Double Cross in Cairo

by Nigel West

  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’.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1943

  SIME 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, w
as 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.

  The great Allied undertaking of 1943 was HUSKY, the invasion of Sicily for which a cover-plan, BARCLAY, was devised to keep the Germans persuaded of a continuing threat in the eastern Mediterranean, and specifically to provide evidence that the 12th Army was in Cairo, preparing for a move to Syria, and then the Balkans. The 12th Army, of course, was one of Clarke’s inventions, and was alleged to comprise of twelve divisions, but in fact it was only ever five real divisions, with a further three, greatly inflated, divisions. Thus the 12th Army became one of ‘A’ Force’s mainstays, and was accepted by the enemy. In February and March 1944, when three of its real divisions were sent to Italy, they were replaced by notional divisions, and by April the 12th Army consisted of just two divisions and three brigades but, according to the official historian Sir Michael Howard, ‘none of them in any condition to take to the field’.

  As well as the entirely fictitious reports generated by CHEESE, the plan was supported by some genuine troop deployments. The plan worked, to the extent that the German reinforced the Balkans with an additional ten divisions, and when the landings happened in Sicily there were only two German divisions there, which were taken entirely by surprise.

  In a review of CHEESE’S contribution to BARCLAY, dated 25 March 1944, ‘A’ Force reported to SIME’s Major Robertson that

  1. CHEESE transmissions over the three months of BARCLAY on 50 out of 92 days, i.e. more often than every other day.

  2. During a typical ‘negative’ month (September 1943) he transmitted on 15 days.

  3. The average number of words per message was 59. September 1942.

  4. During the present period (ZEPPELIN) he has transmitted 14 times in 51 days with an average of 74 words (NB: Not a fair comparison in view of the ‘technical amelioration’ period but his average is only once every three days lately).

  An analysis completed by ‘A’ Force immediately following HUSKY concluded that prior to BARCLAY the German forces amounted to six divisions in Yugoslavia, with one in Greece and one in Crete. By June reinforcements changed these figures to nine divisions in Greece, and seven in Yugoslavia:

  It seems fair, therefore, to claim a net ten divisions as having been added to the German Balkan Armies during the period of the operation of the BARCLAY plan. The garrison in Southern France has been increased simultaneously by two to three German divisions while two more had been sent to occupy Sardinia and Corsica.

  Throughout 1943 ‘A’ Force undertook studies to determine the degree of their campaign’s success, and it emerged that one reason for the enemy’s greater reliance on double agents, and perhaps in part an explanation for CHEESE’S recovery in the eyes of the Abwehr, was the domination of the skies exercised by the RAF. Total air superiority meant that the Luftwaffe was unable to fly aerial reconnaissance missions, which heightened Rommel’s reliance on other sources of intelligence, the
principal two being the interception and analysis of signals, and the networks of Abwehr agents. Thus, ironically, the Afrika Korps became increasingly dependent upon human sources that were under British control, because the Luftwaffe was incapable of completing flights over enemy lines. Indeed, as Allied wireless communications’ security improved, prompted by clear proof in ULTRA summaries of poor radio procedures, the Germans came to place heavy reliance on the Abwehr.

  During the summer of 1943 CHEESE’S traffic reached a remarkable volume. Ten of his messages repeated items he had spotted in the newspapers:

  Walter Kirk has been appointed ambassador to the Greek government; General Sikorski is in Cairo; The news of Churchill’s arrival was false; The Belgian GOC Order of the Day; General Sikorski inspects Polish troops; King George VI was in North Africa; The Greek King returns from the Lebanon; The Yugoslav government is moving to Cairo at the end of August.

  Fifteen of CHEESE’S messages originated from what were termed ‘casual sources’ which included a Greek corporal from the 3rd Corps in Syria who was staying in Cairo. A ‘journalist I know’ said that at a press conference General Montgomery had announced that the 8th Army would carry the campaign to the end. A telegraph officer had mentioned aircraft in Cyrenaica; His interpreter talked of troop movements on the Derna-Tobruk road, also aircraft and ships in Tobruk, and a convoy with ‘GO’ on a green circle. Two Greek sergeants in a café were heard to say that Greek troops were to be transferred from Syria from 18 May, and that they were convinced that Greece was the next target.

  A sailor on leave said there were ‘more than fifty ships in Alexandria’; ‘An English soldier I know’ announced there would be ‘night manoeuvers till 1 July’; a sergeant in the Warwickshire Yeomanry said the regiment was conducting landing exercises at Kabrit. ‘A doctor I know’ was credited with noting that the Arab Medical Congress had been postponed until 1 August, and that the Syrian frontier would be closed on 14 July.