大象传媒

Besides his official job as a telecommunications Engineer seconded to Palestine Post and Telegraph Service, my father undertook many missions for Mediterranean East Intelligence Centre, known affectionately in our family as Emmy, but generally referred to by people who worked for it as Cairo, since that was where the IC had its HQ.
Much of the work my father did he would never talk about. The period from 1944 to 1947 seemed particularly taboo. Although he remained mentally capable until a few months before he died in 1996, he would get agitated if any of his children wanted to know about his later missions, demanding fiercely the name of the person who had prompted us to ask that question.
One mission though, that he undertook in the first quarter of 1941 was quite different, more in the Boy鈥檚 Own style that he admired and he talked to us about it quite freely once he returned home to Haifa where we lived at the time..
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Towards the end of 1940, Emmy received intelligence that the Germans were erecting telephone poles in Bulgaria and was anxious to find out if the wires were real or dummy. If the wires were real, Emmy could assume that the Germans intended to invade the Balkans and Greece, countries that were not part of its remit. If, however the lines were dummy it would point to a German intention to invade Turkey en route to the oil wells of Iraq and that would be very much Emmy鈥檚 business.
Emmy鈥檚 difficulty was that Bulgaria came under the remit of the Balkans Intelligence Centre, which had a high regard for its own autonomy, but in Emmy鈥檚 opinion, did not have agents with sufficiently advanced telecommunication skills to appraise the situation.
Emmy wanted my father to go to Bulgaria to investigate. He had used German patents pre-war when designing Jericho鈥檚 automatic exchange and then had had to find work-rounds to those patents when designing the Haifa Exchange in 1940. That experience had left him with a considerable knowledge of German telecommunication techniques.
Emmy found an excuse to second my father to Balkans IC when Anthony Eden set out on his Balkans tour early in 1941. My father joined the entourage in Ankara where he had to clamber over rooftops sticking bugging equipment down hotel chimneys, and wander through damp cisterns sticking the same equipment up shafts.
When the entourage arrived in Sofia, his real work began and he quickly confirmed that the telecommunication systems in Bulgaria were genuine.
Balkans Intelligence Centre then requested that he spend a week visiting the cinema to guage the Bulgarian Public鈥檚 response to British propaganda films.
While taking a coffee break in a caf茅, quite by accident he noticed an employee of the British Ambassador to Yugoslavia whom he had met at a conference in Ankara entering the nearby German Embassy.
He spent another week in the caf茅 consuming innumerable cups of coffee and saw the employee enter the embassy five times.
He reported to the Balkans Intelligence Centre who sent him to Belgrade to report the matteer to Yugoslavian ambassador.
The Yugoslavian ambassador defended his employee and accused my father of being a troublemaker.
Before my father took the train back to Ankara, one of the embassy members asked him to record the bridges spanning the train lines.
Suspecting a trap my father decided not to make a written record. He always carried a lot of junk in his suit pockets, screwdrivers, pins, nails, pieces of string, much I may say to my mother鈥檚 disgust. He added to this collection of junk a whole bag of screws, which he put in the larger section of one of those double pockets men鈥檚 suits used to have in those days. Every time he saw a bridge on his journey, he transferred a screw to the smaller section and all the time he kept checking with a map as to where the train was.
Halfway through the journey, the train stopped, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and Bulgarian soldiers boarded. They headed straight for my father and hauled him out of the train. They searched him thoroughly, took his map, letters, photographs, and passport, but left him with his junk and a well worn copy of the Gospel according to St John. They then frogmarched him to a car, which had blackout curtains round all the windows except the windscreen.
My father slipped a pin from his pocket, hid it between his fingers, and opened up his Gospel. Looking through the windscreen, he pricked a dot in the gospel for every telephone pole the car passed and made a score every time the car took a bend. When the car stopped, because Germans always kept an exact distance between each telephone pole and he knew where he had been taken off the train, my father had worked out that he was in the mountains very close to the Greek border
At the end of the journey, the soldiers handed him over to two uncouth police guards who placed him in a squalid cell in a primitive building. They gave him to understand that they were waiting to hand him over to the Germans but communications broke down when my father demanded to see the British Consul.
He stayed there for two days while the guards embarked on a noisy and frequently argumentative game of cards.
At one point, one of the guards, greatly liquored up, brought him some bread and water and then, anxious to get back to his game, forgot to lock the cell door. My father waited until the game reached a particularly aggressive mode and slipped out of the building without the guards noticing.
He walked towards the Greek border and after a while knew, he must be in Greece.
He was walking down a rough road bordering a chasm when a truck came behind him and screeched to a halt. The Greek officer accompanying it spoke a little English and my father was able to convince him that he was British.
The officer offered him a lift to Athens.
My father claimed that was the most dangerous part of the journey, travelling in a truck, driven by a crazy Greek driver along roads scarcely more than goat tracks. However, they stopped at villages each night where the villagers treated everyone in the truck to a bountiful feast.
When the truck eventually arrived at Athens, the Germans were on the point of invading. The British consul found my father a place in the convoy that was evacuating young King Peter of Yugoslavia. German planes strafed the convoy several times as it went East through the Mediterranean but my father disembarked unscathed but filthy when his ship docked in Haifa.

Something that worries me about this story is that quite recently I read a similr one about the Jugoslavian ambassadors valet being reported to the the ambassador with similar results. In that story there is no mention of my father. However,I overheard heard my father fuming about the ambasasador's refusal to believe him almost immediately after he arrived back in Haifa. Perhaps that ambassador was used to reports that his employees wee spies and always stuck up for them!

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