Target

by Roderick Bailey

  The same evening, Mallaby was taken back to Verona. On 28 February, after five hours in a German bomb shelter as Allied bombs dropped on the town, he was driven by fast car to a villa close to Como where, with the assistance of the local SS commander, arrangements were made for his safe dispatch back into Switzerland. At seven that evening he crossed the border. In Chiasso he reported to the Swiss frontier post. Internment followed and lasted longer than expected. Ten days passed before Mallaby was finally delivered to the British Legation in Berne and able to report to Jock McCaffery.

  ‘Dick appears to have put up a good show,’ Cecil Roseberry remarked when he read a report of Mallaby’s latest adventures. ‘The last time he got free it was one chance in a million and this time it was one in a thousand. He will think these things are easy!’18 But Mallaby may have done more than skilfully fashion his own escape. On 2 May 1945, secret negotiations between Karl Wolff and Allen Dulles, the chief OSS man in Berne, culminated in the unconditional surrender of all German forces in Italy, the first major German capitulation to the Western Allies. The first talks between Dulles and German emissaries from Italy seem to have started in Lucerne on 3 March. Wolff himself arrived in Lugano on 8 March when he began to take part personally. Today, the story of those negotiations, known as Operation ‘Sunrise’ and sometimes as Operation ‘Crossword’, is well known. Most of the credit for their success is rightly placed at Dulles’s door. What has not been adequately recorded is the identity of a shadowy English officer who flits through contemporary documents and post-war books as ‘Tucker’, ‘Mallaby’, ‘Drucker’, ‘Wallaby’, and even ‘Tucker-Wallaby’, and whose ‘clever ruse’, as Dulles described it, may well have encouraged Wolff to believe that Allied officials wished to talk.19

  When the war ended, Dick Mallaby was on the Allied side of the lines. SOE had shifted its Italian headquarters to Siena by then and he was there when news arrived on 8 May of Germany’s surrender. In August he left SOE. A few months after that, he married Christine Northcote-Marks, a FANY coder who had worked on the SOE signals staff in Algiers and Italy. With the war over the couple went to live in England where Mallaby studied engineering at the University of Southampton and they began to raise a family. Returning to Italy in the early 1950s, they settled eventually in Verona where Mallaby worked for NATO. His youngest son remembers that his father never spoke about his wartime experiences despite the fact that, in Verona, the family lived for twenty years just yards from where Mallaby had been questioned by the SS in February 1945. Mallaby died in Verona in 1981 at the age of sixty-two, and is buried on his father’s estate in Tuscany.

  Overlooked by the Alps, Turin, in northwest Italy, was one of Italy’s last cities to be liberated in 1945. The first Allied soldiers to reach it were Brazilian reconnaissance troops, whose armoured cars drove in at the end of April. American infantrymen were not far behind. There was little resistance. Most of the German and Fascist forces had already pulled out and the city was in the hands of Italian partisans. It was in Turin on 4 May that one of the agents whom SOE had put into Sardinia in 1943 suddenly appeared, alive and well, out of the partisans’ ranks. It was Salvatore Serra.

  After reporting to Turin’s new military authorities, Serra was rapidly returned to the SOE fold. Soon he was in Siena at SOE headquarters. He was also under arrest: the reports of SIM officers who had switched sides after the Armistice meant that officers there were very aware that Serra had apparently assisted the Italians in the arrest of other agents in Corsica. Then he was questioned. The officer who quizzed him was Peter Cooper, a young Italian-speaking British officer who was working as an interrogator for SOE’s security section.

  Serra began at the beginning. First he described his capture. Hours after paddling ashore that January night in 1943, he and Gabor Adler had met a local shepherd. This man, after giving them food and water, slipped off to fetch some soldiers and Carabinieri. Immediately arrested, the two agents were held for the rest of the day in the old coastal watchtower of San Giovanni di Sarrala and then sent to Cagliari, the Sardinian capital. There, Serra said, he had been stripped naked, bound hand and foot, beaten and questioned, but had refused to talk. At one point the Italians took him back to where he and Adler had been arrested; Serra was beaten and kicked and told to explain every detail of the landing. Twice he was threatened with execution; on one occasion a priest was brought along. Every morning he received an injection that gave him a high temperature.

  He and Adler had been quickly separated, Serra said. His Italian interrogators told him that Adler was an Italian agent, was co-operating fully, and had confessed everything. Then Serra had found himself talking to a Sicilian sent from Rome. He described this man as ‘short; well built; rather bald; fingers covered with rings and jewels’. Between beatings, this man gave Serra two choices. He could follow Adler’s ‘good example’ and collaborate, which would secure his life if not his freedom. Or he could refuse, in which case he would be ‘shot out of hand’. (Later, reading Peter Cooper’s report of Serra’s debriefing, another officer scribbled next to that passage: ‘This man is almost certainly Col. Faga.’)20 Eventually, Serra said, the Italians flew him to the mainland and locked him up in Regina Coeli.

  Serra then tried to explain what he had done for the Italians in Corsica. Cooper recorded in his report:

  [Serra] was escorted into a room [in Ajaccio] where a young French lieutenant was sitting surrounded by Italian officers and carabinieri. [He] was made to sit down in front of the officer who was then asked if he knew [him]. The Frenchman answered that he did. There then followed about 10 minutes [of] rapid conversation in French which [Serra] failed to understand. The Frenchman had been one of the students who had been in training with him in Algiers. [Serra] had then had no idea who he was or where he would be sent. He was, in fact, extremely surprised to see him in Corsica.

  After that, Serra said, he had been flown back to Rome and imprisoned again. Later that year, after the Germans took control of Rome, he was moved from Regina Coeli to a prison in Mantua. In 1944 he was shifted to a civilian internment camp at San Martino di Rossignano, near Alessandria. From there he escaped, to spend the last months of the war fighting alongside local partisans.21

  Cooper, who was already familiar with aspects of the story from SIM reports and other records, was not convinced that Serra was telling him the whole truth. He thought Serra’s account of his arrest was probably accurate and that ‘his bitterness over his treatment at the hands of the Italians after his capture is rather too real to be assumed’. He also felt sure that Serra would at first have refused to talk: as a Carabiniere deserter, his ‘first and most natural instinct’ would probably have been ‘the stubbornness of a renegade’ in the face of old comrades. But when confronted with the proffered alternatives – collaboration or death – Serra ‘must have made some sort of promise, although he denies promising anything concrete’. Serra’s account of his time in Corsica was very doubtful, Cooper thought. ‘It is quite likely that the incident at which [Serra] claims he was identified by a French officer was actually the reverse of the truth.’22

  However, Cooper went on, even if Serra had gleaned ‘a few odd details from the indiscretions of French students in training’, he would have had minimal knowledge of SOE work on Corsica. ‘Probably [Serra] was asked to do this one case of identification. Possibly there were one or two others at most … It is hard to believe that [he] was in a position to do more than this and very hard to think that [he] would have had sufficient information on plans and movements to have anyone picked up.’ Also, Cooper stressed, ‘it must be recorded that he was almost certainly subjected to fairly extreme duress’. Serra’s suspicion that Adler was already collaborating, ‘added to his physical miseries and the threat of being shot,’ had probably caused him to make ‘some sort of confession and some sort of agreement to collaborate’.23

  A few months later, Serra was released from arrest, discharged from SOE and returned to civilian life. No hard evide
nce had been produced to condemn him. There was also a degree of sympathy for his fate after capture. A final analysis of the case felt that he had not been really cut out for the situation that arose when he and Adler landed, but ‘once he was with the partisans and able to fight as he understands, he appears to have done a good job’. It also acknowledged, accurately, ‘that he was recruited at a time when recruiting was extremely difficult, and when the best material was not to be had,’ and that he had undertaken ‘a highly dangerous operation voluntarily, and was well aware at the time of the risks’.24

  When he reappeared in Turin, Serra had no recent news of Gabor Adler. The last time he had seen him, he told Peter Cooper, was in Regina Coeli on the day of the Italian Armistice. Another man whom SOE, in 1945, was able to question about Adler was Cesare Faccio, the SIM officer who had shared his mess with him in Sardinia and driven him around the island. Faccio, who was now working for the Allies, could not help either, save for giving assurances that ‘Armstrong’, as he called him, was likely to have been in Rome in September 1943 and had not been ill treated or shot: a statement that suggests that the Italians had felt that Adler, like Serra, had co-operated enough to escape the attentions of a firing squad.25 By 1945, however, SOE knew more than Serra and Faccio about Adler’s time in Rome.

  Allied forces had reached the city on 4 June 1944. Since landing on the mainland nine months before, the advance had been slow and bloody. By the end of 1943 it had more or less ground to a halt, held south of Rome by the Germans’ well-defended Winter Line. In January 1944, in an ambitious attempt to outflank it, British and American forces had then made fresh landings at Anzio and Nettuno on the coast west of Rome. Three months later, those forces had barely moved: vicious German resistance still had them pinned to the beaches. Only in May, after a series of major assaults along a rugged front running west from Monte Cassino to the sea, did Allied troops in the south finally break the German lines and resume the push north, while a simultaneous advance at Anzio at last ended the stagnation there. By then Rome had been declared an ‘open city’. That meant the occupying forces had declared they would not defend it, in return for which, they hoped, their attackers would not assault it but simply march in. American soldiers from the Anzio bridgehead were the first to get there, reaching Rome as the last Germans withdrew through the city’s northern outskirts. Soon, tens of thousands of Allied soldiers had flooded into the city and Allied flags were flying from all principal buildings. Among the liberators were a handful of SOE personnel, one of whose immediate tasks was to follow up the stories that Gabor Adler had once been imprisoned in the city.

  Peter Cooper carried out the investigation. He began his inquiries on the afternoon of 3 August 1944 when he arrived at the gates of Regina Coeli to inspect its surviving files. Leafing through these, he found a record of Adler’s arrival on 29 April 1943. He also turned up Adler’s statement that his name was Giovanni Armstrong, that he was British, and that he had been born in Gibraltar in 1919. The files confirmed that Adler had been held at SIM’s disposal until the Armistice. After that the prison had come under German control. A final document stated that Adler had been moved to the feared fourth wing, the section that the Germans used for holding political prisoners, in October 1943. Here the files ended. ‘[T]he Germans,’ noted Cooper, ‘were careful to take away all their own records with them.’26

  Cooper then began to search in Rome for ex-inmates who might have known Adler in prison. One man he eventually found was the unfortunate Eugenio Paladino, the Italian businessman whom Jock McCaffery had put in touch with Eligio Klein in 1942, a step that had led to his arrest and a thirty-year prison sentence for military espionage. Paladino explained that he had first encountered ‘Lieut. John Armstrong’ when the guards had allowed Paladino to share with other inmates some of the food that his family was delivering to him; he added that Adler had confided his codename to him as well as a contact telephone number in London: these details Paladino had written on the wall of his cell.27 After the Germans moved Adler to the fourth wing, however, Paladino had not seen him again.

  Another man who had known Adler in Regina Coeli was Renato Traversi. In a written account that finally reached Cooper via the Swiss authorities, Almerico Bonetti, Traversi’s brother-in-law, recounted that Traversi had been released in October 1943 after five-and-a-half years’ imprisonment and had arrived home anxious to arrange the escape of a fellow inmate, ‘a valorous British officer, Major [sic] Armstrong, who had been arrested in Sardinia’. With Bonetti on board, a bold rescue had then been planned: with others’ help, including that of a few prison staff, and brazenly dressed in German uniforms, they would drive a truck to the gates of Regina Coeli and request that Adler be released into their care. But the plan had been betrayed and Renato Traversi re-arrested; after a spell at the hands of German interrogators in the notorious Gestapo headquarters on Via Tasso, he ended up again in Regina Coeli, where Bonetti, his brother-in-law, was eventually able to visit him. ‘He told me of the tortures he had undergone at Via Tasso and to which these barbarians had submitted him to obtain the names of those involved,’ Bonetti wrote in his account; ‘He was very worried about Armstrong.’ (Three months after Traversi’s re-imprisonment, Bonetti was invited to the prison mortuary to inspect the corpses of the latest prisoners executed by the Germans. Among these he found his brother-in-law’s body. ‘It was very difficult to recognise Renato amongst the 10 dead bodies, as their clothes had been changed. I finally had to examine the bodies themselves, and eventually identified my poor Renato from the socks he was wearing, and which I had sent him during his detention.’)28

  Renato Traversi’s arrest may well explain why the Germans moved Adler to the political prisoners’ wing: Adler’s pseudonym appears to have been among the names tortured out of Traversi at Via Tasso.29 To judge from the memories of Amedeo Strazzera-Perniciani, who had spent months working at Regina Coeli with a commission dealing with prisoners’ welfare, it seems that Adler, too, was taken to Via Tasso and subjected to similar treatment. In 1946, Strazzera-Perniciani published a book about Regina Coeli’s recent history that described ‘John Armstrong’ as a tall young man with a ‘sturdy constitution’ whom the Germans left with a broken nose, multiple bruises to his face, a wound to the arch of his left eyebrow, a cut right ear, and heavy bruising elsewhere.30 ‘Strazzera[-Perniciani] knew Armstrong [sic] quite well,’ Peter Cooper discovered when he spoke with him in Rome in 1944. ‘He formed a good opinion of him. He describes him as inclined to be silent, but always cheerful.’ Strazzera-Perniciani, who seems not to have told Cooper about Adler’s brutal treatment or injuries, did assure him that Adler was still in Regina Coeli ‘up to the last day before the arrival of the Allies in Rome’. But he did not know, he said, if Adler ‘was carried off by the Germans’ when they evacuated the city or if had managed somehow to escape. ‘Strazzera had always assumed that Armstrong had got out, and rejoined the Allies as soon as they arrived. He expresses surprise that he has not reported.’31

  Confirmation that Adler had been in Regina Coeli at the beginning of June 1944 came from another former inmate, Louis Ingram Leslie, an Englishman caught by the Germans in January 1944 who had apparently lived for years in Rome under the protection of influential friends. Deciding that he was a British agent, the Germans had locked up Leslie in Regina Coeli’s fourth wing. ‘Leslie’s connection with Armstrong started on the first afternoon of his imprisonment,’ recorded Cooper after they spoke:

  He was sitting alone in his cell when Armstrong was shown in and asked him if there was anything which he could do for Leslie. The net result of this question was that later on in the afternoon a pair of prison sheets and a table appeared in Leslie’s cell … From time to time, up to the first week in March, Armstrong and Leslie visited each other’s cells between 1 p.m. and 7 or 8 p.m…. Armstrong was on extremely good terms with all the guards …

  At the beginning of March the 4th wing of Regina Coeli became very overcrowded, and so Les
lie was moved into Armstrong’s cell, No. 461 …

  When Leslie first arrived in Armstrong’s cell, he said that Armstrong’s morale was very high, and that he had been very ill with dysentery, from which he had by that time recovered. It appears that whilst he was ill the German commandant of the prison, who was a 200% Nazi, and the only man whom Armstrong had failed to impress, stated that ‘It did not really matter if Armstrong died, as it would save everyone a great deal of trouble.’ Leslie described Armstrong at this time as a very powerful muscular man, but still a little weak from his illness. He had the build of a professional pugilist.

  Cooper also heard from Leslie that ‘Armstrong vouchsafed little information about himself, but little by little the story came out.’ Adler’s mother, Leslie recalled, ‘about whom he talked a great deal, was Spanish. His father was a Scot, and was dead. Before the war he lived in Gibraltar, travelling to the UK at the outbreak of the war. He was called up almost immediately.’ Adler’s capture, Leslie remembered him saying, had come during ‘a commando raid’ on Sardinia when he and his men had accidentally been left behind on the beach; after that, he had been imprisoned in Sardinia and in a regular prison camp near Chieti, in the Abruzzo, before escaping at the time of the Armistice; recaptured by the Germans a fortnight later, Adler had then been imprisoned in Rome as a suspect spy. (Cooper, well aware of Adler’s real history, noted: ‘It appears that Armstrong never completely trusted Leslie’.) The last time that Leslie saw Adler was on the afternoon of 2 June, Cooper recorded. ‘Both were together in their cell when a warder entered and called Leslie’s name, telling him to pick up his things quickly. Leslie asked if he was going to be sent to Germany, to which the warder replied that he did not know.’32 Leslie was taken away and escaped soon afterwards.