Klein was thirty-five years old when McCaffery met him. ‘Full, flabby face,’ recorded an interrogator when the British caught up with him again in 1945. ‘Gesticulates a great deal. Has a very noticeable habit of pulling at his coat collar. Speaks with [a] Triestino accent, and has a slight impediment in his speech which makes him unable to pronounce his Rs properly.’58
Born in Trieste when the city was still Austrian, Klein had worked there before the war as a journalist on a small newspaper called Piccolo. His real army career was more modest than he made it sound when he and McCaffery met: it seems to have consisted in fact of a few months’ conscripted service in the ranks. While it is possible that he was, as he insisted to his interrogators, a nephew of Fiorello La Guardia, whose first wife, Thea Almerigotti, shared Klein’s mother’s surname, it is interesting that Klein seems to have been unaware that Thea had been dead since 1921. Certainly his claim to have passed naval intelligence to the American Embassy in Rome was accurate, albeit intelligence that came from SIM and was designed to impress and exploit the Americans without disclosing anything significant.
It was SIM that then sent Klein to Berne, in February 1942, to contact the British and find out what they were planning. Within days it had heard back from him about McCaffery’s eagerness to set up ‘a centre of information and sabotage’, possibly in Milan, and supply it with a wireless set and other material. Klein even sent a detailed pen portrait of the man he had met: ‘lived 11 years in Italy … was correspondent of the Daily Mail and professor of English … has a wife and a child of three in London … average height … robust constitution … youthful (36–37 years) … face slightly pitted … grey-brown eyes … trimmed, reddish-blond hair.’ Almost the only important thing that SIM did not learn about McCaffery, whom Klein described as the ‘head of the [British] I.S. [Intelligence Service] in Berne’, was his name.59
Much later, when the war was over and Allied interrogators got their hands on him, there was general agreement that Klein was best understood as an unscrupulous and opportunistic mercenary who had fallen into the world of secret work more by accident than by design. ‘[He] does not give an impression of having a great deal of physical or moral courage,’ reads one British report:
He is undoubtedly endowed with a certain amount of cunning, and possibly even intelligence. He is a plausible individual of doubtful ethical outlook, who has almost certainly no higher motives than his own personal safety and interests … The most likely explanation [for his actions] is that [he] drifted into intelligence out of greed and fondly imagined that it would be a very simple way of earning easy money.60
An American interrogator made much the same assessment. Although ‘fundamentally cowardly’ and ‘not a man of outstanding intelligence or education’, Klein was ‘a convincing liar’ and ‘a person of extraordinary cunning and self assurance’. Aware by then of the tricks pulled by SIM on the Americans in Rome and the British in Switzerland, his British interrogator observed ruefully of Klein’s doubtful character: ‘The Italians, however, seem to have had the advantage of realising this at an early date, and used him as a mere cut-out.’61
That observation was accurate. SIM was never convinced of Klein’s reliability and integrity and always sought to keep him under very strict control. Its ability to do so was helped inordinately by McCaffery’s unwavering faith in Elio Andreoli, SOE’s courier to the Tigrotti, whom he decided to use as his go-between for all dealings with Klein too. Since Andreoli was one of its agents, SIM was thus able to receive every consignment of money and stores from Switzerland that McCaffery believed he was sending to Klein’s organisation. It also allowed SIM to intercept and read every incoming message that McCaffery penned to Klein before it reached him, as well as compose all of Klein’s replies and reports to the British, since these, too, were channelled through Andreoli. That correspondence was often written in secret ink but this posed no problems for SIM, who learned early on that the ink came from water in which tablets of pyramidon, a painkilling drug, had been dissolved, and that it could be read by employing the appropriate developing salts taken from the stores sent in by the British. An unexpected benefit of being able to monitor everything so closely was that it also enabled SIM to reinforce its low opinion of Klein. On one occasion it allowed them to catch him trying to siphon off, for his personal use, some of the incoming British money.
Mirroring the OVRA’s handling of the imaginary Tigrotti, SIM also used Klein to cement the trust of the British by reporting, as if from him, genuine factory and railway accidents and similar incidents that they dressed up as convincing acts of anti-Fascist sabotage carried out by his men. This was delicate work and great care was taken to get it right. A marshalling yard accident, for example, would be reported to a SIM representative working in the directorate of the Italian railways; then it would be carefully considered to see if it seemed suitably persuasive to be represented to the British as a deliberate misdeed. By having Klein’s fictional anti-Fascists appeal to Switzerland for directives and guidance, SIM was also able to fish successfully for details of targets that interested the British and thus ensure that these reports of apparent sabotage underlined his organisation’s worth. Although SIM officers in Milan were the ones who ran Klein and drafted his letters to McCaffery, the main SIM headquarters in Rome was responsible for coordinating much of the effort and for studying and responding to British requests and questionnaires. They were assisted in this by the Italian General Staff, which drafted and approved the intelligence that SIM sent back to the British.
SIM, like the OVRA, was also able to coax the British into sending material into Italy directly. In early 1943, McCaffery heard from Klein that he was able to receive a parachute drop of supplies into Lake Viverone in northern Italy. If given a few days’ notice, Klein said, he could provide a safe house nearby. ‘Here we have really got something,’ McCaffery told London, stressing that he had the ‘greatest confidence’ in Klein’s abilities.62 SOE went to work. Six containers were specially prepared at Aston House in Bedfordshire, a secret research and development facility known as Station XII. Each one was designed to float with three to six inches protruding above the surface and to remain waterproof for a week. Then, at nine in the evening of 13 April, a four-engined RAF Halifax bomber took off from Tempsford airfield, not far from Aston House, bound for northern Italy. Five hours later, in spite of terrible visibility, the aircraft made it successfully to the spot and parachuted the containers into the lake. Afterwards McCaffery heard from Klein that two of his men had rowed out and searched the lake, but they had recovered only one container before ‘a bunch of young recruits on a day’s outing in hired boats’ had suddenly appeared; these recruits had discovered another container and had raised the alarm, ‘and soon the place had been swarming with police and sightseers’.63 In reality, five containers were hauled out of the water. All ended up in SIM’s hands.
Drawn up afterwards by appropriate technical specialists, a long inventory of what SIM found inside reveals the range of colourful items that SOE and the Royal Air Force had taken so much trouble to send. The attention to detail is typical of the care taken by the Italians over every aspect of the deception. There were ‘packets of plastic explosive in oiled paper, each package weighing approximately 2 kg and in the shape of small sticks’, plus dozens of ‘small, black, round incendiary bombs’. There was a plethora of primers and detonators and various types of fuse:
metal boxes containing incendiary devices in celluloid for delayed detonation … metal boxes containing time-pencil detonators … black-painted metal tubes containing a series of small yellow truncated cones for initiation purposes … rolls of instantly igniting quick burning fuse coloured orange-red … rolls of detonating fuse coloured grey … rolls of slow-burning Bickford fuse coloured black … containers of tarred cardboard, capacity ¼ litre, with added fuses and caps …
There were penknives and pliers and boxes of Vaseline. There were bobbins of copper wire and rolls of insul
ation tape. There were objects that the Italians failed to identify: ‘special metallic pencils of unknown purpose (very delicate tools protected in cotton wool)’ and ‘plastic phials of approx. 50 cubic cm containing an unidentified liquid’. Lastly ‘there was a small booklet of instructions with a red cover written in French entitled: “La technique du sabotage”. There were 15 of these.’64
More stores were sent in subsequent weeks. On the night of 16/17 June, thirty-five floating containers were dropped by parachute into Lake Varano, the largest lake in southern Italy, a long, thin, salt-water lagoon on the Gargano Peninsula. This time McCaffery heard from Klein that his men had found the stores. Two months later, on the night of 17/18 August, nine more containers were dropped at the same spot. August also saw more supplies landed from the sea, when a three-man landing party paddled ashore at night from the submarine Seraph and buried four wireless sets on the rocky Portofino peninsula. One of these men was a pre-war Arctic explorer, Captain Andrew Croft. A fire-eating SOE officer who would later parachute into France and win a DSO, Croft would recall in his memoirs that the sets had been dug in beneath ‘some luxuriant maquis bushes’ and their exact location communicated to ‘the Italian Resistance’ who were due to pick them up.65 ‘The secreting of the stores was carried out very quietly, and all traces of our work carefully removed,’ adds the report of the British officer in charge of the party, Captain McClair of the Special Boat Section; ‘I have every reason to believe the enemy will not suspect a landing.’66 Today, with access to both British and Italian records, it is clear that McClair and his companions were particularly exposed. Quite apart from having landed stores at a spot suggested by SIM, they had been briefed beforehand to make for a certain barber’s shop in Genoa if they found themselves stranded ashore. The address for this safe house had also been passed to the British by Italian intelligence.
SIM secured more from SOE than material and money. Once McCaffery and the British were taken in by Klein and his contacts, the Italians found themselves able to watch and destroy communications between the British and genuine anti-Fascists. One such was Eugenio Paladino, an Italian engineer in his forties to whom McCaffery was introduced by an American banker in Zurich in the autumn of 1941. Paladino, who lived in Rome, had a sideline in the tobacco business that took him frequently through Switzerland on business trips to Germany. He told McCaffery that he was happy to report back about those trips and to explore the possibilities in Italy of arranging safe houses and the receipt of agents and stores. In May 1942, with the intention of providing Paladino with a secure means of maintaining contact, McCaffery put him in touch with Klein in Milan. Not long after that, Paladino was arrested in Rome, found guilty by the Special Tribunal of passing intelligence to the Allies, and sentenced to thirty years in prison.
Another line into Italy that fell victim in this way and at about this time was what McCaffery had described to London as ‘a very good thing in Milan … in the shape of two first-class Yugoslavs’.67 These were a pair of university students who appeared to have good contacts, and McCaffery was confident that, among other things, they could help agents to cross Italy’s border with Slovenia. In April 1942, McCaffery delegated the task of contacting them to Edmund Schwerdt. Schwerdt gave Elio Andreoli, his Swiss friend, appropriate instructions. SIM did the rest. ‘I have taken all possible precautions to act safely and to exploit these contacts to the full,’ reported the SIM officer overseeing proceedings. ‘I consider it necessary, however, to follow and control the Yugoslav students’ activities to the furthest degree possible before suppressing their work.’68 In June, after a delivery was made to their Milan apartment of explosives, instructions, 35,000 lire, and ‘a “Leica” camera 1 x 3.5 (already loaded) plus an additional lens and 7 rolls of film’, those arrested included a man from Trieste who had come to visit the pair and a Bulgarian student in whose room they had scheduled their next meeting with Andreoli.69
And then there was the fate of SOE’s young wireless operator, Giacomino Sarfatti. When he turned up in Milan in December 1942, stepping off the train from Como just hours after crossing the border, SIM had been expecting him for months. McCaffery had always been open with Eligio Klein about his wish to send him a wireless operator, and in recent months had warned often of his impending arrival. This was a time when the trials and executions in Italy of suspected British agents were reaching a peak: the Zaccaria brothers, shot on 10 November; Emilio Zappalà and SOE’s Antonio Gallo, shot on 28 November; Ettore Vacca and Giuseppe Giacomazzi, both shot in December; and Laura D’Oriano, the only woman to die at Forte Bravetta, who would be shot there in January 1943. But SIM did not plan to arrest Sarfatti immediately.
Instead, SIM decided to keep him tightly under Klein’s wing, to make him feel protected, undetected, and freely in contact with the outside world. This, it was hoped, would neutralise Sarfatti’s ability to engage in any kind of anti-Italian activity, while allowing SIM to keep deceiving the British in Berne by maintaining an illusion that all was well and that he was safe among friends. So, when Sarfatti sought out Klein in Milan, SIM made sure that he received every impression that Klein was doing all he could for him: he fixed up Sarfatti with a rented room in an apartment on Via Marcona; he bought him suitable clothes and supplied him with a ration card; to provide some local cover, Klein gave him an attaché case of medicines so that he could pretend to be a pharmaceutical salesman. Klein also handed him a suitcase sent over the frontier by McCaffery in readiness for Sarfatti’s arrival. It contained, among other items, an automatic pistol. Later he delivered a wireless set that had also been smuggled across. Meanwhile, through its ongoing control of Elio Andreoli, McCaffery’s Swiss courier to Milan, SIM was also able to open, read and reseal every item of correspondence that Sarfatti and McCaffery exchanged.
SIM’s delicate handling of Sarfatti was helped by his absolute faith in Klein, his only contact in Milan, whom he had been told by McCaffery to trust completely. ‘[The British] agent Giacomo Rossi [Sarfatti’s cover name] has to date been inactive,’ reads one early SIM report about him,
evidently because, according to instructions received from the English service, he should try for a certain period only to orientate himself and to get to know ‘Giusto’ [SIM’s codename for Klein]. He conducts a normal life: goes out of the house in the morning and afternoon in order to become accepted by the inhabitants of Via Marcona 81 as a commercial agent for pharmaceutical products; he eats his lunch in a trattoria in the neighbourhood of Via Marcona 81 and passes his evenings in a cinema or theatre. He often likes to walk around the city and for preference dines in the Restaurant ‘Brenta’ with ‘Giusto’.70
From his chats with Klein, SIM soon learned that Sarfatti was an Italian citizen and ‘that he has his parents and a brother in Italy, who, however, he has no intention of visiting (he has so far given no information about them)’.71 It knew that he had joined the Pioneer Corps after being interned in 1940 and had later received training in ‘techniques of sabotage and espionage’. It knew that he had reached Italy after landing in France ‘by a motor fishing boat’ and been arrested in Switzerland where he had rolled out a cover story of being a British commando who had been at Dieppe.72
SIM gathered, too, that Sarfatti had received his final instructions in Switzerland from a man called ‘Mac’. ‘This was probably the chief I met in Berne,’ Klein pointed out in one report.73 It knew, too, that Sarfatti’s orders included the task of sending back ‘documents of every type, including official ones, such as passes, military discharge papers, identity cards, etc’.74 It even knew that he carried a pill of quick-acting poison, to be swallowed in case of arrest, and that he somehow managed to lose it. When he wrote to Berne to say that he wanted a new one, SIM read the request and resolved to swap the new pill, when it arrived, for a harmless replacement, so that the real one could be sent ‘for chemical analysis’ and the production, if possible, of an antidote, ‘which could be administered in case of need … [It has been] learn
t in recent correspondence with the leadership of the Gestapo that various different spies in the pay of the enemy had swallowed poison pills in order to escape the interrogators.’75
Sarfatti’s untroubled time in Milan lasted until the eve of the Armistice. It was prolonged by the fact that, as SIM knew well, he was there mainly to play a waiting game, since his orders were to stay in place and do little until SOE really needed him. One SIM memorandum in February 1943 noted that Sarfatti, ‘in chatting with [Klein], revealed that, to date, he did not know the use he was supposed to make of the radio transmitter [he had received], but that he was keeping it in accordance with the instructions of his superiors that it would be useful at some [later] stage for communicating directly with London matters of particular importance.’ 76 Confident that it was controlling him so effectively that he knew nothing of particular importance, SIM was happy to allow him to use the set and remained hands-off even when SOE began to request information about enemy troop movements. Since Sarfatti asked Klein for the answers, SIM ensured that suitably ineffectual responses were sent. At one point, after learning that Sarfatti needed more room for his aerial, SIM even arranged for Klein to move him from his pokey room at 81 Via Marcona to a spacious apartment at 8 Via Spartaco. Feeding the wire out of the attic, into the courtyard, and back in through the bathroom window, Sarfatti was soon getting a better reception.
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