The attempt to assassinate Vladimir Lenin and to depose the Bolshevik government is considered by biographers to be Reilly's most daring exploit. The Ambassadors' Plot, later misnamed in the press as the Lockhart-Reilly Plot, has sparked considerable debate over the years: Did the Allies launch a clandestine operation to overthrow the Bolsheviks in the later summer of 1918 and, if so, did Felix Dzerzhinsky's Cheka uncover the plot at the eleventh hour or did they know of the conspiracy from the outset? At the time, the dissembling American Consul-General DeWitt Clinton Poole publicly insisted the Cheka orchestrated the conspiracy from beginning to end and that Reilly was a Bolshevik agent provocateur. Later, Robert Bruce Lockhart would state that he was "not to this day sure of the extent of Reilly's responsibility for the disastrous turn of events."