Among units pushed forward from Cairo was the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (Cairo) with one intelligence requirement: to identify units that had escaped to Italy. Lieutenant Harold Shergold exploited the desire of bewildered prisoners to stick together by holding formal parades, which then enabled him to identify units down to Company level.
CHAPTER FIVE
Iraq, Syria, Persia, Malta, Gibraltar and West Africa 1940–1943
Intelligence is Information plus applied judgement
Paul Crick
Iraq
While the British faced defeat in North Africa and Greece, in May 1941 the attention of GHQ Middle East Forces was diverted to Iraq where the nationalist Rashid Ali al-Gaylani and his pro-Nazi Golden Mound cohorts challenged the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty by overthrowing the King. In 1918, after capturing Iraq from the Ottoman Empire, Great Britain had agreed to a Mandate that hinted at independence but, in the meantime, accepted a proposal from the Air Ministry of air power being provided from the RAF stations at Basrah and Habbaniya. One measure was to deploy RAF intelligence officers on the ground to direct peacekeeping operations and enhance psychological operations. Supported by German and Italian aircraft based in Syria, Rashid Ali besieged RAF Habbaniya until it was relieved by the 1st Cavalry Division and two 10th Indian Division brigades sent from Palestine that had landed at Basrah and had entered Baghdad on 31 May. Two days earlier, Rashid Ali had fled to Persia.
In spite of powerful Indian nationalism and the British Expeditionary Force experience in France, GHQ India, which had responsibility for Iraq, regarded counter-intelligence as unnecessary and had avoided creating the Intelligence Corps (India) until January 1941. British Troops, Iraq was supported by an Intelligence staff of two GSO 3 (Intelligence) detached from the Indian Intelligence School in Karachi, namely Captain Tony Mains (9 Gurkha Rifles) and Captain Hudson (Baluch Regiment), an Arabic interpreter. Mains was a rarity among Regular officers because he sought out Intelligence postings and had attended a Command Intelligence Course in 1939. While serving on the Khyber Pass in 1940, he became interested in Field Security but had no idea what to expect. The Intelligence School (India) was then formed with the intention of expanding to a Depot with Major Jock Campbell (Royal Indian Army Service Corps) appointed as the Commandant. In March, the Indian FS Wing was opened with two instructors but the quality of the students, generally long service Indian NCOs and reservists no longer required by their units, was poor. Meanwhile, the HQ British Troops Intelligence Staff grew with the appointment of Lieutenant Colonel Tony Boyce (Punjabs) as the senior Intelligence Officer and Mains as the GSO 3 (Counter Intelligence). When Boyce asked GHQ Middle East Forces for counter-intelligence support, several Intelligence Corps sent from Cairo allowed Mains to form No. 1 (Iraq) Indian Composite FSS of a British FSO, the CSM, an Indian Jemadar (sergeant) and six NCOs for port security at Al-Ma‘qil near Basrah. Later able to form three more sections, he deployed them to RAF Shaibah and Baghdad, where the Railway Section was based at the station to monitor the twice weekly Baghdad to Istanbul ‘Taurus’ Express. When Hitler ignored the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union and launched Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941 and within months, military equipment being delivered to ports in Iraq and Persia was being sent to the Soviet Union by the ‘Aid to Russia’ railway, Mains also created a Special Branch equipped with a variety of European languages to help the Railway Section. In the spring, FS Wing, Cairo loaned 266 and 281 FSS to Iraq. The former, which had been formed in October 1940 in Winchester, deployed a detachment to the Shatt-Al-Arab estuary while the remainder took up port security duties at Al-Ma‘qil. A Censor Section reinforced the Force Deputy Chief Censor. The sections operated under the control of Captain Geoffrey Seligman (later Chairman S.G. Warburg investment bank), the new GS0 3 (Counter Intelligence) and effectively FS Commandant, Iraq.
Syria (Lebanon)
By exploiting resentment over the carving up of the region by Great Britain and France after the First World War, German subversion scored some successes in the Near East, particularly when things were not going well for the British in North Africa, After the Vichy administration in Syria (now Syria and Lebanon) had supplied Rashid Ali with weapons and had allowed German and Italian aircraft to refuel, on 8 June Ninth Army, which consisted of British, Australian, Indian and Free French units, advanced from Palestine and forced the Vichy French Army of the Levant to capitulate within five weeks. The Free French then insisted that since Syria was a French colony, the Allies had no right to interfere. Intelligence Corps contributions to operations included delivering agents in caiques sailing from Cyprus, training young Jewish men provided by the Jewish Agency into the Palmach (literally ‘strike force’) for irregular operations, and training Dodecanese Island fishermen to plant limpet mines on ships in Syrian ports. After being evacuated from Greece, Captain Household briefly managed the Greek Bureau at Security Intelligence Middle East, Cairo until Lieutenant Colonel Wentworth offered him command of 262 FSS, which had been formed in Cairo in 1941 and was covering Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. His comfortable lifestyle was interrupted when the section was attached to the Allied Control Commission Embarkation Committee, which was organizing the repatriation of the 32,000 prisoners and detainees and their families from Beirut to Vichy territory. He was allocated an Australian infantry company as a guard force, one or two Australian FS sections, depending on their availability, and 268 FSS, commanded by Captain Oswald Ormsby, to help him. In June 1941 268 FSS had arrived in Egypt from Winchester with four other sections and, after the Vichy capitulation and joining HQ Ninth Army took responsibility for southern Lebanon.
With the ships due to dock in relays about every four days, Household made 268 FSS responsible for checking them, in particular searching wireless rooms for surreptitious devices and gathering information from the Marseille-based vessels about conditions in France. Embarkation Day was a formal affair with the Australian guard force and FS smartly turned out. Before each passenger boarded, rigorous inspections of personal luggage were carried out for illicit valuables and documents of intelligence value. Hold baggage of cars, furniture and crates was also examined. The guard force checked embarkation cards at the bottom of the gangway while FS NCOs confirmed their details against a manifest list on board. The section was a little taken aback when an Intelligence Corps sergeant, who had recently joined the section, also embarked – on his way to France. Although the Australian cordon ensured that there was no unauthorized boarding or disembarking, it was not unknown for French crewmen to either dive overboard or shin down mooring ropes seeking asylum, most intending to join the Free French. Political tensions simmered throughout and when some French marines threatened a Foreign Legion battalion that had declared it would not fight for the Free French but would join the British, Household summoned an Australian platoon to restore order. By September, the evacuation was over.
With Syria firmly in Allied hands, Captain Ormsby spread 268 FSS to cover the coast from Turkey to Palestine with detachments at Sidon, Tyre and Jounie in order to intercept agents infiltrating from Greece and Turkey. The Tyre detachment monitored the railway between Haifa and Tripoli. The selling of arms by Allied soldiers required investigation, although, in one instance, this turned out to be the SOE forming Lebanese Maquis guerrilla bands of mainly young men and women. The NCO at the Miye-Mia internment camp unearthed several unknown Abwehr agents and German sympathizers and investigated the connection between the agent Paula Koch and the Swiss Consulate. A combined MI6 and FS surveillance operation resulted in the arrest of seven agents and the execution of five Italians left behind in Aleppo. NCOs also visited photo shops to vet snaps taken by soldiers and confiscated any identified as a breach of security and handed them to the Censor Officer. Corporal Maurice Oldfield escorted several Vichy officials to Beirut. By the end of 1942, Ormsby had handed over 268 FSS to his Company Sergeant Major Harnden, after he was commissioned. When Sergeant T.A. Baker, of 28 FSS and fluent in six
languages, became acquainted with several sheikhs in northern Syria and appeared to be living beyond his means, a New Zealand Base FS NCO sent from Cairo concluded that he had a case to answer. However, Lieutenant Colonel Wordsworth confirmed that Baker was sending useful intelligence to General Headquarters and had uncovered several Fifth Column groups. The report was later said to contain ‘an element of naivety’. A member of the 28 FSS in 1945 was Sergeant Stephen Grady, who served with SOE in France and became Director-General of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in that country. Elections in 1943 put pressure on the Free French to end its Mandate but when the authorities declared a state of emergency and immediately faced a nationalist backlash, HQ Ninth Army relied on the FS sections to collect intelligence on civilian morale and attitudes to the British. As the war drifted away from the Eastern Mediterranean, 268 FSS moved to the Intelligence Corps Middle East Depot at Helwan and reformed as 417 FSS in 1944, leaving three Sections in the region.
Persia
When Persia appeared reluctant to secure her oil fields and deter the threat of sabotage against the 700-mile ‘Aid to Russia’ rail and road supply from Teheran and through Iraq, in late August, the 10th Indian Division crossed the frontier from Baghdad, while the 8th Indian Division advanced from Basrah. Soviet columns also crossed the northern border and a week later met the British near Khorramshahr. Persia capitulated. A major task of the FS sections was to conduct port security and counter-intelligence operations to cover the railway, threading from the Persian Gulf to the Soviet Union, by collecting economic intelligence on German penetration of the railways, postal services and war industries. During that month, British Forces, Iraq was designated Tenth Army and responsibility for counter-intelligence passed to the Deputy Director of Intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel E.J.P. Ryan (Indian Army), who doubled as Head of the Combined Intelligence Centre, Iraq and was collecting tribal and political Intelligence along the lines of communication to the Soviet Union through a network of Area Liaison Officers.
Soon after Persia and Iraq Force (PAI Force) had been formed on 15 September, Major Robinson moved from the Intelligence Corps Depot, Cairo to be Commandant, FS Wing, PAI Force and rationalized titles by renaming No. 1 (Iraq) Composite FSS Section as 401 FSS. It was then sharing Al-Maqil port security with 266 FSS and was on frontier controls with Persia until June 1943, when it joined 296 FSS on railway counter-intelligence. The Security Control Officer, Persian Gulf controlling port security throughout the Persian Gulf could rely on their support. Other operations hinged on destabilizing Persian and Arab tribesmen raiding supply depots and extracting information from prostitutes used by US soldiers. An NCO at the Iraq/Syria border station at Tel Kotchek working with Free French Sûreté officers complained that he was forced to finance the searching of female suspects by local women from his meagre ‘slush’ funds. The handler of an attractive, blonde Swiss secretary employed at the Japanese Embassy in Kabul lived on lavish expenses in Baghdad until the US Combined Intelligence Centre took her over. When Captain B.M. de Quehen transferred from the Rhodesian Military Forces to the Intelligence Corps and was posted to HQ PAI Force, he and a RE captain accompanied a Red Army engineer colonel carrying out a feasibility study of the only two decent roads from Teheran through the Soviet occupied zone to the border. In between mapping the roads and checking bridges for heavily-laden convoys in glorious mountain scenery, it was also a blur of vodka, dancing with female Soviet officers, followed by breakfast harangues from a political commissar.
After a voyage during which their convoy had been attacked by aircraft and a U-Boat in the Mediterranean, 71, 72 and 73 FSS, which had all been formed at Winchester, landed at Basrah in January 1942. FS Wing adopted the pre-war RAF strategy of locating forward air controllers in communities by deploying two to three-man detachments to villages on a self-sufficient basis to protect the Taurus Express. By April, 71 FSS was covering the mountainous borders of Kurdistan and reporting to the Area Liaison Officer. Greatly helped by an efficient ‘bush telegraph’ that was generally pro-Allies, psychological operations and ‘hearts and minds’ were as important as tracking the gangs stealing Allied military equipment from the railway. The NCOs dispensed justice and negotiated with senior Persian political, civil and military figures, but fever and sickness was a constant worry. Corporal Reginald Gore, a married Lloyds Bank manager from Whitstable, joined 71 Section in 1942 at Mosul and was sent with another NCO to the village of Diana in the border province of Arbil. Living in a single storey, flat-roofed house that lacked running water and electricity and had a toilet at the bottom of the garden, their transport was either their jeep or a mare or two mules. Soon after he arrived, Gore negotiated the end of a small rebellion by the son of a local sheikh demanding the release of several Kurds imprisoned by the authorities. The two NCOs organized the building of a road through the village and persuaded their Area Liaison Officer to supply a spinning wheel for local women. At quarterly meetings in Baghdad, Gore, who learnt Kurdish, became known as the ‘Kurdistan nationalist’; nevertheless, he was later promoted to major and became a Liaison Officer. Leaving Iraq in 1946, he named his second daughter after the village.
While 72 FSS was based in Teheran, Sergeants Navarra and Wickens were seconded to the US Combined Intelligence Centre and helped arrest the SD agent, Franz Mayr, one of two Germans masquerading as Radio Teheran technicians. In early 1943, the section moved to northern Iraq, where Lance Corporal A.W. Gransden lived in the land and river checkpoint border town of Zahko, a few miles south of the Turkish border in the province of Dohuk. Dispensing with his jeep, he achieved local fame as ‘the Englishman who comes on a horse’ and wore local clothes to visit his contacts in remote areas, most of whom were local sheikhs and smugglers, and collected information by showing villagers pictures of German tanks and aircraft while he was dispensing medicine. He helped to improve water supplies, build roads, supplied packets of vegetable seeds and also introduced a spinning wheel and loom. Awarded the British Empire Medal for his work, he later outlined a fundamental principle of security:
All this may seem to have very little to do with security, but these things have more to do with security than those which lie apparently on the surface.
In April 1942, 73 FSS liaised with the NKVD, the forerunners of the KGB, on the border between Kurdistan and the Soviet Union. Sergeant Jock Lawson packing a brace of .38 revolvers was known as ‘The Sheriff of Sultansbad’. Meanwhile, 403 FSS had emerged from No. 3 (Iraq) Composite Indian FSS and formed the Railway Section, Baghdad, where it monitored the railway from Kabul and screened the sixty-seat Nairn Transport Company buses that followed the oil pipeline to Damascus arriving from Persia. It was also heavily involved in the repatriation of Germans. A detachment on the island of Myb on the River Euphrates competed with a thoroughly corrupt police force by investigating the theft of military stores, vehicle parts and ammunition stolen from depots by gangs of islanders supported by women with getaway camels and donkeys. In October the section was converted into an all-British unit and provided the bulk of the protective security for the late 1943 Tehran Conference during which two NCOs protected Soviet Vice-Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, Maisky. By 1943, there were nineteen PAI Force FS sections, the FS Wing Commandant being Major Household.
Malta
Field Security in the battered island of Malta was initially represented only by Sergeant Tom Hale, who reported to the Defence Security Officer. In 1941 about half of 69 (Malta) FSS had formed in Winchester under command of CSM Tom Keen, with orders to collect the remainder from FS Wing, Cairo, however, the island was under siege and since only essentials were being shipped to Valetta, it joined 254 (XIII Corps) in North Africa. But such was the need for counter-intelligence to address Italian espionage and subversion in Malta that, in early 1942, the Section was ferried by submarine to Valetta, where Keen handed command over to the commissioned Captain Hale. Other Intelligence Corps on Malta included the Censor Staff, Malta, 45 Base Field Censor Unit and, from Apri
l 1943, for nine months, a Wireless Intelligence Service.
Gibraltar
Gibraltar was again under siege, this time from a fascist Spain, and while the Germans and Italians regarded the Rock as strategically important, the Royal Navy dominated the Straits into the Mediterranean.
On 7 August 1940 at Avonmouth, the newly-raised, Spanish-speaking 54 FSS embarked on the troopship SS Mohammed Ali El-Kebir, bound for Gibraltar escorted by the destroyer HMS Griffin. The ship was torpedoed by U-38 230 miles west of Bloody Foreland and, of the 697 troops, ninety-four were lost at sea, including Privates William Brown and John Sydney, both Intelligence Corps. Reformed at Winchester by Captain David Scherr, it arrived in Gibraltar later in the year and, co-located with the Defence Security Officer at 13, College Lane, debriefed Belgians, French and Poles who had escaped from France looking for evidence of Abwehr penetration. When Italian frogmen using human torpedoes sank several Allied ships, a source was the wife of the Spanish naval officer appointed as harbourmaster of several small ports in the Bay of Gibraltar. When she first met Captain Scherr, her opening remark was the memorable, ‘I am the Queen of Hearts. Who are you?’ Meanwhile, Captain Peter Musson, who had close family connections with Argentina, had joined SOE in February 1941 and, within the year, had formed the ‘Gibraltar Fishing Fleet’ which supplied weapons to anti-Franco groups in Spain, smuggled tobacco and other comforts as a method of raising pesetas, and recovered Allied evaders from Spanish beaches.
Sharing the Secret Page 10
