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By Root 2916 0

Menzies (as always) was being pressed for military intelligence by the service departments, while the Foreign Office wanted better reporting on the admittedly complicated and confused political situation. In Cairo an office was established with the main function of penetrating Greece, not only from North Africa but also through Smyrna. Matters improved in 1943 when (among others) a network of agents run by Rees – called ‘S’ sources – began to report. ‘S.41’ was recruited in September 1942 and sent military and naval information from Salonika, much of it based on train-watching. Another agent, ‘S.30’, who had previously worked for the Italians against the Turks, was regarded as ‘a most valuable source’ who in 1943 alone, up to his arrest in July, had supplied thirty-nine reports on the Dodecanese, including air, army and naval information which had received ‘very favourable criticism’ from the service ministries.

In 1943 some SIS officers were dropped into Epirus in north-western Greece, primarily to report on German order of battle in Greece. One of these was Nigel Clive, who had been recruited by the Service in December 1941 and had served as assistant to the Baghdad representative, before engineering a move to Cairo in a successful effort to get a more active job. Equipped with a money belt containing a hundred gold sovereigns and under the pseudonym ‘Jim Russell’, he parachuted into Greece in December 1943 along with a wireless operator and a regular Greek army officer to help with liaison. Clive’s duties were not particularly covert. Formally attached to SOE’s Allied Military Mission at EDES headquarters, he served in British battledress and lived openly among the partisans in the Greek mountains. As Clive claimed afterwards, one unusual circumstance of his posting was that his SIS predecessor, an alleged Greek-American called Costa Lawrence, had been shot dead by an SOE officer, an Irishman named Spike Moran. Although Clive was well aware of the intermittent tensions between SIS and SOE, this seemed to take things too far, and it emerged that Moran had believed Lawrence was a traitor and thought that he was about to be betrayed to the Germans. Moran himself and his SOE colleagues were actually very helpful to Clive, who was able to collect a great deal of information about the German forces, finding Greek interpreters working for the enemy to be especially willing to assist. Clive remained in Epirus until the German withdrawal from Greece in the autumn of 1944, and from April 1944 he began also to report on the political competition between the rival Greek resistance groups, in effect predicting the civil war which erupted at the end of the year.18

Turkey, meanwhile, remained a lively centre of intelligence activities during the second half of the war. The enemy scored a notable success with the famous spy ‘Cicero’, Elyesa Bazna, Albanian valet to the British ambassador in Ankara, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, whose sloppy attitude to security enabled Bazna in 1943 systematically to photograph highly classified documents and sell them to the Germans. SIS were involved in the investigation after the leakage of secret information from the Ankara embassy was revealed both by signals intelligence and by an OSS agent in the German Foreign Ministry, but the full story did not emerge until after the war.19 At the same time as the Cicero crisis, SIS struck an outstanding blow against the Abwehr by recruiting and organising the defection of Dr Erich Vermehren and his wife Elisabeth. Vermehren, an anti-Nazi Roman Catholic who had won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford just before the war (but had been prevented from taking it up on account of his refusal to join the Nazi youth organisation at school), had been assistant to Paul Leverkühn, the senior Abwehr officer in Turkey, since October 1942. His wife was a cousin of Franz von Papen, the German ambassador in Ankara, and had family connections with Adam von Trott zu Solz, a leader of the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.

The Vermehrens’ case officer was Nicholas Elliott,