Back in New York City, Salvadori, who had left his university post in January, settled down to writing articles for the Overseas News Agency, an organisation concerned with reporting worldwide news. The job was effectively a front to allow him to work more wholeheartedly for the anti-Fascist cause and to continue to liaise closely with Stephenson’s office and SOE, for which he acted as a link to the Mazzini Society. During the summer of 1941 he also began to be investigated by both the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Curious about his movements and the bizarre goings-on reported by the McAllen Border Patrol, both organisations were concerned about his politics and loyalties. The INS thought he might be ‘a dangerous Italian undercover agent’.55 The FBI, as a note undersigned by its Director, J. Edgar Hoover, explains, wanted to know whether Salvadori should be considered for ‘custodial detention pending investigation in the event of a national emergency’.56 The INS carried out most of the early inquiries, probing Salvadori’s background, interviewing his friends and acquaintances, even questioning him itself. The idea that he might be an Italian agent was swiftly demolished by a mass of testimony affirming his anti-Fascism, to be replaced by a growing conviction that he was an undercover agent working for the British. In one revealing interview in New York in August 1941, Salvadori confirmed that he had worked for the Ministry of Economic Warfare but was evasive when asked if he remained, indirectly, in ‘British service and pay’. ‘I won’t answer that,’ he responded; ‘I help by pro-democratic propaganda among the Italian people.’57 That October, having found no evidence of ‘un-American activities or sentiment’, the INS closed its file on him.58 The FBI remained interested, however, and continued its inquiries: if Salvadori was really a foreign agent operating undercover in the United States, he needed to be watched, whatever his allegiances.
Salvadori also assisted the British when an attempt was made to trawl for recruits among Canada’s 100,000-strong Italian community: in the spring of 1942, going north to do some interviewing, he sifted through a succession of potential candidates in Toronto, Hamilton, Niagara Falls, Sudbury and Montreal. In 1943, a party of half a dozen Canadian volunteers, all in their twenties, would eventually be sent to Britain for specialist training. Their escort, an Italian-speaking Intelligence Corps NCO, noted when they arrived that they possessed ‘more fighting spirit than any other Italian students I have come across’ and were ‘all decent, good-hearted men, though some of them are very crude and rough’.59 As he watched them through their training and came to know them better, he also began to doubt whether they were very suitable for operations: ‘hardly any of them speaks Italian … only one can be said to have lived in Italy, and … they are incapable of behaving inconspicuously. They are Canadian; in other words, they shout rather than talk, sing on the least provocation, drink rather excessively, and hunt women perpetually.’60
None of those six would go on operations before the Italian surrender, but three of them would parachute later into German-occupied Italy to work with SOE missions attached to Italian partisans. Their names were Ralph Vetere, Peter Lizza and Frank Fusco.61 SOE also interviewed in Canada a young man called Giovanni Di Lucia. Born in Ortona, Abruzzo, in 1913, ‘John’ Di Lucia had moved to Niagara Falls as a boy and later graduated in romance languages from New York’s University of Rochester. It was at Niagara Falls, in April 1942, that Max Salvadori spoke to him. ‘Produced good impression,’ Salvadori wrote down:
Seems to be honest, upright, of good morals, hardworking, decided, sincerely convinced in the righteousness of the cause of the United Nations. He also seems to be still young for his age … Thinks more as [an] Italian than as [a] Canadian, is deeply anti-Fascist. Speaks Italian as a native.62
Dropped into northern Italy in early 1944 to work with local partisans, though not as an SOE agent, Di Lucia was captured soon afterwards. The Germans, before killing him, let him pen a last letter. ‘I am giving my life for a good cause,’ he wrote to his parents. ‘This was expected and I am ready to face it. I die happily. May God bless and protect both of you.’63
In October 1941, Frank Nelson confessed ‘the complete failure which we have so far made of Italy … We have no Italians under training … we have so far entirely failed to recruit any suitable type of Italian.’ In defence he pointed out that,
as Martelli and others discovered themselves, the type of Italian internee in England is completely unsuited for our kind of work; and it was the experience of the Fleming Mission to the Middle East early this year that generally speaking the Italian soldiers who were taken prisoner were for the most part perfectly content to remain prisoners, and showed no desire whatever, either for money or for any other reason, to return to their country in an adventurous capacity.64
But at that moment there was one light on the horizon. It took the shape of a fifty-year-old Italian anti-Fascist who had contacted SOE after surfacing suddenly in neutral Lisbon among thousands of refugees seeking escape from Axis-dominated Europe. Sporting spectacles, a grey goatee and a serious expression, he carried a fake Polish passport with forged visas and stamps, was accompanied by his formidable Anglo-Italian wife, and had recently escaped from France where he had lived in exile for more than a decade. His name was Emilio Lussu.
Notes
1 ‘Italy’, Sir Frank Nelson to F. T. Davies, 3 December 1940, TNA HS 6/885.
2 Captain Andrew Croft quoted in R. Bailey, Forgotten Voices of the Secret War (London: Ebury Press, 2008), p. 19.
3 ‘Note of Interview’, TNA HS 9/518/5.
4 J. McCaffery, ‘No Pipes or Drums’.
5 In December 1940, Martelli had felt that SOE might find ‘perhaps 20 or 30’ suitable candidates in Britain. G. Martelli to Sir Frank Nelson, 19 December 1940, TNA HS 6/885.
6 ‘Report on Recruiting of Italians’, by G. Martelli, 9 January 1941, TNA HS 6/885. Martelli explained that the men he had interviewed ‘fell into two categories’: ‘(a) Anglicised Italians with no interest in politics, most of them with family or business ties in this country, and not of the adventurous or idealistic type’; and ‘(b) Jewish refugees, most of them of the middle-class intellectual type – e.g. students, lawyers, teachers and doctors – who came to England after the passing of the racial laws in Italy (in 1938) and hoped to settle down peacefully in this country’. Men of both types had expressed themselves willing ‘to do anything for England, but I received the impression that, with few exceptions, their apparent willingness derived from what they thought was expected of them, rather than from genuine enthusiasm’.
7 ‘I find that the great majority of the men here do not wish to go abroad or take any more active part in the war,’ reads one frustrated report, drawn up in July 1941, after a visit to look through Italians in a Pioneer Corps camp outside London. ‘It is better than internment for they enjoy the greater liberties and can get home quite often. I trust that it will be realised that I have had to waste a great deal of time contacting men who have proved themselves of this type and so useless for our requirements.’ ‘270 Coy AMPC (Italians) Burnham Slough: Individual Reports’, report by Lance-Corporal E. R. Saunders, 19 July 1941, TNA HS 6/888.
8 Sir Walter Monckton to G. Jebb, 24 April 1941, TNA HS 9/1185/2. For SOE, that reasoning missed the point. ‘Surely the most disastrous aspect of the publicity given to the Picchi episode’, wrote George Logie, then head of SOE’s Italian desk, ‘is that any Italians whom we may in future enlist from the Pioneer Corps or Internment Camps at once become marked men among their fellow pioneers or internees. If, for instance, we now recruit a man from the Pioneer Corps the whole of the rest of the Pioneer Corps will assume that he has gone for parachute training … Surely Sir Walter Monckton must realise that publicity such as this must endanger the lives of other trainees and their families in Italy.’ G. K. Logie to D. L. J. Perkins, 6 May 1941, TNA HS 9/1185/2.
9 H. G. Crawshaw to D. L. J. Perkins, 17 June 1941, TNA HS 6/884.
10 ‘Report from Inverlair. 4.10.41’, TNA HS 9/1218/2
.
11 ‘Local Acting Unpaid L/Cpl Purisiol, R.’, note extracted from report of 13 October 1942, TNA HS 9/1218/2.
12 Chief Instructor to Commandant, 30 April 1941, TNA HS 6/884.
13 ‘Report from O.C. STS No. 2’, 22 March 1941, TNA HS 6/884.
14 Telephone message from Lieutenant-Colonel Munn, Commandant, Beaulieu Area, 29 April 1941, TNA HS 6/884.
15 Pilot Officer H. G. Crawshaw to D. L. J. Perkins, 17 June 1941, TNA HS 6/884.
16 ‘General Report’ by J. Dobrski, 15 April 1941, TNA HS 6/884.
17 ‘Recruits’, Pilot Officer H. G. Crawshaw to D. L. J. Perkins, 14 April 1941, TNA HS 6/884.
18 One of Thornhill’s officers, the writer Christopher Sykes, would remember him as ‘amiable, garrulous [and] indiscreet … an indefatigable busybody’. Thornhill was also the man who would save the life of a depressed Orde Wingate, the future Chindit commander, while both were staying at Cairo’s Continental Hotel in 1941. Hearing strange noises in the next-door room, Thornhill alerted the manager. They forced the door and found Wingate in a pool of blood, having stabbed himself in the throat with a hunting knife. ‘When I hear a feller lock a door, I don’t think anything about it,’ Thornhill is said to have explained afterwards, ‘and if I hear a feller fall down, that’s his affair, but when I hear a feller lock his door and then fall down – it’s time for action.’ C. Sykes, Orde Wingate (London Collins, 1959), pp. 329, 331.
19 Some of this work had some success. ‘Your leaflets fell on Bardia,’ one captured Italian colonel told his interrogators. ‘They have a very demoralising effect on the troops because they read them and come to the officers for explanation. We have no convincing arguments against the truth.’ Quoted in H. Dalton to Prime Minister, 7 February 1941, TNA HS 3/189. It was one thing in 1940–1 to prove to Italian prisoners that they had lost a few battles; it was quite another to persuade them that the Axis would lose the war. Prisoners burned the leaflets handed around in the camps, while Thornhill’s attempts to aim a pro-Allied newspaper at the 45,000 Italian civilians living in Egypt proved similarly ineffective. One plan was to take control of a local Fascist newspaper, the Italian-language Il Giornale d’Oriente, and reissue it as an anti-Fascist one. ‘The paper was a complete failure,’ recalled one of Thornhill’s assistants. In its first week, sales ‘fell from 2,200 to 300’. P. Vittorelli to E. Lussu, 26 March 1942, TNA HS 6/821.
20 ‘Memorandum on Anti-Italian Propaganda in the Middle East’ by Colonel C. Thornhill and F. Stark, 15 August 1940, TNA FO 371/29936. For more on the Italian work of SO1 in the Middle East and the endeavour to raise a free Italian force, see: K. Federowich, ‘Propaganda and Political Warfare: The Foreign Office, Italian POWs and the Free Italy Movement, 1940–43’, in B. Moore and K. Federowich (eds), Prisoners of War and their Captors in World War II (Oxford: Berg, 1996). Despite the creation of PWE, SOE would continue, in the Middle East, to draft and disseminate anti-Italian propaganda for months to come. By 1942, the responsible SOE department was known as the Directorate of Special Propaganda (DSP) and had the stated purpose of recruiting ‘active supporters of the Allied cause’ via propaganda that appeared not to emanate from any British source. Methods of dissemination included radio broadcasts, leaflets and rumours. The DSP set-up included a little Italian section that made radio broadcasts from Jerusalem and drafted leaflets and pamphlets for dropping by the RAF.
21 ‘[A]ll my intelligence officers are of [the] opinion that it is most unlikely that sufficient Italians of the right calibre can be found in Egypt,’ Wavell telegraphed London. It would require ‘time and care’ to ensure the reliability of any prisoners, while ‘very few’ of the Italian civilians living in Egypt were of ‘pronounced anti-Fascist opinion’. General Sir Archibald Wavell to Chief of the Imperial General Staff, cipher telegram, 23 December 1940, TNA WO 193/617.
22 D. Hart-Davis, Peter Fleming: A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), p. 240.
23 War Office to General Sir Archibald Wavell, cipher telegram, 9 January 1941, TNA WO 193/617.
24 ‘Minute I’, H. Dalton to G. Jebb, 23 January 1941, TNA HS 6/903.
25 ‘Minute II’, H. Dalton to G. Jebb, 23 January 1941, TNA HS 6/903, Although previously published accounts of Yak Mission have suggested that Fleming’s team was composed of half a dozen or so officers each accompanied by his batman, contemporary paperwork indicates that, by mid-March 1941, it had been authorised to become a force of some size and substance, including seven officers, a sergeant-major, a quartermaster sergeant, four drivers, two cooks, two clerks, three signallers, a three-man detachment of Royal Engineers, and a thirty-strong platoon of soldiers.
26 Cipher telegram, G. Pollock to SOE London, 21 March 1941, TNA HS 3/197.
27 Hart-Davis, Peter Fleming, pp. 248–9.
28 ‘Italian Recruits from America’, G. Taylor to G. Jebb, 4 December 1941, TNA 6/905.
29 Quoted in ‘Colonel Donovan’, Sir Frank Nelson to G. Jebb, 8 February 1941, TNA HS 8/118.
30 Copy of cipher telegram, H. Dalton to General Sir Archibald Wavell, 5 April 1941, TNA HS 3/146.
31 A thirteenth volunteer had accompanied the party across the Atlantic. This was Charles Formosa, a 32-year-old Maltese from Canada who had been working until recently for the Enemy Aliens Department of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. A British citizen, Formosa had refused to associate with Italians and insisted on travelling separately from the others. Unlike them, he was also willing to be trained at once. In the end, SOE felt he was unsuitable for its work but sent him to Malta and found him a job with the Maltese Police. TNA HS 9/527.
32 D. Garnett, The Secret History of PWE: The Political Warfare Executive (London: St Ermin’s Press, 2002), p. 139. Four of the party would be assessed as doing particularly well in India. One was a trained doctor, 32-year-old Lucio Tarchiani, who had fought in France in 1940 and been the outstanding member of the group from the start. The other three were Americo Biasini, a lamp-maker in his early twenties; Luigi Ceccarelli, a cook in his forties who had fought in the First World War; and Albino Zattoni, aged about thirty, who had worked as a newspaperman in the United States and fought in Spain. The rest of the party, however, were considered as unsatisfactory in India as they had been during their time with SOE. One, Osvaldo Forlani, the man who had tried to take five years off his age, vanishes from PWE’s records in the summer of 1942. It was thought that he might have died in the hot weather. For a detailed study of the party and its work in India, see K. Federowich, ‘“Toughs and Thugs”: The Mazzini Society and Political Warfare amongst Italian POWs in India, 1941–43’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 20, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 147–72.
33 Information provided by the SOE Adviser to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office.
34 Ibid.
35 Statement on the Ingrao case sent by SOE to MI5 under note dated 7 March 1942, KV 2/3172.
36 H. N. Sporborg to Sir Charles Hambro, 15 May 1943, TNA HS 6/887. Ingrao made his offer to the SOE-sponsored Mazzini Society, threatening them with ‘revelations’ but saying he would ‘settle the matter’ for $2,500. Cipher telegram, SOE New York to SOE London, 24 May 1943, TNA HS 6/887. Days later, when asked in New York by Count Carlo Sforza how much money he would consider as adequate recompense for his alleged wrongs, Ingrao upped his figure to L100,000.
37 Chicago Sunday Tribune, 12 September 1943.
38 Report by J. Hale, 7 September 1943, TNA KV 2/3712.
39 Tarchiani, who had made his way to the United States after fleeing Paris as the Germans marched in, was also the father of Lucio Tarchiani, the most impressive of the twelve-strong Italian party sent from New York to London in 1941. Helped by British funds, the Mazzini Society’s main vehicle was a weekly newssheet, the Mazzini News, with a modest circulation that began in February 1941 at 2,000 copies and by October had grown to 5,000, while its most capable members toured the country giving talks.
40 ‘Interim Report on Italians in the U.S.A.’, 31 December 1941, TNA HS 8/42.
41 Cipher telegram, SOE New York to SOE London, November 1941, TNA HS 8/88; report, SOE New York to SOE London, 19 November 1941, TNA HS 8/88; cipher telegram, SOE New York to SOE London, 19 November 1941, TNA HS 8/88; ‘I. B.’ to ‘Drew-Brook’, 19 November 1941, TNA HS 8/88.
42 Major F. M. G. Glyn to M. Coit, 4 January 1942, TNA HS 8/88.
43 Section 3 (‘J. D. P.’) to Sections 2 and 35A, 23 December 1941, TNA HS 8/88.
44 Cipher telegram, SOE New York to SOE London, 27 December 1941, TNA HS 8/88.
45 Section 35A (‘I. B.’) to Section 3 (‘J. D. P.’), 24 December 1941, TNA HS 8/88.
46 Report (‘Max William Salvadori, with alias Emmett Williams’) by E. P. O’Neil (FBI field office, San Antonio, Texas), 25 February 1942, quoting letter dated 20 February 1942 from L. T. McCollister (Border Patrol, McAllen, Texas), Bureau file 100-893, FBI Archives.
47 Ibid.
48 Report (‘Max William Salvadori’) by W. J. Goodwin (FBI headquarters, Washington, DC), 11 July 1941, quoting undated letter from L. T. McCollister (Border Patrol, McAllen, Texas), Bureau file 100-2769, FBI Archives.
49 British Security Coordination: The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas 1940–45 (London: St Ermin’s Press, 1998), p. 435. See also H. Montgomery Hyde, The Quiet Canadian: The Secret Service Story of Sir William Stephenson (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962), pp. 228–9.
50 ‘Peter’ (M. Salvadori) to ‘David’ (C. Dansey), 14 November 1940, Salvadori papers. This was also a game, as Salvadori told Dansey, that had managed to secure him an Italian passport from the Italian Embassy in Washington, DC, ‘which may enable me to get in touch with unfriendly people: is there anything I can do in making use of it?’ One course of action, Salvadori thought, might be to ‘make the attempt to go back to the Old Country [i.e. Italy]. It would be impossible for me to say what exactly I could achieve there and how long I could stay, but perhaps it would be worth trying.’ Another could be to ‘go to some country which is not the Old Country. I would prefer it because I could remain with my family.’ In the end, it seems, Salvadori had little need of the passport.
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