I watched Casino Royale, my first James Bond movie ever, this weekend. Someone told me Ian Fleming based Bond on a real spy, so I did a little digging. With pleasure, I bring you Sidney Reilly, the real life James Bond.
A high-roller playboy who was as smart as he was cunning, English spy Sidney Reilly was actually…Ukranian.* As far as what we know for sure about his early life, he was almost certainly illegitimate, almost certainly Jewish, and almost certainly up for anything. He said he went to University of Heidelberg,* he said he went to Cambridge,* he said his dad was an Irish merchant*- long story short, he said a lot of things, but most of them were not true. This is probably unsurprising to you if you’ve seen any James Bond movies or are familiar with the general outline of the job description of “spy.” Anyway, Sidney Reilly was not his real name, since that’s not really a thing Russian people are generally named. It was probably Georgi Rosenblum.*
