Double Cross in Cairo (33 page)
Read Double Cross in Cairo Online
Authors: Nigel West
Sensburg also talked of the AGFA group, a pair of Afghan princes related to ex-King Amanullah. One was codenamed
APOLLO
and the other was Obeid Ullah, and they had been recruited by Rossetti in Rome, however, although the agents reached Athens in preparation for a mission to Turkey, and then to Syria, Palestine or Egypt, the scheme stalled for lack of travel papers, followed by a ban from Berlin on any activity that might embarrass the Afghan government. Accordingly, the AGFA project was shelved indefinitely.
SIME was particularly interested in the ALT group, of whom Sensburg recalled
ARTHUR
and
TOM
, both of whom had Cypriot backgrounds.
In late 1942 or early 1943 the group left Piraeus in a fishing craft for Cyprus to recconnoitre Allied forces in Cyprus and the Middle East. Later the group was to proceed to Egypt with the same mission. Although wireless communication between the ALT mission and Ast Athens was effected, Sensburg does not recall any messages with military information from Egypt.
He also listed the
MOHR-BELAMI
group, which consisted of ‘two Armenians and a wireless operator’.
The group left Greece for the Syrian coast in a fishing craft with the mission of reconnoitering Allied forces, mainly air forces, in the Middle East. The group was unsuccessful and never established wireless communication with Ast Athens. The Ast later learned that the participants in the mission had been arrested on espionage charges and that at least one of them had been executed.
Sensburg also mentioned two women upon whom he had relied. One was Anna Dettlach, codenamed
POLA
, who had been trained in Brussels, given a forged Scandinavian passport in the name of Larsen and
sent to Athens in the autumn of 1941 for a mission to Turkey, where she had been married before the war.
In late 1941
POLA
was sent to Turkey where she was to approach high Allied officers in an effort to obtain certain military documents. From Turkey she was to go to Cairo on the same mission. She was unable to procure the desired documents however, and never reached Cairo.
The other woman was a Belgian, codenamed
LUX
, who was transferred to Athens in ‘the spring of 1942 with a recommendation of being thoroughly reliable’ and was tasked ‘by Sensburg to make contact with persons having exploitable connections in the Middle East. None of the persons engaged by
LUX
proved qualified for agent work.’
A review of Sensburg’s total agent rosta suggested that he had achieved very mixed results. Of the agents he was responsible for supervising, only a few were deployed operationally and none of them succeeded in reaching Egypt where, of course, they might have been in a position to contradict
CHEESE
. As a result,
CHEESE
’S
reporting was accepted by the Abwehr, and Heere Fremde West, unchallenged. The Allied assessment of Sensburg’s record of failure would be reinforced by other Abwehr detainees who were arrested making their way back to what was left of their homeland.
Despite requests for Otto Mayer to be returned to Yugoslavia to face a trial for alleged war crimes, and an undertaking to this effect given by the SOE representative at Tito’s headquarters, he was released from Camp 020 in July 1945 and returned to Germany.
Otto Wagner, the Abwehr chief in Sofia, was detained in the French zone of occupation in Germany and interrogated at Bad Wildungen. Richard Klauder and Anton Turkel were questioned at Camp King, Frankurt. Richard Klauder died in Salzburg in July 1960 and General Turkel died in Munich in 1958.
Of the other British double agents run in the Middle East,
TWIST
proved to be one of the most resilient. Employed by the Italian consulate in Istanbul,
TWIST
volunteered his services to SIS in May 1942 but in October 1943
TRIANGLE
revealed that he had also made himself available to the Abwehr to whom he had admitted his relationship with the British. SIS continued to run him, even when he disclosed in April 1944 that the SD had approached him too. In June he produced an SD questionnaire relating to Allied military intentions in the region, but the channel closed in August when the Turkish authorities interned the entire German diplomatic staff. Undeterred, SIS tried to have
TWIST
offer himself to the Japanese, but that plan failed when all Japan’s envoys were expelled.
Of the Americans, Hal Lehrman worked for the
New York Times, Newsweek
and the
Herald Tribune
after the war and was elected president of the Overseas Press Club. He died in November 1988 and left his papers to the Kroch Library at Cornell University, from whence he had graduated in 1932.
Edgar Yolland, identified by Vermehren as having been recruited as a German spy, renounced his US citizenship in an apparent deal with the ambassador. Steinhardt and OSS reported that he was expelled from Turkey sometime before April 1945 and later tried to acquire a British passport.
Perhaps the most tragic epilogue of the
CHEESE
story is what happened to Evan Simpson. In 1946, having returned to Oxford for his MA, Simpson released
Time Table for Victory: A Brief and Popular Account of the Railways & Railway-owned Dockyards of Great Britain & Northern Ireland During the Six Years’ War of 1939–45
, giving no clue as to how his own very considerable talent for invention had been applied during the recent conflict. Next, in 1948, he wrote
The Network: It Could Happen Here
, and then
Time after Earthquake: An adventure among Greek Islands in August 1953
. On 27 December 1953,
four months after having witnessed the earthquake as part of a relief mission to the Ionian Islands, Simpson succumbed to depression and shot himself with a rifle. According to his widow, who gave evidence at an inquest held at Henley-on-Thames, he had taken his own life in woods near his home, Neal’s Farm, at Checkendon in south Oxfordshire. She explained that her husband suffered from fits of depression and that when he did ‘his creative power to write was destroyed’.
Two years after his death Simpson’s publisher released
The Darkness
, a fictionalised account of Christ’s crucifixion, as reported to the Roman security office in the form of intelligence bulletins.
Dudley Clarke, the founder of ‘A’ Force and the principal architect of modern wartime strategic deception, received permission to publish a sanitised version of his autobiography,
Seven Assignments,
in 1948, but was not allowed to mention
CHEESE
, nor proceed with his wartime memoirs,
The Secret War
. In his typically modest foreword, Clarke wrote that
The secret war of which these pages tell was a war of wits – of fantasy and imagination fought out on an almost private basis between the supreme heads of Hitler’s intelligence (and Mussolini’s) and a small band of men and women – British, American and French – operating from the opposite shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The author had the honour of leading that team through five crowded, urgent years – years which brought moreover, a rare privilege to a professional soldier. For the secret war was waged rather to conserve than to destroy; the stakes were the lives of frontline troops, and the organisation which fought it was able to count its gains from the number of casualties it could avert.
Having retired from the army in 1947, he worked at Conservative Central Office, wrote a thriller,
Golden Arrow
in 1955 and died in 1977. The extent to which his stratagems and phantom armies really duped
the Axis only became clear when Allied analysts had the chance to study captured enemy documents. The material recovered in France proved beyond any doubt that the Fremde Heere West was completely taken in by
FORTITUDE
, and, for weeks after D-Day, continued to believe that the main amphibious landings, spearheaded by the (fictitious) First United States Army Group would occur in the Pas-de-Calais. Likewise in the eastern Mediterranean, the Axis clung to the conviction, created in 1942, that the Allies intended to attack ‘the soft under-belly of Europe’ through the Balkans, and a memorandum drafted by the Hungarian army’s chief of staff General Ferenc Szombathelyi in February 1943, immediately after he had attended a strategy conference addressed by Hitler, predicted landings in the Balkans later the same year. This flawed assessment led to the escalation of German forces in the region, which in March 1944 amounted to twenty-nine first-rate divisions, At the end of that month, in anticipation of a non-existent threat to Hungary, fourteen German divisions entered and occupied the country, including the battle-hardened II SS Panzer Corps, consisting of the 9th SS Panzer Division Hohenstaufen and 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg, which had been transferred from France for the purpose.
These Axis forces, therefore, were not available to defend Normandy, nor to participate in an armoured counter-attack on the invaders. Captured documents demonstrated that of the twenty-six imaginary divisions in the eastern Mediterranean dreamed up by ‘A’ Force, twenty-one were positively identified by enemy analysts and entered on their order-of-battle assessments.
Finally,
CHEESE
himself disappears from MI5’s files after the decision has been taken to compensate him financially for what he had endured during his incarceration. On 4 April 1945 Captain Pierre Grandguillot of ‘A’ Force, formerly a Davis Cup tennis player, urged Eric Pope to treat Levi with the generosity he deserved, pointing out
that this was probably the cost of his silence. Pope then advocated that
CHEESE
, who had expressed a wish to rejoin his wife and son in Genoa as soon as the city was occupied by the Allies, should be paid £1,300 in reward plus £2,000 in compensation for his imprisonment, being the equivalent of the 200,000 lira claimed.
Stress should be laid on the great skill and ingenuity with which Levi ran his case in the early days, without which it could never have been developed. The point should not be overlooked that Levi may be tempted at some future date, if not treated generously enough, to make money by selling his story to the press. It would be most unfortunate if it came out prematurely and in a manner we could not control. This is thought to be a strong argument for generous treatment and for an explanation that it is given partly as the price for secrecy.
Having been paid,
CHEESE
drops from view as far as Whitehall is concerned, but it is believed that he returned to Italy to collect his wife and son, and then travelled to Australia, having chartered a banana-boat and filled it with a cargo of Turkish carpets which he then sold in Australia. He died in Italy in 1954, never having fully recovered from the malnutrition he experienced while in prison, the details of his remarkable adventure apparently buried forever in MI5’s secret archive.
It was not until David Mure, who served in ‘A’ Force and chaired the 31 Committee in Beirut, published his memoirs
Practise to Deceive
, in 1977, that a slightly garbled account of the
CHEESE
case was made public for the first time following a fleeting reference by J. C. Masterman in
The Double Cross System of the War of 1939–45
as ‘a famous double agent of the Middle East … apparently blown in 1941 but was built up again and became once more effective in the summer of 1942’.
Unfortunately Mure, without access to official records, unaware of Levi’s true name or background and heavily reliant on postwar conversations with Noel Wild, gave a rather fanciful account of a double
agent codenamed
ORLANDO
, and tried to correct the error three years later in
Master of Deception
by describing another spy, codenamed
MOSES
. In fact, of course, Mure had conflated several different real and notional agents and succeeded in muddying the waters.
The policy of successive postwar governments was to maintain secrecy about clandestine operations in case similar strategies might be needed in a future conflict, and unauthorised disclosures, or the speculation of individuals such as David Mure, were strongly discouraged by the authorities. Accordingly, almost nothing was said publicly about
CHEESE
and, even when his MI5 dossier was declassified, considerable efforts were made to redact any clues to his true identity. The secrecy surrounding his case was perpetuated only after details had been released about other wartime double agents because he had been run by SIME, an organisation that was wound up in 1958. Although MI5 would continue to have a peacetime existence right up to the present day, the British withdrawal from Palestine and Egypt eliminated the need for a large regional security apparatus and SIME simply disappeared, most of its remaining staff being absorbed by either MI5 or ISLD’s parent, the Secret Intelligence Service. However, the files in SIME’s registry, the essential, functioning heart of any intelligence structure, were not all repatriated to London, and most were consigned to the War Office and to the care of British Middle East Headquarters in Nicosia. Accordingly, what survives is a disparate collection of ostensibly unrelated files, together with various reports that, read separately, give little idea of what was accomplished.
Levi himself, of course, was one of the war’s most remarkable spies and, working in relative isolation, was wholly dependent on his own mainly notional spy-ring. Furthermore, his handlers had absolutely no previous experience of the management of double agents, and essentially wrote the handbook on strategic deception, a concept that
was entirely novel at that time. By the end of the war
CHEESE
had demonstrably fabricated a plausible but bogus Allied order-of-battle and, equally impressively, had conveyed it to the enemy. By any standards, this was an astonishing achievement, and the fact that the entire operation was kept under wraps for so long is equally remarkable.
Often, in the shadowy world of espionage, it is hard to discern cause and effect, to find a definite link between a message conveyed by an agent, and its verifiable consequence. In the case of
MINCEMEAT
, MI5’s celebrated deception scheme undertaken in April 1943, it was possible to recover some enemy signals that suggested certain troop deployments had been made to the Balkans as a direct consequence of a German acceptance of the false material found on the body of a bogus military courier, ‘Major William Martin RM’. Equally, documents captured after the war proved that a message from
GARBO
on 5 June 1944, the day before D-Day, had persuaded the Nazi High Command to cancel the transfer of the 1st SS Panzer Division from the Franco-Belgian border to Normandy. Such compelling evidence is rare, yet we now know from intercepted signals, captured enemy documents
and
the interrogation of prisoners, that
CHEESE
accomplished more, over a longer period, than any other single Allied agent. Although, ironically, Renato Levi himself knew little of what had been undertaken in his name, especially during the months of his imprisonment,
CHEESE
undermined the accuracy of the Axis assessments of Allied strength, and helped save the Suez Canal and much of the region from capture and occupation.