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Fletcher, born Walter Fleischl, the son of a naturalised Austrian, was not the only SOE agent involved in this operation. But he was the pivotal figure, because Remorse had grown directly out of his earlier, disastrous attempt at economic warfare. Known by the code name of ‘Mickleham’, it was an attempt to deny essential rubber supplies to the Japanese by purchasing stocks at inflated prices (Fletcher had been in the rubber business before the war). It was a resounding flop, failing to secure a single pound of rubber. In one sense it was astonishing the British ever financed this first over-ambitious operation; it was even more remarkable that they gave him a second shot after such an abject failure. But Fletcher appeared to have enough charm and chutzpah enough to match his waist size.
The Big Man spent time in China between January and March 1943 while trying to make Mickleham viable and became excited by the opportunities the country presented for trading profitably in any valuable goods, including gems and quinine. When the disastrous Mickelham was finally wound up later that year, Fletcher began to lobby for his next project, to be let loose on China’s illicit black market. It says much for his force of personality that he even got a foot, let alone the rest of him, in the door.
His timing certainly helped. By late 1943 the Treasury was feeling the strain of having to finance China operations with dollars bought at the official rate, when the illegal option could generate four or five times more CNDs to the pound. It was the perfect opportunity for Fletcher’s masterstroke. As a sideline in Mickleham he had already speculated on the currency markets by buying Chinese dollars for Indian rupees with some success. Now he proposed acquiring black-market dollars for the British by trading in hard currency, waterproofed cotton, tungsten, medical supplies, rubies, pearls and South African diamonds. In that way, an unnecessary drain on the Treasury would be plugged, albeit by highly irregular methods. After examining the details of his proposal, he was given the OK by London to purchase the dollars through what was euphemistically described by SOE’s Finance Officer as ‘discrete banking and exchange transactions’. Closer to the truth was the original SOE description of Mickelham: ‘a covert project of the buccaneering type’.
Understandably sceptical after the failure of Mickleham (one senior SOE figure had already warned Fletcher was ‘more trouble than he is worth’), London sent another agent to keep an eye on things. Enter Edward Wharton-Tigar, spy, saboteur and the greatest cartophilist -- collector of cigarette cards – that the world has ever known.
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A mining executive in Yugoslavia before the war, Wharton-Tigar had ended up in Tangier, then an enclave of wartime intrigue and espionage. This supposedly mild-mannered minor bureaucrat pulled a number of memorable stunts in Tangier for the SOE, which had recruited him in Gibraltar while he was en-route home. One of them involved blowing up a cliff-top house which contained concealed German infrared equipment used for monitoring traffic through the Straits of Gibraltar. Another was distributing Nazi postage stamps, forged by the British, where Hitler’s head had been replaced by Himmler’s. The intention was to foment trouble between the two, and by all accounts it certainly generated some friction when the Führer, disbelieving Himmler’s protestations of innocence, believed the SS chief was getting above his station.
[start poss cut?] Wharton-Tigar also discovered that genuine high value British colonial stamps were much desired by collectors, especially in Switzerland, and that the profits could be used to buy small-denomination foreign currency from branches of banks of Nazi-held territories in Tangier. These highly useful notes were then shipped back to Britain and handed on to SOE agents about to parachute into the countries in question. [end poss cut]
And everywhere he went, he always took a selection of his precious cigarette cards. A collector since an early age, he would eventually amass three million examples, the finest collection on the planet.
In April 1944, Wharton-Tigar was recalled to London; there, SOE’s finance officer John Venner summoned him to a meeting. He later wrote: ‘It had occurred to Venner and others in the hierarchy that my currency experience in Tangier could be useful in a situation which had several marked similarities. I said I would be happy to help, whereupon Venner pressed a bell-button on his desk and the mountainous figure of Walter Fletcher came through the door.’ Along with Lionel Davis, a senior SOE officer in China, formerly with Dunlop, they would form the backbone of the new money-laundering scheme. Operation Remorse had begun.
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