Target

by Roderick Bailey

  With Churchill laid low by a bout of pneumonia, another month passed before the War Cabinet discussed the matter afresh at a meeting in mid-March. Two days later, Sargent gave Hambro better news: SOE could ‘proceed’ with getting Pesenti out to Libya, ‘provided it is understood that he will come out unconditionally and that no commitments will be entered into without the prior authority of Ministers’.27 SOE informed McCaffery at once. He was also sent new landing and recognition arrangements to pass along, which remained the same as before except that Pesenti’s pilot should aim for Tokra and circle twice two miles north of the airfield. McCaffery moved quickly, sending a courier into Italy with a message for a friend of Rusca’s, a lawyer in Milan named Antonio Cettuzzi, urging Rusca to make contact. A reply came back that news could be expected from Rusca in April. But in fact no news would ever arrive. McCaffery’s line to him was dead.28

  Rusca had not gone quiet voluntarily. News eventually reached McCaffery in Berne that he had been arrested in Italy ‘for expressing anti-Fascist views’.29 As SIM records now reveal, this was a charge that disguised another success for Italian counter-espionage officers at SOE’s expense. McCaffery’s misplaced faith in his couriers and contacts had ensured that SIM had been monitoring his communications with Rusca since December 1942. ‘I await your news with impatience,’ reads one of McCaffery’s intercepted letters, penned when SOE was holding out for a definite move by Badoglio: ‘Matters have now taken on an accelerated pace. If our friend wants to act, he has to hurry.’30 Surviving today among SIM’s wartime paperwork, that letter had been sent to Rusca through the hands of Elio Andreoli, McCaffery’s Swiss courier, who happened also to be a SIM agent.

  By April 1943, on the eve of his arrest, SIM was supposing that British interest in Rusca indicated the existence of ‘an Italian political movement of seditious character’.31 It was also aware that McCaffery was trying urgently to get hold of him. This knowledge came from McCaffery’s latest letter to Eligio Klein, the next link in his chain of contacts into Italy. McCaffery had decided on Klein as his way of contacting Antonio Cettuzzi, the Milanese lawyer in touch with Rusca. ‘Cettuzzi is linked to “Dr Vulp” (the pseudonym, as is known, given by the enemy service to Dr Rusca),’ SIM officers recorded after Klein spoke with Cettuzzi at his legal practice in Milan. ‘Cettuzzi himself is waiting to move to Switzerland with the help of Dr Rusca, who ought to be in Rome requesting that a visa be granted to each of them.’32 Rusca was arrested in Rome soon after that. Condemned publicly as an ‘anti-fascista mormoratore’, or ‘muttering anti-Fascist’, but really because of his suspect contacts in Switzerland, he spent the last months of Mussolini’s regime languishing in confino in Avigliano, a remote hill-town in southern Italy.33

  Much later, once Mussolini had gone and Italy was on the Allied side, Cecil Roseberry would hear Badoglio and other senior Italian officials criticise Britain’s reaction after contact, through Luigi Rusca, had been made with Berne. ‘It is a great pity your government did not agree to this proposal,’ Roseberry was told; ‘it would have ensured proper collaboration and have enabled us to act much earlier.’34 As it was, they said, the British response ‘had postponed the overthrow of Fascism by many months’.35 Roseberry, a man rarely given to flights of fancy, highlighted that claim as suggesting an intriguing might-have-been.36 He himself had spent months in London pleading for ammunition with which to encourage SOE’s Italian contacts to knock Italy out of the war sooner.

  ‘If leaders are to come out into the open,’ Roseberry had written in December 1941, ‘they must be shielded from the accusation of merely being our hirelings and must themselves be convinced and be able in turn to convince others that opposition to the Germans and a withdrawal from the war will benefit Italy, or, at least, save her from utter ruin.’ To achieve that, ‘some form of political reassurance’ was necessary.37 A year later, Sir Charles Hambro was still requesting Foreign Office help ‘to enable us to show our Italian friends that England is willing to give them leadership and hope … to make it possible for us to persuade them to do really effective work in support of our Armed Forces’.38 SOE still wanted what Emilio Lussu had wanted: a declaration that encouraged Italians to equate their patriotic feelings with the overthrow of their government, by assuring them that they would thereby serve the best interests of their country. If that could be achieved, ‘The feeling that such an action was treacherous – in fact the main obstacle – would be gone.’ A suitable declaration, ‘announced by the Allied Governments, that we are not aiming at the dissolution of Italy but only of the Fascist Government and the evils it has perpetrated, will provide the motives for rallying Italian dissidence at home and abroad and giving it a patriotic focus’.39 As it was, British policy-makers would never permit SOE, or British propaganda, to do much more than take the line that Italy’s defeat was inevitable, and stress that it was within Italians’ power – and in their country’s interests – to get out of the war.

  Allied insistence on Italy’s unconditional surrender, declared publicly at Casablanca in January 1943, has been heavily criticised since. Italians anxious to see Fascism fall were unreasonably deprived, it is argued, of vital direction and drive.40 That debate is beyond the focus of this book. It is worth noting, however, that none of SOE’s Italian contacts felt confident enough to attempt a coup even as the war approached the mainland, seemingly preoccupied by a fear of finding themselves playing a lonely, dangerous game for which few might thank them even if they won.

  SOE actually received its next Italian feeler before word arrived that it had lost contact with Rusca. In April 1943, ‘with the utmost secrecy,’ a forty-year-old diplomat on the Italian consular staff at Lugano contacted the British Legation in Berne. This official was Filippo Caracciolo, Duke of Melito. ‘Tall, slender, rather sickly looking,’ reads a later British report on him, ‘but friendly and courteous … Seems to know a great deal about Italian political life and gives the impression he enjoys talking … Married to an American. Speaks good English.’41 Accompanied by his wife, he spoke with Jock McCaffery for the first time on 16 April. Caracciolo told him that he represented the Partito d’Azione, the Action Party, an anti-Fascist movement – it was in fact backed particularly by Giustizia e Libertà supporters still in Italy – that, he said, had helped organise recent strikes in northern Italy and was ready to do more ‘at an opportune moment’.42

  ‘The Duke made an excellent impression,’ McCaffery told London the following day. He belonged to ‘the sphere of Italian anglophile aristocracy’ but was clearly keen on future action ‘along serious democratic lines’, while his movement, he said, was ‘growing steadily’ and in touch with other groups and wanted ‘more publicity and especially on the British radio’. Caracciolo told McCaffery that he would contact the party’s heads in Italy ‘and bring back what their possibilities are in various fields: army, navy, industry, transport, etc.’ McCaffery’s opinion was that the Partito d’Azione ‘has great possibilities … I believe we can get serious action from [these] people and that we should envisage and work towards the biggest scale possible. I mean a national revolt or, better still, a switch over.’43

  As talks developed, that optimism seeped away. ‘Disappointing,’ McCaffery telegraphed London after one meeting at the end of April; ‘much blah’. The ‘moment for a full revolt’ had not arrived, Caracciolo had told him. The situation was ‘confused and premature’. Older army commanders were still loyal to the King. Younger ones were unwilling to assist with a revolt that could end up a fiasco or, if successful, saddle them with blame for Italy’s military defeat. At one point Caracciolo ‘let slip [a] most important remark which I think is key to the whole position’: in the event of a successful revolt ‘and they took over the country, then peace terms would have to be signed by them. Terms may well be harsh and they would then stand before [the] country and history as [the] people who had accepted such terms.’ McCaffery’s view was that the party ‘want to play a waiting game … creating opposition an
d confusion … but not staging or leading anything on their initiative, so that (a) if people are stirred up to spontaneous combustion and [the] regime is defied or overthrown, or (b) if we land or otherwise knock Italy out of the war, they will be able to step in and take over but without bearing any responsibility.’44

  At a meeting at the Foreign Office on 1 June, Baker Street described the Partito d’Azione as ‘newly formed’ and ‘generally pro-British in outlook’ but lacking ‘heavyweights’ and ‘probably not capable of achieving very much’.45 Until the Armistice, not a great deal occurred to change that opinion. Through Caracciolo, the Partito d’Azione requested forms of assistance that the Allies could not possibly provide. It asked for information about planned Allied landings so that it could prepare for them. It wanted to know about possible peace terms. It wanted, too, a political committee of exiles to be formed outside Italy through which emissaries could be sent and received, ideally with Carlo Sforza as head. London refused all of these requests, to ensure that diplomats’ hands remained free and that Allied plans stayed secret.

  Little changed when one of the party’s leaders, Ugo La Malfa, joined Caracciolo in Switzerland at the end of June. A forty-year-old lawyer and economist, La Malfa, McCaffery reported, was ‘energetic’ and ‘au courant with [the] whole internal situation’. He wanted to go immediately to London to speak to the Foreign Office, ‘render any assistance’ and ‘make open propaganda’. Caracciolo would go with him and declare himself the ‘first official to openly break away’.46 Baker Street knew that La Malfa was a good type. A pre-war member of Giustizia e Libertà, he was well known to Max Salvadori, McCaffery was informed, ‘and you can trust him … He has always worked quietly and concentrated on steady long-term preparation.’47 Baker Street also knew that a ‘sympathetic reaction’ could not be guaranteed if they ever managed to make it to London and turned up at the Foreign Office: La Malfa and Caracciolo may be ‘sincere patriots’, McCaffery was warned, ‘but a patriot can achieve nothing without being a realist and practical’.48 In the end, no one went to London49 and the Partito d’Azione played no role in spearheading any coup. Caracciolo, however, whose contacts included Badoglio’s son, Mario, would continue to send reports to Berne shedding useful light on the general mood in Rome, while acting also as a channel by which SOE urged his contacts to get Italy out of the war.

  Another approach came in June 1943. It arrived in Berne in the short and portly shape of 42-year-old Adriano Olivetti, an Italian entrepreneur and engineer who would later transform his father’s typewriter business into the world-famous Olivetti computer company. McCaffery met him on the evening of 14 June in the Berne home of Allen Dulles, representative in Switzerland of the American OSS, whom Olivetti had recently contacted. Later the longest-serving director of the CIA, Dulles had been in Berne since the previous November. He also felt poorly served by the State Department in terms of guidance and directives. When it became clear that Olivetti was of interest, he let McCaffery take the lead.

  Olivetti was not unknown to the British in Berne. For two years he had had occasional dealings with Frank McGill, a Scotsman working in Switzerland for General Motors. McGill had been quietly using his Swiss factory to manufacture for McCaffery various lethal devices that he tested out secretly in the woods around his house, but his contact with Olivetti had been on a business basis only. It was only when Dulles and McCaffery met him that Olivetti revealed his single-handed efforts at bringing about Italy’s removal from the war.

  ‘According to himself he has always been anti-Fascist,’ McCaffery told London afterwards. ‘He has wide Jewish contacts and appears to be part or wholly Jewish.’ Olivetti had also stated that he was ‘with Giustizia e Libertà’ and had helped Carlo Rosselli to arrange the escape from Italy of the Italian socialist Filippo Turati in 1926. Olivetti had a wide circle of powerful contacts, McCaffery went on, and, some weeks ago, thinking that the time was ‘long over-ripe for action’, he had set out to speak to representatives of all potential opposition elements inside Italy, ‘intending then to come and see whether we would treat with him’. Those with whom he had spoken ranged from the royal house and Badoglio to the Partito d’Azione and the Communist Party, and he had now arrived in Berne ‘certain’ that he could organise sufficient Italian opposition to overthrow the Fascist regime. Olivetti also had a plan. First, a measure of coordination would need to be achieved between the various individuals and groups opposed to Mussolini. Next, the Fascists would be overthrown and replaced by an outwardly neutral but inwardly pro-Allied government, under, say, Badoglio. Next, Allied forces would land on Italian soil and Italy would switch sides. Olivetti also proposed that a committee of prominent anti-Fascists be formed abroad that would be recognised by the Allies at a suitable moment as Italy’s real government. He suggested it include not only exiles and émigrés but also men currently inside Italy who would be willing to be smuggled out, like Ugo La Malfa and Carlo Levi.50

  McCaffery was impressed. ‘[Olivetti] strikes me as an energetic and gifted person who has shown great talents for organisation in industry,’ he told London. ‘If he is all right, as I think he is, it is [the] best bet so far.’51 Reading McCaffery’s telegrams, Cecil Roseberry wondered about Olivetti’s motivations. As a Jew and someone once ‘mixed up’ in Liberal activities, Olivetti, Roseberry wrote, ‘must be a shrewd, self-protecting individual to have remained head of a manufacturing firm which has almost a monopoly of the typewriting business in Italy. His business under “autarki” [sic] would be one which prospered as the result of fascist economic policy and would have suffered from the entry of Italy into the war but for the suitability of his plant for switching over to munitions work.’ Nevertheless, Roseberry added, ‘whether such people as Olivetti are inspired by pure anti-fascist motives or from self-interest, we should give them every encouragement’.52 And he agreed, as he told McCaffery, that Olivetti revealed ‘acumen and ability’ and that his plan seemed promising.53

  Since Allied forces were already poised to land in Sicily, there was concern in Baker Street that Olivetti’s plan would take time to develop and was based on the assumption that no invasion would be launched very soon. There was certainty, too, that time would be needed for the Foreign Office to be sounded out – ‘most probably without success’ – on the ever-awkward topic of an outside Italian committee.54 McCaffery was told to impress on Olivetti the need to move fast so that his contacts would be better placed to act when the landings came. McCaffery did so. When told that a committee could prove problematic, Olivetti immediately abandoned that plank of his plan. It had not figured in his original ideas anyway, he said. Talks over, Olivetti left Switzerland to hold discussions ‘with Badoglio and others’ in Rome.55

  Then, at the beginning of July, Olivetti suggested something else: the involvement of the Vatican. In a letter sent from Italy, Olivetti explained to McCaffery that he had received ‘complete assurance’ from his contacts in Rome that, if approached officially by the Italian royal house or the British government, Pope Pius XII would permit ‘conversations and negotiations’ between Italy and the Allies to take place discreetly in the Vatican, a tiny island of neutral territory in the middle of Fascist Rome, where the British had a resident minister. There might even be possibilities, Olivetti added, for negotiations with a view to the ‘simultaneous breaking away from the Axis’ of Italy, Hungary, Romania and Finland. He therefore suggested that the British help him speak to the Pope.56 On the face of it, Olivetti’s offer seemed to hold enormous promise. Contemplating it in London, however, SOE decided that it was still far too nebulous to put before the Foreign Office. These were just words; much firmer evidence would be needed before the highly sensitive matter of covert discussions in the Vatican could even be considered. A letter from McCaffery was couriered into Italy explaining to Olivetti that any proposal to use the Vatican ‘must be accompanied by proof of serious backing’.57

  To SOE’s shock, Olivetti then jumped the gun: he sent a friend to cont
act D’Arcy Osborne, Britain’s Minister to the Vatican, anyway. Olivetti did warn McCaffery that his friend, when he turned up, would identify himself as ‘Edward Cartin’ and hand over a letter signed ‘Ruben’.58 But when SOE alerted the Foreign Office, which tried to warn Osborne to expect a mysterious visitor, it was too late. As the Foreign Office learned when Osborne replied, not only had ‘Edward Cartin’ already visited the Vatican but he had also delivered a message that Osborne found ‘far from explicit’ and ‘made no sense … And I destroyed the text, so I could not now transmit it [to you] even if I wanted to.’59 Not that much of this mattered. On the last day of July, the Foreign Office told SOE to pull the plug on Olivetti.60

  By then, Olivetti was out of play anyway, having been arrested in Rome on 30 July. Precisely what had happened remains a little unclear. What is certain is that SIM had once again been monitoring events, courtesy of McCaffery’s courier lines from Switzerland. Within days of first meeting Olivetti, McCaffery had entrusted Eligio Klein with the task of acting as a go-between once Olivetti returned to Italy. The first exchange of correspondence took place on 28 June at a rendezvous at a garage in Ivrea, the home town in Piedmont of the Olivetti family firm. ‘Much as he strove to appear calm, Olivetti was, to the contrary, consumed by ill-concealed fluster,’ SIM recorded after he was handed a packet sent down by McCaffery. ‘As soon as he held the bundle in his hands, he quickly inspected its seals and then quickly put it in his pocket.’ Then Olivetti handed over his own letter for McCaffery, which SIM was soon opening and reading: