Andrew Cook

Lockhart was tenuously involved, but you might more accurately call it the Riley plot.

So he was up to his eyes in that.

A lot of people would argue, and I'm pretty convinced of this myself, it was never a real plot.

It was actually started by Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Chekhov, and it was designed at a time of maximum peril to the Bolsheviks because they were on the edge.

It could have gone either way for them.

They could have been pushed out at that time.

They'd only been in power a short period of time, and their regime didn't have deep roots.

The quick solution is to create a number of fictitious conspiracies and plots and see how many anti-Bolsheviks come running to sign up to it.

And that's exactly what happened in 1918.

Even after the war, they kept him on for two or three years, which was actually quite unusual.

But Riley stays on the books till about 1922.

He does earn the king's shilling doing the job they pay him to do, but his number one concern is Sidney George Riley.

By this time, by the way, he's got big debts.

He made an absolute fortune in St.

Petersburg, and he made an even bigger fortune during the First World War as an arms dealer in the States.

But like a lot of people who make massive fortunes very quickly, he's not very good at looking after it.

He spends it quicker than he earns it, and he's living this luxury lifestyle.

I mean, that's about the only probably tangible comparison to James Bond in that era.

He's living in five-star hotels, drinking champagne like it's going out of fashion, digging into caviar.

He's got a luxury lifestyle that most people would just pass out at hearing about.