[citation needed] In 1901, Trilisser joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in Odessa and was arrested in the same year for revolutionary activities.
As the Bolsheviks regained territory in the Far East from the Japanese, Trilisser worked underground in the Russian-Chinese border town of Blagoveshchensk, north of Harbin.
[1] As such, Trilisser played a significant role in the "Trust" operation, among whose achievements were penetration of counter-Soviet and White Russian organizations and the capture and executions of Boris Savinkov and British super spy Sidney Reilly.
Replacing Osip Pyatnitsky, on 10 August 1935, Trilisser was appointed a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern,[5] and became head of its Department of International Relations (OMS), which handled subsidies to foreign communist parties.
Another of Trilisser's tasks was to recruit covert couriers to supply funds, training, and political support to various overseas communist movements deemed sympathetic to the Soviet Union.
[5] In the United States, Trilisser provided Soviet visas for couriers sent to supply funds to left-wing trade unions, African-American worker organizations, and communist movements, including the CPUSA.
Bedacht soon began traveling between the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union as a courier, using his official cover as an international delegate for the American Communist Party.
[10] In 1983, his character appears in the final episodes of Reilly, Ace of Spies, portrayed by an English actor Anthony Higgins.