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 Report of Walter Sensburg [See Footnote c] in 1946. Fackenheim’s MI5 file confirmed that he had been a professional Abwehr agent before being sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis, but after he was dropped into Palestine in early October 1941, AST Athens had heard nothing further from him. [25] Fackenheim had, in fact, surrendered himself at a British military barracks in Haifa on 10 October 1941. He was sent to Cairo for questioning, where he offered to become a DA, but made the mistake of telling a “stool pigeon” of his intention to double-cross the British. The C-in-C Middle East reported that he was to be returned to Palestine to be tried for espionage. [26]
The third channel was an agent Mure called STEPHAN, an Austrian Jew who had arrived in 1940 in Cairo, complete with W/T set, and offered to become a deception link. This agent worked at least until after the surrender of Italy, and Mure believes he was highly regarded by the Germans, in part because he was one of their own nationals. [27] Thaddeus Holt linked the codename STEPHAN to an agent called Klein, working back to the Abwehr in Athens, who had surrendered himself and his transmitter to the British. [28] According to David Mure, in early 1942 CHEESE became the codename for the A Force network of deception agents (LAMBERT, the Gauleiter and STEPHAN) rather than for a single agent (the original CHEESE by this time was languishing in an Italian prison). [29] Some historians doubt whether the Gauleiter and STEPHAN ever existed. [30] They are not mentioned in the MI5 Double Agent files so far released to the public.
QUICKSILVER and PESSIMIST
QUICKSILVER and the PESSIMISTS were operational from October 1942 to 1944. QUICKSILVER was George Liossis, Greek Air Force officer and possibly a British Intelligence contact since April 1941. He volunteered in Athens to work for the Abwehr under the codename LAOS and was trained, then dispatched to work in Beirut with 2 other agents, the Greek seaman Bonzos, codenamed RIO by the British, and Anna Agiraki codenamed GALA. The party was picked up by the Royal Navy on 20 Aug 1942. While Liossis was recruited by SIME as a Controlled Enemy Agent (CEA) W/T operator, his companions were in fact arrested, while “notionally” assisting Liossis. On 16 October QUICKSILVER became an A Force asset, transmitting several times weekly over the following two years and frequently receiving questionnaires from his Abwehr control. In September 1943 they were still in regular communication and were considered reliable by the enemy. David Mure became chairman of the 31 Committee in Beirut from mid-1943, moving from a similar role with Baghdad’s 32 Committee.
The PESSIMISTS (‘X’ was the Swiss/Italian team leader, ‘Y’ was the Alexandrian Greek W/T operator for the team; and ‘Z’ was a former drug-smuggling Alexandrian Greek) were ordered to set up in Damascus. Alerted through ISOS, SIME arranged to have them picked up on arrival by submarine by the French Sûreté Générale and handed over to the British. PESSIMIST ‘Y’, officially known to the Abwehr as agent MIMI, had been a contact of MI6 in Athens before joining the Abwehr, so he was soon working as a CEA while his companions in the COSTA team went to prison. Radio contact was established with Athens on 14 Nov 1942.
Both QUICKSILVER and PESSIMIST ‘Y’ were handled by Capt John Wills (17th Lancers) under the eye of the 31 Committee in Beirut, which also guided the work of “a number of travelling agents under the control of ISLD’s Michael Ionides” [31]. Ionides was described by David Mure as “a remarkable officer of wide experience in Middle Eastern affairs, having as a civilian engineer, been responsible for much of the irrigation system of Iraq.” [32] He had invented a couple of “notional” agents, HUMBLE and ALERT, who were used for deception in Syria from summer 1942. Also available to A Force from November 1942 was DOLEFUL/DOMINO, a Wagon-Lit attendant on the Taurus Express between Istanbul and Baghdad, made available by the Turkish secret services and believed to be in fact a Turkish agent. His German codename was ARTHUR. [33]
ISLD, SIME and the Provision of ISOS
The deployment of ISOS-indoctrinated MI6/ISLD officers to Cairo, Istanbul and Algiers in late
