Another area that struck Cairo as worth exploring was the potential of one or two members of Giustizia e Libertà found among Egypt’s Italian community. The most able seemed to be Paolo Vittorelli. A Jew born in Alexandria in 1915, he had been brought up and schooled in Egypt and had studied at the Sorbonne. He had met Carlo Rosselli in Paris and joined Giustizia e Libertà, which had sent him back to Egypt to raise funds among the Italians living there. Stranded in Egypt by Italy’s entry into the war, he had immediately contacted the British and been put to work reading Italian newspapers, monitoring Italian radio broadcasts and penning anti-Italian propaganda. Vittorelli impressed Cairo. He was keen and he seemed to have contacts. Among the pre-war Giustizia e Libertà members whom he said he might be able to contact in Italy was Carlo Levi, whose recollections of confino in the mid-1930s would be published as Christ Stopped at Eboli. Others were Levi’s mistress, Paola Olivetti, and a lawyer in Rome, Achille Corona, who would become a leading member of Italy’s post-war Socialist Party. Cairo also liked the sound of Giustizia e Libertà, describing it to London as a movement ‘with wide anti-Fascist ramifications before the war’ and potentially ‘of enormous value’.24
Reading Cairo’s incoming messages, SOE officers in London were less positive. Experience and the testimonies of men like Emilio Lussu had suggested that Giustizia e Libertà was now ‘completely broken up’ in Italy and ‘a movement which really no longer existed’, Cairo was told.25 ‘We know several who belonged to it in the days when it was active and who share our view,’ Cecil Roseberry added. ‘There is no central direction and organisation for maintaining contact with people inside Italy … [W]e see no evidence that this group is re-organising itself either in Italy or anywhere outside.’26 As for Vittorelli, Roseberry passed along Lussu’s view that he was ‘well meaning and intelligent but inexperienced … [Lussu’s] opinion may be summed up in his own words “I would employ him to write an article but not to edit a newspaper”.’27
Cairo made one attempt to see if any Giustizia e Libertà groups were still active in Italy. In the summer of 1942 and in the guise of a newspaper correspondent, Vittorelli’s brother was dispatched to neutral Istanbul to gather intelligence and establish links with Italy. His mission did not last long as he was quickly expelled by the Turks ostensibly for being Jewish, though it seems that he may not have been the right choice for Turkey for other reasons as well. ‘You ask for our recommendations concerning the type of man for the job,’ SOE’s Istanbul office, evidently irritated, told Cairo after fielding the young man’s visit:
He should be: not too young, not a Jew, able to speak French and possibly English, have the necessary knowledge and experience to live up to the cover story he adopts, have some experience or instruction in underground work, be completely under the control of our organisation, be a good mixer and a good listener, and have the right ideas about punctuality. He should in addition be given a ‘sound’ passport which the Turks will respect.28
Cairo also tried to get a man into Italy via Istanbul. The key protagonist of this idea was an Italian businessman whom the war had stranded in Persia where he had gone to buy cotton. His name was Lauro Laurenti, he said, and he came to SOE’s attention in February 1942 after approaching British officials in Tehran and offering his services as a committed anti-Fascist. A plan developed for SOE to help set him up in Istanbul from where, under his businessman’s cover, he would make commercial trips to Italy. Everything seemed to start off well. Laurenti arrived in Istanbul in June and settled down to establishing his cover. In the autumn he left on his first trip to Italy. In November he returned with news that he had contacted Gioacchino Malavasi, an anti-Fascist Milanese lawyer with good Catholic and socialist contacts. Malavasi, Laurenti said, was keen on organising sabotage and subversion and might even be able to win the support of monarchists and the army, though he could do with some money to print clandestine newspapers and pamphlets and would welcome some explosives and other devices. Laurenti also claimed to be in touch with Italian Intelligence, who, he said, had mentioned the possibility of putting him in contact with one of their clandestine radio operators in Syria. Unable to corroborate any of this and always dubious about Laurenti’s motives, SOE began to wonder if it should persevere with him. The problem solved itself. In December Laurenti left Istanbul for another visit to Italy, but his contact with SOE soon fell away and that was the end of that scheme, too.
Another plan, which involved one of SOE’s recruits from East Africa, sought to take advantage of an official exchange of captured sick and wounded. The recruit that Cairo had in mind was Giovanni Capra, an Italian in his early thirties who had spent most of his life in France and much of his youth engaged in serious work for the French Communist Party, helping form cells in Alsace, Belgium and Luxembourg. Expelled from France in 1935 for communist activities, he had returned to Italy and promptly been conscripted into the Italian Army and sent to Abyssinia. Demobilised in 1937, he stayed in Addis Ababa, working as a hospital orderly and opening three small shops selling shoes, before being mobilised again in 1940 and put to work in a military hospital. Now, having been found in Abyssinia by SOE, he suggested that he might be able to get sent back to Italy as a nurse accompanying repatriated Italian wounded.
Cairo liked this idea. It liked the look of Capra too. ‘This man is a Communist and an enthusiastic talker who would probably carry conviction among the skilled labourer type,’ reads a study of him by Alexander Kennedy, Cairo’s medical officer. ‘He feels a little too intellectual for sabotage and that he would be most useful as a Fifth Columnist, for which I too consider he would be quite suitable … He is by nature an intriguer and, if he found employment in Italy, might work quite well for his employer, if sustained by the knowledge that he had a secondary purpose.’ In the end, however, that scheme was abandoned when the prospects of an exchange receded and Capra declined to go home by riskier means. ‘In spite of his experience of mental diseases,’ Kennedy observed, ‘he is not prepared to feign insanity himself.’29 A year later he was released by SOE and settled down to a quiet life in Cairo, where he worked as a nurse, married, and set himself up as a chiropodist.
Another plan that Cairo considered was for a man to be sent to Switzerland to work into Italy from there. Again it was an idea tailored to the qualities of one of its East African recruits. This man was 29-year-old Edouard Tridondani. Born and brought up on the shores of Lake Geneva, he was ‘really more Swiss than Italian’, SOE felt.30 He had also been orphaned from the age of five: his Italian father, a surveyor, had died in the First World War and his mother, who was Swiss, in 1918. After school in Montreux, Tridondani had studied architecture at the University of Lausanne before taking a job as an engineer in Montreux’s Ford garage. Then his Italian nationality saw him conscripted into the Italian Army in 1934 and, the following year, sent out to Africa. He had been there ever since. Leaving the army in 1937, Tridondani had lived and worked in Khartoum and Alexandria before being put back into uniform in 1940 and attached to an anti-aircraft battery with which he fought against the British at Keren. SOE came across him when, after the Italian defeat in East Africa, he had left the army again and was working in Eritrea as a clerk in the new Asmara office of the British Overseas Airways Corporation. Noting Tridondani’s ‘unhappy childhood’ and that he ‘seemed to have become embittered with a life which has taken a different course from what he had planned’, SOE came to see him as quietly impressive, secure and sound. ‘Instead of settling down to the comfortable existence of architect in Switzerland, [he] was obliged to fight for a cause which is repugnant to his nature,’ one officer wrote of him. ‘I have the feeling that [he] is sincere when he states that his sole ambition is to do his share in the Allied cause.’31
Cairo’s idea was to provide Tridondani with a real or faked Swiss passport that he could use to return to Switzerland. If a passport could not be secured, he would parachute into France and try to smuggle himself over the border. Then, once in Switzerland,
he would ‘go into the mountains’ near the Italian frontier where he would set up a clandestine wireless link and attempt to get in touch with friendly contacts inside Italy.32 Tridondani had said that he had good connections, including a friend in the wireless business and a wine-selling uncle who travelled between Switzerland and Italy, while he himself knew the frontier from mountaineering and skiing in the area before the war. Ultimately, however, this scheme, too, came to nothing. Cairo found it impossible to get him a real Swiss passport – it seems they even tried to buy one on the local black market – while the plan to drop him into France was quashed by SOE in London. ‘One is always reluctant to decide not to use a willing and capable recruit,’ Cecil Roseberry informed Cairo. ‘A well disposed Swiss whose papers enabled him to live openly is always a welcome addition. But we do not believe that anybody can enter Switzerland and remain above ground with faked papers.’33
This was not the end of Tridondani’s SOE career. Anxious not to waste him, Roseberry offered him to SOE’s DF Section, which helped organise safe houses and escape lines. A job with DF, Roseberry thought, might make better use of his language skills, since French was his native tongue and his Italian was indifferent. Flown to Lagos and then shipped to England for further training, Tridondani lost his luggage en route and arrived ‘very browned off with so much waiting about and only the few clothes he had bought in Freetown and very little money’. By now more than a year had passed since he had volunteered for SOE. In London he was asked if he was still willing to do clandestine work. ‘I suggested he might have changed his mind after all these months,’ recorded the man who asked the question. ‘To which he replied he had waited fifteen months already and he wasn’t changing his mind now.’34
After being commissioned as a British Army officer and receiving the nom de guerre of Pierre Dareme, Tridondani parachuted twice into southern France on missions for DF. His first mission saw him successfully test a new escape line to the Pyrenees and return, safe and sound, to Britain. On his second mission he was caught. SOE heard later that he had been arrested at a bus stop in Perpignan in April 1944 when his self-forged identity card failed to pass muster. It never learned what happened to him after that. His date of arrest came to be recorded as his date of death and his nom de guerre – not his real name – is carved into a panel on Surrey’s Brookwood Memorial, which commemorates missing British personnel from the Second World War. But in 2012, research for this book found that Tridondani appears to have been put aboard a prison-train leaving the French deportation camp at Compiègne for Germany in May 1944. German documents were then located, showing that he had ended up in a concentration camp east of Hannover. This was Watenstedt, a satellite of a larger camp at Neuengamme. These documents also led to a grave. For close to seventy years, Edouard Tridondani has been buried in a marked but misnamed plot in the cemetery of Jammertal in Salzgitter-Lebenstedt. He had died in Watenstedt of ‘heart weakness’ – surely the result of conditions in the camp – on 4 March 1945.35
Yet another idea with which Cairo toyed in 1942 was the preparation of two- and three-man teams for inserting into Italian territory by submarine. These teams would be made up of the pick of its East African recruits. Cairo was keen and had reached the point of pencilling in names when, from London, Cecil Roseberry intervened. He was worried that there was a danger of Cairo launching ‘single-handed operations’ simply ‘in the hope of building up something’ due to a belief that ‘a start has to be made’.36
‘The field of recruitment for Italy is narrower than ever and we must regard the material in hand as possibly irreplaceable,’ Roseberry told Cairo, warning them off the idea. ‘Not only must we therefore not risk it on forlorn hopes, but it must be made available wherever it can be put to the greatest use.’ He also doubted the wisdom of moving young men in teams around Italy. ‘This is workable in occupied countries with a friendly population and a good deal of unemployment; but it is difficult to fit a team into the daily life of a country at war where every man is – or should be – fully employed or enlisted and where every man’s hand is against the possible agent.’37 In the SOE office in Cairo, this counsel hit home. The idea of teams faded away and none was ever dispatched. Officers confessed afterwards that they had felt ‘certain risks had to be taken in order to get the wheel turning. In other words we were looking at the position as was the case in London in June 1940.’38
Unfortunately, there were other men hatching plots in Cairo who were less inclined to be cautious. In the summer of 1942, MI6 officers in the city asked SOE for the loan of an Italian wireless operator. They had an agent of their own who was ready to go into Sicily, they explained, but he lacked the skills necessary to work a wireless set. When word of the proposal was telegraphed to Baker Street, it was received with alarm. Learning that MI6 intended for the men to go ashore with no local contacts and no pre-arranged safe house, Roseberry recorded that it seemed ‘more or less a suicide job’.39 Then the MI6 plan ‘was put forward as being one of high importance’ and SOE ‘reluctantly agreed’ to help out. After that, MI6 in Cairo took charge of planning and mounting the operation and SOE ‘was neither advised nor consulted as to the details’.40 Available British documents do not reveal the purpose of the operation or why it was deemed so important at that moment. (If they survive, all MI6 documents relating to it – it was codenamed ‘Washleather’ – remain classified.) Possibly it was conceived as a way of gathering better intelligence about Sicily’s airfields at a time when the ‘Pedestal’ convoy was poised to come within range of the island.
The SOE wireless operator who found himself suddenly earmarked for Sicily was 31-year-old Antonio Gallo. Born in the village of Sant’Elena, in Veneto, about thirty miles southwest of Venice, he had worked for a time in Vercelli, in a cotton mill, before being called up into the Italian Army in 1935 and sent out to East Africa. Demobilised as a sergeant in 1936 once the campaign was over, he had stayed on in Abyssinia and worked for a time for the National Bank before opening a garage and petrol station in Moggio, outside Addis Ababa, which he settled down to running with his brother, another de-mobbed ex-serviceman. In 1940, Gallo married a woman living in Verona: he was still in Africa at the time and the marriage took place by proxy. SOE found him in Addis Ababa at the end of 1941. Training followed, including instruction in demolitions, parachuting, and the use of a wireless set. By July 1942 he was earmarked to be the wireless operator in a three-man team with Domenico Baroncini and Luciano Tamoni, the two young communists who had deserted to the British while serving with the Italian Army at Gondar.
A letter handwritten that summer by Gallo survives among SOE’s files, addressed to the British officer who he thought was in charge of him. Writing in Italian, Gallo says that he has some knowledge of Sicily and Sardinia but prefers the idea of working much further north: ‘Ferrara, Rovigo, Padova, Treviso, Verona or the province of Vercelli in the Biellese’. He adds that a suitable profession for his future cover story might be that of storekeeper or accounting clerk. He also writes that he would prefer to work in a pair with Giovanni Scudeller, the ex-boxer from Verona, ‘who seems to be an excellent element and has a similar personality to mine … [H]e can contribute a lot if he is properly guided and understood, as he doesn’t lack intelligence or courage. In addition to this, he is from my region, which makes us understand each other better.’41
For SOE and MI6 officers in Cairo, however, Gallo’s preferences were less important than the simple fact that he was the only trained Italian-speaking wireless operator available for operations. Soon he was under the wing of the MI6 office in Cairo. He was also now teamed with the MI6 agent whom he was to accompany into Sicily. This man’s name was Emilio Zappalà. A Sicilian born in Catania in June 1906, Zappalà had worked for MI6 in East Africa where, after the fall of Abyssinia, he had helped to identify Italians who might be suitable for British recruitment. One of these, a man who had known Zappalà in Addis Ababa since the late 1930s, would remember his friend as ‘violently a
nti-Fascist’.42
Whatever the urgency may have been for Zappalà’s mission that summer, he and Gallo would only begin their journey to Sicily at the beginning of October when they were flown from Cairo to Malta. They had also been issued with kit: a 9-millimetre Beretta pistol each and spare ammunition; a wireless set together with a novel, Umberto Fracchia’s Il perduto amore, the pages of which were to be used for encoding and decoding wireless messages; two hand grenades; a range of fake identity cards; a 1:500,000 map of Sicily; two ‘L’ tablets, which were tiny capsules of lethal poison to be bitten and broken if they felt the need to kill themselves; a small number of diamonds; a large amount of Italian lire; dozens of gold coins; and a variety of other gold items suitable for exchanging or melting down, including a gold compass, two gold watches, a gold bracelet, a gold-plated pen, and two gold rings, one of them set with a sapphire. On the evening of 14 October, with most of these items crammed into a pair of suitcases, Gallo and Zappalà were the two men in civilian clothes who went ashore on eastern Sicily from Pat Norman’s submarine, Una, two months after its earlier trip to land the ‘Why Not’ party. According to SOE files, the landing was made close to the home of Zappalà’s sister.
The precise spot where Zappalà and Gallo landed lies between Stazzo and Pozzillo, a pair of little fishing villages north of Catania, on the way to Taormina. As they closed on the coast, the two men spotted lights moving on the shore and Gallo apparently panicked, wanting to shout and give himself up. Zappalà calmed him. They pressed on. Once through the surf and on to the beach they hid the dinghy. Then they began to walk inland, heading directly west, aiming for Zappalà’s old village of Santa Venerina. Below the eastern slopes of Mount Etna, midway between Catania and Taormina, Santa Venerina lies just to the west of today’s main coastal road. The terrain between the sea and the village is mostly coastal plain.
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