20-03-2009, 04:44 AM
(This post was last modified: 21-03-2009, 11:34 AM by Ron Williams.)
My Interest in Dick Ellis: The Books
I guess one way to attempt to explain how I got interested in Dick Ellis is to recount how the first four of the main source books came into my hands, all on the same day, and to present an extensive quote from one of them. The books are:
Wild Bill and Intrepid: Donovan, Stephenson, and the Origin of the CIA, by Thomas F. Troy, 1996
Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44, by Thomas E. Mahl, 1998
Room 3603: The Story of the British Intelligence Center in New York during World War II, by H. Montgomery Hyde, 1962 (with a forward by Ian Fleming, published in Canada and the UK as The Quiet Canadian)
British Security Coordination: The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940-45, written for Sir William Stephenson by various BSC staff members, 1945
Some seven or eight years ago when I was hoping to find some background on the origins of the CIA I stopped into a used book store that I frequented at the time and asked the cashier if they had a section on intelligence and espionage and he pointed me to a shelf in a section of the store that I had overlooked in previous visits. There in close proximity to one another were the above listed four books. What they contained was beyond anything I had imagined, and here specifically is what got me interested in Dick Ellis:
[COLOR="Blue"]The influence of British Security Coordination in America to involve the United States in World War II and to prepare the United States to participate in war is impressive, even startling. In the (Ernest) Cuneo Papers at the Franklin Roosevelt Library is an article written by Cuneo that, while its main purpose was to defend Cuneo’s friend Dick Ellis from charges of being a Soviet mole, captures a telling fact known to few people: British intelligence created William Donovan’s COI/OSS. “If the charge against Ellis is true,” wrote Cuneo, “…it would mean that the OSS, and to some extent its successor, the CIA, in effect was a branch of the Soviet KGB.”
Cuneo is not the only insider to say bluntly that credit must fall to William Stephenson’s organization for the “conception and establishment of the COI.” Stephenson cabled this to London in mid-June 1941: “Donovan accuses me of having ‘intrigued and driven’ him into appointment. You can imagine how relieved I am after three months of battle and jockeying for position in Washington that our man is in a position of such importance to our efforts.”
Not only were the British the primary force in the conception and creation of the COI, which later became the OSS and whose pieces were finally reconstructed in the CIA, but a British officer, Dick Ellis, then ran the organization. This was done in the deepest secrecy, because as Winston Churchill’s personal intelligence assistant, Major Desmond Morton, wrote, “It is of course essential that this fact not be known in view of the furious uproar it would cause if known to the Isolationists.”
The isolationists never caught on, but Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle did, though he was misled by Ellis’s cover name, as he passed this explosive information on to Sumner Welles: “For your confidential information, the really active head of the intelligence section in Donovan’s group is Mr. Elliot, who is assistant to Mr. Stevenson [sic]. In other words, Stevenson’s assistant in The British intelligence is running Donovan’s intelligence service.” (Mahl, pp. 18-19)[/COLOR]
I had read the two “Intrepid” books when they first came out, but I had almost no background at the time to help me appreciate what was in the second one, Intrepid’s Last Case (1983). Only now in a rereading did I learn its main purpose was an attempt by Sir William Stephenson to clear Dick Ellis’s name eight years after his death. (More on this later.)
In the last week and a half or so I also skimmed through A Man Called Intrepid, and read for the first time Spycather, Their Trade is Treachery, and a great and startling book that I had not been aware of at all, The True Intrepid: Sir William Stephenson and the Unknown Agents that was written in 1998 by Bill Macdonald, a Canadian from Sir William’s home town of Winnipeg.
As I am not sure how to get to the end of this, I will leave it here for now, and attempt to put together a basic biographical sketch of Dick Ellis in the next post.
Ron Williams
I guess one way to attempt to explain how I got interested in Dick Ellis is to recount how the first four of the main source books came into my hands, all on the same day, and to present an extensive quote from one of them. The books are:
Wild Bill and Intrepid: Donovan, Stephenson, and the Origin of the CIA, by Thomas F. Troy, 1996
Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44, by Thomas E. Mahl, 1998
Room 3603: The Story of the British Intelligence Center in New York during World War II, by H. Montgomery Hyde, 1962 (with a forward by Ian Fleming, published in Canada and the UK as The Quiet Canadian)
British Security Coordination: The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940-45, written for Sir William Stephenson by various BSC staff members, 1945
Some seven or eight years ago when I was hoping to find some background on the origins of the CIA I stopped into a used book store that I frequented at the time and asked the cashier if they had a section on intelligence and espionage and he pointed me to a shelf in a section of the store that I had overlooked in previous visits. There in close proximity to one another were the above listed four books. What they contained was beyond anything I had imagined, and here specifically is what got me interested in Dick Ellis:
[COLOR="Blue"]The influence of British Security Coordination in America to involve the United States in World War II and to prepare the United States to participate in war is impressive, even startling. In the (Ernest) Cuneo Papers at the Franklin Roosevelt Library is an article written by Cuneo that, while its main purpose was to defend Cuneo’s friend Dick Ellis from charges of being a Soviet mole, captures a telling fact known to few people: British intelligence created William Donovan’s COI/OSS. “If the charge against Ellis is true,” wrote Cuneo, “…it would mean that the OSS, and to some extent its successor, the CIA, in effect was a branch of the Soviet KGB.”
Cuneo is not the only insider to say bluntly that credit must fall to William Stephenson’s organization for the “conception and establishment of the COI.” Stephenson cabled this to London in mid-June 1941: “Donovan accuses me of having ‘intrigued and driven’ him into appointment. You can imagine how relieved I am after three months of battle and jockeying for position in Washington that our man is in a position of such importance to our efforts.”
Not only were the British the primary force in the conception and creation of the COI, which later became the OSS and whose pieces were finally reconstructed in the CIA, but a British officer, Dick Ellis, then ran the organization. This was done in the deepest secrecy, because as Winston Churchill’s personal intelligence assistant, Major Desmond Morton, wrote, “It is of course essential that this fact not be known in view of the furious uproar it would cause if known to the Isolationists.”
The isolationists never caught on, but Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle did, though he was misled by Ellis’s cover name, as he passed this explosive information on to Sumner Welles: “For your confidential information, the really active head of the intelligence section in Donovan’s group is Mr. Elliot, who is assistant to Mr. Stevenson [sic]. In other words, Stevenson’s assistant in The British intelligence is running Donovan’s intelligence service.” (Mahl, pp. 18-19)[/COLOR]
I had read the two “Intrepid” books when they first came out, but I had almost no background at the time to help me appreciate what was in the second one, Intrepid’s Last Case (1983). Only now in a rereading did I learn its main purpose was an attempt by Sir William Stephenson to clear Dick Ellis’s name eight years after his death. (More on this later.)
In the last week and a half or so I also skimmed through A Man Called Intrepid, and read for the first time Spycather, Their Trade is Treachery, and a great and startling book that I had not been aware of at all, The True Intrepid: Sir William Stephenson and the Unknown Agents that was written in 1998 by Bill Macdonald, a Canadian from Sir William’s home town of Winnipeg.
As I am not sure how to get to the end of this, I will leave it here for now, and attempt to put together a basic biographical sketch of Dick Ellis in the next post.
Ron Williams