In subsequent months, more money and stores were dispatched into Italy and more reports of successful sabotage came back. Early news included the derailing of a goods train near Trieste, the destruction of water and gas mains in Genoa, and a fire in a rubber factory at Chiavari causing damage of half a million lire. In June word arrived that the Tigrotti had destroyed petrol dumps at San Quirico in Tuscany and wrecked a train carrying thirty tanks on a line to Bracciano, northwest of Rome. In September the Tigrotti reported the wrecking of the engine-room of a corvette under construction at Genoa. After that came word of the sinking en route to Sardinia of a merchant ship, the Paolina, after explosives were hidden in its boilers, and claims from a little Tigrotti offshoot in northeast Italy to have blown up a length of railway near Aurisina and two transformer stations in Trieste; this little group had also expressed interest in killing ‘Benny’, their name for Mussolini. In December McCaffery reported to London the Tigrotti’s ‘biggest achievement so far, a fire in the port of Genoa which had kept the [fire-]brigade, soldiers, sailors, police and two fire ships busy for the entire day … [It has] been described in the press as an inferno and the damage had been declared as enormous.’18
The Tigrotti were not the only group in Italy whose successes McCaffery reported to London and to whom he would send British funds and supplies. In April 1942, not long after Schwerdt’s Swiss courier had left with the first suitcase of devices for the Tigrotti, McCaffery was introduced in Berne to a youngish Italian Jew who earlier that day had been to see Air Commodore Freddie West, VC, a one-legged former fighter pilot who was working in the Berne Legation as British air attaché. Their Italian visitor presented himself as Eligio Almerigotti, an ex-army officer from Trieste. He was, he said, a prominent figure in an anti-Fascist organisation called the Comitato d’Azione, and a nephew of Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York City.
The Comitato d’Azione, Almerigotti explained, covered much of northern Italy. Its members numbered about 1,500 and ranged from army officers to factory and shipyard workers and were organised in small cells. Until the United States’ recent entry into the war, he said, he had been supplying intelligence to the US Embassy in Rome. Now he wanted to work with the British. To prove his story, Almerigotti showed the calling card from Rome of the Embassy’s former assistant naval attaché. Almerigotti did not know it, but his visit had already been heralded by a message of introduction sent by the Americans to the British in Berne. Impressed, McCaffery gave him 30,000 lire and three weeks to produce results. Almerigotti returned to Italy.
A fortnight later, Almerigotti sent news to McCaffery of two acts of sabotage: the destruction of a factory producing magnesium powder and the burning of a dump of grain and fodder for the Italian Army. More attacks were planned, he added, and he wanted guidance, money and sabotage devices. ‘My own opinion is that he is first class and worth backing all out,’ McCaffery told London. ‘I should honestly give him all the cash he wants. I do not think we have any abler man on our books.’19
In subsequent months and with London’s approval, Almerigotti was sent a lot more money, together with regular suitcases of explosives and other supplies, as McCaffery sought to respond to a steady flow of reports from him detailing further acts of sabotage, the steady spread of the Comitato d’Azione, and the organisation’s growing appetite for direction and supplies. In May came news of two train-derailments on the Brenner Pass and an explosion in an airfield depot. In June Almerigotti reported a fire in a storehouse at the Monfalcone shipyard. In August he sent word of further derailments, the burning of a paper factory, the burning of corn and hay supplies, and an explosion in a munitions factory that had killed several workmen. In September there were claims of further destructive fires, including one in a ship’s hold at Venice and another on the dockside at Monfalcone, and of more lethal explosions, this time at a military chemical institute near Florence and in a cartridge factory in Frosinone. In October Almerigotti sent reports of a fire in a factory making military clothing: machinery had been damaged and large quantities of wool destroyed. The following month he told Berne of another train-derailment, 600,000 lire’s worth of fire-damage to a hemp factory, and even greater destruction, estimated at four million lire, caused to a paper factory in Milan. December saw three more derailments and the further destruction by fire of thousands of kilos of military clothing, the loss being estimated at another four million lire. In early 1943, Almerigotti reported even more deliberate fires, including one in a Marelli machinery factory that had caused damage worth fifteen million lire, and further railway sabotage, including a collision of two goods trains caused by jamming points outside Taranto station. By then, Almerigotti’s achievements, like those of the Tigrotti, were featuring in reports of SOE successes being regularly put before Churchill.
Word of the exploits of the Tigrotti and Almerigotti’s men led SOE to send into Italy the young Italian radio operator who, in November 1942, would step ashore at Cassis. His name was Giacomino Sarfatti. Born in July 1920, the son of a psychologist who had served as a liaison officer to British soldiers fighting in Italy in the First World War, he had been brought up and schooled in Florence. Having gone to live in England in 1938 when the Fascists began persecuting Jews, he was a year into a degree in agriculture at the University of Reading when war between Britain and Italy broke out. Interned in June 1940, he volunteered for the Pioneer Corps as soon as he was able and was serving as a private soldier in an army camp at Ilfracombe when, in January 1941, SOE found him.
‘Quiet, reserved,’ Sarfatti’s recruiter noted. ‘Apparently dependable for a job entailing danger.’20 Soon other observers viewed him as one of the best of their Italian finds. ‘First class intellectual and moral qualities,’ reads an early training report from April 1941, when he was being put through his paces during paramilitary training at Meoble Lodge near Lochailort in Scotland. ‘Has a tendency to be shy, otherwise a perfect specimen of what a young man should be … Has plenty of courage, a strong will, common sense and self control.’21
Not every report was so positive. There was a feeling among some officers that he might not be suited to SOE work. ‘His disposition is too gentle and he has not sufficient ruthlessness of mind for work of this kind,’ remarked the chief instructor at the finishing school at Beaulieu. ‘As a Jew he is anti-fascist and not averse to attacking any fascist or military objective, but he has considerable qualms about the possibility of causing the deaths of any other Italians. He would, therefore, probably be liable to be in two minds about any job he is given to do and could, therefore, not be relied on to do it.’22 But the good reports outweighed the cautious and before long Sarfatti had been earmarked for his first mission. In October 1941, fully trained as a radio operator and carrying papers in the name of a Maltese called Galea, he joined a ship leaving Swansea for the Mediterranean where SOE planned to dispatch him, from Malta, into enemy-occupied Tunisia.
The voyage, which went round the Cape, took three months. Accompanying him were two SOE officers who, by spending more time with him than most, gained a little more knowledge of his qualities and character. One of these officers was Lieutenant Peter Cooper, an Englishman en route to Malta to help set up a training school. ‘Whilst on the boat, both Captain [Dobrski] and myself were much impressed by the mental toughness of Galea,’ Cooper wrote later:
I remember that Captain [Dobrski] pointed out to me that it was only by living with people that one really got to know them. He applied this to the fact that the report with which Galea was handed over to us stated that he was young and immature and without a great deal of experience, and might, therefore, be easily led. In fact, we formed the impression that Galea, although very quiet, was extremely obstinate, and had some very strong convictions …
He was well educated, and took a keen interest in politics. He spoke excellent English, and was very familiar with English political problems, as well as Italian. In political views, he was fairly well to the Left, although by no means Comm
unist. He was rarely to be seen without a copy of the ‘New Statesman and Nation’ …
Temperamentally, I should describe Galea as extremely taciturn, reserved and strongly security minded. He very seldom spoke in the company of strangers, and even with the people he knew well he was strongly inclined to limit his conversation to ‘Yes’, ‘No’, and ‘Perhaps’.
[H]e is very English in mannerisms, never gesticulating, and speaking very quietly and slowly. He is very dark and swarthy … has very dark black eyes … is sturdily built in spite of being small. He has very regular white teeth, which he shows when he laughs, which is not very often.23
Sarfatti’s Tunisian mission never came off. Malta, which they reached in January 1942 after a final leg from Alexandria when they were bombed from the air almost all the way, was now under heavy and persistent enemy attack. By then the island was fast earning its unhappy reputation as the most heavily bombed spot of the war, and soon it was perfectly obvious that the siege made it impossible to send agents from there to North Africa or anywhere else. Instead, Sarfatti was put to work for six months in one of Malta’s wireless stations, handling secret signals from missions in the Balkans. It was the worst period to be on the island. ‘Blitzed, bombed but not bewildered,’ read a telegram to London in April after the office shared by MI5, MI6 and SOE received a direct hit. ‘No casualties except female black eye and three cars written off. Salvaging office today. Business as usual tomorrow.’24 Sarfatti was ‘greatly commended’ for his ‘calmness, patience and cheerfulness in a very difficult period’, when the house in which he was operating was nearly hit on several occasions.25
In the summer of 1942, thoughts turned to ways of making better use of Sarfatti: he was SOE’s outstanding Italian recruit, but he was currently doing a job any good wireless operator could do. First, the SOE office in Cairo, at a time when they were still trying to conjure something from nothing, suddenly wondered about sending him on a mission to Sicily or Sardinia. Alarmed already by Cairo’s eagerness at getting men into the field without adequately considering their chances of survival, Cecil Roseberry, in London, reacted immediately. ‘Have you ascertained whether a young highly educated Florentine Jew would be suitable for the locality?’ he snapped when Cairo’s idea reached his desk.26 ‘Galea [is] far too good to be risked on anything but [a] reasonably secure plan.’27 But Cairo’s dangerous musings also stung Roseberry into action. In signals exchanged with Berne, he and Jock McCaffery hammered out a scheme to send Sarfatti to work as a radio operator with the groups now heard to be active in northern Italy. ‘Your main function will be to communicate to us their requirements in material, money, etc., to notify departure, date and rendezvous of couriers and to report progress,’ reads the brief that Sarfatti was given to read in October after he was flown back to London to prepare. ‘In addition to wireless work, you should give the groups the advantage of your experience in the matter of security, use of our demolition materials, etc.’28
Final arrangements were made. One of these required Sarfatti to write specimen letters and provide samples of his signature. This was so that SOE, in his absence, could send typewritten letters apparently written by Sarfatti to his uncle, a lecturer in law who lived in London, his only relative in Britain, letting him know that his young nephew was safe and serving somewhere warm. Sarfatti also made a will, wrote some letters to be opened in the event of his death, and handed over a gold watch and a Post Office savings book for safekeeping. He was also commissioned as a second lieutenant. Then, after a few false starts, it was time to go.
Towards the end of October 1942, Sarfatti sailed for the Mediterranean in the company of the three women couriers who would land with him in France. When they reached Gibraltar he had time to poke his nose into the shops and scribble a last letter to the Italian desk in London. ‘Things seem to be going according to plan,’ he wrote. ‘Silk stockings are extremely expensive and not of very good quality and I didn’t think of sending you any … Well, goodbye until sometime next year!’ After that came the five-day voyage by felucca with the five French Section agents.29
Once ashore in southern France, Sarfatti stayed a final night with the others before setting off for a safe house in Nice. Here he was to have been collected by a contact of McCaffery’s and conducted into Switzerland. That arrangement went awry and he was collected instead a couple of days later by a Frenchwoman who delivered him to an SOE agent in Perpignan. Confusion followed, since this agent thought he was supposed to be arranging Sarfatti’s escape to Spain, but eventually Sarfatti managed to get himself escorted to Annecy and from there to the border town of Saint Julien-en-Genevois. Then, at night, and with the help of two women schoolteachers who waved their handkerchiefs at the appropriate moment to show him that the coast was clear, he finally crept into Switzerland.
Still Sarfatti’s troubles were not over. In the dark he lost his way to Geneva and was picked up by a pair of Swiss frontier guards, then interned and interrogated. His cover story – that he was an escaping British commando of Maltese origin who had been stranded in France after the major Allied raid on Dieppe – was not believed, but he managed to send a letter to the British consul in Geneva. This saw the British military attaché intervene and successfully arrange his release, albeit to the annoyance of the Swiss. At last, more than a month after he had landed in France, Sarfatti was able to present himself to Jock McCaffery who now prepared him for the final trip into Italy. It was not the first time that the two men had met. In his early role as an SOE talent-spotter, McCaffery had recruited Sarfatti at Ilfracombe two years before.
On the morning of 17 December 1942, Sarfatti boarded a train leaving Geneva for Lugano, close to the Italian border. He was wearing good boots and his own Italian clothes, which it had been agreed he could bring out from England and wear, and he carried 3,000 lire, a fake Italian identity card in the name of Giacomo Rossi, and, hidden in a hollowed-out shoe brush, a faked medical certificate stating that he was exempt from Italian military service because he suffered from epilepsy. The only other document in his possession was a British passport to get him past the Swiss controls on the Gotthard Pass. Once beyond those, but before the train reached Lugano, he hid this in the lavatory from where it was immediately retrieved by the next man to use it. This was a young Englishman, Peter Jellinek, a former employee in Switzerland of the Bally shoe company and now one of McCaffery’s assistants. Jellinek had been given the job of escorting Sarfatti, at a discreet distance, as far as Lugano. It was there, on the platform, that Jellinek had to leave him, his last sight of Sarfatti being of the latter ‘holding up a surreptitious thumb’.30
From Lugano, with the prearranged assistance of a couple of local smugglers and a frontier guard, Sarfatti was guided to the border where he climbed a fence and crossed over, bound for Milan and a rendezvous with McCaffery’s Italian contacts. ‘Galea left yesterday,’ McCaffery telegraphed London. ‘He was absolutely content and in excellent spirits.’31 What no one in SOE knew was that this young and gallant Italian was heading straight into one of the most intricate traps laid by Italian counter-espionage officers at any point during the war.
Six months after arriving in Berne, Jock McCaffery felt that Swiss Intelligence probably thought he was engaged in press work, ‘picking up all the Italian information I can find,’ while the local Germans and Italians ‘probably think I am a fishy individual to be watched closely … But I should be extremely surprised if either of them had any inkling of the real nature of my work. The Italians probably think I am bent on subsidising newspapers, etc.’32 Today, judging from wartime Italian records, McCaffery may have been right to suppose that he was escaping excessive suspicion. In August 1943, the counter-espionage section of SIM, which had agents all over Switzerland, was still recording in its files that he was ‘assistant press attaché at the English Legation at Berne, where he lives at No. 46 Luisenstrasse’.33 A British colleague who worked with him in Berne would remember that ‘Jock kept Italy not only engraved o
n his heart, but altogether very close to his chest.’34 Where McCaffery was less successful was in recruiting men to help him whose own secret lives were as guarded as his own.
There are several reasons for this. For one thing, the Second World War was not the heyday of British secret service vetting. Modern procedures of gauging a man’s integrity and potential for clandestine work lay far in the future. Had such processes been in place and accessible from Switzerland in 1941, it is hard to believe that a man like Edmund Schwerdt, the drunk and indiscreet Englishman whom Jock McCaffery found propping up a Ticino bar, would have been assessed as acceptable material. An alarm bell might have rung, for instance, had someone cast an eye at the testimony of Schwerdt’s first wife when she petitioned for divorce in 1934. After marrying under age while still at university, Schwerdt, according to his wife, started sleeping with other women within a year and was soon leading ‘a most erratic life’: spending too much money; drinking heavily; frightening and neglecting his children; and staying out night after night in London bars and night-clubs from which he would return, drunk, to his little maisonette in Lower Sloane Street, where he would submit his spouse ‘to exceedingly unpleasant and disgusting forms of sexual intercourse’.35
Target Page 25
