It was a friend inside MI5, Tomas Harris, the deception expert, who suggested the move that enabled Philby to burrow deep into the centre of things in the secret service. Harris knew that the section involved with Spain and Portugal, on which he himself was a specialist in MI5, was undermanned and that Philby had experience of the Spanish Civil War. It was friends in MI5 who helped Philby to conspire against his chief and to replace him as head of the Iberian section. They also assisted him to take over the new Russian section when the secret service set this up in 1944.
Philby was in regular contact with Soviet controllers in London and never seems to have taken any important decision without consulting them. While there was no known reason to keep him under surveillance, the controllers themselves were subject to it, or should have been. There is also evidence that, like Burgess, Philby was living beyond his means, yet this seemed to cause no wonder or concern.
In view of all this and more, it seems possible that friends in MI5 might have been doing more than turning a blind eye to suspicious circumstances.
There was evidence, too, of blind eyes inside the secret service. When the allegation of the existence of a Russian spy, codenamed ‘Elli’, inside MI5 was first made in 1945 by the Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko, secret telegrams to this effect were sent to MI5 and to the secret service. As Philby was by that time in charge of the Russian section of the secret service, one of the telegrams came to him. Examination of the ‘Elli’ files after Philby’s defection showed what he had done with the telegram. Normally, it would have been filed flat, but the ‘Elli’ telegram handled by Philby had been folded in four. Clearly, he had taken it outside the office to show to somebody who, in all probability, was his Soviet controller.
Several other officers must have seen that file, but none of them seems to have wondered why the telegram was creased, or, if they did, nobody appears to have questioned Philby about it.
Though Philby was not then very senior, the freedom of action allowed him was remarkable. After the ‘Elli’ telegram had arrived, the director general of the secret service, then Sir Stewart Menzies, suggested to Philby that he should go to Ottawa and interrogate Gouzenko. Philby asked for a day ‘to think about it,’ meaning to give himself time to consult his Soviet controller. He then suggested that his MI5 counterpart, Roger Hollis, should go instead, and Menzies agreed.
The reason why Philby decided against leaving London at that time, probably on Soviet advice, only became apparent during the backtrack inquiries after his defection.
The Volkov case, which he believed could have brought about his downfall as well as that of other British spies, began in late August, and Philby had not resolved it to his advantage until early September. He was back from his fruitful journey to Istanbul when Gouzenko defected on 5 September, and, if Menzies had ordered him to go to Ottawa instead of requesting him, he would have been on his way on 7 September. With the possibility that the collapse of the Volkov defection might lead to inquiries as to its cause, it was to Philby’s advantage to remain at headquarters, where he might be able to cope with any discrepancies with his persuasive brand of glib excuses. As usual, he got his way.
What the security authorities would like to know – purely for the historical records – is whether Philby’s Soviet controller suggested that he should recommend Hollis as his replacement for the Gouzenko interrogation. As I have recorded, Hollis did not send back much information and played down the ‘Elli’ allegation.
• • •
The existence of another secret service spy, believed to have operated for Britain’s enemies, perhaps for thirty years, was uncovered in 1965. The event has been so carefully concealed for political purposes, as well as for reasons of embarrassment, that many of his former colleagues will be astounded by what I have to tell. For this man was held in the highest regard by most senior officials in Britain and America and – as it transpired – in some rather unexpected countries, too.
The spy’s name was Charles Howard Ellis, known to his friends as ‘Dick’. He was a career intelligence officer best known for his wartime service as second in command to Sir William Stephenson, the ‘Man called Intrepid’. In that position, he had access to the most secret operations of British Security Co-ordination, the Anglo–US intelligence organisation set up in New York under Stephenson at Winston Churchill’s request.
Ellis was an Australian, born in Sydney before the turn of the century, in 1895. He joined the British Army, serving with missions on the Russian border immediately after the First World War and becoming fluent in the Russian language. Eventually, he left the army to complete linguistic studies, including German, at Oxford and the Sorbonne.
For a short time, he served as a Foreign Office diplomat in various posts; then, in 1924, he joined the secret intelligence service. As he had married into a White Russian émigré family, the Zilenskis, who were domiciled in Paris, he was posted there with a journalistic job as cover to operate in the large White Russian community, which was known to be heavily penetrated by Soviet military intelligence.
Among the agents Ellis recruited in Paris to work for Britain was his brother-in-law Alexander Zilenski, who was a valuable source because he had access to a man called Waldemar von Petrov. Paris was then the centre of White Russian hopes of overthrowing the Soviet regime and one of the White Russian leaders was a certain General Turkhul, with whom von Petrov was friendly. The advantage of this gossip chain to British intelligence in the ’30s lay in the fact that Turkhul – the same general to whom I have already referred in connection with the ‘Klatt’ affair – had ingratiated himself with Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg, who were both close to Hitler.
Such a complex chain is typical of the sources on which secret services depend for ‘raw’ intelligence, which then has to be cross-checked at other points. As the Second World War drew near, Ellis used the chain to send back a mass of confidential information about Nazi affairs to his headquarters in London.
Unfortunately, much of this intelligence turned out to be faked, and, though Ellis managed to blame his sources, he fell out of favour with his secret service chiefs. Gradually, he rehabilitated himself and was forgiven. In 1940, in the uniform of a colonel, he was posted to serve on ‘Intrepid”s staff in New York. There he worked with such apparent effect that he was eventually awarded the US Legion of Merit, to add to his CMG, CBE and OBE.
In 1944, he returned to secret service headquarters in London on promotion to become the controller dealing with south-east Asia and the Far East and was soon also made controller of North and South American affairs. This meant that, effectively, he became No. 3 in the entire secret service hierarchy, controlling its activities in about half the world.
Soon after Maclean and Burgess defected in 1951, MI5 began looking for evidence against Philby, believing that he must have been the Third Man. Among the documents they examined was the record of information provided by a pre-war Soviet defector called Walter Krivitsky.
It is apposite, at this point, to consider briefly the career of this extraordinary Russian because, had proper notice been taken of his revelations, many, if not most, of the spies mentioned in this book might have been detected long before they inflicted so much damage.
Krivitsky was one of six young men from a small town who became pioneer members of the Soviet espionage machine. After giving valuable service, at considerable sacrifice, they all died violent deaths, being murdered on Stalin’s orders or committing suicide to escape assassination. By 1936, Krivitsky was chief of the Soviet military intelligence for Western Europe, deeply involved in the exchange of military intelligence between Russia and Germany. The following year, when hundreds of agents were ordered back to Moscow to be liquidated in Stalin’s insane purge of suspected traitors ‘plotting’ against him, Krivitsky defected to the West in Paris.
There he gave French intelligence so much information concerning the entire Soviet network in Europe, including Britain, that it filled eighty large vo
lumes. The French presumably used the information of value to themselves but passed none of it to anybody else. The eighty volumes were stored in an old barge on the Seine and left there for so long that the bottom of the vessel fell away and all the material was lost. That, at all events, is the official French version of what happened, but there are those who suspect that pro-Soviet agents inside French counter-intelligence made sure that Krivitsky’s revelations were suppressed.
In the hope of escaping assassination, Krivitsky moved to the United States where he was debriefed again, though not so thoroughly as in France. In 1939, allegations that he had made about Soviet penetration of British government departments were passed to MI5. One of these led to the detection and prosecution of a cypher clerk called King in the Foreign Office. Another referred to a diplomat in the Foreign Office, who could have been Donald Maclean. A third described a man who had been a journalist used by the KGB while working for a British newspaper as a correspondent in the Spanish Civil War. This could well have been Philby.
Krivitsky was therefore invited to London in 1940 for special debriefing by MI5, which was carried out by the woman officer Jane Sissmore. Among the many statements he made was an allegation that a White Russian, von Petrov, known to have been working for the British secret service, had really been a Soviet agent working for the Red Army network, the GRU. Von Petrov had been particularly valuable because he had an important espionage source in the British secret service who fed him highly sensitive information.
While discussing his own position, Krivitsky told Miss Sissmore how he lived under daily fear of assassination by Russian revenge killers. ‘If ever you hear that I have committed suicide, don’t believe it. I will have been murdered.’ He returned to the United States, and in February 1941 his body was found in a Washington hotel bedroom with a fatal head wound inflicted by a soft-nosed bullet. A verdict of suicide was recorded because he left farewell notes. Some friends who read their contents were in little doubt that Krivitsky had killed himself, but I have spoken to a Mrs Beryl Edwards, who was with Krivitsky’s wife, Tania, in Montreal when she received news of her husband’s death. Mrs Krivitsky was convinced that her husband had been murdered by Stalin’s assassins, and when the note to her arrived, she remarked, ‘The writing is Walter’s, but the words are not,’ meaning that he had written it with a pistol at his head. There is evidence that a KGB ‘hit man’, who was also an expert locksmith, was in the United States at the time.
Mrs Edwards said that there had been three apparent attempts to kill Krivitsky while he was sheltering in Montreal, in spite of protection by the Canadian authorities. She told me that Krivitsky, whom she described as ‘small, very dynamic and highly intelligent’, had been very depressed after visiting MI5 in Britain. He had said, ‘They just didn’t want to listen,’ she recalled.
Ten years later, when the MI5 team investigating Philby was examining the Krivitsky material, it recovered the thick file on von Petrov from the old records. This file showed that, according to the testimony of an officer of the German secret service, the Abwehr, interrogated after the Nazi collapse, von Petrov had also been working for him. The officer had stated that von Petrov had assured him that he had an excellent source of high-grade intelligence inside the British secret service and that the Abwehr had no doubt that he was telling the truth because he consistently produced information of the utmost value. The German had also recalled that the secrets from this British source had not reached von Petrov directly but through an intermediary called Zilenski, who was also working for the Abwehr.
Following up this lead, MI5 found that another captured German officer of the Abwehr had confirmed the information and had been able to name Zilenski’s British source as a certain Captain Ellis. Furthermore, he had known that Ellis was an Australian and had a Russian wife.
The Abwehr officer who had dealt personally with the material brought in by von Petrov reported that Ellis had supplied documents showing the detailed organisation of the British secret service and information about secret operations. Among the latter was the fact that, almost up to the outbreak of the war, British intelligence had been tapping a special diplomatic telephone link that Ribbentrop, the German ambassador in London, used when speaking directly to Hitler.
Senior secret service officers were asked by MI5 to consult their records of this operation. They reported back that the Germans had suddenly abandoned the telephone link for no known reason. They agreed that the Germans might well have been warned by somebody that the British had been eavesdropping. But they denied that Ellis had ever been involved in the operation and insisted that there was no way he could possibly have known about it.
Meanwhile, the MI5 investigators had discovered further evidence about a sensational international event, the ‘Venlo Incident’, which might incriminate Ellis. In the early days of the war, when Holland was still neutral, two British intelligence officers from the secret service, Maj. H. R. Stevens and Capt. S. Payne Best, based at The Hague, were lured across the border at Venlo into Germany. There they were captured by the Gestapo, grilled and held prisoner, finally ending up in a concentration camp.
When they returned to Britain, they reported that it was evident from the questions they were asked that German intelligence had detailed knowledge of the organisation of the British secret service and of the personalities running it. This was confirmed by another captured German officer, who volunteered the information that a source inside British intelligence had told them how to get hold of Stevens and Best and how best to question them.
There was no proof that the source was Ellis, but he had been in the right position in the secret service to have provided the information. Furthermore, there has been no trace of any other spy working for the Germans at that time.
To pursue this lead – in the ’50s – MI5 needed access to the secret service files, but this was denied to them. The secret service chiefs were already hotly denying the MI5 allegations that Philby was a spy and were not prepared to believe that Ellis had been one, too. They dismissed the evidence of the captured German officers as faked.
The MI5 men were particularly anxious to grill Ellis, not simply to clear up the wartime German evidence but because they had reason to suspect that he had been later recruited by the Russians. The secret service chiefs would not permit it. The secret service has always insisted on being responsible for its own security and conducting its own counter-espionage investigations, so the attempted intrusion by MI5 was deeply resented, as it had been over the Philby case.
Not until ten years later, when Philby defected in 1963 and MI5 could prove that its suspicions about him had been justified, was the Ellis case reopened as part of the general inquiry into the penetration of both services by the Russians.
When the investigators were at last allowed to examine the secret service files, they discovered the original report by the Abwehr officer naming Ellis. By the usual ill chance, it had landed on the desk of Kim Philby, who had scrawled across it, ‘Who is this man Ellis? NFA.’ NFA meant no further action, and none had ever been taken. At that time, Ellis, by then a colonel, was sitting in an office a few doors down from Philby’s in secret service headquarters in Broadway, Victoria.
This action by Philby strengthened the suspicions that Ellis had been recruited by the Russians, possibly through von Petrov or perhaps because they had found out about his past activities with the Germans and had been able to blackmail him.
The investigators decided to concentrate on the lead concerning Ellis’s involvement in the betrayal of the British tapping of the Ribbentrop– Hitler telephone calls. The operation had been carried out by the security section of the post office, so a search was made of its archives. The official records of the operation were found, and attached to them was a list of six secret service officers, proficient in German, who had been fully briefed so that they could act as translators of the conversations. At the top of the list was the name C. H. Ellis.
Satisfied that
Ellis had been a spy for Germany, at least until the British were driven out of Europe in 1940, MI5 decided to investigate the possibility that he had continued to spy for the Nazis afterward or had been recruited by the Russians.
Ellis had been with the ‘Intrepid’ organisation from 1940 to 1944, and it was already known, from captured German documents and the interrogation of German prisoners, that there had been more than one spy inside it. The Germans had known, for instance, that Leslie Howard, the film actor, had been carrying out secret war missions for Sir William Stephenson. They had been told that he would be on a certain aeroplane and had been able to shoot it down over the Bay of Biscay.
Had Ellis been one of these spies? Not much could be learned about his activities in New York or in the posts he held soon after the war in the Far East and south-east Asia. So the inquiries were concentrated on his behaviour after he had returned to London.
It was found that, just when MI5’s investigations into Philby’s complicity in the Maclean–Burgess affair had been gathering momentum, Ellis, then in his late fifties, had suddenly decided to retire and return to Australia because of heart trouble. It had not seemed unusual at the time, but his later behaviour strongly suggested that his ‘heart trouble’ was an excuse for getting himself abroad, where, even in a British dominion, he could not have been extradited for offences under the Official Secrets Act.
Their Trade Is Treachery: the Full Unexpurgated Truth About the Russian Penetration of the World's Secret Defences Page 23
