The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [118]
In October 1923 Charles Howard (known as ‘Dick’) Ellis was sent out to work under Foley on the Soviet target. Australian-born (in 1895), of British parents, Ellis joined the army in 1915 and served on the Western Front and in the Middle East, ending up with the British forces in Transcaspia and the Caucasus in 1918-19. In October 1921 he abandoned an undergraduate course at Oxford (St Edmund Hall) and was taken on by the Service to work in Istanbul. There he married a Russian woman and became the contact for a number of Russian agents. Long afterwards Ellis reflected on the over-close relationships between SIS’s Russian-speaking officers, using their own names, and their Russian agents, and the socialising between both groups which led to a most unprofessional level of interconsciousness. As these individuals spread out over Central and Eastern Europe, the Russian cadre of SIS case-officers and their head agents became far too well known to the White Russian communities, and thus, in turn, to the OGPU. While Ellis knew no German (though as a talented linguist he soon added it to his fluent Russian), in October 1923 he was posted to Berlin, where he was given a list of Russian agents to run and was himself approached by several White Russians who had heard of his transfer from friends in Turkey. Provided with little specific briefing or preliminary training – a typical experience for the time – Ellis was largely left to fend for himself and learn on the job. Afterwards he complained that desk officers at Head Office, who had no agent-running experience and seldom visited stations, knew very little about the realities of work in the field and frequently nursed unrealistic expectations of what could be achieved. Ellis applied to be moved away from Berlin in 1926, and he settled under journalist cover, first in Vienna and then in Geneva, where he continued to work on German and Russian targets principally through his Berlin-based Russian agents, some of whom clearly were also working (at least) for German intelligence. Reflecting after the war on one agent, whom he believed also to be working for both the Poles and the Estonians (but who told him he had refused to work for the Germans), Ellis described him as ‘no fool and, like most Russians of his type, played both ends against the middle’. Nevertheless, he ‘served me well, and on the whole his information was sound. He kept me well informed about “phoney” agents and was useful in that respect.’
Switzerland was a significant intelligence centre and, as during the First World War, continued to be an important base for Near and Middle Eastern work. The India Office intelligence agency, Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), had representatives in the country who liaised closely with Cumming’s men. In March 1920 Cumming agreed with Charles Tegart, a charismatic Irishman who had been seconded to IPI from the Calcutta Police, that MI1(c) would fund the IPI representative in Geneva to the tune of £1,500 a year and ‘get from him all his non-Indian stuff in exchange’. In June, Rhys Samson proposed that he should be based in Switzerland to co-ordinate ‘Pan-Islamic Intelligence in Western Europe’ and from there run ‘a certain Turkish Nationalist who would be in a position to get inside information on Turkish affairs’. By the end of the year, however, with the pressure for economy beginning to bite, a ‘conference of Swiss affairs’ at Head Office agreed to cut the payment to IPI to £500. On the other hand, the finances for Swiss work were for a couple of years boosted by funding of £2,500 from the British military authorities in Turkey, brought in with Samson, who was transferred from Istanbul in September 1920 to be Inspector of the Swiss Group and (briefly) head of station at Geneva.
Examples of SIS reporting survive in an ‘Eastern Summary’ circulated to the Foreign, India, Colonial and War Offices. In January 1923, for example, there was intelligence about the Egyptian nationalist