Double Cross in Cairo (32 page)
Read Double Cross in Cairo Online
Authors: Nigel West
A
fter the war Count Scirombo was interrogated, and he shed new light on the
CHEESE
case. He confirmed that Levi’s original recruitment had been conducted jointly by SIM and the Abwehr. Without realising the double agent’s true role, Scirombo confirmed that Levi had been sent to Egypt posing as a Jewish refugee seeking to escape religious persecution. He also said that Levi’s sub-agent had communicated first with a SIM wireless station at Forte Braschi, but control had later been switched to an exclusively German facility in Athens.
Scirombo claimed that Levi had raised suspicions when it was learned that he had visited the British delegation in Belgrade while on his way to Turkey. The decision then had been taken to question Levi through an informant who happened to be one of his friends. This had been the encounter with the Italian air force officer, Captain Alessi, and Scirombo said that Levi had
talked very freely to the informer and told him all the details of the mission he had undertaken on behalf of SIM and the German Intelligence Service.
He added that he was expecting shortly to receive instructions to return to Egypt, but had no intention of doing so.
The Germans endeavoured to bring pressure to bear on SIM to obtain Levi’s release. They pointed out that Levi had accomplished a very successful mission and, in an effort to convince [the] subject, showed him copies of the messages which were being received from the agent in Cairo. Subject states that the quality of the traffic was excellent and the information given on Allied troop movements were checked and found to be accurate. The agent quoted as one of the principal sources of information was an Allied NCO working in a military headquarters situated near the Italian consulate in Cairo. Subject also remembers seeing messages requesting funds. In spite of all this SIM refused to adhere to the repeated requests from the German Intelligence Service for Levi’s release and the latter remained in a concentration camp until the Armistice when subject supposes he was set free by the Germans. (Note: subject has no idea of his present whereabouts.) In December 1943, when subject was evacuated from Athens by the Germans, the wireless contact established by Levi in Cairo was still functioning.
Another loose end was represented by Johannes Eppler and Heinrich Sandstede who, in February 1943 had come to the end of their usefulness. Accordingly, SIME asked Herbert Hart, of MI5’s B1(b) section, whether there was any point in sending them to London.
In our view all the intelligence these characters have to give has probably been extracted from them already, and even if it has not we have no better facilities for extracting it than Mid East, with their knowledge of local conditions, background, etc. We therefore have no objection to their being dealt with locally.
Consequently, Eppler and his partner were detained as prisoners
of war in Egypt until March 1946 when Eppler and Sandstede were repatriated to Germany. The first details of their story emerged in 1958 when the war correspondent Leonard Mosley published
The Cat and the Mouse
, a highly inaccurate account in which he claimed that Eppler had achieved radio contact with Rommel’s headquarters, and had employed a book code based on Daphne du Maurier’s
Rebecca
. In fact, of course, the code was based on
The Unwarranted Death.
Another version of Eppler’s arrest emerged in 1965 when Colonel A. W. Sansom, who had served with the Field Security Wing in Cairo in 1942, published
I Spied Spies
and claimed that he had masterminded the raid on the German agents. According to him, the first clue that a spy had reached Egypt was when New Zealand troops had overrun the Bir Hachim intercept site and found two PoWs, who did not speak English, in possession of a copy of
Rebecca
that had been sold in a Lisbon shop.
I sent a cable to London and asked them to investigate. The answer gave me the first, as yet insignificant, lead on Eppler. At least now I knew for certain that this must have been the code book of an agent and that the man concerned was certainly in this country. It wasn’t much – but it was a start.
In Eppler’s own account,
Rommel ruft Kairo
which appeared first in 1960, with an English language edition,
Operation Condor
, released in 1977, he provided a very different tale, diametrically contradicting his CSDIC statements. He claimed that he had been recruited by the Abwehr in Beirut in May 1937, and since that date had undertaken numerous missions across eastern Europe and the Middle East, acted as an interpreter for Adolf Hitler, and operated as a spy in Alexandria long before his final participation in Operation
CONDOR
. Furthermore, he and his companion had established good radio contact with
Rommel’s headquarters, and his belly-dancing girlfriend Hekmat Fahmy had been a very active co-conspirator.
From Hekmat’s sources I had received some essential information about the Allies’ growing military superiority: at that very hour 100,000 mines were being taken up to the Alamein Front, and a new defence line between the sea and the Qattara Depression was being organised. Hundreds of brand-new American tanks were ploughing through the sand on their way to the front. I knew that the Allies’ material superiority was growing steadily – that the enemy was swimming in fuel and up to his ears in tanks and artillery – and that all this would shortly be thrown against Rommel’s army. Our work had all been a complete waste of effort.
Hekmat had wasted her time and risked her life in vain worming secrets out of British officers. In vain had I been nosing about at the Turf Club, the meeting place of Allied staff officers. In vain had I crept round the perimeter of the Eighth Army supply depot at Abassia to take down details of what was being loaded and unloaded there. Someone back home, having established that the two radio operators had been captured at Rommel’s headquarters, had cut off our line of communications and had stopped acknowledging our radio signals. Then we received this message: ‘stop! mission aborted. beware of British decoy information. don’t reply. we’ll lie low.’
Eppler’s story effectively ended at his arrest, and he drew a discreet veil over his subsequent experiences, omitting his role as a prosecution witness in the various trials that took place, for example, of Anwar el Sadati. Nor did Eppler expand on the subject before his death in 1999. Sadati, of course, succeeded Gamal Abdel Nasser as president of Egypt in October 1970, and was assassinated in October 1981.
There is much in Eppler’s somewhat self-serving autobiography that is contradicted by his SIME dossier, and there are other claims, for example that he discovered from his money-changer that he had
been given counterfeit sterling notes by the Abwehr, that do not appear in the file, as one might have expected.
Eppler’s interrogator, Harold Shergold, who was the first CSDIC officer to be decorated during the war, joined SIS in 1947, attended the Cambridge University’s Russian course and used his interrogation skills on Oleg Penkovsky and George Blake in 1961. He retired in 1980.
Another of the Abwehr’s spies, Paul E. Fackenheim, survived the war and in 1985, when he was then living in Henstedt-Ulzberg, near Hamburg, was the subject of a biography,
Arrows of the Almighty
, by Michael Bar-Zohar. Apparently unaware of the influence, or even existence of
TRIANGLE
, and without the benefit of Fackenheim’s yet to be declassified MI5 file, Bar-Zohar speculated that Fackenheim’s mission had been deliberately betrayed by a mole, Hauptsturmfuhrer Kronberg, the senior Sicherheitsdienst officer in Athens, motivated by inter-agency rivalry and jealousy of the Abwehr, even before
KOCH
had embarked on his flight.
Of the German spymasters, Rolf von der Marwitz was interned in Turkey in August 1944 and was repatriated in November 1946. He retired to Wiesbaden and died, aged seventy-seven, in September 1966. Erich Vermehren adopted a new identity, ‘Eric de Saventheim’, and went to live in Switzerland. He died in Bonn in April 2005. Paul Leverkühn survived his imprisonment by the Gestapo and served as a lawyer at the International War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg. He later resumed his law practice, was elected to the Bundestag, and died in March 1960. Willi Hamburger changed his name to Wilhelm Hendricks and after his release from American custody became a well-known journalist in Vienna, where he died in 2011.
Having been released from a PoW camp at Weilheim in Bavaria in June 1945, Walter Sensburg was arrested in Salzburg by the American Counter-Intelligence Corps in August 1945 and interrogated at length. He proved very cooperative and provided a detailed account
of the Athens Abstelle which he had commanded from November 1941. He also described his star agent,
ROBERTO
as having
transmitted valuable information on Allied forces in Egypt and North Africa.
ROBERTO
was the sole Ast Athens agent reporting from Egypt. For this reason all the evaluation agencies showed interest in
ROBERTO
.
ROBERTO
’S
principal assignment was reconnaissance on Allied forces in the Cairo area, for which work he was briefed regularly and in detail. The briefs came from the evaluation sections of Fremde Heere West through Abwehr I in Berlin and the i/c of O/Bef S0, first in Saloniki and then in Belgrade. Further enquiries sometimes had to be made by I-H Ast Athens, where
ROBERTO
’S
messages were checked before being forwarded to evaluation offices at higher headquarters,
ROBERTO
’S
reports to Ast Athens covered:
1. The appearance of new unit designations.
2. Troop and staff movements in Cairo, at the front, and in Syria.
3. Organisation of a Greek brigade in Egypt.
4. Names of CGs and COs.
ROBERTO
once reported he had recruited one or two collaborators, but these were soon dropped, since the Ast was unable to supply the necessary funds to
ROBERTO
. Later
ROBERTO
indicated he was receiving most of his information from two unidentified persons, a woman friend and a corporal. Details are not known to Sensburg.
The twice-weekly wireless communication between Ast Athens and
ROBERTO
was sometimes interrupted by atmospheric disturbances; occasionally
ROBERTO
was silent because of dissatisfaction over pay. Generally wireless communication was satisfactory.
ROBERTO
’S
reliability was doubted by the Ast Athens station, since the much better equipped station sometimes had to cope with transmission or reception difficulties, while at the other end
ROBERTO
reported no difficulties whatsoever. Although these suspicions were widely shared, no proof of
ROBERTO
’S
unreliability ever came to light.
Sensburg has no definite information on payments to
ROBERTO
. He knows only that Rittmeister Graf Schwerin, of Abwehr I Berlin, was sent to North Africa with the mission of paying
ROBERTO
after the expected occupation of Cairo.
When Rossetti left Athens in summer 1943, Schenk took over supervision of
ROBERTO
. Schenk, transferred to KO Bulgara after the dissolution of Ast Athens, continued to oversee
ROBERTO
from there.
Naturally, his interrogators ensured that Sensburg never suspected that
ROBERTO
had always been under British control but, over many hours of questioning, Sensburg proved very cooperative and provided an account of all his agents across the Middle East. Because the responsibility for intelligence collection in the region was shared with the rather smaller KO Istanbul, about which so much was already known because of Vermehren and Hamburger, Sensburg served to fill in the gaps. His description of the Abstelle’s assets made fascinating reading, especially when his version of events coincided with cases with which SIME was already very familiar, and involved that recurring character, Clemens Rossetti. Among his list of sources were two failures:
MIMI
had been parachuted into Palestine or Egypt in late 1941 with a transmitter, but was never heard of again. Similarly,
GEORGES
had been ‘dropped’ into ‘Egypt, Palestine or Syria at the end of 1941 or the beginning of 1942’ and disappeared.
MOZART
,
a completely capable linguist and musician, was enlisted by Rossetti in Italy and received only tactical training. In late 1942 he went to Turkey, but Ast
Athens received no military information from him. KO Turkey probably took over
MOZART
when Rossetti was transferred there after Ast Athens’ dissolution.
REMY
received tactical and probably wireless training. Sensburg recalls vaguely that
REMY
essayed a trip to Egypt, via Turkey in 1943, but that he obtained a visa only for Turkey. Ast Athens never received any information from the man. Sensburg assumes he was taken over by KO Turkey when Ast Athens was dissolved.
Sensburg also mentioned Paul Fackenheim, revealing that originally he had been trained ‘to be parachuted into England, but adverse flying conditions necessitated abandonment of the scheme’. He also confirmed that after he had been dropped near Haifa on a military reconnaissance mission,
KOCH
had fallen silent.
According to Senesburg, his Abstellen relied on two agent recruiters, Ludwig Stoeckel, codenamed
MARIO
, who had previously worked in Lyons but had been brought to Athens by Rossetti because of his strong family connections in Greece, and Rosa Zardiniti, who may have been assisted by her son. These handlers acted as intermediaries between Snesburg and the Abstette’s networks, of which the largest would have been the Georgians, a trio of three Russian political refugees recruited by Rossetti in Rome and codenamed
MARCO, KANT
and
TELL
. They arrived in Athens in May or June 1942 and having undergone training were about to be deployed in the Middle East when they were recalled to Berlin and then sent to Warsaw. Sensburg did not encounter them again. There were also two other distinct groups. One was known as
MUSTA-SASCHA-PARIS
, also recruited by Rossetti, which was to go to ‘Cyprus or Egypt. Before preparations were completed, Ast Athens was dissolved and Schenk continued to supervise the three agents from KO Bulgaria. Schenk thought highly of the
MUSTA-SASCHA-PARIS
contact. Sensburg is uninformed as to their subsequent activities.’