172 • ELTENTON, GEORGE
was wound up and Stephenson returned to the business world, but
Ellis opted to continue his SIS career, being appointed regional con-
troller for the Far East, based in Singapore, and then chief controller,
Pacific, in London. It was not until after Ellis had resigned from SIS,
ostensibly to work for SIS’s Australian counterpart in Sydney, that a
molehunt in London accidentally discovered his prewar treachery.
Ellis, who was then working onThe Expansion of Russia, was con-
fronted with his duplicity and provided a limited confession, which
failed to convince all who saw it that he had been entirely candid
about his relationship with the Abwehr—and possibly with theKGB,
which was suspected of having blackmailed Ellis after the war.
The fact that Ellis had betrayed SIS was kept a closely guarded
secret and he was never prosecuted, an omission which led some of
his supporters, including his aging former colleague Stephenson, to
disbelieve the inevitable leak when it occurred. The news that Ellis
had partially admitted his guilt to William Steedman was revealed by
Peter Wright, who also subscribed to the view that the KGB would
have been bound to exploit his treason immediately after the war, if
not sooner. Wright was convinced that because Ellis’s first brother-
in-law was a known Soviet agent, it was almost a certainty that he
had succumbed to a KGB threat to expose him.
Whatever the truth of the matter, Ellis died in Eastbourne in July
1975 without telling even his family of his disgrace, and there is no
hint in his pre-SIS memoirs of his subsequent intelligence career. Nor
is there any in his later books,Soviet ImperialismandMission Ac-
complished. In 1962 Ellis published an account of his own experi-
ences with the Malleson mission to Meshed and Transcaspia, a
notorious British intervention.ELTENTON, GEORGE.A chemical engineer employed by Shell,
George Eltenton had been educated at Cambridge and in prewar St.
Petersburg before he moved to Berkeley, California, as a research
scientist. In 1943 he was identified by Dr. Robert Oppenheimer as a
casual acquaintance who had invited him to pass atomic secrets to the
Soviets, using a mutual friend, Haakon Chevalier, as an intermediary.
Eltenton and Chevalier were interviewed by theFederal Bureau of
Investigationin 1945 but denied having engaged in espionage and
left the country soon afterward. Upon arrival in England, Eltenton