Double Cross in Cairo (15 page)

For this defection to have happened once was bad enough, but ISLD was so active in Turkey that during the latter part of the war there were no less than three similar episodes. On 12 February, soon after the Vermehrens departed and Leverkühn was thrown into prison, one of his subordinates, Dr Willi Hamburger, received a similar summons. However, reluctant to submit to such an ordeal, Hamburger was persuaded by his lover, a glamorous Hungarian, Adrienne Molnar, to defect to the local representative of the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS). According to MI5, another of Hamburger’s lovers, Edith Karakacievic, later became successively the mistress of two senior UK Commercial Corporation officers, Crabbe and George Howard, the 11th Earl of Carlisle, from whom she was supposedly directed by Hamburger to extract sensitive information. In one of his interrogations Hamburger denied that Karakacievic, a Serbian Jewess, had been his mistress, claiming to have met her only once, and he also refuted the rumour that he had conducted an affair with Frau Stille, the wife of the German consul.

Aged twenty-seven, Hamburger, who worked in Istanbul as the manager of Suedostrope, an import-export business, had first been identified as an Abwehr officer by Walter Aberle and Waldemar Weber, and then by Gottfried Muller, Georg Konieczny and Friedrich
Hoffmann, a trio of German saboteurs, collectively codenamed
THE
LIBERATORS
, who had been arrested twelve days after parachuting into Iraq, near Mosul, on 17 June 1943 while undertaking what became known as the Marmut Expedition, to establish a local espionage and sabotage network among the Kurds. However, the three German officers, equipped with a transmitter and accompanied by an Iraqi interpreter, Nafi Rashid Ramzi, had been dropped some 200 kilometres from their planned landing zone, and had decided to split up, but they had been spotted by the authorities and detained just east of Erbil.

Codenamed
TIGER
and
HARDY
, Muller and Hoffmann admitted that they had been directed to blow up the Trans-Iranian railway and interrupt the delivery of oil to the Allies. The planning for the mission had begun in October 1942 and Muller had been trained at the Abwehr’s school at Quenz and at a laboratory at Tegel, which he described to his interrogators in considerable detail. He also revealed that once they had been established, a second team, codenamed
MAMMUT
II
, would then be dropped to them by the Luftwaffe. Research by the DSO Baghdad, Squadron-Leader Dawson-Shepherd, later identified these spies as Robert Baheshy and Louis Bakos, a pair of Iraqi students attending college in Istanbul, At one moment, when Dawson-Shepherd was coming under local political pressure to have the captives released from detention, the DSO sought testimony from Vermehren to not only implicate those he already had in custody, but to incriminate several other suspects.

Codenamed
HOSIERY
by his SIME, Hamburger described to his interrogator, W. B. Savigny, how, after he had learned Turkish as a student at Vienna University, where he wrote his thesis on the political reconstruction of the Arabic world in Asia, he had started his military service with the Luftwaffe in October 1940 and had been transferred to the Abwehr in March 1941 and posted to Vienna. He
had then been sent to Istanbul and in August 1942 was placed under Paul Leverkühn’s command. However, becoming increasingly disenchanted, he had made contact with Commander George V. Earle III of the Office of Naval Intelligence, but when he heard nothing more from the Americans, and when he was ordered back to Berlin, ostensibly for a new assignment in Paris, he surrendered himself to the British, and was received by Nicholas Elliott. After his interviews with SIME in Cairo, by prior agreement with the Americans, he was transferred to the custody of OSS.

Hamburger’s defection, coming so soon after the Vermehrens switched sides, would have a lasting impact on German morale, and another Austrian, Karl Alois von Kleczkowski and his wife Stella, a couple operating under
Voelkischer Beobachter
journalistic cover for the Abwehr in Istanbul since the autumn of 1941, defected a week later in February 1944. And if this was not enough, in April 1944 Cornelia Kapp, an SD secretary based in Ankara, fell in love with an OSS officer and was also persuaded to defect.

Manipulation of the enemy’s intelligence networks was coordinated with great imagination by a staff officer, Dudley Clarke, whose military intelligence experience dated back to Richard Meinertzhagen’s exploits in Gaza during the First World War. Having served with Archie Wavell in the previous conflict, Clarke began lobbying for deception schemes in December 1940, the first of which was tailor-made for
COMPASS
later the same month when Marshal Rodolfo Graziani’s Italian 10th Army, which had penetrated 54 miles into Egyptian territory, was defeated at Sidi Barrani when General Richard O’Connor’s infantry division and a single armoured division equipped with the Matilda tank trounced ten enemy divisions. Initially intended as a five-day raid, the battle continued until February, with Graziani convinced that he was opposed by a vastly superior force. In the end, 130,000 Italians, including seven generals, surrendered, at a cost of
nearly a thousand Allied casualties. This encounter, long before the
ULTRA
source became available, was a very practical demonstration of how the enemy’s poor tactical signal security could be exploited, and the potential value of an order-of-battle based on deception.

Wavell was an enthusiastic exponent of strategic deception, even though
CAMILLA
, the cover story for his offensive in the Western Desert, did go entirely to plan. On that occasion the Duke of Aosta, fully persuaded that the British intended to attack in Somaliland, simply withdrew when it had been anticipated that he would do precisely the reverse, and reinforce his garrisons. Undeterred, Clarke embraced the principles of strategic deception and became its enthusiastic and persuasive exponent, to the point that he acquired no less than two pseudonyms: ‘Major Constable-Croft’ as the recipient of operation information, and ‘Major Galveston’ for all intelligence-related correspondence.

Despite the
CAMILLA
debacle, Clarke was authorised on 28 March 1941 to create ‘Advance Headquarters ‘A’ Force’, a title intended to mislead by implying some airborne unit. In reality the organisation consisted of Clarke and two officers, supported by a staff of ten soldiers, and was originally accommodated at the ‘Grey Pillars’ GHQ building before moving into two flats at 6 Sharia Kasr-el-Nil, directly below a brothel. Their objective was to develop a master-plan to conceal the Allies’ future plans in the region, and this required not only the usual methods of conveying deception, mainly wireless traffic, the circulation of rumours and the ‘planting’ of false information on suspect neutrals, such as the Japanese consul in Alexandria, but the exploitation of double agents. Fortuitously, Levi arrived in Cairo in February 1941 and created the foundations of the
CHEESE
project, the spy-ring that would be the longest and most successful deception of its kind. One classic ruse adopted by Clarke was codenamed
ABEAM
, a plan conveyed over six months in 1941 intended to promote
the idea that there were airborne troops based in Egypt planning to launch an attack behind the Italian lines in Italy. The intention was to exploit Italian fears, known from intercepted enemy wireless traffic, of just such a surprise. In support of it Clarke invented a non-existent ‘First Special Air Service Brigade’ and used ingenious methods to persuade the enemy it was training in parachute and glider techniques in the Transjordan desert. Captured enemy documents later suggested
ABEAM
succeeded.

Clarke’s mission, defined and directed by Wavell, was in the first instance to buy time. The British position in the Middle East was difficult, if not disastrous, with Wavell having to weaken his defences in the west because of the need to deploy the 1st Armoured Brigade, the New Zealand Division and the 6th Australian Division to Greece, amounting to 50,000 troops and 8,000 vehicles. This left Wavell with just the 2nd Armoured Division and the 9th Australian Division to hold all of Cyrenaica.

The Germans occupied Yugoslavia in April, swept through Greece, and in May captured Crete. The Axis threatened East Africa, Iraq and Syria, and General Erwin Rommel arrived in Libya in February and was due to receive the 15th Panzer Division in April. The British were outnumbered, outgunned and isolated, and the 7th Armoured Division was in a parlous state. Worse, the Allies believed (wrongly) that Cyprus would be the next German objective, so Clarke was given the task of boosting the number of defenders, amounting to 4,000 troops of doubtful quality, by an entire division of 20,000 men. Of course, the 7th Infantry Division was fictitious, as was its armoured component, the 39th Battalion, Royal Tank Regiment, which was only equipped with dummy tanks. When, at the end of July, the British 50th Division reached the island, the defences amounted to a single genuine division, and a bogus one. Significantly, a captured German intelligence assessment was found to include the 7th Infantry Division and 10th Armoured
Division and estimate the British troop strength at more than 20,000. Having established the 50th Division, it would remain in enemy assessments of the Middle East until 1944. Indeed, in December 1941 a map retrieved from General Guglielmo Nasi’s Italian Corps headquarters at Gondar was found to contain details of entirely imaginary defences on Cyprus, and an exaggerated estimate of 30,000 troops.

Under intense pressure from Churchill, and having received reinforcements in the
TIGER
convoy of 238 tanks and forty-three tanks, Wavell reluctantly launched a much-delayed offensive,
BATTLEAXE
, in mid-May. The attack faltered, leading Churchill to replace Wavell with General Claude Auchinleck, who proved equally cautious. Although
BATTLEAXE
failed, Wavell had succeeded in removing the Italians from East Africa, stabilising the situation in Syria and Iraq, and evacuating Allied troops from Crete. He has also become the first military commander of the war to embrace strategic deception, and had endorsed Clarke’s tactics of inventing fictitious units such as the 10th Armoured Division, the 7th Infantry Division and the 39th Battalion, Royal Tank Regiment, to construct a thoroughly misleading order-of-battle. This was accomplished by sheer invention, but also by misrepresenting the true status of reserve, or headquarter units. Thus the 9th Amy, which was no more than at Corps strength, deployed against the Vichy French, became a full army, as did the 10th Army which supposedly was sent to the Caucasus to support the southern Soviet flank in August 1942. Also invented was the 12th Army, components of which were drawn from GHQ’s substantial presence in Cairo and the Delta. The illusion was completed by Noel Wild’s creation of a unit insignia, a seal balancing a globe on its nose, which was duly reported by
CHEESE
. Another of his inspired ideas was the unicorn as the sign of an equally fictitious 12th Army division. On this occasion, however, Wild over-reached himself as he learned too late that there was no French word for unicorn.

In addition to greatly exaggerating the size of the Allied forces across the Middle East, Clarke invented units, among them the 1st Special Air Service Brigade, to pose non-existent threats and exploit the enemy’s perceived fears. Other imaginary units included the 37th, 38th and 101st Royal Tank Regiments, and in July 1942 Clarke won approval for
CASCADE
, an Allied order-of-battle that was composed of fourteen completely notional divisions.

The key to constructing a false order-of-battle was personal observation and this could be accomplished by the ‘lowest grade of agent, whether he could speak English or not’ who reported sightings of the divisional signs which adorned Allied vehicles. Such reports would become the staple of messages transmitted by
CHEESE
, but there was a fear that, after the mischief of October 1941, the enemy had turned rather cool on
ROBERTO
. Simpson, however, disputed this pessimistic interpretation, and on 3 June 1942 advised Dudley Clarke that

As British survival seemed to depend in some small measure on the concept of deception, Clarke needed a method of conveying the false information to the enemy, and this was the role to be fulfilled by
CHEESE
. In 1942 ‘A’ Force’s scheme, codenamed
CASCADE
, which was approved in July, invented no less than eight divisions and two armoured brigades, and in the beginning of 1943 he warmed to his task and created a further six British divisions, a US armoured brigade, the entire 12th Army and, finally in December, 14th Corps. In 1944 this ambitious campaign was enhanced by an even greater deception,
WANTAGE
.