Double Cross in Cairo (16 page)

By May 1942 more captured documents proved that the enemy had accepted the existence of the 8th Division, the 12th Division, the 2nd Indian Division, 1st SAS Brigade and the 101st Royal Tank Regiment, which was an over-estimate by 30 per cent of British strengths. Clarke’s second task was to delay Rommel’s imminent offensive, and this was achieved by pretending that the British were themselves about to attack, thereby forcing the Afrika Korps onto the defensive. Having built up a phoney strength, ‘A’ Force invented three successive dates for the launch, being 9 August, 30 August and 15 September, and perpetuated delays lasting four months by reporting that each operation had been postponed at the last moment. Finally, ‘A’ Force with ‘full orchestral accompaniment’, announced instead that the whole plan had been abandoned until after Christmas, so that when the attack really began on 17 November, the enemy was completely unprepared. During the really critical period, between
2 and 9 November, several ISOS decrypts directly cited
CHEESE
, characterising him as ‘highly reliable’.

An Afrika Korps intelligence document captured after the victory at El Alamein suggested that seven of the eight
CASCADE
divisions had been believed by German analysts who also accepted a US tank regiment and a British armoured brigade. All told, the enemy had exaggerated the Allied infantry by 45 per cent, and tank strengths by 40 per cent. Gradually, as the conflict swung in favour of the Allies, the deception schemes changed. Having originally invented imaginary units to strengthen actual weakness, ‘A’ Force enhanced the true military position by using the false order-of-battle offensively to mislead the enemy about future plans. Thus in April 1942
FABRIC
was devised to persuade Rommel that the next Allied attack would take place in the north of the Libyan desert, whereas the true objective was to be in the south. Furthermore,
FABRIC
’
S
other purpose was timing, and to convey the impression that the British could not mount an attack before August, and would not contemplate action during the ferociously hot months of May, June and July. Additionally, Rommel also came to believe false intelligence reports that the newly-arrived American Grant M3 medium tanks could not be deployed until sufficient ammunition had been delivered. Accordingly, the Afrika Korps was taken by surprise when, in May 1942, it encountered fully operational Grant tanks on its southern flank. However, Rommel’s attack on Tobruk on 26 May, which had been predicted by
ULTRA
, rendered much of
FABRIC
redundant even though he encountered unexpectedly heavy Allied forces and took a month to accomplish the capture of the port, a goal that he had estimated would take only a matter of a few days. Furthermore, by inadvertently launching his attack against strong Allied concentrations, his troops and armour paid a heavy price for what was achieved, which was the occupation of Tobruk on 21 June, taking 33,000 prisoners. Buoyed by victory
and his promotion to the rank of field-marshal, Rommel continued in pursuit of the retreating 8th Army to the defensive positions at El Alamein, the last-ditch fortifications just forty miles from Alexandria. Fortunately,
ULTRA
revealed the enemy’s plan, to attack El Alamein on 1 July, and the confrontation lasted a month, but stymied the German advance. Later Rommel would acknowledge that at this first battle of El Alamein ‘the chance of overrunning the remainder of the 8th Army and occupying eastern Egypt in one stroke was irretrievably gone.’

‘A’ Force was now burdened with the responsibility of exaggerating the defences at El Alamein, most of the dummy tanks prepared for
FABRIC
having perished during the retreat. The plan called for the entirely notional 6th New Zealand Division and the 3rd South African Division, which had been part of the
CASCADE
deception, to be deployed as reinforcements, and the principal channel for conveying the false information, codenamed
SENTINEL
, was
CHEESE
.
SENTINEL
suggested that the British forces were due to be reinforced towards the end of August, and a grossly exaggerated assessment of Allied strengths persuaded Rommel to abandon his planned attack, thus leaving it to the 9th Army to seize the initiative, a plan concealed by yet another cover story devised by ‘A’ Force.

One news item that was considered impossible to keep secret was Churchill’s impending visit to Cairo, scheduled for 4 August. He wanted to visit the 8th Army and confer with Wavell, who was summoned from India, and General Jan Smuts, who arrived from South Africa, and the cover plan, codenamed
GRANDIOSE
, was for
CHEESE
to report Churchill’s movements accurately, but only after a delay of two days.

During Churchill’s momentous visit, made while en route to Moscow, he replaced Auchinleck as commander of the 8th Army with General Gott, who was promptly killed when his aircraft was shot
down, so the post went instead to Montgomery. Churchill also split the Middle East command into a Near East Command, taking in Palestine, Africa and Syria, with its headquarters in Cairo, headed by Harold Alexander, and a Persia and Iraq Command headed by General Maitland Wilson, who had been leading the 9th Army in Syria. Auchinleck would become Commander-in-Chief India, and Wavell would be appointed the Viceroy.

ISLD’s principal task was penetration of the enemy’s intelligence apparatus, and developed
PESSIMISTS
and
QUICKSILVER
for this objective. The
PESSIMISTS
were a group of three double agents run in Syria who had landed in Tripoli in October 1942 on a mission to Damascus, and had been quickly captured through
TRIANGLE
and turned against their Abwehr controllers in Athens. They consisted of
PESSIMIST
X
, a Swiss-Italian named Costa who notionally acted as a courier for
PESSIMIST
Y
, the group’s wireless operator and a professional singer. Known to the Germans as
MIMI
and to SIME as
JACK
, he was a Greek named Demetrios, originally from Alexandria, and was described as ‘a greedy devious shit and a stirrer’. He collected information from
PESSIMIST Z
, a thug with a criminal past involving drug smuggling. Of the three, only
PESSIMIST Y
retained his liberty, living in the same house as
QUICKSILVER
, a Greek air force officer, George Liossis, and nephew of General Liossis who had dispatched on a mission for the Abwehr in August 1942 with a prostitute, Anna Agiraki, codenamed
GALA
, and a Greek sailor, regarded as a Gestapo thug, named Bonzos and codenamed
RIO
. When questioned, Erich Vermehren confirmed that Costa had supplied details of Allied divisional signs and was ‘well looked upon’ by the Istanbul KO which had assessed his reporting as ‘very good indeed’.

Their mission already compromised by
TRANGLE
, all three were picked up in a small boat off Latakia and, upon his arrival in Beirut,
Liossis, who had been in contact with SIS in Athens before the war, cooperated with the local DSO Douglas Roberts, who assigned John Wills of SIME to supervise the contact made with his German controllers by radio in October 1942, after
GALA
and
RIO
had been imprisoned.
QUICKSILVER
’
S
notional network also included
KHALIL
, a laundryman working for the British 9th Army, and
KYRIAKIDES
, supposedly a Greek businessman with royalist connections in Cairo, where he was a frequent visitor.

In 1944
QUICKSILVER
’
S
diminishing funds were replenished with 200 gold sovereigns supplied by
INFAMOUS
, an Armenian double agent under SIS control since May 1943 who had been friendly with the Belgian consul in Beirut, and therefore was considered suspect. Famously his ISLD case officer in Beirut, Charles Dundas, complained to Cairo that ‘plans which appear well-prepared at your end seem half-baked at ours’. Despite the protest,
INFAMOUS
was allowed to make his delivery, but took the opportunity to smuggle some watches into Lebanon, where he was caught and briefly imprisoned. This incident appeared to have no impact on
QUICKSILVER
’
S
standing with the Abwehr, and in August 1944 he was appointed provost-marshal of the Royal Hellenic Air Force in Egypt.

Another important SIME double agent was
STEPHAN
, who was actually an Austrian named Klein who was arrested in Cairo in March 1941. Then there was
INFAMOUS
who became relevant to
CHEESE
when, in May 1943, evidence emerged that the Abwehr had decided to use an unidentified courier to smuggle money to
CHEESE
in Egypt. Naturally, all the parties involved were anxious to spot the man and place him under surveillance, and elaborate arrangements were made to watch the passengers on the Taurus Express which departed Istanbul on 17 May. According to
INFAMOUS
, the courier had been instructed to deliver the money and a document described as a directive to a contact at the Hotel Baron in Aleppo.

At one point, in late May 1943, information from
INFAMOUS
suggested the existence of an Abwehr network in Egypt, perhaps centred on Alexandria. On 26 May the Istanbul station sent the following message to SIME in Cairo:

SIS’s man in Istanbul, Nicholas Elliott, designated 18700, announced that

On the following day, Elliott sent a further report about
INFAMOUS
:

On 16 June the ISLD station in Istanbul reported that

When the directive and its covering letter reached SIME in Cairo, they were studied with great interest. The letter was signed
NAHICHEVAN
and proved to be instructions on how the sum of E£415 was to be delivered ‘with every precaution to ‘Madame
MARIE
’ at ‘Cairo, Rue Gogol 20, in the neighbourhood of the Neiogan Tawgig’. The directive turned out to be a request for ‘information about British espionage, sabotage and counter-espionage organisations, together with the countries in which these are particularly interested. According to
INFAMOUS
, the person behind the operation was von der Marwitz, the German naval attaché in Istanbul. The others implicated were
CAPPELLARTA
,
ODIOUS
and
ARMAVIN
.

Rolf von der Marwitz was a familiar figure to British Intelligence, having been the prewar German naval attaché in Paris. A member of the nobility, he had been appointed to the same post in Ankara in April 1939, and was known to have commanded a squadron of minesweepers at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven during the First World War. Although not an Abwehr professional, he was implicated as the paymaster in several espionage cases across the eastern Mediterranean.

ODIOUS
was Max Brandl, a Swiss watch salesman recruited by SIS in Istanbul in December 1942 as a double agent after he had volunteered the fact that he had been approached by the Abwehr in Vienna to spy in Syria. With SIS’s consent he had returned to Vienna to agree
his mission, and had returned in March 1943. He had been allowed to travel to Syria the following month but SIME interrogated him, aware that he had undergone undisclosed training by the Abwehr in 1940. He was arrested by SIME on a second mission to Syria in October when he admitted that he had been spying for the Abwehr in Spain, Tangier and Vienna since 1941.

Neither SIME nor SIS had any trace of
ARMAVIN
but it was believed that he was probably
ARMEN
, a character who had appeared in a
TRIANGLE
decrypt the previous December as having been the recipient of a large sum of money from von der Marwitz. In that same month
ARMEN
reported on the French fleet in Alexandria and later, most inaccurately, provided information about Gibraltar.

The issue for SIME was whether
INFAMOUS
was telling the truth about the existence of a hitherto undiscovered Abwehr spy-ring in Egypt, or if he was part of some elaborate test to check on
CHEESE
. The matter would never be completely resolved but SIS found a
TRIANGLE
reference dated December 1942 from von der Marwitz in Istanbul concerning a payment made to
ARMEN
in Egypt for information which included a map of Gibraltar and details of various warships. However, in Berlin’s estimation, the information was ‘highly inaccurate’. SIS noted similarities between
ARMEN
and
ARMAVIN
and speculated that they were the same person, remarking that both were believed to be Armenian; both had received large sums of money from the Abwehr in Istanbul and both are interested in naval information and pass material of dubious quality. Accordingly, SIS was inclined to conclude that
INFAMOUS
was telling the truth and that
ARMEN
was identical with
ARMAVIN
, in which case
CHEESE
did not seem to be under suspicion.