utility”. [14]
The reliability of ROBERTO’s reporting was not restored in his German controller’s eyes until November 1942, though from July onwards the enemy was requesting daily transmissions in place of the twice-weekly schedule, and his reporting was being assessed as “credible” and “trustworthy” from about this period. Nicosoff was able to claim that original network members responsible for the faulty intelligence of October 1941 had either been interned or had split from the group, disgusted at the lack of monetary reward from the Germans. The handler for the ROBERTO network, Rossetti, moved in late 1941 to Abwehrstelle (Ast) Athens and took control of the case with him. He later moved again, to Istanbul, but the case stayed under Athens’ control.
It has been suggested that the main reason for the rehabilitation of ROBERTO in the eyes of the Germans was the fact that their other, better sources had been closed down. [15] They had been intercepting and decrypting the telegram traffic of the US Military Attache in Cairo, Col Fellers, a fact which eventually became clear to the British through ISOS. After the codes were changed, the leakage stopped. Rommel had also been benefitting from an excellent wireless interception unit which was reading much of the lax British military radio traffic in the field. This stopped when the unit was captured by the British with its records intact, and its leader, Capt Seebohm, was killed.
Through 1943 CHEESE was used to sell a number of deceptions successfully, but by 1945 A Force became concerned that they had little further use for his services in deception work, while his possible use in penetration of the GIS might compromise all A Force deceptions if he were to be blown. By early 1945 Nicosoff was notionally in Greece and his mistress MISANTHROPE was controlling the CHEESE W/T link. The Germans had left behind money and a W/T set for Nicosoff in Greece, and MISANTHROPE in due course informed the Germans that this had not been found. They then proposed for another stay-behind agent in Athens to provide Nicosoff with a W/T set. According to a SIME letter to MI5,
“it was apparent that the longer we continued, the greater would be the difficulty of avoiding the development of CHEESE on penetration, as opposed to deception, lines. ‘A’ Force no longer had an operational use for the link.”“‘A’ Force were very loath to allow CHEESE to become entangled in penetration activities, arguing (quite rightly, in my opinion) that however carefully SPECIAL SECTION and S.I.M.E. Detachment in ATHENS (KLINGOPULOS) handled the case, there was always the possibility that unforeseen complications might lead to German suspicion that CHEESE/MISANTHROPE were working under British control. This in turn might lead the Germans to re-examine all past CHEESE traffic wth a more critical eye than they have done in the past. As far as ‘A’ Force are concerned, it is imperative that CHEESE must not run any risk of being blown; having been running since July 1941, any suspicion falling on this link might ultimately jeopardise the security of all ‘A’ Force activity in the MEDITERRANEAN theatre during the past three years. This is the ‘A’ Force view, and, in my opinion, a very logical one”.
Against the highlighted section in the letter, a comment was written in the margin: “This is contrary to what Harmer told me last year. J.M.” [16] Harmer, presumably, had either been told otherwise or had reviewed the case himself. As Harmer was the DA expert assigned by MI5 to both liaise with G Ops in SHAEF and to become the OC of 104 SCIU [See Footnote b], the section chosen to run DA deception cases in 21st Army Group (21 AG), his opinion must carry some weight in the discussion. “J.M.” was presumably John Marriott, who succeeded Lt Col T A Robertson as head of B1a in MI5 (the Section running all DAs in the UK). The CHEESE case was closed in early 1945. MI5 were keen for the case to be reopened in case the German Mil Amt organization tried 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,
