Dick Ellis

Dick Ellis
CMG CBE TD
Charles Howard 'Dick' Ellis
Born
Charles Howard Ellis

13 February 1895 (1895-02-13)
Sydney, Australia
Died5 July 1975(1975-07-05) (aged 80)
Eastbourne, East Sussex
NationalityAustralian, British
EducationSt Edmund Hall, Oxford
OccupationIntelligence officer
ChildrenAnn Salwey, Olik Ellis
AwardsOfficer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Legion of Merit, Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George, Territorial Decoration, Commemorative Medal of the Battles of the Somme, Sir Percy Sykes Memorial Medal
Espionage activity
AgencySecret Intelligence Service
RankColonel

Colonel Charles Howard "Dick" Ellis CMG CBE TD (13 February 1895 – 5 July 1975) was an Australian-born British intelligence officer credited with writing the blueprint for United States wartime intelligence agencies Coordinator of Information and Office of Strategic Services, what would become the CIA.[1] For his contribution to the United States in World War II, he received the Legion of Merit from President Harry S. Truman.

Colonel David K. E. Bruce said that ‘without [Ellis's] assistance... American intelligence could not have gotten off the ground in World War II’.[2]

After his death, Ellis was alleged to have been a spy or 'triple agent' for Germany and the Soviet Union. According to British author Nigel West, a joint Security Service (MI5) and Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) internal group called the Fluency Committee believed that Ellis had been a spy for Nazi Germany's military-intelligence unit, the Abwehr, prior to World War II.

During interrogation by the Fluency Committee in the 1960s Ellis had, in the words of West, allegedly 'made a limited confession, admitting his links to the Germans and claiming to have been kept impossibly short of money, but denying that he had ever succumbed to pressure from the Soviets, although he acknowledged it was likely they had learned of his treachery'.[3]

In the 1980s, Ellis was publicly accused first by British author Chapman Pincher and then by former MI5 officer and Fluency Committee member Peter Wright of being a traitor.[4] Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's refusal to confirm or deny Pincher's allegation caused distress to the Ellis family[5][6] and his daughter, Ann Salwey, returned her father's medals to the British Government in protest.[7]

British historian Donald Cameron Watt was among many vocal supporters of Ellis. Watt rubbished Wright's 1987 bestseller Spycatcher and the case against Ellis in a 1988 essay for The Political Quarterly:

"The best that can be said of it is that, if no German evidence were available, if every piece of oral evidence recollected at distances of 30 years from the event was assumed to be unquestionably reliable, then this is the kind of reconstruction that an ignorant, simplificatory but conspiratorially inclined mind might advance as though it were reality. Ellis may have fed his White Russian contacts in Paris with information of a kind in the hope of using them both as a means of finding out what the Abwehr were interested in, and of creating a degree of confidence which could then be turned to advantage. It is equally possible, given the well-known paucity of resources put at MI6's disposal in the 1930s, that he attempted to better his situation by some kind of illegal financial dealings (as some believe). But the identifications, such as they are, to which Wright appeals, are worthless; and the rest is contrary to the historical evidence of the Abwehr's knowledge of, and activities against, MI6."[8]

A former colleague of Ellis, Australian businessman and British Security Co-ordination secret agent Bill Ross-Smith, called the allegations against Ellis a ‘travesty of the truth... an unwarranted attack impugning the honour and integrity of a defenceless dead man’.[9]

  1. ^ Fink, Jesse (2023). The Eagle in the Mirror. Black & White Publishing. p. 96. ISBN 9781785305108.
  2. ^ Fink, Jesse (2023). The Eagle in the Mirror. Edinburgh: Black & White Publishing. p. 97. ISBN 9781785305108.
  3. ^ West, Nigel (2006). Historical Dictionary of International Intelligence. Maryland: Scarecrow Press. p. 94. ISBN 9780810855786.
  4. ^ Fink, Jesse (2023). The Eagle in the Mirror. Black & White Publishing. pp. XX. ISBN 9781785305108.
  5. ^ H. Montgomery Hyde, Letters: "Security risks" The Times, 27 April 1981
  6. ^ Stewart Tendler, "Mrs Thatcher refuses to comment on man named as spy", The Times, 22 April 1981
  7. ^ Fink, Jesse (2023). The Eagle in the Mirror. Edinburgh: Black & White Publishing. p. 186. ISBN 9781785305108.
  8. ^ Watt, Donald Cameron (April 1988). "Fall-out from treachery: Peter Wright and the Spycatcher case". The Political Quarterly. 59 (2): 206–218. doi:10.1111/j.1467-923X.1988.tb02393.x.
  9. ^ Fink, Jesse (2023). The Eagle in the Mirror. Edinburgh: Black & White Publishing. p. 203. ISBN 9781785305108.