Andrew Cook

You're this superhero guy.

Are you really telling us you're frightened to cross the border just for a day?

And his pride gets the better of him.

And there is a rumor that Riley is one of the people who is shot crossing the border.

Of course he wasn't.

He's put in a cell, cell 73, for weeks on end.

He's given some drugs and all the rest of it.

We've got a pretty good idea they were asking him because he kept cigarette papers and he wrote down in very, very tiny handwriting on these cigarette papers what he was being asked and allegedly what his replies were and all the rest of it.

Now, he thought at the time, and it's very sad, I guess, in a way, a bit of sentimentality, he genuinely believed that he just had to hold out as long as possible and good old Britain would find some way of rescuing him.

But that was never ever going to happen.

Quite a sad old story.

You know, he'd manipulated more people than you could throw a stick at, particularly women.

I mean, all the talk about the countless mistresses and women and vigorous wives and all the rest of it, it was the same sort of patto and the same sort of seduction that he used when trying to get information out of people for intelligence purposes.

And he was very good at it.

But as I say, every dog has his day.

And unfortunately, that was the 25th of November, 1925.

How do you describe somebody like Sidney Riley?

He was a one-off.

He was an enigma within an enigma.

He wasn't a likeable person.