RIP Ivor Porter - SOE Romania

Discussion in 'SOE & OSS' started by Jedburgh22, Jun 19, 2012.

  1. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    Ivor Porter
    Ivor Porter, who has died aged 98, was a member of a three-man SOE team parachuted into Romania to link up with opponents of the country’s pro-Nazi dictator Ion Antonescu; immediately captured, the team instead became a conduit for back-channel communications between Antonescu’s regime and the British as Romania was caught in a vice between the Nazis and approaching Soviet forces.

    Image 1 of 2
    Ivor Porter in 1945
    6:31PM BST 19 Jun 2012
    Porter, along with Alfred Gardyne de Chastelain and a Romanian sabotage expert, Silviu Metianu, had been parachuted into southern Romania, just north of the Danube, in the early hours of December 22 1943. After landing 10 miles from the drop zone, and with a thick mist covering the ground, the three had to blow whistles to find each other. Their orders were to find opposition leader Iuliu Maniu, disrupt German communications, and prepare for the post-Nazi future of the country.
    Operation Autonomous, as it was known, had twice been aborted after the aircraft carrying the SOE team failed to find the drop zone. Once the team was on the ground things went no better. The men hid until daybreak then set out to find a car which should have been waiting for them. De Chastelain asked a peasant woman for directions but they were seen by gendarmes and shots were fired over their heads.
    Arrested, the three were escorted to Plosca, a village 100km to the south-west of Bucharest where, instead of harsh treatment, they were welcomed by local officials and given a hearty meal. From there they were driven to Turnu-Magurele and then on to police headquarters in Bucharest.
    They were to remain there for the next nine months until freed on the day of a coup – led by Romania’s King Michael – which successfully deposed Antonescu. In that time, however, Porter and de Chastelain were treated not as foreign irregulars, or spies. Instead, they were ordered to use their radio transmitter to establish contact with British headquarters in Cairo.
    These secret negotiations came at a time when Antonescu’s regime was aware that the Reich was crumbling and was desperate to avoid a Soviet takeover. To prevent this the Romanian leadership wanted Britain and America to establish a substantial military presence in Bucharest, perhaps parachuting in 2,000 men. To ensure the success of these “talks” with the British, the Romanians had to shield their “prisoners” from the attention of the Nazis, whose direction-finding equipment had alerted them to the presence of the aircraft that had dropped the SOE team.
    Berlin requested on several occasions that de Chastelain be handed over, but on each occasion Antonescu refused. When two German officers were allowed to question the group, it was only under Romanian supervision. Meanwhile senior Romanian officials, including General CZ Vasiliu, deputy minister of the interior, and Eugen Cristescu, head of the secret service, interrogated the group independently.
    In his account of the mission, Operation Autonomous (1989), Porter revealed that, befitting their importance to the Romanians, the team was treated well and taken for occasional drives. De Chastelain was even allowed to undergo dental treatment in Bucharest.
    Communications with Cairo were sabotaged on March 29 1944, when the crystals of the SOE transmitter were found to be missing. As it turned out, the fate of Romania had been settled before the men had even parachuted in to the country. At the Tehran Conference of early December 1943 the Allies had largely agreed that Eastern Europe would become a Soviet sphere of influence after the conflict was over.
    This plan was briefly challenged by King Michael’s coup, which established a government keen to negotiate a post-war settlement with Moscow, rather than have one dictated to it.
    As Germany sought to crush the coup, some Romanian units in the German line mutinied or deserted. With the situation highly confused, Porter and two other Romanian SOE operatives, Nicolae Turcanu and Rica Georgescu, restored wireless communications with Cairo from the vault of the National Bank on one of the transmitters held by the king.
    Dreams of an independent future for Romania were quickly snuffed out. An armistice was signed in Moscow on September 12 1944 on terms largely set out by Stalin. Later that month a British Military Mission was established to monitor its application. Porter joined the mission to head its press office and remained in this position until he was transferred to the British Legation in May 1946 as second secretary. For his service with SOE he was appointed OBE.
    Ivor Forsyth Porter was born in the Lake District on November 12 1913, the son of Herbert and Evelyn Porter, and attended Barrow-in-Furness Grammar School and Leeds University, where he studied English.
    He followed his passion for literature to Romania where, as the shadows of war spread across the Continent in the late 1930s, he taught English at the University of Bucharest. Among his colleagues there was Reggie Smith, husband of Olivia Manning and model for the character Guy Pringle in her celebrated sequence of books about the war which were collected as The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy.
    In 1940 Porter became temporary secretary at the British Legation until, along with its other members of staff, he left the country in February 1941.
    Back in Bucharest with the British Mission in autumn 1944, Porter witnessed the swift imposition of communist rule. Contact with the West became a sin for which the leaders of the established democratic parties could be charged, tried, and removed from the political stage. Such was the fate of Iuliu Maniu, then head of the National Peasant Party.
    Porter tried to persuade some of the Romanian personnel of the press office to leave the country and arranged clandestine passage for them, but they refused the offer. Annie Samuelli, Porter’s assistant; Costica Mugur, a cashier; Eleonore Bunea de Wied, Mugur’s assistant (and a cousin of King Michael); Maria Golescu, a librarian; Angela Radulescu, a clerk; and two translators were subsequently arrested in autumn 1949. De Wied died in prison while Samuelli, Golescu and Mugur spent 13 years in jail.
    Porter, meanwhile, left Romania at the end of 1947 and went on to serve with the Foreign Office in Washington, and then with the British delegation to Nato in Paris. He was then deputy head of the British mission in Cyprus, and from 1962 to 1965 he was Britain’s Permanent Representative to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. From 1967 to 1971 he was accredited to the disarmament conference in Geneva and between 1971 and 1974 he served in Senegal, Mali, Guinea, and Mauritania. Although an extremely private person, he showed great warmth towards his friends, and affection for the countries and peoples to which he was posted.
    Above all, he retained a particular interest in Romania and the fate of its monarch. His sympathy for King Michael, who was forced by the communists to abdicate in December 1947, was translated into a biography (Michael of Romania, 2005), which was the first to draw upon the king’s private papers and captured the melancholy of the monarch’s more than 40 years in exile.
    Ivor Porter was appointed CMG in 1963, and was awarded the Cross of the Royal House of Romania in 2008.
    He married, first, in 1951, Anne Speares. The marriage was dissolved in 1961 and he is survived by his second wife Katerina, daughter of AT Cholerton, Moscow correspondent of The Daily Telegraph from the late 1920s until 1943, and their son and daughter.
    Ivor Porter, born November 12 1913, died May 29 2012

    Ivor Porter - Telegraph
     
  2. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    Ivor Porter - Diplomat who took part in a secret wartime mission to occupied Romania and became a confidant and biographer of King Michael
    --------------------------------------------------
    Times, The (London, England)-June 12, 2012

    Friends and former colleagues of Ivor Porter remember him as a quietly unassuming member of the British Foreign Service who ended his career as ambassador to a handful of West African states and as the gently effective director of a section of the Foreign Office's research department.

    But there was nothing unassuming about Porter's activities with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in wartime and early-postwar Romania, which he recalled in his 1989 memoir, Operation Autonomous, and in his biography of King Michael of Romania, published in 2005 when the king was in his 84th year and Porter himself well into his nineties.

    Ivor Forsyth Porter was born in 1913 and educated at Barrow Grammar School and at Leeds University, where he earned his PhD. When war broke out in 1939 he was employed as a lecturer at Bucharest University, a member of a little group of expatriates which was later so memorably characterised in Olivia Manning's novels The Balkan Trilogy.

    Until 1941 Romania, like Hungary and Bulgaria, succeeded in avoiding German occupation but felt threatened after what befell Poland and much of western Europe in 1939-40. Britain was concerned lest the Ploesti oilfields fell into German hands and, in anticipation of this, SOE had established contact with the leader of the Romanian National Peasant Party, Luliu Maniu. Known for his integrity, Maniu had half promised that if Germany occupied the country he would ensure that the oilfields or their rail links would be sabotaged.

    SOE lost contact with Maniu shortly after the fascist regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu allied itself with Germany in August 1941, although a message from Maniu received through intelligence channels that December kept interest alive. An attempt to re-establish contact in early 1943 failed when the SOE officer infiltrated from Serbia was murdered.

    Porter was part of an SOE threeman team, led by Colonel Gardyne de Chastelain, parachuted into the country in December 1943. They landed 14 kilometres from the intended dropping zone; they were without guides and were captured the next day. The following eight months were spent in custody - fortunately Romanian rather than German - and by sheer force of personality de Chastelain was able to assume the role of peace negotiator on behalf of the Allies.

    The Romanians kept the SOE party to themselves until the Red Army broke through on the Moldavian front in August 1944, when de Chastelain was flown as an emissary to Cairo. Porter was released and he was appointed OBE for his services with SOE that same year.

    He stayed on in Soviet-dominated Romania for a time after the war and became a close observer of King Michael's brave but doomed attempts to resist the advance of communism, but there could be no long-term future for him in Bucharest. In 1946 he became a regular member of the Foreign Service and in 1951, by which time Romania had passed firmly beyond the Iron Curtain, he was posted to Washington, the first in a series of diplomatic appointments that had nothing to do with Romania or indeed with communist southeastern Europe.

    Porter steadily climbed the Foreign Service tree with jobs in Cyprus and India, and with the delegation to Nato (in those years before de Gaulle's return to power based in Paris rather than Brussels) and as leader of the delegation to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, where he was appointed CMG.

    By the early 1970s Porter, now in his late fifties, was more than due an ambassadorial appointment. He was given four at once, as Ambassador concurrently to Senegal, Mali, Guinea and Mauritania. He stayed in Dakar for two years, travelling as widely as he could throughout the huge area to which he was accredited. At 60 he retired and took post-retirement employment as the director for the Atlantic region of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's Research Department.

    But even in the worst years of the Cold War Porter never lost his interest in Romania and his contacts with Romanians in exile. In particular he kept in close touch with King Michael and with other members of the royal family. He was awarded the Cross of the Royal House of Romania and in 2008 he was appointed a Commander of the Order of Cultural Merit of Romania In 1972, while still in West Africa, he published his memories of his work with SOE in wartime Romania, Operation Autonomous, a classic description of unorthodox activity in dark corners of wartime eastern Europe. And more than 30 years later, in 2005, he brought out his biography of his old friend, Michael of Romania: The King and the Country.

    A book on this scale would have been an achievement for an author of any age. For a man of 92 it was truly remarkable. Porter drew on his own knowledge of man, country and people and on the fruits of repeated interviews with the king in exile. He wrote it at a time when the king should at last have been at peace with his countrymen, for by the turn of the century Romania had been free of formal communist rule for ten years. But unlike the king of Bulgaria, Michael was not welcomed back into Romanian politics. So at the heart of Porter's book, as of his own life, lay events in Romania more than half a century earlier, when Romania first threw in its lot with Nazi Germany; when, under King Michael, it changed sides; and when it found its "liberator", the Soviet Union, installing in Bucharest a communist dictatorship as oppressive as anything it had experienced in its fascist years.

    In 1951 Porter married Ann Speares. The marriage was dissolved ten years later, when he married Katerina Cholerton.

    They had a son and a daughter.

    Ivor Porter, CMG, OBE, diplomat and SOE veteran, was born on November 12, 1913. He died on May 29, 2012, aged 98

    Ivor Porter Throughout the Cold War he kept in close touch with King Michael and his family

    MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE / TIME LIFE PICTURES / GETTY IMAGES

    The wartime supply of oil to Germany from the refinery at Ploesti, above and below, was a key factor behind Porter's 1943 SOE mission into occupied Romania

    FOX PHOTOS / HULTON ARCHIVE / GETTY IMAGES
    Edition: 01 - eireSection: FeaturesPage: 48
    Record Number: 60830007(c) Times Newspapers Limited 2012

    Ivor Porter - Diplomat who took part in a secret wartime mission to occupied Romania and became a confidant and biographer of King Michael
     
  3. Recce_Mitch

    Recce_Mitch Very Senior Member

    :poppy: Ivor Porter. RIP :poppy:

    Paul
     
  4. Smudger Jnr

    Smudger Jnr Our Man in Berlin

    :poppy: Ivor Porter. R.I.P. :poppy:

    Tom
     
  5. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    ==================================================
    Ivor Porter -
    Obituaries

    Diplomat and SOE operative who worked to liberate Romania from Nazi Germany
    --------------------------------------------------
    Independent, The (London, England)-July 9, 2012
    Author: Bernard Adams

    Ivor Porter, the handsome, courteous and kindly diplomat who retired from the Foreign Office in 1973 after a distinguished career, had a remarkable story to tell about his wartime activities as an SOE agent in Romania. He told it in Operation Autonomous (1989) and then went on to write a fine biography of Michael of Romania (2005), who Porter was with on the night in August 1944 when the King launched his daring coup against the German occupiers.

    Ivor Porter was born in 1913 at Barrow-in-Furness, which he described as "a clean, well-planned shipbuilding town on the edge of the Lake District". His father Herbert was h"a frustrated poet"; his mother, Evelyn, often chided him for having "his head in the clouds". Ivor's boyhood sounds happy - croquet, tennis and walking in the Lake District. He went to Leeds University, where he got a BA and a PhD, then became a freelance teacher and found a steady job lecturing for the British Council in Bucharest.

    He arrived in Romania in March 1939. He describes his arrival in Bucharest vividly: "The Gara de Nord was even livelier than the Gare du Nord [which he had passed through on his way] - the crowd more Latin ... the men blue-chinned, the women a mite frilly, the peasants dressed like peasants, the one Englishman on the platform dressed like an Englishman. This was, undoubtedly, Professor Burbank, his small glance swinging anxiously from one second-class sleeping compartment to the next, wondering what kind of an assistant they had sent him." (From Operation Autonomous.)

    Porter took to lively, prosperous Bucharest, which had the exotic air of an oriental Paris. He noted the Hispano Suizas speeding along the highway - and how the luxury cars had to swerve to avoid ox-carts or gypsies cooking.

    He found the political situation intriguing, with the wily, autocratic King Carol virtually exiling his queen in favour of a red-haired mistress, Madame Lupescu. As the power of the Third Reich increased Romanians had-emptive plans for destroying the oilfields which supplied much of Germany's oil. In summer 1940 the expected blow fell: Romania came under German control. King Carol abdicated in favour of his son Michael and the Romanians were left to contemplate a future caught between two disliked enemies, Russia and Germany. Porter transferred from the British Council to the British Legation in Bucharest; he had done some useful vacation spying in Transylvania and had been helping with cyphering at the Legation.

    In early 1941 he flew to Cairo for training. He thought he could be of some use to the Special Operations Executive in Romania. He was brave to volunteer because an attack of polio in 1941 had undermined his health (for the rest of his life he had difficulty in swallowing). But he submitted to tough training in Cairo - falling off lorries at 40mph and making parachute jumps from towers, which he found terrifying because of his vertigo. Strangely he found the real thing - from aeroplanes - much easier.

    Over the next two years a mission was planned to encourage the Romanians to grab their country back and surrender to the Russians, by now Britain's allies. In December 1943 Porter and two others, a Romanian and a British oilman, Alfred Gardyne de Chastelain, boarded a Liberator in North Africa to be dropped back into Romania. The pilot was over-confident; it was misty and the pre-arranged signals from the ground were invisible. None the less they were dropped - each with a revolver, some sandwiches, civilian clothes and the password (in Romanian) of "I'm looking for Stefan". Two landed in a ploughed field, the other in a tree. They were soon spotted by peasants who had been offered a reward for reporting strangers. Within a day they had been captured by local gendarmes and civilians.

    Tt was clear their captors feared that their mission was to sabotage the oil wells. They spent Christmas in prison but the Romanians treated them well; food was brought in from a local restaurant and they had a bottle of wine a day. Also the threat of Gestapo interrogation was staved off. Porter wrote verse, worked on his Romanian and played bridge. He tried to send information through postcards, but friends failed to pick up his code. Allied bombing raids on Bucharest began in spring 1944 and conditions worsened in their prison. Porter recorded killing 46 bed-bugs in one night.

    After six months their thoughts began to turn to escaping but, suddenly, on 27 August, they were freed. King Michael had engineered a coup and announced that his country was withdrawing from its Axis alliance. In the euphoria of their release Porter and his fellow-spies were lifted shoulder-high and carried to the Royal Palace.

    He set to work sending reports back to Cairo. The coup had worked very well - after August 1944 no more oil was exported to the Third Reich. It was an exciting time: "I worked hard and often late, stayed up even later talking, eating, drinking, taking part - as we all were - in a period of change." He was awarded a military OBE and promoted to the rank of major.

    Porter and many others were now working towards the restoration of a free, democratic Romania but found they were getting little thanks for their efforts from Churchill. He had secretly agreed with Stalin to virtually give Romania to Russia in return for Stalin's non-intervention in Greece.

    Romania resisted full-blown communist dictatorship for as long as possible, but King Michael saw the writing on the wall and abdicated on 30 December 1947. Porter left the Legation in 1948. In 1951 he went to Washington, then joined the UK delegation to Nato Paris as Head of Chancery. After that he worked in Cyprus, Strasbourg and India, then back in Europe as Ambassador to the Geneva Disarmament Conference between 1968 and 1971. His last Foreign Office post was Ambassador to Senegal, Guinea, Mali and Mauretania.

    Porter and his second wife Katerina owned two charming houses on either side of the Rhone valley. There, Katerina exercised a late-flowering talent for sculpture while Ivor worked with persistence, even in his nineties, on his books. They are fascinating personal stories but also meticulously researched history. In 2008 he was awarded the Cross of the Royal House of Romania, a reflection of his love for the country and its people.

    Ivor Forsyth Porter, diplomat and author: born Barrow-in-Furness 12 November 1913; married 1961 Ann Speares (divorced 1961), 1961 Katerina Cholerton (one son, one daughter); died 29 May 2012.
    Edition: 1STSection: ObituariesPage: 42,43
    Index Terms: NewsRecord Number: INMLMMGLSTRY000018081707-ARTICLE-TEXT-1Copyright 2012 Newspaper Publishing plc

    Ivor Porter - Obituaries Diplomat and SOE operative who worked to liberate Romania from Nazi Germany
     
  6. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    ==================================================
    Ivor Porter -
    Obituaries

    Diplomat and SOE operative who worked to liberate Romania from Nazi Germany
    --------------------------------------------------
    Independent, The (London, England)-July 9, 2012
    Author: Bernard Adams

    Ivor Porter, the handsome, courteous and kindly diplomat who retired from the Foreign Office in 1973 after a distinguished career, had a remarkable story to tell about his wartime activities as an SOE agent in Romania. He told it in Operation Autonomous (1989) and then went on to write a fine biography of Michael of Romania (2005), who Porter was with on the night in August 1944 when the King launched his daring coup against the German occupiers.

    Ivor Porter was born in 1913 at Barrow-in-Furness, which he described as "a clean, well-planned shipbuilding town on the edge of the Lake District". His father Herbert was h"a frustrated poet"; his mother, Evelyn, often chided him for having "his head in the clouds". Ivor's boyhood sounds happy - croquet, tennis and walking in the Lake District. He went to Leeds University, where he got a BA and a PhD, then became a freelance teacher and found a steady job lecturing for the British Council in Bucharest.

    He arrived in Romania in March 1939. He describes his arrival in Bucharest vividly: "The Gara de Nord was even livelier than the Gare du Nord [which he had passed through on his way] - the crowd more Latin ... the men blue-chinned, the women a mite frilly, the peasants dressed like peasants, the one Englishman on the platform dressed like an Englishman. This was, undoubtedly, Professor Burbank, his small glance swinging anxiously from one second-class sleeping compartment to the next, wondering what kind of an assistant they had sent him." (From Operation Autonomous.)

    Porter took to lively, prosperous Bucharest, which had the exotic air of an oriental Paris. He noted the Hispano Suizas speeding along the highway - and how the luxury cars had to swerve to avoid ox-carts or gypsies cooking.

    He found the political situation intriguing, with the wily, autocratic King Carol virtually exiling his queen in favour of a red-haired mistress, Madame Lupescu. As the power of the Third Reich increased Romanians had-emptive plans for destroying the oilfields which supplied much of Germany's oil. In summer 1940 the expected blow fell: Romania came under German control. King Carol abdicated in favour of his son Michael and the Romanians were left to contemplate a future caught between two disliked enemies, Russia and Germany. Porter transferred from the British Council to the British Legation in Bucharest; he had done some useful vacation spying in Transylvania and had been helping with cyphering at the Legation.

    In early 1941 he flew to Cairo for training. He thought he could be of some use to the Special Operations Executive in Romania. He was brave to volunteer because an attack of polio in 1941 had undermined his health (for the rest of his life he had difficulty in swallowing). But he submitted to tough training in Cairo - falling off lorries at 40mph and making parachute jumps from towers, which he found terrifying because of his vertigo. Strangely he found the real thing - from aeroplanes - much easier.

    Over the next two years a mission was planned to encourage the Romanians to grab their country back and surrender to the Russians, by now Britain's allies. In December 1943 Porter and two others, a Romanian and a British oilman, Alfred Gardyne de Chastelain, boarded a Liberator in North Africa to be dropped back into Romania. The pilot was over-confident; it was misty and the pre-arranged signals from the ground were invisible. None the less they were dropped - each with a revolver, some sandwiches, civilian clothes and the password (in Romanian) of "I'm looking for Stefan". Two landed in a ploughed field, the other in a tree. They were soon spotted by peasants who had been offered a reward for reporting strangers. Within a day they had been captured by local gendarmes and civilians.

    Tt was clear their captors feared that their mission was to sabotage the oil wells. They spent Christmas in prison but the Romanians treated them well; food was brought in from a local restaurant and they had a bottle of wine a day. Also the threat of Gestapo interrogation was staved off. Porter wrote verse, worked on his Romanian and played bridge. He tried to send information through postcards, but friends failed to pick up his code. Allied bombing raids on Bucharest began in spring 1944 and conditions worsened in their prison. Porter recorded killing 46 bed-bugs in one night.

    After six months their thoughts began to turn to escaping but, suddenly, on 27 August, they were freed. King Michael had engineered a coup and announced that his country was withdrawing from its Axis alliance. In the euphoria of their release Porter and his fellow-spies were lifted shoulder-high and carried to the Royal Palace.

    He set to work sending reports back to Cairo. The coup had worked very well - after August 1944 no more oil was exported to the Third Reich. It was an exciting time: "I worked hard and often late, stayed up even later talking, eating, drinking, taking part - as we all were - in a period of change." He was awarded a military OBE and promoted to the rank of major.

    Porter and many others were now working towards the restoration of a free, democratic Romania but found they were getting little thanks for their efforts from Churchill. He had secretly agreed with Stalin to virtually give Romania to Russia in return for Stalin's non-intervention in Greece.

    Romania resisted full-blown communist dictatorship for as long as possible, but King Michael saw the writing on the wall and abdicated on 30 December 1947. Porter left the Legation in 1948. In 1951 he went to Washington, then joined the UK delegation to Nato Paris as Head of Chancery. After that he worked in Cyprus, Strasbourg and India, then back in Europe as Ambassador to the Geneva Disarmament Conference between 1968 and 1971. His last Foreign Office post was Ambassador to Senegal, Guinea, Mali and Mauretania.

    Porter and his second wife Katerina owned two charming houses on either side of the Rhone valley. There, Katerina exercised a late-flowering talent for sculpture while Ivor worked with persistence, even in his nineties, on his books. They are fascinating personal stories but also meticulously researched history. In 2008 he was awarded the Cross of the Royal House of Romania, a reflection of his love for the country and its people.

    Ivor Forsyth Porter, diplomat and author: born Barrow-in-Furness 12 November 1913; married 1961 Ann Speares (divorced 1961), 1961 Katerina Cholerton (one son, one daughter); died 29 May 2012.
    Edition: 1STSection: ObituariesPage: 42,43
    Index Terms: NewsRecord Number: INMLMMGLSTRY000018081707-ARTICLE-TEXT-1Copyright 2012 Newspaper Publishing plc

    http://docs.newsbank.com/s/InfoWeb/aggdocs/UKNB/13FEA596DE115F58/0F8BFF68D3921800?p_multi=TND1&s_lang=en-US
     

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