Operation Autonomous was a clandestine operation carried out on the territory of Romania by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) set up by Winston Churchill for the duration of World War II to assist local Resistance movements. Although captured by the Romanian Gendarmerie soon after being dropped into the country, the mission proved vital in maintaining contact between the Western Allies and both the Antonescu government and the opposition led by Iuliu Maniu.
After the establishment of the SOE in July 1940, a Romania section was also formed. The role of this section was to sabotage oil shipments from Romania to Germany and to attempt to form a resistance movement by maintaining contacts with pro-British political actors such as Iuliu Maniu. The SOE representative until February 1941, when Romania severed its diplomatic relations with Britain, was Alfred Gardyne de Chastelain an engineer who previously worked for the Unirea Oil Company. After he left the country in the autumn of 1940, de Chastelain was assigned as head of SOE in Istanbul. [1] [2]
In February 1941, de Chastelain recruited Valeriu "Rică" Georgescu to organize intelligence-gathering activities in the country. The network set up by Georgescu, under the code name "Jockey", was also to function as a means through which Maniu was kept in contact with the Allies. Georgescu's network proved to be an invaluable asset, by managing to supply the British with the German plans to invade the USSR gathered from the German High Command in Bucharest in April 1941. In the summer of 1941, the network was discovered by the German Abwehr and its members were arrested. Although imprisoned at Malmaison, Georgescu was allowed to secretly maintain his contacts with the SOE by Eugen Cristescu, the head of the Romanian Secret Intelligence Service (SSI), who obtained permission from Marshal Ion Antonescu. [1] [3]
To ensure a better collaboration between Maniu and the Foreign Office, an SOE mission was dispatched to Romania in 1943 after approval was given by the Soviet Union. The team consisting of Captain Thomas Charles David Russell of the Scots Guards and radioman Nicolae Țurcanu was dropped into Yugoslavia on the night of 15/16 June and made its way to Romania with the help of the Serb Chetniks. Once they reached Romania, the two continued only with one Serbian-Romanian Chetnik and settled in a hut in the woods near Vârciorova. [4]
Under the code name "Reginald", Țurcanu operated the radio set from the house of Ion Pitulescu, a member of the National Peasants' Party in Vârciorova, while the latter went to Bucharest to make contact with Maniu. While Țurcanu was trying to establish radio transmission from Pitulescu's house, Russell was murdered under mysterious circumstances on the night of 4 September. The news of his death was relayed to the SOE by Țurcanu on 20 September. Eventually, "Reginald" reached Bucharest where the radio set was used from the house of a former SOE collaborator to maintain regular contact between Maniu and the British until 14 July 1944, when it was discovered by German radio geometry and Țurcanu was arrested. [4] After this event, the "Reginald" radio was used one more time on 26 August, when a request for an Allied air raid against the Germans in Otopeni and Băneasa was sent to Cairo by Georgescu and Țurcanu. [5] [6]
Although "Ranji" succeeded in delivering the radio equipment and operator through which contact was kept with Maniu and Georgescu, a second SOE mission to Romania was also in the works since the spring of 1943. Since direct British contact failed to be achieved in the previous attempt, the new mission, code-named "Autonomous", was put into motion. Led directly by Lieutenant Colonel de Chastelain, together with Ivor Porter, a former English lecturer at the University of Bucharest, and Captain Silviu Mețianu, a Romanian sabotage expert recruited by the SOE in London, preparations began in November 1943. [7]
The aim of the operation was primarily political:
On 22 November 1943, de Chastelain made his first attempt to jump into Romania alone. Flying in a Liberator bomber of an RAF squadron from Tocra in Libya, no signals were spotted in the drop zone so the aircraft had to turn back, managing to reach Brindisi in Italy due to fuel shortage. A second attempt with both de Chastelain and Porter happened on 5 December, resulting in a similar outcome. [7]
The third attempt happened in the night of 22 December 1943, and all three agents parachuted into thick fog and some distance away from the target. They hid in the woods near their landing location until daybreak when they set out to find the car that would take them to Bucharest. They were however captured by Romanian gendarmerie near the locality of Plosca, Teleorman County as their aircraft was discovered by radar on the night of the drop. Two German soldiers had previously tried to reach the party but were turned away by the local officials. [7] They were held as well-treated prisoners of war at the Gendarmerie headquarters in Bucharest under the care of General Constantin Tobescu, Major Constantin C. Roșescu and of Major Eugen Dobrogeanu. Churchill promptly sent a message to Marshal Ion Antonescu warning him that should the British prisoners fall into German hands he would be held personally responsible. The Romanian leader had been told that de Chastelain had information which in German hands could change the outcome of the war.
After reaching Bucharest, de Chastelain and Porter informed Antonescu of the British attitude towards Romania and also advised him through generals Tobescu and Vasiliu that he should send authorized envoys to negotiate armistice terms with the three Allies. The Conducător eventually sent Prince Barbu Știrbey to Cairo for this purpose. During their internment, the three SOE agents were interrogated several times by Romanian officials. The Germans also requested to interrogate the SOE mission, though they were only allowed to do so twice. [7]
While kept in custody in Bucharest, the Autonomous mission facilitated the contact between the British and both Antonescu and Maniu. On 19 March 1944, while Marshal Antonescu was called to Berlin following the German invasion of Hungary, Deputy Prime Minister Mihai Antonescu sent a message to the British asking what help the Allies could offer Romania. He soon received a response on 25 March from General Henry Maitland Wilson, the Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean Theatre, that Romania must cease all resistance to the Red Army, and Antonescu could rely on Allied air support. Likewise, Maniu sent a similar message on 20 March and received a similar reply from Maitland Wilson. [8]
Upon returning to Romania, Marshal Antonescu responded to Wilson's message that Romania could not surrender "without some serious guarantee of her future". Despite advising the Marshal to rephrase his message in a more practical tone, de Chastelain was requested to send the message as it was on the Autonomous radio set. The radio transmission was however delayed to a later date by the arrival of a German interrogation mission and by the time the radio set could be used again, it was discovered that the required crystals for the Cairo wavelength were missing from the Gendarmerie headquarters. [8]
On 13 April 1944, the armistice terms for Romania were received by de Chastelain via the "Reginald" radio set. These were forwarded to Antonescu but were strongly rejected. On the opposition side, Maniu instead sent Constantin Vișoianu together with Alexandru Racotta, Radu Hurmuzescu, and Max Auschnitt to Cairo on a mission to continue the peace negotiations. [8] On 22 August, de Chastelain was informed of the successful Soviet offensive and that Mihai Antonescu had decided to act independently of the Marshal, requesting to urgently fly together with de Chastelain to Cairo to negotiate the terms with the Allies. De Chastelain agreed, but not before he drafted several conditions: that he must contact Maniu first, re-establish radio contact with Cairo, and that an officer who could provide details on the German battle orders needed to accompany them. Before the British officer could hand over the conditions to Minister Antonescu on 23 August, the coup against the Antonescu government had started. [9]
On 23 August 1944, the young King Michael of Romania, at considerable personal risk, carried out his well-prepared coup d'état which took Hitler completely by surprise and so Romania entered the war against the Axis. The British prisoners were released and that evening the King arranged for de Chastelain to fly to Istanbul from where he could go to Cairo and London to report. Mețianu stayed on for a time and then returned to England. Porter remained to maintain a radio link with SOE Headquarters until the British mission arrived. He later worked at the Legation and in 1948 returned to London to the Foreign Office.
After the start of the Cold War, Soviet authorities alleged that de Chastelain was keeping contact with Maniu, the leader of the National Peasants' Party; the latter had opposed both Antonescu's regime and the Soviet occupation of Romania. During Maniu's trial for treason in 1947, the Minister of the Interior, Teohari Georgescu, was handed a report which indicated Maniu's alleged contacts with de Chastelain as proof that the politician was a British spy.
Reportedly, Cpt. Meţianu visited Romania at least once during the Cold War and visited major Roșescu at home.
In 1989, Porter's book Operation Autonomous: With SOE In Wartime Romania was published by Chatto and Windus. The translation of this book in Romanian was published by Humanitas in 1991.
In 2011, Porter attended the festivities of the Royal Jubilee, held in Bucharest, on the occasion of King Michael's 90th anniversary.
Ion Antonescu was a Romanian military officer and marshal who presided over two successive wartime dictatorships as Prime Minister and Conducător during most of World War II. Having been responsible for facilitating the Holocaust in Romania, he was tried for war crimes and executed in 1946.
The National Peasants' Party was an agrarian political party in the Kingdom of Romania. It was formed in 1926 through the fusion of the Romanian National Party (PNR), a conservative-regionalist group centred on Transylvania, and the Peasants' Party (PȚ), which had coalesced the left-leaning agrarian movement in the Old Kingdom and Bessarabia. The definitive PNR–PȚ merger came after a decade-long rapprochement, producing a credible contender to the dominant National Liberal Party (PNL). National Peasantists agreed on the concept of a "peasant state", which defended smallholding against state capitalism or state socialism, proposing voluntary cooperative farming as the basis for economic policy. Peasants were seen as the first defence of Romanian nationalism and of the country's monarchic regime, sometimes within a system of social corporatism. Regionally, the party expressed sympathy for Balkan federalism and rallied with the International Agrarian Bureau; internally, it championed administrative decentralization and respect for minority rights, as well as, briefly, republicanism. It remained factionalized on mainly ideological grounds, leading to a series of defections.
Iuliu Maniu was a Romanian lawyer and politician. He was a leader of the National Party of Transylvania and Banat before and after World War I, playing an important role in the Union of Transylvania with Romania.
Prince Barbu Alexandru Știrbey was 30th Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Romania in 1927.
Alfred George Gardyne de Chastelain, DSO, OBE (1906–1974) was a British-Canadian businessman, soldier, and secret agent, noted for his actions during World War II. He was the father of Canadian General John de Chastelain.
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The 1944 Romanian coup d'état, better known in Romanian historiography as the Act of 23 August, was a coup d'état led by King Michael I of Romania during World War II on 23 August 1944. With the support of several political parties, the king removed the government of Ion Antonescu, which had aligned Romania with Nazi Germany, after the Axis front in northeastern Romania collapsed in the face of a successful Soviet offensive. The Romanian Army declared a unilateral ceasefire with the Soviet Red Army on the Moldavian front, an event viewed as decisive in the Allied advances against the Axis powers in the European theatre of World War II. The coup was supported by the Romanian Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party, the National Liberal Party, and the National Peasants' Party who had coalesced into the National Democratic Bloc in June 1944.
Eugen Cristescu was the second head of the Kingdom of Romania's domestic espionage agency, the Secret Intelligence Service (SSI), forerunner of today's SRI, convicted in 1946 as a war criminal. He previously served as head of Siguranța Statului, the secret police.
Constantin Vișoianu was a Romanian jurist, diplomat, and politician, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs at the end of World War II. He later emigrated to the United States, where he served as President of the Romanian National Committee.
Radu D. Lecca was a Romanian spy, journalist, civil servant and convicted war criminal. A World War I veteran who served a prison term for espionage in France during the early 1930s, he was a noted supporter of antisemitic concepts and, after 1933, an agent of influence for Nazi Germany. While becoming a double agent for Romania's Special Intelligence Service (SSI), Lecca was involved in fascist politics, gained in importance during World War II and the successive dictatorships, and eventually grew close to Conducător Ion Antonescu.
Eugen Dobrogeanu was a Romanian officer, the first bibliographer of the Romanian criminology and active participant in Operation Autonomous.
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Guttman Shmuel Landau was a leader of the Bessarabian Jewish community, active in the Moldavian Democratic Republic and Romania. His social work was tied to the city of Chișinău, where he was also a civil servant and merchant. A member of the Moldavian Republic's legislature in 1918, he returned to prominence during World War II, designated by the antisemitic regime of Ion Antonescu as President of the Chișinău Judenrat, effectively answering for the Chișinău Ghetto. He was unable to prevent his constituents' deportation and indiscriminate killing in Transnistria Governorate, but was spared their fate until May 20, 1942. He committed suicide the following day; his wife attempted the same, but was rescued and survived the war.
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