The British Culture of Assassination in WWI: Communists Were Lured With the Promise of Sex, But Were Met By Assassins

Duncan Gardham, the security corespondent for the British newspaper The Telegraph, wrote an interesting piece about the British culture of assassination during World War I.

A generation before Ian Fleming dreamed up his character James Bond's license to kill, the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, was involved in assassinations.

Gardham's source is a book called Six: A History of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, Part I, a new history of the intelligence service written by former military intelligence officer Michael Smith.

The book details how a Cossack Colonel, working as a British agent, lured several communists, including Soviet officials, to a lakeside villa with the promise of sex. The communists were then tortured and killed.

The book also covers Sidney Reilly, the British agent known as the "Ace of Spies," who planned to kill the entire Soviet leadership in 1918. Reilly (seen in the above Telegraph photo) was in turn murdered by the Soviets.

You can read the newspaper piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/defence/8010063/Communists-lured-to-their-deaths-by-MI6-with-promise-of-sex.html