Special Counter Intelligence in WW2 Europe. Keith Ellison
to continue its operations outside Germany, but the views of A Force prevailed.
As the case shows, A Force was able to determine the use of a long-term CEA case even when they had no further use for the channel and it may have provided an important CE avenue to post-war operations of the GIS, and this happened in the final stages of the war, when the potential implications for GIS suspicions regarding CHEESE as a CEA would have been negligible.
Although SIME was responsible for running LAMBERT and other DA deception channels, they came under the strategic control of A Force, which was responsible for creating and approving all “chicken feed” and determining policy on the employment of specific agents as channels for deception. This changed slightly with the creation of the Thirty Committee (see below), but A Force still had the main say in how agents were to be used.
Other enemy agents were not as productive as LAMBERT. In February 1941 a Rumanian Vice-Consul destined to work in Alexandria was detained with three diplomatic bags, as diplomatic relations between Rumania and Britain had just been broken off. The bags were searched and revealed a W/T set, operating instructions and ciphers and a questionnaire on Allied military forces in Egypt. The Vice-Consul, Eugen Tanasescu, was initially given a death sentence, but this was commuted to life imprisonment after Rumania threatened reprisals against British citizens.
In Syria the first espionage case in that newly occupied region was that involving Captain Ollion of the Vichy French Deuxième Bureau. He had been left behind to report back to Vichy Intelligence in Turkey by W/T. He was arrested in autumn 1941 and was subsequently exchanged.
More potentially dangerous were some ten Syrian and Palestinian extremists based around Aleppo. Their leader, Jalal Latifi had been recruited by the GIS in Turkey in 1941 – and then reported to British Security in Istanbul, who recruited him as a double agent before he returned to Syria. The group’s mission was to collect military information and pass it over the frontier to Turkey. Tried in French military court, four were executed and four others given long prison sentences. [17]
Another unsuccessful German operation was the insertion into Egypt of two German NCOs, Johannes Eppler and Heinrich Sanstede, by a desert expedition led by the Hungarian Count Almasy. As well as ISOS leads, the British captured two German NCO W/T operators who betrayed the mission and their own intended role, which was to run a W/T relay station at Cyrenaica. After a six-week investigation the two spies were located at the end of July on a houseboat on the Nile at Cairo. They had been unable to make radio contact thanks to the arrest of the two NCOs intended to man the relay station. They had therefore decided to fake their spy work records and spend their funds, but meantime they did contact several dissident Egyptian army officers, three of who were interned and the two more junior were also dismissed from the service by court-martial.
Almasy had also been the initiator of another operation, which had involved the recruitment of two Egyptians in Paris. Mohsen Fadl had been the head of the Egyptian Tourist Office in Paris, and Elie Haggar had been a student there. Haggar was the son of the head of the Egyptian Police Force. They were recruited to set up a spy ring named the Pyramid Organisation. Both were sent back to Cairo via Istanbul in October 1941 to collect political information, but had no means to communicate their findings. They were caught by the British in 1943. [18]
The London Controlling Section and Subordinate Committees
Col Dudley Clarke visited London in September-October 1941 to sell the idea of global strategic deception, and was asked to write a paper on Middle East Deception operations, which drew favourable attention from the top. He was able to meet with the XX Committee on 2 October and spoke to both the Joint Planning Staff and the Joint Intelligence Subcommittee. He also met the Chiefs of Staff on 7 October. [19] As a result, the Joint Planning Committee on 8 October endorsed his proposal for a central Deception Control officer to coordinate deception operations worldwide, develop cover plans for operations and use “existing services to help implement them, including the Army, the Security Service, the political Warfare Executive (PWE) and the camouflage and decoy units”. [20] On 9 October the Chiefs of Staff approved the proposal. Clarke declined a proposal that he fill this new post, and it was given instead to Col Oliver Stanley, MC. Unfortunately, Stanley was not effective in this role and resigned. As a result, the London Controlling Section (LCS) was given a new head, Lt Col John Bevan, who proved to be the right peg in the right hole. It is from this point onwards that British DA operations in Europe began to concentrate more upon strategic deception rather than the counter-espionage benefits.
Part of the control mechanism that was subsequently set up was the creation of committees in Allied theatres to work both locally and in coordination with the XX Committee and the LCS in London. Lt-Col Oliver St. Maur Thynne became the A Force Chairman of the Thirty (30 or XXX) Committee in Cairo in 1942. This Committee now became the authorizer for “chicken feed” sent by controlled agents. The Thirty Committee was based on London’s XX Committee, as were other similarly numbered committees in other theatres – 29 in all. Each Committee consisted of at least three officers, with an A Force officer as chairman, an MI6 officer as secretary and a third officer, usually from MI5/SIME or the French CE service. MI5 officers ran the DAs and MI6 provided staff, finance and enciphered communications, as well as controlling any agent operating outside Allied-controlled areas. In Algiers, because the Committee had an additional member from the French Deuxième Bureau, it was known as the Forty Committee. The addition of this French officer was in recognition of the fact that the French played a significant role in providing and running the DAs in that part of North Africa. [21] A “41 Committee” was also formed in Oran, consisting of Lt Arne Ekstrom, US Army, for A Force; Capt Bobby Barclay of MI6(V), and Eduard Douare for the French CE. [22] For these committees, the deciding body on whether an agent was used for deception or penetration was the French CE, as this was their area of responsibility.
Some Middle East CEA Cases
From Cairo, A Force controlled a number of enemy agents in Egypt and elsewhere. They included agents destined for Lebanon and Syria, such as a team led by a Greek Air Force Officer codenamed QUICKSILVER, and groups like a three-man team codenamed the PESSIMISTS (who provided an important deception channel throughout the war). Two other groups (codenamed the LEMONS and the SAVAGES) had been landed in Cyprus by caique in 1943, ostensibly as refugees, and were under control and were being played back to Athens for deception. Another A Force deception agent was SLAVE (mentioned earlier), an Egyptian journalist who operated briefly between May and July 1942. [23]
The controlled CHEESE W/T channel was used by A Force to sell several major deceptions, including Operation TORCH, the Allied invasion of North Africa in 1942. The deception in the lead up to Operation CRUSADER had caused a major loss of confidence within the GIS for CHEESE’s sub-agent, but the link had been maintained. Nicossof continued to provide information and slowly regained the trust of the Abwehr. He continued as a major means of feeding deception material to the Abwehr for the rest of the war. However, it is possible he was only one of a group of controlled agents who were all used under the umbrella codename CHEESE by the British.
David Mure, who served as an A Force officer in Beirut and Baghdad, reported that SIME had three excellent channels for deception. One, of course, was CHEESE/LAMBERT. Another he called the Gauleiter of Mannheim. A German, claiming to be a part-Jewish GAF aerial navigator, was arrested after having jumped (he said) from an Italian bomber to escape the Nazis. Unfortunately, his story failed to explain the W/T set he was found with, as well as a pile of Palestinian cash. While he was being interrogated in London and then by SIME in Palestine, SIME had succeeded in making contact with Italy using his W/T set, and a cover story was provided for the agent’s current access to information. David Mure called this W/T channel the Gauleiter. Thaddeus Holt, in his book “The Deceivers”, links this agent nom de guerre to “Ernst Paul Fackenheim, a Jew working for the Abwehr, who parachuted into Palestine in October 1941, intending to be a triple agent”. [24]
Unfortunately for both these scenarios, neither Fackenheim nor his W/T set had been used for deception, as was made clear in a USFET Re-Interrogation