Double Cross in Cairo

by Nigel West

  13. From the point of view of GALVESTON, the comments – especially in Paragraph 5 – on the value to be attached to the word ‘reliable’, have helped considerably towards a more objective assessment of ensuring standard on which, in the past too much reliance has perhaps been placed.

  14. A certain amount of Schadenfreude has been derived from the information in Paragraph 3 regarding Abwehr incompetence – an incompetence which at the time of writing has reached new depths in the carelessness with which Athens encodes its messages. In this connection it is worth mentioning (in regard to London’s Paragraph 11), that there has been no change in the CHEESE operator since the present writer first became acquainted with the case in June 1942. Special Section have been extremely fortunate in their operator whose advice has been invaluable and who it is confidently believed has prevented any possibility of a technical flaw such as might arise from a changing transmission note or a blunder on the key.

  Simpson’s reference to GALVESTON concerned an ‘A’ Force order-of-battle deception scheme, later modified to DOWAGER, which owed its success to CHEESE. Just as MI5 assessed its own performance, and that of its agents in counter-espionage terms, identifying and neutralising enemy spies, SIME had opted to play a rather different game by actively engaging with the Abwehr. As Simpson had noted, the environment in which the MI5 and SIME operated were entirely different. MI5 had the geographical advantage of an island, populated by willing co-optees, with the full support of an efficient police apparatus and a vigilant military infrastructure. In contrast, SIME’s territory was vast, with porous borders, a corrupt, incompetent police presence and a largely untrustworthy, hostile Egyptian Army. There was no comparison in their relative circumstances, yet CHEESE proved that even in such adverse conditions it was possible to gain the upper hand.

  1 MISANTHROPE

  CHAPTER TWO

  SIME

  Soon after the outbreak of war MI5 opened negotiations with GHQ Middle East to expand the role of the local Defence Security Officer, Raymund Maunsell, the very first DSO who had been appointed in 1937. Within a year there were two more DSOs, at Gibraltar and Palestine, and 1939 saw the establishment of a regional organisation, Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME), which posted representatives across the Middle East in Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, Nicosia, Aden, Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut, Habbaniyah, Eritrea, Istanbul, Ismaelia in the Canal Zone, as well as Gibraltar and Malta. There were also SIME staff in Persia and Iraq, attached to the PAIC command. Maunsell would take command of SIME with a deputy, K. W. J. Jones, while a new DSO, George Jenkins, was given responsibility for liaising with the Egyptian police’s special section and the Ministry of the Interior. By the end of the war the DSO Egypt had four officers running the administration and organisation and six maintaining the office in Cairo which dealt with Egyptian subversion, and a further nine conducting vetting enquiries. There were also four officers based in the Canal Zone and two in Alexandria. In parallel, the DSO in Jerusalem, Henry Hunloke, headed a staff of twelve, with sub-offices in Haifa, Jaffa and Nablus.

  SIME would continue in existence for nineteen years, until it was wound up in 1958. In addition, SIME administered small prisons in Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Cyprus. At its peak SIME enjoyed a staff of 105 officers, and was divided into ‘A’ Division, with four sections (Records, Balkan, Post Security and Executive Administration); ‘B’ Division, also with four sections (Interrogation, Intelligence coordination and collation, Investigation and Most Secret Material); and the Special Section, handing agents. Initially the Balkan Section consisted of three officers (Edwin Whittall, H. L. Bond and J. C. D. Lassalle) while there were four in the Special Section (James Robertson, C. H. Roberts, Desmond Doran and John Wills). Later a Records Section was added with a staff of three headed by Captain J. Marcham, together with a Research Section of five, headed by Major G. E. Kirk. The Port section was just two officers, while the Interrogation Section employed seven. While Syria had a large DSO staff of ten, headed by Douglas Roberts, there was also a British Security Mission led by a baronet, Colonel Sir Marmaduke Coghill, consisting of twenty-two seconded personnel.

  Because, by historical convention, Iraq had been run by the Royal Air Force from Habbaniyah, a separate organisation, Combined Intelligence Centre Iraq (CICI), headed by Squadron-Leader H. E. Dawson-Shepherd, conducted all counter-intelligence and counter-espionage operations on their territory, supported by a staff of five RAF officers.

  In Tehran the DSO was Major E. Spencer, with just one assistant, Captain Rogers. In Turkey the DSO, G. R. Thomson had a staff of three, with one further officer each at sub-offices in Adana and Izmir.

  Whereas the Middle East hitherto had been regarded as a security officer’s nightmare, it was conversely an attractive environment in which intelligence collection operations could be conducted with impugnity. With its porous frontiers and tradition of cross-border smuggling, endemic police corruption, tribal rivalries, anti-Zionism and anti-colonialism, the region offered vast opportunities to a well-disciplined intelligence apparatus. Building on its comprehensive collection of prewar records of SIS reports, channeled through Passport Control Officers, and exploiting SIS’s experience in the Great War which included the Arab Bureau, the organisation attracted members of some of the great trading families of the area, such as the Whittalls and Lafontaines, who retained their links with the Service over decades.

  In parallel, SIS adopted Inter-Services Liaison Department (ISLD) cover to open offices in Tehran, Transjordan, Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, Eritrea and Algiers. Each communicated directly to both London and Cairo, and so were connected to SIS’s prewar stations at Belgrade and Istanbul.

  ISLD was initially headed by Sir David Petrie, a veteran senior Indian police officer and, until recently, Director of the Delhi Intelligence Bureau. In the summer of 1940 Petrie would be appointed to head MI5, and was replaced by Commander Cuthbert Bowlby who supervised an operations branch, designated ‘B’ Section, which had the advantage of having access to ISOS, referred to locally as TRIANGLE, which was a signals intelligence source, available from March 1941, offering an insight into the Abwehr’s most secret wireless communications encrypted on hand ciphers. This traffic had been broken by Radio Security Service (RSS) cryptographers based at Barnet, in north London, who had made a study of messages transmitted by MI5’s first double agent of the war, codenamed SNOW. The RSS cryptanalysts not only had the benefit of the Abwehr’s side of the exchanges, but also the clear-text versions of SNOW’S own reports which he encrypted with a quite straightforward transposition cipher. Using SNOW as a foundation, RSS extended its reach to all the Abwehr’s traffic, and this would eventually lead to a solution of the machine traffic too.

  Some TRIANGLE, usually in the form of summaries, was supplied to Major Jack Hester from England over the Special Communication Unit (SCU 4) circuit to Whaddon Hall in the Buckinghamshire countryside. Known to insiders as ‘the link’, it was established in August 1941, and the only SIS personnel authorised to handle this highly sensitive material worked for Section V at an entirely separate facility based at three houses on Lord Verulam’s estate at St Albans in Hertfordshire. There the Middle East traffic was separated by a sub-section, designated VE, from other Abwehr communications and processed, meaning translated, turned into summaries and cross-referenced to other relevant data, before being put into the distribution system for circulation to indoctrinated Section V officers posted abroad to individual stations where only they could receive and look at the signal. These officers characteristically were assigned numerical code numbers ending ‘500’ or ‘700’ which immediately identified them internally as the only staff allowed to handle, and personally decode Section V communications.

  Bletchley Park’s satellite, Combined Bureau Middle East (CBME), based in the King Farouk Museum in Heliopolis, provided original intercepts through a local Radio Security Service organisation headed by Kenneth MacFarlan, a veteran signals intelligence officer who had operated in France i
n 1940. While the Abwehr material was available almost from the outset, being initially the decrypted hand ciphers, followed by encrypted messages on ciphers generated on the Enigma machine, the Wehrmacht’s Enigma traffic, circulated as ULTRA, did not become available until September 1941.

  RSS monitoring revealed that the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) ran two stations in Istanbul, one linked to Hamburg and the other to Amt VI in Berlin, while the Abwehr operated a single circuit from Istanbul. Scrutiny of all this traffic showed that the Germans were heavily reliant on the Turks for information, but as the tide of war changed in 1942, the Turks became less cooperative with the Axis and rather more enthusiastic about the Anglo-Turkish Security Bureau (ATSB), a joint liaison created by NID’s Vladimir Wolfson in November 1940.

  The ATSB’s relationship with SIME became very significant and contributed to the success achieved by the DSOs who, between September 1941 and the autumn of 1942, captured twenty-five enemy agents. Among them were two Armenians, recruited by SIM, who were dropped into Syria in September 1941 equipped with a transmitter and a cover address in Switzerland, and detained in Aleppo soon after their arrival. A month later, on 10 October, another parachutist, Paul Fackenheim, was flown from the Phateron military airfield by a Heinkel-111 to a drop-zone near Haifa, but almost as soon as he had landed and buried his Afu set, he surrendered, claiming that as a German Jew recently released from Dachau, his mission for the Abwehr simply had been a method of reaching Palestine. Fackenheim, who had been decorated while serving as an officer in the 63rd Artillery Regiment in the First World War and later had travelled to the Dutch East Indies, was the grandson of Muhlhausen’s chief rabbi, and underwent interrogation at the CSDIC facility at Rehovot, near Sarafand, by Arthur Dowden, formerly the British consul-general in Frankfurt. Fackenheim gave him a detailed account of his recruitment and training, and the DSO, having released a false statement announcing the discovery of the body of a dead parachutist, a calculated attempt to mislead the enemy about Fackenheim’s fate, flew him to Egypt to face further questions at Maadi. There he was interviewed personally by Major Cleary-Fox, then John Wills, formerly of the 17th Lancers and the prewar Federation of British Industry representative in Paris, and even the DMI John Shearer who had been instructed not to reveal that the spy’s transmitter had been dug up from its hiding-place.

  Fackenheim would remain in British custody at Latrun, outside Jerusalem, until 1946. According to his account, given after he had been duped into making incriminating statements by a very plausible stool-pigeon pretending to be a German internee scheduled for imminent repatriation, Fackenheim had undergone an Abwehr radio course in Brussels, at 5 rue de la Loi, and then had been transferred to Athens, ready for his mission. When confronted with a cousin, who lived in Jerusalem, the man was so frightened and ashamed of Fackenheim’s work for Hitler’s regime that he denied knowing him, thereby causing SIME briefly to wonder about his true identity, especially as there was another, rather notorious senior Nazi with a very similar name.

  Codenamed KOCH, Fackenheim’s task was to make military observations in Egypt and report troop movements, using a miniaturised Afu suitcase transmitter and a book code based on Henri Bosco’s 1937 novel L’Ane Culotte. Great emphasis had been placed on the accurate identification, through unit insignia, of specific regiments and divisions so as to verify the enemy’s order-of-battle. His principal objective was to establish himself in Haifa, posing as an illegal immigrant, and watch the main road and railway south of the port, sending daily logs of all military activity on those two routes. He was prohibited from recruiting any sub-agents, and instructed to concentrate on recording the number and types of vehicles spotted.

  The difficulties encountered by the Abwehr in its attempts to collect intelligence in Egypt were heightened in June 1941 when two young Arabic-speaking agents, Mullenbuch and a Jew named Klein, both Palestinian volunteers from the Brandenburg Regiment, were to be flown to an improvised desert landing-strip sixty miles from the Egyptian border and then complete the rest of their journey on motorcycles. Accompanied by the Abwehr’s most notorious spymaster Nikolaus Ritter, who flew one of the Junkers-88, the planes took off from Derna in Libya, but the Luftwaffe pilot refused to land when they reached their destination. Worse, they lost their way on the return leg so Ritter’s aircraft crash-landed in the sea, three kilometres off the coast, killing Mullenbruch, injuring Klein and leaving Ritter with a broken arm.

  The largest German spy-ring in the region was headed by a student named Latifi and consisted of seven Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese, who were betrayed at the end of 1941 and of whom five were subsequently executed by a firing-squad at Aleppo. In April 1942 SIM parachuted two agents into Egypt, and another into Cyprus, but they were all quickly rounded up, the arrival having been presaged by TRIANGLE. Finally, in July 1942 two more were dropped near Aleppo, but did not last long.

  Meanwhile, in Dar-es-Salaam, the local authorities interdicted Sobhy Hannah, a successful Egyptian lawyer who had been recruited by the Abwehr in France and sent on his mission via Lisbon. However, TRIANGLE had revealed his route, and under interrogation he revealed that he had been given a wireless transmitter, secret writing equipment and a large sum of money by the Abwehr in the expectation that he would establish himself in Cairo and cultivate contacts in anti-British circles.

  All these efforts, apparently uncoordinated, indicated that intelligence collection in Egypt was a priority for the Abwehr, which was under some pressure from the Afrika Korps to supply Rommel with accurate estimates of enemy strengths and intentions.

  As well as exploiting TRIANGLE, SIS acquired another significant advantage over its adversary on 19 November 1943 when an Abwehr officer, Otto Mayer, was captured by partisans between Trogir and Knin in Yugoslavia and handed over by Special Operations Executive’s Force 133 to the British authorities in Brindisi. After a bullet had been removed from his neck in Bari he was transported straight to CSDIC in Algiers and then in February, via Marrakesh and Prestwick to London where, because he was well-known to Herbert Hart’s study of ISOS in the Balkans, he underwent a lengthy incarceration at Camp 020. Because of his previous experience in the Balkans, having been attached to the Abstelle in Belgrade and Istanbul, he proved exceptionally valuable and acted as a human encyclopedia concerning the Abwehr and its personalities. Mayer’s interrogations were assisted by information from DOLEFUL who had met him in Istanbul in January 1943 and instructed him to find a suitable sub-agent to operate a wireless transmitter in Syria. His nominee was to undergo training in Istanbul but, although Mayer had become insistent, the matter was taken no further and instead he fulfilled the role of a courier, delivering letters to a pair of recipients, a retired army officer in Damascus and another suspect in Beirut.

  Under interrogation Mayer, who was aged forty, explained that he had lived in Yugoslavia for some years before the war and, following the Axis invasion, had worked for the Abwehr until July 1942 when he had been transferred to Turkey where he had remained for the following year. However, MI5’s comparison with Mayer’s information and ISOS references dating back to 1941 revealed that he had somewhat underplayed his own significance and involvement in espionage across the Middle East, but he could not be taxed with his contradictions owing to the delicate nature of the ISOS source. Accordingly, the arrival of another Abwehr source proved providential and this windfall was credited with having given entirely contrary information so Mayor would never suspect a breach of the Abwehr’s communications security.

  Mayor’s extensive knowledge made available to MI5 was then enhanced by a high-level Abwehr defector who would be used against him, although the two men never met. In December 1943 the SIS station in Istanbul successfully cultivated a young Abwehr officer, Erich Vermehren, and his wife Elisabeth, both of whom were devout Roman Catholics and opponents of the Nazi regime. He had been unable to go up to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship because of the outbreak of war, and in October 1941 had married the Grafin von Plettenberg-Lanhau
sen, eight years his senior, in Freiburg. An aristocrat and committed Anglophile, Vermehren had studied law at the universities of Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig and Freiburg until April 1941 when he had been called up for military service, but found to be medically unfit because of a shooting accident in his youth. Instead, he was assigned to be a welfare officer at several PoW camps, but in December 1942 was posted to Turkey for the Abwehr, under cover as legal adviser to the military attaché. His wife, who was related by marriage to the ambassador, Franz von Papen, tried to engineer permission to join her husband, even though she was a known anti-Nazi who had been interviewed by the Gestapo some thirty times before she eventually had been granted permission to travel to Turkey, ostensibly on a mission to liaise locally about a Vatican visit to Istanbul, and arrived on 20 December 1943 for what was intended to be a visit of short duration.

  Even before Vermehren made contact with SIS, Section V already knew a certain amount about him and his wife, being information gleaned from ISOS, and about his mother who had been categorised as a ‘very dangerous’ Abwehr agent who had been flagged in Athens and then Lisbon, operating under journalistic cover.

  Once in Istanbul his wife had met Nicholas Elliott’s wife Elizabeth in church, and he subsequently had demonstrated his bona-fides to the SIS station’s ‘B’ Section representative, by removing Abwehr papers from his office, including a complete roster of the organisation in Turkey, and allowing them to be photographed. One of these items consisted of 150 pictures of the Abwehr dossier on an SD source codenamed PASCHA. Until that moment, understandably, SIS had regarded the young man with some scepticism and suspected he might be an agent provocateur on a mission to embarrass his adversaries. However, when the Turkish security bureau confided to SIS that they knew of Vermehren’s link with Elliott, the decision was taken to accelerate his defection and, to protect his family and colleagues, make it look like an abduction.