18 H. Seton-Watson to T. Masterson, 13 March 1942, Dobrski papers, LHCMA, KCL.
19 ‘Dr Ulisse Francesco La Terza’, TNA HS 9/888/6.
20 Sergeant L. Norris to B7 (Italian Section, SOE Cairo), 1 December 1942, TNA HS 6/896.
21 Ibid.
22 ‘Draft letter to Gibraltar’, 16 December 1942, TNA HS 9/888/6.
23 Cipher telegram, SOE Cairo to SOE London, 7 December 1942, TNA HS 6/896.
24 ‘Contact with Italy’, Z Section (Cairo) to London, 26 March 1942, TNA 6/821; Major F. Carver to Major J. Pearson, 14 May 1942, TNA HS 6/821.
25 Major J. Pearson to Major F. Carver, 7 June 1942, TNA HS 6/821; Major C. Roseberry to Captain J. Dobrski, 22 October 1942, TNA HS 6/821.
26 Ibid.
27 Cipher telegram, Major C. Roseberry to SOE Cairo, 15 May 1942, TNA HS 6/821.
28 L. A. G. Harrop to Major F. Carver, 16 September 1942, TNA HS 6/821.
29 ‘Report on Psychological Examination of Maltese [sic] Student Group’, by Major A. Kennedy, 23 October 1942, TNA HS 6/890.
30 Major F. Carver (‘Edmund’) to London, 16 June 1942, TNA HS 6/889.
31 ‘Dareme, Pierre Edouard @ [sic: ‘alias’] Tridondani’, report by Captain C. E. Morton, 28 April 1943, TNA HS 9/1483/8.
32 Major F. Carver (‘Edmund’) to London, 15 August 1942, TNA HS 9/1483/8.
33 Major C. Roseberry to Captain J. Dobrski, 11 September 1942, TNA HS 9/1483/8.
34 Comment by Lance-Corporal Hodson, 13 May 1943, TNA HS 9/1483/8.
35 Tridondani is buried under the name ‘Edouard Fredpudan’ in field 1A, row 12, grave H. Information from the Salzgitter Memorial Museum archives. I am grateful to Elke Zacharias of the Arbeitskreis Stadtgeschichte e.V study group for her time and assistance in helping me to unearth this information.
36 Major C. Roseberry to Captain J. Dobrski, 19 August 1942, TNA HS 6/889.
37 Ibid.
38 Captain J. Dobrski to SOE London, 8 September 1943, TNA HS 6/889.
39 Major C. Roseberry to Brigadier C. Gubbins, 2 August 1942, TNA HS 6/889.
40 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/262.
41 A. Gallo (‘Salvatore Mellis’) to ‘Signor Comandante’, 16 July 1942, TNA HS 6/889.
42 L. Mazzotta, responses to questionnaire, 28 May 1944, TNA HS 9/1013.
43 Translation of quotation in M. Franzinelli, Guerra di spie: i servizi segreti fascisti, nazisti e alleati, 1939–1943 (Milan: Mondadori, 2004), p. 121.
44 Sicily: ISO(S) Handbook, 1943, TNA WO 220/403.
45 Captain P. Cooper to Commander J. Senter, enclosing translations of extracts from a report made by Colonel Mario Bertacchi, 7 August 1944, TNA HS 6/816.
46 Translation of report by Major C. De Leo, 12 November 1942, B.851, F.11993, Records of the Special Tribunal, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome.
47 Ibid. Given the fact that the documents with which Zappala was caught included British identity cards carrying his photograph and the same cover-name (‘Nerces Kenapian’) that he had used in East Africa, it is not impossible that the account he gave De Leo and these apparent proofs had been prepared for the event of him falling into Italian hands.
48 Translation of quotation in Franzinelli, Guerra di spie, pp. 122–3.
49 Translation of report by Major C. De Leo, 12 November 1942, B.851, F.11993, Records of the Special Tribunal, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome.
50 Ibid.
51 The Washington Post, 29 November 1942.
52 See, for example: ‘Alleged Saboteurs Executed in Italy’, The Spokesman Review, 3 December 1942.
53 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/262.
54 Ibid.
55 Narrative of the work of SOE’s Italian Section by Lieutenant-Colonel C. Roseberry, July 1945, TNA HS 7/58.
56 DNI Memorandum, 4 December 1941, p. 121, TNA ADM 223/851.
57 K. Jeffery, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. 497. Keith Jeffery’s few lines on MI6 operations against Fascist Italy make no mention of Zappala and Gallo.
58 The news was widely published. ‘2 Spies Executed, Rome Says’, reported The New York Times. ‘London, Nov. 10 (U.P.) – An Italian propaganda broadcast from Rome said today that two men who had landed from a British submarine a month ago to act as spies and saboteurs had been executed. They were identified as Mario [sic] and Eugenio [sic] Zaccaria of Fiume and were said to have confessed.’ The New York Times, 11 November 1942. To judge from Italian and SOE records, Amaury and Egon Zaccaria were the two Italian agents whom one MI6 ‘case-officer’ – quoted in Keith Jeffery’s MI6 – would remember as a ‘very happy go lucky’ pair of ex-POWs who were put ashore on the Tuscan coast in 1942 and never heard of again. Jeffery’s text implies that the pair may simply have absconded and gone home. Jeffery, MI6, p. 497. Italian sources, however, including reports of the brothers’ interrogation, show that the two men should be recorded as committed anti-Fascists who died in the service of the British. For more on the Zaccaria brothers, see: Franzinelli, Guerra di spie and G. Peluso, ‘Sbarchi a Cuma: Le spie venute dall’Oriente’, Pozzuoli Magazine, 18 December 2011.
59 Keith Jeffery refers to this agent in MI6, stating that the ruse was spotted in time for A Force, a British organisation created to deceive the enemy through imaginative acts of counter-intelligence and subterfuge, to exploit it as part of a ‘brilliantly successful deception operation’ in the run-up to the Allied invasion of Northwest Africa in November 1942. This success, Jeffery says, was achieved by ‘sending the agent “questions and warnings” which implied that Sicily was to be the target rather than North Africa’. Jeffery, MI6, p. 497. However, A Force’s own records clearly state that MI6 learned of Rossi’s capture only in February 1943.
60 ‘Lilou: Report by Dr V’, February 1944, TNA WO 169/24902.
61 ‘Servizio Informazione Difesa’, TNA WO 204/11953.
62 Note by Maresciallo Lo Scalzo, 2 November 1942, in the notebook of Hauptmann Dr Wilhelm Meyer, covering period 22 June 1942 to end July 1943, TNA WO 204/964. The same note refers to the Italians receiving stores and more money dropped by parachute on the occasion of ‘the last full moon’.
7
‘Rather a scatterbrained project’
At dawn on the morning of 23 January 1943, as Montgomery’s Eighth Army pursued Rommel’s mauled forces across North Africa in the wake of the Battle of El Alamein, frontline British troops reached Tripoli, the administrative hub of Italian North Africa. Riding in from the desert on the backs of tanks and trucks, the first soldiers to enter were a battalion of the Gordon Highlanders and a company of Seaforth Highlanders. There was no resistance. The enemy had abandoned the city and gone. In subsequent days, Tripoli was searched. Piles of Italian papers were recovered. Among these was a bag of correspondence between the Ministero dell’Africa Italiana, the Ministry of Italian Africa, and the Polizia dell’Africa Italiana, the Police of Italian Africa. Inside that bag was a report on the Italian interrogation of Emilio Zappalà, the MI6 agent captured in Sicily with SOE’s Antonio Gallo.
More precisely, the report described an extraordinary story that Zappalà had told his interrogators that had nothing to do with his Sicily mission. Zappalà was recorded as having said that in Cairo in 1942 he had met an Italian whom he had first encountered a year earlier, in Addis Ababa. When they met again in Cairo, so Zappalà had apparently claimed, the man had been difficult to recognise owing to surgery he had had to his face. He had also told Zappalà that he was planning, with British backing, to return to Italy to kill Mussolini.
Loud allegations that the British plotted to assassinate Mussolini have been made in Italy for years. There are various versions of this claim. At the heart of all of them is the idea of British involvement in Mussolini’s killing after Italian partisans captured him on the shores of Lake Como in April 1945. Days later, his bullet-riddled corpse was brought to Milan, together with the bodies of other Fascists and that of his mistress, Clara Petacci, and hung by its ank
les upside down from the roof of the Esso petrol station in Piazzale Loreto. According to the conspiracy theories, British agents in northern Italy had persuaded the partisans to kill him.
Why might the British have wanted him dead? Because, according to those who propagate these claims, a living Mussolini would have been able to embarrass the British by telling of clandestine contacts he had had with them before and/or after Italy’s entry into the war. Some have claimed these contacts occurred in 1940 when Churchill, they say, wished to persuade Italy to stay out of the conflict.1 Others have claimed the contacts took place later, in 1944–5, after Fascism had fallen and when Mussolini, sprung from prison by German paratroops, remained at liberty in German-occupied northern Italy as leader of the Salò Republic, the Fascist and collaborationist Repubblica Sociale Italiana.2 During that later period, so the theorising goes, the British wished to persuade Mussolini to encourage Hitler to end the war in the west and join the Western Allies in a struggle against the spread of Soviet communism. These dealings are alleged to have included British attempts to accord a conditional peace and offer bribes, if Mussolini agreed to play, in the form of territorial concessions.
Mussolini is also said to have had in his possession copies of secret correspondence with Churchill that confirmed these overtures. The British, the theorists claim, wanted to get their hands on this paperwork, too, lest publication destroy Churchill’s reputation as an uncompromising war leader committed to the unconditional defeat of the Axis. It has even been claimed that Churchill was so anxious about it all that he later holidayed in the Italian Lakes in the hope of turning up the correspondence for himself.3 SOE, meanwhile, has been claimed as responsible for encouraging the partisans to silence Mussolini permanently and for seeking to retrieve the incriminating papers.4 One story has it that an SOE operative gunned down Clara Petacci so that any shared secrets would go to her grave, too.5
Awkwardly for those who advance these theories, no evidence has been produced to prove that the British took steps to kill Mussolini in 1945. Nor has anything come to light to prove that the clandestine communications between Churchill and Mussolini took place. Nor has any item of their alleged correspondence been produced. Nor is there any evidence for Churchill wishing to harness the support of Mussolini and Hitler for any upcoming struggle against communism. Nor are any of these stories supported by any serious study of the Second World War, of wartime British strategy, diplomacy and tactics, or of Churchill’s career, leadership and decision-making. Indeed, the image of a fretting Churchill caring enough to go scratching around lakeside shores in northern Italy seems a fantastic misconception of the man’s character. ‘I am sure I never had any communication with Mussolini other than that already published in my book,’ he wrote privately to his advisors when, after the war, Italian claims of his wartime correspondence with the Duce were brought to his attention, ‘and I do not remember ever having written any letter to him in my life. I have seen this old story in the Italian Press. I really do not think it is worth while paying any attention to it. Surely we should fall back on the Duke of Wellington’s answer – “Publish and be damned”.’6
As for SOE’s involvement in Mussolini’s death in 1945, nothing in its files suggests that it planned, considered or performed such a role. Nor do there appear to be intriguing gaps in the documentary record to suggest that incriminating paperwork has been removed or redacted. Nor does any SOE operative fit the description of the British officer, tall, slim, fluent in Italian, born in Palermo and running a network of agents in Lombardy, who allegedly oversaw Mussolini’s killing and shot dead Clara Petacci.
This is not to say that the British had no interest in seeing Mussolini dead in 1945. Nor is it impossible that documents may be unearthed one day to confirm that the British had clandestine contact with representatives of Mussolini’s Repubblica Sociale Italiana in the months before the end of the war. Although hardly unbiased as sources, a number of his officials and lackeys claimed later that various secret meetings had taken place with British emissaries.7 If contacts like these had really occurred, however, it would be surprising indeed to find that any promises, deals or offers made by the British were seriously meant and, for that matter, incapable of being easily, plausibly and publicly ignored, denied or belittled in the event of them coming to light.
SOE’s real plan to assassinate Mussolini has remained virtually unknown until now. This is not the alleged plot from 1945. Rather, it is a documented, bona fide, plan conceived in Cairo in 1942. From the paperwork it is immediately apparent that the time, thought, and resources put into it were a fraction of those put into Operation Foxley, SOE’s plan to assassinate Adolf Hitler, which was finally revealed to worldwide press interest in 1998. Yet this fact makes the Mussolini plan perhaps all the more remarkable, because, unlike Foxley, it actually received the green light. Indeed, a trained agent was even dispatched with instructions to carry out the killing, albeit with a fresh target in mind: Mussolini’s odious henchman, Roberto Farinacci. What follows records the SOE scheme in as much detail as seems to survive.
‘The bullets pass,’ Mussolini once declared, ‘Mussolini remains … I’m convinced I shall die in my bed when my work for the Greater Italy is done.’ The fact that the bullets kept missing was not for any want of attempts to kill him. Mussolini survived duels in 1919 and 1920. In November 1925, in a hotel room at Rome’s Albergo Dragoni, police arrested Tito Zaniboni, a First World War hero and former Socialist deputy, who, armed with a sniper’s rifle, was waiting for Mussolini to address a crowd from the balcony of the Palazzo Chigi a hundred yards away. In September 1926, while Mussolini was being driven through Rome, an anarchist marble-cutter, Gino Lucetti, threw a bomb at him. Eight bystanders were injured; Mussolini was left unscathed. The following month in Bologna a shot was fired as he was leaving a ceremony to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the March on Rome. Enraged, the crowd rounded on fifteen-year-old Anteo Zamboni, who, likely as not, was innocent, and lynched him on the spot. ‘Be calm!’ Mussolini called out; ‘Nothing can hurt me!’ On that occasion it seems that the bullet actually hit him and might well have hurt him had he not been wearing a ‘corselet’ of bulletproof steel.8
Probably Mussolini’s closest shave came in April 1926. He had just delivered a speech at Rome’s Palazzo dei Conservatori, on the Capitoline Hill, to the Seventh International Congress of Surgeons. Standing in the crowd outside was a thin, grey, fifty-year-old woman called Violet Gibson. The daughter of an Anglo-Irish lord, the late Edward Gibson, 1st Baron Ashbourne, she had a history of mental illness and associated acts of violence. Three years earlier, to quote from case records of the Holloway Sanatorium, she had been ‘sitting on the floor of the padded room, calling for people to kill. She said she had already nearly killed one [she had recently assaulted a fellow patient], and must have some more.’9 After being discharged a little later she went to live in Rome, where she shot but failed to kill herself before resolving to shoot Mussolini. As he emerged from the Palazzo, she stepped forward, raised a revolver, and, from a distance of eight inches, fired. ‘Fancy!’ he was alleged to have said after the bullet nicked his nose. ‘Fancy! A woman!’10
Zaniboni and Lucetti were sentenced to thirty years in prison. The Hon. Violet Gibson was removed to Britain and incarcerated for the rest of her life. The 1930s saw more plots and less consideration for the lives of would-be assassins. In 1931 and 1932, for example, two alleged anarchists, Michele Schirru and Angelo Sbardelotto, were caught separately in Rome with apparent designs on killing Mussolini. Brought before the Special Tribunal and sentenced to death, they were shot by firing squad: two of Forte Bravetta’s early victims.
Rome claimed afterwards that Italian anti-Fascists living in London had had a hand in sponsoring both men. Although it took a war for the British Government to demonstrate any interest in killing Mussolini, it is likely that earlier scheming among Italian exiles and émigrés had indeed occurred on British soil. One probable plotter was Emidio
Recchioni, a Soho businessman by then in his sixties. Recchioni had come to London in 1899 after three years in penal colonies for publishing an anarchist newspaper in Ancona; he had also been accused of plotting to kill one of Italy’s Prime Ministers, Francesco Crispi. During the First World War he came to the attention of Special Branch for subscribing to anarchist newspapers and funds and trying to dissuade young Italians in London from returning home to fight: it was noted that he had hurled ‘abominable language’ at a pro-Allied march of Italians living in London, calling it ‘a Brothel Keepers’ Circus’ among other choice epithets.11 By the late 1920s he was running a successful delicatessen, King Bomba, at 37 Old Compton Street, and seemed to the Home Office to have calmed down enough to be granted naturalisation. Special Branch, however, was still warning that ‘he is an intriguer of the first order … always willing to subsidise any movement which is out to create anarchy’.12 In 1931 the police suspected him of supplying funds to Michele Schirru. The following year, Angelo Sbardelotto, after being apprehended in Rome, named Recchioni as the man who had given him the bombs, the loaded revolver, and the money that he had on him when he was caught. British police surveillance records of Recchioni’s movements match exactly the timing of the alleged handover, outside a Paris hotel, of the bombs, gun and cash. (Sbardelotto was also said to have told his Italian interrogators that, prior to abandoning an earlier attempt on Mussolini, he had received in Paris two bombs and a revolver from Alberto Tarchiani, the mild-mannered ex-editor of the Corriere della Sera with whom SOE would later work.)
Living for a time in pre-war Britain was another exile suspected by the police of wanting Mussolini dead. This was Max Salvadori. In 1934 he was described by the Metropolitan Police as ‘representative in this country of a secret Italian anti-Fascist organization known as “Giustizia e Libertà” (Justice and Liberty)’ and as ‘the person primarily responsible’ for the ‘surreptitious distribution in England’ of an Italian leaflet ‘containing an incitement to assassinate Signor Mussolini’.13 Although Italian Fascist officials in London spread stories about Salvadori and did brief the British police, it is certainly the case that Giustizia e Libertà plotted to kill Mussolini.14 Salvadori himself would write of various schemes considered during his days as an anti-Fascist activist in Rome:
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