The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [254]
The Italian reverses in Libya prompted Hitler in February 1941 to send the Afrika Korps to help. By the end of April, Axis forces under General Erwin Rommel had driven the British back to the Egyptian frontier. The simultaneous collapse of the Balkans further undermined SIS’s opportunities to penetrate Italy. By June, with the Admiralty urgently wanting to keep track of ‘possible reinforcement of Libya from Italian ports’, and complaining that SIS had provided only four reports from Italy and Sicily over the previous six weeks, Bowlby reported that it was hoped shortly to penetrate Sicily from Malta, and ‘N. Italy’ from Switzerland. Dansey, however, warned that it might take four months to improve the situation which in any case depended, ‘to a very great extent, on how long Spain and Switzerland remain unoccupied by the Germans’. Although neither country was invaded, and despite the fact that both the Lisbon and Madrid stations were told to concentrate on Italian work, the dismal performance continued through 1941. Dansey hoped that the Geneva station could step up its reporting but noted in November that the agent working the traffic out of Switzerland through the Simplon railway tunnel had been arrested and this had ‘made them very careful, for which one cannot blame them’. Almost despairingly, the Army Section at Broadway conceded, ‘the truth is that since we lost 44000 station [Vienna], we have never been able to organise a proper service against Italy. I find it difficult to see how we are going to do so now but will go on talking to all and sundry about it.’
Over the next year various stratagems were considered. One officer believed that ‘far more could be accomplished by bringing “high-ups” out of 32-land [Italy] rather than putting agents in’. The Lisbon station identified a prominent musician who had been engaged to perform at an International Musical Congress in Venice in September 1942. The Naval Section wanted him ‘to ascertain what battleships are in Venice during his visit or have been in Venice during July and August’, but no record survives of any response. It was proposed to form a film company in Portugal which could seek production facilities in Italy, gathering intelligence along the way. The Cairo station suggested looking for ‘active anti-fascists’ among Italians being repatriated from East Africa, but Dansey glumly observed that this had already been tried on a previous convoy where the ‘Fascist special police’ had been ‘very well represented on board’ and had warned against any Italians speaking to potential British agents. They had taken ‘very active steps’ to ‘see that this warning was carried out’ and he feared that ‘the worst may have happened to the one useful contact that was made’. Reflecting on the position in December 1942, an officer in the SIS Army Section noted that despite exerting ‘all the pressure I could’ on the production side ‘to produce information on Italy’, there had been ‘little result’. Up to the present, he wrote, ‘the difficulties have been very great’, but he had hopes for an improvement on two grounds. First was ‘the continued failure of Italian arms with the consequent further lowering of morale. This should not only make the task of an agent in Italy far easier, but should make available many more candidates for the penetration of Italy.’ Second was ‘the increasing German hold over Italy’, which ‘might well secure for us the active co-operation of considerable elements among the Italians themselves’. Presciently (as it turned out), he