The most “important but secret” Egyptian desire and goal, according to Raymond Maunsell, was abolishing the British-run European Department of the Interior Ministry. A free Egypt couldn’t have another country running its security services. Britain conceded the point—more or less.
With the Ethiopia crisis, Maunsell had been promoted to major and given the new post of “district security officer,” the DSO, which meant the representative of Britain’s MI5 counterintelligence agency in an overseas British territory. During the treaty negotiations, Maunsell “visited the European Department… two or three times a week, armed with a capacious briefcase which various British officials helped to fill with files.” As far as MI5 was concerned, Egypt was still British turf, and its man in Cairo needed the written memory of the European Department. He also needed ongoing Egyptian cooperation. So “it became necessary and expedient,” Maunsell would write, “to give certain Egyptian officers in the secret police ‘subsidies’… and this helped considerably to oil the wheels.”20
Another part of the deal was that Britain would expand and train Egypt’s own army.21 It needed more officers, so in the autumn of 1936, for the first time, the Egyptian military academy in Cairo accepted some cadets who came from middle-class or poor families.22 Anwar al-Sadat, the village-born son of a low-level government clerk, got in.23 Gamal Abdel Nasser, son of a postal worker, was turned down at first but got accepted a year later and managed to graduate with Sadat. Later accounts by the students of those years describe the academy as an incubator of intense Egyptian nationalism, sharply spiced with resentment of the academy’s British military advisers.24 According to Maunsell, Nasser never came to the DSO’s attention as a potential subversive.25
In the summer of 1937, Farouk reached the age of eighteen according to the lunar Islamic calendar, in which each year has 354 days. As he rode from his palace to parliament for the ceremony making him king, crowds lining the streets showed “wild enthusiasm, such as the country rarely has seen before” for “the beloved young monarch,” the New York Times reported in a glowingly royalist item. Ignoring centuries of medieval Islamic history, the newspaper proclaimed him the “first independent ruler of Egypt since the days of the pharaohs.”26
Farouk was popular, and cocksure. He despised Nahas, his rival for power in Egypt, insulted him, and took “what he thought was innocent pleasure in baiting him,” according to a British diplomat.27 Farouk’s closest adviser was Ali Maher, a master of backroom dealing who had served his father. The Wafd, meanwhile, was suffering from ailments common to independence movements after they achieve their goal: corruption, divvying up of government positions between the faithful, and absence of a new program.
Encouraged by Maher, the king dismissed Nahas’s government and called elections. Ballot stuffing, gerrymandering, and throwing Wafd voters out of polling places reduced the party to a few seats in the new parliament.28 Farouk picked a new prime minister who would be loyal to the palace. But Ali Maher, as chief of the royal household, was the voice whispering closest to the king’s ear—along with the court architect, Ernesto Verucci, an Italian also inherited from Farouk’s father. Fouad’s nostalgia for Italy showed in the servants and advisers he bequeathed to his son.29
IN AUGUST 1939, in Cairo as in Paris, London, and Warsaw, you could feel the hurricane of war rushing toward the coast of the world.
Farouk’s prime minister was ill and wanted a rest cure at the Mediterranean beach town of Mersa Matruh. Farouk took the opportunity to replace him with Ali Maher. The new cabinet appointed Aziz el-Masri, Farouk’s former chaperone in London, as chief of staff of the Egyptian military.30 The name Masri means “Egyptian” in Arabic. It testified to his own underconfidence about that identity. Masri was born in Cairo in 1879, but his family was Circassian—an ethnic group that fled the Caucasus Mountains in the nineteenth century to escape genocide at Russian hands and became a warrior class in the Ottoman Empire. He changed his last name to Masri as a student at the military academy in Constantinople to stress his Egyptian and Arab loyalties. During the Great War he served briefly as chief of staff to Sharif Hussein, the ruler of Mecca who launched the Arab revolt against the Ottomans. They fell out because Masri urged an improbable alliance with Germany. Hussein preferred the alliance with Britain offered by T. E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia. When the war ended, Masri returned to his native city.31
As for Maher, the British considered him a good administrator but a suspect character. An embassy expert on Arab affairs described him as “a small ravenous wolf driven by furnace-heats of ambition.” (However justified the suspicions that Maher was pro-Axis, it also appears that the British did not approve of ambition in local leaders, and that they sometimes judged a man’s character by his height.) Lampson worried that Maher might pass military secrets to the Germans. But the imperious ambassador didn’t want to interfere openly in Egyptian politics. It would make Egypt’s independence look false, and could ignite unrest when Britain had bigger problems.32
On September 1, Lampson went to see Maher. Britain was about to go to war. The pledges in the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty had come due, Lampson said. The prime minister agreed. Maher and Farouk declared a state of siege in Egypt. For practical purposes, Britain’s military occupation of Egypt would remain in place. Two days later, though, Maher had bad news for the ambassador: he couldn’t join Britain that day in declaring war on Germany. The reasons that he gave shifted: Maher said he needed a unanimous cabinet vote, and some ministers were holding out. They feared Germany would respond with “an aerial attack on Egypt,” and as a result “the country would turn on the government.” Britain didn’t have enough troops in Egypt to defend it, and “might contemplate a strategic sacrifice” of the country after pulling it into the conflict. Besides, declaring war would look like taking orders from London. Parliament might not go along. The public wouldn’t understand why Egypt needed to get involved in a distant war.33
But was it distant? That depended on what Italy would do.
ON AUGUST 30, Benito Mussolini ordered nightly blackouts in Rome, and air-raid siren tests, and closing of cafes and public entertainment. On August 31, the Duce reversed himself and gave “orders that the lights of the city be turned back on,” Galeazzo Ciano wrote in his diary.34
The ambassadors in their ornate buildings in and around the Ludovisi district of Rome did not need a codebook to read the message signaled in the city’s lights: Mussolini knew that Hitler was going to war and kept changing his mind about whether to join him.
Ciano spent all August arguing against it. In 1936 he had been the matchmaker of the Axis. Germany’s promise to recognize Italy’s empire helped sway him. So did the shared belief in dictatorship and in the destiny and vitality of the “young nations”—Italy, Germany, and Japan too—that had come late to the fifteen-sided chess game of global power politics.35
Germany’s takeover of Czechoslovakia ignited Ciano’s doubts. He didn’t object to conquest as such. He’d fought in Ethiopia and wrote the year after, “I miss that war.”36 When Hitler entered Prague, Ciano was planning Italy’s conquest of Albania, which took place the next month. Ciano was plotting to foment an insurrection in Croatia that was supposed to end with Italy taking it from Yugoslavia. He was a dedicated Fascist, even though his father-in-law, Mussolini, accused the bourgeoisie of “cowardice, laziness and love of the quiet life,” and he, Ciano, was a rich man’s son who spent much of his time at the golf course, often at the clubhouse bar.37 He worshipped his father-in-law as he worshipped his own father.
But Germany, he concluded, was a dangerous, undependable ally. It grabbed up countries without forewarning Italy. It promised Italy the Balkans and the Mediterranean for its empire but couldn’t be trusted. Hitler might have his own eyes on Croatia.
Germany, Ciano wrote after meetings with Hitler and his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in early August 1939, was “possessed by the demon of destruction.” In a meeting with Ciano near the en
d of the fateful month, Mussolini said that Germany was evading diplomacy over its demands of Poland because Hitler didn’t want Italy to get in the way of his war, as Mussolini had the year before by proposing the Munich Agreement. Ciano wrote that he had a “simpler explanation, namely, that the Germans are treacherous and deceitful.” He added, “Could there ever be a more revolting pig than von Ribbentrop?” Ciano was right about treachery, but this time Mussolini read Hitler accurately. The Führer did not want to get any older before going to war.38
Mussolini dithered. He often agreed with Ciano, but was very afraid of looking like a coward.39 On September 1, he decided at last on “nonintervention.” Ciano did not relax. In his diary he recorded, “The Duce is convinced of the need to remain neutral, but he is not at all happy.”40
MUSSOLINI’S CHOICE ALLOWED a man named Major Manfredi Talamo to go on doing what he did best: breaking, entering, and safecracking. His targets were embassies, especially Britain’s. War would have inconvenienced him.
Talamo pulled off one of his early jobs during the Ethiopia campaign. He and his men entered the British embassy on Via Venti Settembre. (A fifteen-minute walk in one direction on the avenue would take you to Mussolini’s residence, the Villa Torlonia; a fifteen-minute walk the other way would bring you to the War Ministry.) They opened the ambassador’s safe, removed documents, photostatted them in a nearby War Ministry studio, and returned them the same night. The temporary theft went undetected.
The booty included the secret Maffey Report, written the year before, when Italy was threatening to invade Ethiopia but had not yet struck. The report concluded that it would make little difference to British interests in Africa whether the country was independent or not. In practice, the British government had rejected that conclusion and opposed the Italian conquest. To embarrass Britain, Mussolini had the report leaked to the Rome newspaper Il giornale d’Italia. From there it spread to the press around the world.
The risk of a propaganda coup based on espionage is that the injured country will investigate, change codes and locks, hunt down spies. To protect its source, Italy’s Military Information Service—Servizio Informazioni Militari, or SIM—spread a rumor that someone had photographed the report in the British embassy in Paris, and from there it had reached the Italian government.41
Talamo had come up through the ranks of the Carabinieri, Italy’s national paramilitary police. In 1933, he was assigned to the Carabinieri’s counterespionage center, which operated under SIM. Then or soon after he became the center’s commander.42
Even before Talamo’s arrival, SIM was recruiting collaborators among Italians who worked in foreign embassies. Francesco Costantini, employed at the British embassy, had for years been filching papers and turning them over to the Italian intelligence service.43 His brother Secondo, another embassy employee, helped him. Unknown to SIM, the brothers Costantini made a double profit by providing copies to the Rome station of Soviet intelligence agencies. This did not reduce the value of British secret documents that landed on Mussolini’s desk.44
Talamo turned a scattershot method into an ongoing, meticulously run operation: the Removal Section—the Sezione Prelevamento, or P Squad. Under Talamo worked a dozen or so noncommissioned officers. Each was assigned an embassy, perhaps two. Over months, even years, they got to know Italians who worked there and identified who might be turned into agents. Their candidates were invited to the War Ministry, where they were interviewed by a man dressed in civilian clothes, who had dark, wavy hair, a pudgy face, and a southern Italian accent, and who gave his name as something other than Talamo. He offered a salary, which was not open to negotiation. If they said no, they were warned never to talk about the meeting. If they said yes, they were told to learn everything about the layout of the embassy, its schedule, and the habits of its denizens. And they waited, patiently, for the chance to make wax impressions of unattended keys to doors and safes, which they delivered to Talamo so that he could make copies.45
At the Argentine embassy, Talamo recruited a chauffeur. At the Portuguese legation, he enlisted a servant, and another at the residence of the Portuguese minister—in practice, the ambassador, but with a diplomatic rank one rung lower. At the Swiss legation, a servant named Peppino worked for him. At the French embassy, Talamo’s man, or at least one of them, was a porter. A typist at the Turkish embassy worked for Talamo, as did the maid of the Turkish military attaché. A doorman at the American embassy was on the P Squad’s payroll, and a doorman at the Japanese embassy, where Talamo also recruited the head messenger, who doubled as an embassy typist and made copies of all the ambassador’s cables and reports to Tokyo. A footman at the British embassy named Paesano was on Talamo’s payroll; either he or someone with a very similar name was also employed as a messenger for the US military attaché.46
The maid at the home of an Egyptian diplomat made wax impressions of his keys while he was taking a bath. The P Squad signed up an Italian man whose lover was a secretary at the Swedish legation, and who convinced her to type up extra copies of documents for him. To get keys from one of the Balkan embassies, a P Squad agent arranged for a woman to invite a diplomat home.47 The agent hid under the bed, extracted the keys from the diplomat’s pants, pressed them into wax, and put them back in the man’s pocket while the diplomat was engaged in a frank and cordial exchange with his hostess.48
Talamo’s NCOs were ordered not to discuss their work with each other. Between themselves, they whispered the rumor that their commander had made his own connections with diplomats rather than servants, but they never knew for sure. Talamo strictly followed the rules he set for secrecy; he told them nothing but what they needed to know.49 They did know for sure that their commander was the maître d’ of a hotel called Rome, in which the rooms were embassies. He had keys to nearly all of them.50
Francesco Costantini lost his job at the British embassy in 1936, possibly due to the Maffey Report theft. But his brother stayed on. At the start of the next year, in Ambassador Eric Drummond’s personal quarters, Secondo Costantini opened what was known as a “red box”—a wooden lockbox ornately clad in red leather, used to carry secret documents. Inside, instead of papers, lay Drummond’s daughter’s diamond necklace. Secondo was not one to spit in fortune’s eye. He took the jewelry.
When the theft was noticed, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service—otherwise known as MI6—sent Major Valentine Vivian, the head of its own counterespionage unit, to Rome to investigate. His report described a thief’s paradise. All the embassy’s keys, Vivian wrote, had surely been copied, since the diplomats “habitually” took them to their residences, where Italian servants could make wax impressions. At least six staffers had identical keys that opened all the red boxes. The embassy did have a safe with a combination lock, where keys should have been left at night. Vivian found the combination on a piece of paper—stored in a red box.
If a thief nonetheless lacked a key, he could open the embassy press officer’s wooden cabinet by removing six screws. Among the documents stored there was the “confidential print,” a secret Foreign Office digest of papers from key British embassies around the world. When the embassy was closed at night and during the long Mediterranean afternoon break, the only guard was a Carabinieri soldier at the gate. Vivian described him as “a menace rather than a safeguard.”
Britain had a separate legation to the Holy See. Since the Vatican was too small for embassy buildings, the legation was located elsewhere in Rome—on the grounds of the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian financial police. The Vatican legation also received the confidential print from London. “The legation premises… are entirely unoccupied at night and afford no protection whatever for the documents they house,” Major Vivian found.
MI6’s man saw local employees—Italians, or British subjects who were longtime Italian residents—as the greatest threat to security. “Certain countries—Italy, Germany, the USSR and Japan in particular—must be treated as ‘enemy’ countries,” the MI6 man w
rote, and it had to be assumed that their intelligence agencies would exploit every opening to bribe or pressure locals working at embassies. In Rome, Vivian said, there was “at least one traitor” on the embassy payroll, and he strongly suspected Secondo Costantini. Major Vivian’s report included a long list of recommendations, from replacing cabinets to replacing Italian workers with people sent from the United Kingdom.51
None of this was done. Later in the year “a further leakage came to notice,” and Vivian’s instructions were repeated. Nothing happened.52
Vivian went on to inspect the British embassy in Berlin and wrote a similarly scathing report. The British ambassador took two months of vacation every summer, leaving his German porter free to access the embassy at night when the offices were closed. “The Gestapo could… introduce nightly and for a practically unlimited period each night any number of locksmiths and experts in safe-breaking,” Vivian wrote.53 The ambassador, however, thought very little of MI6, and the results of Vivian’s Berlin report apparently matched those of the Rome report.54
Employing the reckless Costantini brothers stood in contrast to Talamo’s usual micromanaged precision. He took care of every detail of each entry. In most cases, Talamo went in personally, leaving his men outside to keep watch. He would open the targeted safe, note the precise arrangement of the contents, take what he wanted to the War Ministry photo studio, supervise the photostatting, and return everything to its position.
Sometimes, instead, Talamo gave the copied keys to a safe to his agent inside the embassy, who removed the documents and gave them to Talamo for copying. Once everything was back in place, Talamo took the keys. That’s how he raided the Belgian legation twice in 1937. The Belgians did not like to work late. The operations took place between five and six in the evening, and yielded codebooks along with other documents. Talamo stole the Portuguese legation’s cipher books and the Turkish military attaché’s cipher.
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