against Trotskyists and members of Right Opposition of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The defendants were Old Bolshevik party leaders and top officials of the Soviet secret police. Most defendants were charged under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code with conspiring with the Western powers to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, dismember the Soviet Union, and restore capitalism. The Moscow Trials led to the execution of many of the defendants. The Moscow Trials are generally seen as part of Stalin’s Great Purge or the Great Terror. It involved a large-scale repression of wealthy peasants, referred to as “kulaks,” genocide of ethnic minorities, a purge of the Communist Party and government officials, and the Red Army leadership, widespread police surveillance, suspicion of saboteurs, counter-revolutionaries, imprisonment, and arbitrary executions. Historians estimate the total number of deaths due to Stalinist repression in 1937–38 to be between 680,000 and 1,200,000.[62]

There were three Moscow Trials: the Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center, aka “Trial of the Sixteen,” in 1936; the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center, or the Pyatakov-Radek Trial, of 1937; and the Case of the Anti-Soviet “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites,” aka “Trial of the Twenty-One,” of 1938. In December 1935, the original case surrounding Zinoviev began to widen into what was called the Trotsky-Zinoviev Center. The main charge of the trial (aka Trial of the Sixteen) which was held in 1936 was forming a terror organization with the purpose of killing Joseph Stalin and other members of the Soviet government. Kamenev, Zinoviev and other leftist Old Bolsheviks were sentenced to death and were subsequently shot in the cellars of Lubyanka Prison in Moscow by NKVD chief executioner Vasily Blokhin.

The second trial in 1937 involved lesser figures including Karl Radek, Yuri Pyatakov and Grigory Sokolnikov. Thirteen of the defendants were eventually executed by shooting. The rest received sentences in labour camps. Radek was spared as he implicated others, including Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, setting the stage for the Trial of Military and Trial of the Twenty One of 1938.

As a leading Soviet military leader and theoretician from 1918 to 1937, Tukhachevsky was a driving force behind Soviet development of the theory of deep operations. When the Great Purge began in 1936, as Stalin sought to liquidate his former allies and rivals for power, he instructed NKVD Chief Nikolai Yezhov to torture and interrogate Tukhachevsky. Tukhachevsky confessed that Avel Yenukidze, a prominent “Old Bolshevik” and a member of the Soviet Central Committee in Moscow, had recruited him in 1928, and that he was a German agent in cahoots with Nikolai Bukharin to seize power.[63] Tukhachevsky was arrested on May 22, 1937 and charged, along with seven other Red Army commanders, with the creation of a “right-wing-Trotskyist” military and espionage conspiracy for Nazi Germany. At least 4 of Tukhachevsky’s co-conspirators were Jews, including Iona Yakir, Robert Eideman, Vitovt Putna, Boris Feldman, and Yan Gamarnik.[64] Vitaly Primakov, a legendary leader of the Red Cossacks, was married to a Jewish woman.[65] All were rehabilitated under Nikita Khrushchev in 1957.

In his 1968 book The Great Terror, British historian Robert Conquest accuses Nazi Party leaders Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich of forging documents that implicated Tukhachevsky in an anti-Stalinist conspiracy with the Wehrmacht General Staff, to weaken the Soviet Union’s defence capacity. Heydrich served as president of the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC, later known as Interpol) and chaired the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, which formalised plans for the Final Solution. Heydrich was directly responsible for the Einsatzgruppen, the special task forces which travelled in the wake of the German armies and murdered over two million people, including 1.3 million Jews, by mass shooting and gassing.

Bukharin was also tried in the Trial of the Twenty One, along with ex-premier Alexei Rykov, Christian Rakovsky, Nikolai Krestinsky, Genrikh Yagoda, and sixteen other defendants alleged to belong to the so-called “Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites.” In a trial meant to be the culmination of previous show trials, it was alleged that Bukharin and others sought to assassinate Lenin and Stalin from 1918, murder Maxim Gorky by poison, partition the Soviet Union and hand out her territories to Germany, Japan, and Great Britain. By the end of the final trial Stalin had arrested and executed almost every important living Bolshevik from the Revolution. Of 1,966 delegates to the party congress in 1934, 1,108 were arrested. Of 139 members of the Central Committee, 98 were arrested. Three out of five Soviet marshals, including Alexander Ilyich Yegorov, Vasily Blyukher, and Tukhachevsky, and several thousands of the Red Army officers were arrested or shot. Although Leon Trotsky, the key defendant, was living in exile abroad, he still did not escape Stalin’s desire to have him dead and was assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico in 1940.

[1] Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920. p. 5. Retrieved from http://www.fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/WSC/WSCwrote1920.html

[2] Churton. Aleister Crowley in America.

[3] Comte de St. Aulaire. Geneva Versus Peace (New York: Shee & Ward, 1937), pp. 80, 83-84.

[4] Carroll Quigley. Tragedy and Hope, A History of the World in Our Time (The Macmillan Co., NY, 1966), pp. 580-582

[5] Andreas Dorpalen. The World of General Haushofer. Geopolitics in Action (New York: Farrar & Rinehart Inc., 1942)

[6] Spence. Secret Agent 666. Kindle Locations 3570-3573.

[7] Yale University, Sterling Library, Special Collections, Sir William Wiseman Papers (WWP) 10/261, “Intelligence and Propaganda Work in Russia, July to December 1917”; cited in Richard B. Spence. Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult (Feral House, 2008). Kindle Location 3831.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Martin Booth. A Magick Life: The Biography of Aleister Crowley (London: Coronet Books, 2000), pp. 159–163.

[10] Ibid. pp. 164–167.

[11] Andrew Cook. On His Majesty’s Secret Service, Sydney Reilly Codename ST1 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing, 2004), p. 12.

[12] Spence. Secret Agent 666.

[13] “The Jewish Community of Odessa.” The Museum of the Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot.

[14] Jarrod Tanny. City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the myth of old Odessa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), p. 2.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Edmund Spencer. Travels in Circassia, 2 vols (London: H. Colburn, 1839), p. 97–98. Cited in Tanny. City of Rogues and Schnorrers, p. 29.

[17] Herman Rosenthal & Peter Wiernik. “HASKALAH (lit. “wisdom” or “understanding,” but used in Neo-Hebrew in the sense of “enlightenment,” “liberalism”).” Jewish Encyclopedia.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Jarrod Tanny. City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the myth of old Odessa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), p. 28.

[20] Isidore Singer, M. Franco. “DANON, ABRAHAM.” Jewish Encyclopedia.

[21] Mark Mazower. What you did not tell. A Russian past and the journey home (St Ives UK: Penguin Books, 2018), pp. 31–33.

[22] Briand Mefford. “James Bond is From Odessa.” The Odessa Review (July 18, 2016).

[23] Andrew Cook. On His Majesty’s Secret Service, Sydney Reilly Codename ST1 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing, 2004), pp. 44–50.

[24] Christopher Andrew. Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (Viking, 1986), p. 83.

[25] Richard B. Spence. Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly (Feral House, 2002), pp. 57–59.

[26] Gill Bennett. Churchill’s Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 61.

[27] Richard Deacon. Spyclopedia: The Comprehensive Handbook of Espionage (London: MacDonald, 1987), pp. 133–136.

[28] Spence. “The Tsar’s other lieutenant.”

[29] Rita T. Kronenbitter. “Paris Okhrana 1885-1905.” Center for the Study of Intelligence. Studies Archive Indexes. Vol. 10, No. 3. Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol10no3/html/v10i3a06p_0001.htm

[30] Martin J. Manning & Herbert Romerstein. Historical Dictionary of American Propaganda, p. 227; Eliza Slavet. Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question, p. 244; Bat Yeʼor. Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, p. 149; Michael Streeter. Behind Closed Doors: The Power and Influence of Secret Societies, p. 148; Avner Falk. Anti-Semitism: A History and Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Hatred, p. 147.

[31] Victor Marsden. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (Chicago: Patriotic Pub. Co., 1934), p. 100.

[32] Cesare G. De Michelis. The Non-Existent Manuscript: A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion, trans. Richard Newhouse (Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2004) p. 115.

[33] Pilenas to Nathan Isaacs, Nathan Isaacs Papers, Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio, Box 2, File 12, July 7, 1931; cited in Spence. “The Tsar's other lieutenant.”

[34] Spence. “The Tsar’s other lieutenant,” Part I, p. 200.

[35] John Roy Carlson. Under Cover (New York: E.P. Button & Co, 1943).

[36] Jonathan Yardley. “‘A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel ’ by Edmund Levin.” Washington Post (February 21, 2014).

[37] Spence. Secret Agent 666. Kindle Locations 3636-3639.

[38] “PILENAS, Casimir; pseudonym WALLENROD.” Okhrana Records, Paris, Deep Cover Agent (L-Z)-Russian, HIA, File 111F; cited in Richard Spence. “The Tsar's other lieutenant: the antisemitic activities of Boris L'vovich Brasol, 1910-1960 Part I: Beilis, the protocols, and Henry Ford.” Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (June 1, 2012).

[39] Richard Spence. “The Tsar’s other lieutenant: the antisemitic activities of Boris L'vovich Brasol, 1910-1960 Part I: Beilis, the protocols, and Henry Ford.” Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (June 1, 2012), p. 204.

[40] Spence. Secret Agent 666. Kindle Locations 3636-3639.

[41] Richard B. Spence. Wall Street and the Russian Revolution: 1905-1925 (Waterville, OR: TrineDay, 2017).

[42] Spence. Secret Agent 666. Kindle Locations 3636-3639.

[43] Ibid., Kindle Locations 3638-3639; Richard Spence. “Was Aleister Crowley a Secret Agent?” Dazed (July 17, 2008). Retrieved from http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/603/1/was-aleister-crowley-a-secret-agent

[44] Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern. Lenin’s Jewish Question (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 66–67.

[45] Isaac Deutscher. The Prophet Armed. Trotsky, 1879-1921 (New York, 1965), p. 13.

[46] La Libre Parole (6 February 1918).

[47] Oleg Platonov. Russia’s Crown of Thorns: The Secret History of Freemasonry 1731-1996 (Moscow, 2000), Volume 2, p. 417.

[48] Soviet Analyst (June, 2002). p. 12

[49] Viktor Ostretsov. Freemasonry, Culture, and Russian History (Moscow, 1999), pp. 582- 583.

[50] Leon Trotsky. My Life: The Rise and Fall of a Dictator. pp. 124-127.

[51] Louis Fischer. The Life of Lenin (NY: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 111.]

[52] General Erich Ludendorff. My War Memories, 1914-1918 (1920), p. 407.

[53] Spence. “The Tsar’s Other Lieutenant,” Part II, p. 690.

[54] Natalie Grant. Murder in the Tiergarten: The Political Life of Vladimir Orlov, Intelligence Agent and Disinformer (Washington, DC: Nathan Hale Institute, 1997); cited in Richard Spence. “The Tsar’s Other Lieutenant,” Part II, p. 690.

[55] John W. Long. “Searching for Sidney Reilly: The Lockhart Plot in Revolutionary Russia, 1918.” Europe-Asia Studies, 47, 7 (November 1995), p. 1227.

[56] Giles Milton. Russian Roulette: A Deadly Game: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin’s Global Plot (Hodder & Stoughton, 2014).

[57] Mike Thomson. “Did Britain try to assassinate Lenin?” BBC (March 19, 2011).

[58] John W. Long. “Searching for Sidney Reilly: The Lockhart Plot in Revolutionary Russia, 1918.” Europe-Asia Studies, 47, 7 (November 1995), p. 1225.

[59] Edward Jay Epstein. “Raymond Rocca: The Trust Breaker.” Retrieved from http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/diary/rocca.htm

[60] Ibid.

[61] L.D. Trotsky. “The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects.” Marxists Internet Archive (Progress Publishers, 1931).

[62] Robert W. Thurston. Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941 (Yale University Press, 1998). p. 139.

[63] Simon Sebag Montefiore. Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar. (Orion Publishing Group, 2010), p. 223.

[64] Alexey Vasiliev. Russia’s Middle East Policy (Routledge, 2018). John Erickson. The Soviet High Command: a Military-political History, 1918-1941: A Military Political History, 1918-1941 (Routledge, 2013) p. 426.

[65] Roman Brackman. The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life (Routledge, 2004).

Volume Three

1. Synarchy

2. Ariosophy

3. Zionism

4. Eugenics & Sexology

5. The Round Table

6. Black Gold

7. The League of Nations

8. avant-Garde

9. Secrets of Fatima

10. Polaires Brotherhood

11. Operation Trust

12. Aryan Christ

13. Aufbau

14. Brotherhood of Death

15. The Cliveden Set

16. Conservative Revolution

17. Eranos Conferences

18. Frankfurt School

19. Vichy Regime

20. Shangri-La

21. The Final Solution

22. Cold War

23. European Union