Double Cross in Cairo (14 page)

This fascinating perspective showed that, after
PASCHA
had departed the scene, the Abwehr had been left devoid of reliable sources, and in those circumstances it was hardly surprising that it had come to rely even more heavily on
CHEESE
. As his interrogators, Stephenson and Eadie, noted,

Allegedly PACSHA had been recruited before the war, perhaps by Admiral Canaris personally, and had been handled initially by the SD but from the middle of 1941 by Gottfried Schenker-Angerer, the assistant air attaché at the Istanbul consulate.
PASCHA
’
S
sub-agents were located in Iraq, southern Palestine, Cyprus and Egypt, and one of them, who communicated by wireless, had access to General Wilson’s headquarters. On one occasion
PASCHA
himself had demanded E£12,000 to extend his wireless network to Malta and Gibraltar, but the plan fell through within a week.

According to Vermehren, the entire
PASCHA
organisation collapsed following the Italian surrender, and the last message was received in October 1943. He also revealed that Willi Hamburger had confided
in him that ‘a Jew belonging to a Marconi institution’, was ‘behind the scenes’ in the network.

As the interviews with SIME’s Captain H. R. M. Eadie continued, Vermehren was judged to be ‘gradually giving away more details’, especially about Germanophile Egyptians. He named El Said Abubakr Ratib as a close friend of the Egyptian royal family who had decided to remain in Turkey rather than risk internment in Cairo. Abubakr had been a fencing umpire at the 1936 Olympic Games where he had embraced the Nazis, and was associated with Taher Pacha, a suspect in British detention, along with other influential sympathisers, including Prince Mansour Daoud, Prince Shahab, Ahmet Saabet, Hassan el Fekhe and Hassan Sirry. Fekhe had been acting as a recruiter since 1942, enrolling agents to go to Syria, but was dismissed the following year for faking his expenses.

With some reluctance Vermehren identified the four spies he had personally recruited, and named Nuradin Sagun, Hassan Sirry, Semsettin Kandemir and an Iraqi manicurist, Rahmiya Vedat, codenamed
BERBER
, whose husband had been interned by the British in Asmara, but recently released to live in Basra. Vedat’s mission was to travel to Basra and communicate using secret writing with a twenty-year-old girl in Baghdad codenamed
BARRER
who had been living there with her sister since December 1943, and would hand her reports to Muhharem Oysu, a Taurus Express employee and part-time smuggler.
BARRER
was also to act as a link for Kandemir, codenamed
MONTLER
, who was to be based in Ahwaz. Such detailed information, of course, was gold-dust to SIME.

Vermehren also described in detail the entire KONO staff in Istanbul, which amounted to about two dozen officers organised like any other KO, with representatives from the various Abwehr branches, Abteilungs I, II and III, and the three services, Heer, Luft and Marine. In a series of lengthy interviews conducted in a friendly atmosphere in
Cairo, he identified their individual roles, describing Robert Ulshöfer as the Turkish-speaking deputy chief of the Einz Heer who, he said, had attended Ankara University and was the principal recruiter. Professor Walther Hinz led the Einz Marine branch, and was responsible for liaising with the Turkish authorities. Hinz’s deputy was Gailani, codenamed
TAN
, whose wife was the daughter of Persia’s chief of police. He also said that Gottfried Schenker-Angerer, who headed the Einz Luft, had a radio interception facility in his office, run by an operator, Carl H. Clauss, monitoring British and Allied wireless traffic which was relayed to Berlin. Schenker-Angerer, who was described, along with his wife and daughter, as anti-Nazi, also had an agent codenamed
MIMI
who communicated through a link in the Iraqi consulate in Istanbul. Schenker-Angerer’s deputy was Hermann von Sperl, a cotton merchant in Adana.

The head of Abteilung III was Hauptman Thomas Ludwig, codenamed
ALADDIN
, who worked under diplomatic cover at the Istanbul consulate. He was assisted by Helmut Braun and an interpreter, Robert Bendetsch, and Vermehren revealed that one of
ALADDIN
’
S
coups was his regular access to the office safe of a director of the Walton & Goeland Shipping Company in Istanbul. As a result, Mr Walton’s secretary, a Madame Dumont, was arrested in Beirut in May 1944.

Subordinate to Kurt Zähringer of Einz Marine was an agent runner, Ronald Lochner, who was based in Mersin and operated against Cyprus. His son Erich was responsible for drafting agent assessments and managing the agents employed on the Taurus Express.

When asked about Otto Mayer, Vermehren identified his codename as
MURAT
and said that he had operated in Istanbul under commercial cover, managing a refrigerator business. Although he had access to the KO communications and courier facilities, he apparently had operated independently under Berlin’s direct control. Vermehren also predicted, correctly, that his Austrian colleague, Willi Hamburger, would also defect.

One focus of SIME’s attention was the process by which agent reporting was assessed by the Abwehr, and Vermehren explained that when he had first arrived in Turkey

One of Vermehren’s interrogators, Captain J. F. C. Stephenson, noted that he was ‘convinced that Berlin must have more than one wireless agent in the Middle East because they are so well informed’ and concluded:

Because Elisabeth Vermehren fell ill with pneumonia in Algiers, her husband was flown alone, carrying a British passport in the name of Henry George Thomson, to RAF Lyneham from Gibraltar on 13 March 1944, and he found employment, under the alias Erich Vollmer, in a prep school, the Bluecoat School in Horsham, and then at Worth Priory, also in Sussex.

Elliott’s cultivation of the Vermehrens was considered a great coup at the time, especially as they were smuggled by train to Syria on false papers, and then reached Cairo by air where they were interviewed at length by SIS before the Abwehr even noticed their disappearance. In his discussions with Vermehren Elliott had agreed that their departure would be made to look like a crime had been committed by leaving their apartment in disorder, a ploy intended to keep the Germans in the dark about their fate. Implied in these negotiations was an acceptance that no public statement would be made, thus keeping the rest of Vermehren’s family safe, and maybe limiting the counter-measures that any intelligence agency suffering the loss of key personnel would be expected to take. However, almost as soon as Vermehren reached Gibraltar, on his way to England, the BBC reported their defection. The consequences were on a hideous scale as the incident proved the catalyst for the subsequent absorption of the entire Abwehr into the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RHSA). Also, Vermehren’s mother, Petra Schwabroch, the
Das Reich
correspondent in Lisbon since February 1941 and living in some style at the Palacio Hotel in Estoril, made
a voluntary return to Germany in the hope that the disapproval of Erich’s defection would not be misinterpreted, but she was arrested by the SD and incarcerated at the Oranienburg concentration camp, and her husband Kurt, a well-known Hamburg lawyer, other son, working for United Press in Berlin, and daughter Isa, an artist, were subjected to harassment. According to Klop Ustinov, who reported on Petra, she was privately anti-Nazi, but her SIS dossier suggested that she had been working for the Abwehr in Athens in 1937, and that her husband was also connected to the Abwehr. Klop, also living in Estoril, but reporting on the local German colony for SIS, complained that the BBC publicity about Vermehren and his mother had ‘discouraged a great number of people from coming over physically to the British’ while applauding the discretion exercised over the recent defection of Wolfgang Krauel, the German consul-general in Geneva. Another victim of the contamination was the Abwehr’s Hans Ruser, a German journalist referred to in ISOS intercepts as having been in contact with Paula, who would himself defect to SIS.

Vermehren’s own head of the Istanbul KO, Paul Leverkühn, was recalled to Berlin in February and imprisoned on 16 July. A prewar lawyer who had graduated from Gottingen and studied at Edinburgh University, and an old friend and colleague of Kurt Vermehren’s, Leverkühn had worked in Washington, DC and New York. As he was in the Gestapo’s custody on 20 July he survived the purge that followed the attempt on Hitler’s life. His replacement, as head of the Istanbul KO, was Admiral Marwitz.

One of ISLD’s many challenges was the management of double agents who may have been known to Vermehren, and might therefore be expected to come under suspicion as having been compromised by him. Under normal circumstances the Abwehr would have appointed a senior officer to undertake a damage assessment and then review the performance of any source likely to have been contaminated by
the defector. However, in the chaos of the RHSA’s retribution, followed by the 20 July plot, no such damage control study appeared to have been made, leaving the double agents,
CHEESE
among them, at liberty to continue their duplicity. One unexpected bonus from the defection was the discovery that
INFAMOUS
had been selling fabricated information to the Abwehr, without SIS’s consent, so he was promptly terminated.

The interviews with Vermehren proved that the Abwehr had absolutely no concept of large-scale strategic deception, and actually thought the idea impossible. Furthermore, it had no capability for even considering the integrity and performance of individual agents, and certainly did not realise that some of its supposedly most reliable sources, such as
ARTHUR
, were actually double agents under British control. Furthermore, the fact that
ARTHUR
’
S
sub-source
HELMUT
was entirely notional had also gone undetected, even though Willi Hamburger at least had been alive to the possibility of notional sources. He himself had invented a generic imaginary agent for all his Turkish political information, but purely as a security measure to protect the identity of his genuine informants. Among Vermehren’s more notable revelations was his account of the Abwehr’s attitude towards intelligence collection in Egypt. While his KO had taken the lead, other Abstellen, such as Athens, Sofia and Belgrade, also tried to run agents against the same target, although Vermehren had few specifics apart from some very helpful ‘corridor gossip’. However, from his personal knowledge, the Istanbul KO had only occasionally mounted individual, short-term missions to Egypt, and had experienced very limited success, chiefly because of poor communications and a lack of a local support from an existing resistance movement. SIME interpreted this scenario as being extremely favourable for
CHEESE
who, run from Bari and then Athens, had been outside of Vermehren’s purview. Based on the totality of the defector’s insight, it
rather looked as though
CHEESE
had become the Abwehr’s longest-serving and most reliable source of military intelligence.

Another potential unintended casualty of the Vermehrens’ defection was
ARTIST
in Lisbon. He was Johnny Jebsen, an Abwehr officer who had been recruited by his own agent, Dusan Popov, codenamed
TRICYCLE
by MI5 and
IVAN
by the Abwehr. Unfortunately, Jebsen was known to have been a close friend of the Vermehrens, and this connection automatically placed him in jeopardy, and in turn served to contaminate Popov. Ultimately, Jebsen was arrested by the Gestapo on corruption charges, and somehow managed to protect Popov.