21-03-2009, 11:29 AM
(This post was last modified: 21-03-2009, 11:38 AM by Ron Williams.)
Dick Ellis: A Conclusion?
From a distance of many years and having only access to standard published sources it is difficult to come to a completely satisfactory conclusion about the career of Dick Ellis, not only regarding his role in the birth of American central intelligence, but also the part he played in two World Wars and the Cold War. As far as the serious charges made against him stemming from his career as an intelligence officer during the World War II and Cold War period I might recommend checking, what could be called the case for the prosecution, contained in Their Trade is Treachery by Chapman Pincher and Spycather by Peter Wright, and the defense by friends and colleagues contained in Intrepid’s Last Case by William Stevenson (no relation to Sir William), and in a book that I can’t recommend highly enough, The True Intrepid: Sir William Stephenson and the Unknown Agents by Bill Macdonald.
Dick Ellis was charged by Chapman Pincher in 1981 (six years after his death) with having passed “order of battle” information about the British intelligence services to the Germans before and during World War II and of being a Soviet agent that did so much damage to the West that in this regard he put Kim Philby “in the shade,” and Peter Wright in Spycatcher claimed that Ellis would have been hung if the information that came out in the 1960s would have been known in 1939-40. Both Chapman and Wright claim that Ellis confessed to these charges made against him.
A very different story is to be found in Intrepid’s Last Case in which Ellis’s friend and World War II boss, Sir William Stephenson, makes some telling points. He explains, for example, that Dick Ellis’s career in Europe was set in such a complex shifting minefield of Germans, Bolsheviks, and White Russians of unknown loyalties that it would not have been difficult for anyone wanting to, to make a case against him by a selective interpretation of facts and events. He also shows that “to his friends, it seemed that Dick Ellis was being framed, in a service where a scapegoat was easily created to take the blame for otherwise serious and otherwise unexplained breaches of security” and that “the Soviets had an interest in helping this along.” (Stevenson, pp. 252-253)
Another eloquent defense of Dick Ellis comes from a source largely unknown and unheard from until Bill Macdonald’s book came out in 1998. This was the amazing Canadian electronic telecommunications wizard, Benjamin de Forest “Pat” Bayly, who had become a good friend of Ellis in New York during World War II. He describes for example long hours of discussing their shared love of classical music and he says “…I’m quite sure if Ellis had been a spy (we would have known). I’m suspicious of the people who said he was.” (Macdonald, pp. 337-338)
Dick Ellis is someone we need to know more about and I would be very interested in learning about other sources that might help this process along.
Ron Williams
From a distance of many years and having only access to standard published sources it is difficult to come to a completely satisfactory conclusion about the career of Dick Ellis, not only regarding his role in the birth of American central intelligence, but also the part he played in two World Wars and the Cold War. As far as the serious charges made against him stemming from his career as an intelligence officer during the World War II and Cold War period I might recommend checking, what could be called the case for the prosecution, contained in Their Trade is Treachery by Chapman Pincher and Spycather by Peter Wright, and the defense by friends and colleagues contained in Intrepid’s Last Case by William Stevenson (no relation to Sir William), and in a book that I can’t recommend highly enough, The True Intrepid: Sir William Stephenson and the Unknown Agents by Bill Macdonald.
Dick Ellis was charged by Chapman Pincher in 1981 (six years after his death) with having passed “order of battle” information about the British intelligence services to the Germans before and during World War II and of being a Soviet agent that did so much damage to the West that in this regard he put Kim Philby “in the shade,” and Peter Wright in Spycatcher claimed that Ellis would have been hung if the information that came out in the 1960s would have been known in 1939-40. Both Chapman and Wright claim that Ellis confessed to these charges made against him.
A very different story is to be found in Intrepid’s Last Case in which Ellis’s friend and World War II boss, Sir William Stephenson, makes some telling points. He explains, for example, that Dick Ellis’s career in Europe was set in such a complex shifting minefield of Germans, Bolsheviks, and White Russians of unknown loyalties that it would not have been difficult for anyone wanting to, to make a case against him by a selective interpretation of facts and events. He also shows that “to his friends, it seemed that Dick Ellis was being framed, in a service where a scapegoat was easily created to take the blame for otherwise serious and otherwise unexplained breaches of security” and that “the Soviets had an interest in helping this along.” (Stevenson, pp. 252-253)
Another eloquent defense of Dick Ellis comes from a source largely unknown and unheard from until Bill Macdonald’s book came out in 1998. This was the amazing Canadian electronic telecommunications wizard, Benjamin de Forest “Pat” Bayly, who had become a good friend of Ellis in New York during World War II. He describes for example long hours of discussing their shared love of classical music and he says “…I’m quite sure if Ellis had been a spy (we would have known). I’m suspicious of the people who said he was.” (Macdonald, pp. 337-338)
Dick Ellis is someone we need to know more about and I would be very interested in learning about other sources that might help this process along.
Ron Williams