444 • RELATOR
An announcement of Reilly’s death was made in theTimeson 15
December 1925 but in reality he had by then been dead for more than
a month. He had been kept a prisoner, under constant interrogation,
until his execution on 5 November by a single bullet in the back of
the head. Documents purporting to have come from Reilly’s dossier,
recently released from theKGB archives, show that he was driven
into the woods near Bogorodsk and shot, and then buried in the
courtyard of an OGPU prison. There are, however, various reports of
uncertain reliability indicating that Reilly was either a Soviet-con-
trolleddouble agent—a theory propounded in 1968 by a leading ac-
ademic, Revolt Pimenov—or that he survived his imprisonment, a
claim made to George Hill in 1943 by hisNKVDcontact, Colonel
Ossipov.
Reilly’s widow Pepita persisted in her attempts to extract informa-
tion from the British authorities, and even approached Churchill for
help, but he insisted that her husband ‘‘did not go into Russia at the
request of any British official, but went there on his own private af-
fairs.’’ Heartbroken by these rebuffs, she arranged for Reilly’s mem-
oirs, which contained the names of several senior SIS officers, to be
published. Her intention was to embarrass SIS and force them to help
her husband, but by the time she had finished the necessary editorial
work and the book was released, Reilly could not be saved.
RELATOR.SeeMAD DOG.
REMORSE. Special Operations Executivecode name for a sophisti-
cated financial operation conducted by a rubber merchant, Walter
Fletcher, andEdward Wharton-Tigar, which exploited the wartime
Chinese currency market and manipulated the local black market in
dollars.remorsewas an extraordinarily successful operation and
was backed by the British Treasury to fundReuter’s News Agency,
the Red Cross, the British Embassy, the Ministry of Information, and
the clandestine services.
RENNIE, SIR JOHN.Chief of theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS)
from 1968 to 1973, Rennie and his predecessor were the only Chiefs
appointed from outside SIS. He had no background in intelligence,
although he had spent five years, from 1953 to 1958, running theIn-
formation Research Department(IRD).