Double Cross in Cairo (3 page)

Upon his release Levi was given a British passport by SIS and sailed to Haifa. He was interviewed by SIME in Jerusalem and finally reached Cairo on an RAF aircraft to establish himself in the famous National Hotel, on the corner of Talaat Harb and Abdel Khalek Sarwat Streets, on 10 February 1941. He did so, but was never provided with the promised transmitter. Instead, Levi claimed that he had been introduced in March in a bar in the Kharia Malika Farida to Paul Nicossof who had once been a ship's wireless operator. The meeting had been arranged by an Italian, Antonio Garbarino, who allegedly had access, for £200, to a radio provided by another Italian who had been hiding in his house. Of course, neither Nicossof nor
Garbarino ever really existed. Similarly, Levi was initially accommodated in the Abbassia Barracks, and not the National Hotel.

Levi's case, codenamed
CHEESE
, was handled by Rex Hamer, Rodney Dennys and John de Salis for ISLD's B Section, and Terence Robertson, Desmond Doran, Eric Pope and the novelist Evan J. Simpson, for SIME's Special Section. In one report dated 1 September 1942 Simpson said that ‘Levi, as a result of his successful activities in France, Italy, Turkey and then in Egypt, has acquired an amazing self-confidence and complete belief in his own ability to travel anywhere and deceive anybody'. Simpson, who was only commissioned from the ranks in 1941, considered him

Simpson was born in London in April 1901, and was living in Surrey when he was sent away to school. He was educated at Winchester, where he went as a scholar in September 1914, and then from 1920 read history at University College, Oxford. As soon as he graduated he appeared at the Liverpool Playhouse as Mackenzie in
Abraham
Lincoln
and in 1928 appeared in
Napoleon's Josephine
at the Fortune Theatre. He then managed the Festival Theatre in Cambridge before joining the Huddersfield Repertory Theatre. In 1929 he had married the actress Dorothy Holmes-Gore, the star of
Midshipman Easy,
and in October 1931 their son was born.

Simpson's first play,
The Dark Path,
about a pair of Englishmen in Japan, was performed at the Savoy Theatre in November 1928. Upon the outbreak of war he joined the Intelligence Corps and participated in
Operation
CLAYMORE,
the Commando raid on the Lofoten Islands on 3 March 1941, which led him to write
Lofoten Letter.
The true purpose of
CLAYMORE
was to capture one of the enemy's three Enigma cipher machines known to be there. In the event none were recovered because Lieutenant Hans Kupfinger, the commander of the unarmed trawler
Krebs
, threw his overboard moments before he was killed. However, the machine's rotors were seized, and so were cipher documents that disclosed the Kriegsmarine's Home Waters keys for February, allowing Bletchley Park to retrospectively read the traffic. Other material seized helped Allied cryptographers to solve much of the April traffic, compromising signals sent between 1 March and 10 May. Naturally, the raid's true purpose was known only to a handful of officers who undertook their special assignments while the rest of the troops engaged the enemy and destroyed economic targets, such as the local fish oil processing plant.

Originally intended as a letter written to his wife while sailing for enemy-occupied territory as a corporal in a Special Service Battalion, Simpson was obliged by the constraints of military security to cut large sections of the text from
Lofoten Letter,
and not even hint that the raid had an alternative, highly secret objective. The same considerations required him to identify the ship on which he sailed as HMS
Domino
, a non-existent warship, and certainly not part of the 6th Destroyer Flotilla. Nevertheless,
Lofoten Letter
was released, and probably stands as the first book of the conflict written by a participant in a clandestine operation undertaken on Nazi-held Europe. He was by then a published author under the nom-de-plume Evan John, and by the time he was transferred to SIME he had written
Plus ça change: An Historical Rhapsody in One Act
in verse in 1935, and
Kings Masque: Scenes from an historical tragedy
in 1941. The biographer of King Charles I, he would write five other one-act plays, some of which were performed on the London stage, and go on to publish historical novels such as
Crippled Splendour
and
Ride Home Tomorrow.

Simpson was indeed an extraordinary intelligence officer, in a profession in which eccentricity is not a rare phenomenon, for while he was employed by SIME he also found the time to write a book,
Time in the East,
which described his travels to Jerusalem, Cyprus, Beirut, Aleppo and Persia, and included some unfashionable opinions about Charles I, psycho-analysis, literary criticism and blood-sports, not to mention some limericks in French, Latin and Greek. A 1946 review in
The Wykehamist
described Simpson's book as ‘humourous and humane' while an earlier article drew attention to his versatility as a poet, actor, playwright and historian. He was also a frequent contributor to the
Spectator.

Simpson was originally transferred to Cairo to run sabotage operations in the Caucasus to prevent oil being shipped to Germany, and to take over the work of a special bureau headed by Oliver Baldwin, son of the former prime minister. However, as Axis forces swept through the Balkans, the opportunities for sabotage diminished, and Simpson found himself posted to SIME.

Simpson gave some thought to Levi, reflecting that

Another SIME report, allegedly endorsed by Major Jones, observed that

Although he carried £500 in Sterling notes, there was no message for him at his Cairo hotel, and no wireless. Accordingly, Levi called on Lina Vigoretti-Antoniada, who was placed under surveillance by SIME, but she appeared ‘unintelligent and quite unresponsive to his hints and suggestions' so she was put under discreet observation, with no result. Khouri, on the other hand, was a Syrian money-lender already known to SIME as being anti-British and involved in agitation in Palestine. An investigation by SIME revealed that Khouri had lent cash to several British personnel, among them officers named Chesterfield, Stirling, and Captains Massey and Soames.

Evidently the Abwehr believed that Khouri was the organiser of a network of low-level local spies, but his encounter with Levi, which was not monitored independently or recorded by SIME, proved to be unproductive. Khouri was interned and his network ‘melted away' without Abwehr money. The relationship between Khouri and Levi presented some fundamental problems, not the least of which was the fact that Khouri ‘was flesh and blood' so ‘it was decided that Paul should not have any actual contact with him'. Instead of meeting, they corresponded through three addresses in Cairo, with Nicossof signing himself ‘Willy' while Khouri wrote as ‘Albert'.

Much later Evan Simpson recorded that he ‘was very uncertain
about how much of Levi's accounts of his conversations with Khouri could be believed'. Khouri, when arrested in 1941, denied ever having met Levi. While undoubtedly this was a lie it is considered possible that Levi met Khouri on one or perhaps two occasions, that Khouri refused to have anything to do with him and that the accounts given of subsequent conversations with Khouri were sheer invention on Levi's part. Before leaving Cairo, Levi told SIME that he had informed Khouri of the setting up of a wireless communication, arranged for him to supply the operator with reports for transmission by means of a post box and promised to send him more money, signing himself ‘Willy Rogers'. In actual fact, no information was ever supplied through this post box.

Initially, Bill Kenyon-Jones's enthusiasm for promoting a wireless link with the Abwehr attracted some derision at GHQ, and in later life he would recall that the signals branch had explained to him that their principal function was to
prevent
illicit transmissions to the enemy, not to
assist
them.

CHEESE
tried to communicate with the Abwehr on 17 May using a homemade transmitter constructed by a skilled Royal Signals technician, Staff Sergeant Ellis, whose role would later be taken by Sergeant Rowland (‘Rowley') G. Shears, because of ill health. Shears held an amateur licence with the call sign G8KW and in 1956 started his own radio manufacturing business, KW Electronics, at his home at the Vanguard Works in Heath Street, Dartford, Kent. When he died in November 2009, at the age of ninety, none of his obituaries mentioned his connection with
CHEESE.

Initially Ellis was unable to make contact and a technical study concluded that the agreed frequencies were unsuitable, so they were changed through a simple plain-language code over the commercial cable to Istanbul, as previously arranged for just such an eventuality, and his messages finally were relayed to Rome on 14, 17 and 21
July 1941 when the first radio link was established. For the first three months these signals were transmitted from a flat next to a military base in Heliopolis twice a week on most Mondays and Thursdays, but they contained little information of value as SIME's deception skills were then unsophisticated. During this same period the amateur transmitter was replaced with an army model, and illness required two changes in operators, none of which apparently attracted the enemy's attention.

SIME's case officer complained that ‘the book-cipher code suggested by the Italians proved clumsy and unsuitable'; a SIME officer devised a new substitution cipher.

SIME also complained about the quality of Bari's substandard radio technique, observing that

A survey conducted by SIME of the first 163 messages transmitted by Shears demonstrated that ‘as many as twenty-four transmissions were unsuccessful due to four causes:

In April 1941 when Levi was scheduled to return home, he recruited Paul Nicossof, a notional agent, to replace him, and gave him £150. Thereafter, Nicossof became a valuable cog in the
CHEESE
deception machine, and at first was played by a SIME officer named Beddington. He was supposedly a Syrian of mixed Caucasian heritage, eager to work as a mercenary. In September 1941 ‘A' Force adopted
CHEESE
, and as a first step it was reported that he had acquired a South African source who, a few weeks later on 29 September, was replaced by
PIET
, a well-informed South African NCO with money and women trouble, but was employed as a confidential secretary to General John P. Whiteley at GHQ Middle East, and therefore ‘in a position to
acquire first-class information'. SIME noted that ‘experience shows that the enemy is curiously unwary and eager to accept stories of the disloyalty of disgruntled Colonials, Irishmen, etc. and even of supposed ex-members of Fascist organisations in England.'

General Whiteley, a Woolwich graduate who was a willing participant in the scheme, had been commissioned in 1915 and had served in the First World War in the Royal Engineers at Salonika and across the Middle East, having won the Military Cross. He had been posted to Wavell's staff in Cairo in May 1940. In May 1941 he travelled to Washington, DC to negotiate delivery of Lend-Lease material to Egypt. Some sixteen ships arrived each month for the remainder of the year, bringing eighty-four M4 Stuart light ‘Honey' tanks, 10,000 trucks and 174 aircraft. The arrival of the Stuart tanks, with their 37mm gun and high speed, ensured their participation in
CRUSADER
, although with a limited range they would be out-performed by Rommel's panzers which were equipped with better armour.