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by Fiona G. Holter, USAICoE Staff Historian
On November 15, 1945, the 400th Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) Detachment in Cairo inactivated after supporting counterintelligence (CI) missions in the Middle East. During its three years in the theater, the CIC became popular amongst U.S. personnel and Allied counterparts who were formerly unfamiliar with the CIC organization.
On November 12, 1942, the U.S. Army Forces in the Middle East (USAFIME) CIC Detachment, later designated the 400th CIC Detachment, opened a Middle Eastern headquarters near Cairo. While intelligence in the Middle East fell under the British CI organization known as Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME), evidence of enemy intelligence rings in Egypt and in other Middle Eastern nations necessitated the presence of American CI agents to subdue or eliminate enemy sabotage and subversive activities to protect American troops in the theater.
What began as a detachment of four officers and twenty-seven enlisted agents multiplied as the CI threat grew across the Middle East. By December, the CIC established its first field offices in Eritrea and the Levant region. Throughout 1943, the network of field offices continued to grow and, by 1945, the CIC had offices across the Middle East and Africa including in Teheran, Beirut, Tripoli, Aleppo, Damascus, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jaffa, Ahwaz, Isfahan, Mosul, Baghdad, Alexandria, Port Said, and the Suez. In addition to supporting the primary counterintelligence mission in the theater, CIC agents across the field office network were responsible for investigating cases of disaffection, black marketeering, and espionage.
CIC reports described espionage cases as plentiful. Despite Allied efforts to drive the Axis powers out of Africa and the Middle East, German and Italian agents continued to exploit vulnerabilities amongst the non-belligerent populations in the Middle East. While pro-fascist propaganda was relatively ineffective within the Jewish population, the Axis powers gained sympathizers from the Arab community where anti-American and anti-French sentiment already existed. The rise of sympathizers in the Levant states encouraged Axis intelligence agents as well as enemy spy and saboteur networks to increase their presence in the region.
While the CIC documented a few cases in which enemy spies made rather grand entrances arriving in the Middle East—to include parachuting or arriving in ports on submarines—many posed as Greek and Baltic refugees who fled Nazi occupation. In 1943, the CIC captured and interrogated two agents who unsuccessfully posed as refugees. George Livaditis and Constantinos Photinos were both German intelligence agents sent to the Middle East to infiltrate the Greek Army. Livaditis was to join the Greek military in Syria and then, after several months, he was to desert and cross the border into Turkey where he and Photinos would report to the German Consulate. The two spies were given a list of addresses in Greece and Turkey where they were to send reports written in secret ink and were told to listen to the Athens radio for messages addressed to “Jean-Jacques” or other code names.
However, their plans were thwarted when they were picked up by Allied authorities after landing in the Middle East. The CIC arrested Livaditis in Aleppo and, after interrogating him, turned him over to the French authorities. Photinos missed his landing in Syria and accidentally came ashore in Turkey where he was quickly arrested by a Turkish patrol and later interrogated by the CIC. Both agents were tried by the military tribunal and were executed in Beirut in September 1943.
After the war ended in Europe in May 1945, the 400th CIC’s work slowed across the Middle East and personnel were moved to other units. Finally, on November 15, 1945, the unit was inactivated.
| Date Taken: | 11.16.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 11.15.2022 09:57 |
| Story ID: | 433274 |
| Location: | FORT HUACHUCA, ARIZONA, US |
| Web Views: | 81 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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