Target

by Roderick Bailey

  2100. Surfaced in position 90° [from] Stazzo [and] 2.5 miles [from the shore]. Moon had set. Calm moderately dark night. Ideal conditions for a landing. Numerous lights to be seen throughout the towns and villages of the district. Very poor blackout.

  2114. Having fixed position of submarine accurately, opened fore hatch, placed Folbot and landing party on casing. Closed [on] the coast at slow speed.

  2128. Disembarked Folbot and party. No hitches occurred. Folbot last seen on correct course making good headway. Position of disembarkation 37 38.2N. 15 13E. approximately 2,000 yards [and] 100° from landing position.

  2140. Started to withdraw to seaward slowly. Water was phosphorescent.10

  The men paddling ashore this time were the two men dressed as civilians who had gone aboard Una at Malta. Later Norman added that they ‘embarked and set out in a confident and orderly manner, and as Una slowly withdrew to seaward the shore was watched and it appeared that the landing had been undetected and entirely successful’.11 One of the men was the first SOE-trained trained agent to set foot in Italy since Fortunato Picchi twenty months before. Recruited in Italian East Africa during a fresh sweep for volunteers in late 1941, he also had the distinction of having embarked on a mission just as dangerously ambitious as Operation ‘Why Not’.

  By the end of 1941, months had passed since Peter Fleming’s dispiriting experiences among Italian prisoners in Egypt. In that time British and Commonwealth forces had captured almost all of East Africa. More prisoners had been taken. Tens of thousands of Italian civilians, too, were now in British hands, having been rounded up in the Italian colonies of Eritrea, Abyssinia and Somalia where they had gone to live and work. But with the wider conflict still going more or less disastrously for the Allies, few of these prisoners or internees seemed very pro-British. Even anti-Fascists among them found reasons to wonder about switching sides, after the occupying British authorities, finding themselves badly undermanned in Eritrea, decided to permit local Fascist administrators to remain in the saddle. This was not exactly ‘a shining example of our intentions towards Fascism’, as one SOE staff officer put it.12

  Other difficulties met in the Middle East and Africa included finding the opportunity to recruit promising volunteers before the military shipped them off to camps in India and Britain. Also there was the ongoing problem posed by the fact that recruiting prisoners for warlike purposes was prohibited by international law. SOE knew that captured soldiers could be released for good conduct and subsequently recruited. It also knew that the protecting power, the neutral nation that monitored the treatment of prisoners, was legally bound to inform a soldier’s government of his release, information that might seriously endanger the relatives in Italy of any ex-prisoner prepared to be an SOE agent. Eventually an unofficial but effective solution was found: when a good candidate was located, officers would make a ‘clerical error’ and simply ‘forget’ to notify the protecting power that he had been released.13

  Despite these difficulties, men came forward, names were taken, and suitable volunteers began to be selected. The first twenty or so arrived in Cairo from East Africa in January 1942. Others, including ex-prisoners from POW camps, followed in later months. In all about seventy Italians found in the Middle East and Africa would pass through SOE’s hands. In age they ranged from early twenties to mid-fifties. Some were communists. Some were socialists. Some were Jews. The majority were civilian internees, though many of these had seen recent military service. Some were soldiers who had deserted from Italian units during recent fighting. Several had experience of active anti-Fascist work in Abyssinia and Eritrea, printing underground pamphlets, for example, or assisting the liberating British and Commonwealth forces. One or two might best be described as adventurers, men driven by an appetite for excitement or self-enrichment.

  Training came next at specialist SOE schools in Cairo, in Palestine, and on the shores of the Red Sea. Physical fitness was tested and improved. The men were instructed in unarmed combat and techniques of silent killing. They learned to handle various weapons and explosives and were taught to sabotage different targets, from factories to railway lines and locomotives. Some were taught to parachute. A few were trained in Morse and the use of wireless sets.

  The haste with which many had been recruited told immediately, however. As they passed through the schools, most came to be seen as unsuitable for behind-the-lines work. Some were assessed as poorly suited temperamentally to the demands of what might await them. Some were motivated and mentally strong but insufficiently fit to cope with the physical training. Some turned out not to be keen at all. A few caused problems, especially as their training continued, the months began to pass, and they became bored, impatient and restless. One recruit asked one day for an interview. His name was Giuseppe Bucco. Born in Naples, he was an army doctor who had previously been in charge of a fever hospital in Addis Ababa and claimed to be a nephew of Carmine Senise, Arturo Bocchini’s successor as chief of Mussolini’s police. ‘He told me that he had had enough of us,’ recorded the SOE officer who spoke to him.

  He explained: ‘I cannot continue to live like this. It is doing me great harm mentally and physically. If I cannot be given work, or cannot be allowed to move freely in Egypt, then I must be given the opportunity to brutalise myself with drink and women. If I do not do this I will become neurasthenic.’

  I asked: ‘How much will be necessary for you to prevent such a happening?’

  He replied: ‘I will need Le. 100 a month, because I will wish to do it properly.’

  I brought the discussion to an end by asking what would be his reaction if our roles were reversed and I was an Italian prisoner; and by informing him that I had never heard such a piece of brazen effrontery.14

  Two recruits, who were discovered to be regular takers of cocaine and, when that was lacking, hashish, were re-interned when they were suspected of plotting to make a break for Eritrea. Others were found alternative employment. Some were loaned to MI6 or British field security units. One, a former aircraft mechanic, went to work in the garage of SOE’s Cairo headquarters, while another, a First World War veteran in his fifties who had run a restaurant in Addis Ababa, cooked for the others while they trained.

  Other recruits were assessed as better suited to the tasks that SOE had in mind. There was Domenici Baroncini, for example, a communist whose father had apparently been murdered by the Fascists, and his friend Luciano Tamoni. Both men were army conscripts in their early twenties. They had been serving together at Gondar in Abyssinia in 1941 when they had voluntarily gone over to the British lines, taking with them military plans and a machinegun. Then there was Guido De Benedetti. Educated, Jewish, and hailing from Turin, he was in his late twenties and had gone to work in Africa in 1938 to escape persecution at home. Six years later, in 1944, he would parachute back into German-occupied Italy to work with an SOE mission attached to local partisans.

  Another was Giovanni Scudeller. Born in July 1914, he was a mechanic and firefighter from Verona who had gone out to Africa with the Italian Army in 1937. When SOE found him in 1941 he was in Addis Ababa, where he was employed as a civilian mechanic once again and involved with an anti-Fascist group. Scudeller was a big man, an ex-boxer, strong and athletic. One SOE observer assessed him as having ‘a genuine loathing of the Italian political regime, but I do not think he has any very decided political views. He strikes me as loathing the war altogether … He has a sound solid sort of character, is very good natured, smiling and amiable.’15 Scudeller was another who would parachute into German-occupied northern Italy to work with Italian partisans. On the evening of 6 July 1944, during a nasty skirmish with German soldiers near the village of Rocca Cigliè in Cuneo, southeast of Turin, he was laying mines when one exploded prematurely and wounded him. The Germans reached him first and beat him to death with rifle butts.

  Baroncini, Tamoni, De Benedetti and Scudeller were all deserters or internees. Among the POWs who volunteered and impressed was Franco Mola,
an army medical officer in his early thirties. Captured at El Alamein, he would end up working in Cairo with Major Alexander Kennedy, a medical officer employed occasionally by SOE, who found him ‘outstanding’ and ‘of the greatest assistance’. Aside from examining agents of all nationalities due for dispatch to the field, Mola pressed hard to be allowed to ‘do something positive as an anti-Fascist’ and asked repeatedly to parachute into enemy territory. He did the training, Kennedy wrote of him, but never went, ‘and I know that his disappointment was genuine’.16 Another ex-prisoner was 23-year-old Leo Donati, a naval wireless operator captured at Addis Ababa in April 1941. Recruited in April 1943 from a POW camp in Kenya, he sailed through his wireless training and landed that autumn with an SOE team at Salerno, later doing good work as an instructor and interpreter at SOE training schools.

  Then there was Giulio Koelman. Born in the port of Taranto in October 1908, he was a petty officer in the Italian Navy and, like Donati, a trained wireless operator. SOE found him in a POW camp in Nairobi in May 1943. That October, after the Armistice, he was infiltrated through the German lines in Italy and made his way to Rome to set up and work a wireless link between the Allies and Emilio Lussu, who had finally re-entered Italy and was living in the city covertly. In January 1944, Koelman moved north to Milan to work with senior members of the Italian resistance there. In August he was arrested in Genoa. Interned in northern Italy in the notorious Nazi concentration camp at Bolzano, a transit camp for prisoners headed for Mauthausen, Dachau, Auschwitz and similar destinations, he was sent on to Germany in January 1945. SOE never heard of him again.

  In May 1943, SOE stopped searching Africa for Italians to recruit. The British authorities in the Middle East had called a halt to it, but SOE had outrun its local training facilities anyway and could not have coped with many more. Shipping them to Britain for training was an option but costly in time and resources, not least because the route went via South Africa. SOE tried it once. A party of five was sent back in early 1943 and it took two months to get them there. Their escort, an Italian-speaking corporal called Henry Boutigny, experienced another downside of the journey. On the troopship to Liverpool, one of his Italian charges, a thief by trade, stole Boutigny’s money. The culprit finally confessed when he and Boutigny met again in Milan after the war. Even in Britain the group gave Boutigny problems, when they escaped their secure Surrey quarters to go dancing one night but ran into the military police.17

  Early in 1942, Baker Street directed that its Cairo office should do more than recruit Italians. Since the Middle East was the nearest point from which operations into Italy could be launched, Cairo, it was decided, should be responsible for planning operations into southern Italy and Sicily. When it hit home in Cairo that this would mean starting from scratch since London had no contacts or information to share, officers there were stunned. ‘What were the British Embassy and the various British Secret Service organisations doing in Italy from 1922–1940???’ wrote an ‘appalled’ Hugh Seton-Watson, the future historian, who was then working for SOE in Cairo. ‘[I]f the whole resources of the British Empire have failed to obtain any confidential information from Italy during the past 18 years, then God help us.’18

  Orders were orders. Cairo began to do what it could to think up subversive schemes and ways of returning agents to Italian soil. But this, too, was to prove another problem-strewn affair. By 1942, SOE was sending agents into Western Europe with increasing regularity and comparative ease, dropping them by parachute, flying them in to landing strips, or putting them ashore by sea. Conditions in the Mediterranean were very different. The Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy had more pressing priorities, while Malta, identified early on as an excellent exit point for agents bound for Italy, the Balkans or North Africa, was soon being bombed so badly that the RAF temporarily withdrew its aircraft and the Navy sailed away its submarines. As a result, the schemes hammered out by Cairo were a strange and colourful lot, each fashioned and shaped by the quality of the slim resources to hand and the eternal conundrum of how to get men into the field.

  One of Cairo’s earliest ideas was to exploit the impending repatriation from British-conquered East Africa of tens of thousands of Italians who were being permitted to go home. In April 1942, to see what might be done, it sent a man down to Berbera, a dust-blown town in Somaliland on the southern shores of the Gulf of Aden. The man dispatched was Ernesto Ottolenghi, the ex-internee with the too-short trigger-finger whom SOE had considered ‘too good a man to be wasted’. Dispatched by London to Cairo with a commission in the British Army and the new name of Ernest Ottley, he left for Berbera with instructions to search among the assembling Italians for suitable anti-Fascists who might be prepared, on going home, to engage in factory sabotage and shelter any agents sent in later. The repatriation scheme was limited to women, children, men over sixty, and sick, wounded, and non-combatant servicemen, so these orders were a little hopeful. Ottolenghi found just a couple who seemed to have any potential.

  One of these was Ulisse La Terza. Thirty-four years old, with a toothbrush moustache and one eye fixed and staring, he was not a repatriate at all but a medical officer on the Vulcania, one of the liners sent out from Italy to bring the colonists back. Normally, he said, he lived in Rome and practised as a doctor in Perugia, specialising in radiology and physical therapy. He also claimed to be an ardent and well-connected anti-Fascist whose acquaintances included Mussolini’s mistress (he did not specify which one) and that he might be able to rig up a clandestine wireless set in his surgery and find someone local to work it. ‘Ambitious, daring, full of enthusiasm and venom’, SOE wrote of him. ‘Fond of the pleasures of life, particularly women … Prepared to die.’ He claimed to hate Fascism: the Fascists had sequestered his family’s mines and property and he wanted ‘a Free Italy’.19 By the time the Vulcania sailed for Italy in late May, La Terza had promised to do what he could for the British. He left with a set of passwords to use if he ever made contact again. He also took with him half a torn lira note to produce later as a tally. SOE held on to the other half.

  Six months later, another Italian repatriation ship, the Duilio, docked at Massawa, on the coast of Eritrea, to pick up another load of Italians bound for home. It had set sail from Italy and La Terza was on board. Amid the confusion of people getting on and off, Laurence Norris, an Intelligence Corps sergeant working undercover as a policeman, managed to get himself on to the ship by pretending to accompany a draft of repatriates. Norris spoke Italian by virtue of the fact that from 1936, after studying at the Royal College of Art, he had spent two years painting in Italy on a scholarship at the British School at Rome. Now, in a cabin that he had checked was free of hidden microphones, and after exchanging passwords and being shown half a torn lira note, he and La Terza managed to talk. Next day Norris prefaced his report of their conversation by remarking that the doctor’s story ‘sounds astounding and smacks of the melodrama of spy fiction … He has either betrayed us or is astonishingly clever – not to say lucky.’20

  La Terza had explained that after arriving back in Italy aboard the Vulcania he had become a member of the OVRA, Mussolini’s secret police, and was now on board the Duilio not as a doctor – his Red Cross position as the ship’s radiologist was just a cover – but as an OVRA agent with various clandestine missions. One of these was to murder Sergeant Edmund Gross, another of the field security NCOs whom SOE was using to sift through potential recruits. A Hungarian-born Jew and former opera singer who had studied in Italy before the war, Gross had met, quizzed and briefed La Terza when he had arrived in East Africa the first time. La Terza now revealed that he had returned from Italy with a special poison with which to kill Gross if he saw him, together with instructions to bring back proof in the form of a poisoned wineglass bearing Gross’s fingerprints. The poison was arsenic-based, Norris noted, which had ‘a delayed action of about a week … This he was supposed to administer to Sgt. Gross if he came on board.’ La Terza also had instructions to obtain
specimens of the latest British military identity cards and AB 64, the Soldier’s Service and Pay Book. But the doctor’s ‘chief mission’, Norris reported, was to get details of British minefields around Gibraltar, where the Duilio was due to stop after circling the African coast on its return journey before re-entering the Mediterranean, together with the departure dates and routes of British convoys. La Terza had then proposed to Norris that this particular mission could now be exploited in the Allies’ favour. If the British could furnish him with some misleading information, he said, then Axis submarines could be ‘lured into a trap’. To plant that information in a convincing manner, La Terza suggested that ‘a bogus British traitor’ should meet with him and an OVRA representative in Spain, in front of the largest church in La Línea, a town close to Gibraltar’s border, at seven in the evening of 30 January 1943.21

  SOE was not quite sure what to make of this. Was La Terza an unwilling enemy agent genuinely wishing to play a bizarre double game? Could it be an OVRA plot? ‘The whole set up smells,’ thought officers in London.22 Cairo, however, felt that although La Terza’s story sounded ‘rather fantastic … we are inclined to believe the man is genuine’.23 They were encouraged in this belief when it was learned through naval channels that, when the Duilio left for Italy and stopped en route at Port Elizabeth, La Terza had alerted the shore authorities to the presence of eight escaped Italian prisoners who had been hidden aboard in East Africa. Although still suspicious, SOE invited its Gibraltar office to contact La Terza when the Duilio docked and set up the January rendezvous. La Terza was duly contacted and informed that the meeting at La Línea would be kept. It was the last that SOE would see of him. When the moment arrived, the British had a man waiting outside the church. Nobody else turned up and that was the end of that.