Andrew Cook

He was a manipulative person, almost to the extent that people wouldn't realize they were being manipulated.

Some people have gone so far as to say he was a sociopath.

He may well have been.

But he was a very able person intellectually and in his ability to get what he wanted from people.

Rosenblum, as he was at the time, was actively and almost openly associating with people that Scotland Yard were a bit concerned about.

Rosenblum was recruited by Melville effectively as an informant, keeping an eye and informing on people in revolutionary and radical circles in London.

Melville found a birth certificate for a child who died at birth almost, and that was Sidney Riley.

He was given a passport and off he went with his new wife at the end of 1898.

We can actually place him in most of the places he claimed he was at.

So whether that's in Manchuria, whether it's in Japan, whether it's in St.

Petersburg,

Despite all his many stories about being behind German lines in the First World War, having met the Kaiser, posing as a German officer, all this hullabaloo, not a word of it's true.

The nearest he got to the front line in the First World War was when he was sitting in the cinemas of Manhattan watching the newsreels about what was happening in Europe.

For most of World War I, he was living in the lapper luxury in New York, more money than he knew what to do with.

He was an arms salesman.

He made the modern equivalent of millions procuring arms for the Russians in the First World War, but all through the luxury of an armchair in a Fifth Avenue hotel.

What happened?

Bolsheviks came along and seized power and closed down the country.

You know, you couldn't get into Russia if you were an outsider.

So all of a sudden, Ryle is in panic mode.