Target

by Roderick Bailey

  ‘In view of the rapidity and great skill with which Italy’s capitulation was carried out,’ Ōshima continued next day,

  it may be said to be increasingly clear now that negotiations with Britain and America had been in progress for some considerable time … Through what channel the negotiations were carried on is not yet clear, but it is suspected that … the Vatican acted to some extent as intermediary. In the meanwhile the Badoglio Government very adroitly concealed these proceedings and tried to delude the Japanese and Germans with their lies up to the very last moment – a breach of faith on its part which one can only view with disgust.57

  Abject apologies followed from Shirokuro Hidaka, the Japanese Ambassador in Rome. ‘I realised that Badoglio and Company would probably be glad to get out of the war while saving Italy’s face,’ Hidaka told Tokyo, ‘and I tried to do my humble best to prevent this; but the fact that … I failed to see through Badoglio’s treachery and missed the opportunity of taking suitable action was a blunder for which I can offer no excuse. Consequently I respectfully await your instructions.’58

  Though it was only a tiny cog in the Allied military machine and had become involved more by luck than by design, SOE had contributed to Hidaka’s humiliation. It had not been established with a view to handling peace negotiations, and recognition of the importance of Dick Mallaby’s role must acknowledge that his involvement came only after carefully laid plans had gone badly wrong. Nevertheless, such a rapid and reliable means of clandestine communication could not have been fashioned if the Allies had had to resort to more conventional and less adaptable channels, or if SOE had lacked able and imaginative officers in London, sound technical expertise, and a good man on the ground. An in-house history of its Italian operations concluded accurately at the end of the war:

  SOE’s part in assisting the carrying out of the Armistice terms was undoubtedly responsible in no small measure for the shortening of the Italian war at this vital stage, and equally may be regarded as one of our major contributions to the Mediterranean campaign.59

  Notes

  1 ‘Attempts at Recruiting Volunteers for Italy’, 17 October 1941, TNA HS 6/888.

  2 D. L. J. Perkins to P. Broad, 16 May 1941, TNA HS 6/901.

  3 D. L. J. Perkins to Sir Frank Nelson, 24 July 1941, TNA HS 6/901.

  4 R. Lamb, War in Italy 1943–1945: A Brutal Story (London: John Murray, 1993), p. 15.

  5 ‘Report on Psychological Examination of Maltese [sic] Student Group’, by Major A. Kennedy, 20 October 1942, TNA HS 6/890.

  6 Major C. Roseberry to Captain J. Dobrski, 5 January 1943, TNA HS 6/871.

  7 Captain J. Dobrski to Major C. Roseberry, 15 February 1943, TNA HS6/871.

  8 Major C. Roseberry to Captain J. Dobrski, 5 January 1943, TNA HS 6/871.

  9 ‘The Olaf Story’, by C. Roseberry, 28 September 1943, TNA HS 6/775.

  10 J. McCaffery, ‘No Pipes or Drums’.

  11 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/262.

  12 Captain J. Dobrski to Major C. Roseberry, 2 July 1943, TNA HS 6/869.

  13 Captain E. de Haan to Major C. Roseberry, 15 August 1943, TNA HS 6/870.

  14 Il Secolo-La Sera, 18 August 1943, reproduced in G. Barneschi, L’inglese che viaggiò con il re e Badoglio: La missioni dell’agente speciale Dick Mallaby (Gorizia: LEG, 2013).

  15 J. McCaffery, ‘No Pipes or Drums’.

  16 Major C. Roseberry to Captain J. Dobrski, 19 January 1943, TNA HS 6/869.

  17 J. McCaffery (‘To.’) to E. Klein, 12 August 1943, NARA RG 226, Entry 174, Box 221, Folder 49(A).

  18 J. McCaffery (‘Tomaso’) to G. Sarfatti (‘Giacomo’), 12 August 1943, NARA RG 226, Entry 174, Box 221, Folder 49(A).

  19 SIM report, ‘Azione “E–G”’, 20 August 1943, NARA RG 226, Entry 174, Box 221, Folder 49(A).

  20 Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, p. 202.

  21 ‘Diary of Giuseppe Castellano, General, Italian Royal Army’, RG 226, Entry 210, Box 358, WN#14052.

  22 E. Aga Rossi, A Nation Collapses: The Italian Surrender of September 1943 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 74.

  23 Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, p. 202.

  24 Report, H. Macmillan to the Prime Minister, 20 September 1943, TNA PREM 3/249/5.

  25 H. Macmillan, The Blast of War 1939–1945 (London: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 381.

  26 ‘Diary of Giuseppe Castellano, General, Italian Royal Army’, NARA RG 226, Entry 210, Box 358, WN#14052.

  27 K. Strong, Intelligence at the Top: The Recollections of an Intelligence Officer (London: Cassell, 1968), pp. 146–7.

  28 The use of an alternative wireless link with Rome was also considered. In 1943, British security officers had caught in Tunisia an Italian wireless operator who had been left behind to work a clandestine set in hills near Tripoli. Persuaded to work for the British, he was used by A Force, the deception specialists, to send back to Italy false troop movements in advance of the Sicily landings. At the beginning of August, on the instructions of Eisenhower and London, that channel, which the British codenamed ‘Llama’, was then considered as a means of securing a reliable link to Rome. This was a time when a number of Italian commanders in the Eastern Mediterranean were trying to contact the Allies with a view to seeking peace, and Allied officers were anxious to ascertain if they spoke with Rome’s authority and were secure. Eventually a message was sent to Rome over the ‘Llama’ link informing the Italians that their operator had been captured and offering the link as a means of ‘direct and secret communication between the British and Italian General Staffs’. The Italians replied accepting the offer but warned that the ciphers were not secure. In the end, Castellano’s arrival in Lisbon overtook these dealings. ‘Historical Record of Deception in the War Against Germany and Italy’, TNA CAB 154/100. Some official records of the ‘Llama’ episode remain heavily redacted. See, for example: ‘A Force Narrative War Diary, 1st Jan to 31st Dec 1943’, TNA CAB 154/3.

  29 D. Dodds-Parker, Setting Europe Ablaze: Some Account of Ungentlemanly Warfare (Windlesham: Springwood Books, 1983), pp. 136–41.

  30 L. Marks, Between Silk and Cyanide: The Story of SOE’s Code War (London: HarperCollins, 1998), pp. 358–62, 379–80. Marks, whose memoirs, though entertaining, are shot through with invention, claimed to have upgraded Dick Mallaby’s emergency signal plan for the purposes of Monkey. That is not what happened. Monkey was a brand new double-transposition signal plan issued to Cecil Roseberry in London, then passed to Castellano in Lisbon to take with him back to Rome, to be used with Bino Sanminiatelli’s novel, L’omnibus del corso. Mallaby had gone into Italy with three different plans: ‘Maraschino Orange’, to be used in communications with ‘Massingham’; ‘Maraschino’, to be used, if necessary, to communicate with London; and ‘Pallinode’, which had been a code originally prepared for Bruno Luzzi and the mission to Trieste. When Mallaby opened up from Rome and made contact with ‘Massingham’, he used Maraschino Orange to confirm his identity and then continued with Monkey, save for the occasional message dealing with personal matters. The last messages passed in the Monkey code were sent in mid-September; thereafter, new plans were used.

  31 Narrative of the work of SOE’s Italian Section by Lieutenant-Colonel C. Roseberry, July 1945, TNA HS 7/58. His encounter with the signals office was an ‘interesting instance’, Roseberry reflected, ‘of how internal regulations aimed at ensuring smooth and proper working, could, unless circumvented in emergency, delay, hamper, or even prevent the carrying out of a vital project.’

  32 ‘The Olaf Story’, by C. Roseberry, 28 September 1943, TNA HS 6/901. ‘A very good one too,’ wrote Lord Selborne on the copy given to him to read the day after Roseberry wrote it.

  33 Cipher telegram, Major C. Roseberry to ‘Massingham’, 25 August 1943, TNA HS 6/779. This was not the only plan afoot to secure Mallaby’s release. When SOE first heard of Mallaby’s capture, thought was given immediately to his rescue. From Switzerland, Jock McCaffery sent word to one of his supposed confidants in Italy, En
rico Cavadini, the head of the Wolves, to see what he could do about helping Mallaby escape. In Rome, Sir D’Arcy Osborne, the British Minister to the Holy See, asked the Vatican to help with a prisoner exchange: SOE felt that two Italian saboteurs of the elite San Marco Regiment, captured recently in Libya trying to sabotage British aircraft, might make a suitable swap. ‘Please intervene unofficially in any way you think most effective,’ Osborne was told from London. ‘We are most anxious to ensure that he is not shot out of hand.’ Cipher telegram, Foreign Office to The Holy See, 26 August 1943, TNA HS 6/872. Three days later, Luigi Maglione, the Vatican’s Cardinal Secretary of State, informed the British Minister that Mallaby was ‘all right and will probably be brought to Rome on August 30th’. Cipher telegram, SOE London to Massingham, 30 August 1943, TNA HS 6/872.

  34 D. Williams, ‘An Interview with Miss Paddy Sproule’, FANY Gazette (1999). The three other FANYs were Leonora Railton, Sue Rowley and Barbara Tims, with a FANY officer, 29-year-old Lieutenant Margaret ‘Peg’ Todd, responsible for the Ops Room.

  35 Wireless message, ‘Massingham’ to SOE London, 30 August 1943, TNA HS 6/779. On 29 August, ‘Massingham’ and Rome had only exchanged over Monkey one or two standard ‘Q’ code messages to establish contact. One of the first proper messages sent to Rome over Monkey informed the Italians that General Zanussi, the other Italian general whom Rome had sent to Lisbon, had endorsed the proposals put to Castellano; Zanussi had left Italy before Castellano’s return and, like him, had no secure means of reporting on his activities, thus leaving Rome unaware of his progress. These proposals were the so-called ‘Short Terms’, which had been agreed under pressure from Eisenhower’s headquarters in Algiers for an urgent military armistice document, and had been presented to Castellano with a personal communication from Churchill and Roosevelt. They contained a proviso that full political, economic and other conditions would be submitted at a later date. Although the full surrender terms, known as the ‘Long Terms’, had received top-level Allied agreement, it was feared in Algiers that, if these were transmitted to the Italian Government before they had accepted the Short Terms, the conclusion of a military armistice could be badly delayed. Later, Zanussi was flown to Algiers, where Douglas Dodds-Parker met him, and then flown to Sicily to be present for the final negotiations.

  36 ‘The Olaf Story’, by C. Roseberry, 28 September 1943, TNA HS 6/901.

  37 G. Castellano, Come firmai l’armistizio di Cassibile (Milan: Mondadori, 1945), p. 123. Gianluca Barneschi’s fine account of Mallaby’s life and wartime missions draws on a brief memoir, unpublished and incomplete, that Mallaby wrote after the war. In this, Mallaby recalled that he had been brought to Rome and held at first in Regina Coeli prison, before being taken out again, put in a car, and driven through the city. Still with no idea as to what it was all about, he feared they might be taking him to be shot. On reaching the Palazzo Vidoni, home of the Comando Supremo, he was ushered into the presence of Castellano and Montanari. Barneschi, L’inglese che viaggiò con il re e Badoglio, p. 148.

  38 Ibid. p. 157.

  39 Wireless message, Monkey to ‘Massingham’, 4 September 1943, TNA HS 6/779.

  40 For more on Christine Granville, see M. Masson, Christine (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973), and C. Mulley, The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (London: Macmillan, 2012).

  41 Strong, Intelligence at the Top, p. 155.

  42 ‘Diary of Giuseppe Castellano, General, Italian Royal Army’, NARA RG 226, Entry 210, Box 358, WN#14052.

  43 Ibid.

  44 Strong, Intelligence at the Top, pp. 156–7.

  45 Ibid.

  46 Quoted in report, H. Macmillan to the Prime Minister, 20 September 1943, TNA PREM 3/249/5.

  47 Strong, Intelligence at the Top, p. 158.

  48 Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, p. 205.

  49 D. Williams, ‘An Interview with Miss Paddy Sproule’, FANY Gazette (1999).

  50 ‘History of Italian Activities of SOE, 1941–1945’, TNA HS 7/58.

  51 Wireless message, Monkey to Massingham, 8 September 1943, TNA HS 6/779.

  52 Wireless message, General D. Eisenhower to Marshal P. Badoglio, 8 September 1943, quoted in A. Chandler (ed.), The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The War Years Volume III (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), p. 1402.

  53 Quoted in S. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Volume One: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890–1952 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), p. 260.

  54 Intercepted signal, Iraqi Chargé d’Affaires in London to Minister for Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, 9 September 1943, TNA HW 12/292.

  55 Intercepted signal, Rome to Berlin, 30 August 1943, TNA HW 19/237.

  56 Intercepted signal, Japanese Ambassador in Berlin to Tokyo, 9 September 1943, TNA HW 12/292.

  57 Intercepted signal, Japanese Ambassador in Berlin to Tokyo, 10 September 1943, TNA HW 12/292.

  58 Intercepted signal, Japanese Ambassador in Berlin to Tokyo, 23 September 1943, TNA HW 1/2036.

  59 ‘History of Italian Activities of SOE, 1941–1945’, TNA HS 7/58.

  14

  ‘Inglese Ignoto’

  By 8 September 1943, of the eight trained SOE agents who had worked clandestinely on Italian soil, only one had returned to Allied lines. This was Max Salvadori, whose impressive drive along Sicilian roads packed with retreating Italian troops had lasted only a few hours anyway. Of the other seven, SOE knew by the Armistice that two of them were dead. One was Fortunato Picchi, who had parachuted into Italy with the Colossus party in 1941. The other was Antonio Gallo, who had gone ashore on Sicily in 1942. Rome had named both men when broadcasting news that they had been caught and shot. Of the remaining five, three were still missing. Branko Nekić, who had been put through the German lines in Sicily in August 1943, was one of those. Confirmation of his capture and news of his execution would come a few weeks later. The other missing agents were Gabor Adler and Salvatore Serra, the team sent into Sardinia in January 1943. Lastly there were two agents that SOE thought were safe: Dick Mallaby and Giacomino Sarfatti. Mallaby was thought to be in Rome and under the protection of Badoglio’s government. Sarfatti was believed to be at liberty in Milan, though nothing had been heard of him for a fortnight.

  Long after dark on the evening of 10 September 1943, a young man walked into a café in Chiasso, the Swiss customs town on the border with Italy. His shoes were covered in mud and his trousers were torn and bloody. When the last customer had left he approached the woman running the place and explained that he was an Englishman, a civilian, who had escaped from internment in Italy. He had made it across the frontier, he said, and wanted to get in touch with the nearest British consul. The café-owner fed him, found him a bed for the night, changed his Italian money and gave him a pair of her husband’s trousers. Next morning, following her advice, he caught a train to Lugano and contacted the British vice-consul.

  The young man who crossed the border that night was Giacomino Sarfatti, the Italian wireless operator who had been living in Milan since the previous December. Until the Armistice, SIM had continued to keep him under its gaze, monitoring his correspondence with McCaffery, permitting him to use his wireless set, and generally allowing him to believe that he was free and life was good. So far as Sarfatti had been aware, the chief danger he had faced in Milan was from Allied bombing. In August, when air raids on Italy were reaching their peak, an incendiary bomb smashed through the roof of the next-door flat. He helped put out the fire with water from his bath, having kept it full for just such an emergency.

  According to one Italian account given to British interrogators, by the summer of 1943 SIM had been wondering whether it might be time for Sarfatti’s arrest. Had he been hauled in a few months earlier, Sarfatti might well have ended his days in Forte Bravetta with his back to a firing squad. Aware that he was Italian and had returned to Italy as an enemy agent, SIM possessed more than enough evidence to make a death sentence a formality. As it was, with Mussolini gone, Fascism finish
ed, and Italy’s surrender apparently imminent, SIM seems to have decided instead to encourage him gently, through Eligio Klein, to go home. In early September, advised by Klein that the air raids were making Milan far too dangerous and that he really ought to return to Switzerland, Sarfatti left the city and headed north. On 10 September, opposite Chiasso, he scouted the frontier for a suitable crossing point. Evading an Italian patrol, he made a break for it later that evening. He shredded his trousers and buttocks getting through the barbed wire, then fell into a ditch, but got across.

  Sarfatti made contact with Jock McCaffery a few days later. At that moment both men remained wholly oblivious to the fact that Sarfatti’s nine-month stint in Milan had been controlled entirely by SIM. Much later, when Sarfatti finally learned that Klein had been a plant, he reflected that the latter had certainly been strange. He noted Klein’s ‘complete lack of morality, of political principles or of principles of any kind’, his ‘amazing tendency to lie and to enlarge everything’, and his habit of ‘contradicting himself even in the course of the same conversation … I also noticed that he had very little or no courage, as I was able to find out during alarms and air raids. At the same time he seemed so sure of himself in what he was doing. The two things did not seem to fit well together.’ The fact that he had failed to rumble that Klein was really an enemy agent, Sarfatti felt, was because

  I was handicapped by two things: (a) [by] my age (22 at the time) and my very little experience of life and men generally; [and] (b) by the fact that I had been repeatedly told both in London and Berne that I could trust [Klein] and rely completely on him. I was actually told he was a wonderful man and that I was going to be quite safe as long as he was looking after me.1