Colonel Charles Howard "Dick" Ellis (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. 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".
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".
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. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's refusal to confirm or deny Pincher's allegation caused distress to the Ellis familyH. Montgomery Hyde, Letters: "Security risks" The Times, 27 April 1981Stewart Tendler, "Mrs Thatcher refuses to comment on man named as spy", The Times, 22 April 1981 and his daughter, Ann Salwey, returned her father's medals to the British Government in protest.
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.
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".
Early life in Australia Ellis was born in Annandale, Sydney, Australia, to Devonshire-born William Edward Ellis and New Zealand-born Lillian Mary Hobday and spent most his early life in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Launceston and Warragul in Gippsland.
A largely self-educated student and self-trained classical musician, he played as a cellist in orchestras in Melbourne and won a scholarship after taking night classes at the University of Melbourne, which gave Ellis 'the possibility of taking a course at one of the English universities, provided a small sum of money could be found to cover the cost of the journey and sojourn in England'. In June 1914, he travelled to England.
Military service in World War I and Central Asia
Following the outbreak of the First World War (1914–18), Ellis enlisted as a private in the 100th Provisional Battalion, headquartered in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, a unit of the Territorial Force and later known as the 29th (City of London) Battalion.
According to his biographer, Jesse Fink, Ellis ‘entered the actual "theatre of war" on 19 October 1916 in France, where he fought in the First Battle of the Somme commanded by Douglas Haig (which ended on 13 November 1916), got promoted to lance corporal (second-in-command of a section), [and] was repeatedly maimed.'
Wrote Ellis: ‘[I] served [on the Western Front] until the Somme battle finished, when I was given a commission and returned to England to work at the War Office and on censorship work in London and the Midlands. My department was in connection with Russian affairs, and the interesting character of the work induced me to take up the language. I worked at this in London and Paris for 13 months.’
Decades later, Ellis was awarded a Battles of the Somme Commemorative Medal.
After convalescing in a British hospital and further training in Troon, Scotland, Ellis joined the 4th Battalion Middlesex Regiment, was commissioned as a junior officer in September 1917,Cain, Frank, 'Ellis, Charles Howard (Dick) (1895–1975)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, accessed 4 April 2012. and later promoted to captain.
In 1918, Ellis left Europe for Egypt and India, via Italy. While stationed with the South Lancashire Regiment 1st Battalion in Quetta, he volunteered for the Intelligence Corps in Persia and Transcaspia. Ellis was later sent to Transcaspia as part of the Malleson mission against the Bolsheviks in what is now Turkmenistan.
Writes Fink: 'The original campaign to thwart German and Turkish incursions in Central Asia and India was two-pronged: Major General Lionel Dunsterville’s "Dunsterforce" led a British Indian Army brigade in Baku, capital of the newly formed and oil-rich Azerbaijan, and Major General Wilfrid Malleson, assistant quartermaster-general for intelligence, focused on the area from Meshed in Persia to Merv in Transcaspia: a distance of about 400 kilometres. Ellis was appointed one of Malleson's three staff officers, or captains, accompanied by "a small guard of Indian cavalry"... but Malleson's primary aim switched to preventing the Bolsheviks from taking over the... Trans-Caspian Railway, or Central Asian Railway, which roughly followed the route of the old Silk Road from Samarkand (now part of Uzbekistan) west to Krasnovodsk (now Türkmenbaşy) in Transcaspia.'
On 20 September 1918 Ellis was alleged to have been present for the slaying of 26 Commissars in Baku, Azerbaijan, though he strenuously denied any involvement: ‘No British officer was in the vicinity, nor was any British officer or official aware of what was happening to the prisoners.'
The following year Ellis took part in the Anglo-Afghan War, was awarded an OBE (military)Mr C. H. Ellis (Obituaries) The Times 16 July 1975 and joined the Foreign Office as liaison officer and King’s Messenger. He also applied to study at Oxford University.
Ellis on the Malleson mission
In 1963 Ellis wrote a book about the Malleson mission titled The Transcaspian Episode, 1918–1919 (also released as The British 'Intervention' in Transcaspia, 1918–1919). Among the events addressed in the book was the 26 Commissars massacre. The commissars had earlier fled the Mussavatist Azerbaijan advanced guard in the September Days of 1918 just before the Turks occupied Baku. They planned to sail to Astrakhan, the only Caspian port still in Bolshevik hands but were instead dumped at the port of Krasnovodsk where they were summarily executed by the local Menshevik garrison. Ellis fundamentally disagreed with claims by the Socialist Revolutionary journalist Vadim Chaikin that British officers were responsible for the deaths of the Commissars, pointing out that it had been a triumph for Soviet propaganda. In a letter to The Times in 1961, Ellis placed the blame with the "Menshevik-Socialist Revolutionary" Transcaspian Government, which had jurisdiction over the prisoners. According to Ellis, the claim of British involvement arose only after the Socialist Revolutionaries found the need to ingratiate themselves with the stronger Bolsheviks.C. H. Ellis, Letters:Baku Commissars, The Times, 10 October 1961
Pre World War II intelligence career In October 1920, Ellis enrolled at St Edmund Hall, Oxford where he studied Russian. In November the following year he joined MI6 and was sent to Paris, France, and Constantinople, Turkey. He never finished his degree. On 12 April 1923, he married his first wife, Lilia Zelensky, in Constantinople.
In October 1923, Ellis was transferred to Berlin and became vice-consul at the British Passport Control Office, a cover for his intelligence work. MI6 historian Keith Jeffery writes in his official history of the service that Ellis worked for Frank Foley 'on the Soviet target’ and ‘was given a list of Russian agents to run and was himself approached by several White Russians who had heard of his transfer from friends in Turkey. Provided with little specific briefing or preliminary training – a typical experience for the time – Ellis was largely left to fend for himself and learn on the job. Afterwards he complained that desk officers at Head Office, who had no agent-running experience and seldom visited stations, knew very little about the realities of work in the field and frequently nursed unrealistic expectations of what could be achieved.’ Ellis and Zelensky had a son, Olik, in Berlin in 1924.
In 1926, Ellis moved to Vienna to work for station chief Thomas Kendrick under the cover of foreign correspondent for the Morning Post and in 1927 went to Geneva where he wrote a major book on the League of Nations called The Origin, Structure and Working of the League of Nations (1928). Although for long attributed to British-Finnish League official Konni Zilliacus, it has been proven that Ellis was the real author. According to Russian double agent Aleksandr Nelidov, Ellis's MI6 mission was to 'target Comintern [Communist International] agents in Europe... his main job had been to collect material about the Soviet Union from German sources in exchange for British information or for payments.'
In 1931, Ellis and Zelensky divorced and two years later Ellis married Barbara Mary Burgess-Smith in London. The following year they had a daughter, Ann. Throughout the 1930s Ellis was based largely in London. Ellis was made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1932. In 1938, with Captain Henry 'Bob' Kerby, Ellis was involved in MI6 wiretaps of Adolf Hitler and Joachim von Ribbentrop at the German Embassy in London. Ellis's job was to translate the conversations into English. Ellis also ran his own intelligence service, the 22000 Organisation, which existed parallel to Claude Dansey's Z Organisation. Keith Jeffery wrote that the 22000 Organisation's main tasks 'were the penetration of Germany and Italy... agents were recruited mostly from the business, journalistic and academic world'.
World War II intelligence career
In June 1940 Ellis was appointed deputy head to William Stephenson at British Security Co-ordination (BSC) in New York, after the two men were introduced in 1938 in London by Sir Ralph Glyn. Ellis was officially appointed His Britannic Majesty's Consul in New York. He arrived in the United States in July that year.