Double Cross in Cairo

by Nigel West

  In June or July a ‘nouvelle convention’ was negotiated at PASCHA’S suggestion. PASCHA offered to supply reports (a) more than once a day, (b) from new sources covering Malta, and Gibraltar, (c) giving greater details of divisional numbers, (d) in return for a further T£12,000 a month. Canaris told Hinz at the Sofia conference to pay PASCHA this further salary, but it was never in fact paid. The file shows that on 31 May in answer to a question about commandos in Malta PASCHA promised direct communication with Malta from 10 June; he had already produced one ‘communication directe Malte’ on 29 April. The first fruits of the ‘nouvelle convention’ were the longest single report ever received from PASCHA covering 14–20 July which contains one report on 17 July about Malta from a ‘source directe’; but the reports following it fell off instead of maintaining the improvement, and justified the complaint made in the questionnaire for PASCHA, drafted by PRECIOUS and amended by Hinz about the end of July, which repudiated the ‘nouvelle convention’. PRECIOUS formed the opinion that PASCHA had somehow recruited a British or Allied wireless operator receiving messages from Malta and Gibraltar, but had then ‘lost’ him and so been unable to fulfil this part of the new bargain.

  The flow of PASCHA reports ended suddenly with the month of August. To PRECIOUS’s enquiries Wolf replied that PASCHA had been put in difficulties by the Italian armistice, but hoped to re-establish his organisation on a smaller scale. He never did. After waiting a fortnight at Wolf’s request, PRECIOUS was told by Wolf that he had seen his contact in Istanbul; Wolf was very upset, but helpless. At PRECIOUS’S suggestion Leverkühn then summoned Wolf; Wolf came but, according to Leverkühn, said he would not be sending any more PASCHA reports. This collapse of PASCHA, at the time of the Italian collapse, first made PRECIOUS think that PASCHA relied on Italian agents.

  When invited to speculate about PASCHA, Vermehren offered some interesting opinions about what had really happened.

  In September or October 1943 Willi Hamburger was in touch with George Earle, the American naval attaché, through having stolen his mistress, and was trying to get information which he could take out to the British without hurting the Abwehr. He told PRECIOUS that he had heard that someone connected with the SD, that at the back of the PASCHA organisation was an Italian Jew connected with Marconi’s office or shop in Cairo, and asked PRECIOUS for his name and further particulars. These PRECIOUS told him he could not give, because he did not have them.

  PRECIOUS had always considered that PASCHA or his organisation might be Jewish. It was not until July 1943 that KONO received an order forbidding the employment of Jews. Canaris would have had no objection to recruiting Jews, as the fact that this ban was not laid on until 1943 indicates; at the same time if PASCHA or his organisation were Jewish, Canaris would be reticent about him and so would the SD. There were of course other guesses to explain Canaris’s reticence, e.g. some promise made by Canaris. Leverkühn told PRECIOUS he was going to ask Canaris who PASCHA was; but so far as PRECIOUS knows, he never did. KONO in fact employed no Jews, because both Hinz and Ulshoefer were against employing them. The ban was interpreted in the spirit: ‘You keep your Jews, but you don’t mention them!’ In PRECIOUS’S opinion, the SD knew more about PASCHA than KONO, and Canaris more than the SD.

  No further information about PASCHA had been acquired by KONO by the time PRECIOUS left. Leverkühn turned down a suggestion from Ludwig that he should ‘trail’ the SD contact in Istanbul in the hope of identifying him. KONO thought he lived in Ayes Pasha, where the German Consulate was. A theory held ‘jokingly’ was that PASCHA was connected with the British military attaché in Ankara, perhaps through his Security Officer (name unknown), who was betraying information to the Germans.

  This theory was based on the ‘source militaire’ which PASCHA often quoted, and which KONO thought he might have in 9th Army Headquarters. It was also supported by the scale of PASCHA’S remuneration, which indicated (PRECIOUS thought) more than oriental greed; PASCHA was paid T£30,000 a month, not by KONO, but (KONO assumed) by the SD.

  PRECIOUS asked the Interrogating Officer (a) if he thought PRECIOUS should have suspected that there was something suspicious about PASCHA [and] (b) if he knew of the PASCHA organisation as such before PRECIOUS gave his information about it. Evasive answers were returned. PRECIOUS seemed to think (i) that British interest in a defunct organisation was curious; (ii) that on reflection his own suspicions should have been aroused sooner and more strongly; and (iii) that PASCHA was at least partly under British control. (i) could not be disguised, but (ii) was not consciously suggested; nor was (iii), although it was not discouraged. PRECIOUS professed a complacent faith in the omniscience of Berlin, Berlin would know whether PASCHA’S reports were true or false and while Berlin accepted them without complaint, KONO were content to be a conduit pipe for these. KONO had good reason to be satisfied with a source that covered so much ground with such an appearance of speed and veracity and was neither recruited nor controlled nor paid by them, as long as it satisfied the Head of the Abwehr in Berlin, by whom it was reputed to have been established. In the last few months of its life it came under suspicion both from PRECIOUS and from Berlin, but according to him its reports were still eagerly awaited. When it dried up, KONO were left to ponder how far it had ever really covered the wide regions laid suddenly bare and how best they could now be covered with new, and less bountiful, sources of supply.

  This fascinating perspective showed that, after PASCHA had departed the scene, the Abwehr had been left devoid of reliable sources, and in those circumstances it was hardly surprising that it had come to rely even more heavily on CHEESE. As his interrogators, Stephenson and Eadie, noted,

  Vermehren says that he was always anxious to keep out of the dirty business of running agents but late last year Leverkühn asked him to lend a hand because of the urgent need for more agents, presumably to replace PASCHA.

  Allegedly PACSHA had been recruited before the war, perhaps by Admiral Canaris personally, and had been handled initially by the SD but from the middle of 1941 by Gottfried Schenker-Angerer, the assistant air attaché at the Istanbul consulate. PASCHA’S sub-agents were located in Iraq, southern Palestine, Cyprus and Egypt, and one of them, who communicated by wireless, had access to General Wilson’s headquarters. On one occasion PASCHA himself had demanded E£12,000 to extend his wireless network to Malta and Gibraltar, but the plan fell through within a week.

  The Germans were always slightly suspicious of PASCHA as on several occasions its information corresponded to a marked degree with that already at the disposal of the OKW in Berlin. At one time, in fact, OKW asked Abwehr Turkey whether their questionnaires contained leading questions, thus indicating the expected reply to PASCHA. Vermehren claims that this was not the case. The Germans thought it possible that PASCHA was in touch with the British military attaché.

  According to Vermehren, the entire PASCHA organisation collapsed following the Italian surrender, and the last message was received in October 1943. He also revealed that Willi Hamburger had confided in him that ‘a Jew belonging to a Marconi institution’, was ‘behind the scenes’ in the network.

  As the interviews with SIME’s Captain H. R. M. Eadie continued, Vermehren was judged to be ‘gradually giving away more details’, especially about Germanophile Egyptians. He named El Said Abubakr Ratib as a close friend of the Egyptian royal family who had decided to remain in Turkey rather than risk internment in Cairo. Abubakr had been a fencing umpire at the 1936 Olympic Games where he had embraced the Nazis, and was associated with Taher Pacha, a suspect in British detention, along with other influential sympathisers, including Prince Mansour Daoud, Prince Shahab, Ahmet Saabet, Hassan el Fekhe and Hassan Sirry. Fekhe had been acting as a recruiter since 1942, enrolling agents to go to Syria, but was dismissed the following year for faking his expenses.

  With some reluctance Vermehren identified the four spies he had personally recruited, and named Nuradin Sagun, Hassan Sirry, Semsettin Kandemir and an Ira
qi manicurist, Rahmiya Vedat, codenamed BERBER, whose husband had been interned by the British in Asmara, but recently released to live in Basra. Vedat’s mission was to travel to Basra and communicate using secret writing with a twenty-year-old girl in Baghdad codenamed BARRER who had been living there with her sister since December 1943, and would hand her reports to Muhharem Oysu, a Taurus Express employee and part-time smuggler. BARRER was also to act as a link for Kandemir, codenamed MONTLER, who was to be based in Ahwaz. Such detailed information, of course, was gold-dust to SIME.

  Vermehren also described in detail the entire KONO staff in Istanbul, which amounted to about two dozen officers organised like any other KO, with representatives from the various Abwehr branches, Abteilungs I, II and III, and the three services, Heer, Luft and Marine. In a series of lengthy interviews conducted in a friendly atmosphere in Cairo, he identified their individual roles, describing Robert Ulshöfer as the Turkish-speaking deputy chief of the Einz Heer who, he said, had attended Ankara University and was the principal recruiter. Professor Walther Hinz led the Einz Marine branch, and was responsible for liaising with the Turkish authorities. Hinz’s deputy was Gailani, codenamed TAN, whose wife was the daughter of Persia’s chief of police. He also said that Gottfried Schenker-Angerer, who headed the Einz Luft, had a radio interception facility in his office, run by an operator, Carl H. Clauss, monitoring British and Allied wireless traffic which was relayed to Berlin. Schenker-Angerer, who was described, along with his wife and daughter, as anti-Nazi, also had an agent codenamed MIMI who communicated through a link in the Iraqi consulate in Istanbul. Schenker-Angerer’s deputy was Hermann von Sperl, a cotton merchant in Adana.

  The head of Abteilung III was Hauptman Thomas Ludwig, codenamed ALADDIN, who worked under diplomatic cover at the Istanbul consulate. He was assisted by Helmut Braun and an interpreter, Robert Bendetsch, and Vermehren revealed that one of ALADDIN’S coups was his regular access to the office safe of a director of the Walton & Goeland Shipping Company in Istanbul. As a result, Mr Walton’s secretary, a Madame Dumont, was arrested in Beirut in May 1944.

  Subordinate to Kurt Zähringer of Einz Marine was an agent runner, Ronald Lochner, who was based in Mersin and operated against Cyprus. His son Erich was responsible for drafting agent assessments and managing the agents employed on the Taurus Express.

  When asked about Otto Mayer, Vermehren identified his codename as MURAT and said that he had operated in Istanbul under commercial cover, managing a refrigerator business. Although he had access to the KO communications and courier facilities, he apparently had operated independently under Berlin’s direct control. Vermehren also predicted, correctly, that his Austrian colleague, Willi Hamburger, would also defect.

  One focus of SIME’s attention was the process by which agent reporting was assessed by the Abwehr, and Vermehren explained that when he had first arrived in Turkey

  the KO relied for its estimations of the worth of its sources entirely upon the comments passed by Fremde Heere West, upon the veracity and importance of the reports submitted to it via Abwehr HQ. These appreciations were not very satisfactory since they depended upon Fremde Heere West possessing independent evidence by which to check the veracity of the reports of the KO’s agents. Later on KO was put on the distribution list, with the Service Attachés for OKW situation reports and order-of-battle charts. The KO then delegated to Lochner the task of collating agents’ reports with those data from OKW. In some cases Lochner was able to show that the information available to the OKW was inferior to that got from some of the KO’s sources. Vermehren gave the impression that there was no centralised grading-office responsible for assessing the bona-fides or the acumen of agents. Though Vermehren was not interrogated on the point, he did not seem to be aware of the existence of any machinery for scrutinizing the long-term record of an agent for symptoms of control or of indirect chicken-feeding.

  One of Vermehren’s interrogators, Captain J. F. C. Stephenson, noted that he was ‘convinced that Berlin must have more than one wireless agent in the Middle East because they are so well informed’ and concluded:

  Vermehren grows on one. It should be noted that he is not in any way anti-German but is anti-Nazi. He said that he tried to come to the Allies in April, July and September 1943 but only succeeded in doing so in January 1944 after his wife had joined him. He and his wife seem perfectly sincere in their reasons for coming over to the Allies. They say that her family has been persecuted by the Gestapo and she herself has been interrogated by them over thirty times. They both claim to be devout Catholics and opposed to the Nazi persecution of the Church. Vermehren is rather unwilling to divulge details concerning German agents operating against the Middle East, and I believe further facts could be obtained from him on much of the information which he has given, e.g. the name of the Roman Catholic priest in the St Antonin Church, Istanbul.

  Because Elisabeth Vermehren fell ill with pneumonia in Algiers, her husband was flown alone, carrying a British passport in the name of Henry George Thomson, to RAF Lyneham from Gibraltar on 13 March 1944, and he found employment, under the alias Erich Vollmer, in a prep school, the Bluecoat School in Horsham, and then at Worth Priory, also in Sussex.

  Elliott’s cultivation of the Vermehrens was considered a great coup at the time, especially as they were smuggled by train to Syria on false papers, and then reached Cairo by air where they were interviewed at length by SIS before the Abwehr even noticed their disappearance. In his discussions with Vermehren Elliott had agreed that their departure would be made to look like a crime had been committed by leaving their apartment in disorder, a ploy intended to keep the Germans in the dark about their fate. Implied in these negotiations was an acceptance that no public statement would be made, thus keeping the rest of Vermehren’s family safe, and maybe limiting the counter-measures that any intelligence agency suffering the loss of key personnel would be expected to take. However, almost as soon as Vermehren reached Gibraltar, on his way to England, the BBC reported their defection. The consequences were on a hideous scale as the incident proved the catalyst for the subsequent absorption of the entire Abwehr into the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RHSA). Also, Vermehren’s mother, Petra Schwabroch, the Das Reich correspondent in Lisbon since February 1941 and living in some style at the Palacio Hotel in Estoril, made a voluntary return to Germany in the hope that the disapproval of Erich’s defection would not be misinterpreted, but she was arrested by the SD and incarcerated at the Oranienburg concentration camp, and her husband Kurt, a well-known Hamburg lawyer, other son, working for United Press in Berlin, and daughter Isa, an artist, were subjected to harassment. According to Klop Ustinov, who reported on Petra, she was privately anti-Nazi, but her SIS dossier suggested that she had been working for the Abwehr in Athens in 1937, and that her husband was also connected to the Abwehr. Klop, also living in Estoril, but reporting on the local German colony for SIS, complained that the BBC publicity about Vermehren and his mother had ‘discouraged a great number of people from coming over physically to the British’ while applauding the discretion exercised over the recent defection of Wolfgang Krauel, the German consul-general in Geneva. Another victim of the contamination was the Abwehr’s Hans Ruser, a German journalist referred to in ISOS intercepts as having been in contact with Paula, who would himself defect to SIS.

  Vermehren’s own head of the Istanbul KO, Paul Leverkühn, was recalled to Berlin in February and imprisoned on 16 July. A prewar lawyer who had graduated from Gottingen and studied at Edinburgh University, and an old friend and colleague of Kurt Vermehren’s, Leverkühn had worked in Washington, DC and New York. As he was in the Gestapo’s custody on 20 July he survived the purge that followed the attempt on Hitler’s life. His replacement, as head of the Istanbul KO, was Admiral Marwitz.

  One of ISLD’s many challenges was the management of double agents who may have been known to Vermehren, and might therefore be expected to come under suspicion as having been compromised by him. Under normal circumstan
ces the Abwehr would have appointed a senior officer to undertake a damage assessment and then review the performance of any source likely to have been contaminated by the defector. However, in the chaos of the RHSA’s retribution, followed by the 20 July plot, no such damage control study appeared to have been made, leaving the double agents, CHEESE among them, at liberty to continue their duplicity. One unexpected bonus from the defection was the discovery that INFAMOUS had been selling fabricated information to the Abwehr, without SIS’s consent, so he was promptly terminated.

  The interviews with Vermehren proved that the Abwehr had absolutely no concept of large-scale strategic deception, and actually thought the idea impossible. Furthermore, it had no capability for even considering the integrity and performance of individual agents, and certainly did not realise that some of its supposedly most reliable sources, such as ARTHUR, were actually double agents under British control. Furthermore, the fact that ARTHUR’S sub-source HELMUT was entirely notional had also gone undetected, even though Willi Hamburger at least had been alive to the possibility of notional sources. He himself had invented a generic imaginary agent for all his Turkish political information, but purely as a security measure to protect the identity of his genuine informants. Among Vermehren’s more notable revelations was his account of the Abwehr’s attitude towards intelligence collection in Egypt. While his KO had taken the lead, other Abstellen, such as Athens, Sofia and Belgrade, also tried to run agents against the same target, although Vermehren had few specifics apart from some very helpful ‘corridor gossip’. However, from his personal knowledge, the Istanbul KO had only occasionally mounted individual, short-term missions to Egypt, and had experienced very limited success, chiefly because of poor communications and a lack of a local support from an existing resistance movement. SIME interpreted this scenario as being extremely favourable for CHEESE who, run from Bari and then Athens, had been outside of Vermehren’s purview. Based on the totality of the defector’s insight, it rather looked as though CHEESE had become the Abwehr’s longest-serving and most reliable source of military intelligence.