Double Cross in Cairo

by Nigel West

  Another potential unintended casualty of the Vermehrens’ defection was ARTIST in Lisbon. He was Johnny Jebsen, an Abwehr officer who had been recruited by his own agent, Dusan Popov, codenamed TRICYCLE by MI5 and IVAN by the Abwehr. Unfortunately, Jebsen was known to have been a close friend of the Vermehrens, and this connection automatically placed him in jeopardy, and in turn served to contaminate Popov. Ultimately, Jebsen was arrested by the Gestapo on corruption charges, and somehow managed to protect Popov.

  For this defection to have happened once was bad enough, but ISLD was so active in Turkey that during the latter part of the war there were no less than three similar episodes. On 12 February, soon after the Vermehrens departed and Leverkühn was thrown into prison, one of his subordinates, Dr Willi Hamburger, received a similar summons. However, reluctant to submit to such an ordeal, Hamburger was persuaded by his lover, a glamorous Hungarian, Adrienne Molnar, to defect to the local representative of the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS). According to MI5, another of Hamburger’s lovers, Edith Karakacievic, later became successively the mistress of two senior UK Commercial Corporation officers, Crabbe and George Howard, the 11th Earl of Carlisle, from whom she was supposedly directed by Hamburger to extract sensitive information. In one of his interrogations Hamburger denied that Karakacievic, a Serbian Jewess, had been his mistress, claiming to have met her only once, and he also refuted the rumour that he had conducted an affair with Frau Stille, the wife of the German consul.

  Aged twenty-seven, Hamburger, who worked in Istanbul as the manager of Suedostrope, an import-export business, had first been identified as an Abwehr officer by Walter Aberle and Waldemar Weber, and then by Gottfried Muller, Georg Konieczny and Friedrich Hoffmann, a trio of German saboteurs, collectively codenamed THE LIBERATORS, who had been arrested twelve days after parachuting into Iraq, near Mosul, on 17 June 1943 while undertaking what became known as the Marmut Expedition, to establish a local espionage and sabotage network among the Kurds. However, the three German officers, equipped with a transmitter and accompanied by an Iraqi interpreter, Nafi Rashid Ramzi, had been dropped some 200 kilometres from their planned landing zone, and had decided to split up, but they had been spotted by the authorities and detained just east of Erbil.

  Codenamed TIGER and HARDY, Muller and Hoffmann admitted that they had been directed to blow up the Trans-Iranian railway and interrupt the delivery of oil to the Allies. The planning for the mission had begun in October 1942 and Muller had been trained at the Abwehr’s school at Quenz and at a laboratory at Tegel, which he described to his interrogators in considerable detail. He also revealed that once they had been established, a second team, codenamed MAMMUT II, would then be dropped to them by the Luftwaffe. Research by the DSO Baghdad, Squadron-Leader Dawson-Shepherd, later identified these spies as Robert Baheshy and Louis Bakos, a pair of Iraqi students attending college in Istanbul, At one moment, when Dawson-Shepherd was coming under local political pressure to have the captives released from detention, the DSO sought testimony from Vermehren to not only implicate those he already had in custody, but to incriminate several other suspects.

  Codenamed HOSIERY by his SIME, Hamburger described to his interrogator, W. B. Savigny, how, after he had learned Turkish as a student at Vienna University, where he wrote his thesis on the political reconstruction of the Arabic world in Asia, he had started his military service with the Luftwaffe in October 1940 and had been transferred to the Abwehr in March 1941 and posted to Vienna. He had then been sent to Istanbul and in August 1942 was placed under Paul Leverkühn’s command. However, becoming increasingly disenchanted, he had made contact with Commander George V. Earle III of the Office of Naval Intelligence, but when he heard nothing more from the Americans, and when he was ordered back to Berlin, ostensibly for a new assignment in Paris, he surrendered himself to the British, and was received by Nicholas Elliott. After his interviews with SIME in Cairo, by prior agreement with the Americans, he was transferred to the custody of OSS.

  Hamburger’s defection, coming so soon after the Vermehrens switched sides, would have a lasting impact on German morale, and another Austrian, Karl Alois von Kleczkowski and his wife Stella, a couple operating under Voelkischer Beobachter journalistic cover for the Abwehr in Istanbul since the autumn of 1941, defected a week later in February 1944. And if this was not enough, in April 1944 Cornelia Kapp, an SD secretary based in Ankara, fell in love with an OSS officer and was also persuaded to defect.

  Manipulation of the enemy’s intelligence networks was coordinated with great imagination by a staff officer, Dudley Clarke, whose military intelligence experience dated back to Richard Meinertzhagen’s exploits in Gaza during the First World War. Having served with Archie Wavell in the previous conflict, Clarke began lobbying for deception schemes in December 1940, the first of which was tailor-made for COMPASS later the same month when Marshal Rodolfo Graziani’s Italian 10th Army, which had penetrated 54 miles into Egyptian territory, was defeated at Sidi Barrani when General Richard O’Connor’s infantry division and a single armoured division equipped with the Matilda tank trounced ten enemy divisions. Initially intended as a five-day raid, the battle continued until February, with Graziani convinced that he was opposed by a vastly superior force. In the end, 130,000 Italians, including seven generals, surrendered, at a cost of nearly a thousand Allied casualties. This encounter, long before the ULTRA source became available, was a very practical demonstration of how the enemy’s poor tactical signal security could be exploited, and the potential value of an order-of-battle based on deception.

  Wavell was an enthusiastic exponent of strategic deception, even though CAMILLA, the cover story for his offensive in the Western Desert, did go entirely to plan. On that occasion the Duke of Aosta, fully persuaded that the British intended to attack in Somaliland, simply withdrew when it had been anticipated that he would do precisely the reverse, and reinforce his garrisons. Undeterred, Clarke embraced the principles of strategic deception and became its enthusiastic and persuasive exponent, to the point that he acquired no less than two pseudonyms: ‘Major Constable-Croft’ as the recipient of operation information, and ‘Major Galveston’ for all intelligence-related correspondence.

  Despite the CAMILLA debacle, Clarke was authorised on 28 March 1941 to create ‘Advance Headquarters ‘A’ Force’, a title intended to mislead by implying some airborne unit. In reality the organisation consisted of Clarke and two officers, supported by a staff of ten soldiers, and was originally accommodated at the ‘Grey Pillars’ GHQ building before moving into two flats at 6 Sharia Kasr-el-Nil, directly below a brothel. Their objective was to develop a master-plan to conceal the Allies’ future plans in the region, and this required not only the usual methods of conveying deception, mainly wireless traffic, the circulation of rumours and the ‘planting’ of false information on suspect neutrals, such as the Japanese consul in Alexandria, but the exploitation of double agents. Fortuitously, Levi arrived in Cairo in February 1941 and created the foundations of the CHEESE project, the spy-ring that would be the longest and most successful deception of its kind. One classic ruse adopted by Clarke was codenamed ABEAM, a plan conveyed over six months in 1941 intended to promote the idea that there were airborne troops based in Egypt planning to launch an attack behind the Italian lines in Italy. The intention was to exploit Italian fears, known from intercepted enemy wireless traffic, of just such a surprise. In support of it Clarke invented a non-existent ‘First Special Air Service Brigade’ and used ingenious methods to persuade the enemy it was training in parachute and glider techniques in the Transjordan desert. Captured enemy documents later suggested ABEAM succeeded.

  Clarke’s mission, defined and directed by Wavell, was in the first instance to buy time. The British position in the Middle East was difficult, if not disastrous, with Wavell having to weaken his defences in the west because of the need to deploy the 1st Armoured Brigade, the New Zealand Division and the 6th Australian Division to Greece, amounting to 50,
000 troops and 8,000 vehicles. This left Wavell with just the 2nd Armoured Division and the 9th Australian Division to hold all of Cyrenaica.

  The Germans occupied Yugoslavia in April, swept through Greece, and in May captured Crete. The Axis threatened East Africa, Iraq and Syria, and General Erwin Rommel arrived in Libya in February and was due to receive the 15th Panzer Division in April. The British were outnumbered, outgunned and isolated, and the 7th Armoured Division was in a parlous state. Worse, the Allies believed (wrongly) that Cyprus would be the next German objective, so Clarke was given the task of boosting the number of defenders, amounting to 4,000 troops of doubtful quality, by an entire division of 20,000 men. Of course, the 7th Infantry Division was fictitious, as was its armoured component, the 39th Battalion, Royal Tank Regiment, which was only equipped with dummy tanks. When, at the end of July, the British 50th Division reached the island, the defences amounted to a single genuine division, and a bogus one. Significantly, a captured German intelligence assessment was found to include the 7th Infantry Division and 10th Armoured Division and estimate the British troop strength at more than 20,000. Having established the 50th Division, it would remain in enemy assessments of the Middle East until 1944. Indeed, in December 1941 a map retrieved from General Guglielmo Nasi’s Italian Corps headquarters at Gondar was found to contain details of entirely imaginary defences on Cyprus, and an exaggerated estimate of 30,000 troops.

  Under intense pressure from Churchill, and having received reinforcements in the TIGER convoy of 238 tanks and forty-three tanks, Wavell reluctantly launched a much-delayed offensive, BATTLEAXE, in mid-May. The attack faltered, leading Churchill to replace Wavell with General Claude Auchinleck, who proved equally cautious. Although BATTLEAXE failed, Wavell had succeeded in removing the Italians from East Africa, stabilising the situation in Syria and Iraq, and evacuating Allied troops from Crete. He has also become the first military commander of the war to embrace strategic deception, and had endorsed Clarke’s tactics of inventing fictitious units such as the 10th Armoured Division, the 7th Infantry Division and the 39th Battalion, Royal Tank Regiment, to construct a thoroughly misleading order-of-battle. This was accomplished by sheer invention, but also by misrepresenting the true status of reserve, or headquarter units. Thus the 9th Amy, which was no more than at Corps strength, deployed against the Vichy French, became a full army, as did the 10th Army which supposedly was sent to the Caucasus to support the southern Soviet flank in August 1942. Also invented was the 12th Army, components of which were drawn from GHQ’s substantial presence in Cairo and the Delta. The illusion was completed by Noel Wild’s creation of a unit insignia, a seal balancing a globe on its nose, which was duly reported by CHEESE. Another of his inspired ideas was the unicorn as the sign of an equally fictitious 12th Army division. On this occasion, however, Wild over-reached himself as he learned too late that there was no French word for unicorn.

  In addition to greatly exaggerating the size of the Allied forces across the Middle East, Clarke invented units, among them the 1st Special Air Service Brigade, to pose non-existent threats and exploit the enemy’s perceived fears. Other imaginary units included the 37th, 38th and 101st Royal Tank Regiments, and in July 1942 Clarke won approval for CASCADE, an Allied order-of-battle that was composed of fourteen completely notional divisions.

  The key to constructing a false order-of-battle was personal observation and this could be accomplished by the ‘lowest grade of agent, whether he could speak English or not’ who reported sightings of the divisional signs which adorned Allied vehicles. Such reports would become the staple of messages transmitted by CHEESE, but there was a fear that, after the mischief of October 1941, the enemy had turned rather cool on ROBERTO. Simpson, however, disputed this pessimistic interpretation, and on 3 June 1942 advised Dudley Clarke that

  we believe that the enemy, thoroughly tricked in October 1941, has never quite recovered faith in this source. An attempt is being made to build it up again. Communications are sent in the name and character of Paul Nicossof, the only remaining member of the imaginary gang that Renato Levi was supposed to have built up in Egypt. Nicossof reports inability to secure any but the most trivial information; all the others, and all the sources of intelligence, have lost faith in the enemies’ promises to send money and have left him hanging on alone in the faint hope that such money may yet arrive. This is the burden of every message, and it is only varied by occasional and unimportant tit-bits of information such as anyone could pick up in Cairo.

  The enemy has gone to considerable trouble to convince Nicossof that the money is on its way, and is constantly asking for methods of getting it to him, etc. If they consider that the source is completely poisoned, this may be mere playing about. It is hoped that they are still in doubt, that they may actually send money, accept the information supposedly based on the enquiries this money pays for, and be gradually persuaded that Paul is real, loyal to them and more reliable than the agents who misled them in October. The whole case requires the most cautious handling, but it should not yet be regarded as beyond possible repair.

  As British survival seemed to depend in some small measure on the concept of deception, Clarke needed a method of conveying the false information to the enemy, and this was the role to be fulfilled by CHEESE. In 1942 ‘A’ Force’s scheme, codenamed CASCADE, which was approved in July, invented no less than eight divisions and two armoured brigades, and in the beginning of 1943 he warmed to his task and created a further six British divisions, a US armoured brigade, the entire 12th Army and, finally in December, 14th Corps. In 1944 this ambitious campaign was enhanced by an even greater deception, WANTAGE.

  By May 1942 more captured documents proved that the enemy had accepted the existence of the 8th Division, the 12th Division, the 2nd Indian Division, 1st SAS Brigade and the 101st Royal Tank Regiment, which was an over-estimate by 30 per cent of British strengths. Clarke’s second task was to delay Rommel’s imminent offensive, and this was achieved by pretending that the British were themselves about to attack, thereby forcing the Afrika Korps onto the defensive. Having built up a phoney strength, ‘A’ Force invented three successive dates for the launch, being 9 August, 30 August and 15 September, and perpetuated delays lasting four months by reporting that each operation had been postponed at the last moment. Finally, ‘A’ Force with ‘full orchestral accompaniment’, announced instead that the whole plan had been abandoned until after Christmas, so that when the attack really began on 17 November, the enemy was completely unprepared. During the really critical period, between 2 and 9 November, several ISOS decrypts directly cited CHEESE, characterising him as ‘highly reliable’.

  An Afrika Korps intelligence document captured after the victory at El Alamein suggested that seven of the eight CASCADE divisions had been believed by German analysts who also accepted a US tank regiment and a British armoured brigade. All told, the enemy had exaggerated the Allied infantry by 45 per cent, and tank strengths by 40 per cent. Gradually, as the conflict swung in favour of the Allies, the deception schemes changed. Having originally invented imaginary units to strengthen actual weakness, ‘A’ Force enhanced the true military position by using the false order-of-battle offensively to mislead the enemy about future plans. Thus in April 1942 FABRIC was devised to persuade Rommel that the next Allied attack would take place in the north of the Libyan desert, whereas the true objective was to be in the south. Furthermore, FABRIC’S other purpose was timing, and to convey the impression that the British could not mount an attack before August, and would not contemplate action during the ferociously hot months of May, June and July. Additionally, Rommel also came to believe false intelligence reports that the newly-arrived American Grant M3 medium tanks could not be deployed until sufficient ammunition had been delivered. Accordingly, the Afrika Korps was taken by surprise when, in May 1942, it encountered fully operational Grant tanks on its southern flank. However, Rommel’s attack on Tobruk on 26 May, which had been predicted by ULTRA, rendered much
of FABRIC redundant even though he encountered unexpectedly heavy Allied forces and took a month to accomplish the capture of the port, a goal that he had estimated would take only a matter of a few days. Furthermore, by inadvertently launching his attack against strong Allied concentrations, his troops and armour paid a heavy price for what was achieved, which was the occupation of Tobruk on 21 June, taking 33,000 prisoners. Buoyed by victory and his promotion to the rank of field-marshal, Rommel continued in pursuit of the retreating 8th Army to the defensive positions at El Alamein, the last-ditch fortifications just forty miles from Alexandria. Fortunately, ULTRA revealed the enemy’s plan, to attack El Alamein on 1 July, and the confrontation lasted a month, but stymied the German advance. Later Rommel would acknowledge that at this first battle of El Alamein ‘the chance of overrunning the remainder of the 8th Army and occupying eastern Egypt in one stroke was irretrievably gone.’