Read Double Cross in Cairo Online
Authors: Nigel West
Double Cross in Cairo (4 page)
After Auchinleck replaced Wavell in July 1941 it was Whiteley who was selected by him to fly to London to brief Churchill in October 1941 on the delayed
CRUSADER
offensive. At the end of March 1942 Whiteley was appointed Chief of Staff for the 8th Army, but was replaced by General Freddie de Guingand in October, and in February 1943 Whiteley joined General Dwight Eisenhower as deputy Chief of Staff at Allied Forces Headquarters to plan the invasion of Sicily. In August 1943 he acted as Eisenhower's envoy to fly to London to brief Churchill again, and in January 1944 moved to SHAEF to plan the D-Day invasion.
Whiteley's senior staff posts enabled his notional clerk,
PIET
, to provide invaluable strategic information, as well as details of the Stuart tank to
MISANTHROPE
and, through her, to Nicossof.
As he reported to the Abwehr, Nicossof paid
PIET
40 Egyptian pounds (E£), but was soon in debt to him to the tune of E£35, and
when asked how much he needed, he replied E£1,000. By 4 July 1942, that figure had grown to E£1,400, and Nicossof claimed he was no longer in a position to borrow more. Indeed,
CHEESE'S
chronic lack of cash led SIME to discuss the idea of inventing an alternative source of income for him, perhaps as the proprietor of a garage, but the idea was dropped. Another suggestion was that
CHEESE
should spend his afternoons giving lessons in Arabic and French, which would allow him to meet more officers, one of whom might be a construction expert from the Royal Engineers with a knowledge the Cyranaican and Tripolitanian railway systems.
As well as recruiting
PIET
, Nicossof from July had the benefit of a Greek girlfriend, codenamed
MISANTHROPE
, who he referred to as his â
petite amie
'. She is a fascinating character because, although she was mainly notional, SIME felt obliged to recruit a real person to act her role so she could, if the circumstances arose, act as an intermediary and receive Nicossof's money from the Abwehr. Accordingly, SIME went to considerable lengths to fabricate her background.
Codenamed
MARIE
by the Abwehr, she was
a Greek girl animated by her hatred of the British â well-educated, intelligent, witty and courageous sustaining him [
CHEESE
]when discouraged or disgruntled â she aided and abetted him by forming a series of friendships â and possibly âalliances' â with British and American officers â military and Air Force. From these she extracted information of varying degree of reliability and importance. This enabled
CHEESE
to supplement information gleaned from his Greek military friends â and other acquaintances. Without funds he could no longer employ reliable agents. All information â whether high-level or low â true or false â he passed on to his Axis friends â leaving them to sift the chaff from the wheat. Those sources that misinformed him he discarded, and thus always had the requisite retort if and when accused of passing on false information. For instance â on 17 August 1942 he said that
he was sorry for having given false information but without money he had to collect such information his friends told him and report what he saw himself.
SIME's decision to introduce
MISANTHROPE
turned out to be an inspired one, and was probably taken by Evan Simpson in conjunction with other Special Section colleagues and, of course, Dudley Clarke. It may also have been influenced by Rowley Shears who had strong links to the local expatriate Greek community and the Greek government-in-exile's radio station in the suburb of Abu Zaabal which broadcast bulletins twice a day on the medium wave in eleven languages under the sponsorship of the Political Warfare Executive (PWE). The studios belonged to Egyptian State Broadcasting but were largely managed by British personnel, among them Shears's close friend Norman Joly, and was the principal means for the coalition government to maintain one-way contact with Greeks living under the Axis occupation. Among those who appeared regularly on the channel were Crown Prince Paul and the leading politicians, among them Prime Minister Emmanouil Tsouderos, his successor Eleftherios Venizelos, the Minister for War, Panagiotis Kanellopoulos and Admiral Petros Voulgaris. A conference in Beirut established George Papandreou as the Prime Minister of a coalition government, and his administration moved briefly to Naples before finally reaching Athens in October 1944. Whenever these individuals were allowed access to the microphone a switch engineer was present who had the authority, under the Chief Censor Professor Eric Sloman, to cut the transmission. Formerly the first director of Corfu's police academy, Sloman ensured that no indiscretions were transmitted, fully aware that every broadcast was monitored by the enemy for any potential intelligence leads.
MISANTHROPE
's Greek background allowed
CHEESE
access to a complex world of political intrigue and competing groups who tried to influence Allied policy and were anyway determined to exercise
power in Athens after the liberation. It was a maelstrom of personalities and military commanders who were, of themselves, of minimal consequence in terms of strategic importance, but they did represent a plausible milieu which SIME and âA' Force could portray, to the Abwehr at least, as a constituency in Cairo that could shed light on Allied policy towards the Balkans. The dispossessed Greek forces would obviously be essential in any action taken in the eastern Mediterranean, and could be represented as a barometer of Allied plans in the region. At a time when there were no textbooks available on strategic deception, and little experience of the wholesale manipulation of double agents, not to mention the fabrication of notional sources,
MISANTHROPE
was a truly extraordinary development. Appropriately, Simpson created a narrative, complete with domestic details, to describe how she had gained
CHEESE'S
confidence. They had met at a party with some Greek friends, and
he had attempted to obtain from her military information about the Greek forces, supposing her to have many officer friends. He had observed her air of indifference as to the military success of the Allies, and as they became more intimate she had revealed the full extent of her antagonism to the British.
Some time in May 1942 Paul had remarked to her half-seriously: âSupposing that we were agents for the Axis. How easily we could obtain valuable information.' She had been skeptical; whereupon he had suggested that she should make the experiment of noting what she saw in the course of an hour's walk in the Cairo streets. She had agreed, and Paul had appeared much interested in the result of the experiment. A little later in the same month he had revealed to her (uncertainly and with much and anxious insistence on secrecy) that he was acting as an agent for the Axis. His manner had been at once vain and nervous. He had not at this stage told her that he was in wireless communication with the enemy. He had then asked her to continue systematically to keep her eyes open for badges and vehicle signs;
also for any other kind of military information obtainable visually; and to try and make the acquaintance of members of the Allied forces for the purpose of obtaining military information from them. She had hesitated, pointing out the risks and had asked for time to think the proposal over. But she has a natural disposition for the risk and had been finally convinced by Paul's assurance that there would be good money for them both in the venture.
She had noticed that Paul was always anxious that she should not be in or near his flat between about 7.30 and 10 o'clock in the evening. One night early in July, however, he had called her to look at his wireless receiver â on which they had been in the habit of listening to the radio programmes together and which she had never suspected to be anything but an ordinary domestic apparatus. Having locked the door of the room he had pulled back a false panel from the apparatus and shown her that it was a transmitter as well as a receiver. Unlocking a door, he had produced a Morse key; and then, to her further surprise, had suspended an aerial from nails already inserted in the walls near the ceiling.
All this had been done with an air of mysterious importance and great nervousness. At just after half past seven he had begun to tap out something that she could not understand on the Morse key. He had worn earphones and she could faintly hear the note of the signals. After about twenty minutes he had ceased tapping and had produced paper and pencil and began to write as he listened.
When the proceedings were finished he turned to her and remarked: âNow you know exactly what I'm up to.' Then he told her the whole story of his nightly communication with the enemy and had proposed that they should work as partners. She had hesitated once more; but once more she had been persuaded by her own disposition for adventure and by Paul's assurance that it would make their joint fortune and assure their safety and honour when â he was certain, the genuine Rommel entered Cairo.
Paul had taught her to decipher the messages received from the German Intelligence Service and thereafter she had occasionally helped him in this;
she had found it very difficult however, and Paul had sometimes been impatient with her when she had made mistakes. She had also made some effort to learn Morse, but that had been a tedious business; Paul had given her a test a few days ago, and had been quite angry when he had found how little she knew. Since that time she had assisted Paul mainly in the collection of military information.
Following the collapse of Greece in April 1941 the level of political infighting and scheming among senior politicians and the senior military hierarchy rivalled any play, and the mutiny of April 1944 among the ratings at Alexandria and Port Said was a manifestation of the discontent felt within the Royal Hellenic Navy when activists among the sailors on the lower decks demanded the government-in-exile be reconstituted to allow the participation of the Communist-controlled National Liberation Front (EAM). Their intervention was opposed by the officers and NCOs, usually anti-Communist ELAS supporters, who were placed under arrest by so-called Revolutionary Committees aboard the destroyer
Terax
and the corvettes
Apostolis
and
Sachtouris
. The mutiny was eventually crushed by the expedient of denying the ships food and water, but the bitterness would re-emerge during the postwar civil war. One destroyer, the
Pindos
, threw their officers overboard and, after a voyage to Malta, reached Italy where it surrendered to the local Communist Party. Seven members of the Royal Hellenic Navy were killed in Alexandria as officers led 250 volunteers over HMS
Phoebe
to reach the mutineers. Among the vessels involved were the repair ship
Hyphaistos,
the destroyer
Criti
, together with some minesweepers and auxiliaries. The last to give up in Port Said were men aboard the battleship
Georgios Averof,
six destroyers and the submarine
Papanicolis
. Finally the rebels who had seized control of the recruitment office in central Alexandria surrendered, bringing the episode to a close in Egypt. Meanwhile, the trouble spread to Malta where three
submarines, the submarine escort
Corinthia
, the destroyer
Spetses
and two auxiliary ships were taken over until the Royal Navy arrested the ringleaders, most of whom were concentrated on the destroyer
Navarinon
, and sent them back to a detention camp in Egypt.
These events demonstrated the volatility of Greek exile politics and the sensitivity of issues which were likely to be exploited by the Axis if the opportunity arose.
MISANTHROPE
'
S
SIME file identifies her as Mrs Evangeline Palidou, born in Canea, Crete on 25 July 1913. Five foot four inches tall, with brown hair and an oval face, her religion was Greek Orthodox. She had been issued with a Security Card, No. 615 on 28 May 1941 and had received a Red Card, No. 017002 on 25 May 1942. Educated at the Lycée in Canea, with a baccalauréat in French, she had been taken to visit Smyrna as a child in 1928. She had worked in the Anti-Fascist Movement in Crete from 1932 and been employed as a journalist on the anti-fascist newspaper
Literia
in 1933 before getting married and moving to Athens the following year. She returned to Crete in 1936, spent four months in exile on Naxos in 1938 after her arrest by the â4 August regime', and then worked first as a mannequin and secretary, and then for counter-espionage in Greece from November 1940. She was divorced from her 33-year-old husband, Evangelos Ktistakis in March 1942 and from July 1942 she worked for SIME's Greek Section and took up residence at the Metropolitan Hotel in Cairo.
Within SIME Evangeline was referred to as
BGM
, an acronym for âBlonde Gun Moll', a name she acquired as a result of her reputation for packing a pistol. Some believed that she had shot one of her lovers dead, but others suggested this tale was something of an exaggeration, as she had simply thrown him off a roof.
The immense trouble taken by SIME to create
MISANTHROPE
extended to her entire family. He father, supposedly, was Nicholas
Palides, aged sixty-four, formerly the director of economic services in Crete's Ministry of Finance between 1910 and 1918. He then served in Athens for two years, then in Turkey for two years, returning to Crete where he still lived. His wife, Anastasia Kokytha, was aged fifty-eight,
MISANTHROPE'
S
infant son was still in Crete, and her brother Ionis worked in the port office at Canea.
Nicossof announced her recruitment in a transmission on 24 July but âunfortunately uncertainty of livelihood â curtailment of his black bourse activities' and the non-arrival of funds from his Axis partners finally forced him to find regular employment. After trying from 7 December until 25 December 1942 he secured a post as an interpreter in the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA), an organisation created in the First World War to govern the Ottoman Empire,
CHEESE
commenced his duties on 1 January 1943, and on 27 January he announced that âshe could decode already and was learning to transmit'.