Double Cross in Cairo

by Nigel West

  From Hekmat’s sources I had received some essential information about the Allies’ growing military superiority: at that very hour 100,000 mines were being taken up to the Alamein Front, and a new defence line between the sea and the Qattara Depression was being organised. Hundreds of brand-new American tanks were ploughing through the sand on their way to the front. I knew that the Allies’ material superiority was growing steadily – that the enemy was swimming in fuel and up to his ears in tanks and artillery – and that all this would shortly be thrown against Rommel’s army. Our work had all been a complete waste of effort.

  Hekmat had wasted her time and risked her life in vain worming secrets out of British officers. In vain had I been nosing about at the Turf Club, the meeting place of Allied staff officers. In vain had I crept round the perimeter of the Eighth Army supply depot at Abassia to take down details of what was being loaded and unloaded there. Someone back home, having established that the two radio operators had been captured at Rommel’s headquarters, had cut off our line of communications and had stopped acknowledging our radio signals. Then we received this message: ‘stop! mission aborted. beware of British decoy information. don’t reply. we’ll lie low.’

  Eppler’s story effectively ended at his arrest, and he drew a discreet veil over his subsequent experiences, omitting his role as a prosecution witness in the various trials that took place, for example, of Anwar el Sadati. Nor did Eppler expand on the subject before his death in 1999. Sadati, of course, succeeded Gamal Abdel Nasser as president of Egypt in October 1970, and was assassinated in October 1981.

  There is much in Eppler’s somewhat self-serving autobiography that is contradicted by his SIME dossier, and there are other claims, for example that he discovered from his money-changer that he had been given counterfeit sterling notes by the Abwehr, that do not appear in the file, as one might have expected.

  Eppler’s interrogator, Harold Shergold, who was the first CSDIC officer to be decorated during the war, joined SIS in 1947, attended the Cambridge University’s Russian course and used his interrogation skills on Oleg Penkovsky and George Blake in 1961. He retired in 1980.

  Another of the Abwehr’s spies, Paul E. Fackenheim, survived the war and in 1985, when he was then living in Henstedt-Ulzberg, near Hamburg, was the subject of a biography, Arrows of the Almighty, by Michael Bar-Zohar. Apparently unaware of the influence, or even existence of TRIANGLE, and without the benefit of Fackenheim’s yet to be declassified MI5 file, Bar-Zohar speculated that Fackenheim’s mission had been deliberately betrayed by a mole, Hauptsturmfuhrer Kronberg, the senior Sicherheitsdienst officer in Athens, motivated by inter-agency rivalry and jealousy of the Abwehr, even before KOCH had embarked on his flight.

  Of the German spymasters, Rolf von der Marwitz was interned in Turkey in August 1944 and was repatriated in November 1946. He retired to Wiesbaden and died, aged seventy-seven, in September 1966. Erich Vermehren adopted a new identity, ‘Eric de Saventheim’, and went to live in Switzerland. He died in Bonn in April 2005. Paul Leverkühn survived his imprisonment by the Gestapo and served as a lawyer at the International War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg. He later resumed his law practice, was elected to the Bundestag, and died in March 1960. Willi Hamburger changed his name to Wilhelm Hendricks and after his release from American custody became a well-known journalist in Vienna, where he died in 2011.

  Having been released from a PoW camp at Weilheim in Bavaria in June 1945, Walter Sensburg was arrested in Salzburg by the American Counter-Intelligence Corps in August 1945 and interrogated at length. He proved very cooperative and provided a detailed account of the Athens Abstelle which he had commanded from November 1941. He also described his star agent, ROBERTO as having

  transmitted valuable information on Allied forces in Egypt and North Africa. ROBERTO was the sole Ast Athens agent reporting from Egypt. For this reason all the evaluation agencies showed interest in ROBERTO. ROBERTO’S principal assignment was reconnaissance on Allied forces in the Cairo area, for which work he was briefed regularly and in detail. The briefs came from the evaluation sections of Fremde Heere West through Abwehr I in Berlin and the i/c of O/Bef S0, first in Saloniki and then in Belgrade. Further enquiries sometimes had to be made by I-H Ast Athens, where ROBERTO’S messages were checked before being forwarded to evaluation offices at higher headquarters, ROBERTO’S reports to Ast Athens covered:

  1. The appearance of new unit designations.

  2. Troop and staff movements in Cairo, at the front, and in Syria.

  3. Organisation of a Greek brigade in Egypt.

  4. Names of CGs and COs.

  ROBERTO once reported he had recruited one or two collaborators, but these were soon dropped, since the Ast was unable to supply the necessary funds to ROBERTO. Later ROBERTO indicated he was receiving most of his information from two unidentified persons, a woman friend and a corporal. Details are not known to Sensburg.

  The twice-weekly wireless communication between Ast Athens and ROBERTO was sometimes interrupted by atmospheric disturbances; occasionally ROBERTO was silent because of dissatisfaction over pay. Generally wireless communication was satisfactory.

  ROBERTO’S reliability was doubted by the Ast Athens station, since the much better equipped station sometimes had to cope with transmission or reception difficulties, while at the other end ROBERTO reported no difficulties whatsoever. Although these suspicions were widely shared, no proof of ROBERTO’S unreliability ever came to light.

  Sensburg has no definite information on payments to ROBERTO. He knows only that Rittmeister Graf Schwerin, of Abwehr I Berlin, was sent to North Africa with the mission of paying ROBERTO after the expected occupation of Cairo.

  When Rossetti left Athens in summer 1943, Schenk took over supervision of ROBERTO. Schenk, transferred to KO Bulgara after the dissolution of Ast Athens, continued to oversee ROBERTO from there.

  Naturally, his interrogators ensured that Sensburg never suspected that ROBERTO had always been under British control but, over many hours of questioning, Sensburg proved very cooperative and provided an account of all his agents across the Middle East. Because the responsibility for intelligence collection in the region was shared with the rather smaller KO Istanbul, about which so much was already known because of Vermehren and Hamburger, Sensburg served to fill in the gaps. His description of the Abstelle’s assets made fascinating reading, especially when his version of events coincided with cases with which SIME was already very familiar, and involved that recurring character, Clemens Rossetti. Among his list of sources were two failures: MIMI had been parachuted into Palestine or Egypt in late 1941 with a transmitter, but was never heard of again. Similarly, GEORGES had been ‘dropped’ into ‘Egypt, Palestine or Syria at the end of 1941 or the beginning of 1942’ and disappeared. MOZART,

  a completely capable linguist and musician, was enlisted by Rossetti in Italy and received only tactical training. In late 1942 he went to Turkey, but Ast Athens received no military information from him. KO Turkey probably took over MOZART when Rossetti was transferred there after Ast Athens’ dissolution. REMY received tactical and probably wireless training. Sensburg recalls vaguely that REMY essayed a trip to Egypt, via Turkey in 1943, but that he obtained a visa only for Turkey. Ast Athens never received any information from the man. Sensburg assumes he was taken over by KO Turkey when Ast Athens was dissolved.

  Sensburg also mentioned Paul Fackenheim, revealing that originally he had been trained ‘to be parachuted into England, but adverse flying conditions necessitated abandonment of the scheme’. He also confirmed that after he had been dropped near Haifa on a military reconnaissance mission, KOCH had fallen silent.

  According to Senesburg, his Abstellen relied on two agent recruiters, Ludwig Stoeckel, codenamed MARIO, who had previously worked in Lyons but had been brought to Athens by Rossetti because of his strong family connections in Greece, and Rosa Zardiniti, who may have been assisted by her son. These handlers acted as intermediaries between Snes
burg and the Abstette’s networks, of which the largest would have been the Georgians, a trio of three Russian political refugees recruited by Rossetti in Rome and codenamed MARCO, KANT and TELL. They arrived in Athens in May or June 1942 and having undergone training were about to be deployed in the Middle East when they were recalled to Berlin and then sent to Warsaw. Sensburg did not encounter them again. There were also two other distinct groups. One was known as MUSTA-SASCHA-PARIS, also recruited by Rossetti, which was to go to ‘Cyprus or Egypt. Before preparations were completed, Ast Athens was dissolved and Schenk continued to supervise the three agents from KO Bulgaria. Schenk thought highly of the MUSTA-SASCHA-PARIS contact. Sensburg is uninformed as to their subsequent activities.’

  Sensburg also talked of the AGFA group, a pair of Afghan princes related to ex-King Amanullah. One was codenamed APOLLO and the other was Obeid Ullah, and they had been recruited by Rossetti in Rome, however, although the agents reached Athens in preparation for a mission to Turkey, and then to Syria, Palestine or Egypt, the scheme stalled for lack of travel papers, followed by a ban from Berlin on any activity that might embarrass the Afghan government. Accordingly, the AGFA project was shelved indefinitely.

  SIME was particularly interested in the ALT group, of whom Sensburg recalled ARTHUR and TOM, both of whom had Cypriot backgrounds.

  In late 1942 or early 1943 the group left Piraeus in a fishing craft for Cyprus to recconnoitre Allied forces in Cyprus and the Middle East. Later the group was to proceed to Egypt with the same mission. Although wireless communication between the ALT mission and Ast Athens was effected, Sensburg does not recall any messages with military information from Egypt.

  He also listed the MOHR-BELAMI group, which consisted of ‘two Armenians and a wireless operator’.

  The group left Greece for the Syrian coast in a fishing craft with the mission of reconnoitering Allied forces, mainly air forces, in the Middle East. The group was unsuccessful and never established wireless communication with Ast Athens. The Ast later learned that the participants in the mission had been arrested on espionage charges and that at least one of them had been executed.

  Sensburg also mentioned two women upon whom he had relied. One was Anna Dettlach, codenamed POLA, who had been trained in Brussels, given a forged Scandinavian passport in the name of Larsen and sent to Athens in the autumn of 1941 for a mission to Turkey, where she had been married before the war.

  In late 1941 POLA was sent to Turkey where she was to approach high Allied officers in an effort to obtain certain military documents. From Turkey she was to go to Cairo on the same mission. She was unable to procure the desired documents however, and never reached Cairo.

  The other woman was a Belgian, codenamed LUX, who was transferred to Athens in ‘the spring of 1942 with a recommendation of being thoroughly reliable’ and was tasked ‘by Sensburg to make contact with persons having exploitable connections in the Middle East. None of the persons engaged by LUX proved qualified for agent work.’

  A review of Sensburg’s total agent rosta suggested that he had achieved very mixed results. Of the agents he was responsible for supervising, only a few were deployed operationally and none of them succeeded in reaching Egypt where, of course, they might have been in a position to contradict CHEESE. As a result, CHEESE’S reporting was accepted by the Abwehr, and Heere Fremde West, unchallenged. The Allied assessment of Sensburg’s record of failure would be reinforced by other Abwehr detainees who were arrested making their way back to what was left of their homeland.

  Despite requests for Otto Mayer to be returned to Yugoslavia to face a trial for alleged war crimes, and an undertaking to this effect given by the SOE representative at Tito’s headquarters, he was released from Camp 020 in July 1945 and returned to Germany.

  Otto Wagner, the Abwehr chief in Sofia, was detained in the French zone of occupation in Germany and interrogated at Bad Wildungen. Richard Klauder and Anton Turkel were questioned at Camp King, Frankurt. Richard Klauder died in Salzburg in July 1960 and General Turkel died in Munich in 1958.

  Of the other British double agents run in the Middle East, TWIST proved to be one of the most resilient. Employed by the Italian consulate in Istanbul, TWIST volunteered his services to SIS in May 1942 but in October 1943 TRIANGLE revealed that he had also made himself available to the Abwehr to whom he had admitted his relationship with the British. SIS continued to run him, even when he disclosed in April 1944 that the SD had approached him too. In June he produced an SD questionnaire relating to Allied military intentions in the region, but the channel closed in August when the Turkish authorities interned the entire German diplomatic staff. Undeterred, SIS tried to have TWIST offer himself to the Japanese, but that plan failed when all Japan’s envoys were expelled.

  Of the Americans, Hal Lehrman worked for the New York Times, Newsweek and the Herald Tribune after the war and was elected president of the Overseas Press Club. He died in November 1988 and left his papers to the Kroch Library at Cornell University, from whence he had graduated in 1932.

  Edgar Yolland, identified by Vermehren as having been recruited as a German spy, renounced his US citizenship in an apparent deal with the ambassador. Steinhardt and OSS reported that he was expelled from Turkey sometime before April 1945 and later tried to acquire a British passport.

  Perhaps the most tragic epilogue of the CHEESE story is what happened to Evan Simpson. In 1946, having returned to Oxford for his MA, Simpson released Time Table for Victory: A Brief and Popular Account of the Railways & Railway-owned Dockyards of Great Britain & Northern Ireland During the Six Years’ War of 1939–45, giving no clue as to how his own very considerable talent for invention had been applied during the recent conflict. Next, in 1948, he wrote The Network: It Could Happen Here, and then Time after Earthquake: An adventure among Greek Islands in August 1953. On 27 December 1953, four months after having witnessed the earthquake as part of a relief mission to the Ionian Islands, Simpson succumbed to depression and shot himself with a rifle. According to his widow, who gave evidence at an inquest held at Henley-on-Thames, he had taken his own life in woods near his home, Neal’s Farm, at Checkendon in south Oxfordshire. She explained that her husband suffered from fits of depression and that when he did ‘his creative power to write was destroyed’.

  Two years after his death Simpson’s publisher released The Darkness, a fictionalised account of Christ’s crucifixion, as reported to the Roman security office in the form of intelligence bulletins.

  Dudley Clarke, the founder of ‘A’ Force and the principal architect of modern wartime strategic deception, received permission to publish a sanitised version of his autobiography, Seven Assignments, in 1948, but was not allowed to mention CHEESE, nor proceed with his wartime memoirs, The Secret War. In his typically modest foreword, Clarke wrote that

  The secret war of which these pages tell was a war of wits – of fantasy and imagination fought out on an almost private basis between the supreme heads of Hitler’s intelligence (and Mussolini’s) and a small band of men and women – British, American and French – operating from the opposite shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The author had the honour of leading that team through five crowded, urgent years – years which brought moreover, a rare privilege to a professional soldier. For the secret war was waged rather to conserve than to destroy; the stakes were the lives of frontline troops, and the organisation which fought it was able to count its gains from the number of casualties it could avert.

  Having retired from the army in 1947, he worked at Conservative Central Office, wrote a thriller, Golden Arrow in 1955 and died in 1977. The extent to which his stratagems and phantom armies really duped the Axis only became clear when Allied analysts had the chance to study captured enemy documents. The material recovered in France proved beyond any doubt that the Fremde Heere West was completely taken in by FORTITUDE, and, for weeks after D-Day, continued to believe that the main amphibious landings, spearheaded by the (fictitious) First United States Army Group wou
ld occur in the Pas-de-Calais. Likewise in the eastern Mediterranean, the Axis clung to the conviction, created in 1942, that the Allies intended to attack ‘the soft under-belly of Europe’ through the Balkans, and a memorandum drafted by the Hungarian army’s chief of staff General Ferenc Szombathelyi in February 1943, immediately after he had attended a strategy conference addressed by Hitler, predicted landings in the Balkans later the same year. This flawed assessment led to the escalation of German forces in the region, which in March 1944 amounted to twenty-nine first-rate divisions, At the end of that month, in anticipation of a non-existent threat to Hungary, fourteen German divisions entered and occupied the country, including the battle-hardened II SS Panzer Corps, consisting of the 9th SS Panzer Division Hohenstaufen and 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg, which had been transferred from France for the purpose.

  These Axis forces, therefore, were not available to defend Normandy, nor to participate in an armoured counter-attack on the invaders. Captured documents demonstrated that of the twenty-six imaginary divisions in the eastern Mediterranean dreamed up by ‘A’ Force, twenty-one were positively identified by enemy analysts and entered on their order-of-battle assessments.

  Finally, CHEESE himself disappears from MI5’s files after the decision has been taken to compensate him financially for what he had endured during his incarceration. On 4 April 1945 Captain Pierre Grandguillot of ‘A’ Force, formerly a Davis Cup tennis player, urged Eric Pope to treat Levi with the generosity he deserved, pointing out that this was probably the cost of his silence. Pope then advocated that CHEESE, who had expressed a wish to rejoin his wife and son in Genoa as soon as the city was occupied by the Allies, should be paid £1,300 in reward plus £2,000 in compensation for his imprisonment, being the equivalent of the 200,000 lira claimed.