Target

by Roderick Bailey

  22 ‘Interrogation report on Serra, Salvatore’, 27 May 1945, TNA HS 9/1343/1.

  23 Ibid.

  24 Ibid.

  25 ‘Interrogation Report on Faccio, Cesare’, 19 March 1945, TNA HS 9/1343/1.

  26 Captain P. Cooper to Major P. Lee, 3 August 1944, TNA HS 9/9/3.

  27 ‘Translation by A.M.212 [Captain P. Cooper] made July 44 of statement by Paladino, Eugenio’, TNA HS 9/9/3.

  28 A. Bonetti to ‘the Swiss Legation in charge of Foreign Embassies to be forwarded to the British Embassy’, translated 12 August 1944, TNA HS 9/9/3.

  29 Gian Paolo Pelizzaro, ‘Il Cerchio si Chiude’, Storia in Rete, 2009.

  30 A. Strazzera-Perniciani, Umanità e eroismo nella vita segreta di Regina Coeli (Rome: Azienda Libraria Amato, 1946), quoted in Gian Paolo Pelizzaro, ‘Il Cerchio si Chiude’, Storia in Rete, 2009. SS‑Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, in Rome at the time, would later tell British interrogators that he learned of Adler’s presence as a result of the plot to free him, and confirmed that the Germans had interrogated him. SOE observed from Kappler’s testimony that Adler ‘appears to have admitted to having been a British agent, but in general told a cover story … including [the claim] that he was English’. Kappler also claimed that no further action had been taken against Adler. ‘Adler, Gabriele, alias Armstrong, John, alias Bianchi, Gabriele’, attached to note from Captain A. M. Baird to Lieutenant-Colonel T. G. Roche, 25 August 1945, TNA HS 9/9/3.

  31 Captain P. Cooper to Major P. Lee, 3 August 1944, TNA HS 9/9/3.

  32 ‘Report on Conversation with Louis Ingram Leslie’, 16 August 1944, TNA HS 9/9/3.

  33 Report by Captain P. Cooper, 23 August 1944, TNA HS 9/9/3.

  34 Ibid.

  35 ‘Statement made by Nedda Solich [sic] to AM.212 [Captain P. Cooper] on 17 September 1944 concerning John Armstrong’, TNA HS 9/9/3.

  36 Quoted in Gian Paolo Pelizzaro, ‘14 colpi alla nuca in 3 minuti’, Storia in Rete, 2009.

  37 ‘Interim report on the Adler case’, by Captain P. Cooper, 23 September 1944, TNA HS 9/9/3.

  38 ‘Statement made by Nedda Solich [sic] to AM.212 [Captain P. Cooper] on 17 September 1944 concerning John Armstrong’, TNA HS 9/9/3.

  39 ‘Report of a conversation with Father O. Snedden’, 15 August 1944, TNA HS 9/9/3.

  40 ‘Interim report on the Adler case’, by Captain P. Cooper, 23 September 1944, TNA HS 9/9/3.

  41 ‘Adler, Gabriele, alias Armstrong, John, alias Bianchi, Gabriele’, attached to note from Captain A. M. Baird to Lieutenant-Colonel T. G. Roche, 25 August 1945, TNA HS 9/9/3.

  42 Major A. Butler to Mrs Irma [sic] Adler, 20 December 1945, TNA HS 9/9/3.

  43 Mrs Samu [sic] Adler to Major Butler, 21 January 1946, TNA HS 9/9/3.

  44 The detective work of Italian researchers proved especially important in this regard: Marco Patucchi, a journalist for La Repubblicca, in articles published in 2007–8; Gian Paolo Pelizzaro, who published his detailed findings in a series of articles for the journal Storia in Rete in 2008–9; and Aladino Lombardi, writing in Patria Indipendente in 2009. Among his discoveries, Pelizzaro traced Neda Solic, then in her eighties and living in Rome. Shown a picture of Adler, she told Pelizzaro that this was the man she remembered as having been with her in Via Tasso. Research in Rome also located the remains of the fourteenth victim at La Storta in ‘box 5’ in the section for ‘political victims’ in the cemetery at Verano (‘riquadro 5, vittime politiche, Cimitero Monumentale del Verano’). A. Lombardi, ‘Finalmente ha un nome il quattordicesimo assassinato a La Storta’, Patria Indipendente (2009), p. 31.

  15

  ‘Foreign agent’

  Days after the announcement of the Italian Armistice, Cecil Roseberry was asked to write a report about SOE’s contribution to the war against Italy. Submitting it at the end of September 1943, he prefaced his account with the caveat that ‘after 20 years of suppression’ no ‘strong coherent opposition’ existed within Italy’s borders. He then highlighted the following: the outstanding success of the vital wireless link between Algiers and Rome during the armistice negotiations; the work done outside Italy with exiled members of Giustizia e Libertà; the handling of the early contact with Badoglio through Luigi Rusca and Berne; the subsequent insight into intentions and machinations in Rome courtesy of contacts like Filippo Caracciolo and Adriano Olivetti; and the effort made to stimulate the growth and activity of the Partito d’Azione.1

  Roseberry also drew attention to the success had from Switzerland in encouraging and supplying Jock McCaffery’s ‘action groups’ in Italy. ‘Throughout two and a half years,’ he asserted with confidence, ‘we have had lines into Italy which not only enabled us to send in and bring out representatives of the various groups, but enabled us to keep the action parties supplied with explosive and incendiary material.’ The groups were made up of men of diverse backgrounds and had done excellent work, he added. ‘They included members of the steel workers’ federation, electrical workers, dockers, railwaymen, garage hands, and cells were formed in the services,’ and they had carried out ‘a continuous series of fires, explosions and derailments’. Some had waged ‘a systematic campaign of slashing the tyres of commercial and military lorries’. Some had attacked goods trains. One had specialised in ‘liquidating isolated German soldiers’. Five wireless sets had been sent into Italy with a view to future operators picking them up and working them. ‘Our own wireless operator [Giacomino Sarfatti] had [also] been maintained in a town in northern Italy for nearly a year.’2

  ‘I consider that [Roseberry] has done exceptionally well,’ wrote Colin Gubbins, SOE’s new chief, in a covering note when he passed Roseberry’s report to Lord Selborne, its minister. ‘When he took over the section [in late 1941] practically nothing had been achieved, but by his persistence and technical skill he surmounted the most difficult obstacle of breaking the crust (ably assisted by [McCaffery] in Switzerland) and from that moment has gone from strength to strength.’3 Copies of the report were sent as well to the War Office and the Chiefs of Staff.

  A few weeks later, Roseberry was in southern Italy, in the Adriatic port of Brindisi, attached temporarily to a British military mission liaising with Badoglio’s staff, when SIM officers who had just switched sides began talking about their earlier work against the Allies. It was then that the first indications emerged that SOE’s successful record from Switzerland had been nothing of the sort. ‘Intimate details’ from SIM, Roseberry told London in an immediate telegram, had revealed that an Italian agent named Eligio Klein, codenamed ‘Giusto’, had been deceiving the British in Berne; a courier codenamed ‘Elda’ had been in on it, too. As a consequence, all operations into Italy through these two had been under SIM surveillance and control.4

  When word was dispatched to SOE’s outpost in Berne, care was taken to break the news gently to Jock McCaffery. A few weeks earlier he had ended up in a Lugano clinic suffering from nervous exhaustion from overwork and ‘cerebral commotion’ from a spot of concussion, and he was still a sick man. Unsurprisingly his first reaction to the report was one of shock and disbelief. Had Edmund Schwerdt been involved, he asked. Had Almerigotti/Klein been ‘a willing double-crosser or a dupe’? Why had nothing happened to young Giacomino Sarfatti whom he had recently seen after his safe escape to Switzerland? Why had SIM said nothing about the Tigrotti, his other main anti-Fascist group?5

  Gradually SIM disclosed more details to Roseberry. Since its officers had fled Rome in a hurry, there were no documents and the story emerged ‘little by little in conversation’. In time, however, the ghastly scale of the deception took greater and convincing shape:

  The head of the Wolves and Almerigotti had been deliberately planted … Pin-points [for supply drops] and addresses had all been supplied by the chief co-ordinating officer of SIM in Rome … [Sarfatti’s] reception and safe housing had all been arranged by SIM … Rusca had not been planted: his activities had come to light as all messages conveyed by certain couriers had been opened a
nd photographed …

  The SIM officers with whom he was talking also assured Roseberry that it had kept the OVRA, the Italian police and the Germans ‘entirely ignorant’ of this counter-subversion work. He noted, too, that they were vague about some details, ‘but their inability to remember might be due to their fear that the British might take reprisals’.6 Certainly SIM did not tell Roseberry everything. All knowledge of the Tigrotti was denied, which encouraged SOE to believe that that group, at least, had been genuine. It would take much longer to discover the Tigrotti’s true colours, which SIM had in fact known all about. Only in the spring of 1945, when the British got their hands on its architect, the sleek and wily Luca Osteria, did SOE hear that it had been the victim of an equally devious and effective deception by the OVRA.

  Playing down the significance of the Italians’ success, Roseberry would later make the interesting argument that the reports of supposed sabotage, true or not, had still usefully boosted SOE’s prestige and profile among senior British commanders. He also claimed that no serious damage had been done: a claim that made its way into W. J. M. Mackenzie’s Cabinet Office history of SOE, generally considered today to be the most authoritative published account of its history available, written in 1946 with privileged access to files otherwise kept secret for more than fifty years. Certainly, in terms of men and material lost, SOE’s failure to spot the Italians’ ruse bore little comparison to the infamous deception in Holland, for example, where it was tricked into dropping dozens of Dutch agents straight to the Germans, who then killed almost all of them, or to ruses in France, where it was similarly deceived by the Germans and, as a consequence, lost more agents. Nevertheless, it was far from correct to claim, as Mackenzie did, that ‘no harm was done to the real [Italian] resistance’.7

  Controlling Berne’s links into Italy had allowed SIM and the OVRA to identify and neutralise genuine anti-Fascists in Italy, such as Luigi Rusca, Eugenio Paladino, the two Yugoslav students in Milan – whose ultimate fate remains obscure – and the Yugoslavs’ circle of sympathisers. It had also meant that the British expended their energies in pointless directions, which may have meant, too, that SOE became so absorbed in channelling support to the likes of Eligio Klein and the Tigrotti that it failed to consider adequately other avenues that could have proved authentic. Little effort appears to have been made to contact and work with communists inside Italy, for instance. The communists were few in number; they were active nevertheless.

  Possibly SOE may also have missed an opportunity by not thoroughly investigating the potential of Gioacchino Malavasi, a Milanese lawyer whom Lauro Laurenti, the Italian businessman recruited by its Cairo office in 1942, claimed to have contacted during one of his trips to Italy from Istanbul. SOE had always been suspicious of Laurenti. ‘He wanted 8,000,000 lire,’ Roseberry would recall after the war, referring to a sum that Laurenti had requested to fund ‘some fantastic scheme for a movement headed jointly by [Luigi] Federzoni (fascist) and [Alcide] De Gasperi [Prime Minister of Italy, 1945–53, who had sheltered from Fascism in the Vatican] with the Pope’s blessing … I refused to consider it. I felt – and still believe – [that Laurenti] was an agent of S.I.M.’8 Malavasi, though, had indeed been a solid anti-Fascist with good Catholic and socialist contacts, just as Laurenti had described him; co-founder in 1928 of a Catholic opposition group, Guelfo d’Azione, he had been sentenced in the 1930s to five years’ imprisonment for spreading subversive propaganda.9 Then again, greater effort at exploring Malavasi’s possibilities might merely have led to more trouble; by the summer of 1942, Jock McCaffery, on London’s instructions, had already asked Eligio Klein to make discreet ‘enquiries’ about Malavasi ‘and if possible find some suitable means of contact’.10

  In fact, if the British had had more contacts, greater resources and better means of delivery, it is quite possible that more stores and personnel would have been channelled into Italian hands. As it was, there were several close calls. Before Andrew Croft and his SBS colleagues buried four wireless sets on a headland near Portofino in August 1943, SOE had planned that one of its Italian wireless operators, Giulio Koelman, would go ashore, too, and attach himself to the Tigrotti. When Koelman’s confidence began to wobble, SOE ruled him out and wondered if two of its hardened anti-Fascists, Alberto Tarchiani and Alberto Cianca, should land instead. In the end it was decided that those two old hands – both pushing sixty, they were codenamed ‘the elderlies’ – would be too conspicuous in enemy territory and more useful on the Allied side of the lines.

  Another plan that summer had been to land four Italians near Genoa: two prominent members of Giustizia e Libertà, Aldo Garosci and Leo Valiani, plus an associate of Emilio Lussu’s, Dino Gentili, and a wireless operator called Binetti who had fought in Spain. The plan was for them to go ashore from a submarine, collect one of the wireless sets buried near Portofino, and then make their way to Trieste, the supposed base of one of McCaffery’s groups. Another plan, to drop Valiani and Binetti by parachute at a spot north of Udine, reached the point where McCaffery was instructed to tell Eligio Klein to prepare to receive the pair and take them to a safe house. Those plans, too, failed to come off, after Binetti, the wireless operator, damaged his knee while parachute training. SOE had also wondered if a sabotage instructor and one or two more wireless operators should follow Dick Mallaby into northern Italy and work with the Tigrotti.

  One man briefly in the frame for that last mission was Branko Nekić, who was destined instead to be caught and killed by the Germans in Sicily. Given that Mussolini fell in July 1943 and his successors were inclined to seek peace, there is a danger of overspeculating about the fate of agents who might have been captured by the Italians that summer. It should be noted, though, that Italy’s authorities had been executing enemy agents as a matter of course when Giacomino Sarfatti arrived in Milan in December 1942. Probably Sarfatti owed his life to the SIM decision that he should be watched, not arrested.

  Acknowledgement of the efficiency of Mussolini’s secret police and counter-espionage set-up is essential to understanding a good many of SOE’s troubles as it tried to target Italy, just as the strength of that skilled system of suppression helps explain why the regime had been so secure from domestic opponents for so long. Important to acknowledge, too, is the fact that Italy at war was a thoroughly dangerous environment for anti-Fascists contemplating rebellion. As SOE eventually learned from experience, opposition elements inside Italy ‘felt, quite rightly, that the time had not come when they could run risks by coming into the open’. Anti-Fascists outside, meanwhile, ‘were loathe [sic] to become too deeply implicated in active opposition [and] they were not yet in the state of mind where they would willingly become technical traitors’.11

  It is pertinent to note that SOE encountered near-identical troubles trying to work into Nazi Germany. SOE’s X Section was responsible for German operations and found itself confronted, as one officer put it, with ‘a stupendous task’.12 A report drawn up in 1945 explains:

  It must be realized that the operation of secret agents in the heart of the enemy country – especially when this involves the carrying out of sabotage – where 100% of the population can be considered as hostile, is an infinitely more difficult and dangerous task than similar work in friendly countries occupied by the enemy, such as France, Belgium, Holland, etc. It must also be appreciated that as there was no Allied secret organisation established in Germany at the outbreak of the war, and as at that time at least there were practically no sympathisers with the Allied cause among Germans, it was not possible to supply reception committees, safe houses or reliable contacts to any agents willing to carry out operations …

  Furthermore, the possible field of recruitment of suitable agents was from the outset extremely restricted and was practically confined to refugees from Nazi oppression or anti-Nazi individuals among interned enemy aliens or Prisoners of War. The possible use of the latter, however, was very much restricted by the necessity of observing the Geneva
Conventions. As to the former, i.e. refugees from Nazi oppression, a large percentage of them were of the Jewish race and appearance, which would handicap them from the start, and, in addition, most of them had not lived recently in Germany and were therefore not cognisant of the ways of life pertaining in that country in war time.13

  By the end of 1943, X Section had dispatched just two agents to Germany. As late as July 1944, it was still reporting that there were ‘no active resistance groups in Germany such as existed in the Occupied territories: nor were these likely to emerge unless the German Armed Forces suffered a decisive defeat’. Undoubtedly there were ‘potential oppositional elements’ and ‘minor acts of sabotage had been carried out’, but such elements were ‘mostly inactive and unorganised’ and ‘at present primarily interested in preserving their own lives and ensuring some kind of existence for themselves in the future’.14

  Interestingly, X Section, faced with this desperate situation, considered the capture of its agents to be part and parcel of its goal of discomfiting the enemy:

  It was always our conviction that if we sent into Germany a limited number of sabotage agents of which a certain number were bound to be caught, the Germans, whose mentality never changes, would immediately deduce that agent activity was taking place on a large scale and act accordingly. This meant that they were bound to extend still further their already over-expanded Security Services.15

  Certainly SOE’s experience in Italy showed that an agent’s capture in enemy territory could lead to achievements that far outstripped anything he might have been capable of accomplishing had he managed to remain free. Probably the propaganda value of the fate of Fortunato Picchi, executed after being caught with the Colossus party in 1941, was far more useful to the Allied cause than his work as an interpreter. The potential to contribute to deception schemes is neatly demonstrated by the success had in exploiting the capture of Gabor Adler and Salvatore Serra in Sardinia in 1943. The usefulness of Dick Mallaby as a prisoner speaks for itself. Although SOE files do not suggest that anyone was dispatched deliberately into Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany as a pawn to be caught, such successes, fortuitous and unpredictable though they were, underline the potential worth to any war effort of having capable agents (and even incapable ones) at large in enemy territory.