by Nigel West
Robertson went on to observe that Clemens Rossetti was an Abwehr officer of great interest, and one meriting study, perhaps fulfilling a role close to that of the notorious Nikolaus Ritter, the spymaster who had spent some years as a businessman in the United States before the war and had subsequently returned to the Hamburg Abstelle to supervise the infiltration of agents into Great Britain. One of his early stars had been Owens, the spy known to Robertson as SNOW. Frequently mentioned in TRIANGLE intercepts, Rossetti was to be considered
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.
Robertson then drew a parallel with SNOW, the classic case that he had supervised personally from September 1939 when the duplicitous Welshnan had been arrested in London and thereupon had promptly surrendered his transmitter which then had been used to dupe the enemy. As MI5’s first double agent of the war, SNOW laid the foundation for the whole double-cross scheme, and was directly responsible for the identification of many subsequent German spies, in a role not entirely dissimilar to CHEESE’S in Cairo.
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.
While praising SIME for what had been accomplished by exploiting CHEESE as a channel for deception, Robertson was subtly critical of the way his original contacts in Cairo, Georges Khouri and Madame Vigoretti-Antoniada, had not been pursued more professionally.
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.
Finally, Robertson turned to what he perceived as the central weakness in the CHEESE affair, which was the lack of funding.
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.
Robertson’s analysis was sent to Maunsell on 15 April 1943 and SIME prepared a rather resentful, four-page rebuttal of thirteen specific points dated 20 May 1943.
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 cont
ained 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).