20 Facts About Dick Ellis

Dick Ellis was later sent to Transcaspia as part of the Malleson mission against the Bolsheviks in what is Turkmenistan.

Dick Ellis was appointed one of Malleson's three staff officers, or captains, accompanied by "a small guard of Indian cavalry".

Dick Ellis fundamentally disagreed with claims by the Socialist Revolutionary journalist Vadim Chaikin that British officers were responsible for the deaths of the Commissars, pointing out that it had been a triumph for Soviet propaganda.

Dick Ellis was made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1932.

Dick Ellis ran his own intelligence service, the 22000 Organisation, which existed parallel to Claude Dansey's Z Organisation.

Dick Ellis was officially appointed His Britannic Majesty's Consul in New York.

Dick Ellis wrote a 14-page document for Donovan titled 'Working of a secret service organisation'.

Dick Ellis continued working closely with Donovan and OSS during 1942 and was involved in the setting up of OSS training centres and the infamous Camp X in Whitby, Ontario.

Dick Ellis placed reservedly at our disposal his extensive experience with and intimate knowledge of the British Intelligence Service, of which he had been an officer for many years.

Dick Ellis enjoyed 'a close and cooperative contact with various officials of the Office of Strategic Services, which has been of incalculable assistance to [the OSS]'.

Dick Ellis gave unreservedly of his talent and wealth of information toward the development of certain of our intelligence organizations and methods.

Dick Ellis headed MI6's Combined Intelligence Far East, based in Singapore and Hong Kong.

Dick Ellis retired from MI6 in 1953 and accepted a two-year contract with the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to act as a liaison between the Australian intelligence services and MI6.

Dick Ellis continued visiting Australia throughout the 1950s, '60s and '70s, primarily working on books, pamphlets and journal articles, with two unpublished manuscripts forming the basis for H Montgomery Hyde's The Quiet Canadian and William Stevenson's A Man Called Intrepid.

Dick Ellis remarried again, to his fourth wife, Joyce Hatten, in 1973.

Dick Ellis denied anything to do with the Soviet Union.

CIA historian Thomas F Troy stated that CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton had warned him in 1963 that Ellis was under investigation as a suspected Soviet agent.

Dorril wrote in his book MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations : 'There is a suspicion that [Dick Ellis] was later made a scapegoat in order to hide a more disturbing fact, namely that he had been trading information with the Germans on the orders of [MI6 chief] Stewart Menzies.

Dick Ellis is the subject of British-Australian author Jesse Fink's biography The Eagle in the Mirror, which was released in August 2023 in Australia and the United Kingdom.

Dick Ellis was another victim of the Cold War, when hysteria and fear overtook sense and reason, when paranoid intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were utterly convinced there were other Philbys to be uncovered, so long as they looked somewhere in that wilderness of mirrors.