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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
As part of the infamous Double Cross operation, Jewish double agent Renato Levi proved to be one of the Allies' most devastating weapons in World War Two. ln 1941, with the help of Ml6, Levi built an extensive spy-ring in North Africa and the Middle East. But, most remarkably, it was entirely fictitious. This network of imagined informants peddled dangerously false misinformation to Levi's unwitting German handlers. His efforts would distort any enemy estimates of Allied battle plans for the remainder of the war. His communications were infused with just enough truth to be palatable, and just enough imagination to make them irresistible. ln a vacuum of seemingly trustworthy sources, Levi's enemies not only believed in the CHEESE network, as it was codenamed, but they came to depend upon it. And, by the war's conclusion, he could boast of having helped the Allies thwart Rommel in North Africa, as well as diverting whole armies from the D-Day landing sites. He wielded great influence and, as a double agent, he was unrivalled. Until now, Levi's devilish deceptions and feats of derring-do have remained completely hidden. Using recently declassified fi les, Double Cross in Cairo uncovers the heroic exploits of one of the Second World War's most closely guarded secrets.
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Nicossof ’s a Russian name
And not what you might think,
A form of Oriental vice,
Or buggery, or drink.
A scion of this noble house,
An unattractive sod,
Was Stanislas P. Nicossof
Of Nizhni Novgorod.
COLONEL DUDLEY CLARKE
They call me Venal Vera
I’m a lovely from Gezira
The Fuhrer pays me well for what I do
The order of battle
I obtain from last night’s rattle
On the golf course with the brigadier from GHQ.
ODE TO A GEZIRA LOVELY
Any trustworthy item of intelligence
is worth a dozen panzers.
ADMIRAL WILHELM CANARIS, FEBRUARY 1941
Chief among these masters of espionage was the
innocuously named agent CHEESE. This case
became one of the most successful of all the
double cross agents in the war.
TERRY CROWDY IN DECEIVING HITLER
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author owes a debt of gratitude to the intelligence professionals who have assisted his research, among them Tommy Robertson, Rodney O. Dennys, David Mure and Bill Kenyon-Jones. He is also grateful for the assistance of the deception historian Thaddeus Holt, and Martin Levi and his family. In addition, the archivists at Winchester College and University College, Oxford, were generous with their time.
Renato Levi in 1949
GLOSSARY
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
INTRODUCTION
Very little has ever been written about CHEESE because almost nothing has been known about him for certain. Even the declassification of MI5’s wartime files in 2011 ensured that practically all references to his true identity had been redacted, but it is now possible to tell his astonishing story in full for the very first time since his death in 1954, with the support of his surviving family.
As a double agent, CHEESE has few, if any, equals. He was an Italian Jew who was brought up in India, was educated in Switzerland, and employed as a British agent while working for the French, Italian and German intelligence services. During his extraordinary espionage career which spanned the entire length of the Second World War, he worked for four intelligence agencies (sometimes simultaneously), and survived the experience. He was imprisoned in Turkey and Italy, and his information, brilliantly fabricated in Cairo, had a profound impact on the course of the war in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, and became the foundation upon which the concept of strategic deception was constructed. He was fluent in English, French, Italian and German, and his wireless traffic was transmitted in French. He was also entirely cosmopolitan, a womaniser, and the legitimate holder of a British passport. Exceptionally brave, he made a perilous journey to place himself back in the hands of the Abwehr in 1942 when his loyalties had come under German investigation. The huge quantities of misleading material that he conveyed to the Axis undermined the Afrika Korps’s attempt to capture Cairo and the Suez Canal, and made a substantial contribution to the first defeat suffered by General Erwin Rommel. In particular, CHEESE is widely acknowledged as having played a pivotal role in the success of Operation CRUSADER, General Claude Auchinleck’s offensive in November 1941 which took the enemy by surprise and successfully recaptured Tobruk.
In 1942 the British deception planners, known as ‘A’ Force, exploited the enemy’s confidence in CHEESE’S network by vastly exaggerating the Allied order-of-battle across the Middle East, and conveying bogus reports of deployments and intentions. According to Sir Michael Howard, the official historian of British strategic deception in the Second World War, CHEESE was ‘the most successful channel at their disposal’. Best of all, TRIANGLE demonstrated that CHEESE’S information was routinely circulated ‘to the Admiral Aegean, Panzer Armee Afrika IC, and the Festungskommandant Crete’.
What makes CHEESE so remarkable, apart from the absence of any reference to him by the authorised historians of both MI5 and MI6 (Christopher Andrew in The Defence of the Realm and Keith Jeffery in MI6), is the entirely notional network of agents and casual contacts that he developed, among them the colourful, pipe-smoking Syrian Paul Nicossof, who eventually took over control of the organisation, and CHEESE’S Greek girlfriend, codenamed MISANTHROPE. Although she was an invention, a very real woman, a fierce Cretan known as the Blonde Gun Moll, or BGM, acted her role when required.
As we shall see, CHEESE’S spy-ring extended to informants of all types and ranged from an American general to cabaret artiste. Perhaps most importantly of all, CHEESE became the principal channel of ingeniously fabricated false intelligence which had been invented by a large team of case officers and analysts who effectively created the concept of military misdirection. As an agent of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), he is unrivalled, and accomplished more, over a longer period, than any other. Quite simply, CHEESE became one of the most influential figures of the conflict, yet his role remains undisclosed until now.
Over the past forty years, since the first revelations about the XX Committee, which managed MI5’s stable of double agents, and ULTRA, the signals intelligence product distributed from Bletchley Park, much has been published about the manipulation of the enemy’s spy-rings, and the influence of Enigma and Geheimschreiber decrypts. Once highly classified, the concept of strategic deception is now acknowledged as yet another hidden dimension to the clandestine war, but few have stopped to ask how all this effort started. The extraordinary exploits of GARBO, SNOW, ZIGZAG and TRICYCLE have now been declassified, and much has been written about the D-Day deception campaign codenamed FORTITUDE and the highly imaginative schemes, such as MINCEMEAT and COPPERHEAD, designed to mislead the enemy. Such adventures have captured the public’s imagination, and one can only marvel at the ingenuity of the British intelligence personnel who dreamed up a plan to drop the body of a dead courier on a Spanish beach in April 1943, or to send Monty’s double to visit Gibraltar shortly before the invasion of Normandy. Schoolboy pranks or ruses designed with scientific precision to deceive the Abwehr and save thousands of Allied lives?
With the advantages of virtual control over the Axis intelligence collection system, access to the German High Command’s internal communications, and the willingness to mount highly sophisticated deception campaigns, the Allies took significant gambles with the objective of misdirecting the enemy. The results certainly justified the risks. We know now that secret intelligence had a significant impact on the destruction of the Kriegsmarine’s U-boat fleet during the Battle of the Atlantic, on the amphibious landings on the coast of France, and the defeat of the Afrika Korps in Libya. We have also learned much about the cryptographers who solved the most complex ciphers, the technicians who devised the machinery, such as Bombes and the Colossus computer, to assist their task, and the British agents and their case officers who worked in conditions of great secrecy to ensure victory. Some of these individuals have been recognised at exhibitions, with belated medals, biographies and even Hollywood movies. Much information has also been released about similar operations in the Far East theatre, where Peter Fleming ran double agents from India against the Japanese, and American cryptanalysts broke the PURPLE and other codes and circulated the results as MAGIC. However, all these triumphs owe their origins to a pioneering operation masterminded by a complete amateur, Evan Simpson, and his star, a playboy with the unprepossessing codename CHEESE.
CHAPTER ONE
RENATO’S TALE
A 38-year-old Italian Jew from a wealthy family whose mother, the actress Dolores Domenici, owned the Hotel Miramare in Rapallo and the Hotel Select in Genoa’s Piazza delle Fontane Marose, Renato Levi was known to Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME) as CHEESE (later LAMBERT, and to his German controller as ROBERTO, later designated V-mann 7501). In MI5’s opinion, as expressed in a report dated September 1942, he was motivated by his Jewish heritage, but not a dislike of either the Germans or the Italians. He enjoyed the adventure, and wished to settle in Australia after the war with a British passport. According to German documents, he was registered as an agent of the Athens Abstelle and an Abwehr officer named Heilgendorf acted as his radio control in Bari.
Born in Italy in 1902 of Jewish-Italian parents, Renato spent five years in Bombay, where the prosperous Levi family operated a shipyard, until 1913 and then was educated at Zug in Switzerland until 1918. He remained in Italy until 1926 when he moved to Wentworth, and then East Sydney in Australia, but he returned to Italy in 1937 and settled in Genoa with his Australian wife Lia and son Luciano, who was born in 1925, together with his brother Paulo and step-father Alberico. Renato was good looking, with great charm and a penchant for nightclubs and beautiful women, but was a financial burden for his formidable mother. He was supposed to help her in the management of the hotels, but they often clashed and she occasionally banished him to a neighbouring pension, the Hotel Metropoli.
In 1939 Levi told the British consul in Genoa, Alfred G. Major, that he had been approached by the Germans to spy in Holland, and had been encouraged to accept the assignment. Subsequently, between December 1939 and June 1940, he had been in touch with the French Deuxième Bureau and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in Paris where a former MI5 officer, Geoffrey W. Courtney headed the station. A former MI5 officer, Courtney had been transferred to Paris in 1938 from the Cairo station.
Upon his return to Genoa, his German contact, Hans Travaglio, had persuaded him to go to Egypt with a wireless transmitter to collect military information, and this scheme was approved by Count Sircombo, a senior Italian intelligence officer and formerly the Italian consul in Cairo. Levi was briefed in Bari and the plan changed. He would be sent a wireless after he had arrived in Cairo, probably through the Hungarian diplomatic bag, and he was required to send his encrypted messages in French. He was supplied with two questionnaires, one Italian and one German, and a list of contacts in Budapest and Belgrade, and given the address of two Abwehr officers, Otto Eisentrager and Dr Delius, in Sofia. He was warned to avoid any contact with German consulates in Turkey, for fear of attracting the attention of the British or Turkish authorities, but was told he could obtain assistance from any German consul in a neutral country simply by mentioning ‘Emile from Genoa’.
SIS would later identify Hauptman Eisentrager as an Abwehr personality first identified in a report dated 12 June 1939 who used the alias ‘Major Otto Wagner’ and held a post in Ast III in Berlin. He later appeared in two ISOS decrypts, in October and November 1940, probably working in Sofia, responsible for the collection of economic and Air Force intelligence. Significantly, an ISOS intercept dated 9 November 1940 asked Eisentrager ‘if and when the apparatus was leaving Sofia for Egypt and how long the transport was expected to take’. As SIME later commented, ‘it seems not improbable that this message referred to the original arrangement for providing Levi with a transmitter’. After the war, MI5 learned that Wagner, an attorney from Mannheim fluent in Bulgarian, was Eisentrager’s true name and that was his codename.
Levi’s supervision was to fall to Sonderfuhrer Clemens Rossetti, an Abwehr personality who frequently appeared in Abwehr traffic handling agents across the Middle East. According to SIS, Rossetti had headed the Genoa Abstelle until the end of 1940 when he was replaced by Travaglio, whom SIME described as
Born in Munich, age about forty-five. Over 6ft in height, broad shoulders and stout build. Very large head – when buying hats always found difficulty in obtaining the correct size. Dark brown hair, very thin, particularly in the centre of the scalp. Ruddy fair complexion, fat cheeks. Clean shaven. Eyes dark brown (?). Large nose. Large mouth with full lips, three or four gold teeth. Rounded double chin. Large thick ears. Large very fleshy hands. Big feet. Speaks German with Bavarian accent. Walks ponderously. Large scar on left side of abdomen said to have been the result of a flying accident during the 1914–18 war, when he was a pilot.
Travaglio is very fond of music, particularly opera; plays the piano and sings himself. Jovial disposition and enjoys company. Has a fund of humorous stories about Hitler and Mussolini in particular. Generous, open-handed and romantic nature; professes to be deeply influenced by scenic beauty. Is an amateur antique collector, Levi considers Travaglio to be a very patriotic German but not a good Nazi. He confided to Levi on one occasion that he had been an agent in peacetime, travelling under cover of a guide for German tourist parties, particularly in Italy. He also stated (in strict confidence) that in 1936–39 he had succeeded in penetrating the British Secret Service in the Netherlands posing as an anti-Nazi. To support this cover he had had his name struck off the official list of Party members. Claimed to be responsible for the capture of the British agents on the Dutch-German frontier.
Holds German degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Languages: German, Italian, French, poor English. Has travelled Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands. Private home address in 1940/41 was 10 Mariakirchenstrasse, Munich. May have moved his home since marriage in June 1941 with well-known German opera singer, age about thirty/thirty-five. Father dead, but mother still living, age about sixty-five. Has nervous trick of rubbing the tip of his nose, as though attempting to stifle a sneeze. Heavy cigarette smoker. Dresses smartly and expensively. Fond of motor-cars and women, in that order.
Thereafter Rossetti, codenamed EMILE, appeared in ISOS traffic as being engaged in Abwehr activity in Italy between January and May 1941, and in one intercept his address was given as ‘care of the German consulate in Naples’. An ISOS decrypt dated 7 October 1941 suggested that Rossetti was then in Rome but had been ‘Leiter I Luft’ in the Munich Abstelle. After the war, when Count Sircombo was interrogated by Allied intelligence officers, he identified Rossetti’s real name as ‘Kurt Knabe’. A German defector, Wili Hamburger, would describe Rossetti as ‘the most expensive member of the Abwehr in Turkey’ and suggested that his status has been achieved because of his success in Holland where he had developed a relationship with Anton Mussert’s pro-Nazi movement. His arrival in Istanbul had been sponsored by the former head of the local KO, Walter Schulze-Bernett.
ISOS disclosed that Rossetti
received frequent information from Helfferich in Rome, all of which were apparently concerned with the dispatch of agents. Thus on 3 February 1942 he was advised of Kurt Hammer’s departure from Brindisi; on 5 March 1942 of the arrival of APOLLO and OTTO in Athens; on 13 April 1942 on the arrival of Emil Tisl, and on 6 May 1942 his presence was desired for a personal discussion in Rome with reference to the agent APOLLO. In addition to this Rossetti appears to have private connections of his own in Italy, of which are also productive of agents. On 13 January 1942 Ast Paris consulted him on the provision of a wireless set for WERNER of Rome’s AFU man for Egypt; On 13 April 1942 they again consulted him on concerning the transfer of V-mann 7501, who had previously been working for I.I. Paris to ‘Rome Annabella’. Further references to Rome Annabella occur in messages of Italy of September/October 1942 which seem to suggest that Annabella was a personal agent of Rossetti’s in Italy, who was subsequently transferred to Athens in connection with the agent ARMANDO who set out from Turkey at the end of September. During the same period there were references to a visit paid by Rossetti to Rome to test two agents who were being considered as reserves for HAMLET in the Syrian undertaking; to the ‘new V-mann PAPAS’, who was to be vetted by Rossetti in Turkey; to one Hattenkorn, apparently an untrustworthy agent who had been dismissed; to two agents HASSAN and LUPO, who arrived in Athens in early October; to ‘a Persian agent of CHARLES’, who was to be visited by Rossetti in Sofia in January 1943; and finally to Rossetti’s agent CARPELLASO who had reported at KO Bulgarien and asked for a German passport in the name of Hoffmann and a travelling allowance to Rome for the purpose of working in Cairo.
Rossetti also occupies himself with looking after the agents of other Stellen who are visiting Athens or are in the area in which Ast Athens works. Then on 13 December 1942 Berlin enquired whether he was in touch with the agent Hamado Amin Bey of IM Ast III whom it had become necessary to arrest; on 23 December 1942 he was asked to assist one Tschanscheff, apparently an agent who was arriving in Athens; on 7 December 1942 Rossetti, who was then in Istanbul, informed Berlin that he wished to speak with their agent T 400 when the latter was next in Istanbul, Sofia or Athens; in February 1943 Rossetti, who was still in Turkey, was announcing that he had been authorised by IM Ost to work upon a considerable scale in Turkey, and for that purpose wanted 20,000 Turkish pounds.
Even this does not reflect the full scale of Rossetti’s activities, for it appears that he is also concerned with matters which usually fall outside the sphere of an Abt I officer. On 23 January 1943 he was provided with false information which he was to pass on to PARKER (presumably of OSS) from which we may assume that he is also concerned in the running of double agents. On 13 March 1942 he requested IH Ost to provide him with supplies of the drug Pervitin and a pistol with a silencer, reminding them that the former had been used with success by Ast Brussels. It is impossible to guess what was the reason for this request, but it suggests on the face of it Abt III rather than Abt I work.
There are two messages from which one can gather some idea of the attitude of Rossetti’s superior officers to him. The first is the rebuke he received from Berlin at the beginning of September 1942, when he was instructed to curtail his endless journeyings about which had so far produced no visible result. This, however, seems to have been a temporary phase, for on 26 September, when Rossetti was in Italy, Sensburg informed him that he had interviewed the head of IH Ost and also the Chief Abt I, as a result of which they both now appreciated the work done by Rossetti in the past and, it was implied, would support his activities in the future. The circumstances of Sensburg having travelled to Berlin and taken up the question of Rossetti’s work with Piekenbrock himself suggests that there must have been fairly serious trouble before. If this is fact, coupled with the general speciousness of the Abwehr, which suggests that Rossetti’s constant activity may after all produce very little that is harmful, or of direct value to the enemy.
While still in Genoa, Levi and Travaglio manipulated the black market to exchange US dollars, which had been supplied by the Abwehr to pay agents, for Italian lira. This netted them almost double the official exchange rate, so the agents were paid in Italian currency, leaving Travaglio with a substantial profit. However, these activities led to Levi’s arrest in Genoa in 1940 on black marketeering charges, although he was released after a few hours upon Rossetti’s intervention with the spurious excuse that Levi had been participating in a clandestine operation. According to SIS, Travaglio was the alias of a Luftwaffe officer of Italian extraction who had been a pilot in the Great War. His dossier noted that he had been adopted by a wealthy widow and that although he claimed to have been an actor, had really earned a living by singing in cafés. SIS also identified him as the tall German officer with bushy eyebrows and a deep scar on his forehead who had used the alias Dr Hans Solms during the Venlo incident in November 1939.
The Venlo episode had cast a long shadow across all SIS operations since November 1939 when two SIS officers, Sigismund Payne Best and Richard Stevens, were abducted while attending what they thought was a rendezvous with anti-Nazi German officers on the Dutch frontier. The hapless pair, who were unarmed and unable to resist, were seized on Dutch territory and dragged across the border to face incarceration and interrogation, and the debacle had been a profound embarrassment for the supposedly neutral Netherlands government, forcing the resignation of the DMI. However, the impact on SIS was lasting, for the assumption was that the two SIS officers would inevitably compromise whatever they knew, and that amounted to the entire SIS structure, its operations and agents in Holland, and much else besides. Thereafter SIS exercised extreme caution in handling anyone claiming to possess anti-regime credentials, and took great care not to endanger other personnel in similar circumstances. The fact that Travaglio had participated in the Venlo affair must have been seen as ironic by Rodney Dennys and Nicholas Elliott, both of whom had served at the SIS station in The Hague under Stevens.
Once in Cairo, Levi was instructed that he would receive a message at the Carlton Hotel about how to acquire his transmitter, and he was given the names of George Khouri and Lina Vigoretti-Antoniada as two of Sircombo’s local acquaintances.
Levi visited the British embassy in Belgrade on 12 September and 15 October 1940 to inform the SIS station commander, Major Lethbridge, of his plans, and this news was sent to Cairo which had been informed on 3 June 1940 by MI5 that he was likely to turn up in Egypt and require assistance. Actually, Levi then returned to Italy, visiting Eisentrager in Sofia, and did not reach Turkey, travelling on a German passport in the name of Ludovici, until 26 December 1940, where he was arrested on a charge of passport and currency fraud, together with his companion, Giovanni Magaracci. Alias Fulvio Melcher, Magaracci was to act as his wireless operator, but after three weeks in a Turkish jail Melcher abandoned his mission and returned to his native Italy. The other members of the gang, led by Joseph Buchegger, did not appear to have any links with the Abwehr or espionage.
Upon his release Levi was given a British passport by SIS and sailed to Haifa. He was interviewed by SIME in Jerusalem and finally reached Cairo on an RAF aircraft to establish himself in the famous National Hotel, on the corner of Talaat Harb and Abdel Khalek Sarwat Streets, on 10 February 1941. He did so, but was never provided with the promised transmitter. Instead, Levi claimed that he had been introduced in March in a bar in the Kharia Malika Farida to Paul Nicossof who had once been a ship’s wireless operator. The meeting had been arranged by an Italian, Antonio Garbarino, who allegedly had access, for £200, to a radio provided by another Italian who had been hiding in his house. Of course, neither Nicossof nor Garbarino ever really existed. Similarly, Levi was initially accommodated in the Abbassia Barracks, and not the National Hotel.
Levi’s case, codenamed CHEESE, was handled by Rex Hamer, Rodney Dennys and John de Salis for ISLD’s B Section, and Terence Robertson, Desmond Doran, Eric Pope and the novelist Evan J. Simpson, for SIME’s Special Section. In one report dated 1 September 1942 Simpson said that ‘Levi, as a result of his successful activities in France, Italy, Turkey and then in Egypt, has acquired an amazing self-confidence and complete belief in his own ability to travel anywhere and deceive anybody’. Simpson, who was only commissioned from the ranks in 1941, considered him
a natural liar, capable of inventing any story on the spur of the moment to get himself out of a fix. He has very considerable intelligence and an inventive mind. For example, he invented ciphers of his own, but immediately grasped the advantages of the one which was put up to him and mastered it in a very short time.
Simpson was born in London in April 1901, and was living in Surrey when he was sent away to school. He was educated at Winchester, where he went as a scholar in September 1914, and then from 1920 read history at University College, Oxford. As soon as he graduated he appeared at the Liverpool Playhouse as Mackenzie in AbrahamLincoln and in 1928 appeared in Napoleon’s Josephine at the Fortune Theatre. He then managed the Festival Theatre in Cambridge before joining the Huddersfield Repertory Theatre. In 1929 he had married the actress Dorothy Holmes-Gore, the star of Midshipman Easy, and in October 1931 their son was born.
Simpson’s first play, The Dark Path, about a pair of Englishmen in Japan, was performed at the Savoy Theatre in November 1928. Upon the outbreak of war he joined the Intelligence Corps and participated in Operation CLAYMORE, the Commando raid on the Lofoten Islands on 3 March 1941, which led him to write Lofoten Letter. The true purpose of CLAYMORE was to capture one of the enemy’s three Enigma cipher machines known to be there. In the event none were recovered because Lieutenant Hans Kupfinger, the commander of the unarmed trawler Krebs, threw his overboard moments before he was killed. However, the machine’s rotors were seized, and so were cipher documents that disclosed the Kriegsmarine’s Home Waters keys for February, allowing Bletchley Park to retrospectively read the traffic. Other material seized helped Allied cryptographers to solve much of the April traffic, compromising signals sent between 1 March and 10 May. Naturally, the raid’s true purpose was known only to a handful of officers who undertook their special assignments while the rest of the troops engaged the enemy and destroyed economic targets, such as the local fish oil processing plant.
Originally intended as a letter written to his wife while sailing for enemy-occupied territory as a corporal in a Special Service Battalion, Simpson was obliged by the constraints of military security to cut large sections of the text from Lofoten Letter, and not even hint that the raid had an alternative, highly secret objective. The same considerations required him to identify the ship on which he sailed as HMS Domino, a non-existent warship, and certainly not part of the 6th Destroyer Flotilla. Nevertheless, Lofoten Letter was released, and probably stands as the first book of the conflict written by a participant in a clandestine operation undertaken on Nazi-held Europe. He was by then a published author under the nom-de-plume Evan John, and by the time he was transferred to SIME he had written Plus ça change: An Historical Rhapsody in One Act in verse in 1935, and Kings Masque: Scenes from an historical tragedy in 1941. The biographer of King Charles I, he would write five other one-act plays, some of which were performed on the London stage, and go on to publish historical novels such as Crippled Splendour and Ride Home Tomorrow.
Simpson was indeed an extraordinary intelligence officer, in a profession in which eccentricity is not a rare phenomenon, for while he was employed by SIME he also found the time to write a book, Time in the East, which described his travels to Jerusalem, Cyprus, Beirut, Aleppo and Persia, and included some unfashionable opinions about Charles I, psycho-analysis, literary criticism and blood-sports, not to mention some limericks in French, Latin and Greek. A 1946 review in The Wykehamist described Simpson’s book as ‘humourous and humane’ while an earlier article drew attention to his versatility as a poet, actor, playwright and historian. He was also a frequent contributor to the Spectator.
Simpson was originally transferred to Cairo to run sabotage operations in the Caucasus to prevent oil being shipped to Germany, and to take over the work of a special bureau headed by Oliver Baldwin, son of the former prime minister. However, as Axis forces swept through the Balkans, the opportunities for sabotage diminished, and Simpson found himself posted to SIME.
Simpson gave some thought to Levi, reflecting that
his motives for working for us are difficult to fathom. He is, of course, a Jew and says he wants to do something to help the Allied cause because it is fighting on behalf of the Jews. In addition, he obviously has considerable love of adventure, and enjoys the work for its own sake. He is very fond of women, and the work gives him opportunities of travel, and of handling large sums of money, which he would not otherwise get. He showed no particular dislike of the Germans or the Italians; in fact he often described the good times the Germans had given him, and how friendly he was with Travaglio.
Another SIME report, allegedly endorsed by Major Jones, observed that
he appears to be a man of personality rather than character, quick-witted and resourceful, consciously proud of his role of his double agent (e.g. he was inclined to air his ‘intimacy’ with Helfferich and Travaglio) and highly imaginative (between Cairo and Istanbul he elaborated the man Paul he had met in a bar in Cairo into Paul Nicossof, born in Egypt, and believed to be a Syrian). He was fond of women and vain of his contact with them. It seems highly improbable that he acknowledged any loyalty, except to himself. His professed attitude towards the Germans was that he naturally resented their treatment of the Jews and he appears to have felt no antipathy.
Although he carried £500 in Sterling notes, there was no message for him at his Cairo hotel, and no wireless. Accordingly, Levi called on Lina Vigoretti-Antoniada, who was placed under surveillance by SIME, but she appeared ‘unintelligent and quite unresponsive to his hints and suggestions’ so she was put under discreet observation, with no result. Khouri, on the other hand, was a Syrian money-lender already known to SIME as being anti-British and involved in agitation in Palestine. An investigation by SIME revealed that Khouri had lent cash to several British personnel, among them officers named Chesterfield, Stirling, and Captains Massey and Soames.
Evidently the Abwehr believed that Khouri was the organiser of a network of low-level local spies, but his encounter with Levi, which was not monitored independently or recorded by SIME, proved to be unproductive. Khouri was interned and his network ‘melted away’ without Abwehr money. The relationship between Khouri and Levi presented some fundamental problems, not the least of which was the fact that Khouri ‘was flesh and blood’ so ‘it was decided that Paul should not have any actual contact with him’. Instead of meeting, they corresponded through three addresses in Cairo, with Nicossof signing himself ‘Willy’ while Khouri wrote as ‘Albert’.
Much later Evan Simpson recorded that he ‘was very uncertain about how much of Levi’s accounts of his conversations with Khouri could be believed’. Khouri, when arrested in 1941, denied ever having met Levi. While undoubtedly this was a lie it is considered possible that Levi met Khouri on one or perhaps two occasions, that Khouri refused to have anything to do with him and that the accounts given of subsequent conversations with Khouri were sheer invention on Levi’s part. Before leaving Cairo, Levi told SIME that he had informed Khouri of the setting up of a wireless communication, arranged for him to supply the operator with reports for transmission by means of a post box and promised to send him more money, signing himself ‘Willy Rogers’. In actual fact, no information was ever supplied through this post box.
Initially, Bill Kenyon-Jones’s enthusiasm for promoting a wireless link with the Abwehr attracted some derision at GHQ, and in later life he would recall that the signals branch had explained to him that their principal function was to prevent illicit transmissions to the enemy, not to assist them.
CHEESE tried to communicate with the Abwehr on 17 May using a homemade transmitter constructed by a skilled Royal Signals technician, Staff Sergeant Ellis, whose role would later be taken by Sergeant Rowland (‘Rowley’) G. Shears, because of ill health. Shears held an amateur licence with the call sign G8KW and in 1956 started his own radio manufacturing business, KW Electronics, at his home at the Vanguard Works in Heath Street, Dartford, Kent. When he died in November 2009, at the age of ninety, none of his obituaries mentioned his connection with CHEESE.
Initially Ellis was unable to make contact and a technical study concluded that the agreed frequencies were unsuitable, so they were changed through a simple plain-language code over the commercial cable to Istanbul, as previously arranged for just such an eventuality, and his messages finally were relayed to Rome on 14, 17 and 21 July 1941 when the first radio link was established. For the first three months these signals were transmitted from a flat next to a military base in Heliopolis twice a week on most Mondays and Thursdays, but they contained little information of value as SIME’s deception skills were then unsophisticated. During this same period the amateur transmitter was replaced with an army model, and illness required two changes in operators, none of which apparently attracted the enemy’s attention.
SIME’s case officer complained that ‘the book-cipher code suggested by the Italians proved clumsy and unsuitable’; a SIME officer devised a new substitution cipher.
SIME also complained about the quality of Bari’s substandard radio technique, observing that
the organisation at Bari appeared to be very bad. The encoding was particularly careless (it has improved a little since but has never attained a reasonably good standard), and there was much repetition of questions, etc. The slipshod methods suggested that Levi himself was handling the job at the other end!
A survey conducted by SIME of the first 163 messages transmitted by Shears demonstrated that ‘as many as twenty-four transmissions were unsuccessful due to four causes:
1. Bad atmospheric conditions – (particularly October – November).
2. Heavy interference.
3. Incompetence or laziness of enemy operator.
4. Enemy ‘not on the air’.
The third cause became so bad that on 21 October he registered a complaint in no mean terms. This had the effect of bringing new operators into action. The enemy are now using six operators whom we call:
• The ‘original’ for whom CHEESE has a high regard.
• The ‘goon’ – a dull-witted and lazy operator.
• ‘Curt’ – so called from his style.
• ‘Good’ – an expert ‘ham’ operator.
• ‘New Good’ – first appeared late in December 1942.
• ‘Square Morse’ – a good operator who sends in Continental style.
Wavelengths have been changed three times. We can now work two alternative frequencies. Callsigns have been changed five times and hours of transmission three times.
In April 1941 when Levi was scheduled to return home, he recruited Paul Nicossof, a notional agent, to replace him, and gave him £150. Thereafter, Nicossof became a valuable cog in the CHEESE deception machine, and at first was played by a SIME officer named Beddington. He was supposedly a Syrian of mixed Caucasian heritage, eager to work as a mercenary. In September 1941 ‘A’ Force adopted CHEESE, and as a first step it was reported that he had acquired a South African source who, a few weeks later on 29 September, was replaced by PIET, a well-informed South African NCO with money and women trouble, but was employed as a confidential secretary to General John P. Whiteley at GHQ Middle East, and therefore ‘in a position to acquire first-class information’. SIME noted that ‘experience shows that the enemy is curiously unwary and eager to accept stories of the disloyalty of disgruntled Colonials, Irishmen, etc. and even of supposed ex-members of Fascist organisations in England.’
General Whiteley, a Woolwich graduate who was a willing participant in the scheme, had been commissioned in 1915 and had served in the First World War in the Royal Engineers at Salonika and across the Middle East, having won the Military Cross. He had been posted to Wavell’s staff in Cairo in May 1940. In May 1941 he travelled to Washington, DC to negotiate delivery of Lend-Lease material to Egypt. Some sixteen ships arrived each month for the remainder of the year, bringing eighty-four M4 Stuart light ‘Honey’ tanks, 10,000 trucks and 174 aircraft. The arrival of the Stuart tanks, with their 37mm gun and high speed, ensured their participation in CRUSADER, although with a limited range they would be out-performed by Rommel’s panzers which were equipped with better armour.
After Auchinleck replaced Wavell in July 1941 it was Whiteley who was selected by him to fly to London to brief Churchill in October 1941 on the delayed CRUSADER offensive. At the end of March 1942 Whiteley was appointed Chief of Staff for the 8th Army, but was replaced by General Freddie de Guingand in October, and in February 1943 Whiteley joined General Dwight Eisenhower as deputy Chief of Staff at Allied Forces Headquarters to plan the invasion of Sicily. In August 1943 he acted as Eisenhower’s envoy to fly to London to brief Churchill again, and in January 1944 moved to SHAEF to plan the D-Day invasion.
Whiteley’s senior staff posts enabled his notional clerk, PIET, to provide invaluable strategic information, as well as details of the Stuart tank to MISANTHROPE and, through her, to Nicossof.
As he reported to the Abwehr, Nicossof paid PIET 40 Egyptian pounds (E£), but was soon in debt to him to the tune of E£35, and when asked how much he needed, he replied E£1,000. By 4 July 1942, that figure had grown to E£1,400, and Nicossof claimed he was no longer in a position to borrow more. Indeed, CHEESE’S chronic lack of cash led SIME to discuss the idea of inventing an alternative source of income for him, perhaps as the proprietor of a garage, but the idea was dropped. Another suggestion was that CHEESE should spend his afternoons giving lessons in Arabic and French, which would allow him to meet more officers, one of whom might be a construction expert from the Royal Engineers with a knowledge the Cyranaican and Tripolitanian railway systems.
As well as recruiting PIET, Nicossof from July had the benefit of a Greek girlfriend, codenamed MISANTHROPE, who he referred to as his ‘petite amie’. She is a fascinating character because, although she was mainly notional, SIME felt obliged to recruit a real person to act her role so she could, if the circumstances arose, act as an intermediary and receive Nicossof’s money from the Abwehr. Accordingly, SIME went to considerable lengths to fabricate her background.
Codenamed MARIE by the Abwehr, she was
a Greek girl animated by her hatred of the British – well-educated, intelligent, witty and courageous sustaining him [CHEESE]when discouraged or disgruntled – she aided and abetted him by forming a series of friendships – and possibly ‘alliances’ – with British and American officers – military and Air Force. From these she extracted information of varying degree of reliability and importance. This enabled CHEESE to supplement information gleaned from his Greek military friends – and other acquaintances. Without funds he could no longer employ reliable agents. All information – whether high-level or low – true or false – he passed on to his Axis friends – leaving them to sift the chaff from the wheat. Those sources that misinformed him he discarded, and thus always had the requisite retort if and when accused of passing on false information. For instance – on 17 August 1942 he said that he was sorry for having given false information but without money he had to collect such information his friends told him and report what he saw himself.
SIME’s decision to introduce MISANTHROPE turned out to be an inspired one, and was probably taken by Evan Simpson in conjunction with other Special Section colleagues and, of course, Dudley Clarke. It may also have been influenced by Rowley Shears who had strong links to the local expatriate Greek community and the Greek government-in-exile’s radio station in the suburb of Abu Zaabal which broadcast bulletins twice a day on the medium wave in eleven languages under the sponsorship of the Political Warfare Executive (PWE). The studios belonged to Egyptian State Broadcasting but were largely managed by British personnel, among them Shears’s close friend Norman Joly, and was the principal means for the coalition government to maintain one-way contact with Greeks living under the Axis occupation. Among those who appeared regularly on the channel were Crown Prince Paul and the leading politicians, among them Prime Minister Emmanouil Tsouderos, his successor Eleftherios Venizelos, the Minister for War, Panagiotis Kanellopoulos and Admiral Petros Voulgaris. A conference in Beirut established George Papandreou as the Prime Minister of a coalition government, and his administration moved briefly to Naples before finally reaching Athens in October 1944. Whenever these individuals were allowed access to the microphone a switch engineer was present who had the authority, under the Chief Censor Professor Eric Sloman, to cut the transmission. Formerly the first director of Corfu’s police academy, Sloman ensured that no indiscretions were transmitted, fully aware that every broadcast was monitored by the enemy for any potential intelligence leads.
MISANTHROPE’s Greek background allowed CHEESE access to a complex world of political intrigue and competing groups who tried to influence Allied policy and were anyway determined to exercise power in Athens after the liberation. It was a maelstrom of personalities and military commanders who were, of themselves, of minimal consequence in terms of strategic importance, but they did represent a plausible milieu which SIME and ‘A’ Force could portray, to the Abwehr at least, as a constituency in Cairo that could shed light on Allied policy towards the Balkans. The dispossessed Greek forces would obviously be essential in any action taken in the eastern Mediterranean, and could be represented as a barometer of Allied plans in the region. At a time when there were no textbooks available on strategic deception, and little experience of the wholesale manipulation of double agents, not to mention the fabrication of notional sources, MISANTHROPE was a truly extraordinary development. Appropriately, Simpson created a narrative, complete with domestic details, to describe how she had gained CHEESE’S confidence. They had met at a party with some Greek friends, and
he had attempted to obtain from her military information about the Greek forces, supposing her to have many officer friends. He had observed her air of indifference as to the military success of the Allies, and as they became more intimate she had revealed the full extent of her antagonism to the British.
Some time in May 1942 Paul had remarked to her half-seriously: ‘Supposing that we were agents for the Axis. How easily we could obtain valuable information.’ She had been skeptical; whereupon he had suggested that she should make the experiment of noting what she saw in the course of an hour’s walk in the Cairo streets. She had agreed, and Paul had appeared much interested in the result of the experiment. A little later in the same month he had revealed to her (uncertainly and with much and anxious insistence on secrecy) that he was acting as an agent for the Axis. His manner had been at once vain and nervous. He had not at this stage told her that he was in wireless communication with the enemy. He had then asked her to continue systematically to keep her eyes open for badges and vehicle signs; also for any other kind of military information obtainable visually; and to try and make the acquaintance of members of the Allied forces for the purpose of obtaining military information from them. She had hesitated, pointing out the risks and had asked for time to think the proposal over. But she has a natural disposition for the risk and had been finally convinced by Paul’s assurance that there would be good money for them both in the venture.
She had noticed that Paul was always anxious that she should not be in or near his flat between about 7.30 and 10 o’clock in the evening. One night early in July, however, he had called her to look at his wireless receiver – on which they had been in the habit of listening to the radio programmes together and which she had never suspected to be anything but an ordinary domestic apparatus. Having locked the door of the room he had pulled back a false panel from the apparatus and shown her that it was a transmitter as well as a receiver. Unlocking a door, he had produced a Morse key; and then, to her further surprise, had suspended an aerial from nails already inserted in the walls near the ceiling.
All this had been done with an air of mysterious importance and great nervousness. At just after half past seven he had begun to tap out something that she could not understand on the Morse key. He had worn earphones and she could faintly hear the note of the signals. After about twenty minutes he had ceased tapping and had produced paper and pencil and began to write as he listened.
When the proceedings were finished he turned to her and remarked: ‘Now you know exactly what I’m up to.’ Then he told her the whole story of his nightly communication with the enemy and had proposed that they should work as partners. She had hesitated once more; but once more she had been persuaded by her own disposition for adventure and by Paul’s assurance that it would make their joint fortune and assure their safety and honour when – he was certain, the genuine Rommel entered Cairo.
Paul had taught her to decipher the messages received from the German Intelligence Service and thereafter she had occasionally helped him in this; she had found it very difficult however, and Paul had sometimes been impatient with her when she had made mistakes. She had also made some effort to learn Morse, but that had been a tedious business; Paul had given her a test a few days ago, and had been quite angry when he had found how little she knew. Since that time she had assisted Paul mainly in the collection of military information.
Following the collapse of Greece in April 1941 the level of political infighting and scheming among senior politicians and the senior military hierarchy rivalled any play, and the mutiny of April 1944 among the ratings at Alexandria and Port Said was a manifestation of the discontent felt within the Royal Hellenic Navy when activists among the sailors on the lower decks demanded the government-in-exile be reconstituted to allow the participation of the Communist-controlled National Liberation Front (EAM). Their intervention was opposed by the officers and NCOs, usually anti-Communist ELAS supporters, who were placed under arrest by so-called Revolutionary Committees aboard the destroyer Terax and the corvettes Apostolis and Sachtouris. The mutiny was eventually crushed by the expedient of denying the ships food and water, but the bitterness would re-emerge during the postwar civil war. One destroyer, the Pindos, threw their officers overboard and, after a voyage to Malta, reached Italy where it surrendered to the local Communist Party. Seven members of the Royal Hellenic Navy were killed in Alexandria as officers led 250 volunteers over HMS Phoebe to reach the mutineers. Among the vessels involved were the repair ship Hyphaistos, the destroyer Criti, together with some minesweepers and auxiliaries. The last to give up in Port Said were men aboard the battleship Georgios Averof, six destroyers and the submarine Papanicolis. Finally the rebels who had seized control of the recruitment office in central Alexandria surrendered, bringing the episode to a close in Egypt. Meanwhile, the trouble spread to Malta where three submarines, the submarine escort Corinthia, the destroyer Spetses and two auxiliary ships were taken over until the Royal Navy arrested the ringleaders, most of whom were concentrated on the destroyer Navarinon, and sent them back to a detention camp in Egypt.
These events demonstrated the volatility of Greek exile politics and the sensitivity of issues which were likely to be exploited by the Axis if the opportunity arose.
MISANTHROPE’S SIME file identifies her as Mrs Evangeline Palidou, born in Canea, Crete on 25 July 1913. Five foot four inches tall, with brown hair and an oval face, her religion was Greek Orthodox. She had been issued with a Security Card, No. 615 on 28 May 1941 and had received a Red Card, No. 017002 on 25 May 1942. Educated at the Lycée in Canea, with a baccalauréat in French, she had been taken to visit Smyrna as a child in 1928. She had worked in the Anti-Fascist Movement in Crete from 1932 and been employed as a journalist on the anti-fascist newspaper Literia in 1933 before getting married and moving to Athens the following year. She returned to Crete in 1936, spent four months in exile on Naxos in 1938 after her arrest by the ‘4 August regime’, and then worked first as a mannequin and secretary, and then for counter-espionage in Greece from November 1940. She was divorced from her 33-year-old husband, Evangelos Ktistakis in March 1942 and from July 1942 she worked for SIME’s Greek Section and took up residence at the Metropolitan Hotel in Cairo.
Within SIME Evangeline was referred to as BGM, an acronym for ‘Blonde Gun Moll’, a name she acquired as a result of her reputation for packing a pistol. Some believed that she had shot one of her lovers dead, but others suggested this tale was something of an exaggeration, as she had simply thrown him off a roof.
The immense trouble taken by SIME to create MISANTHROPE extended to her entire family. He father, supposedly, was Nicholas Palides, aged sixty-four, formerly the director of economic services in Crete’s Ministry of Finance between 1910 and 1918. He then served in Athens for two years, then in Turkey for two years, returning to Crete where he still lived. His wife, Anastasia Kokytha, was aged fifty-eight, MISANTHROPE’S infant son was still in Crete, and her brother Ionis worked in the port office at Canea.
Nicossof announced her recruitment in a transmission on 24 July but ‘unfortunately uncertainty of livelihood – curtailment of his black bourse activities’ and the non-arrival of funds from his Axis partners finally forced him to find regular employment. After trying from 7 December until 25 December 1942 he secured a post as an interpreter in the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA), an organisation created in the First World War to govern the Ottoman Empire, CHEESE commenced his duties on 1 January 1943, and on 27 January he announced that ‘she could decode already and was learning to transmit’.
Nicossof’s employment by EOTA followed a discussion in SIME, led by James Robertson, over the merits of planting an enemy spy in the organisation. A study of his duties for EOTA, and his contact with other EOTA personnel, would be a tremendous advantage and greatly expand his access to information that would be instantly attractive to the Abwehr. As Robertson noted,
it would appear that in Eritrea OETA interpreters were also used as translators. While it is improbable that CHEESE’S knowledge of English is sufficient to allow him to be employed in this latter capacity under normal circumstances, he might reasonably be employed to translate Italian into French for the convenience of his officers, or to translate simple English phrases into Italian. The publication entitled Notes on the Military Government of Occupied Territories Part II defines the duties of OETA and contains some points which might be of use to CHEESE for transmission to the enemy.
1. Air Raid Precautions. OETA is responsible for the maintenance and repair of civil ARP. Hence it is probable that reports of air raid damage of the territory would reach OETA Cairo.
2. Police. Civil security. Native raiding. Control of arms. Hence probable that CHEESE would hear of sabotage, attacks by Arabs on Italian settlers, desertions from Libyan Arab Force (Gendarmerie), sale of arms by native troops, concealed arms.
3. Collection of political intelligence. Morale of local population both European and native.
4. Hygiene. OETA is responsible for maintenance of civil hospitals and enforcement of hygiene regulations. Also for supply of drugs to civil hospitals and doctors.
5. Supplies and rationing.
6. Maintenance of roads, railways, and communications. (When taken over from HEs and HCS to relieve them for other duties.)
7. Propaganda.
