by Nigel West
Following his defection on Friday 28 January 1944, orchestrated by Elliott who codenamed him PRECIOUS, Vermehren’s interrogation in Cairo revealed the extent to which the Abwehr had come to rely on sources across the region that were almost entirely under Allied control, although he was given no hint of the true situation. As personal assistant to Paul Leverkühn, chief of the Istanbul Kreigsor-ganisation Nahe Orient (KONO), Vermehren was exceptionally well informed and could offer a comprehensive and detailed overview of the Abwehr’s operations right across the Balkan, eastern Mediterranean and Middle East area, amounting to around a hundred individual sources who had been assigned codenames. The greatest proportion of these spies, numbering ten, were waiters, sleeping-car attendants and other employees of the Taurus Express who regularly crossed the border into Syria. In particular, he singled out ARTHUR, a Taurus attendant and former NCO attached to the German Army during the First World War considered ‘very reliable’ who was known to the military attaché, General Hans Rohde, and was handled for Einz Heer by Erich Lochner. He collected information about troop movements in Syria and was thought to be friendly with a British NCO in Tripoli who gave him military information. ARTHUR’s reports
contained very precise details on regimental badges and divisional signs. He made excellent sketches of them and even identified the writing on the Maltese Cross of the Queen’s Own Rifles as scripture. He was not used by the Abwehr to recruit agents for them either among other Taurus employees or in Syria but in December 1943 ARTHUR did discover a sub-source (cover-name HELMUT) about whose identity and whereabouts he has told the Germans nothing. HELMUT writes in secret ink from, Vermehren thinks, Haifa to a cover address in Tripoli where ARTHUR collects the letters and delivers them to the Abwehr in Istanbul, where they are developed.
Naturally, SIME was especially interested in the enemy’s activities in Egypt, and Vermehren revealed that in October 1943 he had been given responsibility for the recruitment of all Egyptian agents. He had been helped in his task by Prince Shahab, a member of the old Khedive’s family who had volunteered to travel to Germany and help with propaganda. The offer had been turned down by the Reich Foreign Ministry but passed to the SD which had sent him to Cairo in the summer of 1942 to activate a transmitter hidden in the church of an Orthodox cleric, Father Demetriou. This attempt failed, so instead Shahab had made contact with a pair of cousins, Aziz and Mohsen Fadl, who had been recruited in 1941 by the Graf Meran, then head of the Istanbul SD, but later lost touch with them because of difficulties encountered when trying to send them instructions and codes.
This news was well received by SIME, which had first encountered Father Demetriou during the Eppler investigation. Demetriou had been detained in July 1942 and questioned when he had been compromised by the German spy who had been captured in Cairo (see Chapter Three). As a human repository of knowledge about the enemy’s espionage, Vermehren was unequalled, and much of his information either neatly dovetailed with TRIANGLE or accurately reflected SIME’s own information, garnered from its double agents.
After Shabab’s successful return to Turkey, the Abwehr had sent Prince Mansour Daoud’s mother-in-law to Egypt on a mission to deliver instructions and secret ink to the Fadls. Vermehren also knew about a Coptic Christian named Metaxoros who was supposed to repay a large debt he owed to AEG by passing cash to the Fadls. Another channel of payment had been Hassan Sirry, whose address in Istanbul, 29 Abe Sokak, and that of his mistress Sofia Misirli, had been used as a cover by the Abwehr. However, Vermehren said that he thought that Sirry, who had undertaken a mission to Egypt in November 1942 to establish contact with the Fadls, had been compromised by Prince Mansour’s mother-in-law when she had been detained and questioned by the British authorities. Apparently, having had her face slapped in public in Turkey by Mansour, she had never forgiven him for the humiliation, and had been delighted to denounce him.
Then, in February 1943, Mahmoud Nitzi Sirry was sent to Egypt to report on Allied shipping, with instructions to send his reports in secret writing to his sister in Istanbul, and to recruit two sub-sources, one of whom was supposed to work in a British army workshop where he could access numerous different transmitters. However, within a fortnight of his arrival Sirry, who had been entrusted E£500 to pay the Fadls, had opened a club in Cairo and, according to a report from Berlin, had been arrested, so ‘it was presumed the mission was unaccomplished’.
When tackled on the subject of his Abwehr networks, Vermehren was forthright, and listed the cases he was familiar with. Firstly, there was Anwar Sadr, the radio operator off the Egyptian liner Zamzam who had been in a PoW camp near Hamburg and had agreed to participate in a bogus escape and travel to Egypt as a spy. As far as Vermehren knew, this individual was still active and in situ. The SS Zamzam, formerly the Bibby liner Leicestershire, had been sunk on a voyage to South Africa by the Kreigsmarine raider Atlantis in the south Atlantic in April 1941. The Egyptian radio operator was one of 202 survivors, many of whom were repatriated to the United States through Portugal.
Another spy was Mehmet Narud-Din Sagun, codenamed REALTER and fluent in Turkish, Arabic and French, who was an officer in the Turkish army reserve whom he had first met in June 1943 through Prince Shahab, and then sent to Egypt in November 1943. Although his mission included making personal observations and acting as a recruiter, this former member of the Turkish army’s intelligence branch was to communicate to a cover address in Istanbul by using secret writing on newspaper wrappers. He only lasted six weeks, and then returned home because ‘he lacked physical courage’.
Sagun had been directed to collect ‘divisional signs; regimental badges; other indications of units; names of senior officers; existence of military establishments and repair shops, stating what types of vehicle or equipment was under repair; scraps of conversation overheard in bars, etc.’ and, according to Vermehren’s interrogators,
Sagun brought back a very complete report to Turkey in his head, particularly regarding regimental badges and divisional signs. But even with this information at their disposal Vermehren claims that it was difficult for the Germans to locate units definitely in Egypt as Sagun failed to report how frequently he had seen the different signs and badges. Sagun subsequently stated that he had picked up some of his information by observing camps situated along the Cairo-Helwan railway.
What Vermehren did not know was that Sagun had declared his espionage mission to the British when he applied for his visa, and had also stated that apart from the E£3,500 he had been paid by the Germans, his motive for accepting the assignment was his wish to be out of the country when he thought he might be recalled for military duty.
REALTER had adopted the same methodology used by DAKHLA, a Turkish journalist and Abteilung II agent who had been reporting on shipping from Alexandria, Suez and Port Said since May 1943. He had links to the Egyptian nationalist movement, but DAKHLA’S disadvantage was that his reports, also written in newspaper wrappers mailed to Istanbul, had taken four weeks to reach their destination, so he had been withdrawn in November 1943, after just five months.
According to Vermehren, ‘in Turkey there was a gentleman’s agreement between Abwehr and SD to exchange information, and the SD never passed the KO any military reports. Vermehren thinks all SD agents practised political espionage only.’ He also identified the local SD chief as a wealthy officer named Fast who came originally from Palestine and before the war had owned two hotels, one in Beirut. He worked alongside Bruno Wolf and acted as deputy to Ludwig Moyszich, a sophisticated operator who was based under diplomatic cover at the embassy in Ankara.
In relation to CHEESE, Vermehren denied ever having heard of the codenames of two mystery couriers associated with him, ARMAVIR and NAHICHEVAN, but did mention Clemens Rossetti whose post in southern Italy, he alleged, had been taken over by his wife when he was transferred to Athens. Rossetti had also boasted to him about two of his most reliable networks, one of which was in Cairo. Unwittingly, Vermehren commented to his int
errogators on
the technique of framing deceptive reports. He insisted that to be convincing reports must be based on a solid background of eye-witness facts, divisional signs, badges, etc. He himself had seen many reports framed by the Germans for issue to their double agents, and had been much struck by their compelling nature. Continuing on the subject of badges and individual signs, source claimed that the Germans knew by now all the signs and badges which were present in the Middle East, and that deception would have to be especially subtly carried out.
As a matter of general interest, though unconnected with the Middle East, source then spoke of the Allied order-of-battle in England. From reports sent from Berlin to Istanbul he had observed that we had some sixty divisions in England. It was clear, he thought, that this did not represent a sufficient force for the projected invasion of the Continent. However, while it was no doubt possible for us to conceal a few extra divisions here and there, he could hardly suppose that any large additional force could be hidden from German agents in England, and he had been much puzzled as to the truth of the matter.
Thus Vermehren unwittingly confirmed one of the cornerstones of ‘A’ Force’s deception doctrine, that having successfully established an entirely false Allied order-of-battle at a very early stage, the enemy had not only come to accept its veracity, but had taken the view that any subsequent deviation was likely to be an easily detectable attempt to mislead the Abwehr’s analysts. Certainly his understanding of the Allied strength in England, preparing for D-Day, was greatly exaggerated, and actually the 21st Army Group consisted of six armoured divisions, two airborne divisions and eleven infantry divisions, together with a number of independent brigades. Encouragingly, Vermehren’s estimate seemed to include the imaginary five armoured divisions and six infantry divisions of the ‘ghost’ First United States Army Group.
When questioned about penetrations of the Allied intelligence community, Vermehren recalled that Clemens Rossetti, who he said had worked for the Abwehr for the past decade, had recruited the housemaid, perhaps named Carniglia Orlando, of ‘a high British intelligence officer’ in Istanbul who had provided ‘fascinating’ reporting on his ‘sinister doings’ at the time of the attempt on the life of Ambassador Franz von Papen in February 1942. He also named Edgar Yolland, a 33-year-old member of the US Office of War Information (OWI) attached to the US consulate-general in Istanbul, and son of a distinguished academic, Professor A. B. Yolland of the Royal University in Budapest who had been interned in England during the First World War. A naturalised American who had been a teacher at the American College, Yolland was handled by the Abwehr’s Helmuth Hohne. Yolland was described as ‘a great friend’ of the deputy chief of the local OWI, the former Associated Press correspondent Harold Lehrman, but also of Georg Streiter of the Berlin Bösenzeitung, a known SD agent. SIME later established that Yolland had been removed from his post after Lehrman had returned to the United States and investigated by OSS’s X-2 but, to avoid embarrassment, no further action was taken against him apart from arranging his expulsion from Turkey after he had renounced his American citizenship. Vermehren also claimed to his SIME interrogator, Desmond Doran, that Paula Koch, a known spy in Beirut, had a source, allegedly recruited in the autumn of 1943 who was a French clerk or secretary, inside the local French Deuxième Bureau office with access to Sureté files, although an investigation failed to identify him (or her).
Among the gems in Vermehren’s interrogation report was his admission that he had been responsible for handling a spy codenamed PASCHA until the source had terminated in April 1943. This enabled SIME to question him with the benefit of PASCHA’S reconstructed, 150-page file which showed that PASCHA was an SD agent in wireless contact with a network across the region, His reports, typed in French by a man living in the Ayas Pasha district, contained
information about British and Allied military, naval and air forces in the Middle East; they cover an area ranging from Persia to Gibraltar and from Sicily to Capetown; they sometimes forecast a strategic plan, but generally descend to the most particular details for which personal observation is sometimes expressly claimed. They appear from the notes to have been mostly communicated by wireless; in some places the language plainly refers to their transmission by wireless. Of all the sources quoted, by far the commonest is a ‘source militaire anglaise’.
Vermehren described in great detail how the Abwehr had come to acquire PASCHA from the SD, and explained how his reporting was distributed.
PRECIOUS sent the collected reports off to Berlin by courier every Friday in the ‘original’ French, which he was forbidden by Leverkühn to alter or annotate. If he thought any report urgent, he would draft a signal for Hinz to send to Berlin and Sofia by the wireless transmitter of the German Consulate-General in Istanbul, the latter headed ‘Spruch an andreas, zugleich fur Fremde Heerc West – Cura. fur KING’.
Attgerer sent copies of all PASCHA reports giving air intelligence to the Air Attache in Ankara (first Colonel Morell, later General Kettembeil) and also to LOUIS (Einz Luft Berlin), and Murwitz or Zähringer sent PASCHA’S naval intelligence to Einz Marine Berlin. But on Leverkühn’s instructions all the PASCHA reports received from the SD were sent to ANDREAS. PRECIOUS believed that there were some purely political PASCHA reports, which Bruno Wolf of the SD did not hand over to KONO.
It was announced by KONO that PASCHA was, or directed, an organisation of agents and that PASCHA, or one or more of his hard agents, sent their reports by wireless to the SD’s contact in Istanbul. This contact was not himself PASCHA, but received the reports of the PASCHA organisation by wireless and could transmit questions by wireless to the organisation. PASCHA himself had been recruited by Admiral Canaris before the war and was always regarded as an Abwehr, Berlin source; hence it was for Berlin to assess the value of PASCHA’S reports and for KONO to pass them to Berlin unaltered. It was also assumed that the SD received the reports merely because there was no branch of the Abwehr in Istanbul to receive them until the middle of 1941.
PRECIOUS inferred from the dates and places mentioned in the reports that they were sent by wireless; they were sometimes written in telegraphic style. Indeed the ‘original’ reports typed in block capitals looked like wireless messages, not telegrams; PRECIOUS often saw them when or before Fraulein Schott copied them, and noticed also that they were sometimes crumpled, as it they had been carried in a pocket, presumably by the SD’s contact, since the SD would have passed them to Angerer properly enclosed in an envelope. The time taken by PASCHA in answering PRECIOUS’S questions was not short, but nonetheless indicated to PRECIOUS that both questions and answers had alike been transmitted by wireless.
On the location of PASCHA’S wireless transmitter or transmitters PRECIOUS made the following comments:
1. Alexandretta seems to have been the site of one of them when PRECIOUS arrived, but to have ceased about the end of March.
2. Alexandria or Cairo was probably another, as reports on areas all over the Middle East were represented as having come from those places.
3. PASCHA apparently had no ‘residential’ agent as far west as Tunis until July.
Despite these apparently authentic credentials, Vermehren explained that he had come to develop some doubts about PASCHA.
On 4 and 30 December 1942, 23 February 1943 and 6 April 1943 PASCHA reported the presence of parts of the 3rd American Infantry Division and 4th American Armoured Division in the Julfa region on the Russo-Persian frontier. This disagreed with other reports from agents of DENNIS [von der Marwitz], Zedow [Zähringer] and THEOBALD [Thoran] and made PRECIOUS begin to doubt at the end of April whether PASCHA had eyewitnesses in all the areas on which he reported, and to wonder whether he might not be relying on, e.g. truck (train?) drivers for sources of his information, as Zedow’s agents often did. PRECIOUS therefore asked Wolf of the SD for particulars of the organisation; Wolf replied he knew nothing except that his reports were brought to him by his contact in Istanbul. PRECIOUS
then asked if he might interview the contact; Wolf refused, but suggested that PRECIOUS should send any questions he wanted asked to Wolf for him to pass to PASCHA through the contact in Istanbul; the questions should be in French, from which PRECIOUS concluded that the contact could only speak Turkish and French. PRECIOUS therefore put questions to PASCHA on 30 April 1943 ending with one about the Egyptian Army to discover whether he was or had a source in Egypt. To this last question there was no reply.
A month or two later a fresh seed of doubt about PASCHA was sown in KONO’s mind by Berlin with a signal asking if coincidences between PASCHA reports and material supplied to KONO by the General Staff might not be caused by KONO’s passing this material indirectly to PASCHA. Berlin suggested that KONO night have passed it to someone, who might be, unknown to KONO, a member of the PASCHA organisation or in touch with it, or might have put questions to PASCHA leading him to give answers agreeing with the material. This suggestion alarmed Hinz and made him wonder whether there might not have been a leakage back to PASCHA through Lieutenant Ancora, the Italian assistant military attaché in Istanbul, with whom Hinz used to exchange military information. However, KONO asked General Rohde and DENNIS if they had been responsible for any such leakage, passed their negative answers to Berlin, and suggested that perhaps the leakage was in Spain.
The third blow to KONO’s confidence in PASCHA was his report of 9 July, amplified on 17 July, that the 5th English Division was in Syria and consisted of the 13th, 15th Brigades and the 3rd, 9th and the 91st artillery regiments. On 19 July PRECIOUS asked PASCHA for an explanation of this report, as according to KONO’s information this division had taken part in the attack on Sicily. On 24 July PASCHA reported that ‘la repetition de la transmission’ had established an error in the transmission and a confusion in the text, which should have read 5th Indian Division. On 31 July PRECIOUS pointed out that this reply was unsatisfactory, because PASCHA had given the numbers of the brigades of that division, which could only be the numbers of the 5th English, and not of the 5th Indian Division; and he asked for further particulars of the source and channel of PASCHA’s original information – a question which was never answered. PRECIOUS interpreted these reports as indicating that either consciously or unconsciously PASCHA was passing to KONO British ‘smoke’ concealing the fact that the 5th English Division was taking part in the attack on Sicily. PRECIOUS thinks, however, that PRECIOUS correctly anticipated the Allied attack on Pantellaria within two days.
