18 Author’s interview in Troina, 7 November 2012.
19 ‘List of Members of the Mafia’, 6 August 1942, Dobrski papers, KCL. An alternative explanation might be that the two marchesi could have been involved in some way with another secret society active in Sicily: the Freemasons.
20 Ibid. Another name apparently provided by Di Giunta was that of a lawyer called Villa, said to be ‘Chief of the Rome region’.
21 The testimony of Antonio Calderone, a former member of Cosa Nostra from Catania, provides rare and interesting insight into the history and workings of the Mafia in eastern Sicily. According to Calderone, who had been born in 1935 and became one of the most important repentants – or pentiti as they are known – after his arrest in 1986, Cosa Nostra in Palermo had authorised the creation of the first Mafia ‘family’ in Catania, by a group of 10 to 15 uomini d’onore (‘men of honour’), in 1925. P. Arlacchi, ‘Mafia: The Sicilian Cosa Nostra’, South European Society and Politics, 1/1, 1996, p. 77. The next family was apparently created only in the 1950s. Calderone describes the Ferraras, to whom he also refers as the ‘Cavadduzzi’ and whose forebears included a certain ‘man of honor … nicknamed “Cavadduzzo”’, as an established criminal family, ‘a real clan’, which rose to become part of ‘the cream of the Catanian Mafia’. P. Arlacchi, Men of Dishonor: Inside the Sicilian Mafia: An Account of Antonio Calderone (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1993), pp. 45, 65, 118. For more on post-war Ferrara/Cavadduzzo criminality and Mafia activity in Catania in general, see: C. Fava, La mafia comanda a Catania 1960–1991 (Rome/Bari: Laterza, 1991).
22 ‘List of Members of the Mafia’, 6 August 1942, Dobrski papers, KCL.
23 This was in a famous report by Ermanno Sangiorgi, chief of the Palermo police, in 1900. S. Lupo, History of the Mafia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 213.
24 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/237.
9
‘Things seem to be going according to plan …’
On a November night in 1942, a small wooden fishing boat closed on the coast of southern France. Crewed by Poles and with French colours on its hull, it was the same clandestine felucca that five months earlier had landed Emilio Lussu and his wife near Cassis. This time it was poised to land six agents at the same spot. Five were to operate in France for SOE’s French Section. Two of these were Englishmen: George Starr, who was destined to run one of SOE’s most successful French networks; and Marcus Bloom, a radio operator, who would be arrested and imprisoned in Mauthausen concentration camp where he was eventually executed. The other three were women going in to work as underground couriers. One of them, Odette Sansom, was a young Frenchwoman who would survive capture, torture and imprisonment in Ravensbrück concentration camp, and receive the George Cross for gallantry. Her story was later told in the 1950 film Odette.
In published accounts of SOE activities on the Continent, next to no mention has been made until now of the sixth agent who went ashore that night. Jewish, twenty-two years old, short, dark and slight, he was the only Italian ex-internee recruited in Britain who would go into enemy territory on a mission exclusively for SOE. His orders were to make for neutral Switzerland, get across the Swiss–Italian frontier, and secure SOE’s first firm link with anti-Fascists inside Italy.
This was a mission defined partly by a growing acceptance that no other means of penetrating mainland Italy seemed likely to have any success whatsoever. Experience in the Middle East of exploring other methods, like getting a man on to a repatriation ship or to masquerade as an escaping prisoner, had not been encouraging. But the immediate origins of SOE’s first attempt to get a trained agent of its own into Italy lay in the fact that reports were at last reaching London of groups of anti-Fascists in northern Italy who seemed active, very aggressive, and willing to have help from the British. These reports were coming from SOE’s man in neutral Switzerland who was already trying to help them by smuggling over the border suitcases of money, explosives and sabotage devices. It was to these groups that SOE’s young Italian agent was being sent.
SOE’s man in Switzerland was Jock McCaffery, a confident and combative Scot. Born in Glasgow to Irish parents settled in Scotland, he had lived for a decade in Italy where he had gone to train for the Catholic priesthood but ended up teaching English, working for the British Council, and penning freelance articles for the Daily Mail. He was thirty-five when he joined SOE in the summer of 1940, apparently on the recommendation of Douglas Woodruff, editor of The Tablet. McCaffery’s interviewer was Lieutenant-Colonel Montagu Chidson, whose various claims to fame included being the first British pilot to engage a German aircraft in aerial combat (he had shot at it from his cockpit, with a rifle, in 1914) and snatching a haul of Dutch industrial diamonds from under the noses of the invading Germans in May 1940.
Once on board, McCaffery worked for a while at SOE’s London headquarters and toured internment camps and Pioneer Corps bases to help search for Italian volunteers. In January 1941 he would be the man sent up to Scotland to choose the best of the Quins for the Colossus operation; it was McCaffery who would remember hearing Fortunato Picchi, ‘white as a sheet’, make his plea for selection. He also attended a few short courses to learn the rudiments of security and sabotage work, and at one point, according to his memoirs,1 proposed that he lead a sabotage team into Italy to bring down a viaduct carrying the main road and railway line between Genoa and Rome.
First tabled in November 1940, the original idea for sending McCaffery to Switzerland was a revival of Cuthbert Hamilton Ellis’s abortive mission earlier that year. By the autumn, experts in London had estimated that about a third of Italy’s coal requirements were arriving from the Reich via Switzerland. Interrupting that traffic, it was assessed, would ‘certainly prevent imports into Italy from being kept at the level essential for the Italian war effort’.2 The best way to do this was to sabotage small-scale targets like turntables, sheds, marshalling yards, and pipelines feeding the Swiss hydroelectric system. Even the Prime Minister was interested. ‘It is obviously most important that this should be impeded in every way,’ he wrote to Hugh Dalton in January 1941. ‘In view of the mountainous nature of the country through which the railways run, this should be feasible.’3
By then, several weeks had been spent trying to address the awkward problem of getting a man into a country that now shared its borders with the Greater Reich, Fascist Italy and Nazi-occupied and -dominated France. Frank Nelson’s suggestion of seeking Swiss permission for a direct flight with diplomatic status did not play well with the Foreign Office, which was sensitive to the fact that the Swiss had not been pleased in recent weeks when RAF aircraft overflew their territory and mistakenly bombed it. There was also the delicate task of convincing the British Minister in Berne to allow SOE to have a man on his staff. As Gladwyn Jebb warned Dalton, if anything went wrong it could lead to the Swiss expelling the whole legation. Finally SOE resigned itself to sending McCaffery by the long route, via Lisbon and through Spain and Vichy France, which remained open to officials with diplomatic status. He arrived in Berne in March. By then his instructions went far beyond railway sabotage. As SOE’s principal representative in Switzerland, he was to settle in for the long term and attempt to run clandestine lines into every state surrounding it.
Switzerland was not an easy place to engage unseen in secret wartime work. It was crawling with Swiss, Italian and German intelligence officers intent on identifying anyone British who was there on clandestine duty. Weeks after arriving, McCaffery wrote to London that he was being ‘watched and listened to still with considerable thoroughness … Only last night I had a German agent planted on me.’4 ‘The country is small,’ he added five months later; ‘no Swiss is without a friend in the Swiss Intelligence Service; and the latter is everywhere and interested in everything: they are extremely jealous of their neutrality … [A]nd of course the entire country is riddled with German and Italian agents for whom nothing is too small.’5 But his cover, he felt, was ‘first rate’.
6 McCaffery had been appointed assistant press attaché at the British Legation in Berne, ostensibly responsible for reporting to London on Italian matters for the Ministry of Information, the BBC, and the War Office’s Press Department. For some time he devoted his efforts to building up that cover, ‘creating the impression of being a very energetic Press man by day’, he told London, while ‘at the expense of sleep and digestion’ spending a lot of evenings out. ‘I even managed to figure in several foolish incidents in night clubs which duly went the round of the town. At the end of six weeks both reputations were soundly established and it then seemed that the Swiss and our German and Italian friends might have let up a bit on their supervision.’7
So far as McCaffery’s original mission was concerned, progress was slow. From the Legation, where he started out sharing an office but eventually took over the top floor, he busily planned and plotted. Months would pass before his efforts to target Axis rolling stock began to bear much fruit. Eventually, with the aid of an anti-Nazi Swiss named René Bertholet, local teams were recruited in Basle and various frontier posts and run by a socialist associate of Bertholet’s, a German ex-policeman, Paul Schlotter. Independently, a fifty-year-old Swiss railwayman, whom SOE described as ‘non-political but an ardent hater of the Nazis’, was also found in Basle and ran another team in the Muttenz goods yard.8 The chief methods of sabotage were drilling holes in tankers and tampering with brakes and axle-boxes. The assistance provided by McCaffery included consignments of finely ground carborundum for inserting as an abrasive into lubricating oil. Occasionally he was able to pass along oilcans filled with plastic explosive and little bombs disguised as coal, as well as black propaganda for pasting onto passing rolling stock. The work of these teams, which was limited only by McCaffery’s ability to keep them supplied, continued until the end of the war. During 1942, according to McCaffery’s reports to London, the monthly rate of sabotage sometimes exceeded 600 axle-boxes and the brake systems of up to forty trains.
Night-time tinkering in Swiss marshalling yards was all well and good. Where McCaffery hoped to make a much greater impact was in encouraging subversive activity over the border in Italy. To do this, he had to find men to help him. To do that, he found his press cover invaluable, by providing him with a believable excuse for travelling about and talking to people. While wielding that cover, on an early trip to speak to the local press in Ticino, Switzerland’s southernmost canton, in late March 1941, McCaffery met 38-year-old Piero Pellegrini. Though born in Turin, Pellegrini was a stolid Swiss journalist and socialist who now edited Libera Stampa, a Ticino-based socialist daily. It was from him that McCaffery first heard that underground socialist groups were still active in northern Italy. Pellegrini also said that he was in touch with these groups. McCaffery liked the sound of that.
Soon McCaffery was paying Pellegrini a monthly salary, subsidising his newspaper and offering to finance his Italian friends if they proved themselves worth backing. By the summer, Pellegrini was reporting that the groups were arranging themselves into districts and cells, from Trieste across to Como, Genoa and Milan, and hoped to hasten an Italian defeat through sabotage and spreading dissent. ‘Take it from me, I know my 32-landers [Italians] and speak their language (figuratively as well as literally),’ McCaffery told London. Pellegrini was ‘able, zealous, and honest’ and ‘painstaking in giving a picture containing only what could be absolutely guaranteed … If you do not get satisfactory results from 32-land [Italy] (though I am convinced we shall) then be quite certain that the fault will not be [his].’9
By the autumn of 1941, Pellegrini was informing McCaffery that these groups now had a militant arm known as the Tigrotti, made up mostly of army officers and professional men. The Tigrotti had recently damaged some factories and power stations in Genoa, he said. In December came news of more sabotage in Genoa, including the firing of 18,000 petrol drums and the bursting of a ship’s boiler. Encouraged by London, McCaffery, through Pellegrini, began passing guidance to the Tigrotti on the sorts of target preferred by the British, like railways, shipping, road transport, rubber, silk and hemp. He offered Pellegrini all help and asked if the Tigrotti would be willing and able to receive and look after British wireless operators, instructors and stores.
Aside from his dealings with Pellegrini, McCaffery dealt regularly for a time in Switzerland with another committed anti-Fascist, the writer Ignazio Silone. Born in 1900, Silone had spent much of his youth as a militant socialist and in 1921 helped found the Italian Communist Party. By the early 1930s, however, his growing disgust and disillusionment with Moscow had seen him expelled from the party. His years of activism seemed over, and he was living the isolated life of an exile in Switzerland where he devoted himself to his writing. It was there that he wrote two of the great anti-Fascist novels, Fontamara (1933) and Pane e Vino (1936), stories of the struggles of Abruzzo villagers oppressed by landlords and officialdom. By 1941, it seems, he had been tempted back to political work and started working in Switzerland for the Italian Socialist Party.
Silone was ‘a born revolutionary and subterranean organiser’ with whom he was extremely keen to work, McCaffery told London after he met him in March 1941.10 At the same time, their dealings threatened to prove ‘extremely difficult. He is shot through with tuberculosis, has a strain of egotism, is disillusioned about old beliefs of his, is sceptical in general, and thinks that a British victory would have a merely negative value. Still, I shall persevere with him.’11 In one attempt to win him over, McCaffery offered to send Silone’s next novel to the London publishers Jonathan Cape, by diplomatic bag. Eventually, after ‘several meals and long walks together,’ McCaffery felt that he had convinced Silone ‘that anyone of his ideas ought to be working wholeheartedly for a British victory if only so that they might be able to continue their own particular fight whether it conflicted with British aims or not’. Silone gave McCaffery the names of possible collaborators and promised to ‘sound out the ground’ with others.12 Later, Silone would tell McCaffery that he was prepared to work with Pellegrini in trying to contact in Italy suitable socialists and communists capable of ‘stirring up discontent and strife’ in a common front against the Fascists.13
Over time, McCaffery would work more closely with Pellegrini than Silone. Eventually he would drop Silone altogether. This would appear to have been partly due to McCaffery’s preference for the apparently superior energy and potential of Pellegrini’s groups for delivering sabotage in Italy, as opposed to Silone’s more cautious line of subtler and less violent action. It may also have had something to do with a clash of personalities and politics. At a distance of seventy years and with none of the offended and offending cast still around, it is hard to unpick precisely why McCaffery and Silone hated each other. After the Swiss police arrested him in late 1942 on suspicion of illegal activity, Silone appears to have claimed that McCaffery had shopped him to the authorities out of revenge after he had criticized McCaffery for becoming too focused on encouraging the Tigrotti.14 According to a scribbled note among American files in Washington, DC, Silone’s besotted young lover, Darina Laracy, a Dubliner in her mid-twenties, later told American agents in Switzerland that the ‘½ Scotch ½ Irish’ McCaffery was ‘dangerous, although Catholic, & VERY reactionary’ and ‘loathes’ Silone ‘and his like’.15 By ‘reactionary’ Laracy probably meant ‘anti-communist’ and McCaffery was certainly that: he was ‘very Catholic and very anti-communist’ remembered one wartime colleague who worked with him in Berne.16 For his part, McCaffery recorded that Silone’s arrest had been precipitated by a recent BBC broadcast to Germany that had described the Italian Socialist Party as having headquarters in Switzerland. The Swiss had had no alternative but to respond, McCaffery explained to London, and had hauled in Silone because he had been so stupidly indiscreet about his anti-Fascist activities. Whatever the reasons behind their falling out, McCaffery certainly came to loathe Silone. He was glad to be rid of him, he told London after Silone’s arrest, and wanted a s
tory spread far and wide that Silone was discredited and that his socialist friends were tired of him.
As well as throwing much of his energy into backing Pellegrini’s groups, McCaffery sought to find ways of channelling explosives and other material to them, too. Smuggling anything in either direction across the Swiss–Italian frontier could be tricky. Often both sides were tightly controlled and patrolled. The Italians were as keen to prevent the sort of cross-border smuggling that McCaffery was planning as the Swiss were eager to avoid compromising their neutrality by allowing that activity to go on. As McCaffery told London not long after arriving in Berne, ‘the Italian frontier now is a devil of a job and it is a triumph to be able to get a person over. The carrying of stuff complicates the business infinitely.’17 But in early 1942, while sitting one evening in a Ticino bar, he seemed to have found a solution.
Drinking next to him was a drunken Englishman who boasted that he could get anything from Italy that McCaffery cared to mention. This Englishman was Edmund Schwerdt. The Oxford-educated son of a German-born button-manufacturer who had settled in London in the 1880s, Schwerdt was thirty-nine and had been living near Lake Como when the war broke out, whereupon he had moved to Switzerland, settled in Ticino, and dabbled in a bit of covert cross-border work. After eliciting promises that Schwerdt would sober up and behave, McCaffery gave him the job of helping him pierce the frontier. Soon enough Schwerdt had acquired the services of a young Swiss friend, a radio technician called Elio Andreoli from the Ticino town of Lugano, who agreed to act as a courier between Switzerland and Italy. In February 1942, having heard from the Tigrotti that they were willing and able to receive supplies, McCaffery laid on the first delivery. A suitcase of explosives and sabotage devices was packed and delivered to Schwerdt, who gave it to Andreoli, who then disappeared over the border bound for a rendezvous with a man in Milan.
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