Target

by Roderick Bailey

  When he arrived in Berne in 1941 with orders to build something from nothing, McCaffery was also a man more or less fresh to secret work. He was no more experienced in the recruitment and running of clandestine agents than he was in the capabilities of Italian counter-intelligence organisations. Within a few months he was a man under mounting pressure, too. His workload was enormous – he was responsible for SOE’s lines from Switzerland into the Greater Reich and France as well as Italy – yet London was hinting darkly by the autumn that he was taking too long to deliver results. ‘I know and understand how impatient you are,’ McCaffery tried to explain in October. ‘There are certain things that it is very dangerous to try and force.’36 Later that month, Cecil Roseberry, who had recently taken over London’s Italian desk, told McCaffery directly that his results on Italy compared poorly ‘with those from other fields’ and ‘something concrete once a week would be encouraging’.37 Italy was regarded in London as ‘a weak spot vulnerable to subversive activity’, Roseberry added, and ‘ripe for subversive action’.38 At that moment Roseberry had been in the job a matter of days; if he really believed that Italy was ‘ripe for subversive action’, it was not an opinion he held for long. The fact remains that in October 1941 Roseberry wanted more from McCaffery, and was not yet as cautious as he would be nine months later when warning officers in Cairo not to do too much too quickly.39

  McCaffery and Roseberry may have been naïve and overconfident, but the decision to gamble on a man like Schwerdt neatly illustrates how desperate SOE was to find a method of piercing the Swiss–Italian frontier and how slim were the available options. It may also say something about MI6. Headed locally by Frederick (‘Fanny’) Vanden Heuvel, a cosmopolitan count of Italian origin, its representatives in Switzerland were supposed to be the experts in recruiting and running agents and matters of counter-espionage; they knew what McCaffery was doing; and Schwerdt, to judge from McCaffery’s memoirs, had even been one of their men at one time. Finally, Schwerdt’s recruitment underlines the risks of gambling on men like him: from the point of view of what SOE was trying to achieve from Switzerland, its effects were catastrophic.

  By the end of 1941, when McCaffery offered him a job, Italian intelligence had been watching Edmund Schwerdt for months. He had not been hard to shadow. Several SIM reports call him ‘the well known Englishman’ and record how he was frequently to be found in restaurants and bars.40 The Italians knew that he had lived in Italy, in the Valsolda, near Como, ‘where he owned a villa and led a very extravagant life’.41 They knew that he still had contacts over the border, that he had two passports in different names and was known by at least four pseudonyms, that the Swiss military police suspected him of ‘dubious activities’ along the frontier, and that he had even ‘stated confidentially that he is a member of the [British] I.S. [Intelligence Service]’.42 They knew, too, that he was a drinker, somewhat eccentric, and living an unhappy and cash-strapped life. ‘He is in great misery,’ reads one Italian report from October 1941. ‘He often has only one meal a day and he is very much preoccupied with his lot, both present and future … He is affected by mastoiditis and is a little deaf … He hopes that the war will end soon and that he will be able to return to the Valsolda.’43 But what ultimately caused the suspicious and conspicuous Schwerdt to come unstuck was when he sought out his young friend in Lugano, the radio technician Elio Andreoli, and explained that he was looking for someone to smuggle material into Italy. Schwerdt had known Andreoli for years. What he did not know was that Andreoli, though Swiss, was working for SIM.

  Described in its files as ‘a correct and honest person but not in good financial circumstances’, Andreoli was known to SIM by the codename ‘Elda’ and run by the SIM counter-espionage officer who was in charge of Schwerdt’s surveillance. This officer was Eugenio Piccardo, a Carabinieri captain working in Lugano under the cover of Italian vice-consul. Piccardo had long suspected that Schwerdt was working clandestinely for the British, and, when he learned from Andreoli that Schwerdt was looking for a clandestine courier to transport ‘a suitcase containing material for acts of sabotage’, he saw an opportunity and acted. A contemporary report by Piccardo explains all:

  Towards the end of January, I established that Schwerdt was concerned about the choice of who to entrust with the task of introducing the material into [Italy] … In fact, he was trying to decide between:

  1. ‘Elda’ my agent …

  2. Selmoni, Arnaldo … an anti-Italian, subversive element, involved in every kind of unsavoury activity such as contraband, espionage, illicit trafficking, an abuser of women, including his widowed sister …

  In early February, at the moment when Schwerdt was in this maximum state of uncertainty – a real psychological crisis – I persuaded ‘Elda’ to tie up the operation but with the greatest care and above all without giving the impression that he had any personal interest in being chosen himself … I have persuaded him to say to Schwerdt, keeping always to generalities and not to reveal or stress specific circumstances, that he has many trustworthy friends, some of whom are favourable to the English cause; that among his most trustworthy friends are various drivers who own vehicles for hire with authorisations to circulate in [Italy] and to make journeys into Switzerland; that he knows a driver who works with smugglers and is able to conceal packages of about 10–15 decilitres in volume in a hiding place constructed in the chassis of his vehicle … finally, that he, ‘Elda’, is willing to offer his services through his dislike of the Italians.44

  Schwerdt fell for it, Andreoli got the job, and, from that point onwards, SIM was entirely in control of the principal route by which SOE, for months to come, was to send into Italy its supplies of money, explosives and devices.

  ‘Punctually on the evening of 19 [February] Schwerdt passed the material locked in a suitcase over to Elda,’ recorded Piccardo of the first time it happened. This consisted ‘of nine carefully sealed packets and an envelope containing a pair of pliers’ and a day later all of it was in Piccardo’s hands.45 As with each subsequent delivery, Piccardo sent it down to Italy as diplomatic baggage for delivery to SIM headquarters in Milan. On this occasion SIM snapped photographs of what was inside. The various items included time pencil fuses, sticks of plastic explosive, and ‘fog signal’ devices for initiating detonations beneath passing trains. The British had boldly wrapped the fog signals in pages of the Daily Telegraph.

  At that moment the British were not the only ones being deceived. When he received that first suitcase for Milan, Andreoli also received instructions from the British about what he should do at the rendezvous. First, he was to be at the Arco della Pace, the great neoclassical arch at one end of Milan’s Parco Sempione, for ten o’clock on the morning of 21 February. Next, he was to look for ‘a man of normal stature with a brown suit and a grey coat’:

  He will have a copy of the weekly review ‘Tempo’ in his hand … [A]pproach him and ask if the tram No. 12 goes from there to Piazza del Duomo. The person should reply that the 12 does not pass by the Arco della Pace, but to go to Del Duomo one must take tram No. 1. After this reply … invite the unknown man to have a coffee [and there] … hand over the material.46

  Keen of course to make further gains by smashing the Tigrotti, hopefully by arresting and unmasking the man whom the British wished Andreoli to meet, SIM made Andreoli keep that appointment. Once over the border he had the original suitcase returned and was shadowed to Milan, where, under SIM surveillance, he proceeded to meet his contact at the Arco della Pace and, as planned, adjourned to a nearby café. It was at that moment that SIM learned that Elio Andreoli, their double agent, was not alone in being more than he appeared.

  To their astonishment, the watching SIM officers recognized several men sitting in the same café who were watching the meeting just as intently. These men belonged to the Milanese branch of the OVRA, the Italian secret police. As Eugenio Piccardo explained afterwards: ‘It immediately became clear that the man who came to [meet Andreoli at] t
he Arco della Pace was an agent of the OVRA.’ Andreoli and his contact were allowed to leave unmolested; then the men from SIM and the men from the OVRA spoke, whereupon both learned for the first time that they were engaged independently in similarly secret schemes aimed at deceiving the British in Switzerland. Just as the OVRA now discovered that Andreoli was under SIM’s control, SIM now learned that the Tigrotti were an intricate OVRA invention designed to misdirect British energies and intentions. ‘Initially Comm. Peruzzi [head of the Milanese OVRA] showed himself most surprised by the involvement of SIM,’ Piccardo recorded, ‘but then naturally he understood that between two operational services, each unaware of the other’s involvement and working in different fields, a natural point of convergence had developed ending in the meeting of the two agents.’47

  The chief OVRA architect of the Tigrotti deception was a man named Luca Osteria. ‘[S]leek black hair, brushed sharply back off face; protuberant black eyes, wide set; high cheek bones; sunken cheeks,’ reads a description, much later, in British files; ‘quick, precise, rather careful way of speaking’.48 In his late thirties, Osteria was a highly experienced agent provocateur who had been engaged in OVRA work since the twenties, when, masquerading as a communist, he had infiltrated communist and socialist groups in Marseilles with considerable success. Similar missions followed in the thirties, to Berlin, Prague, Paris, and as far as away as Australia, until in 1940 he received instructions to prepare a counter-espionage campaign for the coming war with Britain.

  ‘As usual, I was given full opportunity to organise this service,’ Osteria recalled in 1945. At the outset this organisational work took the form of identifying Switzerland as a probable neutral base for the enemy’s intelligence services, and then, ‘still using the system of fictitious political party activity’, seeking out Filippo Amedeo, a genuine Italian socialist living in exile in Marseilles who was known to be in touch with Switzerland. That path led Osteria to Piero Pellegrini, the Lugano newspaper editor with whom McCaffery was to deal, and other socialists. These men ‘suggested to me the organising of activities of a Socialist nature’ and ‘asked me if I knew of people suitable for carrying on certain activities of a terrorist nature in Italy’. Osteria said he could help. ‘I pointed out that I was in touch with a political organisation known as [the] Tigrotti, a group of people who had devoted themselves voluntarily to sabotage. In connection with this, I sent off a first report to Pellegrini about this organisation, which was a figment of my imagination. Pellegrini, who as far as I could make out was a person with few scruples and whose one desire was to speculate, leapt at the bait.’ Correspondence began between the two men, and Osteria ‘worked out on paper the whole fictitious organisation which purported to be devoting itself to terrorist and sabotage activity as well as military espionage’.49

  After the first suitcase of explosive material and devices was sent to Milan, and SIM and the OVRA at last became aware of each other’s activities, the two secret services quickly agreed that SIM should continue to run Andreoli but pass to the OVRA the deliveries from the British that were meant for the OVRA-invented Tigrotti. ‘Here naturally arises a logical question,’ Osteria continued in his confession in 1945; ‘that is to say, how did we manage to justify [to the British] the [ongoing delivery and] use of the material?’ The answer was simple. Genuine accidents, he explained, like fires, factory explosions, train derailments and so on, were carefully presented to the British via an unsuspecting Pellegrini as deliberate acts of ‘foul play’.50

  Osteria would recount, too, how he had gone on to encourage Pellegrini and the British to believe that the Tigrotti were well placed to receive material landed by submarine on the coast of mainland Italy; ‘I also asked for the dispatch of a wireless transmitter.’51 As its records confirm, this alternative to sending stores over the Swiss border was exactly what SOE wished to hear. It was not easy for SOE to keep McCaffery stocked with supplies secreted in diplomatic bags sent from Lisbon, a route that anyway became impossible after the German occupation of southern France. Nor could the bags carry very much. By December 1941, SOE had sent to Lisbon for onward passage to Berne just 26½ pounds of plastic explosive, together with 550 delayed-action relay switches, 152 fake fog signals, 496 detonators, 36 magnets, one tin of abrasive tablets and paste, and one tin of itching powder (for covert sprinkling in enemy laundries, for example). Nor was it very secure or straightforward for McCaffery to hide and move these sorts of supplies in and around a neutral country.

  Various methods of improving the means of supply were considered. One idea that never left London’s drawing board was a proposal of McCaffery’s for the RAF to drop stores by parachute directly into Switzerland. He had suggested Lake Bienne, where he could offer a safe house on an island where signal fires could be lit. Another idea was for pro-Allied sailors on neutral ships to ferry, directly from Lisbon to Italy, small consignments of explosives disguised in sardine tins. This came to little, but it was anyway blown from the start because McCaffery had broached the topic with the Tigrotti. This allowed Luca Osteria to get as far as insinuating himself in Genoa among various crewmembers. Comparing British reports from Lisbon and Berne, and with the comfortable benefit of hindsight, it seems that on that occasion the OVRA showed more of their hand than was wise. In August 1942, a pro-Allied Dutchman put in at Genoa with instructions from SOE to contact one of the Tigrotti. The Dutchman’s name was Heeres, he was the captain of the steamer Abdul, and he intended to hand over a tin of sardines as a simple test of the route’s potential for smuggling into Italy more warlike stores. Afterwards McCaffery heard from Pellegrini that the Tigrotti’s man had approached Heeres but received no response to requests for the agreed password and found that he had no supplies to hand over. Heeres, however, would report on his return to Lisbon that he had never been approached by anyone and, moreover, had been alarmed to find himself watched. SOE appears not to have thought that discrepancy worth investigating, if it noticed it at all.52

  Eventually, in May 1943, after SOE heard from Italy that the Tigrotti were ready and able to receive stores at a secluded spot on the coast, a British submarine landed and buried a wireless set and eight containers packed with 200 pounds of explosives and fifty incendiary bombs in a bay near the Adriatic town of Vieste, on the Gargano Peninsula, in Apulia. Osteria claimed later that he had suggested the spot and, when Pellegrini warned him that the delivery was imminent, set off personally to retrieve the set and supplies: ‘I had to hire some mules and pass myself off [to locals] as an engineer of the military engineers on a special mission.’53 He failed to get there in time, however, and heard afterwards that some fisherman had discovered the containers and alerted the local police.

  More stores were sent in late August, when the British submarine Sybil sailed into the Gulf of Genoa to land five tons of explosives in seventy-two watertight containers in the vicinity of Gallinara, an island off the Ligurian coast between Alassio and Albenga. Osteria had apparently recommended that location after liaising with the Italian Admiralty and passed along the coordinates to Pellegrini with an equally convincing request for the top layers of the containers to be made up of contraband commodities like coffee and tea. Sybil’s crew, who were new to this work but had practised hard with the containers before leaving port, were alarmed to find the sea off the island being swept by searchlights, while ‘the entire coastline was covered with fishing rowing boats working on the shallow banks’.54 Nevertheless, they succeeded in getting all seventy-two containers into the water, sliding them down a special wooden chute hooked to the fore-hatch to stop them banging noisily against the saddle tanks, and leaving them submerged like lobster pots. On this occasion, it seems, Pellegrini’s warning of the landing arrived late, and Osteria first learned of it when he was summoned to the offices of the Italian Admiralty to be told ‘that a considerable quantity of containers full of explosive material and devices had been found off the shore of the Ligurian Riviera … on the sea-bed and linked together by means of a
chain of floats’.55 After soothing the navy’s concerns that the discovery might indicate enemy intentions to invade, Osteria proceeded to the spot and, with the assistance of some Italian soldiers on coastal defence duty, recovered more than fifty containers.

  By 1943, McCaffery had been convinced of the authenticity of yet another anti-Fascist group that deserved British support. Known to SOE as the Wolves and seemingly active in and around Milan, their leader was heard to be a young Swiss called Cavadini who worked in Ticino but had a house across the border in Como. By May, McCaffery was describing Cavadini as ‘going very strong’. His organisation was reported as ‘spreading’ and claimed to have recently ‘eliminated’ a ‘fair number’ of German soldiers ‘and offered us uniforms if we had any use of them’. One of the Wolves served with the Milanese anti-aircraft defences and was ‘working his way steadily round the batteries doctoring guns’, while others were slashing vehicle tyres and detonating small charges to bring down telegraph poles.56 Italian records identify Cavadini as Enrico Cavadini, born in July 1910, who worked as a teacher of art and drawing at a school in Arogno, in Ticino, ‘but when necessary [as] a clerk as well’. They also reveal him to be a man who seemingly started out as ‘a genuine agent on the English payroll’ before being rumbled by the OVRA, which ‘managed to get him hooked’ and ‘play for both sides but in Italy’s favour’.57

  The duping of the British in Switzerland was not limited to the OVRA’s Tigrotti ruse and SIM’s control of McCaffery’s courier. The most successful Italian plant of the lot was a man whom McCaffery met and recruited in person, to whom he explained in detail what SOE wished to do in Italy, and to whom he subsequently sent significant quantities of supplies and cash. This was the Italian who had introduced himself to the British in Berne as Eligio Almerigotti, the ex-army officer from Trieste who claimed to be in touch with another set of anti-Fascists in Italy and whom McCaffery considered ‘first class and worth backing all out’. In reality, Almerigotti’s real name was Eligio Klein and he was another agent run by SIM.