The Eagle in the Mirror

By Jesse Fink
Published by Viking/Penguin
RRP $34.99 in hardback | ISBN 9780143777557

Seventeen pages of bibliography tell the story of Jesse Fink’s cold-case investigation into the life of Australian-born intelligence officer Charles Howard ‘Dick’ Ellis who was accused by some espionage experts of being the traitor of the century.

The longest serving spy for the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Ellis helped set up the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), now known as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS).

At one point in the 1940s he was considered one of the top three secret agents in MI6 and controlled its activities, as one journalist put it, ‘for half the world’.

Familiar names appear to accuse Ellis of being a traitor, including Spycatcher author, retired MI5 intelligence officer Peter Wright who posthumously accused Ellis of having operated as a ‘triple agent’ for Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

In 1965, while under interrogation in London, Ellis had allegedly made a partial confession that he had worked for the Nazis. However these accusations against Ellis have never been comprehensively proven.

Was Ellis guilty or was an innocent man framed? Fink sets out on an impossible task to uncover the truth about the boy from Sydney, attempting to tease out the truth from the murky world of spies and lies.

VERDICT: A ‘must read’ for those who can’t get enough of the opaque world of espionage.