‘At first no one spoke,’ McCaffery would recall of one dramatic press account of the standoff on the lake:
Then Dick, as he lay there in the water, asked them were they fishermen. Possibly nonplussed by the fluency of his perfect Italian, still no one spoke. And then, the newspaper informed its readers, this young man repeated his question, saying in an annoyed tone of voice: ‘I asked you, are you fishermen?’ It seemed absolutely incredible that in such a desperate situation any man could allow himself the luxury of being annoyed, but an enemy newspaper, which it still was, would hardly invent such a detail.15
Also reported was the ominous news that the captive was being held for trial by a military tribunal.
It is likely, of course, that Mallaby would have ended up in Italian hands sooner or later anyway, given the fact that the groups to which he was being sent were an enemy invention. Mallaby’s instructions on landing were to make for a safe house in Como; if he found no one there, he should hitchhike to another in Milan or Genoa. Jock McCaffery had provided the addresses, which Mallaby had learned by heart. Both were known to SIM. The one in Como was the home of Enrico Cavadini, an agent of both SIM and the OVRA. The address in Milan was the SIM-provided flat used by Eligio Klein. ‘We have good reason to place reliance on our end of the line,’ Cecil Roseberry, blissfully unaware of the truth, had assured Cairo when Mallaby was first assigned to the operation. ‘[McCaffery] has given ample proof of [Klein’s] bona fides and of his ability …’16
On top of that, McCaffery had sent letters to both Klein and Giacomino Sarfatti, SOE’s young Italian agent in Milan, warning them of Mallaby’s imminent arrival. ‘One of our colleagues – a trustworthy friend and gifted technician – ought to visit you on Saturday 14 [August] or in the days that follow,’ Klein was told. ‘Tito is his name … When you have done all that is necessary to accommodate him comfortably (and I know that I can count on you for this after you did the same so marvellously for Giacomo [i.e. Sarfatti]), give him the green suitcase which we sent a few months ago.’17 The warning to Sarfatti was much the same: ‘in a few days’ time a colleague will be arriving. He will be known as Tito (his current name is Olaf).’18 Both letters found their way rapidly into the hands of SIM. The quotes above come from copies among its records.
Once Mallaby had dropped into Italian hands and was being beaten up in Como’s San Donnino prison, it did not take long for SIM to put the pieces together. ‘Tito’, SIM noted a week after Mallaby’s capture, ‘is none other than the parachutist who was sent to Lake Como on the night of 13 [August] and caught shortly after.’ SIM also recorded that after ‘repeated and stringent interrogation’ in Como the prisoner had admitted to the name ‘Olaf’ and ‘that his task was that of a radio operator for an extant group in Italy that was supposed to provide him with radio equipment (namely the one from Trieste contained in the green suitcase)’.19 Within days, from both an Allied and Italian point of view, the fact that SIM had established Mallaby’s identity would prove to be no bad thing.
‘The Italian hope of independently negotiating a surrender was slim indeed,’ Dwight Eisenhower would write in his memoirs, ‘because throughout the Italian governmental structure Mussolini had permitted or had been forced to accept the infiltration of countless Germans, all of whom were ready to pounce upon the first sign of defection and to take over the Italian nation in name as well as in fact.’20 That a channel for negotiation was ever established owed much to the personal actions and initiative of a short, dark man in a civilian suit who, incognito, left Rome by train on the evening of 12 August 1943 and, three days later, presented himself in neutral Madrid to Sir Samuel Hoare, the British Ambassador to Spain.
Ostensibly Hoare’s visitor was Signor Raimondi, a member of a diplomatic party en route from Rome to collect a party of Italian officials arriving in Lisbon from Chile. His real name was Giuseppe Castellano and he was in fact a 49-year-old general in the Italian Army whose true mission, as he now disclosed, was to seek out Allied officials and discuss with them the possibility of removing Italy from the war. Castellano was an aide to General Vittorio Ambrosio, chief of Comando Supremo, the military Supreme Command, and it had been Ambrosio, with the knowledge of Badoglio and the King, that had put him on the train to Spain. Accompanying Castellano was an interpreter, Franco Montanari, a young English-speaking official from the Italian Foreign Ministry; he also had with him a letter of introduction from Sir D’Arcy Osborne, the British Minister in the Vatican, addressed to Hoare, stating that Castellano could speak for Badoglio. Otherwise he carried no credentials. It was a highly delicate mission that called for the strictest secrecy to prevent the Germans from discovering what was afoot and trying to stop it. ‘I was not given any document which would confirm to the Anglo-Americans the official task entrusted to me,’ Castellano later wrote. ‘I started upon my trip entrusting myself solely to good fortune.’21
Castellano’s appearance was not the first Italian peace feeler recently received by the Allies. The new Badoglio government had sent out two that month already. Before Mussolini’s fall even a few Fascists had tried to sound out the ground, while the earliest approach from Badoglio – the one via Berne through the offices of Luigi Rusca – had come a year before Castellano set off. This approach was different, however. Castellano’s instructions from his superiors in Italy were to tell the Allies about Italy’s situation in general and suggest Allied landings on the coast north of the Rome. As he sat with Hoare in Madrid, however, he stated instead that Italy would accept the terms of unconditional surrender if it were allowed to change sides and fight the Germans with the Allies. These ideas, though they had never been discussed with Badoglio, were to prove essential in ensuring that talks progressed. As one historian has written, if Castellano had stuck to his original instructions ‘he would have faced the same wall of [British] Foreign Office opposition, and the request for unconditional surrender prior to any discussion, as had all the other Italian emissaries’.22
Late on 15 August, after the general and his interpreter had gone, Hoare sent word of Castellano’s proposal to London. From there it was forwarded immediately to Quebec where Churchill, Roosevelt and a host of senior British and American leaders and commanders were attending the Anglo-American ‘Quadrant’ conference. Reading Hoare’s telegram, Anthony Eden, who was in Canada too, urged that the Allies should continue to call for the Italians to surrender unconditionally. Churchill and Roosevelt felt differently. Instructions were dispatched that night to Allied Forces Headquarters in Algiers for Eisenhower to send two of his senior officers, under conditions of extreme secrecy, to neutral Lisbon, where Castellano and young Montanari, continuing their travels, were shortly due to arrive.
By the afternoon of 18 August, Eisenhower had selected two of his ‘most trusted staff officers’.23 One was his chief of staff, Major General Walter Bedell Smith, later a director of the CIA; the other was his chief intelligence officer, Brigadier Kenneth Strong, who was British. ‘Arrangements were accordingly put in hand to try to get them off by aeroplane at 2 p.m.,’ reported Harold Macmillan, the future British Prime Minister, who was then the resident British minister attached to Eisenhower’s headquarters:
Somehow the Mediterranean Air Command had to produce a British civilian aircraft to take the two officers from Gibraltar to Lisbon; somehow civilian clothes had to be obtained; somehow civilian papers had to be provided, for it was felt that if these two officers were to arrive openly in Lisbon the international press and the German Secret Service would be on to them in a moment. Fortunately both officers had common surnames and by juggling with the christian names and with the photographs, passable papers were provided before lunch time.24
Soon Bedell Smith and Strong were flying to Gibraltar. Next day they flew on to Lisbon. ‘I shall never forget Bedell sporting an appalling Norfolk jacket which he had somehow purchased in Algiers and some grey flannel trousers which fitted him very ill,’ Macmillan would write in his memoirs.
He had ob
tained some kind of dubious hat with a feather in it; but I persuaded him to remove this, saying that no British traveller of whatever class would walk about with this unusual decoration. Kenneth Strong did not find the civilian tailors of Algiers to his taste, and was similarly decked out in a very improbable costume. However, they got through.25
At half-past ten on the evening of 19 August, Castellano and Montanari were shown in to the drawing room of the British Embassy in Lisbon. Waiting for them were Bedell Smith, Strong, the British Ambassador and the American Chargé d’Affaires. ‘The Ambassador introduced me to all of them,’ Castellano wrote later; ‘they all greeted me with a nod. No one offered to shake my hand.’26 Discussions then began. ‘Both our visitors were nervous,’ Strong remembered.
Castellano, a small, dark-eyed and suave Sicilian, of about fifty years of age and with an intelligent and alert face but speaking no English, was obviously a man of importance, accustomed to authority. He carried on the talks with scarcely a reference to notes and he had a remarkable grasp of detail. He remained friendly throughout …
Montanari, whose mother was American, had been educated at Harvard and looked and behaved like an Anglo-Saxon, both in dress and manner. He was, however, clearly the junior partner in the affair; he seemed to know little of military matters and Castellano seldom referred to him except on some minor political point. He scarcely volunteered a remark, looking extremely sad the whole time, but as an interpreter his translations were excellent.
Talks lasted through the night. Castellano stuck to his line that Italy would surrender unconditionally if permitted to change sides when the Allies attacked the mainland; he also asked to know Allied plans. ‘That he was unable to obtain any concessions of importance was not a criticism of his ability,’ Strong noted. ‘Bedell Smith had no authority to depart one iota from his instructions.’27 Those instructions were to make it quite clear that the Italians must agree unconditionally to a military armistice, though the precise terms might be modified depending on the degree of assistance forthcoming from the Italian Government and people. By the time the discussions ended at seven the following morning, Castellano, who had no authority to discuss the terms, had agreed to take them back to Rome.
Before the meeting broke up, Castellano had also agreed to try to establish from Rome a means of clandestine communication with the Allies so that this crucial contact could survive and develop. Ideally this would take the form of a secret wireless link; if that proved impossible, he would attempt to communicate instead with the British Legation in Berne. The Combined Chiefs of Staff in Quebec had identified this as a matter of such vital importance that they had instructed Eisenhower, even before Castellano’s meeting in Lisbon, to ensure that such a link could be provided. Eisenhower had turned to Harold Macmillan. Macmillan then spoke to Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Dodds-Parker, the head of SOE’s ‘Massingham’ base.28
Both Dodds-Parker and Leo Marks, a young coding expert working in London at the time, would later make a series of erroneous claims as to the part that they and SOE were to play in the Italian surrender. Dodds-Parker, in his memoirs, confused Castellano with General Giacomo Zanussi, an entirely different Italian emissary dispatched from Rome at about this time.29 Marks, in his memoirs, would appear to have modelled his own recollections on those of Dodds-Parker.30 What really happened is that Eisenhower’s request was forwarded to London where it landed in the lap of ‘The Moke’: Brigadier Eric Mockler-Ferryman. Six months earlier, Mockler-Ferryman had been head of Eisenhower’s intelligence team for the campaign in Northwest Africa until he was sacked, unfairly, after the chaotic American defeat at the Kasserine Pass. Sent home in apparent disgrace and seemingly fated for a job in London with the Boy Scout movement, Mockler-Ferryman had been snapped up instead by SOE and put in charge of its operations in Northwest Europe. Now, in Baker Street, he put his mind to meeting Eisenhower’s request. Speed, he knew, was paramount: Castellano, to maintain his visiting diplomat’s cover, would have to return soon to Rome. One idea, very briefly entertained, was to send out Max Salvadori and a first-class wireless operator and have them return with Castellano to Italy. This was dropped in favour of Cecil Roseberry securing in London a secret SOE signals plan, flying with it to Lisbon, and handing it to Castellano, who would also be given an SOE wireless set and instructions in how to use it.
The first hiccup was quick in coming. Roseberry received Mockler-Ferryman’s instructions late in the afternoon of 18 August. He dropped everything and acted immediately but found that there was no senior officer still at work in SOE’s London signals office. The only officer present declared that he could not possibly issue a signals plan until he had been formally informed that a project had been both approved and allotted a codename. Bluffing, Roseberry assured him that it had been approved with the codename ‘Monkey’. With his boxes ticked, the officer produced the plan. The ‘Monkey’ name would stick.31
Roseberry failed to catch that night’s flight to Lisbon. Then the next night’s was cancelled. He finally flew the night after that, on the evening of 20 August, and reached Lisbon early the following morning. By then Bedell Smith and Strong had finished talking to Castellano and already returned to Algiers, but the two Italians were still there. On Baker Street’s instructions, the SOE office in Lisbon handed over a wireless set for the pair to take back to Italy; SOE-designed, it was known as a B Mark II and fitted snugly into what Castellano would recall as an elegant leather suitcase. They also taught Montanari, Castellano’s interpreter, how it worked; a wireless specialist on the Lisbon staff, Jack Robertson, acted as instructor. Roseberry arrived just in time to brief the Italians on the use of the ‘Monkey’ signals plan. He also helped arrange a simple double-transposition code based on the text of L’omnibus del corso, a 1941 novel by the Florentine writer Bino Sanminiatelli. The book was chosen after three copies were found in Lisbon: one for each end of the wireless link, plus a spare.
Roseberry, aware of reports reaching London that Dick Mallaby had been captured, also took the opportunity in Lisbon to try something else. Could he convincingly pretend to the Italians that the far-sighted British had dropped a wireless operator into Italy precisely for this eventuality, and try to persuade them to use a fully trained SOE wireless operator to work the Italian end of a link between Rome and Algiers? If Mallaby could be hauled out of prison and used like this, it might also save him from being shot. With all this in mind, Roseberry pointed out to Castellano that it was vital for the Italians to be ‘certain’ of any wireless operator.
[I] also laid great stress on the importance of the correct procedure when making contact … [Castellano] was very impressed with this difficulty and asked how it could be solved. The following conversation took place:
‘We cannot get such an operator.’
‘I can give you one.’
‘Where is he?’
‘In Italy.’
‘An Italian?’
‘No. A British officer who entered your country by parachute so as to be available for just such an emergency.’
‘Will he work for us?’
‘Definitely no, unless he receives from you … certain messages which he will know could not have emanated from anybody but me.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘In prison at Como; you captured him two [sic] days ago …’
[Castellano] seemed rather doubtful as to whether a British officer who had been taken ‘as a spy’ would be approved by Badoglio. At this I pointed out that although a British subject, he was born [sic] in Italy, loved Italy, but was prepared to risk his life in an attempt to fight against Fascism, which was exactly what the mission themselves [Castellano and Montanari] had set out to do.32
Castellano agreed to use him. ‘As soon as he crosses [the] Italian frontier General ‘C’ will telephone Rome saying no action must be taken against Olaf,’ SOE recorded. He would also ‘apply for the custody of Olaf’ and seek to use him as his operator.33
Delayed by the late
arrival of the Italian party coming from Chile, Castellano and Montanari eventually left Lisbon on 23 August. Embarking by train, the pair took with them the proposed armistice terms and, secreted in its neat leather case, their SOE wireless set, together with guidance regarding wavelengths and transmitting times and strict instructions that they had until midnight on 30 August to make contact. If nothing were heard, the Allies would assume that the Italian Government had not accepted the terms. With the Allied assault on mainland Italy now being prepared for early September, time was already very short.
In the hope of speeding Castellano safely back to Rome, orders were issued to the RAF to lay off bombing and strafing his likely route. Other than that, little more could be done on the Allied side except to make certain that any incoming messages from Castellano’s set – if Rome proved willing and able to get it working – were heard, taken down and decoded. These tasks were given to the SOE signals station at ‘Massingham’, where a handpicked team of four young women of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, the well-heeled unit that did much of SOE’s secret signals work, was assigned to handling the Monkey traffic if Rome ever came up on the air. ‘To maintain total security we were kept incommunicado,’ remembered one of the four, Patricia ‘Paddy’ Sproule, who had joined the FANYs in 1942.34 The daughter of a British Army colonel, she had trained for coding and cipher work after finding, at five-foot-two, that she was too short to reach the pedals of an ambulance. The day after Castellano’s departure from Lisbon was her nineteenth birthday.
While the SOE signals staff in Algiers waited and watched for any sign of life from Rome, they also waited, with growing anxiety, for a copy of L’omnibus del corso, the Italian book on which the Monkey transposition code was based. Castellano had taken one copy with him when leaving Lisbon. Cecil Roseberry had flown back to London with the other two, one of which had been quickly placed in the hands of another SOE officer detailed to fly with it, at once, to Algiers. The plan was for this officer to make immediately for a rendezvous at Algiers’ Hotel Saint George on rue Michelet, home to Eisenhower’s Allied Forces Headquarters, where he was to hand the book straight away to one of ‘Massingham’s’ officers. London’s chosen courier was Major Harold Meakin, a 41-year-old staff officer in SOE’s Signals Section who, before the war, had run a little company in London making glass for optical instruments. With the book in his care, Meakin left London for Algiers on 24 August. It was expected that he would arrive next day. That day came and there was no sign of him. Nor was there any the next day. Nor did he show up the day after that. After a badly delayed journey, Meakin finally turned up, three days late, at six o’clock on the evening of 28 August. On the morning of 29 August, SOE operators manning the signals station at ‘Massingham’ heard a Morse key tapping from Rome.
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