Double Cross in Cairo (10 page)

The return of Levi to Italy had, I think, another valuable result. With his going (since Fulvio Melcher had already fallen by the way) the Germans lost the only member of the Cairo organisation with whom they had any personal acquaintance. This, as we know from our own experience in England, is an incomparable advantage. A double agent whom the Abwehr has recruited directly, whom they have trained, and with whose personality they are acquainted, is always a little circumscribed as to what he can and cannot do. He cannot step too far out of character without arousing suspicion; it is difficult for him suddenly to change the type or value of his reports; he must react to new situations in a manner in keeping with what the Germans know of his character. An agent whom the Abwehr have never seen, or better still a network of imaginary agents, offers a wide scope. The Abwehr know only as much or as little about them as it is expedient that they should be told. They have no means to assess the probability, physical or psychological, of their saying or doing one thing more than another. Moreover, when necessary, imaginary agents can be dispensed with, changed or even captured without imperiling the remainder of the network or giving rise to inconvenient administrative problems.

Our experience in England has shown that the Abwehr, provided that its confidence in the original agent is unshaken, is very ready to accept new sub-agents recruited in the course of operations, and surprisingly unexacting in the particulars which it demands of their past careers and personalities. In this way we have been able to provide one agent with seven non-existent sub-agents, some of whom we have since put into direct communication with the Abwehr and who now constitute a network which has spread even outside the UK. Our experiences in this and similar cases also bears out
the statement on page nine of the SIME report that ‘the enemy is curiously unwary and eager to accept stories of the disloyalty of disgruntled colonials, Irishmen, etc. and even of supposed ex-member of Fascist organisations in England'. It may be unnecessary to draw the attention of SIME to the equally wide field of opportunity offered by disgruntled allies, nationalist (and even Republican) Spaniards; Indian supporters of Congress; and German-born Americans. The Abwehr is also prepared to accept on the one hand agents or sub-agents who work without any other motive purely for money, and on the other such ideological prodigies as Poles inspired by a disinterested love for the Greater Germany. The explanation is probably to be found first in the degree (always noticeable) to which Abwehr officers are the victims of Dr Goebbels's propaganda; secondly, in the slackness and increasing corruption of the organisation as a whole; thirdly, in the natural anxiety of an intelligence officer to see his estimate of the original agent justified by the skill and initiative with which he develops his work.

a man of great energy. He travels incessantly to Sofia, to Italy, to Berlin, to Istanbul, and to Ankara. His name is constantly mentioned in connection with agents in the Middle East. Einz Luft Paris offers him one agent; on another occasion he declines an offer from Oberstleutnant Heidsschuch in Rome. He is the moving spirit of the
HAMLET
undertaking in Syria; he
interviews a Persian agent in Sofia, he is authorised by Einz Heer Ost to operate on a considerable scale in Turkey and requires T£20,000 for the purpose. He is instrumental in planting false information on the Americans; he requires (for some nameless purpose) a pistol with silencer and supplies of the drug Pervitin which Ast Brussels has previously used with success. It may be questioned how great or of what value to the enemy is the practical result of this activity. Nevertheless it is clear than whether the Abwehr's machinations in the Middle East are successful or not, Rossetti is in some sense the centre of them. He holds, we may say, a position analogous to that occupied until the spring of 1941 by Oberstleutnant Ritter of Ast Hamburg in relation to this country.

We were greatly the gainers in knowing as much as we did about Ritter, his methods and his organisation. By far the greater part of this knowledge was a product of the
SNOW
case which was conducted almost exclusively with counter-espionage objectives in view. In one respect this case differed radically from that of
CHEESE
.
SNOW
was throughout his career in constant personal contact with the Abwehr. Between the outbreak of war and the final winding up of his case he made, or his sub-agents made on his behalf, six visits to the continent for personal conferences with Ritter or his officers. Each of these visits added something to our knowledge. On fourteen separate occasions (or as nearly as we can judge) the Abwehr either attempted,
although not always successfully, to reinforce
SNOW
's organisation in England or put him in touch obliquely with other agents, some of whom might otherwise have remained unknown to us.

It does not appear that such opportunities as did present themselves were exploited to the full. The contrary seems rather to be the case. Levi, for example, went unaccompanied to see Madame Vigoretti-Antoniada and Georges Khouri, the two persons in Cairo who had been recommended to him by Count Scirombo. Nothing came of these meetings and no record survives of what passed. It is no doubt true that the practical difficulty of covering or recording such meetings were great, perhaps insuperable; it is also true that at the end of the operations SIME were no nearer to discovering the true sympathies of these people than they would have been had Levi not existed. At the same time a welcome opportunity was missed of testing the good faith of Levi himself at the very opening of the case.

Nicossof started his career in April 1941 with only £150. Nearly two years later, in February 1943, he was still without additional funds, but still apparently able to operate although during the intervening period his outgoing expenses must have at times been heavy. This situation must, until it is remedied, represent a grave weakness in the case. At any moment some senior Abwehr officer may from curiosity examine the back records and, if he does so, must reach the conclusion that Nicossof's accountancy can
only be explained on the assumption that he is working under British control. SIME is, of course, fully alive to this danger, their report describes four attempts to secure additional funds: in August 1942, in October and again in December and the following January. None of these attempts was successful or at least had not been at the time the SIME report was written. It is, I think, pertinent to enquire whether this was wholly the Abwehr's fault. We know at least from the message already quoted that in August 1942 Rossetti was making a genuine effort to pay
ROBERTO
, and this was not his first attempt. Similarly, we know that he was exerting himself in Turkey to secure the latest payment in January this year. He has not, therefore, been entirely neglectful of his agent. On the other hand I received the impression (perhaps wrongly) from the first or introductory report forwarded by SIME that Rossetti had not always enjoyed their full cooperation in his efforts to pay
CHEESE
. It is said, with regard to the August plan, that at the last moment
CHEESE'S
merchant friend was frightened off by the execution of five spies which had occurred a few days previously. Similarly, in December the flat at which
CHEESE
was to receive the money was raided at a crucial moment by the Egyptian police with the result that a fresh scheme had to be arranged.

I do not know if it was in SIME's power to have prevented either of these incidents: the report even seems to imply that both were staged. If so, I think SIME was following a false policy. In either case, apart from the general desirability of
CHEESE'S
receiving money, there was a distinct counter-espionage advantage to be gained from allowing, even compelling, the payment to proceed. In equivalent circumstances in this country we should, I think, have felt that a contact with the Abwehr in Aleppo and still more in Cairo was worth the slight lapse from reality involved in inducing a Greek merchant not to be frightened or persuading the Egyptian police to postpone a raid.

I make this point because our own experience has been that the Abwehr is not adept at paying its agents and not infrequently fails to do so unless rendered active assistance. This is, I think, because they lack not the means but the imagination. The problem of making a clandestine payment to England
should never be insoluble to an organisation with branches in the Peninsula and even in Eire. However, we have known long periods during which agents, whom it was clear that the Abwehr trusted, remained in urgent need of money, although during the same period there were other agents in England with surplus funds and yet others who might have acted as couriers on their way here. We should certainly have been wrong had we deduced, from the fact that these agents were not paid, that the Abwehr lacked the means to pay them. It was rather that it lacked the imagination and good sense to make use of the opportunities that were available. For this reason most, if not all, of the really successful schemes for paying agents in England have been our invention, not the Abwehr's, and have been carried through with our active, not to say pressing, collaboration. I suggest that SIME should find a similar approach to yield the same results.

1. Special Station have read with very great interest the comments on their history of the
CHEESE
case which accompanied Lieutenant-Colonel White's letter of 15 April addressed to Colonel Maunsell. They are very far from considering the points made as merely academic or the criticism unhelpful. The truth is the contrary, and all those who have read the London comments wish that it could be possible to have a full-length personal exchange of ideas with their opposite numbers in London. Since the opportunity for this does not at the moment exist, the following paragraphs represent an unsatisfactory substitute for those personal conversations which, it is hoped may one day become feasible.

2. Paragraph 1 of the commentary contains, of course, the key to the understanding of what may appear to London to be the somewhat unbalanced
handling of the
CHEESE
case. Operating from behind the lines – at one time one might almost say within the sound of enemy guns – it has been natural that the principal and almost the only object of
CHEESE'S
existence should be the practice of operational deception.

3. Since his ‘rehabilitation'
CHEESE
has been almost exclusively used for the transmission of high grade operational material, with occasional interludes which have been devoted to ‘building him up' for his next coup, while keeping him continuously at the disposal of the operational chiefs as a potential, rapid and reliable means of communication with the enemy.

4. This devoting of
CHEESE
to operational uses – almost entirely excluding any possibility of using him for counter-espionage purposes – to some extent explains what may appear to London to have been the over-cautious policy adopted in coordinating plans with the enemy for his payment. Special Section are only too aware of the weakness of the
CHEESE
story in its financial aspect, as pointed out in Paragraph 17 of London's comments. At the time of writing in fact,
CHEESE
has reached an almost unprecedented pitch of exasperation, and the slender thread on which depends the credibility of his story must be regarded as very near breaking point. Arrangements – approaching, it is believed, as near as was conceivable to the fool-proof – had once more been made for the receipt of money in Cairo, when
CHEESE
was informed (in response to querulous enquiries) on 9 May that the money had been delivered at the agreed address before 5 April. It was in point of fact certain that there had been no such delivery. Further irritable enquiries were made of the Abwehr; these produced information that the money had been handed over at the address which had been raided by the Egyptian Police in late 1942. While plans had remained in force for the receipt of money at this address, its unsuitability had been made clear to the enemy, and an alternative and much more satisfactory address given to and apparently accepted by them. It would seem that the Abwehr have failed once
more, through incompetence and/or dishonesty to take their fair share in the task of maintaining the probability of the
CHEESE
saga.

5. At this juncture the London comment is pertinent – have all these successive frustrations of the enemy's attempts to pay
CHEESE
been entirely the fault of the Abwehr? And – a question which has been of even greater interest to Special Section – will the Abwehr ever be capable of delivering money to
CHEESE
without more active assistance from us than they have hitherto received? In this connection it is felt that due emphasis should be given to certain aspects of the problem in Egypt, described in the following paragraph:

6. The necessity for giving absolute priority to operational considerations has been explained in Paragraph 1 above. The practical result of this has been the acceptance as an axiom that, for the sake of avoiding any possible prejudice to current operational schemes
CHEESE
and his story must be kept to a maximum extent free from the possibly fatal touch of such physical reality as, for example, is involved in contact with the enemy in the shape of his agents or couriers. Passivity has therefore been the keynote of all plans hitherto framed for the reception of the money; action has been confined to the making of such local arrangements as were necessary, and then merely inviting the Abwehr to do their duty – which they have systematically failed to do. The possibility that (notwithstanding the operational considerations involved) this policy may have been mistaken, is now demonstrated in the mounting danger which faces
CHEESE
as his impecuniousness continues without relief.

7. A certain timidity, therefore, occasioned by operational considerations of high importance, has been the first factor tending to hamper Special Section's schemes for guiding Abwehr money into
CHEESE'S
pocket. A second restricting influence has arisen from the difficulty – possibly not quite fully appreciated in London – of working in a neutral country with
whose police and security authorities it is impossible to cooperate in matters ever approaching the degree of secrecy which attaches to
CHEESE
. The raid in December 1942 on the flat at which
CHEESE
was at that time expecting to receive money, is a case in point. This raid was not staged: it was due mainly to the fact that the premises and personalities chosen for the reception of the money erred perhaps too much on the side of verisimilitude – with the result that the Egyptian authorities (whom security considerations make it most undesirable to warn) did their duty with an embarrassing violence which could only be counteracted – after the event – by most devious methods.

8. The execution of the five Aleppo spies in August 1942 was deliberately advanced by
CHEESE
as an excuse for withdrawal from a plan for reception of money in Aleppo which had been necessarily improvised at short notice, in response to a snap request from the enemy. In justice to itself, Special Section may be allowed here to point out that considerable difficulties are involved in making such arrangements at a distance of some 600 miles through the agency of the local Defence Security Officer, in territory under French administration. This was a time, moreover, when Special Section was still suffering from growing pains accentuated by the always present difficulty of the lack (then particularly acute) of suitable officers for the handling of this type of work. It may be mentioned also that operational considerations applied at this time with a force which made it impossible (according to the
CHEESE
policy hitherto accepted as standard) to run any risk whatsoever of his reliability being exposed to danger. It was at this period that he was being nursed for the important part he was to play in the preparations for the El Alamein offensive, followed somewhat later by the
TORCH
operation.

9. No mention has so far been made of the part played by ill-luck (if one may be allowed exceptionally thus to describe the sinking of a German
submarine) in frustrating two other Abwehr plans for paying
CHEESE
. The first of these was when Jawad Hamadi fell unexpectedly into our hands in the summer of 1942 when a passenger on a submarine sunk off the coast, Hamadi had been recruited by the Sensburg organisation, had a large sum of money in his possession and had been told that he might expect to be contacted by ‘a man called Paul'.
CHEESE
received no instructions which could be linked in any way to the Hamadi operation. The fates were unkind for a second time when, after a carefully prepared plan had been made by
CHEESE
for his ‘
petite amie
' to receive the money at a suitably selected café on the Pyramids Road in October, the enemy were distracted and apparently compelled to abandon that side of the plan by the shock of the British victory at El Alamein.

10. There is no doubt that
CHEESE'S
records could not stand up for five minutes to the scrutiny of a chartered accountant and he continues to be in danger of a pauper's fate unless he can find some means of making both ends meet. At the time of writing he is at least able to keep body and soul together, having for some months been in the employment as an interpreter in the Cairo office of OETA – a post which not only enables him to pay his daily way but also to benefit from the indiscretions of his employing officers, who have a way of leaving their diaries about and discussing secret matters at the tops of their voices.
CHEESE'S
salary, however, obviously cannot be expected to cover the overhead expenses of high grade espionage. Plans are at the moment under consideration for insuring against a continuation of failure on the part of the Abwehr paymaster, by initiating
CHEESE
into the profitable game of illicit diamond trafficking. It is hoped to be able to give to the enemy, as notional contacts of
CHEESE
, the names of actual persons known to the Abwehr as being involved in this traffic.

11. London's comments on
CHEESE'S
financial status have served the useful purpose of clarifying still further an aspect of the case which has been the
principal worry of Special Section since the story began. Special Section would like also to express their appreciation of the constructive comments contained elsewhere in the London notes, and as stated before, only wish that the opportunity existed for the personal discussions which would be so much more satisfactory than the present exchange of necessarily abbreviated observations.

12. Paragraph 2 is a useful corrective to our previously not wholly clear appreciation of
CHEESE'S
directing organisation; Paragraph 14 has helped to round off the picture which we have of the bizarre Sonderfuhrer Rossetti; Paragraph 10 has given some most useful suggestions for the introduction of new characters into
CHEESE'S
comedie humaine,
the analysis of significance in – and danger to – the case, contained in Paragraphs 6 and 7, is of great interest, especially in the light of Levi's recent dramatic release from internment Italy and summons to Athens (an event which caused Special Section to alternate between, on the one hand, serious misgivings as to exactly what Rossetti would require of Levi and, on the other hand, hopes that our old friend of 1941 might return to Cairo with money for Paul, and to claim the fatted calf for himself).

13. From the point of view of
GALVESTON
, the comments – especially in Paragraph 5 – on the value to be attached to the word ‘reliable', have helped considerably towards a more objective assessment of ensuring standard on which, in the past too much reliance has perhaps been placed.

14. A certain amount of Schadenfreude has been derived from the information in Paragraph 3 regarding Abwehr incompetence – an incompetence which at the time of writing has reached new depths in the carelessness with which Athens encodes its messages. In this connection it is worth mentioning (in regard to London's Paragraph 11), that there has been no change in the
CHEESE
operator since the present writer first became acquainted with
the case in June 1942. Special Section have been extremely fortunate in their operator whose advice has been invaluable and who it is confidently believed has prevented any possibility of a technical flaw such as might arise from a changing transmission note or a blunder on the key.