Double Cross in Cairo (24 page)
Read Double Cross in Cairo Online
Authors: Nigel West
No sooner had the Abwehr’s money arrived, which included payment intended for the
SAVAGES
too, than Raymund Maundell circulated ISLD and ‘A’ Force with a division of the spoils, issuing an invitation to collect each organisation’s share from his personal safe. His statement for the distribution divided the loot into Sterling, gold, dollars and Egyptian pounds, which amounted to $8,600, £80 on Sterling, £30 in gold and E£1,400. Of this 10 per cent went to ‘A’ Force, 45 per cent was allocated to SIME and the remainder was retained.
Not surprisingly, in the opening weeks of 1944 there was an air of self-congratulation at SIME, with the end of the war in Europe eagerly anticipated. A manifestation of this atmosphere was a hugely entertaining letter dated 11 January from Rex Hamer addressed to Terence Robertson.
I am instructed by Brigadier Clarke CBE to extend his congratulations to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party and to all persons who, working in the spirit of Clarence Hatry and under the guidance of the manifold involutions of the 30 Committee’s collective genius have provided so brilliant an example of that system of relief and rehabilitation which upon an even grander scale will be one of the finest features of the future co-operation of the United Nations.
The approvisionment of
CHEESE
after so prolonged a period of penury cannot but be the happiest augury for the future of your efforts and Brigadier Clarke will consider it his duty to recommend to Dr Smart-Alick that, at the next Narkover Speech Day, the ‘Governor’s Prize for Peculation and Financial Manipulation’ be awarded to T. C. Robertson and the Sensburg-Kennenkuhn award for Practical Chemistry be granted to the Committee
Jointly (under the ‘Cribbing and Combined Study’ statute) for their successful laboratory work in ‘producing and maintaining for over two years an odourless and inexpensive cheese’.
S
IME and ISLD had the benefit of a steady stream of interrogation reports from the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC), the organisation designated as MI14, which screened recently captured enemy prisoners and used a variety of techniques, including the employment of agents provocateur and concealed microphones, to extract useful information. Another valuable source was Imperial Censorship which monitored the mails and commercial cables.
To coordinate these disparate ventures was the Middle East Intelligence Centre, headed by Illtyd Clayton, the Joint Intelligence Committee (Middle East), and eventually the 30 Committee which from March 1943, chaired by Oliver Thynne, supervised the region’s double agents, with five subcommittees based at various times in Beirut (31 Committee), Baghdad (32 Committee, which included a 34 Committee in Tehran), Nicosia (33 Committee), Asmara, Tehran, Istanbul, Nairobi, Tripoli, and Algiers, and liaised closely with ‘A’ Force, the deception planners led by Dudley Clarke. In July 1942 Thynne was replaced by Michael Crichton, who was himself succeeded by Terence Kenyon in July 1943. A 31 Committee based
in Beirut would be chaired by a former headmaster, Rex Hamer, until July 1943 with a membership of John Wills, the 3rd Viscount Astor (from the Naval Intelligence Division), and Peter Chandor and Michael Ionides from ISLD. A 32 Committee in Baghdad was chaired by David Mure with support from the ISLD representative, Frank Giffey, who would be replaced by Reg Wharry. Altogether, some forty different double agents would be manipulated by the 30 Committee and its offshoots.
One of the major challenges to be addressed by these committees, which amounted to channels authorising the transfer of information (much of it authentic) to the enemy, was the issue of proportions. How much genuine material should be disclosed to sugar-coat the false? In February 1943 ‘A’ Force undertook a study to assess
CHEESE’S
relative veracity and reviewed the content of forty-two messages transmitted since October 1942. Of this total, only eight items were considered 100 perfect false, although a further eleven were more than 80 per cent untrue. For example, four items were sent in October 1942 which were completely untrue: ‘Units of the 9th Australian Division were in the line; General Martel had passed through Cairo en route to Baghdad; General Casey had arrived from Iraq; Polish officers to Iran’. On the other hand, all the reported content of an OETA officer’s desk diary, reported on 12 January 1943, was quite true.
The above statistics in themselves can prove nothing. One of the reasons being that the percentage reality is only our estimate and consequently affected by bad memory and incomplete knowledge! Certain trends however emerge and are interesting. It must be borne in mind that no ‘domestic’ messages are included in the above analysis and that all domestic material is 100 per cent false. It appears that before and after putting over a 100 per cent falsehood we have usually given items with a high percentage of veracity. Although this is very reasonable and correct we should guard against too
obvious build-ups and reestablishments in future which on a close analysis by the enemy might look suspicious. The strong influence which
CHEESE’S
notional story has upon the quality, and more particularly, the quantity of traffic is very noticeable. Although this may at times be a nuisance from the operational point of view, it is essential that the notional picture should be followed faithfully and with the greatest care. Care must be taken when
CHEESE
opens up again to maintain a steady flow of chicken-food which could be obtained from OETA sources. If and whenever possible a programme should be mapped out for
CHEESE
for about ten days ahead and based on the strategic addendum of ‘A’ Force instructions.
By June 1943, when Terence Robertson visited London and saw MI5’s Guy Liddell, he reported that ‘A’ Force was running three double agents, being
CHEESE
and
SAVAGES
in Egypt, and a pair of Greek Cypriots codenamed
LEMONS
posing as refugees, and run by Philip Druiff in Cyprus. In fact the radio operator,
LITTLE LEMON
, who had a very pale appearance, had denounced his leader,
BIG LEMON
, to the British, and he was enrolled as a double agent.
LITTLE LEMON
continued to transmit deceptive information to the Germans until September 1944, and among his notional sources was a genuine troupe of chorus girls working in Nicosia cabarets, consisting of a Belgian codenamed
MARIA
; a Bulgarian,
MARKI
; a Romanian,
SWING-TIT
; an Austrian,
TRUDI
; and a Hungarian,
GABBIE
.
SAVAGES
consisted of a Cypriot, who notionally was operating a transmitter from Cairo, and a pair of Greeks based in Cyprus, who had been arrested upon their arrival on the island in July 1942, the skipper of their boat having abandoned their original plan to sail to Syria. The Cypriot reported that he had found a job in the Allied Liaison Branch at GHQ in Cairo, a position that was intended to improve his status.
Liddell noted in his (redacted) diaries that whereas double agents
in England often had a counter-intelligence purpose, to identify other enemy spies, those in the Middle East were run exclusively as a means of conveying deception. They
were begun by ISLD [XXXXXXXXXXXXX] but their case officer was provided by SIME and received (I speak at second-hand) far more assistance from DSO Syria than from any representative of ISLD in Syria.
KISS
was, I suppose, controlled by CICI, but his case officer was provided by SIME and the B Section of ISLD. The ISLD representative in Persia was incapable of making any valuable contribution to his working. The guiding hand controlling all the double agents was Major Terence Robertson of SIME Special Section, and he, not ISLD, trained case offices for similar work in Italy and Greece. There were two ISLD agents,
SMOOTH
and
CRUDE
started by [XXXXXXX] and covering Syria well. But the most important agents were run by SIME representatives, namely
DOLEFUL
, handed over to DSO Turkey by the Turks, and
BLACKGUARD
, handed over to DSO Turkey by B Section ISLD representative in Istanbul (this may be wrong but he was certainly run by the Defence Security Officer).
DOLEFUL
continued to work for the Turks and also most certainly for the Germans; and
BLACKGUARD
was used primarily to penetrate the Abwehr (ISLD’s job) and might perhaps have been better run (ISLD certainly thought so). But the fact remains that DSO ran them, not ISLD.
KISS
was the codename for an Iranian who had been recruited by the Abwehr before the war in Hamburg, but had been sent to Tehran on a mission and was denounced to Security Intelligence Middle East by
BLACKGUARD
, another Iranian who had been employed as an announcer on Radio Berlin. Unusually,
KISS
was run jointly by Combined Intelligence Centre Iraq (CICI) with their NKVD counterparts to pass deception material to the enemy, but collapsed in March 1945 because of Soviet suspicions.
Having volunteered to work for SIS,
BLACKGUARD
was sent to Istanbul by the Abwehr on a mission to recruit agents for assignments in Egypt, Persia and India. One of his coups, in July 1944, was to convey a transmitter to another double agent,
FATHER
, based in India.
FATHER
was a Belgian pilot, Henri Arents, who had been run as a double agent since his arrival in England from Lisbon in June 1941. In August 1944 he had been posted to Calcutta, and elaborate arrangements were made by the Abwehr to supply him with a transmitter, codenamed
DUCK
. The delivery was made through
BLACKGUARD
, and the radio link was established by a police radio operator, member of the Delhi Intelligence Bureau. During his February 1944 interrogation, Erich Vermehren confirmed that the Einz Marine branch of the Abwehr held this particular source in high regard.
DOLEFUL
was Ahmed, a Turkish wagon-lits attendant on the Tagus Express who had been recommended by the Turkish Security Bureau. His entirely notional sub-source,
SCEPTIC
, was later identified by Vermehren as a trusted agent known to the Germans as
HELMUTH
.
SMOOTH
was a Turkish customs officer in Antioch who supplied information to his German controllers allegedly supplied by
HUMBLE
, invented by Michael Ionides, who was the notional proprietor of a fruit and vegetable shop in Aleppo. In turn,
HUMBLE
supposedly was in touch with
KNOCK
, a salesman in medical supplies who travelled frequently to and from Iran and Iraq.
SMOOTH
was run by ISLD’s Michael Ionides, who was able to use him to identify two important Abwehr spies in Alexandretta, Turkey: Paula Koch, then the matron of the German hospital in Beirut, and her Armenian brother-in-law Joseph Ayvazian, who was married to her younger sister.
HUMBLE
’s performance was so good that the Germans authorised him to recruit two more sub-agents,
WIT
and
WAIT
.
Ionides also dreamed up
ALERT
, supposedly an orderly working in a British army who was motivated to spy for the Abwehr by the
rape of his mother in the Great War by an Australian sergeant-major.
ALERT
sent his information in letters to
CRUDE
, a German source employed as a
kavas
(janitor) in the British consulate-general in Istanbul and codenamed
HAZARD
by the Abwehr.
Axis reliance on controlled sources increased in February 1943 when the DSO in Palestine arrested Ellie Haggar, the son of Egypt’s chief of police, who had been studying in France in 1939 and had been recruited by the Abwehr. Betrayed by
TRIANGLE
, Haggar spent the remainder of the war in prison.
By November 1943, with his status restored but still ostensibly penniless,
CHEESE
succumbed to illness, and moved to Alexandria to convalesce, which gave ‘A’ Force the opportunity to expand the Cairo network that had been left in hands of
MARIE
, a member of Nicossof’s Greek menage. Equally notional,
MARIE
was supposedly
MISANTHROPE
’
S
‘
amie
direct’, a Greek woman aged about thirty, ‘young enough to attract Allied officers and old enough to be steady from the espionage angle’ and fluent in French with some English. Allegedly ‘AD’, as she was referred to, had met
CHEESE
some six months earlier while in the company of a British officer, and a few days later he had introduced himself to her when she was alone at Groppi’s Americaine, the most popular bar in Cairo. He professed that she would prefer a Levantine like himself to a ‘cold Anglo-Saxon’ and although she already had ‘a regular lover of local extraction to whom she remained faithful in thought though not in deed’.
Nicossof’s plan was to recruit a new source in Alexandria and a SIME case officer. Captain G. R. C. Davis, recorded that
he feels as far as finance is concerned that they owe him an answer. He will stress his need of money, but he will be inclined to wait and see what he gets on the next transmission before he really releases the considerable head of steam he has acquired during his sick leave. He is in two minds whether
to play up his illness to dispel any ideas the Germans may have that he is malingering or whether to trade as far as possible on the penniless situation in which he finds himself as a result of being ill. If he does the latter the Germans may think he is in fact malingering, when he is still keen but fed up with their incompetence.
The dilemma for SIME was how to properly interpret the Abwehr’s demonstrable inability to fund their star source.
CHEESE
had successfully re-established himself as a source of proven reliability, yet the Germans had not found a channel to fund him. The contradiction was so manifest that SIME began to wonder whether its security apparatus was rather more efficient than they had dared hope.
It is possible that we underestimated the success of our security measures in the Middle East, and consequently underestimated the enemy’s difficulties in getting, or even attempting to get, a large sum of money to a spy in Egypt.
By January 1944
MARIE
had established herself as a useful sub-agent, her ‘contacts with the members of the Allied forces have proved of considerable value as a source of information’. With
CHEESE
having recently received E£1,400 from the Abwehr, she was asked on 28 January to develop a network in Alexandria, and on 4 February she replied that she had visited Nicossof in Alexandria and he had agreed to consider the proposal. Her other mission, requested by the Abwehr, was that she should report on Vichy sailors around the port.
Initially
CHEESE
had been quite reluctant, acknowledging that a sub-source would require more money from the Germans, and raised several issues of security. A suitable candidate would have to travel frequently to Cairo to deliver his information if it was still to be relevant, and this could not be entrusted to the mail as
CHEESE
had no experience of secret ink. Having almost decided against the
idea,
CHEESE
by chance encountered an old acquaintance in a café who had moved to Alexandria from Cairo, a businessman aged about forty who was ‘an enthusiastic woman-chaser’. The two men met several times before
CHEESE
moved back to Cairo on 7 February and in his second transmission after his return, on 9 February,
CHEESE
described his nominee, whom he referred to as ‘A’, as a man who had espoused support for Germany’s ‘sincere will to create a New Order out of European chaos’, and said he was due to meet him again on the following day. He advised on 11 February that ‘A’ would require ‘substantial sums of money’ but would take no further action until he had received his masters’ approval.
