Too Secret Too Long, page 58
In its first formal report, in 1967, the Fluency Committee concluded that the evidence indicated that MI5 had been penetrated by one or more Soviet agents over many years since the departure of the only proven MI5 spy, Anthony Blunt. Totting up what it called ‘debits’ and ‘assets’ it named Sir Roger Hollis and Graham Mitchell as the likeliest suspects and, because so many suspicious incidents were attributable to Hollis, the Committee believed that the Hollis case should be developed without delay by interrogating him but, knowing Furnival Jones’s antipathy to such a step, it recommended that Mitchell should be interrogated first. Furnival Jones agreed and the interrogation was carried out with results which cleared Mitchell to the Committee’s satisfaction, as already described.
Sir Dick White, as head of MI6, received a copy of the Fluency Committee’s report but nobody else outside MI5 did so and knowledge of the Committee’s existence and its findings was restricted to the minimum number of people inside MI5.
chapter forty-five
The Ellis Case
Among the unsolved suspected cases of penetration of the secret services taken off the shelf by the Fluency Committee for re-examination was that of Colonel Charles Howard Ellis, a senior MI6 officer known to his friends as ‘Dick’. The case had caused deep concern in MI5 at the end of the Second World War, when evidence had indicated that he might have been spying for the Germans, and again in the early 1950s following the Philby case. On both occasions MI6 had refused to consider the possibility, rejecting it as absurd, and when the Fluency Committee approached Hollis about reopening the case he, too, was dismayed. He warned the chairman that it would make MI5 very unpopular with the MI6 management but Hollis’s deputy, Furnival Jones, said that he would deal with any objections from MI6, which he eventually did.
The files showed that Ellis, who was born in Sydney in 1895, had been an outstanding student of modern languages, had served in the Middlesex Regiment during the First World War and had then taken part in British operations in Transcaspia against the Bolsheviks, when he had learned some Russian.[1] He had continued his studies at Oxford, arriving there in 1920, and had then spent some time in Paris, at the Sorbonne, perfecting his French. While there he also improved his Russian, becoming almost bilingual, by marrying a White Russian from an émigré family called Zilenski. His qualifications had enabled him to work for the British Foreign Office in junior diplomatic posts and he had then moved into MI6 as an agent in 1924 in Berlin, where his cover was his appointment as an officer in the British Passport Control Office, and in Paris where he worked among the Russian émigrés. The White Russian community in Paris was known to include spies who were working for both German and Soviet Intelligence to earn money, and Ellis’s task there was to make use of them wherever possible and transmit his findings to London. He worked as a journalist to provide extra cover and had managed to recruit several promising agents, including his young brother-in-law, Alexander Zilenski, whom he was later to blame for his own known treachery.[2]
Alexander proved useful to him because he had access to a White Russian, Waldemar von Petrov, who was influential in the movement to overthrow the Soviet régime, then centred in Paris. Von Petrov was friendly with two leading generals in this anti-Bolshevik group, who were really Soviet spies – Nikolai Skobline and Prince Turkul. General Skobline was to become notorious in 1937 as being responsible for the kidnapping by the Russians of General Eugene Miller, a former Czarist staff chief, who was almost certainly executed.[3] Turkul, who was later to take part in a major Soviet deception exercise against the Germans when the Soviet Union was forced into the war, had succeeded in gaining the trust of Himmler, the Gestapo chief, and Alfred Rosenberg, who were both close to Hiltler.[4] Through such sources Ellis was able to provide a lot of information about the internal affairs of the Nazi Party but much of it proved to be false, either because it had been faked by informants or dreamed up by Ellis himself to improve his standing at headquarters. When questioned, Ellis blamed the sources, and Zilenski in particular, but he was distrusted for a long time, recalled to London and barred from headquarters, though not dismissed.
With MI6’s rapid expansion in 1938 due to the imminence of war, Ellis, who had divorced his Russian wife and married an English woman, had been taken back and by August 1940 was sufficiently re-established to be sent to New York to become deputy head of British Security Co-ordination (B.S.C.) with the rank of Colonel.[5] This organization had been set up on Churchill’s initiative to collect intelligence about clandestine German activities in America and to secure every type of assistance from the U.S. Government for the Allies. Its chief was William Stephenson, later knighted, a rich Canadian inventor and businessman, who had selected Ellis, having been impressed by him in London. When the U.S. entered the war, after Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, B.S.C. became much more important with a staff eventually numbering 1,000. When its story was eventually told, Stephenson became famous as ‘Intrepid’, the code-name he had adopted for his communications with London.[6]
American documents released under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that the U.S. State Department was misled over Ellis’s true function. He was officially listed as ‘His Britannic Majesty’s Consul in New York’, which gave him diplomatic immunity in the event of any clandestine activities to which the U.S. Government would have objected.[7] The F.B.I. knew the truth, however, as is made clear by Dusko Popov, the wartime double agent being run by the British Double Cross Committee to feed false information to the Germans.[8] There is also F.B.I. evidence that Ellis acted clandestinely in the U.S. using the alias ‘Howard.’[9]
Ellis’s relations with the F.B.I. might repay critical study by historians because he could, possibly, have been responsible for Hoover’s decison to ignore a clear warning from Popov about the forthcoming attack on Pearl Harbor. Ellis might have given a bad report on Popov to Hoover, who became aggressively unpleasant to the agent and disinclined to believe anything he said. On the other hand, if Ellis had still been assisting the German intelligence authorities he would have told them what he knew about the Double Cross operation and there is no evidence that they learned anything about it.
Ellis returned to MI6 headquarters in London in 1944, eventually being awarded the U.S. Legion of Merit to add to the C.M.G., C.B.E. and O.B.E. he had received from Britain. In 1946 he was promoted to be MI6 Controller responsible for South-East Asia and the Far East, based in Singapore. Following discussions in London he was sent to Australia in 1950 to give advice about the new Australian Secret Intelligence Service (A.S.I.S.). He also became MI6 Controller of North and South American Affairs, which meant that for several years he was in charge of MI6’s activities in almost half the world and was, effectively, number three in the hierarchy.
Until 1951 there had been no suspicion concerning Ellis’s loyalty, apart from the occasion when he was thought to have manufactured intelligence, which had been explained away as the exuberance of youth. But evidence of his treachery then emerged by accident, as it so often does in intelligence affairs.
MI5 officers who were convinced that Philby had betrayed their case against Maclean began to examine old documents for clues, including statements made by Krivitsky, the Soviet defector who had been based in Holland, from which certain Soviet spies operating in Britain had been controlled. When he had been debriefed in London in 1940, Krivitsky had said that a White Russian called von Petrov had been an important G.R.U. agent and had valuable sources of secret information in Britain.[10] One source, in particular, had supplied highly secret details about the British Secret Intelligence Service itself. When investigators examined the old file on von Petrov they found that according to the testimony of an Abwehr (German Secret Service) officer who had been interrogated after the Nazi defeat, the White Russian had also been a source of intelligence about Britain for the Germans. This officer had also named Zilenski as having a good source inside British Intelligence. The file contained the evidence of a German naval officer in the Abwehr who had known the source’s name as Captain Ellis. He had also stated that Ellis was an Australian and had a Russian wife. He claimed that Ellis had provided the Abwehr with documents giving MI6 the ‘order of battle’ – its organization and personnel, including their specific duties.
The Abwehr officers’ evidence also recorded that this Captain Ellis had warned the Germans, before the war, that the British were listening in to secret telephone links set up between von Ribbentrop, the German Ambassador in London, and Hitler in Berlin and that the conversations had, therefore, been ended.
The MI5 officers could not understand why no action had been taken to track down Captain Ellis and question him at the time and the reason was not to emerge until much later: because of the White Russian connection the information had been passed to the MI6 head of Soviet counter-espionage for action. That official was Philby, who had written on the report, ‘Who is this man Ellis? N.F.A.’ N.F.A. meant No Further Action and the document was duly filed and forgotten. At that time Ellis was working in an office in MI6 headquarters a few doors down from Philby.
The operation against the German telephone link had been conducted by MI6, so in 1953, when the MI5 officers had progressed as far as they could, they asked MI6 to look at their old records of it, not having any right of access to them themselves. The first reaction from MI6 was that nobody there could recall any such operation and that the Abwehr information in the MI5 files must have been ‘disinformation’. Under pressure, however, the records were found, and while agreeing that somebody must have warned the Germans that the line was being tapped MI6 denied that Ellis had ever been involved in the operation or had any access to information about it. There is no doubt now that in 1953, incensed at MI5’s suspicions against Philby, which his colleagues believed to be unwarranted, MI6 was totally opposed to supporting any suspicions against another MI6 officer as senior as Ellis then was.
Undeterred, the MI5 men re-examined an event which had made international headlines – the ‘Venlo Incident’ when, in November 1939, the Abwehr had laid a successful trap for the two chief MI6 officers operating in Holland, which was then still neutral. Abwehr agents posing as anti-Nazis had induced these two officers, Major H.R. Stevens and Captain Payne Best, to attend a meeting at Venlo, near the Dutch-German border. They were driven across the border, seized, and interrogated over many months.[11] A German document secured after the war showed that under duress the officers had supplied detailed information about MI6 and other intelligence and security departments, but on their return to Britain, as released prisoners, they described how they had done little more than confirm what the Germans already knew, saying that they had been astonished by the detailed questions they were asked.[12] The MI5 officers who debriefed them were convinced that the Abwehr had indeed been in possession of a mass of highly secret information which could only have come from a source inside MI6. This conclusion was endorsed when they were able to question the Abwehr officers who had grilled Stevens and Best. To their horror, the MI5 men learned that it was a British Intelligence source that had advised the Abwehr on how to lay hands on the two Britons.
Ellis had been in a position to supply the information so MI5 again asked for permisson to examine the relevant MI6 files. Again this was refused. The MI6 management argued that the White Russians with whom Ellis had been in contact before the war had proved to be double-crossers and fabricators of ‘intelligence’, so von Petrov and the rest must have convinced the Abwehr that Ellis had been their agent when, in fact, they had been his. This argument did not explain how the MI6 secrets had leaked, so the MI5 officers suggested that the best way to resolve the problem was to interrogate Ellis. They asked their chief, Sir Dick White, to request the co-operation of MI6 in this venture but White, who had just succeeded to the Director-Generalship of MI5, was anxious to avoid exacerbating the ill will between the two services generated by MI5’s continuing insistence that Philby was the ‘Third Man’. After being told in 1953 that Ellis had decided to retire, spontaneously and at his own request, White agreed to shelve the case. In short, at the top level of both MI5 and MI6 there was agreement that the Ellis scandal should be covered up for ever ‘in the national interest’.
In pursuance of this cover-up the American F.B.I. was told nothing officially of the strong suspicions against Ellis though they should have been because of Ellis’s service in the U.S. from 1940 to 1944. Recently, however, F.B.I. papers available under the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that as early as January 1953 the F.B.I. was making espionage inquiries into Ellis and that these continued through 1956.[13] Almost all the information about Ellis in the papers, which are memoranda from the F.B.I. office in New York to headquarters in Washington, has been blanked out for security reasons. Expert examination of the various numbers and initials still remaining suggest that the blanking out was done prior to declassification at the request of the C.I.A. acting on behalf of MI6.
It is possible that the F.B.I. had been warned about Ellis unofficially by an MI5 officer but the documents suggest that it was following its own leads from a special informer who may have been a Soviet defector. One of the F.B.I. officials listed in the documents as having special interest in the case was head of the Russian Section.[14] In any event, the information was considered to be so important that it was channelled directly to the F.B.I. chief, Hoover.
During the Fluency Committee’s inquiries into Ellis he had been referred to in documents by the code-name ‘Emerton’. This was a standard precaution to reduce the number of people in MI5 and MI6 who could learn about the suspicions and to prevent Ellis himself from hearing about them.
In the middle of 1953 Ellis left MI6, two years before the usual retiring age which was then sixty, claiming that he had been advised to do so on health grounds as his doctors had diagnosed heart trouble. He said that he had decided to return to Australia, where he could take things easy and where the climate would be more suitable. He travelled alone, by sea, having already divorced his second wife, and nine days after his arrival, despite his alleged heart trouble, he signed a two-year contract to work for A.S.I.S., which he had helped to establish. A.S.I.S. had been told nothing about the suspicions against Ellis and, understandably, made no security check with MI5 which, as a result, did not know of his A.S.I.S. appointment.
After only two months Ellis broke his contract saying that he had decided to return to England to remarry. He booked a sea passage, as he disliked travelling by air, and arrived back early in 1954. Ellis’s supporters have seen nothing strange in this behaviour and what almost certainly lay behind it was not to become apparent until the defection of Kim Philby from Beirut in January 1963. The setting up of the Fluency Committee soon after that event gave MI5 right of access to MI6 files and those on Ellis revealed how Philby had ensured that no action would be taken against him.
Philby’s action in covering up the evidence against Ellis seemed strange because the Russians were keen to bring retribution to anyone who had assisted the Nazis and Philby would, undoubtedly, have consulted his Soviet controller about the case, but the Fluency Committee put forward a possible explanation. As it was certain by then that von Petrov had been primarily a G.R.U. agent Moscow would have known about Ellis’s espionage activities the Germans. It seemed likely that von Petrov would have been required to recruit Ellis for Soviet Intelligence, using the blackmail threat if necessary. Whether this had happened or not the Fluency Committee regarded it as inconceivable that once Philby had alerted the K.G.B. to Ellis’s position, the Russians would have failed to try to exploit it. The need to find out everything possible about Ellis’s activities was therefore greatly increased and the Committee had to move beyond examining the record of a man who might have spied for Germany before and during the early part of the war.
Its first move, however, was to establish whether Ellis could have been involved in the betrayal of MI6’s tap on the telephone line between von Ribbentrop and Hitler which had been secretly installed when the German Embassy had been renovated. No record of the personalities involved could be found in the MI6 archives because the tapping operation had been carried out by the security department of the Post Office. A research officer was sent to delve into old Post Office records and subsequently found a file which included a list of the six translators of German who had been involved. The top name on the list was that of Captain C.H. Ellis.
The Fluency Committee then examined his career inside B.S.C. in New York where he could have done great damage had he still been working for the Germans. Various serious leakages could have occurred there, though Sir William Stephenson is understandably loath to admit this.[15] The recent release of American secret documents shows that a verbatim minute of a British War Cabinet discussion dated 31 July 1940 had leaked to the Germans. Because it concerned the possibility of a Japanese intervention against America in the Far East the minute had almost certainly been passed to the B.S.C. office in New York where Ellis was installed.[16] It has since transpired, however, that this leak was due to the capture of a British merchant ship by a German raider when it was taking documents and codes to the British Commander Far East.[17]
The Fluency Committee knew that decipherment of some of the Bride traffic, the K.G.B. messages transmitted from New York to Moscow, had shown the existence of at least twelve Soviet sympathizers inside B.S.C. A few, like Cedric Belfrage, a former member of the British Communist Party, were identified but most of them remain known only by the code-names used in the traffic. The Committee therefore concentrated on the possibility that Ellis was one of the unknown agents having, perhaps, been pressed into K.G.B. service, through blackmail or money, after 1940.[18] It was recalled that Ellis’s services had been made available to Colonel William Donovan to assist him in setting up the American Intelligence agency which became the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.).[19] Ellis was said to have selected some of the staff including a White Russian who was chief of the espionage section. So, if Ellis had been working for the K.G.B. many of the O.S.S. failures could be attributable to his activities. It was known by then, through decipherment of the Bride traffic, that the O.S.S. had been deeply penetrated by Soviet agents.
