Black and White Publishing The Eagle in the Mirror In Search of War Hero, Master Spy and Alleged Traitor Charles Howard Dick Ellis.

‘Dick Ellis’s adventures not only rival those of James Bond; he was James Bond.’
Phillip Knightley, author of The Second Oldest Profession and Philby: KGB Masterspy

‘The most intriguing figure who has crossed the often-surprising landscape of Australian intelligence’.
Brian Toohey and William Pinwill, authors of Oyster: The Story of The Australian Secret Intelligence Service

‘A sturdy, genial Australian-born survivor of the intelligence wars from Paris to the Soviet border.’
Burton Hursh, author of The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA

‘One of the most shadowy figures of all.’
Desmond Ball and David Horner, authors of Breaking the Codes: Australia’s KGB Network, 1944–1950

‘[Ellis] slid down the slippery slope of treachery in support of alien creeds, until he was committing treason to a degree which could have sent him to the gallows.’
Chapman Pincher, author of Their Trade is Treachery and Too Secret Too Long

‘Perhaps an even worse traitor [than Kim Philby], making Philby look like a rank amateur.’
Nigel West, author of A Matter of Trust: MI5 1945–72and MI6: British Secret Intelligence Service Operations, 1909–1945

‘The Grand Old Man of British espionage… the oldest living professional agent.’
William Stevenson, author of A Man Called Intrepid and Intrepid’s Last Case

Part biography, part forensic jigsaw puzzle, part cold-case detective investigation, The Eagle in the Mirror is the astonishing untold story of an Australian-born intelligence officer accused by some espionage experts of being the traitor of the century: Charles Howard ‘Dick’ Ellis.

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’.

But in the 1980s journalist Chapman Pincher and retired MI5 intelligence officer Peter ‘Spycatcher’ Wright 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. The scope of Ellis’s purported betrayal was considered even worse than notorious British traitor and double agent Kim Philby.

However, Pincher’s and Wright’s accusations against Ellis have never been comprehensively proven. Was Ellis guilty or was an innocent man framed? By confessing did he take the fall for someone else? Or had the intelligence agencies of the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia been fatally compromised by a ‘super mole’?

Internationally bestselling author Jesse Fink attempts to find out the truth once and for all. The Eagle in the Mirror is not just a long-overdue biography of the unheralded Dick Ellis; it’s a gripping real-life international whodunit.