Various people suggested that we should make our way through the sewers to the Palazzo Venezia, to lay a charge of high explosives. It was absurd to imagine that we could get enough explosives to do any serious damage to the building; however, we decided to look into this plan, and found that it had been anticipated. Twice daily, police patrolled the malodorous sewers under the centre of the city, and there were iron gates in them in the vicinity of Palazzo Venezia and all the main government buildings. Other optimists proposed driving round the city in an armoured car, until there was an opportunity to fire at the dictator – as if there were the faintest chance of penetrating the swarm of police cars and motor-cycles perpetually on guard whenever the Padrone (Master) was in the streets.
Another idea was a variation on the exploits of Lauro De Bosis, a gallant young activist who, in 1931, flew from Corsica to scatter anti-Fascist leaflets over Rome and perished on the way back. Salvadori remembered that one colleague in Italy ‘suggested that some of us should buy tickets for an air flight, overpower the pilot, and take over the aircraft; we would then proceed to a prearranged spot where bombs would be loaded, and, on the return journey over Rome, these would be dropped on Palazzo Venezia’. Other friends had ideas of succeeding ‘where Zaniboni had failed’ and wanted to ‘lie in wait with rifle or machinegun’ at Gola del Furlo, a gorge in the Marche often visited by Mussolini, or on the road to Castel Porziano, a coastal estate near Ostia where he liked to spend his summers.15
For Salvadori, actions like these had their place in ‘the cause of freedom’ but their ‘unpractical romanticism’ had little appeal.16 Indeed, experience of the difficulty of getting at Mussolini may explain why there is no trace anywhere in any SOE file of any recommendation by any of the grizzled anti-Fascists with which it was in touch, like Salvadori, Emilio Lussu or Alberto Tarchiani, that SOE should try to bump him off. Nor did any of these men have any involvement in the scheme that was eventually tabled. Responsible for coming up with that plan was one of the Italians whom SOE had recruited in East Africa in 1941. His name was Giovanni Di Giunta.
Giovanni Di Giunta told SOE that he had been born in Troina, a hilltop town in eastern Sicily, on 26 November 1908. He had been called up into the Italian artillery in 1935, he said, and been de-mobbed in October the following year with the rank of sottotenente, the equivalent of a British second lieutenant. He came to SOE’s attention in East Africa in late 1941 through Luigi Mazzotta, a civilian tailor in Addis Ababa who also joined at that time. What Di Giunta had been doing since 1936 and why he was still in East Africa six years later are not recorded. SOE noted that he was an intelligent man who knew a little French. It considered that he might be suitable as a ‘thug’, or commando-type saboteur, for raids on enemy coasts. His character was described as ‘mercenary’.17
In January 1942, not long after he had arrived in Egypt with the other recruits from East Africa, Di Giunta was loaned by SOE to the MI6 office in Cairo. Whatever it was that MI6 wished him to do, if anything, is not recorded either. What is apparent is that it was then, with the help of an Intelligence Corps sergeant attached to MI6’s Middle East staff, that he hammered out the bones of a plan to kill Mussolini. That plan was dispatched to MI6 headquarters in London at the end of the month. Presumably because assassinations were not its line of work, MI6 then passed the plan to Baker Street, with Foreign Office approval, for SOE to consider. Baker Street passed it back to Cairo, telling its men there to speak to the local MI6 office and move the plan forward if they considered it feasible. Cairo replied that it would proceed with the project ‘unless further study disclosed major difficulties’.18 Not long afterwards, with the war going badly in the Western Desert and Rommel’s Afrikakorps so close to Egypt that staff officers across Cairo were burning reams of paperwork, the MI6 men who were dealing with the scheme were pulled out and sent to Khartoum. From then on, the plan was in the hands of SOE.
A few details of the plan survive among SOE’s papers. The proposed assassin was Di Giunta himself. As the first step towards getting back to Italy he would assume the guise of a captured Italian soldier and be installed in a camp of Italian prisoners somewhere in the Middle East. From there he would fake an escape. To add a layer of apparent authenticity, he would seek to flee in the company of an Italian officer who was genuinely pro-Fascist. Alone or with this officer, Di Giunta would then make for neutral Turkey where he would contact Italian officials who would arrange for his repatriation. Once back in Italy he would plan and mount the assassination alone. Poisoning, or a more violent form of death, probably on an occasion when Mussolini was speaking in public, seem to have been the methods suggested.
In London, Cecil Roseberry was left unconvinced by the plan’s potential. Telling Colin Gubbins, the officer in charge of Operations, that he considered it ‘rather a scatterbrained project’ that ‘revealed a poverty of operational conception’, Roseberry observed that ‘Mussolini’s food was not to be got at and certainly not through the activities of an unknown individual from outside. The Duce would certainly not be alive today if it were as simple as all that. Moreover he seldom spoke from a specially prepared rostrum and his appearances were not heralded in advance.’19
Officers in Baker Street also wondered whether Mussolini should even be assassinated at all. One with such doubts was Major Jimmy Pearson, head of London’s Middle East and Mediterranean desk.20 A down-to-earth officer respected by his seniors, Pearson, ruminating on Di Giunta’s plan, warned that Mussolini, although ‘discredited in the eyes of a portion of the population’, was still ‘idolised by large sections’ and ‘his removal would make him a martyr’. But Pearson did not recommend that the plan be abandoned entirely. Perhaps there was a better target: Roberto Farinacci, ‘the sponsor of collaboration with Germany and the mainstay behind Mussolini’.21
While Farinacci’s name may be unfamiliar to most people today, it was well known in the early 1940s. ‘Swarthy, vituperative Roberto Farinacci’ was ‘Fascismo’s hellion’, read a contemporary article in Time magazine. Here was a man who ‘ranted against the democracies, baited Israel and the Church [and] flayed Fascist weaklings’.22 Born in 1892 in Isernia, a small town in the central Italian province of Molise, Farinacci had started his working life as an assistant telegraph operator on the Italian state railways. Drawn to politics during the First World War, in which he served first at the front and then as a propagandist, he was soon dedicating himself to a career of corruption and shameless self-advancement. In the Lombard city of Cremona he built a formidable power-base, styled himself ‘ras’, an Abyssinian term for leader, and intimidated the population with gangs of thuggish followers. His rise towards the top was rapid. In 1921 he was one of the first Fascists elected to parliament. Four years later he became the party’s general secretary. Only Mussolini had greater power.
It is debatable whether Farinacci was ‘the mainstay behind Mussolini’, as SOE believed, in 1942. His appointment as party secretary was the peak of his political career and it lasted barely a year. Aggressive, undisciplined, increasingly unpopular, Farinacci came to be seen as a liability more than an asset and was no driven ideologue, unless untrammelled self-interest counts as an ideology. ‘The ras of Cremona’, as one historian has written, ‘was a man better understood as a rough and tumble boss than as a true believing fanatic. Farinacci did not so much strive to bring “mythical thought to power” as to enjoy the fleshpots available to those in authority and to win and retain them for himself, his family, friends and clients by whatever means necessary.’ Compelled to resign as party secretary in 1926, he withdrew to his Cremona fiefdom and to the running of his private newspaper. Yet he remained ‘the boss of his town and a fascist who mattered’.23 And Mussolini, aware that Farinacci still had influence, ambition and value, kept him close, eyeing him warily and employing him carefully. In 1929, portraying him accurately as an odious thug in charge of other odious thugs, Time described Farinacci as ‘the Castor Oil Man’ of Fascism. ‘Politicians who rashly
opposed Il Duce were ambushed and forced to swallow a pint, a quart, even a sickening gallon of what Farinacci called his “golden nectar of nausea”.’24 In 1936, arriving in Abyssinia to associate himself with the new imperial spirit, he went fishing with grenades in a lake near Dessie and blew off one of his hands. Hailed on his return as a gallant and wounded hero and fitted with a new metal hand, he was reappointed to the Fascist Grand Council and soon proved an enthusiastic enforcer of Italy’s new racial laws.
Regardless of whether he was ever ‘Mussolini’s spur’, as SOE also called him,25 it is a fact that Farinacci was one of the most outspoken and constant advocates of Italy’s alliance with Germany. For good measure he accompanied this stance by pouring invective on the Jews. As the Nazis took power, he railed in his newspaper, Il Regime Fascista, about the ‘Jewish international conspiracy’, the ‘Jewish Bolshevik leadership’ and the ‘Jewish financial octopus’. By 1934 he was writing: ‘Anyone who declares himself in favour of Zionism has no right to hold public posts or lucrative employment in our country.’ In 1936 his newspaper announced Fascist Italy’s inflexible opposition to ‘international Judaism’. By 1938 his paper was attacking Jews almost daily. Farinacci’s opinions on such topics were not lost on the Germans.26 ‘He is exceptionally pleasant,’ Goebbels wrote in his diary when Farinacci visited Berlin in October 1940, ‘a real old fascist whom one cannot help but like.’ He was ‘a true supporter of the Axis’ and a ‘chip off the old block’.27
SOE liked the sound of killing Farinacci: ‘his removal would be popular with all classes’, while ‘to remove Mussolini before Italy had suffered further defeat and while Farinacci was still powerful might easily result in the rallying of the Fascist Party and an increased German control’. It was felt, too, that Farinacci was ‘more easily accessible … frequently to be found taking his aperitif at public bars’.28 A decision was made: Cairo should ask Di Giunta if he would kill Farinacci. Cairo asked him. Di Giunta agreed to switch targets.
It was about now that Di Giunta was preparing to have surgery to his face. The available records do not state the reasons for this. Nor do they reveal what surgery was proposed or who suggested it. It is possible, however, that the procedure was recommended in order to disguise his features in preparation for his return to Italy. Although altering an agent’s looks might sound the stuff of Hollywood films, several agents during the course of the war did receive ‘permanent make-up’, as SOE called it.29 What is certain is that, in May 1942, Giovanni Di Giunta’s face did go under the knife. ‘Cairo cabled on the 16th,’ London recorded; ‘the individual was now undergoing a facial operation and would be ready for action in the middle of June.’30
By the middle of June the operation had indeed been done and officers in Cairo were beginning to worry that Di Giunta would become ‘restless’ if he were not unleashed soon. Almost six months had passed since he had come up with his plan, and Cairo told London that it felt it ‘essential to start him on his journey as soon as possible’. It also advised Baker Street to ‘definitely decide’ whether the mission should proceed and added a final word of warning. Di Giunta had said that he would kill himself if caught, but ‘if he were arrested and subjected to third degree methods’ his silence could not be guaranteed. Therefore London ‘must understand that there must be a risk of the agent confessing his British support’. Next day, on 18 June, London telegraphed Cairo its decision: ‘go ahead’.31
Now the wheels began to turn. More steps were taken in Cairo to prepare Di Giunta for his mission. These included ‘all precautions concerning documents, etc.’32 SOE also issued him with diamonds. Readily portable and easily hidden, precious stones were far less cumbersome than coins or wads of notes and SOE was not inexperienced in shifting wealth by this means. (‘They would send me a little tin full of diamonds, cut diamonds,’ recalled one officer who had been tasked with channelling funds from neutral Stockholm to the Danish resistance. ‘I used to look at them occasionally, admire them.’)33
By the beginning of August, now masquerading as an Italian prisoner-of-war and operating under the codename of ‘Kit’, Di Giunta was in Palestine and behind the wire of No. 321 POW Camp, somewhere off the main Jerusalem–Tel Aviv road. Few records of the camp survive. One document that does exist is its war diary and this shows that escape attempts were fairly common. In November 1942 alone there were five attempted breakouts involving a total of thirteen Italians, six of whom made it through the wire, while the following February a snap search uncovered a well-dug tunnel. ‘This tunnel’, wrote the camp’s commander, an ageing infantry colonel called Eric ‘Bingy’ Bingham, ‘started in an unused deep trench latrine, was approximately 3 to 4 yards below earth surface, approximately 21 yards long, [and] high and wide enough to allow any man to crawl through with ease.’34 Whether the camp had been chosen for its leakiness is not recorded. What is apparent is that the Italians who broke out of it did not include Giovanni Di Giunta.
Not long after Di Giunta entered the camp, SOE learned from MI6 that on the eve of his faked incarceration he had met and spoken in Cairo with an Italian he had known in East Africa. During the course of that conversation Di Giunta had revealed the whole of his plan. The man to whom he told it, a fellow Sicilian, was Emilio Zappalà, the MI6 agent who would be sent into Sicily with Antonio Gallo a few weeks later. Zappalà had immediately reported Di Giunta’s indiscretion to the MI6 office, adding his impression that Di Giunta was by no means settled on what action he would take when he eventually reached Italy. In fact, Zappalà reported, there was a definite implication that Di Giunta might try to double-cross the British. When this news was passed to SOE, the risks of unleashing him ‘and the uncertainty of his good faith’ were seen at once to be intolerable and Cairo decided to scrap the entire project.35 On 3 October 1942, Di Giunta was discharged from No. 321 POW camp and returned to British care. A single clue remains as to what happened to him after that: SOE recorded that MI6 took charge of him.
When SOE’s Cairo office had asked London to decide if Di Giunta should be dispatched to kill Roberto Farinacci, the green light had been given so quickly that it seems unlikely that much final discussion occurred over the plot’s pros and cons. Perhaps, if anyone more senior had ever been invited to express a view, they had simply shared Roseberry’s relaxed opinion that ‘if Cairo were satisfied that the man had possibilities of perfecting such a job we ought to allow him to pursue it’.36 Added to this may have been the consideration that SOE had little else in the pipeline in terms of anti-Italian plans. Certainly officers had accepted that they could do no more than embark him on his journey to Italy and provide some funds to pay his way. Everything else rested on Di Giunta’s word that he was willing to have a go.
Leafing through the surviving records of Operation Foxley, SOE’s plan to kill Adolf Hitler, it is hard not to be struck by the greater time and effort expended in considering alternative methods by which he might be killed, as well as the possible consequences. Initiated in London in the summer of 1944 by Colin Gubbins, who, by then, was SOE’s chief, the planning for Foxley had continued until the following spring. It boiled down to two main ideas. One was to poison Hitler on his personal train, if poison could somehow be got into the train’s supply of drinking and cooking water; the second was to kill him at a spot in or around the Berghof, his alpine retreat near Berchtesgaden in southern Bavaria. The Berghof idea became the favoured one.
A good deal of intelligence appears to have been collected about the Berghof. It ranged from Hitler’s daily routines to the variety of passes used by his security detachments, the location of pickets, patrols, anti-aircraft guns and air-raid shelters and the thickness and height of surrounding fences. Some of this intelligence was very detailed. SOE’s account of his personal habits, for instance, recorded that Hitler was a late riser, surfacing at about nine o’clock. After being shaved and groomed by a barber he walked to a teahouse for breakfast (milk and toast) from which he returned to the Berghof by motorcade. He might then
consult with his personal doctor and in the afternoon meet carefully vetted visitors. If he did not have afternoon appointments elsewhere, he remained in the Berghof, where he had a late lunch (vegetables only, about four o’clock). Sometimes he invited the Goebbels and Bormann families to eat with him. After that he worked until ten in the evening, generally aided by a clerk or by Eva Braun. He ate supper very late, between one and half past one in the morning, and eventually went to bed at three but sometimes even later.
As thinking about the Berghof developed, SOE gave consideration to three methods of assassination. One was to send in snipers in German uniforms to pick him off with explosive bullets on his morning walk to the teahouse for breakfast; if that failed a backup team would attack the teahouse using a bazooka or similar weapon. A second idea was to ambush Hitler’s motorcade. The third was to drop an SAS battalion to overrun the place.
In the end, Operation Foxley was never approved. From the outset there had been debate among senior SOE staff officers in London as to the fundamental value of assassinating Hitler. Some felt that killing him would have a positive impact on the Allied war effort. Others argued more forcefully that keeping him alive would be wiser, since Hitler was making such a mess of German strategy and because removing him, or, more precisely, the revelation that the Allies had been responsible for killing him, might make him a martyr, with the effect of rallying the German people behind the surviving Nazi leadership, by creating a fresh ‘stab in the back’ myth, and making post-war reconstruction more difficult. There were also grave and realistic doubts in London about the chances of success. There were fundamental problems of logistics and secrecy, for example. Even the sniper operation would have needed to clear the formidable hurdle of infiltrating and moving a sizeable team around Bavaria undetected. Today it may also be noted that Foxley had been academic in any case, since the meeting in London at which Colin Gubbins instigated the planning took place on 28 June 1944. Hitler never returned to the Berghof after he left it for the final time, a fortnight later, on 14 July.
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