The British Spy Behind U.S. Intelligence in WWII
BOOK REVIEW: The Eagle in the Mirror, The Greatest Spy Story Never Told
By Jesse Fink / Citadel Press
Reviewed by: Nicholas Reynolds
The Reviewer – Nick Reynolds is a lifelong World War II buff, author in retirement of Need to Know, World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence, a New Yorker “Best of 2022” selection. Before that he worked at some of the best jobs in the US Government, including positions in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and at the CIA Museum, to say nothing of serving as the Officer-in-Charge of Field History for the US Marine Corps.
REVIEW — What you need to know about Charles Howard “Dick” Ellis is that the MI6 officer had a rich and varied career spanning both world wars, to include helping to lay the foundations of OSS, and that he may have confessed to selling secrets to the Nazis in the 1930s. This book hones in on that alleged transaction. Author Fink tells us that The Eagle in the Mirror is not “a traditional biography but … a sort of biographical cold-case investigation.” He tells readers to decide for themselves, but it is clear by the end of the book that, after two years of careful research, he made up his mind about what actually happened.
First, who was Ellis? Born in Australia in 1895, he did not have “a great start in life.” His father was many years older than your typical dad and there was never enough money or food to go around. A talented musician and night school student, Ellis obtained a small scholarship to go to England. World War I was an opportunity to break out from his straitened circumstances. By the end of the war, Ellis had risen from private to captain, having fought in the trenches in France and joined the Intelligence Corps, which sent him to the fringes of the old Russian empire to play a role in the great game. From there it was a short step to MI6, which he served in a great variety of capacities and locations. Fink quotes an evaluation of Ellis as “the very model of eccentric creativity essential to any successful intelligence service,” and notes that he was often working alone against Soviets and Nazis. Ellis’s career may have been going well but his love life was not; in the end he would marry four times. This entailed financial strain, worsened by the appallingly low pay at MI6. At some point in the 1930s, the cash-strapped Ellis may have borrowed money from a former brother-in-law, one Alexsei Zelensky, to pay his first ex-wife’s medical bills — and Zelensky may have sold “order of battle” secrets (that is, names of agents and officers) that he acquired from Ellis to the Abwehr.
Ellis went on to a distinguished career during and after World War II. He was, notably, the second in command at British Security Coordination (BSC), the massive MI6 station based in New York, intended first to get America into the war by hook or by crook and then to prod the Roosevelt Administration into creating something like MI6. Ellis became one of the key players in the creation of COI and OSS, active enough for Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle to comment acidly in 1941 that Ellis was running American intelligence. After the war, he served as an advisor to the Australian security service. By the end of his career in 1953 he had numerous senior awards from three countries to his credit, as well as a long, scholarly book he had written on the League of Nations—in short, he was a man of many talents and not a few accomplishments.
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So, what went wrong? There are many versions of the story, all second-hand and mostly retailed by British writers like Nigel West, Chapman Pincher, and Peter Wright, the retired MI 5 officer and author of the tell-all Spycatcher. (Wright’s central argument that MI5 chief Roger Hollis was a Soviet spy has now been thoroughly debunked.) West’s more or less plausible version in his 1983 book on MI6 goes like this: in the wake of Kim Philby’s defection to the Soviet Union in 1963, an MI6 internal investigation came upon a reference to the Zelensky-Abwehr transaction and interviewed Ellis about it. Over the course of a two-day proceeding, he allegedly confessed that he was Zelensky’s witting source, but insisted that it was a one-off affair. There the matter might have rested until British and American conspiracy theorists got to work. The usually well-informed West wrote that, having been married four times (like Philby), Ellis fit the profile of a Soviet spy. Perhaps the NKVD learned of his connection to the Abwehr and used it to blackmail him. Ready to question anyone’s bona fides after being so completely taken in by Philby, James Angleton put Ellis on a list of possible Soviet spies, even cautioning the well-meaning CIA historian Thomas Troy to stay away from him. Australia’s internal service put Ellis under surveillance and established conclusively that he was an elderly gentleman who dressed well and went to the grocery store when he needed to buy food. Ellis died in 1975 in England. Prominent members of MI6, including former chief Maurice Oldfield, attended his funeral.
British-Australian editor-turned-writer Fink has clearly done his homework, reading and evaluating many sources before ultimately entering a plea in Ellis’s defense. His problem is that the one first-hand source that should settle the matter once and for all is unavailable. No one outside MI6 has been able to confirm exactly what, if anything, Ellis confessed to. The relevant files remain under lock and key. Keith Jeffery, the authorized historian of MI6, consulted at least some of them. In his chapters on the 1930s, he evaluated Ellis’s work — and did not mention any treachery. But Jeffery’s solid and comprehensive work, entitled MI6, The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909-1949 and published in 2010, stops short by a few years of Ellis’s supposed confession.
This book will remind many veterans of a good CI study; Fink weighs the evidence pro and con at some length—without being able to reach a definitive conclusion. Though some will find this frustrating, Eagle in the Mirror is well-written and holds the reader’s attention. It offers yet another look at the inner workings of MI6, and will take its rightful place on the bookshelf next to two other eminently readable and substantive books that cover some of the same ground: Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends, Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (2014) and Jimmy Burns’ A Faithful Spy, The Life and Times of an MI 6 and MI 5 Officer (2023). Macintyre focuses on the last phase of Philby’s treachery, while Burns looks at an officer who served alongside Ellis in BSC and, as the title suggests, was never accused of aiding the enemy. The Eagle in the Mirror was originally published in the UK in 2023 and was published in the United States on May 21.
The Eagle in the Mirror earns an impressive 3.5 out of 4 trench coats
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