Double Cross in Cairo Read Free Page B

III whom it had become necessary to arrest; on 23 December 1942 he was asked to assist one Tschanscheff, apparently an agent who was arriving in Athens; on 7 December 1942 Rossetti,who was then in Istanbul, informed Berlin that he wished to speak with their agent T 400 when the latter was next in Istanbul, Sofia or Athens; in February 1943 Rossetti, who was still in Turkey, was announcing that he had been authorised by IM Ost to work upon a considerable scale in Turkey, and for that purpose wanted 20,000 Turkish pounds.
    Even this does not reflect the full scale of Rossetti’s activities, for it appears that he is also concerned with matters which usually fall outside the sphere of an Abt I officer. On 23 January 1943 he was provided with false information which he was to pass on to PARKER (presumably of OSS) from which we may assume that he is also concerned in the running of double agents. On 13 March 1942 he requested IH Ost to provide him with supplies of the drug Pervitin and a pistol with a silencer, reminding them that the former had been used with success by Ast Brussels. It is impossible to guess what was the reason for this request, but it suggests on the face of it Abt III rather than Abt I work.
    There are two messages from which one can gather some idea of the attitude of Rossetti’s superior officers to him. The first is the rebuke he received from Berlin at the beginning of September 1942, when he was instructed to curtail his endless journeyings about which had so far produced no visible result. This, however, seems to have been a temporary phase, for on 26 September, when Rossetti was in Italy, Sensburg informed him that he had interviewed the head of IH Ost and also the Chief Abt I, as a result of which they both now appreciated the work done by Rossetti in the past and, it was implied, would support his activities in the future. The circumstances of Sensburg having travelled to Berlin and taken up the question of Rossetti’s work with Piekenbrock himself suggests that there must have been fairly serious trouble before. If this is fact, coupled with the general speciousness of the Abwehr, which suggests that Rossetti’s constant activity may after all produce very little that is harmful, or of direct value to the enemy.
    While still in Genoa, Levi and Travaglio manipulated the black marketto exchange US dollars, which had been supplied by the Abwehr to pay agents, for Italian lira. This netted them almost double the official exchange rate, so the agents were paid in Italian currency, leaving Travaglio with a substantial profit. However, these activities led to Levi’s arrest in Genoa in 1940 on black marketeering charges, although he was released after a few hours upon Rossetti’s intervention with the spurious excuse that Levi had been participating in a clandestine operation. According to SIS, Travaglio was the alias of a Luftwaffe officer of Italian extraction who had been a pilot in the Great War. His dossier noted that he had been adopted by a wealthy widow and that although he claimed to have been an actor, had really earned a living by singing in cafés. SIS also identified him as the tall German officer with bushy eyebrows and a deep scar on his forehead who had used the alias Dr Hans Solms during the Venlo incident in November 1939.
    The Venlo episode had cast a long shadow across all SIS operations since November 1939 when two SIS officers, Sigismund Payne Best and Richard Stevens, were abducted while attending what they thought was a rendezvous with anti-Nazi German officers on the Dutch frontier. The hapless pair, who were unarmed and unable to resist, were seized on Dutch territory and dragged across the border to face incarceration and interrogation, and the debacle had been a profound embarrassment for the supposedly neutral Netherlands government, forcing the resignation of the DMI. However, the impact on SIS was lasting, for the assumption was that the two SIS