81
expatriates of Egypt since the summer of 1939.^44 After disagreement with
his SOE handlers over the editorial policy of the paper, Sereni proposed
that he be transferred to Greece to establish contact with Italians there and
organize sabotage and propaganda in Italy itself. Finding himself back in
Cairo with Thornhill after the Greek defeat during the summer of 1941,
Sereni was appointed to the editorial board of the Corriere d’Italia, the
successor to the now defunct Giornale d’Italia. This enabled him to travel
freely, bringing him into direct contact with Italians throughout Egypt. He
began touring the huge POW camps, organizing an antifascist network,
and recruiting agents to monitor the activities of the fascist diaspora. As a
journalist, Sereni was astonishingly prolific, reeling off some 20 articles per
month for the Corriere. However, Cudbert Thornhill and some other con-
servative SOE officers, most notably John de Salis (D/H.204; D/H.1107),
grew increasingly alarmed at the far-left orientation of the paper. The lan-
guage and tone of Sereni’s writing and that of his fellow editors was
becoming progressively more socialist, Marxist, and even openly revolu-
tionary. It was as if they had been emboldened by the entry of the Soviet
Union into the war on the side of the Allies. Ultimately, because of this
trend, Sereni was dismissed from the staff of the paper in November 1941,
and was then arrested by the Egyptian police on the ridiculous trumped-up
charge of having a dual identity, a fictitious name, and a forged passport—
all issued by SOE of course and essential cover for his secret work for them.
Eventually, after formal representations had been made on his behalf by the
Jewish Agency, Sereni was released from police custody. He returned home
to Givat Brenner, where he remained until he was recalled by SOE in the
early spring of 1942 and deployed to Iraq on a mission jointly mounted by
SOE and the branch of the Haganah called Mossad LeAliyah Bet
(Institution for Clandestine Immigration).^45
It was a shrewd move on the part of SOE to place one of their own, with
unbreakable Jewish cover, in a position where he could control or at least
heavily influence the recruitment, training, and movement of young Iraqi
Zionists, not just in Jewish interests but also in the interest of British policy
on Palestine. The details of Enzo Sereni’s cover show how cleverly embed-
ded he was as the chief representative of the Solel Boneh construction
company in Iraq, not just any Jewish organization but a ‘heterogeneous’
one under British control, whose employees wore British army uniform,
and whose contracts were exclusively with the British armed forces.^46
Indeed, some of Solel Boneh’s activities in Iraq involved the construction
of such classified projects as airfields and other secret security installations.
RESTORING THE PEACE