Mr Fink did offer me some flattering comments on the coldspur site: he also told me that he was working on a biography of Ellis that would be published in the summer of , and that his book would rehabilitate Ellis.
I immediately ordered it from amazon. I have dedicated a large amount of space to this review because a a proper account of the life of Ellis needs to be told; b Fink has performed an admirable job of tracking down some diverse and obscure sources, and has thus made a highly significant contribution to the literature of intelligence; and c the exercise brings up a number of issues to do with tradecraft and terminology that interest me greatly.
For example, Fink chose to title it The Eagle in the Mirror because, as he asks, perhaps rhetorically, on p xxxix:. Where did his loyalties lie? For a man whose name was inextricably linked with the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and the United States of America, what national eagle β Russian, German, American β was staring back at him? Was he truly innocent or guilty? By whom? Moreover, since Fink concludes his analysis by asserting that Ellis was an innocent man, and a loyal servant of the Crown, it would appear that he has performed the extrication himself, and that he would judge that his hero saw no eagles but instead the Lion and the Unicorn when he looked into the mirror.
In addition, in the interests of gaining commercial success with his work, I believe Fink has allowed his agent and publicity machine to hyperbolize the questions surrounding Ellis, and his resolution of them. Fink would assert that such exaggeration is needed to help make the book sell at the airport bookstalls, but once the reader is captured, he or she in my opinion could well handle a more sober story. In August I wrote, firstly citing Richardson:. Goodman at the same time. Not that Max Archer, or his creator, appeared to recognize the Dilemma β unlike Mr Fink, an established author, who described to me the exact same quandary in which he found himself.
The problem is that an author can melodramatize the events for the benefit of a large, popular readership, but those readers will not appreciate the scholarly references and endnotes. He was born in Australia in , and came to the United Kingdom just before World War I, in which he served with distinction. He was sent to Transcaspia, on a mission against the Bolsheviks. After studying Russian at St.
