With heavy suitcases to carry, the two agents made slow progress. A journey that they had expected to take two hours took more than four. ‘[O]nce in a while we saw workers who were going to work; they didn’t pay attention to us and neither did we to them,’ Gallo recalled:
Finally we arrived at the edge of Santa Venerina. As it was already broad daylight Zappalà talked to a woman who was coming from the village and told her in Sicilian dialect that we were smugglers. He asked if she knew of someone in the area with whom we could leave our suitcases for a few hours. The woman indicated a farmhouse not too far away … Zappalà followed her. He entered the house while I was waiting with the suitcases on the side of the road. The hospitality he asked for was turned down so he told me he was going to go to the village on his own to see his family and that he would be back in half an hour. Before he left he hid the two hand grenades in a hole close to me. I stayed in the area that he indicated and waited for him to return. He came back, in fact, and invited me to follow him in the direction of the village without saying anything else.
These were the pair’s last seconds of freedom. ‘After a few steps, the Marshal of the police, with three policemen and an officer in plain clothes, stopped us and put us under arrest.’43
The policemen, who apparently belonged to the Santa Venerina station, then gave the suitcases a cursory search, and, retracing the agents’ steps, discovered the two buried hand grenades. Soon Zappalà and Gallo found themselves in prison in Palermo and under the scrutiny of the Servizio Informazioni Militare (SIM). Set up in the 1920s, SIM was the Italian military intelligence service, a modern organisation whose activities ranged from running agents behind enemy lines to counter-espionage work. For some time its efficiency at the latter task had been greatly increased by the attachment of personnel from the Carabinieri Reali, the senior arm of the regular Italian Army that commonly acted as a military police force. Gallo’s recollections, quoted above, come from his interrogation at the hands of SIM.
The SIM officer in charge of counter-espionage in Sicily in 1942 was Major Candeloro De Leo, a 46-year-old career officer in the Carabinieri who hailed from Reggio Calabria. Posted to SIM in 1935, De Leo had been working in Palermo since 1938 after three years of counter-espionage work in Genoa. British records from 1943 describe him as ‘very active … evidently invested with considerable authority … a disciplinarian.’44 According to one of his superiors, Colonel Mario Bertacchi, De Leo was ‘particularly good at investigations and the compilation of irreproachable denunciations’.45 De Leo took charge of the interrogation of Zappalà and Gallo and questioned both men closely, exploring their lives, their dealings with the British, their reasons for returning to Italy and the purpose of their mission.
Emilio Zappalà was already known to SIM, recorded in its files as having worked for British and French Intelligence in Africa. SIM had known since 1940 that Zappalà, ‘after being in service for the [French] Deuxième Bureau in Djibouti, passed over to the [British] I.S. [Intelligence Service] in Aden, keeping the French passport that he obtained from the Deuxième Bureau under the fake name of Nerces Kenapian’. Since the summer of 1941 SIM had also known that he had been engaged in East Africa in ‘open and permanent anti-national and anti-fascist activity at the service of the English’.46
While it is possible that De Leo confronted Zappalà with his past activities, it is certain that Zappalà admitted that the British had sent him to Sicily to gather and report intelligence. His instructions, he said, were to set up a clandestine radio north of Catania, preferably in Messina, and an intelligence-gathering network across the rest of the island, extending it, if possible, to the mainland. The British had given him guidelines on what intelligence should be sought in Sicily. Detailed information was wanted about coastal defences, for example, down to the location of machineguns and mines; they wanted to know about airfields and supply dumps, local politics and morale, the identities of local commanders, German units on the island, and so on. The British had also told him that money and other material could be dropped by parachute if he requested it, and that he should expect to be put in touch with British agents in Milan and emissaries sent from Switzerland.
Zappalà gave De Leo a good deal of information. He admitted that he had assisted the British in recruiting anti-Fascists and gathering information in East Africa. He admitted, too, to working earlier for the French Deuxième Bureau in Djibouti. But he also insisted that he had done this work reluctantly – even engaging in various pro-Italian activities while employed by the British in Addis Ababa, like helping fellow Italians to escape from imprisonment – and that he had volunteered to go to Sicily with the simple aim of surrendering at the first opportunity. Indeed, he said, he had been imprisoned in East Africa for striking a British officer over a matter of honour, and had been offered his release on the condition that he agreed to participate in this mission to Sicily. ‘He accepted this proposal in order to seek vengeance,’ De Leo recorded of Zappalà’s account; ‘he thought that once Sicily was reached, he could have presented himself immediately to the Italian authorities in order to start working against English interests.’47
As for Antonio Gallo, he, too, disclosed the mission’s instructions and tried to make out that he had volunteered to work for the British merely in the hope of getting back to Italy: ‘The mirage of returning home and joining my family induced me to say yes.’ As the days passed and the pressure mounted, he, too, began to claim that he had always intended to give himself up at the earliest possible moment. But in addition, he said, he had wanted to deliver Zappalà to the Italians, as ‘a dangerous spy’ who had been ‘an acrimonious persecutor’ of his compatriots in Africa. Zappalà, Gallo added, had never said anything about wanting to give himself up and reveal everything to the Italian authorities:
Instead, he told me in front of an English lieutenant that only if we were arrested in Italy would we have to play ambiguously, making them believe we had agreed to spy for the English but without any intention of doing so … He added that if by chance we ran into one of the military guards on the coast we would have to disobey their injunctions and, if necessary, we would have to kill them.48
For De Leo, neither man was innocent. Zappalà’s statement that he had agreed to go to Sicily ‘for the sole reason of presenting himself to the Italian authorities and being at their disposition’ was ‘simply ridiculous’. De Leo listed the reasons:
1) – he never informed Gallo [about that intention], not even after having disembarked in Sicily …
2) – he prevented Gallo, when he was on the rubber dinghy close to the coast, from calling the attention of the coastal defence …
3) – he sank the dinghy as soon as they had reached the coast for the evident purpose of concealing the landing;
4) – he walked for many hours across an area in which there were many military defence detachments without feeling the need to engage with any of them;
5) – he hid the bombs;
6) – he talked about the supposed pretext only when he was caught by the police in possession of the compromising material – he could not logically have given any other version to justify his actions.
As for Gallo, De Leo considered that his actions ‘from the moment of his enrollment to the moment of the arrest’ were ‘no different’ from Zappalà’s, even if, as both men had claimed, Gallo had wanted to attract the attention of troops ashore as they neared the coast.49
By late November 1942, Gallo and Zappalà were in prison in Rome and De Leo had submitted a long report, accompanied by evidence, to the Special Tribunal. De Leo’s report recommended that the pair ‘be charged with military espionage in wartime’.50 Their case came up on 27 November. Guilty verdicts and death sentences were immediately handed down, and at dawn the following morning a firing squad of Fascist militia shot the two men in the back. The executions took place at the same spare and lonely spot within the walls of Forte Bravetta where, eighteen months earlier, Fortunato Picchi had di
ed.
After Zappalà and Gallo had left for Sicily, all that SOE heard of them was when Rome announced six weeks later that they had been captured, tried and shot. The news was picked up and reported far and wide. ‘TWO SPIES EXECUTED’, declared The Washington Post the following day. ‘Nov. 28 (AP) – The Rome radio tonight announced the execution at dawn of two men who were said to have landed from a British submarine on Sicily a month ago to commit sabotage and spy for the British.’51 Other papers printed the names.52 When he learned that the pair had been caught and killed, Sir Charles Hambro, SOE’s chief, was not pleased. SOE’s war diary – an ongoing document compiled at headquarters from incoming and outgoing messages, memos and reports – recorded that Hambro was ‘very upset at what had occurred’. He had expressed concern at ‘the quickness with which the SOE man had been sent off’ and directed that, in future, ‘no SOE personnel were to be loaned to an outside department for an operation unless SOE had previously approved the plans’.53
Summarising the known details of the mission’s demise, the war diary’s anonymous compiler added that ‘of course C could not be accused of having been careless’.54 ‘C’ stood for MI6. Available records fail to indicate whether that comment was meant ironically, but SOE had a history of friction with MI6 and its unhappiness about the handling of Antonio Gallo is clear. Later Cecil Roseberry would remark that while liaison with MI6 was made easier by the fact that he had worked for it in the field before joining SOE, he had a poor opinion of the heads of the relevant MI6 sections with whom he had dealt and of the quality of support that MI6 had provided. ‘It was sheer murder to put agents into a hostile country without knowing the conditions they must fulfil in order to satisfy at least the unavoidable controls,’ he wrote at one point, but MI6, ‘on whom SOE was expected to depend for intelligence, produced nothing helpful and, on being reproached, replied that what they got out of Italy was intelligence required by the fighting services’ and that ‘nothing came their way’ in the nature of ‘the hundred and one things which, if unheeded, would at once lead to the exposure of an infiltree’.55
In its own efforts at penetrating Fascist Italy, MI6 was never very successful, experiencing similar frustrations to SOE when searching for contacts and recruits and attempting to gather an accurate picture of what was happening there. By December 1941, Naval Intelligence officers at the Admiralty were still recording that the value of information on Italy coming from MI6 was ‘very poor indeed’.56 Throughout 1942, as the authorised history of MI6 puts it, Italy continued to prove ‘a very hard nut to crack’.57 To judge from SOE files and Italian sources, two of MI6’s agents were Amaury and Egon Zaccaria, brothers in their twenties, who were captured on 9 October 1942, hours after landing from a British submarine at a point just north of Naples. Caught in possession of money, forged documents and parts of a wireless set, they, too, tried to protest to their interrogators that they had had ulterior motives for volunteering to help the British: in their case, they claimed that they had wished to avoid internment. This statement was not believed, particularly after evidence came to light that they came from a family of known anti-Fascists. Tried in Rome by the Special Tribunal on 9 November, they were shot the following day at Forte Bravetta.58
MI6 does not emerge well from Italian reporting on the interrogations of men like Zappalà, Gallo, and the Zaccaria brothers. At best, its officers in Cairo seem to have been grossly overconfident in the ability of these agents to stay at liberty once on Italian soil. It is an image reinforced by the fate of another MI6 agent who had gone into Sicily prior to Zappalà and Gallo’s arrival on the island.
Rossi, as both British and Italian sources refer to him, appears to have been a French-speaking Italian Jew from Syria whose family lived in Tunisia, and he had gone ashore on the Sicilian coast on 7 October 1941 and been captured immediately. For months afterwards, SIM officers in Sicily made him work his wireless set to give the British the impression that he remained free and active. MI6 fell for it, to the point where Rossi was sent fresh supplies of money and instructions by submarine and two new wireless sets dropped by parachute. Only in February 1943, when Rossi seems to have succeeded in saying in one of his messages that he was working under duress, did MI6 realise what was happening.59
Not long afterwards, according to the later testimony of an Italian employed in the deception, Rossi made a bid to escape. Apparently he was being moved by car when it stopped for a break and he bolted for a wood, whereupon the escorting Carabinieri shouted at him to stop, fired a warning volley, and shot him through the head. (Since SIM had discovered by then his attempt to warn the British, it may be wondered if his death was entirely accidental.) That Italian testimony, provided by a man recorded in British files only as ‘Dr V.’, also indicates the trouble that SIM had taken until that point to ensure that the double-cross went undetected. Hundreds of messages, Dr V. claimed, had been exchanged over the wireless set. Every British request for information was telegraphed to Rome, he said, so that the main office of SIM’s counter-espionage section could draft suitable answers, while the two wireless sets dropped by parachute were used to set up in Sicily two fictional wireless stations supposedly run by Rossi. At the same time the Italians took care not to overplay their hand: ‘[T]he sending of material and money by [British] submarine was discouraged,’ Dr V. recalled, ‘so as not to expose how relatively easy it would be to land in this way on the Sicilian coast.’ He also believed that the Italians had profited handsomely from funds sent in by the British: ‘I remember one sum of a million lire.’60 Other SIM sources would estimate the final figure at ‘about 2,000,000 lire’ and state that Candeloro De Leo, who had run the Rossi double-cross, eventually turned over that cash to the Servizio Informazione Difesa. Created by die-hard Fascists, the Servizio Informazione Difesa was a post-Armistice and pro-Mussolini equivalent of SIM. De Leo became its chief.61
Future research among SIM records may yet confirm that the Italians gained more from controlling Rossi than money and wireless sets. Although no available British records reveal a concrete link between Rossi and MI6’s decision to dispatch Zappalà and Gallo, it is not impossible that the Italian authorities were alert to their imminent arrival. Dr V. recalled from the exchange of messages that the British had been wondering about sending in another wireless operator. Indeed, one German document that survives among released British files does seem to suggest that the Italians may have caught the pair as a consequence of the Rossi double-cross.
That document is a copy of a notebook discovered by British officers in an abandoned apartment in Naples after Allied forces liberated the city in October 1943. The apartment, on Via Manzoni, had recently been home to an officer of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence service, and the notebook found inside had belonged to a certain Hauptmann Wilhelm Meyer, a young Abwehr counter-intelligence officer stationed in Sicily from June 1942 until July 1943. One early set of entries in Meyer’s notebook, all in German, relates to the interrogation of each member of George Duncan’s ‘Why Not’ party. ‘NEWPY [sic], George Eric, Leutnant, N.153984,’ reads one of them; ‘ca. 8 Uhr festgenommen, schwimmend, 4½ Stund in Wasser. Verweigert zäh unter Ausfragen …’ (‘Detained about 8 o’clock, swimming, after 4½ [hours] in water. Stubbornly refuses [to speak] under interrogation …’) A few pages on there is an entry in Italian, signed by a senior Italian NCO, dated 2 November 1942:
For several days the radio that Dr De Leo mentioned has been working in Catania. This has allowed the capture near Messina of two agents of the [British] I.S. [Intelligence Service] with a radio, half a million [lire] and precious objects, landed from a submarine in the usual dinghy on the night of 14 [October] from Malta.62
Notes
1 E. Newby, Love and War in the Apennines (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1971), p. 14.
2 Captain G. Simpson, ‘HMS Una: Patrol Report No. 9 (Including Operation “Why Not”), 9–19 August 1942’, 5 September 1942, TNA ADM 236/42.
3 The 48-year-old H
ayhurst-France had been a cavalry officer in the First World War, when he had won a Military Cross for galloping along the front to gauge the enemy’s strength by being shot at. He had been farming in Essex before he was recalled to service in 1940 and recruited by SOE.
4 SOE Malta to SOE Cairo, 16 August 1942, TNA HS 3/134.
5 Captain G. Simpson, ‘HMS Una: Patrol Report No. 9 (Including Operation “Why Not”), 9–19 August 1942’, 5 September 1942, TNA ADM 236/42.
6 Newby, Love and War in the Apennines, p. 13.
7 Ibid. p. 16.
8 Captain G. Simpson, Remarks on Patrol Report, 5 November 1942, TNA ADM 199/1226.
9 Monthly Log of HM Submarine Una, October 1942, TNA ADM 173/17696.
10 Lieutenant C. Norman, Patrol Report, 26 October 1942, TNA ADM 199/1226.
11 Captain G. Simpson, Remarks on Patrol Report, 5 November 1942, TNA ADM 199/1226.
12 ‘Note on Italy’, by Major F. Carver, 18 August 1942, TNA HS 6/889.
13 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/237.
14 ‘GI (b) Report No. 1’, Captain O. Gallagher to Major T. G. Roche, 13 June 1944, TNA HS 8/874.
15 Note by Corporal Beaumont, 11 June 1943, TNA 9/1334/4.
16 ‘Dr Franco Mola’, character reference by Major A. Kennedy, 13 December 1944, TNA HS 9/1048/2.
17 H. Boutigny to C. M. Woods, May 1989, private papers of C. M. Woods (hereafter, Woods papers).
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