Their Trade Is Treachery

by Pincher Chapman

  To keep the inquiries as secret as possible, the investigators always referred to Ellis as ‘Emerton’ in documents and in conversations. But, as Philby’s old colleagues were still refusing to believe that he was a spy and were still in touch with him, one of them who was in the know might have gossiped to him about the suspicion surrounding Ellis. Philby might then have alerted Ellis, for they were friends, and within a short time Ellis was to do a similar service for Philby.

  After the customary farewell parties, Ellis emigrated back to Australia in late 1953. There, though he was supposed to be too ill to do further intelligence work, he quickly signed a two-year contract to work for the Australian secret intelligence service, the counterpart of the British organisation from which he had just retired.

  Shortly after doing that, and in line of duty, he called on Sir Charles Spry, the director general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the counterpart of MI5. Spry told him, in good faith, that his agency was in touch with an important KGB officer based in the Russian embassy in Canberra and that there were high hopes that he would defect. The man’s name was Vladimir Petrov.

  This Petrov, who was no relation to the von Petrov whom Ellis had known earlier in Europe, was head of the Soviet espionage apparatus in Australia, and, as it was discovered later, his wife was also a career KGB officer. So it was expected that he would bring with him documents and information about other KGB agents operating in Australia and, perhaps, elsewhere in the world.

  If Ellis was a Russian spy at that time, his consternation on hearing this can be imagined. After emigrating all the way from Britain to escape possible arrest there, he would find himself faced with possible betrayal in Australia. While neither country would be safe, it would be easier to defect from Britain than from Australia, which was as distant as it could be from any communist haven.

  Ellis’s immediate behaviour suggested that he was in a state of panic. He resigned his two-year contract only nine days after signing it, claiming that he had to return to Britain to marry a woman he had met there shortly before leaving.

  Believing his story, the Australian security authorities asked him to serve as a courier so that the British secret service and MI5 could be brought up to date, in total secrecy, about the precise situation concerning Petrov. He did this after arriving back in Britain – along with the motorcar he had so recently bought in Australia in March 1954.

  Though some of his old secret service colleagues may have known about MI5’s previous suspicions concerning Ellis, he was nevertheless briefed, in return for his news about Petrov, on the state of the investigations into Philby, about whom there was still no firm evidence. He was specifically told not to see Philby or talk to him. His response was to leave a note for Philby at his club, the Athenaeum, asking him to lunch.

  Philby, who was under telephone surveillance, rang Ellis and fixed a lunch appointment. It is not known what they discussed, but that same afternoon Philby telephoned his current girlfriend to say ‘the clouds are parting’. In his book My Silent War, there is a chapter called ‘The Clouds Part’ in which he relates how, after being ignored by the KGB for two years (save for the probable payment of money), he received ‘through the most ingenious of routes’ a message from his Soviet friends conjuring him to be of good cheer.

  It is possible that Ellis was that ‘route’, though, as I have already described, it could have been via Anthony Blunt. Philby avoided making reference in his book to Ellis, admitting only that Maclean and Burgess had been fellow traitors.

  Under interrogation, Blunt has since confirmed that Philby, who was supposed to be remote from any secret information, knew about the impending defection of Petrov in Canberra some weeks before it took place, as it eventually did with sensational publicity in April 1954. Further confirmation has since come from Sir William McMahon, a former Prime Minister of Australia, who reiterated in the Australian Parliament that he knew that the Russians had been ‘tipped off’ about Petrov’s pending defection, though he had no knowledge of the source.

  It may therefore be asked why, if Ellis, Philby and Blunt knew about the defection, it was not prevented, as Volkov’s had been. There is evidence that the KGB did know and mistimed Petrov’s defection by only a few hours. Two tough diplomatic couriers sent to Canberra from Moscow were later involved in the attempted removal of Mrs Petrov, who accepted a last-minute offer to defect herself when the plane, bound for Russia, stopped to refuel at Darwin. The later defector Anatoli Golitsin provided evidence that the two officers sent from Moscow to bring back both the Petrovs were severely disciplined for failing to do so.

  As I have pointed out, the MI5 investigators did not have the opportunity to reopen the case against Ellis until after Philby had defected, early in 1963. Such inquiries not only take time but can be expensive. The case officers had taken the trouble, for instance, to show photographs of Ellis, who was short and slim with fair hair that had turned white, to several people living abroad who might have known him to be a Soviet agent. One of these was the widow of Richard Sorge, who thought she recalled his face, though her memory was not good. Another, the widow of Ignace Reiss, a highly successful Soviet spy of Ellis’s vintage who had been murdered by the KGB’s ‘SMERSH’ assassination squad, thought she recognised him but could not be sure.

  It was 1965 before the case officers decided that they could get no further without direct action. It was therefore agreed that the time had come for a full interrogation of Ellis, hostile if necessary, to be conducted jointly by officers from the secret service and from MI5. As the recently appointed head of counter-espionage in the secret service was cooperative, Ellis, by that time fully retired and on the pension list in England, was asked to attend for interview.

  He was told bluntly that there was serious evidence impugning his loyalty and was confronted with the report of the German officer who named him as a spy. His response was that it must be a forgery. He insisted that he had never heard of the secret telephone link between Ribbentrop and Hitler. Though severely shaken when shown his name at the top of the post office list, he said that he could not recall any involvement. The interrogators then threatened to bring over the German officer and confront him with his evidence. They ended the session by giving Ellis twenty-four hours to think about that.

  The following day, Ellis, who was kept under surveillance against his possible defection, arrived with a document that was an abject confession of his guilt in spying for Germany up to 1940.

  He complained that the secret service had sent him into the field in Europe with inadequate training, which was probably true. He said that it was his unfortunate recruitment of his brother-in-law, Alexander Zilenski, that had turned him into a spy for the Nazis. While Zilenski had produced some useful information for Britain, he was also selling any secrets he could get both to the Germans and to the Russians, being in the game purely for money. Ellis explained that he had run into debt because his British pay was too low and had borrowed from Zilenski, who then started pressurising him for information to sell to the Germans and Russians.

  He claimed that, at first, the information he handed over was trivial, but Zilenski, urged on by his Soviet contact, then threatened to expose him to his secret service chiefs unless he provided more valuable material. Ellis excused his action by pointing out that his wife had been ill and that he needed money for her treatment. So he had taken the easy way out, becoming more and more deeply compromised.

  Under further questioning, he admitted handing over detailed charts of the organisation of British intelligence before the war, knowing that they would go both to Germany and to Russia. This had been the source of much of the information that the Abwehr used during its interrogations following the Venlo kidnappings.

  He confessed that he had betrayed the British intelligence achievement in tapping the Hitler–Ribbentrop telephone link, knowing that the information was going to Germany. He also admitted making use after the war began of a brother secret service
officer to deliver secrets, unwittingly, in an envelope delivered to an agent, whom he knew to be working for the Germans, and to bring back a package containing money.

  Ellis denied having continued to spy while in the ‘Intrepid’ mission in the United States, being aware that his interrogators had no evidence in that regard. Nevertheless, his confession constituted unquestionably the worst case of British espionage to the Germans both before and during the war.

  When told that he had committed treason in war and could have justifiably been hanged, he broke down and pleaded physical frailty against any further cross-examination, but the interrogators were determined to continue their probing on the following day.

  He continued to deny any secret dealings with the Russians and insisted that it had not been the Petrov affair that had caused him to return so precipitately from Australia. He said that he had returned to marry a girl and, under pressure, gave her name. Inquiries soon showed that she had already been happily married at the time and, though she had met Ellis, had never had any intention of marrying him. Ellis then pleaded that his memory must have been at fault and gave the name of another girl. This, too, proved to be a false trail.

  He denied that he had met Philby on his return from Australia, which was known to be a lie, or that the secret service had warned him not to contact his former colleague.

  Fearful that he might collapse under the strain of further grilling, it was decided that, as a last throw, Ellis should be offered immunity, after the Attorney General had been consulted, if he would confess his treacherous activities with Russia and name his contacts. He refused to believe that immunity would really be granted and held to his position regarding any Russian espionage after 1940.

  The interrogators’ consensus, as entered in the case records, was that Ellis had spied for Russia after the war, not for ideological motives but because he would be under heavy blackmail pressure from the KGB. Through Zilenski, the Centre in Moscow knew that Ellis had supplied secrets for money, and it was considered inconceivable that it could resist applying pressure when he was in such a sensitive post, both in New York and later when he returned to the secret service proper. It was concluded that it would never be possible to make a detailed assessment of the damage he had done, but if, as seemed likely, his treachery had covered something like thirty years, it would have put Philby’s in the shade.

  To illustrate the extraordinary relationship existing over so many years between the secret service and MI5, I have purposely reserved an item of Ellis’s career, which occurred after his unexpected return from Australia in such a hurry. Incredibly, in spite of the peculiar circumstances and the known suspicions of MI5, Ellis was taken back, part time, into secret service headquarters in London. There he assisted in the ‘weeding’ of secret service files – the extraction of material considered, by an expert such as himself, to be of no further value so that it could safely be consigned to the shredding machine.

  If he was still an active spy or keen to cover up past evidence of his own operations and those of his pro-Soviet colleagues, the damage he may have caused in destroying leads to KGB activities is incalculable. Fortunately, there were documents concerning himself and Philby that did not come his way.

  I have recently received further independent confirmation of Ellis’s treachery from former colleagues of his and from an international authority on intelligence and defence affairs who prefers not to be named. This authority had been involved in the setting up of ‘Interdoc’, the International Documentary Centre, an organisation involving intelligence affairs. Interdoc needed a London representative, and Ellis had taken on the appointment. In the early ’70s, a representative from the secret service called on my informant to ask if he had been responsible for recommending Ellis because Ellis was known to have been a spy for Germany and was suspected of having been a Soviet agent, too.

  The disquiet among those senior secret service men who had not been able to bring themselves to believe that Dick Ellis could possibly have been a spy was intense. After their recent failure to smother Philby’s treachery because he had defected rather than accept immunity, they decided that ‘in the interests of the service’ the Ellis case should be completely suppressed. It was until the original publication of this book. Considering how many secret service officers eventually learned about Ellis’s treachery, it is astonishing that it never leaked before. The secret was so closely held that Ellis’s relatives and intimate friends never heard of it and still find it hard to believe. Ellis’s daughter wrote to Mrs Thatcher asking her to deny my disclosure, but the Prime Minister had to decline because she was aware of the truth of it.

  In 1962, when Montgomery Hyde published his biography of Sir William Stephenson under the title The Quiet Canadian, a foreword was contributed by that outstanding American ambassador to Britain, the late David Bruce. In it, Bruce referred to Ellis as ‘that remarkable, unpublicised individual’. It was a fair description. Little was known of him outside the security services.

  Ellis also had another prerequisite of the successful undercover agent – brass nerve. When the more extensive and less accurate book A Man called Intrepid was published in 1976, a special historical note was inserted by the publisher. It had been written by Col. Charles Howard Ellis, when an old man living, apparently, in honourable retirement in Eastbourne in Sussex. It contained the paragraph ‘From New York, while the United States was at peace and at war, Britain ran the most intricate integrated intelligence and secret operations organisation in history. Could such activity be kept secret?’ Ellis, who died in 1975, almost certainly knew the answer.

  • • •

  With Ellis, Philby, Cairncross and others who appear to have been less important, the secret service was heavily penetrated before and during the Second World War and for some years afterward. What is the position today?

  As with MI5, there have been improvements in the regular vetting of existing officers and agents of the service and the recruitment of new ones. Documentary films, some of them records of actual operations taken clandestinely, others made for the purpose, are used to demonstrate how members of the security services can be suborned by the KGB. Control of documents, which was lax in the past to a near-criminal extent, has been tightened with the involvement of electronic and other technological devices to help prevent unauthorised removal. Surveillance of known Soviet bloc agents has been intensified, where resources permit.

  Much, of course, depends on the leadership of the organisation, and this has been patchy, to say the least. Sir Dick White made important changes when he took command after moving from MI5 in 1956. He banned any resort to violence by members of the organisation, an action that explains why monsters like Idi Amin are not assassinated before they kill so many others. Nobody in the secret service is licensed to kill anymore. Even the internal traitor Philby was allowed to escape to continue to serve an organisation that would have liquidated him without compunction in comparable circumstances.

  Even in the past, such assassinations were rare, though they did occur on occasion. In the operation to oust Mossadeq and restore the Shah of Iran in 1953, the secret service had successfully organised the murder of an Iranian police chief in an exercise codenamed ‘Boot’.

  As the crisis over the unilateral takeover of the Suez Canal by Egypt’s President Nasser deepened in 1956, it became clear in Whitehall that there was only one solution to the problem – the toppling of Nasser, by assassination if necessary. To this end, the secret service, in collaboration with leaders of the Special Air Service (SAS), put forward a detailed plan of an operation to kill Nasser, along with his bodyguards and anyone else who might be in the way. Plans of a building where, it was known, Nasser was likely to be on a certain night showed that it should be possible to introduce canisters of a poison gas, which would be quickly fatal. It was strenuously argued that this could save both British and Egyptian lives, but Anthony Eden, then Prime Minister, vetoed the scheme. He did so partly because of the objection t
o the use of gas but mainly because he demurred at the assassination of a head of state, though the Special Air Service gave an assurance that any evidence of their involvement would be removed so smartly as to be deniable.

  Eden turned a blind eye, however, to an alternative secret service operation. This was to be controlled by an officer posing under the name of ‘Colonel Yarrow’, and the killing was to be accomplished by Egyptian officers using a cache of weapons hidden in the sand. This remained part of the Suez Operation but was bungled by the Egyptian officers, who paid for their failure with their lives.

  Such misfortunes seemed constantly to dog the secret service’s attempts to help resolve Britain’s international problems. On another occasion, a large cache of arms was concealed behind a false wall, specially built onto the front of a house, in a Middle East country. Regrettably, a lorry ran into the wall, and machine guns, rifles and other weaponry tumbled out onto the street. The owner of the house, who had moved into it since the cache had been stored and knew nothing of it, subsequently had a hard time at the hands of the local secret police.

  In the past, the secret service has had no qualms about handing over a captive to a third party intent on killing him. One former officer has described to me how a certain Mikal Trinsky, who had taken money from Polish Jews to help them to escape and had then betrayed them to the Nazis, was kidnapped by the secret service and handed over to the Jews concerned. Trinsky’s head was eventually used as a football.

  Sir Dick White ended such robust measures so completely that during the reign of one of his successors, Sir Maurice Oldfield, a policy statement was circulated through secret service headquarters assuring the staff that no violence of any kind would be involved in the espionage and intelligence operations conducted by the organisation. This followed a claim by criminals that the secret service had supplied them with weapons and explosives to carry out intelligence work against the IRA.