The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [328]
Ashford-Russell ran most of these networks, and through him SIS provided the Italian Communists with communications equipment and codes for them to report back on enemy order-of-battle information, but the Service also routinely monitored all Communist signals traffic. By this means, and through a British officer openly based in the Party headquarters in Naples (though not formally acknowledged as being SIS), the Service gathered much political intelligence as well. Shortly before the fall of Rome in June 1944 Palmiro Togliatti, General Secretary of the Communist Committee for Liberated Italy and future leader of the post-war Italian Communist Party, arrived from Moscow. Although he ejected the SIS representative, he promised that Communists would continue to supply information, but from now on this was limited to military matters. In the spring of 1945, when it was clear that the Germans were beaten, and much of northern Italy was in Communist hands, Togliatti terminated the wartime marriage of convenience with SIS. While the volume of intelligence from Communists fell off in early 1945, other left-wing groups continued to supply a considerable quantity of information through Ashford-Russell’s head agent in Milan, who was a political activist. From May to September 1944, in a series of reports marked by this agent’s ‘wide experience . . . of men and their problems’, he covered the partisan organisation and operations, the dispositions and morale of the Germans, Italian Fascist forces, propaganda, politics, economics, the Church and the press. In October, having briefly come out to Rome for consultations, he and a colleague were infiltrated back behind enemy lines in the unhappily named operation ‘Wop/Risky’ (a title both offensively inappropriate and insecure, since the point of a code-name is ideally to bear no relation whatsoever to the operation in question). They were flown from Bari to Lyons in France, and proceeded to Chamonix where they climbed to 12,000 feet and on foot crossed a corner of Switzerland into Italy. Since it was ‘undoubtedly the hardest’ mountain crossing, the Germans did not ‘consider it worth watching’. This agent continued to report for the first four months of 1945, until the end of the war in Italy.
Another of Ashford-Russell’s agents (not, in this case, a Communist), ‘Dragonfly’, had been recruited in South America and operated in Rome for four months during early 1944. He ‘used to lunch regularly’ with Herbert Kappler, the SS chief in the city, ‘and report back to us on the meetings’. He sent large numbers of messages by wireless, and, despite being warned of the dangers of enemy direction finding, refused to cut down the volume of signals, arguing that ‘risks had sometimes to be taken and he would not abandon his post at this critical moment (shortly before the fall of Rome)’. In the end he was caught red-handed (though ‘while the door was being forced open he had time to burn all his papers’), and was shot at Dachau several months later.
Reflecting afterwards on the success of his Bari operations into northern Italy, Bruce Lockhart recalled that by the end of the war they had had ‘about 30 or 40 wireless sets coming up daily giving German order of battle and troop movements’. This had made them ‘somewhat swollen headed’ and ‘we thought we knew all the answers’, but ‘we didn’t realise how easy it was being made for us’, as army headquarters could audit SIS product against very good prisoner-of-war interrogation intelligence, ‘first-rate aerial photography and first-rate Sigint’. This ‘admirable collateral’ meant that ‘as soon as an agent or group started to send something unlikely or improbable all lights flashed at G.H.Q. and straight away the information was shown up as being phoney’.
Bruce Lockhart’s other section was headed by Major James Millar, who was posted to Bari in January 1944. Millar, a Scot educated at St John’s College, Cambridge, had