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.