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.
Ellis was a venal, sly man. He sat there, stripped of his rank, white-faced and puffy. But never once did I hear an apology. I could understand how a man might choose the Soviets through ideological conviction. But to sell colleagues out to the Germans for a few pounds in time of war? I told him that had he been caught in 1939-40 he would have been hanged.
Ellis clearly thought the interrogation was over. But it had just begun. We wanted to know about his involvement with the Soviets, we said. For a moment he wavered in front of us, then he fought back.
"Never!" he shouted, "never with the Communists..."
The next day we took him through the odd chain of events - his trip to Australia, and his rapid return to Britain, and the coincidence of Petrov's defection. But he denied everything, even when he was caught out in repeated lying about his actions until he retired. Not even an authorized offer of immunity could make him change his mind. But I have little doubt of Ellis' involvement with the Russians.
Bunny Pancheff and I wrote the case up, and concluded that in our opinion Ellis had certainly committed espionage for the Germans, including during the war, and that we believed him also to have been a long-term agent of the Russian Intelligence Service until his removal from secret access. The report was endorsed without reservation by Christopher Phillpotts, and submitted to Dick White and his deputy, Maurice Oldfield.
Oldfield was a shy and good man, with a wonderful grasp of the principles of counterintelligence. But he was a poor judge of character. At first he doubted the veracity of Ellis' confession, until eventually Bunny Pancheff played the crucial exchanges to him. But even though we had uncovered a traitor of major proportions, I sometimes felt as if it were I who was being blamed. Oldfield despised the climate of fear engendered by Phillpotts' vetting purges, and campaigned hard to change Dick's mind. The fact that Ellis had confessed seemed to weigh hardly at all on his thinking. As far as he was concerned, it was all a long time ago, and best forgotten.
As the climate against investigations turned in the late 1960s, I wanted desperately to have some of the FLUENCY conclusions circulated more widely inside both Services. I felt sure that this was the only way we could restore some general consent for a continuation of the work. At the moment, people knew nothing of the cases, and to them our activities seemed like blind McCarthyism. D3 had become such a massive section, embracing FLUENCY and the D3 researches into the 1930s. Inevitably, other senior officers resented its priority call on resources and personnel, and since they had no way of judging the importance of the work we were conducting, their resentments grew. I was accused of being suspicious of everybody. F.J. would defend me if the attacks were public. On one occasion he turned around and said to my attacker, "It is Peter's job to be suspicious." Like Angleton, I could sense my enemies multiplying. It was a curious sensation. After years of being the hunter, I suddenly felt myself hunted.