Free Ace of Spies by Andrew Cook Page A

mind the intimate relationship between Ginsburg & Company and the Pacific fleet, it is highly probable that Reilly would have come into regular contact with port and naval officials at all levels. In fact, many of the naval contacts he utilised in later years were initially made during his time in Port Arthur.
    Reilly and Ho are further linked by their mutual disappearance, for shortly after Ho’s escape, Reilly too departed. In 1917 Moisei Ginsburg recalled that Reilly had ‘suddenly vanished’, leading the local Russians to conclude that he was a spy. 26 Winfried Ludecke and Richard Deacon have both maintained that Reilly concluded the Russians had their suspicions about him after discovering someone associated with East-Asiatic was in the employ of Russian intelligence. 27 This theory again finds corroboration in Moscow archives, which reveal that one of Russia’s most valuable espionage finds was a British citizen by the name of Horace Collins who indeed happened to work for the East-Asiatic Company. Collins was born on 12 March 1870 in Hever, Kent. 28 His father was a well-to-do farmer, and Horace grew up workingwith horses, eventually taking up an apprenticeship as a jockey at the nearby Lingfield stables. On completion of his apprenticeship in 1893 he went to the Far East, where he eventually secured a job at the stables of the Japanese Emperor. It was during this period that he learnt to speak Japanese and a Chinese language. Although moderately successful as a jockey, it was not long before he took to business, making the most of his oriental languages and travelling widely on behalf of various trading houses in China, Korea, Japan and eastern Russia.
    There is no indication in Russian records as to how Collins was recruited as a spy, although money may well have been a factor. It would seem from the commentary in his file that he was not exactly prospering in business when he was first recruited. From the Russian point of view, he was most useful by virtue of his language abilities and his knowledge of Japan and her people. Accordingly, the Russians were paying him $300 per month plus expenses. 29
    Whether Reilly’s discovery of the Russian agent was made by chance or through a third party is unknown. However, bearing in mind the suggestion that he was involved in an affair with a woman by the name of Anna, one candidate stands out in particular – Anna Grigoryevna Collins, Horace Collins’ Russian-born wife. 30 She not only knew of his work for the Russians, but was also known to be having an affair with an associate of her husband.
    Having made a swift exit from Port Arthur, Winfried Ludecke suggests that Reilly headed for Japan in the company of ‘a lady with whom he had been flirting’. 31 Whether Anna and the lady companion are one and the same is conjecture. If Reilly did go to Japan, he could not have stayed there very long, for in June 1904 we find him in Paris. 32 During the brief time he spent in the city he renewed his acquaintance with William Melville, whom he had last seen in 1899, shortly before his hurried departure from London. Reilly’s meeting with Melville is most significant, for within a matter of weeks Melville was to enlist his help in what would later become known as the D’Arcy Affair.
    Authors writing about Reilly’s role in the D’Arcy Affair have often relied on Reilly’s own tale of what happened. Other sources lead to a rather different train of events. The background to the affair is succinctly set out in a letter of reminiscence dated 30 April 1919 from E.G. Pretyman MP to Sir Charles Greenway, the chairman of The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, 33 in which Pretyman recounts his own involvement some fifteen years earlier, as Civil Lord of the Admiralty, in securing the Persian oil concession for Britain, which led indirectly to the founding of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company:
    In 1904 it became obvious to the Board of the Admiralty that petroleum would largely supersede coal as