Spycatcher (53 page)

A few days later Arthur came to see me. He and I had seen little of each other since his departure to MI6. He had aged and seemed less driven than he was before, though the past still held him. He wanted to know about Stevens. They were friends in D Branch in the old days, and Arthur, much the older man, had an almost paternal regard for him.

"Did you have to do it?" he asked.

I told him about the middling-grade agent, and the retracted confession, and the confusion and doubt which plagued us all.

"What else could we do?" I asked. "How can we tell Whitehall to do their vetting, and then turn a blind eye ourselves?"

Arthur knew we had been right, but the cost was becoming progressively higher.

"It's poisoning us all," he said quietly.

Gregory Stevens' departure caused great bitterness in the office. He was a popular officer, and inevitably I was blamed. No one, apart from a handful of senior officers, knew the context which had led up to his investigation - the long history of suspected high-level penetration of MI5, the Blunt confessions, the terrible secret of the FLUENCY conclusions which implicated Sir Roger Hollis, and the hunt for the middling-grade agent.

Word began to spread through the office that D3 was conducting vetting purges in the office, and that officers like Gregory Stevens were being victimized. There was talk of the Gestapo. Younger officers began to avoid me in the canteen. Casual conversation with many of my colleagues became a rarity. Those of us involved in the penetration issue were set apart, feared and distrusted in equal measure.

It was the same in MI6. After years of neglect, a new head of Counterintelligence, Christopher Phillpotts, was appointed in the mid-1960s, around the time FLUENCY got off the ground. Phillpotts looked to all intents and purposes like a figure from the ANCIEN REGIME of British Intelligence. He was a charismatic war hero with a penchant for pink gins and cravats and bow ties. But he was a strict disciplinarian, who believed that in the wake of Philby's defection, the Augean stables needed cleaning. A thorough review of security procedures and personnel was the precondition for a return to self-respect for a Service which, despite Dick White's best efforts, had still to recover from the wounds of Philby, Suez, and Commander Crabbe. Those who could not satisfactorily account for their backgrounds would have to go. National security demanded that, at long last, the benefit of the doubt be given to the state.

Phillpotts supported FLUENCY without reservation, and initiated his own program of vetting inside Century House. At least eight senior officers were forced to resign in the wake of Phillpotts' new regime. One officer, for instance, was forced to go when it was discovered that he had a long affair with Litzi Friedman without ever declaring it to the office. Friedman was Philby's first wife, and almost certainly the person who recruited him to the Soviet cause. Another senior officer to suffer had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s.

Several officers who had been through the Joint Services Language School were also unable to account for discrepancies in their backgrounds, and chose to leave. Even Nicholas Elliott, for so long Philby's supporter, until finally traveling to Beirut to obtain his confession, was investigated, in case Philby had managed to extract intelligence from him. But after lengthy interrogation Elliott just convinced his interrogator, Arthur Martin, that he was in the clear.

None of this was a matter of treachery. But for so long the normal rules of vetting had been waived in the club world of intelligence that when the reckoning came it was abrupt and painful. Much of the blame for the purges inside MI6 was attributed to MI5, and to people like Patrick Stewart and me in particular. Many felt that MI5 were taking advantage of Philby's defection to even up a few old scores.

I had been unpopular inside certain sections of MI6 since my review of the Penkovsky case. But it was the Ellis case which really earned me the undying enmity of the MI6 old guard, an enmity which I wore as a mark of achievement.

The Ellis case caused friction between MI5 and MI6 for almost as long as the Philby case. It began in the aftermath of the Burgess and Maclean defections, when MI5 began to reanalyze the intelligence provided by the defector Walter Krivitsky. One of Krivitsky's serials concerned a White Russian emigre based in Paris named Vladimir Von Petrov, who, Krivitsky alleged, had been an important agent for the Fourth Department, the GRU, during the prewar period, with good sources in Britain as well as Germany, where he was operating as a double agent for the Germans and the Russians.

MI5 were interested to find out who those sources might be, so they studied Von Petrov's file and found a series of debriefing reports of Abwehr officers taken at the end of the war. The Abwehr officers confirmed that Von Petrov was being run by them as their agent, although, of course, they did not know that he was also working for the Russians. Several mentioned that Von Petrov had a source in British Intelligence who could obtain our order of battle, as well as details of vital operations, such as the tap on the secret telephone link between Hitler and his Ambassador in London, von Ribbentrop. One Abwehr officer even remembered the name of Von Petrov's source - it was a Captain Ellis, who was an Australian, a brilliant linguist, and who had a Russian wife.

Charles "Dickie" Ellis was then a senior MI6 officer, recently promoted from MI6 controller for Far Eastern Affairs to be in charge of all

operations in North and South America. He joined MI6 in the 1920s, and was based in Paris, where he was responsible for recruiting agents in the White Russian emigre community. During this period he recruited an agent with access to Von Petrov.

The prewar Russian emigre community was a cesspool of uncertain loyalties, and when MI5 raised the query against Ellis, MI6 rejected any possibility that he could be a spy. They maintained that it was much more likely that Von Petrov was working for Ellis, than the other way around, and was lying to protect himself. In any case, Ellis had opted for early retirement, and was planning to return to Australia.

Dick White, newly appointed to MI5, and not wanting to aggravate still further the tensions already strained to breaking point by the gathering suspicions against Philby, agreed to shelve the case, where it lay festering in the Registry until I took over as D3.

When Phillpotts took over as head of Counterintelligence, I approached him as chairman of FLUENCY and asked him if he was prepared to sanction a joint MI5-MI6 investigation into Ellis to finally resolve the case.

He went to Dick White, who gave his agreement, and I began working with a young MI6 Counterintelligence officer named Bunny Pancheff.

The real difficulty in the Ellis case was trying to determine whether he was working for the Germans or the Russians, or both. Early on we got confirmation of the Abwehr officer's story, when we traced the records of the prewar operation to tap the Hitler-von Ribbentrop link. The officer in charge of processing the product was Ellis. The question was whether he was providing the information to Von Petrov in the knowledge that he was a Russian spy, or whether he assumed he was working only for the Germans.

The first thing which convinced me Ellis was always a Russian spy was the discovery of the distribution of the Abwehr officer's report in which he claimed Von Petrov's British source was a Captain Ellis. The report was sent routinely to Kim Philby, in the Counterintelligence Department. He had scrawled in the margin: "Who is this man Ellis?

NFA," meaning "No further action," before burying the report in the files. At the time Ellis' office was just a few doors down the corridor, but it seemed to me to be a most suspicious oversight by the normally eagle-eyed Philby.

That was only the first of a number of interesting connections between Philby's career and Ellis'. Within a year of Philby's falling under suspicion Ellis took early retirement, pleading ill-health. He traveled to Australia, and took up a job as a consultant to ASIS, the Australian overseas intelligence-gathering organization. While there he was briefed by the Australians on the impending defection of Vladimir Petrov, a Beria henchman who opted to stay in the West rather than take his chances in Moscow. Almost immediately Ellis returned to Britain and contacted Kim Philby, despite being specifically warned against doing so by Maurice Oldfield. No one knows what they discussed, but from that date onward Petrov fell under suspicion in Australia, and when he noticed his safe had been tampered with in the Soviet Embassy, he defected earlier than anticipated, eluding by hours two burly KGB officers who had been sent out from Moscow to bring him back. The reasons for Ellis' hasty flight from Australia have never been clear, but I have always assumed that he thought the Petrov who was about to defect was the same Von Petrov with whom he had been involved in the 1920s, and who must have known the secret of his treachery.

We looked at his wartime record. He spent most of the war in the USA working as deputy to Sir William Stephenson, the Man Called Intrepid, at British Security Coordination. Some of the American VENONA showed clearly that the Soviets were operating a number of agents inside BSC, but although we tried exhaustive analysis to link Ellis with each of the cryptonyms, we could never be certain.

I began to search further back for more definite clues connecting Ellis to the Soviets in the prewar period. At the time I was studying the prewar period as part of the D3 researches, and was rereading Elizabeth Poretsky's autobiography, OUR OWN PEOPLE, about her life as the wife of Ludwik Poretsky (also known as Ignace Reiss), one of the "great illegals" who worked along with Krivitsky as a Fourth Department agent runner for the Soviet GRU. He was murdered after he refused to return to Moscow and defected. I first read the book in its English translation, but this time I studied the original French text, titled LES NOTRES. I seized on an extraordinary statement which had not appeared in the English edition. Elizabeth Poretsky said that in the late 1920s Ludwik had an agent high up in British Intelligence.

In 1966 I traveled to Paris to see Mrs Poretsky, a shrew who guarded her husband's memory jealously and remained suspicious of all agents of Western imperialism. I talked around the subject for a while, and then reminded her of the passage in the book. Surely, I ventured, she had got her dates wrong, and presumably this agent was Philby? She became quite indignant, squawking at me for my ignorance.

"This was not Philby," she jabbered. "Ludwik ran this agent in Amsterdam in 1928 and 1929. Philby was just a schoolboy then."

"Do you think you could recognize the man?" I asked, trying hard to conceal my excitement.

She began to hedge. She told me she was still loyal to LES NOTRES. She could never inform.

"Oh no," I told her, "it's nothing like that - we just need it for our records."

I produced a spread of twenty photographs from my briefcase. Some were dummy photographs, others were of known colleagues of her husband, and one was of Ellis, dating from the mid-1920s. She picked out all those she ought to have known, and Ellis as well.

"I do not know this man's name," she told me, "but I am sure he is familiar."

From Paris I traveled by bus to Amsterdam to see a woman named Mrs. Pieck, the widow of a Dutchman, Henri Pieck, who worked as a Soviet illegal and recruited several spies in Britain during the prewar period, including John Herbert King, a cipher clerk in the Foreign Office. Elizabeth Poretsky had suggested I visit Mrs. Pieck in case she could throw any light on the photograph she had picked out. Mrs. Pieck was a woman from the same mold, and had clearly been warned of my imminent arrival. She too picked out Ellis' photograph, but refused to say why.

There was only one other lead. Elizabeth Poretsky told in her book how Richard Sorge, the great Soviet illegal who eventually built up one of the most important spy networks in history in China and Japan during World War II, had traveled to Britain during the late 1920s. His mission had been highly dangerous, but she told me she knew no more details, and tried too obviously to dissuade me from visiting Sorge's widow, Christiane, who was living in a seminary near New York. I cabled Stephen de Mowbray, then based in Washington as an MI6 liaison officer, and asked him to visit her.

Christiane Sorge placed the final piece in the jigsaw, but left the picture still infuriatingly unfocused. She did indeed remember Sorge's mission, and said it was to see a very important agent, although she knew nothing of his identity. She recalled just one fragment - a meeting on a street corner in London. She and Rickie had gone together to meet this agent, but he had told her to stand well back and cover him in case there was trouble. Could she recognize the man? Stephen asked her. She had seen him, but not well. He showed her the photographs.

"This man looks familiar," she said, "but I could not be certain, after over forty years."

It was Ellis' photograph.

Eventually Ellis was interrogated. He was old, and claimed to be in ill-health, so Bunny Pancheff and I were instructed to take the

sessions extremely gently. Ellis denied everything for several days. He blustered and blamed the whole thing on jealous colleagues. But as we produced the evidence, the Abwehr officer's report, and the indoctrination list for the telephone tap, he began to wilt.

After lunch on the Friday he returned to the interrogation room in the basement of the old War Office, known as Room 055, with a typed sheet of paper. It was a confession of sorts. He claimed that he had got into trouble during the early years in MI6. He was sent out into the field with no training and no money, and began providing chicken feed, odd scraps of information about MI6 plans, to his agent Zilenski (his brother-in-law), who was in touch with Von Petrov, in order to obtain more intelligence in return. It was a dangerous game, and soon he was being blackmailed. He claimed that his wife was ill, and he needed money, so he agreed to supply Zilenski with more information.

Ellis' confession was carefully shaded at the edges to hide precisely what intelligence he had given, and where it had gone, so, under interrogation, we asked him to clarify it. He admitted passing over detailed order-of-battle plans for British Intelligence, as well as betraying the Hitler-von Ribbentrop telephone link, even though he knew this material was being passed by Von Petrov to the Germans. (Part of the Abwehr information came from Stevens and Best, who were captured by a trick on the Dutch-German border by the Gestapo. We were able to talk to them after the war, and they said that at their interrogation they were amazed how much the Abwehr knew about the organization of MI6. We asked Ellis when he last had contact with the Russian emigre's. He admitted that it was in December 1939, after the outbreak of war.