As for how to put that propaganda across, Salvadori proposed four methods: letters, leaflets, radio broadcasts, and something that he termed the ‘personal approach’. Letters could be sent to carefully selected addresses: he recommended those of ‘political leaders (from Secretaries of local Fasci [political groups] up), military leaders, civil servants, the clergy, professional and business people, etc.’ Leaflet distribution would be small-scale, more costly and less practical, but nevertheless possible with the assistance in Italy of surviving anti-Fascists such as socialists and members of Giustizia e Libertà. Broadcasts, Salvadori felt, perhaps thinking back to his Girl Beatrice days, could be transmitted to Italy from a boat off the coast of a neighbouring territory, like Corsica, Malta, Dalmatia or Tunisia. As for the propaganda content, he stressed that this had to avoid being seen as anti-Fascist; instead, it should be ‘strongly patriotic, monarchical and Catholic and contain only violent attacks against Germany’, while giving the impression that those responsible were Italians acting in Italy’s interests. The purpose of Salvadori’s last proposed method – the ‘personal approach’ – was ‘to get close to people in key positions’ and ‘win political and other leaders to the cause of the Allies’. This might be achieved, he suggested, by spreading doubt about Germany’s ability to win the war, for example, or by the offer of political ‘advantages’ or wealth.27
Presented in a paper read as far as the Foreign Office, Salvadori’s proposals were dismissed out of hand. ‘I do not say that such propaganda would not produce results,’ wrote the Foreign Office’s Sir Andrew Noble, Second Secretary in its Southern Department, ‘but it would certainly be dangerous and I think at the moment unnecessary and unwise.’ Noble’s reasoning provides a good snapshot of how anxious the Foreign Office was at that time to keep Italy neutral. No Italian of much importance seemed keen on war with Britain, Noble firmly asserted, before reasoning feebly that the unwillingness of the Italian Army ‘is sufficiently shown by the fact that a little while ago – about the middle of September – soldiers attacked [Fascist] militiamen in the streets of Turin, calling them “tedeschi” (Germans) and other rude names’. Mussolini, Noble conceded, remained ‘the enigma in the Italian political jigsaw’, but it was possible that even he was ‘coming down more on the side of neutrality’. Some ‘cautious’ propaganda might do ‘considerable good’, he went on, if ‘designed to explain to the Italians what we are fighting for and thereby show them that our interests are theirs, and to bring home the fact that though this war does look rather queer, we are really going the right way about winning it’. But Salvadori’s ‘more adventurous policy’ would involve ‘very great risks’: ‘Signor Mussolini would certainly come to learn soon or later what we were up to and he might be expected to hold very strong views about it.’ There was also the possibility that pro-German Fascists would be given a ‘weapon’ to attack more moderate ones. ‘Time is on our side,’ Noble concluded hopefully, before echoing the appeasement arguments of the 1930s: ‘[I]f we can also make it profitable for the Italians to remain neutral we are likely to achieve the results we desire without running the dangerous risks involved in Mr Salvadori’s scheme.’28
This was a time when Italy’s protestations of neutrality were encouraging even British diplomats in Rome to believe that Mussolini might stay out of the fighting for good. The Italian press, Fascist editors all, had started to adopt a less pro-German tone. In October a reshuffle of Mussolini’s Cabinet seemed to sideline some of the most pro-Nazi sabre-rattlers. In December the Fascist Grand Council, the state body empowered to approve policy and elect party leaders, reaffirmed Italy’s official attitude of non-belligerency. Italy still seemed willing to sell Britain warlike goods, allowed escaped Polish soldiers to cross Italian territory unimpeded, and, in the face of an apparent warming in Russo-German relations, expressed sympathy for the Finns when they were attacked by the Soviet Union. This was also a time, as one MI6 officer recorded in early 1940, when the quality of British intelligence on Italy was ‘lamentable’.29
What Salvadori did next has been recently and publicly interpreted as a reason to explode his reputation as an honest and wholehearted anti-Fascist. Documents unearthed in Italian archives in 2004 revealed that in 1939 Salvadori had offered his services to the Fascist regime. His first move had been that autumn, when, prior to leaving the United States for Britain, he had presented himself to the Italian ambassador in Washington, DC, to explain that he was poised to proceed to Britain and that, because war between the British and Italy seemed possible, he felt it his ‘duty’ to make his services available to Italy. In October, after news of this move reached Rome, Arturo Bocchini, Mussolini’s police chief, responded. Salvadori, who by then had reached London, was given a confidential address to which he should send all future correspondence, together with instructions to address everything to ‘Adriano’ and refer always to Bocchini as ‘Mr H. G. Roberts’. Salvadori was also informed that Switzerland might make a convenient place for a face-to-face meeting.30
In December 1939, so the Italian documents show, Salvadori then travelled from London to Switzerland and, in a Geneva hotel, met an emissary whom Bocchini had sent from Italy. At this meeting, so the emissary recorded in a report that survives in the OVRA archives, Salvadori insisted that he remained anti-Fascist but explained again that he felt compelled to ‘do everything possible’ for the good of Italy. He added that he was willing to develop pro-Italian propaganda and would give his ‘full commitment to Fascism’ if only the regime allowed greater free speech. He asked, too, for the opportunity to return to Italy to speak with the authorities there. On returning to Britain and with Bocchini’s encouragement, Salvadori struck up correspondence with Italy’s ambassador in London, Giuseppe Bastianini, to whom he repeated his keenness to visit Italy and his willingness to encourage understanding of Italy’s foreign policies in the ‘political and intellectual circles’ he frequented and in newspaper and magazine articles.31 These statements, it was claimed in 2004–5, provided grounds on which to challenge Salvadori’s credentials as a constant anti-Fascist and support the belief that he had suffered a moment of ‘political crisis’. The title of one newspaper article neatly sums up the thrust of the claims: ‘L’uomo che visse due volte: prima al servizio del Duce, poi di Sua Maestà’ (‘The man who lived twice: first in the service of the Duce, then of His Majesty’).32 It was considered ‘valid’ to conclude that Salvadori had kept the British in the dark and his OVRA contacts to himself, fooling the former into believing that he was entirely committed to the cause against Italy.33
There is no doubt at all that Salvadori was in contact with Fascist officials. It is also true that he had offered them his services. But a collection of his contemporary papers, dating from his time with Section D and SOE, which Salvadori passed to the British historian Christopher Woods in the early 1990s, and which were unavailable to other researchers in 2004–5, show that there was rather more to this picture than has been supposed. Ranging from incoming letters and telegrams to copies of his own reports and outgoing correspondence, these documents shed important new light on the real nature of Salvadori’s dealings.
Particularly instructive is surviving paperwork for Salvadori’s trip to Switzerland to meet Bocchini’s emissary. This was a trip that Lawrence Grand, the head of Section D, had in fact recommended. ‘[W]rite yet another letter to your friend [Adriano] suggesting that Mr Roberts should meet you,’ reads one instruction from Grand.34 ‘I can see what I can get from an interview with Mr Roberts,’ Salvadori wrote in reply, according to a surviving draft. ‘For that I shall have to go to France and arrange a meeting.’35 It is also a trip documented among Salvadori’s papers down to the costs incurred, since Section D paid his way and required an account of his expenses. With an exit permit and visa provided by Section D, Salvadori had left for Paris at the end of November. From the Elysée Palace Hotel he drafted a message to ‘Adriano’ saying he wanted to meet. He then proceeded via Lyons (train ticket: 320
Francs) to wintry Geneva (return train ticket: 685 Francs) where, from the Hotel Cornavin by the city’s railway station, he sent ‘Adriano’ a letter.36 Salvadori scribbled a copy on the hotel’s headed notepaper: ‘please let me know as soon as possible, if possible by telegram, in what locality in France, Switzerland or Germany we can meet and when’.37 Also among Salvadori’s papers is a copy of the later report he submitted to Grand about the conversations that had followed. Its title (‘My meeting with an agent of the OVRA’) is perhaps enough on its own to demonstrate that Salvadori was not deceiving the British, while his account of what was discussed matches almost exactly the Italian report, by Bocchini’s man, found recently in the OVRA archives.38
In his report for Lawrence Grand, Salvadori sought to record verbatim the key points covered when he and the OVRA agent spoke. ‘I come with orders directly from the Chief, Bocchini,’ the agent had announced at their first meeting. ‘We would like you to give us information concerning your political friends who live as exiles in foreign countries. I am authorized to pay as much as you ask.’ To this, Salvadori replied:
I am afraid that you are looking in the wrong direction. My relations with the exiles have been reduced to a minimum, because I do not approve of their extremists’ views. I have no intention to betray them or to act as an agent provocateur. As for your monetary offer, my teaching job provides me amply with the little I need and I could not renegate [sic] my past by accepting your money.
Salvadori had then explained what he was prepared to do:
My attitude towards your Government remains what it has always been. I am willing to recognise what good it has done to the country, but I still maintain my conviction that freedom is indispensible in a State. I believe that a nation can prosper, increase its authority and bring a contribution to the civilisation of mankind, only if its members enjoy certain liberties. A nation in which there is little or no political freedom can attain certain achievements under exceptionally good leadership, but is bound to lose later on more than it has ever gained.
I am glad however that you came here. We live in a particularly difficult time and, apart from every question concerning the internal politics of your government, I believe that an effort should be made in order to bring about a better understanding between the country from which my family came and the country in which I was born. If there is anything which I can do in that field I am perfectly willing to do it.
If I can find a situation in England, I will remain there a few more months. Otherwise I will go back to the United States at the beginning of the next month. In either country I have a large circle of acquaintances and friends. I can do my best to explain [to] them the point of view, the grievances, eventually the claims of Italy.
Salvadori also requested permission and safe passage to enter Italy and speak with its Ministers of Information and Education:
There are two questions which I would particularly like to ask to one or both … 1) Is there a possibility of seeing one day in Italy greater freedom and tolerance than they exist at present? 2) What are approximately the aims which the Italian government would like to attain? Once I am clear on that point, I can try to interpret either in England or America or in both countries your claims, many of which are probably justified.
‘Italy needs intelligent people,’ the OVRA agent told Salvadori in response,
I will report to the Chief and you can be sure that responsible elements will greatly appreciate your offer … I will speak to Bocchini, who will have to discuss the matter with the Head of the Government [i.e. Mussolini] before taking any decision … We will be very glad to see you in Italy.39
Talks over, the two men said their goodbyes and went their separate ways. Salvadori returned to London at the end of December and at once filed his report with Section D. He finished it on a high note: ‘I believe that after the two interviews and … [unless] the Fascist Government adopts a more strongly accentuated pro-German policy, I could go more or less safely to Italy.’40
In subsequent months, Salvadori continued his correspondence with ‘Adriano’ and cultivated a similarly duplicitous relationship with Giuseppe Bastianini, the Italian ambassador in London. Again Salvadori kept the British informed about what he was doing. In April 1940 he would tell Claude Dansey of recent suggestions by ‘my excellent friend’ (a security-conscious reference to ‘His Excellency’ Bastianini) that Britain start ‘conversations’ with the Italians about control in the Mediterranean and a thirty-year pact of friendship.41
Such was the real nature of Salvadori’s contact with Fascist officials in Geneva and London in 1939–40. He and the British seem to have wished to win their trust in order to exploit it, by seeking insight into Italian intentions and perhaps exerting a little influence: a tactic with obvious parallels to the ‘personal approach’ that Salvadori immediately recommended when he arrived in Britain in September 1939.42
By the spring of 1940, British observers were increasingly certain that the Italians would enter the war at the moment most likely to secure, quickly, a place on the winning side with the minimum of risk and effort. That meant Germany’s side. In February, Mussolini had ended negotiations over an economic agreement with Britain. In March, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, had been warmly welcomed on a flying visit to Rome that suggested keen German interest in Italy’s intentions. Days later, in a snowstorm at the Brenner Pass on Italy’s alpine border with Austria, Hitler had stepped from his train to speak briefly with Mussolini.
Details of what transpired on that occasion were not immediately known in London (Mussolini had in fact pledged to enter the war at an opportune time). But film, photographs and the fact of the meeting were widely publicised and, from that point onwards, Italy’s press became stridently anti-Ally. ‘[T]he word “Axis” creeps back into the journalists’ vocabulary,’ observed Sir Percy Loraine, the British Ambassador in Rome; ‘[A]ll pretence on the part of the press of holding the scales evenly between the belligerents falls away; on each occasion the German case is vehemently defended.’43 In April, after Germany’s invasion of Denmark and Norway, Rome began to fill with growing numbers of German officers.
In May, when Germany struck at France and the Low Countries, Italian attitudes became still more extreme, as Loraine recorded:
[T]he walls of Rome were plastered with placards obnoxious to Britain, bands of Fascist hooligans marauded in the streets … and there were a few cases of molestation of British officials and subjects … And, of course, the press and propaganda services poured out a shriller and yet more strident jazz of boastful vituperation … All the taps were turned on in order to make Italy war-minded and anti-British – Italy’s poverty, her land hunger, her strangulation in the Mediterranean, British arrogance towards her, British decadence and inefficiency in war.44
‘Is it too late to stop a river of blood from flowing between the British and Italian peoples?’ wrote Winston Churchill, Britain’s new Prime Minister, to Mussolini that month. ‘We can no doubt inflict grievous injuries upon one another and maul each other cruelly, and darken the Mediterranean with our strife. If you so decree, it must be so …’ Mussolini’s reply sought to justify what was to come. He wrote of ‘grave reasons of an historical and contingent character which have ranged our two countries in opposite camps’. He highlighted Britain’s decision in 1935 to apply sanctions against Italy for invading Abyssinia, when his country, as he put it, had merely sought ‘a small space in the African sun without causing the slightest injury to your interests and territories or those of others’. He pointed to ‘the real and actual state of servitude in which Italy finds herself in her own sea’: an allusion to Britain’s prominent presence in the Mediterranean, a central theme in Italian anti-British propaganda. Finally he told Churchill that, in view of the fact that Britain had declared war on Nazi Germany to honour its treaty commitments to Poland, ‘you will understand that the same sense of honour and of respect for engagements assumed in the Italian–German
Treaty guides Italian policy today and tomorrow in the face of any event whatsoever’.45
By then, the ban on British planning for conflict with Italy had at last been removed. Orders had been issued for aerial reconnaissance of Italian ports. The Admiralty began to reinforce the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean and re-route merchant shipping. There was even a little movement when, in May, Max Salvadori submitted another set of proposals on how the British should seek to keep Italy neutral. His paper included another dark and prophetic analysis of the difficulties of finding Italians who were able and willing to help. ‘Responsible people, or people who can take initiative, enjoy prestige, possess influence or exercise power, form a very small fraction of the population,’ he pointed out. ‘The majority [of people] … are always ready to applaud those who are strong and successful [and] will not lift a finger to defend those who have not many chances of succeeding …’ Once again he urged that any effort to keep Italy out of the war had to focus on anti-German propaganda and ‘personal approaches’.46 Days later, on 23 May, with British and French forces on the Continent now reeling from the German onslaught, Salvadori was given a passport, a laissez-passer, 2,000 francs, and instructions to board a Paris-bound flight leaving Hendon the following morning. His mission was to put the British in touch with old colleagues from his Giustizia e Libertà days.
Salvadori arrived in a city already terror-struck by the German advance. A week earlier, when Churchill had flown in, the French Government was already burning its files and preparing for the evacuation. ‘When you reach Paris ring Mr Beresford at Invalides 1881,’ reads a handwritten note from Section D that survives among Salvadori’s papers; ‘He is au fait with the situation and will accompany you to your friends. Bon Voyage!’47 ‘Mr Beresford’ was really Willie Berington, a 36-year-old Englishman employed in Section D’s Paris office whose civilian occupation is recorded in its files as ‘Lord of the Manor, Little Malvern’.48 Berington also spoke some Italian, having travelled and studied in Italy, and, on 25 May, he accompanied Salvadori to a meeting with three Italians: Alberto Cianca, Emilio Lussu and Aldo Garosci. Cianca was a lawyer, journalist and former editor of the liberal newspaper Il Mondo who had been forced into exile in 1925. Lussu, a prominent Sardinian socialist, had escaped from Lipari with Carlo Rosselli. Garosci was a journalist and liberal socialist who had fought and been wounded in Spain. All now discussed an alliance wherein Giustizia e Libertà would assist Section D in drafting and distributing in Italy propaganda directed against Germany. Later that day, Salvadori and Berington spoke to two more Italian anti-Fascists: Alberto Tarchiani, former editor of Italy’s one-time leading liberal newspaper, the Corriere della Sera; and Vincenzo Nitti, son of one of Italy’s former prime ministers. A week after that, on 1 June, Berington gave Cianca £20,000 and said that Section D would try to deliver 11,000 leaflets to a contact of Cianca’s in Turin.49 Then all contact with Cianca and his friends was lost. With the Dunkirk evacuation well under way and the German Army bearing down on Paris, Berington joined the rest of the Section D office and left the city, finally scrambling aboard a boat leaving Bordeaux for Plymouth.
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