170 • ELLIOTT, NICHOLAS
net. In his evidence before the commission, the editor of theTimes
noted:We did not spend nearly enough money or send enough officers. The eight
or ten who went out did very good work but they were fewer than the men
IemployedmyselfasTimescorrespondents, and I should have been
ashamed to have sent correspondents anywhere, or even a commercial
traveler, with the sums of money they were given.ELLIOTT, NICHOLAS.The son of Eton’s headmaster, Nicholas El-
liott was working as an honorary attache ́at the British embassy in
The Hague shortly before the outbreak of war and was present in
Holland in November 1939 when twoSecret Intelligence Service
(SIS) officers,Sigismund BestandRichard Stevens, were abducted
by Nazi agents and dragged across the frontier into Germany. When
Elliott returned to London, he was recruited into the Security Service,
but his tenure in B1(a), thecounterespionagesubsection dealing
with Germandouble agents, was brief.
Elliott was soon transferred to SIS and posted to Istanbul, which
required a lengthy voyage to Lagos and a flight to Cairo. En route he
encountered his colleagueGraham Greeneon the quay at Freetown,
Sierra Leone (Elliott later remarked that ‘‘hisHeart of the Matterrep-
resentsMI6’s contribution to world literature’’). In Turkey in January
1944, with the help of his wife, Elliott pulled off a remarkable coup,
thedefectionof Erich Vermehren, a seniorAbwehrofficial. He was
also a witness to the investigation pursued in the aftermath of the
ciceroaffair, the theft of vital secrets from the British ambassador’s
private safe by his valet,Elyesa Bazna.
At the end of the war, Elliott was sent to the SIS station in Bern,
Switzerland, and later served in Vienna. In 1956 he was back in Lon-
don, running operations from SIS’s domestic station, among them
being a risky mission to inspect the hull of theOrdzhonikidze, the
Soviet cruiser bringing premier Nikita Khrushchev on a state visit to
England. The operation proved an embarrassing fiasco after Elliott’s
agent,Lionel Crabb, died while still in the muddy waters of Ports-
mouth Harbor. The incident sparked off a major diplomatic protest
from the Soviets, but Elliott survived the subsequent purge that cost
Ted Davies, SIS’s liaison with theNaval Intelligence Division, his
job.