Faccio could ‘keep it going nicely’.31 Faccio, who impressed SOE as ‘very obviously not a proper SIM officer’, went on to describe how, on discovering on his arrival in Sardinia that Adler was languishing in Cagliari prison, he had thought this ‘very hard’ on the young man. Faccio had therefore decided to let him live instead in his officers’ mess. By the time that orders arrived from Rome in May to send Adler to the mainland, the two men had become ‘quite good friends’. Adler had even accompanied Faccio on car drives around the island. But this had not meant that Adler had co-operated, Faccio stressed. Adler’s attitude had struck him as ‘one of complete indifference’. He had given away ‘nothing of what he had seen or heard in England’ or, indeed, any other information of importance. The ‘double-cross’ had been conducted without Adler’s ‘consent or collaboration’ and he had never worked the wireless set himself, ‘the transmitting being done by an Italian lieutenant.’32
The second Italian whom SOE interviewed was a sergeant-major named Antonio Silvestri. In 1945 he was working for the Allies in the SIM office in Rome, having, like Faccio, switched sides after the Armistice. The SOE officer who spoke to Silvestri considered him ‘an excellent type, serious and intelligent. He was careful and precise in his statements and showed every sign of doing his best to tell everything he knew which was of importance, and to stress the difference between what he knew first-hand and what he knew from other people. His statements can probably be considered as very reliable.’33 According to a captured American officer who met him in Cagliari in the summer of 1943, Silvestri was the son of an Italian father and Japanese mother and before the war had lived in Shanghai and worked for American Express. In Cagliari, remembered the American, Silvestri had been Faccio’s ‘secretary interpreter’ and knew, ‘according to him, 4,000 Chinese ideograms’.34
Silvestri, who spoke excellent English, explained to SOE in 1945 that he had been sent from Rome to Sardinia in May 1943 to replace a junior SIM officer in Cagliari’s counter-espionage office. Neither Serra nor Adler was still on the island when Silvestri arrived. From his new colleagues, however, he had managed to gather something of the background to the case. Once ashore, ‘these two individuals found themselves more or less lost,’ he recalled, ‘and committed the imprudence of asking a shepherd (or some such individual) for directions’. This man, or someone else who had noticed their ‘manner and obvious ignorance’, promptly alerted the authorities with the result that the two agents were arrested the same day. Silvestri believed that they had been treated well and that Adler ‘certainly lived with the commander of the SIM C/S [the Controspionaggio section] and ate at the same table’.35
In Cagliari, Silvestri had had the role of providing English translations for the signals being sent over Adler’s wireless set. He explained in 1945 that ‘all incoming messages from the British were repeated back immediately to Rome, which then signalled back the message which was to go to the British in reply’. These outgoing messages, which he translated into English, were then enciphered and transmitted. ‘On one or two fairly rare occasions Cagliari drafted the reply on its own initiative, but all texts in and out were submitted to Rome.’ Listening to him speak in 1945, SOE observed that Silvestri
considered that the whole operation of doubling had been very successful [and was] quite sure that the British were taken in by it. To demonstrate his point he explained that on one occasion the Italians had asked for certain supplies of stores to be dropped and the stores had in fact arrived. On another occasion the British asked for most important details on the fortifications and military dispositions on Sardinia, and, by co-operating with the local Sardinian Military HQ, the necessary information was ‘planted’. The military authorities were particularly pleased over this matter.36
Mario Bertacchi, the SIM counter-espionage chief, would remember that Adler and Serra were taken from Sardinia and imprisoned in Rome ‘as soon as their presence on the island was no longer necessary for playing the double game’. Bertacchi also recalled that SIM was particularly anxious to avoid repeating the same mistakes ‘as in the Rossi case’.37 This was a reference to the MI6 agent in Sicily who had tried to indicate to the British in one of his messages that he was sending them under duress. Bertacchi evidently believed that SIM had got things right with the Sardinian deception. He was mistaken. Almost from the start, SOE had rumbled that Adler and Serra were blown.
As the first few messages began to arrive from Adler’s set, fears had quickly grown in Algiers that something was seriously wrong. SOE wireless operators receiving Adler’s coded signals spotted that his messages referred to Serra by his real name and not as Pisano, his agreed nom de guerre. More worryingly, Adler’s security checks were missing. Security checks were a series of letters that an agent would insert in his outgoing messages as a means of indicating to those receiving them that he was operating freely. If checks were absent or corrupt, it might indicate that an agent was working under duress or someone else was working his set.
SOE knew that the security check system was primitive and unreliable: sometimes agents made mistakes or simply forgot to include them. For this reason a team of Adler’s old instructors who had trained him at Thame Park were put to work at an SOE signals station in Buckinghamshire to listen to his messages and record what they thought. On the night of 26 February, all four were manning receivers when the Morse of the next message was heard from faraway Sardinia. It was brief. The signal merely mentioned again the mission’s food problems and claimed that recent Allied bombing had caused a ‘great number [of] victims [and] damage and revenge feelings’ on the island.38 But it was enough for each of the listeners. All expressed ‘grave doubt’ about the identity of the operator: the quality of the Morse seemed well above Adler’s standard.39
There were other disturbing signs. In March an Italian prisoner being interrogated in Algiers was reported to have claimed that in Cagliari in January he had heard a rumour – ‘everyone was talking about it’ – that four [sic] agents carrying a wireless set ‘and lots of money’ had been captured after landing by submarine ‘somewhere near Cagliari’. One captive, he said, had been ‘a Sardinian deserter from the Carabinieri’.40 Then the same spy story began to be discussed by captive Italian submariners whose vessels had recently been sunk off Algeria and whose conversations were bugged as they shared cells between interrogations. ‘He wanted to know whether there was a curfew in Cagliari when we left,’ remarked one prisoner, a chief boatswain from the Italian submarine Tritone, about his interrogator’s line of questioning; ‘I told him I never went out [at night]’. ‘There can’t be a curfew there,’ said his cellmate, a torpedo officer from the submarine Avorio; ‘Why do they imagine there might be curfew?’ ‘There was something of the sort,’ the Tritone boatswain replied; ‘There was a curfew about the 16th or 17th January. People said they had captured some men who landed from a submarine near there.’41 In another cell the boatswain from the Avorio also wondered aloud about the point of the curfew: ‘Shore leave [at Cagliari] for petty officers was from two to six … because there were supposed to have been some parachutists or submarines about. The English landed some men.’ To which his cellmate, the Tritone’s chief engine-room petty officer, responded: ‘They soon caught that “carabiniere”. They captured a “carabiniere” who was a Sardinian.’42
SOE then set about trying to confirm whether Adler and Serra were really in enemy hands. Since it was felt that if Serra had been captured he ‘would probably have been dealt with already as not being any use’, a message was transmitted to Sardinia asking innocently for the names by which Serra had known a fellow trainee, plus the latter’s age and the name of a mutual friend in India, with the explanation that the trainee was in London and wished to have proof that Serra was working for the British.43 A few days later, a reply came back. It contained the correct responses and the name of another authentic friend. Serra, SOE grimly deduced, was ‘obviously still above ground’.44
A second attempt, b
ased on the persistent use of Serra’s real name in all signals coming from Sardinia, proved more conclusive. At the end of April SOE transmitted a message telling the pair to expect the arrival of a new agent by the name of Pisano. ‘Pisano will shortly be ready to join you,’ the message read. ‘Can you receive him and how do you recommend [us] sending him?’45 Since Adler would know that Pisano was Serra’s nom de guerre, SOE felt that this message would surely provoke surprise and a request for clarity if Adler were really in control of his set. Two days passed. Then a reply was received. ‘Very glad Pisano is ready to join us,’ it began. ‘We can receive him and give him convenient hospitality.’46 Days later, a second message arrived: ‘Pisano can easily be sent by submarine and landed on deserted beach south [of] Cape Palmeri … Let us know landing date and time. Serra will be on the spot with two friends who will receive Pisano, give him proper hospitality and accompany him where required. Cheerio.’47
So far as the British were concerned, discovering that the Italians were operating Adler’s wireless set was only the beginning of this affair. In early May, SOE’s Harold Crawshaw alerted the Algiers office of A Force, Dudley Clarke’s famous deception organisation, to what was going on. ‘S/Ldr Crawshaw has absolutely no doubt whatsoever that [Adler] is being run by the Italians,’ A Force recorded; ‘it is even possible that he has been killed’.48 In charge of A Force’s Algiers office, which was a sub-headquarters to Clarke’s main office in Cairo, was Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Crichton. Keeping in close touch with Eisenhower’s planning staff, Crichton and his little team were responsible for doing all they could to assist with imaginative schemes aimed at deceiving and discomfiting the enemy. They were also well briefed on tactical and strategic requirements. When he heard about what was happening in Sardinia, Crichton, to quote from SOE’s files, attached ‘the utmost importance’ to the matter.49 Soon A Force was considering how to exploit it in support of what was known in secret circles as Plan ‘Barclay’.
Plan ‘Barclay’ had been born out of the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 when Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, with their senior aides and military chiefs, had mapped out afresh their strategic aims. One outcome of these discussions had been the decision to prepare for an invasion of Sicily, and ‘Barclay’ had been devised as a deception operation aimed at diverting enemy attention from Sicily’s defence by deceiving the Axis about Allied intentions in the Mediterranean. It involved an extraordinary range of imaginative measures. Intricate but entirely artificial threats to Greece, Sardinia, Corsica and southern France were developed, including, for example, a fictitious ‘Twelfth Army’ in the Eastern Mediterranean, poised to invade the Balkans, complete with vast numbers of dummy landing craft constructed in Cyrenaica and Egypt to suggest to enemy spies and reconnaissance aircraft the presence of an invasion fleet. The most famous ruse, though never formally integrated into ‘Barclay’, was Operation ‘Mincemeat’, the scheme wherein a dead body in the uniform of a Royal Marines officer was slipped from a submarine into the waters off Spain in the hope that the corpse would wash ashore as if from a plane crash at sea. Attached to the corpse was a briefcase of papers and plans suggesting that the Allies intended to invade Sardinia and Greece. The hope was that the Germans would see and believe the documents.
With the Italians apparently thinking that they were successfully controlling Adler’s set, A Force saw a useful opportunity to spread misinformation in Sardinia itself. It also hoped to draw and identify what it termed ‘enemy smoke’. This meant misinformation that the enemy wished to plant on the Allies. If spotted and accurately interpreted, ‘smoke’ could help to establish the enemy’s real intentions and any secrets he was trying to hide. Vital to achieving any of this was the need to prolong the illusion that the British were unaware of what the Italians were doing, so regular meetings began to be held in Algiers at which A Force, MI6 and SOE officers discussed the progress of the case, ruminated over the latest signals received, and prepared all outgoing messages.
In the hope of reaping the greatest benefit, it was understood by all in Algiers that nothing should be rushed. To begin with, they decided to carry on sending ‘the sort of messages SOE would send’ and refrain from attempting anything too ambitious or unsubtle.50 Soon, though, A Force began to feed in to the traffic indications that the Allies might wish the mission to provide support for an imminent landing. ‘Proceed urgently with organising local elements,’ read one message sent to Sardinia in early June. ‘How do you think your friends could help by sabotage, civil disobedience, etcetera, in event [of] military operations?’51 ‘What arms and money do you want?’ read another a few days later. ‘If we supply arms and money what action could you hope [to] organise among local sympathisers in near future?’52
Meanwhile, as A Force had hoped, messages were coming back from Sardinia to suggest that the Italians were hooked: requests for stores, directions and information. ‘We have consulted Serra’s friends who are very reliable and ready to work with us,’ read one awkwardly phrased message received in Algiers in May. ‘Before trying to organise favourable elements they wish to know which are your aims and how long would it be at their disposal and with how many means and specialised men would you be able to supply us. Cheerio.’53 ‘We are working with all our might,’ read another received in early June. ‘However [a] substantial increase in organisation depends chiefly on [the] possibility of sending us men, arms and money.’54 To help Serra’s ‘friends’ to organise ‘local sympathisers’, Sardinia repeated at the end of the month, ‘you should send us Italian money, automatic guns and sabotage material.’55
By then, A Force had decided that a tangible display of trust was required to show that the Allies believed that their agents in Sardinia were free. More than words were needed: already Algiers had had to explain away the non-arrival of the imaginary ‘Pisano’ by saying that he had lost his nerve and was no longer coming. It was with this need in mind that Cecil Roseberry made a proposal of particular ruthlessness. To perpetuate the idea that the British were still being hoodwinked, perhaps SOE might ‘sacrifice’ a real agent by sending him in to act as Adler’s ‘assistant’? Possibly, Roseberry thought, ‘one of our doubtful Wops’?56 He meant one of the ex-prisoners and internees who had volunteered for SOE service but proved unreliable, un-trainable, or otherwise unsuitable. (‘Wop’, a common but derogatory British term for an Italian, was frequently used as formal SOE shorthand [like ‘Huns’ for Germans and ‘Japs’ for Japanese] in order to keep the length of telegrams to a minimum.)
Roseberry was not alone in being so cold-hearted. Both A Force and other SOE officers seem to have liked his idea and an unsuspecting Italian was considered for the job. The identity of this man is never stated explicitly in SOE’s surviving records, but an otherwise inexplicable reference to a ‘cover’ being proposed for this one-way ticket suggests that it was probably Luigi Mazzotta, whose nom de guerre was ‘Cover’. A tall, athletic man with thick black hair and a thick black moustache, the 31-year-old Mazzotta was the son of a bricklayer from Lecce and a tailor by trade who had been in Africa since 1935 after being called up into the Italian artillery. Demobilised in 1936, he had lived in Mogadishu, where he opened a shop as a tailor and outfitter, started a dry-cleaning business, and bought three haulage trucks, before moving in 1939 to Addis Ababa. Emilio Zappalà had recommended Mazzotta to the British in Abyssinia in 1941.
SOE had never been sure about Mazzotta, even though he claimed that his parents were socialists whom the Fascists had persecuted. ‘In spite of his well-built appearance, I am satisfied that this man is too full of fear to do anything very active of an operational kind,’ was the view of Cairo’s medical officer, Alexander Kennedy, in October 1942:
He is by trade and by nature an industrious tailor who has joined anything that would offer temporary economic security. He has no interest in getting on with the job and is quite satisfied with his present life if he gets enough money for clothes and girls. It is true that he has lost ev
erything and has the Fascists to thank for it, but this will not make him undertake any dangerous operation. If captured, he would at once tell all he knew …
This is a man of weak character, who will always take the easier course and who will take no risks.57
‘I cannot find any signs in Mazzotta’s make-up of definite anti-Fascist bias,’ recorded another officer in April 1943, after Mazzotta arrived in Britain as one of the five Italians whom Cairo had shipped back by sea for special training. ‘He might possibly prove unsuitable for such dangerous work owing to the shallowness of his motives.’ Particularly odd had been his frank admission to suddenly liquidating his businesses in 1939 to fund ‘a life of ease and pleasure’ in Addis Ababa and then, until the British arrived, doing ‘absolutely nothing except spend his money’: evidence, the officer thought, of ‘a highly temperamental and highly eccentric character’.58
Despite agreement in London that the ‘sacrifice’ of one Italian ‘might save lots of our own troops’, it was eventually decided that sending a live agent to be captured might not be very wise.59 This was not because of any sudden concern or consideration for the man’s life. It simply reflected a degree of worry that, as Cecil Roseberry put it, ‘dropping a victim’ who might ‘break down under treatment’ could endanger the wider operation.60 But to give the Italians something, steps were taken with RAF consent to parachute supplies instead. After a failed attempt in June, a drop of four containers of money, weapons and sabotage devices was finally and successfully made at precisely one o’clock on the morning of 17 July on to the slopes of Monte Cardiga. A Halifax flying from Algeria carried out the sortie. At the controls as it came in to drop was Flight Lieutenant John Austin, an experienced ‘special duties’ pilot for whom the day was his twenty-sixth birthday. The report made afterwards by Austin and his crew reveals that SIM was well aware of the agreed ground procedures. ‘Nothing seen at first,’ reads the report, ‘but on aircraft flashing “B,” three bonfires were lit up and ground answered with “A”. Cargo was dropped at 0100 from 3–400 ft., heading 110º mag at 140mph … [Rear gunner] saw “chutes” open normally.’61
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