Also at work in Italy was the OVRA. A secret, ruthless and efficient force of political police, it had been set up at about the same time as the Special Tribunal and was dedicated to rooting out sedition and subversion. Some debate remains over quite what the acronym meant. Probably it was short for the Organizzazione di Vigilanza e Repressione dell’Antifascismo, the Organisation for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism.7 Insidious and skilled, it could be brutal in its methods and was able to inflict plenty of punishment, from physical torture to stretches of confino, without prisoners needing to be tried. It has been said that the OVRA served as Himmler’s model for the Gestapo. Mussolini’s police chief, Arturo Bocchini, was in charge.
Entering this world in 1929, Salvadori, still only twenty-one, based himself in Rome and began spreading anti-Fascist propaganda and forming and coordinating groups of supporters. Propaganda, he wrote later, ranged from ‘leaflets dropped unseen in letter-boxes in the hope of kindling a new spark’ to ‘the stampsized emblems of G.L. – a red flame flanked by an ‘I’ (Insurrection) and an ‘R’ (Resurrection) – stuck on walls and in places where people would notice them (in trams, on mail-boxes, on theatre posters, even in public urinals)’. It was small-scale work, he knew, but the most that could be done in the circumstances.
It was absurd to think of a revolution against the well-armed, well-organized fascist regime … Under a dictatorship there is not much that can be done to rouse people’s minds and consciences, and every opportunity had to be grasped. It was worth doing even if it did no more than spread the knowledge that an organized opposition existed.8
To appear above-board and divert suspicion, Salvadori enrolled for a doctorate at the University of Rome and found work at the Institute of Foreign Trade. He allowed himself to be conscripted into the Bersaglieri for seven months and underwent officer training in Milan. But carelessness, spies and tortured confessions saw arrests among his colleagues grow, and his own turn came in July 1932.
Arrested at his mother’s home in the Marche, Salvadori was imprisoned in Rome in the main prison of Regina Coeli, on the banks of the Tiber, in a stinking, windowless, bug-infested cell measuring six feet by three. He was spared the tortures inflicted on others. Although the police, it seems, failed to realise the full extent of his activities, the strain of incarceration still had an effect, for he scribbled to Mussolini a letter appealing for clemency. Later Salvadori would write of his ‘humiliation’ at penning those ‘words of self-abasement’.9 Recently re-discovered in Italian archives, the letter has been described by one modern Italian writer as Salvadori’s ‘failure’ and ‘act of submission to fascism’.10 It ought to be seen as a human response to a system designed purposely to break men down. On scrutiny, the text of his letterina shows that he had played down his past and kept the full extent of his real work secret, claiming to have ‘walked away from the straight path’ only a few months before.11
Half a year in Regina Coeli was followed by a stint in jail in Naples. Then Salvadori was transported to the penal island of Ponza to see out a sentence of five years’ confino. In every place were graphic examples of what the regime was capable of meting out to its subjects. In Rome he met a young communist who had had needles driven under his fingernails, his testicles crushed, his cheeks burnt with an oil-lamp and his heart damaged by repeated beatings with a sandbag; also a girl who had had her breasts and genitals slashed with razor blades. In Naples he spoke to ‘a tall emaciated ghost of a man’ with shrunken body and transparent skin who had spent eleven months in an underground cell for supposedly plotting to kill Mussolini. Another man met in Naples was a courier of Giustizia e Libertà leaflets whose torturers had applied burrowing insects, beneath a glass, to his navel.12
After serving a year of his sentence, Salvadori was removed from Ponza and placed instead under house arrest at his family home in the Marche. A cousin in Britain’s Foreign Office, Laurence Collier, grandson of the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, had intervened by reminding Rome of its prisoner’s place of birth. Finding house arrest as frustrating as prison but easier to escape, Salvadori decided to go once more into exile, setting off for Switzerland and successfully crossing the border by showing the borrowed passport of another British cousin to whom he bore a good resemblance. From Switzerland he made his way to Britain where he settled down to a job at a prep school in Buckinghamshire and resumed his anti-Fascist activities, giving talks and writing articles. In 1934, to earn a living and perhaps evade the attentions of Fascist agents and officials visiting London, he left to farm in Kenya. His young English wife, Joyce, whom he had married a few months before, went with him. In 1937, three harvests later, they returned to Europe.
Salvadori had reached Geneva, where he had been offered a university post, when news reached him of the murder in France of Carlo Rosselli. Recently returned from the Spanish Civil War where he had shared command of a column of Italian anti-Fascists, Rosselli had been staying in a hotel in Normandy with his younger brother, Nello, when Fascist assassins stalked and killed them. Salvadori renewed his connection with Giustizia e Libertà and rejoined the struggle. It was in London that summer that Laurence Collier, his Foreign Office cousin, helped put him in touch with British Intelligence.
When he met ‘Mr Constable’ that July, Salvadori was eager to work with the British. ‘I was not interested in the UK as such nor in the British Empire,’ he would recall of his thinking at the time:
[What] mattered [was] the British contribution to modern progressive civilisation (priority of the rule of law, of reason over non reason and over all dogmatisms and fanaticisms, of tolerance … moral equality … parliamentarianism [and] economic liberty …) [What] mattered [was] Bacon, Locke and Newton, J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer and A. Toynbee.
What I believed in was threatened by totalitarianism, in the interwar period red, black and brown, all three born from a socialist matrix made explosive by nationalistic frenzy … In 1937–39 I was convinced that the French had suffered and lost too much to face another war; that only imbeciles could trust Stalin and (national) communism, national socialism’s rival twin; that Americans knew little and understood less (except a few, among whom fortunately the President and his wife) about what happened beyond their borders, and were totally absorbed in their own problems.
[What] remained [were] the British, badly wounded in WWI but not as badly as the French, deeply attached to their institutions even when not knowing what they meant, who in long drawn-out conflicts had saved enough of the Western community from inquisitorial Spain, absolutist France, Jacobin-Bonapartist dictatorialism, to enable modern civilization to survive and advance.13
If Salvadori thought that Fascist Italy was now beginning to worry the British, he would have been right. Where he was to be disappointed was in his hope that they were prepared to do something about it.
‘The impression created by the new Prime Minister is essentially one of strength,’ had been the cautious reaction of The Times in 1922 when, at the age of thirty-nine, Mussolini had become Italy’s youngest premier; ‘he smiles but rarely, speaks slowly and says little but without hesitation. His eyes are black and very expressive … and [he] answers to the description “A Napoleon turned pugilist”.’14 Left-wing British newspapers would consistently loathe him. Conservative opinion in Britain tended, early on, to view his drive, determination and uncompromising anti-socialism with a degree of respect, even admiration. Churchill, speaking in Rome in 1927, was one of many public figures to praise him.
By the mid-1930s, sympathy for the regime had mostly evaporated. Tolerance had been tested by stories of Fascist efforts to suppress internal opposition, while Mussolini’s imperial ambitions, aggressive tendencies and gradual drift into the arms of Hitler were causing British governments growing unease. In 1935, keen to acquire an image as a conqueror and imperialist, Mussolini sent forces to invade Abyssinia, better known today as Ethiopia; the Italians’ use of gas against Abyssinian tribesmen was met with worldwide revuls
ion. In 1936 Mussolini concluded a treaty of friendship with Germany, spoke for the first time of a Rome–Berlin ‘Axis,’ and dispatched aid, aircraft and men to back Franco’s fight in Spain. But with slim and shrinking resources with which to protect their country’s interests, and an electorate still traumatised by the First World War, British statesmen had little appetite for international confrontation or threatening sabre-rattling. The remit of MI6, meanwhile, was strictly limited to gathering intelligence. Listening in the Strand Palace Hotel in July 1937 to Salvadori’s appeal for help, ‘Mr Constable’ broke the news that the British were not in the line of sponsoring anti-Fascist propaganda.
Salvadori left the meeting disappointed and empty-handed. But he had made an impression. ‘Mr Constable’ worked for Claude Dansey, a senior MI6 officer who was running a European network of agents known as the ‘Z’ organisation.15 Based in an office in Bush House on the Strand, a stone’s-throw from where Salvadori and ‘Mr Constable’ had their chat, this was a top-secret set-up that paralleled the work of MI6 stations whose existing networks the Germans were suspected of having blown. Shrewd and experienced, the sixty-year-old Dansey had been MI6’s man in Rome from 1929 until 1936 and felt he saw in Salvadori a man who might have much to offer if the right opportunity came along. Later that year, when Salvadori left for war-ravaged Spain in a similarly unsuccessful effort to seek help from Spanish socialists – he particularly wanted assistance with a plan to drop propaganda leaflets over Italy from aircraft flying from Spain – he went with a false identity that Dansey helped arrange. And in early 1938, when Salvadori left for the United States to give a series of anti-Fascist talks, Dansey urged him to keep in contact. ‘I should be extremely sorry to lose touch with you,’ Dansey wrote to him in a letter that survives among Salvadori’s private papers. ‘I feel quite certain that there are ways and means for continuing an association.’16
Such an opportunity came that summer, when Salvadori, back in Britain, participated in his first clandestine job for the British. Germany, not Italy, was the target but he agreed to take part all the same. The plan was for a tiny group of European exiles to sail a small boat close to the German coast and, from there, broadcast anti-Nazi propaganda. A British trawler, the Girl Beatrice, was found, hired and sailed to Boulogne. A wireless transmitter was brought up from Paris, carried aboard and installed. Then, in August, with the boat still berthed in Boulogne’s inner harbour, there was an explosion. Petrol was being pumped into the tank at the time and Salvadori was down below. ‘I heard a terrific crash,’ reads an account among his papers. ‘I saw flames all round me. I ran as quickly as possible up the stairs, which had been half destroyed, to the deck and jumped thence on to the quay. The whole of the forward part of the deck was on fire. I helped the Captain, who appeared to be badly injured, to get on to the quay, where I also found the cook, who was badly burned on the face and hands.’17 The boat was wrecked, the cause was never discovered, and the project was over before it began.
In subsequent weeks, in letters heavy with security-conscious euphemism, Dansey kept Salvadori informed of the potential for another ‘yachting’ expedition. But progress was slow – in the end no fresh ‘yachting’ came off – and in October 1938, with nothing else on the table and now a young family to support, Salvadori left for the United States to take up a teaching post at St Lawrence University in upstate New York. By now, however, it was becoming obvious that war in Europe was approaching fast, and he and Dansey kept in regular touch. ‘I think it looks like being a hot summer,’ Dansey wrote to him in June 1939. ‘You must always let me know where you are [to] be found by cable so that if any opening suddenly appeared, I could communicate with you quickly.’18 In August he added: ‘The temperature increases and I always have you in the back of my mind.’19 Six days after that, with war with Germany imminent, Dansey telegraphed: ‘Come [to] London as quickly as possible.’20 Salvadori dropped everything and sailed for Britain.
In September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and went to war with Britain and France, Italy proclaimed itself neutral. In Britain, though, there were few doubts remaining as to Mussolini’s likely allegiances. In 1938, Italy had introduced new laws to persecute Jews and offered no objection to Hitler’s Anschluss with Austria. Nor had Mussolini objected in March 1939 to the betrayal of the Munich Agreement when, to international outrage, German troops marched into Bohemia and Moravia. That April, Italian forces invaded and annexed Albania, while in May the ‘Pact of Steel’ had established a military and diplomatic bond between Italy and Germany that implied mutual support in any forthcoming conflict.
When he arrived in Britain from the United States, however, Salvadori found himself in a country still clinging to a policy of keeping Italy non-belligerent. Great care was being taken by the British to avoid doing anything, or being caught doing anything, that could create an excuse for an Italian entry into the war on Nazi Germany’s side, thereby creating serious problems for Britain’s ability to defend itself and its host of worldwide commitments. ‘On Italy’s inactivity depended … the free use of the Mediterranean and, it was believed, the Red Sea for our shipping,’ explains the official history of British wartime strategy. ‘For these reasons the British Government deliberately avoided giving Italy provocation.’21 As Salvadori quickly discovered, one consequence was that Britain’s clandestine organisations were banned from engaging in anti-Italian activity or even preparing for a showdown.
One such organisation was Military Intelligence (Research). A shadowy department of the War Office from which SOE would partly spring, MI(R) had evolved from an earlier section, GS(R), established in 1938 to research matters of military significance such as tactics, training and lessons to be learned from contemporary conflicts like those in China and Spain. GS(R) had been required to be ‘small, almost anonymous’, one senior officer had instructed. Its men should be permitted to ‘go where they like, talk to whom they like’, but their existence was to be ‘kept from files, correspondence and telephone calls’. In charge at its office in London was the deep-thinking Jo Holland, a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Engineers. In the summer of 1939, with Holland in command, MI(R) was given an expanded role, which included the task of preparing the ground for irregular operations in countries that might come under the control of real or future enemies. In September, one MI(R) officer studied a few files and drew up a report on roads and railways in northern Italy with a view to hindering any future Italian moves against France. The only action taken was to pass a copy to the French Deuxième Bureau. Aside from some thin research into the possibilities of causing trouble in Italian possessions like Albania, the Dodecanese and Abyssinia, nothing more on Italy was done. Until the eve of Mussolini’s declaration of war, most of MI(R)’s slim resources were devoted to the possibilities of creating difficulties for Nazi Germany. As MI(R)’s war diary explains: ‘The scope of preparation to meet active Italian hostility was limited by the British Government’s fear of offending Italian susceptibilities.’22
Another organisation, a little more active and energetic, was Section D. This was an offshoot of MI6 and would be another of SOE’s forebears. Set up in 1938, it had been envisaged, as SOE would be envisaged, as much more aggressive than MI6, which was traditionally devoted to the quieter processes of intelligence collection. Section D’s job was to help counter the intentions of enemies and potential enemies in countries that seemed likely to become hostile or fall under enemy influence. Its methods ranged from printing propaganda to gunrunning.
In charge of Section D was another Royal Engineers officer, Major Lawrence Grand. Rarely seen without a red carnation in his buttonhole or a cigarette holder in his hand, Grand was a dapper and likeable man of drive and imagination. Among Section D’s surviving files are his handwritten recollections of the interview at which Hugh Sinclair, head of MI6, offered him the job. At one point Sinclair had wondered if Grand had anything to ask. ‘My first question was “Is anything banned?” He replied “Nothing at all.�
��’23 But resources would always be slight and its expertise slim; even its own in-house history described Section D as ‘a relatively unsupported body of amateurs bent on the crudest forms of sabotage’. Slim, too, was the degree to which it was officially permitted to act without regard to the main priorities of higher policy.24 Well into 1940, even the approach governing underground work into Italian-occupied Albania was to ‘do nothing that might cause Italian resentment and thus tempt Italy into war on the side of the Axis’.25
It was for Section D, housed in London offices at 2 Caxton Street and in rooms next door at the St Ermin’s Hotel, that Max Salvadori was first invited to work. Aware of the prevailing British policy of tiptoeing round the Italians, he quickly set down his thoughts on what could and should be clandestinely done. ‘[U]nder the Fascist regime, initiatives from the inside of the country are extremely difficult, unless they come from leading personalities,’ he began. ‘Those who talk today of a possible internal revolution, of a coup d’etat by the Army or the Crown, or organised opposition on the part of the Catholic Clergy, indulge in a [sic] useless wishful thinking.’ Propaganda, he urged, was the best way forward. It should seek to turn Italian opinion against Nazi Germany and be aimed at ‘responsible people, or people who are capable of initiative, and enjoy prestige, influence or power’.26
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