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.