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By Root 2845 0

who had been Section V representative in Istanbul since the spring of 1942. An assessment after the war recorded that Elliott handled the Vermehrens with ‘consummate skill and sympathy, but with just the necessary touch of firmness’. Vermehren had got in touch with the British assistant military attaché in Istanbul, who passed him on to Elliott. The first contact was made on 18 January 1944 and on 21 January Elliott told Felix Cowgill in London that he had recruited Vermehren, whom he described as a ‘highly strung, cultivated, self-confident, extremely clever, logical-minded, slightly precious young German of good family’. Vermehren, he said, was willing to work for SIS as he was ‘intensely anti-Nazi on religious grounds’, and also because his wife and her family had been persecuted by the Nazis. Vermehren had produced ‘a quantity of detailed information’ about the Abwehr organisation in Turkey, which had ‘fully convinced’ the SIS station of his bona fides. Over a four-day period in late January, Vermehren managed to bring out important Abwehr files for SIS to photograph, including an organogram of the complete Abwehr set-up in Istanbul, and he was able to give SIS details of current Abwehr operations in Turkey and the Middle East.

On 25 January Elliott was tipped off by a contact in the Turkish secret police that they knew Vermehren had been in touch with the British. Reasoning that it would not be long, therefore, before the Germans got wind of this, with Turkish assistance he arranged for the Vermehrens and two other anti-Nazi Abwehr officers to be smuggled out to Cairo through the SIS station at Smyrna. Because of Vermehren’s supreme access, his defection completely compromised and demoralised Axis espionage throughout the region. Leverkühn, who was reported to be in ‘a hell of a flap’ over Vermehren’s flight, was recalled in disgrace to Berlin. Apart from its impact on German operations in the Near and Middle East, the Vermehren defection had a very significant impact on the struggle for intelligence supremacy in Germany between the Abwehr and Himmler’s Sicherheitsdienst, which ended with the latter absorbing the former. It was also one of the factors leading to Canaris’s downfall. As Michael Howard has concluded, the entire German intelligence service ‘was thrown into a state of confusion just at the moment, in the early summer of 1944, when its efficient functioning was vital to the survival of the Third Reich’.20

In Bucharest the productive head agent, Nannygoat, continued to provide a variety of intelligence. In the summer of 1942 he was asked to confirm the identification of five Italian divisions deployed in Romania. The following year he supplied a ‘news reel film purporting to show fortifications on French coast’ and reported that a sub-agent claimed to ‘know German engineers willing [to] desert bringing new bomber range 3,000 kilometres’. ‘Shall I make further enquiries,’ he asked in July 1943. ‘This is probably the Heinkel 177,’ replied London: ‘ZA [Air Ministry] very interested. Please go ahead.’21 Nannygoat’s contact seems not to have delivered the wavering German engineers, but the exchanges between Head Office and Istanbul demonstrate the range of information which any one agent might provide.

Nannygoat’s network also illustrates the polyglot nature of wartime intelligence-gathering. He himself had originally been a French agent, and his own organisation included several different nationalities. This, of course, could bring risks. In November 1943 he acquired some Polish wireless operators, three of whom were arrested the following February ‘due to discovery in Warsaw of Polish organisation working to Bucharest’. By the spring of 1944 Nannygoat (no left-winger he) was wiring ‘for instructions as to what course to pursue in the event of Russians arriving in Bucharest before British’. ‘In principle,’ replied London, ‘we would like as many agents as possible to remain undisclosed to Russians but feel that those who are likely to be arrested should be protected by us.’ In June 1944, however, ‘after denouncement