Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire. Calder Walton

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      This type of warped activity was accentuated by the fact that there were a number of inbuilt reasons preventing the objective collection of intelligence by Nazi officials: they were often afraid of reprisals against themselves or their families if they produced ‘wrong’ reports, and this inevitably created a large degree of sycophancy among their ranks, with junior staff wary of voicing dissenting opinions. There is some evidence to suggest that, due to their fear of admitting failures to their superiors, some Abwehr officers continued to run agents even when they suspected that their cover had been blown. The head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, is known to have been strongly anti-Hitler, and was eventually executed for treason in April 1945 on the Führer’s personal orders. However, contrary to what has been alleged, there is no evidence that Canaris was secretly in communication with SIS during the war to negotiate a peace settlement.³⁴

      One of the main Abwehr officers conducting operations against Britain and its empire, Dr Nikolaus Ritter, who also went by the alias ‘Clark Gable’ because, he said, of his resemblance to the Hollywood actor, later unconvincingly claimed to have known that the cover of some of the agents he sent to England was blown, and that he was really running a triple-cross against Britain. By the middle of the war, after a series of failed intelligence missions, Ritter’s Abwehr career was over. He went on to be in charge of civil air defence in Hanover, and was responsible for coordinating the city’s defences on the evening of a devastating Allied raid in October 1944, when his powers of prediction spectacularly failed him. Believing that a diversionary raid was the main thrust of the attack, Ritter stood Hanover’s air defences down. Precisely six minutes after he gave his order, 1,500 Allied bombers arrived overhead. Ritter was immediately retired. One of the last reports we find on him in MI5 records is from 1945, after his capture by the Allies, which notes that he is in charge of sweeping out the canteen in a British interrogation facility in occupied Germany, and that he has one subordinate under him in his sweeping duties – Kurt Zeitzler, the former Chief of the German General Staff.³⁵

      AXIS PLOTS IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

      One of the most harebrained schemes devised by the Abwehr in the entire war – and it devised many – occurred in the spring of 1941, when Ernst Paul Fackenheim, a Palestine-born Jewish prisoner in a German concentration camp, was recruited and sent on a mission to Palestine to learn what he could of the British efforts to stop Rommel taking the Suez Canal. Unsurprisingly, Fackenheim gave himself up to the Allies after he was dropped into Palestine by parachute. The German intelligence services devised similarly ill-conceived plots elsewhere in the Middle East. Operation Atlas was planned by the Abwehr together with Hitler’s Arab protégé, the virulent anti-Semite Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, who from 1940 was exiled in Berlin, installed at the splendid Bellevue Palace where he set himself up as a kind of Lawrence of Arabia figure, and was known as Hitler’s guest in the red fez. The gist of Operation Atlas was that in September 1944 two Arab fighters and three Abwehr agents would be dropped from a Heinkel 111 over Jericho with banknotes and ten cylinders of poison with which to poison the wells in Tel Aviv – apparently in a perverse reversal of the old conspiracy theory that Jews were responsible for poisoning wells in Europe. The Abwehr agents would then help fund anti-British revolts in Palestine and neighbouring countries. Although the Abwehr did not know it, details of the mission had been disclosed to the Allies by Ultra decrypts obtained by Bletchley Park, and its agents were tracked down and arrested. One of the Arab agents, Ali Hassan Salameh, known as ‘the cut-throat’, was wounded in a skirmish with the Palestine police, but limped off to fight another day, waging violent campaigns against Jews in Palestine and, after 1948, against Israelis. Salameh’s son inherited his father’s implacable anti-Semitism. Born in 1940, he was known as ‘the red prince’, and would become notorious as the chief of operations of Black September, the Palestinian terrorist organisation responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes and officials at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Nothing better illustrates how animosities and hatred can be passed down through the generations in the modern history of the Middle East.³⁶

      Another, equally unsuccessful, Nazi espionage network in the Middle East was the so-called ‘Pyramid’ organisation in Egypt, led by Count László Almásy, a Hungarian explorer and the real-life original of ‘the English Patient’. In the award-winning novel of that name by Michael Ondaatje and film by Anthony Minghella, Almásy is depicted as a handsome airman and hero. In reality he was neither handsome nor a hero, but an unsuccessful Nazi intelligence officer, according to his MI5 file a ‘hunchback … shabbily dressed, with a fat and pendulous nose, drooping shoulders and a nervous tic’. In the novel and the film, Almásy is depicted as dying from a morphine overdose, with his heart broken. In reality, he died of amoebic dysentery in 1951. After his recruitment by Nazi intelligence in Paris sometime in the immediate pre-war years, Almásy was sent to Egypt to report on British troop and shipping movements. His mission was a total failure. In 1942 he was supposed to infiltrate two agents into British-occupied Egypt, who would report directly to Rommel’s headquarters in the Middle East by wireless. For this task he recruited an Egyptian, Mohsen Fadl, who was working for the Egyptian tourist board in Paris, and a former cotton trader named Hans Eppler, the illegitimate son of a German woman who had married an Egyptian judge. Both proved unqualified disasters.

      In May 1942 Almásy began Operation Condor, an epic but ultimately unsuccessful mission to smuggle his two agents into Egypt. It involved a hellish journey of about 3,000 miles, in two stolen US trucks and two Chevrolets, from Libya across the Egyptian desert. The first attempt was a failure, with the vehicles becoming stuck in quicksand and the drivers falling desperately ill. The second, however, was a success. After dropping his agents in the town of Asyut, Almásy made the return journey to Libya. His agents travelled on to Cairo, where they went underground in the city’s red-light district, and blew the £3,000 he had given them on cheap champagne, cabarets, prostitutes and nightclubs. Their mission produced no important intelligence, but they did manage to recruit one of the best belly-dancers in Egypt, described in MI5 records as ‘an exponent of the dance de ventre’, who installed them on a houseboat on the Nile, in the cocktail bar of which they hid their radio transmitters. Their attempts to make wireless communication with Rommel’s headquarters were unsuccessful: unknown to them, the Abwehr unit with which they were supposed to communicate had been captured by the Allies. In a desperate bid to get messages to the German forces they recruited a young signals officer in the Egyptian army named Anwar Sadat – the future President of Egypt. In fact, Almásy’s entire mission had been compromised from the outset: Bletchley Park and MI5’s inter-service agency, SIME, had been closely monitoring it as it took one inept turn after another. Almásy was identified in Ultra decrypts as operating under the codename ‘Salam’, an anagram of the first five letters of his surname. After three months watching its every move, SIME finally decided to put an end to the network, and in July 1942 Almásy and all of his agents, including the young Sadat, were arrested.³⁷

      One of the most complicated counter-espionage and deception agents run anywhere in the British empire in the Second World War was ‘Silver’, who was skilfully handled by British and Allied intelligence services in India. Silver is revealed by IPI records, now held at the British Library in London, to have been Bhagat Ram, an Afghani who was the right-hand man of the great Indian-Bengali nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose. In the course of the war Ram, who also went by the alias of ‘Ramat Khan’, actually became a triple agent, working at various times for Germany, the Soviet Union and Britain, and there is some evidence to suggest that he was also in communication with Chinese intelligence.³⁸

      Ram was a fiercely anti-British Indian nationalist, whose twin allegiances lay with India and the cause of communism. When war in Europe was declared in 1939, he and Bose threw in their lot with the Axis Powers – Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union started the war as allies through the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939. Bose, who regarded the war as India’s great opportunity, helped to lead the ‘Quit India Movement’, whose aim was to eject the British from India, and also assisted with the formation of the Indian National Army (INA), which collaborated with the Japanese СКАЧАТЬ