Double Cross in Cairo (12 page)

Mayor’s extensive knowledge made available to MI5 was then enhanced by a high-level Abwehr defector who would be used against him, although the two men never met. In December 1943 the SIS station in Istanbul successfully cultivated a young Abwehr officer, Erich Vermehren, and his wife Elisabeth, both of whom were devout
Roman Catholics and opponents of the Nazi regime. He had been unable to go up to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship because of the outbreak of war, and in October 1941 had married the Grafin von Plettenberg-Lanhausen, eight years his senior, in Freiburg. An aristocrat and committed Anglophile, Vermehren had studied law at the universities of Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig and Freiburg until April 1941 when he had been called up for military service, but found to be medically unfit because of a shooting accident in his youth. Instead, he was assigned to be a welfare officer at several PoW camps, but in December 1942 was posted to Turkey for the Abwehr, under cover as legal adviser to the military attaché. His wife, who was related by marriage to the ambassador, Franz von Papen, tried to engineer permission to join her husband, even though she was a known anti-Nazi who had been interviewed by the Gestapo some thirty times before she eventually had been granted permission to travel to Turkey, ostensibly on a mission to liaise locally about a Vatican visit to Istanbul, and arrived on 20 December 1943 for what was intended to be a visit of short duration.

Even before Vermehren made contact with SIS, Section V already knew a certain amount about him and his wife, being information gleaned from ISOS, and about his mother who had been categorised as a ‘very dangerous’ Abwehr agent who had been flagged in Athens and then Lisbon, operating under journalistic cover.

Once in Istanbul his wife had met Nicholas Elliott’s wife Elizabeth in church, and he subsequently had demonstrated his bona-fides to the SIS station’s ‘B’ Section representative, by removing Abwehr papers from his office, including a complete roster of the organisation in Turkey, and allowing them to be photographed. One of these items consisted of 150 pictures of the Abwehr dossier on an SD source codenamed
PASCHA
. Until that moment, understandably, SIS had regarded the young man with some scepticism and suspected he might be an agent provocateur on a mission to embarrass his adversaries.
However, when the Turkish security bureau confided to SIS that they knew of Vermehren’s link with Elliott, the decision was taken to accelerate his defection and, to protect his family and colleagues, make it look like an abduction.

Following his defection on Friday 28 January 1944, orchestrated by Elliott who codenamed him
PRECIOUS
, Vermehren’s interrogation in Cairo revealed the extent to which the Abwehr had come to rely on sources across the region that were almost entirely under Allied control, although he was given no hint of the true situation. As personal assistant to Paul Leverkühn, chief of the Istanbul Kreigsor-ganisation Nahe Orient (KONO), Vermehren was exceptionally well informed and could offer a comprehensive and detailed overview of the Abwehr’s operations right across the Balkan, eastern Mediterranean and Middle East area, amounting to around a hundred individual sources who had been assigned codenames. The greatest proportion of these spies, numbering ten, were waiters, sleeping-car attendants and other employees of the Taurus Express who regularly crossed the border into Syria. In particular, he singled out
ARTHUR
, a Taurus attendant and former NCO attached to the German Army during the First World War considered ‘very reliable’ who was known to the military attaché, General Hans Rohde, and was handled for Einz Heer by Erich Lochner. He collected information about troop movements in Syria and was thought to be friendly with a British NCO in Tripoli who gave him military information.
ARTHUR
’s reports

Naturally, SIME was especially interested in the enemy’s activities in Egypt, and Vermehren revealed that in October 1943 he had been given responsibility for the recruitment of all Egyptian agents. He had been helped in his task by Prince Shahab, a member of the old Khedive’s family who had volunteered to travel to Germany and help with propaganda. The offer had been turned down by the Reich Foreign Ministry but passed to the SD which had sent him to Cairo in the summer of 1942 to activate a transmitter hidden in the church of an Orthodox cleric, Father Demetriou. This attempt failed, so instead Shahab had made contact with a pair of cousins, Aziz and Mohsen Fadl, who had been recruited in 1941 by the Graf Meran, then head of the Istanbul SD, but later lost touch with them because of difficulties encountered when trying to send them instructions and codes.

This news was well received by SIME, which had first encountered Father Demetriou during the Eppler investigation. Demetriou had been detained in July 1942 and questioned when he had been compromised by the German spy who had been captured in Cairo (see Chapter Three). As a human repository of knowledge about the enemy’s espionage, Vermehren was unequalled, and much of his information either neatly dovetailed with
TRIANGLE
or accurately reflected SIME’s own information, garnered from its double agents.

After Shabab’s successful return to Turkey, the Abwehr had sent Prince Mansour Daoud’s mother-in-law to Egypt on a mission to deliver instructions and secret ink to the Fadls. Vermehren also knew about a Coptic Christian named Metaxoros who was supposed to repay a large debt he owed to AEG by passing cash to the Fadls. Another channel of payment had been Hassan Sirry, whose address
in Istanbul, 29 Abe Sokak, and that of his mistress Sofia Misirli, had been used as a cover by the Abwehr. However, Vermehren said that he thought that Sirry, who had undertaken a mission to Egypt in November 1942 to establish contact with the Fadls, had been compromised by Prince Mansour’s mother-in-law when she had been detained and questioned by the British authorities. Apparently, having had her face slapped in public in Turkey by Mansour, she had never forgiven him for the humiliation, and had been delighted to denounce him.

Then, in February 1943, Mahmoud Nitzi Sirry was sent to Egypt to report on Allied shipping, with instructions to send his reports in secret writing to his sister in Istanbul, and to recruit two sub-sources, one of whom was supposed to work in a British army workshop where he could access numerous different transmitters. However, within a fortnight of his arrival Sirry, who had been entrusted E£500 to pay the Fadls, had opened a club in Cairo and, according to a report from Berlin, had been arrested, so ‘it was presumed the mission was unaccomplished’.

When tackled on the subject of his Abwehr networks, Vermehren was forthright, and listed the cases he was familiar with. Firstly, there was Anwar Sadr, the radio operator off the Egyptian liner
Zamzam
who had been in a PoW camp near Hamburg and had agreed to participate in a bogus escape and travel to Egypt as a spy. As far as Vermehren knew, this individual was still active and
in situ.
The SS
Zamzam
, formerly the Bibby liner
Leicestershire
, had been sunk on a voyage to South Africa by the Kreigsmarine raider
Atlantis
in the south Atlantic in April 1941. The Egyptian radio operator was one of 202 survivors, many of whom were repatriated to the United States through Portugal.

Another spy was Mehmet Narud-Din Sagun, codenamed
REALTER
and fluent in Turkish, Arabic and French, who was an officer in the Turkish army reserve whom he had first met in June 1943 through
Prince Shahab, and then sent to Egypt in November 1943. Although his mission included making personal observations and acting as a recruiter, this former member of the Turkish army’s intelligence branch was to communicate to a cover address in Istanbul by using secret writing on newspaper wrappers. He only lasted six weeks, and then returned home because ‘he lacked physical courage’.

Sagun had been directed to collect ‘divisional signs; regimental badges; other indications of units; names of senior officers; existence of military establishments and repair shops, stating what types of vehicle or equipment was under repair; scraps of conversation overheard in bars, etc.’ and, according to Vermehren’s interrogators,

What Vermehren did not know was that Sagun had declared his espionage mission to the British when he applied for his visa, and had also stated that apart from the E£3,500 he had been paid by the Germans, his motive for accepting the assignment was his wish to be out of the country when he thought he might be recalled for military duty.

REALTER
had adopted the same methodology used by
DAKHLA
, a Turkish journalist and Abteilung II agent who had been reporting on shipping from Alexandria, Suez and Port Said since May 1943. He had links to the Egyptian nationalist movement, but
DAKHLA
’
S
disadvantage was that his reports, also written in newspaper wrappers
mailed to Istanbul, had taken four weeks to reach their destination, so he had been withdrawn in November 1943, after just five months.

According to Vermehren, ‘in Turkey there was a gentleman’s agreement between Abwehr and SD to exchange information, and the SD never passed the KO any military reports. Vermehren thinks all SD agents practised political espionage only.’ He also identified the local SD chief as a wealthy officer named Fast who came originally from Palestine and before the war had owned two hotels, one in Beirut. He worked alongside Bruno Wolf and acted as deputy to Ludwig Moyszich, a sophisticated operator who was based under diplomatic cover at the embassy in Ankara.

In relation to
CHEESE
, Vermehren denied ever having heard of the codenames of two mystery couriers associated with him,
ARMAVIR
and
NAHICHEVAN
, but did mention Clemens Rossetti whose post in southern Italy, he alleged, had been taken over by his wife when he was transferred to Athens. Rossetti had also boasted to him about two of his most reliable networks, one of which was in Cairo. Unwittingly, Vermehren commented to his interrogators on

Thus Vermehren unwittingly confirmed one of the cornerstones of ‘A’ Force’s deception doctrine, that having successfully established an entirely false Allied order-of-battle at a very early stage, the enemy had not only come to accept its veracity, but had taken the view that any subsequent deviation was likely to be an easily detectable attempt to mislead the Abwehr’s analysts. Certainly his understanding of the Allied strength in England, preparing for D-Day, was greatly exaggerated, and actually the 21st Army Group consisted of six armoured divisions, two airborne divisions and eleven infantry divisions, together with a number of independent brigades. Encouragingly, Vermehren’s estimate seemed to include the imaginary five armoured divisions and six infantry divisions of the ‘ghost’ First United States Army Group.

When questioned about penetrations of the Allied intelligence community, Vermehren recalled that Clemens Rossetti, who he said had worked for the Abwehr for the past decade, had recruited the housemaid, perhaps named Carniglia Orlando, of ‘a high British intelligence officer’ in Istanbul who had provided ‘fascinating’ reporting on his ‘sinister doings’ at the time of the attempt on the life of Ambassador Franz von Papen in February 1942. He also named Edgar Yolland, a 33-year-old member of the US Office of War Information (OWI) attached to the US consulate-general in Istanbul, and son of a distinguished academic, Professor A. B. Yolland of the Royal University in Budapest who had been interned in England during the First World War. A naturalised American who had been a teacher at the American College, Yolland was handled by the Abwehr’s Helmuth Hohne. Yolland was described as ‘a great friend’ of the deputy chief of the local
OWI, the former Associated Press correspondent Harold Lehrman, but also of Georg Streiter of the
Berlin Bösenzeitung,
a known SD agent. SIME later established that Yolland had been removed from his post after Lehrman had returned to the United States and investigated by OSS’s X-2 but, to avoid embarrassment, no further action was taken against him apart from arranging his expulsion from Turkey after he had renounced his American citizenship. Vermehren also claimed to his SIME interrogator, Desmond Doran, that Paula Koch, a known spy in Beirut, had a source, allegedly recruited in the autumn of 1943 who was a French clerk or secretary, inside the local French Deuxième Bureau office with access to Sureté files, although an investigation failed to identify him (or her).