Burn After Reading (24 page)

Serao was Ponzo's father-in-law, and more than that, the idol of his son-in-law. Serao himself gave the British all sorts of confidential information, which he procured in the course of his practice; thanks to his intimacy with Ponzo, he could also supply military and naval intelligence of the highest order. For all practical purposes, Giovanni Serao was the clandestine chief of the British Secret Service in Rome.

Before Franco Maugeri's arrival in S.I.S., Ponzo's contribution had to be limited by sheer necessity. His superiors were no parties to the plot. He had to operate on his own. Serao's Embassy connections were broken at the outbreak of the war. Serao and Ponzo had to confine their services to limited intelligence which they slipped to the British as best they could, mainly through a surreptitious contact with the British Legation that remained at the Vatican. Even this was of great value.

The British had an accurate appreciation of the Italian fleet and refused to regard it as a mortal threat to Britain's control of the sea, but its nuisance value was recognized. There was some apprehension, in particular, about the forty-odd submarines owned by the Italians, which could have wrought havoc with British shipping in the Mediterranean if properly employed. Naval Intelligence succeeded in acquiring the special code used by the Italian submariners.

An ingenious officer on Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham's staff hit upon a fantastic idea. Devising signals in the Italian code, and impersonating the Italian command, he would dispatch an Italian submarine to a certain spot in the Mediterranean to attack supposed Allied merchantmen. When the hapless submarine arrived at the spot, it was met by British destroyers waiting to send it to its doom.

In this manner, the British decimated Mussolini's submarine arm. The operation would have continued most probably to its inevitable conclusion had it not been for an accident. The
British ordered a certain Italian submarine to one of those spots where the destroyers were waiting, but that particular sub happened at the time to be in drydock at La Spezia.

The blunder alerted the Italians and ended the game, but severe damage had already been done.

Rommel was hammering the British mercilessly in Africa, and he was being supplied by shipping across the Mediterranean. The conspiracy inside the S.I.S. became of essential importance. On March 25, 1941, mysterious information alerted Admiral Cunningham to an ominous stirring of the Italian Fleet. Some of its major elements, led by the battleship
Vittorio Veneto,
were supposed to move in the direction of the Aegean to draw off elements of the British Fleet from the route of those Italo-German convoys. That obscure message resulted in a great British naval victory on March 28, in the memorable Battle of Cape Matapan. In Churchill's words, “This timely and welcome victory off Cape Matapan disposed of all challenge to British naval mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean at this critical time.”

By the beginning of April, the steady flow of intelligence enabled the British to intensify attacks on the shipping which had to feed Rommel's forces in Libya on a substantial scale. So effective was this surreptitious co-operation that Commander Malcolm Wanklyn in the submarine
Upholder
could win the Victoria Cross for his apparently uncanny ability to track down and sink German supply ships. An outstanding victory was scored in April, when a task force of four destroyers was guided to a large convoy. In this one action, fourteen thousand tons of enemy shipping, fully loaded with war materials for Rommel, was destroyed.

As time passed, Ponzo developed better communications with the British. A sympathetic S.I.S. agent in Berne became a pipeline to British Intelligence there. And still later the British managed to plant a clandestine radio transmitter in Rome. Now Ponzo needed a go-between to take information to the operator.
His eye fell on the Countess Montarini, an Englishwoman by birth, married to an Italian nobleman, the mother-in-law of a gallant young lieutenant of the Italian Navy. She worked as the
direttrice
of Elizabeth Arden's beauty salon.

Each morning, on her way to the shop, the Countess stopped at the church of the Trinità dei Monti for a brief prayer. Leaving, she would stop in front of the church to look down to the elongated Piazza di Spagna below, at the bottom of a flight of steps, inhaling the beauty of the sight.

At this famous Piazza, Rome is at its best. In the center of the square stands Bernini's fountain,
La Barcaccia
. It was made in the shape of a barque of war, spouting water from its marble cannons. Leading down to it is the Scala di Spagna, a flight of one hundred and thirty-eight steps.

When the Countess Montarini descended the grand staircase, she might pass a young man who stood on one of the steps. There would be nothing unusual, apparently, in this chance encounter, but, in fact, it was an ingeniously devised means of communication. The step on which the young man waited for the passing of the signora had a special significance. Each of the one hundred and thirty-eight steps meant a specific, separate message according to an elaborate system of codes. Each step had a different meaning when counted from the top or the bottom. Additional messages were passed on by having members of the ring do something specific on individual steps, such as lighting a cigarette, blowing a nose or cupping a hand over an eye.

The Countess was not only a transmission belt; she also gathered much useful information on her own. The Arden Beauty Salon was patronized by many of the most influential women of Rome, including the wives, daughters, and mistresses of Axis diplomats and officers. They gossiped freely while having their hair done, their faces mudpacked, and their nails manicured.

The Countess hired operators who could be trusted and taught them how to listen to the conversations of their celebrated
clients and how to pose loaded questions without making them even slightly suspicious. Frequently the mention of a name would start the ball rolling. An operator once reported to the Countess that one of her clients had told her she wanted to be especially attractive since she was to have a reunion with her husband she had not seen for more than a year. She was the wife of a general assigned to the African front. From this pebble of information it was possible to develop the intelligence that the general's recall had ushered in a complete reorganization of the Italian command structure in Libya.

Meanwhile, in Africa, Rommel went on to his greatest triumphs. He reached his peak in the summer of 1942 when he defeated the Eighth Army between Gazala and Tobruk, and then chased what was left of it almost to Cairo.

The British managed to halt his advance at El Alamein. In August, however, Rommel returned to the offensive, only to be finally checked this time. He could not go beyond El Alamein and saw his chances of conquering Egypt go up in the sand dust of the Western Desert.

There were several factors that robbed him of ultimate glory: the British utilized the interval he had granted them to shake up their high command, to send General Sir Bernard Montgomery to lead the Eighth Army, and to give him adequate reinforcements. But fully as important as what Monty received was what Rommel did not get: reinforcements and supplies via Italy and especially that confounded “shprit”—his word for gasoline.

Marshal Kesselring was sending all the fuel that Rommel was asking for, but somehow only a fraction of what left Italy ever arrived in Africa. As Liddell Hart put it, the Desert Fox was “vitally crippled by the submarine sinkings of the petrol tankers crossing the Mediterranean.”

The Germans were sure there was a leak. A special detachment of the usually infallible
Funkabwehr,
the
Abwehr's
radio monitoring service, was brought to Italy to search for outgoing
messages. They failed to find a single suspicious signal. Another special detachment, this one from
Abwehr
III (counter-espionage) was sent into Italy, and, in close co-operation with the brave
carabinieri
of Section E of the S.I.S., they instituted a manhunt for the presumed spies. The source of the leak was never found. The leak itself was never plugged.

What actually happened was simplicity itself. Since wars cannot be conducted in silence, the Italians had to advise their African command about these convoys. Their routing was radioed to Africa in a naval code that nobody expected the enemy to break. But someone at the Italian end had slipped the key of that sacrosanct code to the British and also advised them promptly whenever the code was changed.

Rommel was effectively deprived of his “shprit.” In the words of Captain Liddell Hart: “That decided the issue, and once the enemy began to collapse at their extreme forward point they were not capable of any serious stand until they had reached the western end of Libya, more than a thousand miles back.”

Ponzo's operation continued until the Italian Armistice in September, 1943. When the Germans occupied Rome, the city became too hot for him; and he was needed in Taranto, to the south, where the Italian Navy was being resurrected to a new life in a new war, this time to do exactly what most of its flag officers wanted, to fight against the Germans.

On October 10th, Max Ponzo sneaked out of Rome. Disguised as a straggler, he succeeded in making his way to Taranto where he was received with open arms. The morning after his arrival, he was named chief of the reconstituted Italian Naval Intelligence, with the wholehearted approval of the Allies.

The situation in Rome remained in excellent hands. Admiral Maugeri disappeared underground and became one of the chiefs of the resistance organization inside the Eternal City.

Countess Montarini's position became untenable. She could no longer maintain her masquerade. Her son-in-law, the naval lieutenant who was himself on the periphery of the ring, escaped
to the Allies at the first opportunity, and that tipped off the Germans to the mother-in-law's true sentiments. With the help of friends, she vanished from sight, although she never left Rome. She disappeared into the vast palace complex of Prince Colonna, where she remained in hiding until that June day of 1944, when at long last Rome was liberated by the Allies.

In the spring of 1935, a tourist arrived in New York en route to Berlin from Tokyo. He registered at the Hotel Lincoln on West 44th Street as Dr. Richard Sorge, a foreign correspondent for the
Frankfurter Zeitung,
one of Germany's major newspapers.

The intelligence services of various countries had tried to keep up-to-date biographical cards on this fascinating man, but it proved somewhat difficult to follow him on his erratic course. His “suspect card” in the files of American counter-intelligence dated back to 1929 and contained a number of melodramatic entries. It put down Sorge as a very important member of the great Soviet espionage apparatus.

This Sorge was a melancholy intellectual who had been born in Baku, in Southern Russia, in 1895. His grandfather was Adolph Sorge, secretary to Karl Marx at the time of the First International; his father was a German engineer working for an oil firm in the Caucasus; his mother was more obscure, said to be a Russian. He was a sensitive, good-natured, studious boy, somewhat spoiled by his parents who called him “Ika.”

When, as a youngster, he moved with his family to Germany and found out more about his grandfather's association with Marx, he became deeply interested in Socialism. The First World War (in which he fought at Ypern and Langemark) supplied the ferment for his ideas and, when it came to an end, young Richard groped his way to the Bolsheviks. A strange woman played an important part in Sorge's conversion. She
was the wife of a professor under whom he studied at Kiel University, the familiar neglected faculty wife who lures a student into a campus romance. She was considerably older than Sorge and she turned him into a fanatical idealist and took him to the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks received him with open arms and gave him odd conspiratorial jobs in various parts of Europe. Eventually he was absorbed by the Fourth Bureau of the Red Army General Staff and became a full-time Soviet espionage agent. Inside the apparatus he was known by the cover name “Ramsey.”

He was a key operative in the “Shanghai Conspiracy,” a major espionage operation of the late Twenties and early Thirties, when Soviet interest was focused on China. From Shanghai he returned to Moscow, but in May, 1933, he went to Germany where he joined the Nazi Party. He developed contacts with the new German intelligence agencies mushrooming under Hitler and joined General Karl Haushofer's geopolitical study group, the quasi-scientific propagandists of the
Lebensraum
idea. He joined the editorial department of the
Frankfurter Zeitung
, which sent him to Japan toward the end of that same year.

In Tokyo, Sorge lived in a big house in an excellent residential district. He joined the German Club, became a confidant of the German Ambassador and an informant of the German Military Attaché. The Germans regarded Sorge as one of their own and trusted him implicitly. The only objection the Embassy men had to him was that he was prone to start affairs with their wives. They did not know that Nazism was only a cover for his real mission.

This was the situation in 1935, when Richard Sorge suddenly showed up in the United States. He traveled under his own name, on his own genuine German passport, with papers to show that he was en route to Frankfurt for conferences with the newspaper he represented. He carried no incriminating documents. Except for one visitor, he was alone all the time.

His sole visitor was also a stranger among strangers,
traveling on a foolproof “legend.” He was a captain of the Fourth Bureau, sent especially from Moscow to deliver into Sorge's hands a fake passport for a clandestine detour to Moscow.