Loyal MI6 Spy or Nazi-Soviet Triple Agent?
Legendary British intelligence officer Dick Ellis deserves a break, author Jesse Fink argues.
THE QUEST TO UNDERSTAND the twists and uncertainties of espionage can be mind-bending, “a wilderness of mirrors,” James Jesus Angleton, the folkloric chief of CIA counterintelligence famously called it, an “ever-fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.”
Welcome to the new world of Jesse Fink and his book, The Eagle in the Mirror, the story of Charles Howard “Dick” Ellis, a fellow Australian who rose to the pinnacle of Western intelligence, but was suspected late in life of having worked all along for the Nazis and the Soviet Union, in effect, a triple agent. The book was published in the U.K. last year but hits U.S. bookstores May 21.
Anyone remembering the name Dick Ellis might associate him with the 1976 global bestseller (and subsequent 1979 David Niven miniseries), A Man Called Intrepid and its 1983 sequel, Intrepid’s Last Case, in which Ellis plays second fiddle to the title character, a fictionalized version of William Stephenson, his real-life boss at MI6 at the start of World War II. In fact, Fink tells us, Ellis originally wrote the foreword to the first book, but died before publication. Both books were penned in turn (with all due confusion) by a Canadian writer of a similar name, William Stevenson. Further convoluting matters, the story of Intrepid has been roundly criticized by historians as flawed and inaccurate. Welcome to the hall of mirrors.
[My 2022 SpyTalk review of the book, Agents of Influence by Henry Hemming, deals with the real story of Intrepid, Stephenson and Stevenson.]
Ellis grew up impoverished in the Sydney suburb of Annandale, close to where Jesse Fink’s father lives. His father suggested the author sort out the story. The project was a departure for Fink, whose earlier books focused on the Miami cocaine wars and the foibles of the Australian hard-rock group AC/DC. It was not an easy transition.
“What I didn’t realize was just how profoundly difficult it would be,” writes Fink. “I feel like I went down a very deep rabbit hole attempting to piece together Ellis’s movements over the 80 years of his life, but it was worth it.”
Fink found that Ellis, though never officially charged, fell under suspicion in the 1960s as having been a mole for both the Germans and Soviets for decades. Several sources, citing anonymous intelligence sources, said that Ellis had been called before a special MI6 committee and had confessed. But other authors said that no such thing had happened.
Fink pored over reams of articles, documents and pamphlets, and dozens of books, for The Eagle in the Mirror, which reads at times like a legal brief in defense of Ellis, the forgotten 20th century British spy. The documentation, the notes, and the tendency to double back to facts already mentioned make this no easy read. Perhaps that is necessary in the hall of mirrors in which espionage lives.
The author, in fact, describes the book as “a cold case investigation” rather than a biography. He tells us at the outset that he has gathered information—one third of the book is an extensive bibliography and notes— that he thinks amounts to showing that Ellis was innocent as charged.
“Was Ellis a traitor or forgotten war hero or both? That is ultimately for the reader to decide,” Fink writes in his introduction. “The case I present and what I believe, on balance, ultimately amounts to his vindication.”
Ellis may not be well-known beyond the works of historians and those of us who obsess over the spy vs. spy tales of World War Two. Yet, while we may never know for sure whether Dick Ellis betrayed MI6 to the enemy, he certainly has an interesting curriculum vitae.
Born in 1895, Ellis enlisted in the British Army during World War I, after which, in 1921, he joined the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. No doubt this foreigner’s ticket to the Empire’s inner sanctum was aided by an apparent talent for languages. Having already studied Russian, he eventually came to speak French, German, Urdu, Farsi and Turkish, along with some fluency in Mandarin, Italian and Spanish. But he became an expert on Russia and Central Asia.
Ellis rose to prominence at the start of World War II, serving in 1940 as William Stephenson’s deputy in British Security Coordination, a New York office whose mundane title belied its clandestine mission to secretly manipulate American public opinion into entering the war against Nazi Germany. There he established a relationship with William J. Donovan and is credited with helping set up and counsel Donovan on the creation of a modern U.S. intelligence apparatus, which in 1941, became the U.S. Office of the Coordinator of Information. A year later the COI split into two pieces, the Office of War Information, and the Office of Strategic Services, the espionage and paramilitary agency that operated under Donovan and would eventually meld into the CIA.
‘Without [Ellis's] assistance... ,” Fink quotes OSS colonel and later diplomat David K. E. Bruce, “American intelligence could not have gotten off the ground in World War II.”
The claims against Ellis come from several British authors who base their reporting on unnamed intelligence sources. They include the contention that he passed along a comprehensive MI6 organizational chart to officials of the Abwehr—German military intelligence—including names of assets and the addresses of safe houses.
Furthermore, one of Ellis’s principal detractors, Chapman Pincher, a British journalist, wrote in 1981 that Ellis “broke down after interrogation in 1965 [interviewed by an MI6 committee, the so-called Fluency Committee] and confessed to having spied for Germany before and during the early stages of the war.” The charge of spying for Moscow is based on the word of a Soviet defector after World War II about a mole codenamed “ELLI” who had penetrated MI6. ELLI has never been identified, but there was speculation, in part because of the name, that this was Dick Ellis.
Pincher, who died in 2014, summed up his case by comparing Ellis to the worst of traitors in British history, worse even than Kim Philby, the senior MI6 officer who was unmasked as a Soviet mole and escaped to Moscow in 1963.
Fink, on the other hand, notes that no proof of the existence of that confession has emerged, and that Pincher does not cite his source. “The problem, of course is MI5 and MI6 aren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act,” Fink writes, “and aren’t legally or morally obliged to cough up anything, especially a confession” of another high ranking mole.
Another specific claim about Ellis was that he allegedly told the Nazis that Britain was wiretapping a secret hotline from the German embassy in London to Berlin, established before the war for personal communications between Hitler and his ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Exploiting Ellis’s linguistic skills, British intelligence had assigned him to monitor and translate the calls placed on the hotline.
Fink offers several explanations for suspicions of Ellis’s treachery. First, it could have been that MI6 ordered Ellis to establish his bona fides with his German contacts in a counterintelligence operation. That view is bolstered by MI6 officer Anthony Cavendish, who said in 1984 that, “any connections Dick Ellis had with the Abwehr were simply part of his duties in working for British intelligence.” It was also possible that Ellis might have acted on his own, and that the value of what information he provided the Nazis was minimal. A third possibility was that Ellis was not involved in trading secrets at all.
If Ellis was an agent for the Germans, how was it, asks Fink, that he did not provide his alleged Nazi masters with more important secrets, such as the fact that British codebreakers had broken Germany’s Enigma cipher code as early as 1941?
Writes Fink, “The issue of whether Ellis’s confession exists (I suspect it does, in some form; perhaps more of an inconclusive interview than a full-blown admission of guilt) obscures what is really the core issue: the whole circumstantial case against Ellis is so doubtful that he deserves the benefit of that doubt.” [sic]
Despite the clouds that followed his career, Ellis held the rank of colonel, won a number of royal titles, including the prestigious designation, Commander of the British Empire, and garnered praise during and after his life from his peers and superiors at MI6. In 1981, more than a decade after Ellis’s purported confession as a Nazi and alleged Soviet triple agent, Ellis’s family appealed to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that she clear his name. Thatcher stopped short of doing so, saying that would be a breach of precedent, though she wrote a kind of apology to Ellis’s daughter, Ann. “I am very sorry for the distress that you are suffering on account of the reference to your father in Chapman Pincher’s book and I deplore as strongly as you do his attacks on the memories of those who are no longer living and cannot defend themselves.”
Fink also notes that Maurice Oldfield, who had been “C,” the chief of MI6, from 1973-1978, trusted Ellis and sent him greetings on his 80th birthday, five months before Ellis died. Fink quotes Oldfield’s biographer, Donald McCormick (pen name Richard Deacon), as saying that the question of Ellis’s loyalty to Britain had long before been resolved. In addition, the biographer offered information suggesting that any material handover of files to the Germans was coordinated with officials. MI6, McCormick said, had maintained wartime contacts with dissident members of German military intelligence. Oldfield, he said “made the point again and again in private conversation that ‘without aid from our friends inside the German Abwehr, we shouldn’t have won the war quite so soon.’” Problematically, McCormick, who died in 1998, having worked for British Naval Intelligence during World War II, was sometimes challenged for his own veracity in his writings. Hall of mirrors again.
Fink turns to unassailable sources, though. Ellis’s “adventures not only rival those of James Bond; he was James Bond,” writes Fink, quoting the late Australian journalist and authoritative author Phillip Knightley. Knightley interviewed Kim Philby extensively for his book, The Master Spy – The Story of Kim Philby.
Though Fink is calling for Ellis’s exoneration, he does hedge a bit. He’s merely calling for giving Ellis the benefit of the doubt, he says. “Without irrefutable proof of treason and judged on the breadth of his career, Ellis should be remembered not as a traitor but as one of the great intelligence officers of the 20th century.”
The author knows, however, that he is dealing with the distorted realities of the spy trade. Wherever the truth is to be found, he concludes “Dick Ellis, a good man, could look in the mirror and be happy with what he saw.” Mirrors, alas, are fundamental props in the espionage trade.
SpyTalk Contributing Editor Peter Eisner is the author of a nonfiction trilogy about World War II: The Freedom Line, The Pope’s Last Crusade, and MacArthur’s Spies.
And so the cold dead hand of Chapman Pincher reaches out from beyond the grave to continue to advance his unsupported allegations. He was the worst type of journalist: the kind who realise there is a grey area of innuendo and accusation you can operate in because no one can prove you're wrong. In his case it was easy to prosper because to contradict him with evidence would involve breaking the Official Secrets Act and the certainty of a prison sentence. Pincher was simply a gossip merchant used by the security services in their incessant infighting. Maurice Oldfield received much the same treatment. As did the Director-General of MI5, Roger Hollis, and also Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
It's also fascinating (and a warning to us all) how susceptible intelligence officers and journalists are to uncomfirmable rumours that play on our prejudices.