Inappropriate Conduct: Mystery of a Disgraced War Correspondent

By Don North

I went in behind the lines and emerged as a kind of agent. I went in as a reporter and came out a kind of soldier. I sometimes wish I had never gone in at all.

-Paul Morton

War correspondents have long entered combat zones at great personal risk, determined to capture the conflict for those on the home front. But during World War II, Toronto Star journalist Paul Morton found himself not just reporting the war but fighting his own personal battle in a shocking turn of events that led to disastrous consequences for his career.

Morton volunteered in 1944 to parachute behind Nazi lines and report on the guerrilla war being waged by Italian partisans. But after he spent two months writing a series, the British Army changed its battle strategy and ordered stories on the partisans to cease. Mortons stories were spiked, and he was disacredited as a correspondent. Morton was subsequently fired by the Toronto Star after they unfairly claimed his reporting was fabricated.

Eye-opening and gripping, Inappropriate Conduct shares the dramatic true story of how Morton became the target of a ruthless campaign that shattered his journalistic integrity and his career. Journalist Don North captures Mortons experiences from the beginning, using Mortons previously unpublished memoir and archival sources to create a seamless, powerful narrative that speaks to the tenuous relationship between the truth and propaganda during war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475955408

Don North

Done North, journalist and director of Northstar Productions, Inc. in Fairfax, Virginia, Has a degree in advanced international reporting from Columbia University, New York. He writes regularly for Vietnam Magazine and Consortiumnews.com North is vice president of Military Reporters and Editors and a member of the National Press Club and National Association of Press Photographers.

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Copyright © 2013 by Don North.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-5274-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-5541-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-5540-8 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012919248

iUniverse rev. date: 01/03/2013

Contents

It was the worst nightmare for Paul Morton

to find his greatest story, on which he had risked his life,

was not believed by his editors.

INAPPROPRIATE CONDUCT

Photos, illustrations and documents

1. Paul Morton, reporter for the Toronto Daily Star in Italy 1944 in the uniform of a Canadian war correspondent. P-14

2. Portrait of Paul Morton with Italian partisans 1944 drawn by combat artist Capt. Geoffrey Long, Army of South Africa. P-26

3. Portrait of Capt. Geoffrey Long, war artist, Army of South Africa, drawn by Neville Lewis. P-31

4. Capt. Michael Lees, British Army SOE escort officer for Morton and Long. (UK National Archives) P-32

5. Sgt. Maurice La Rouche, turret gunner B-17, 15th U.S. Army Air Force. Drawn by Capt. Geoffrey Long 1944. P-44

6. Mario Donadei, alias Dona partisan leader and later historian of the Italian partisans (Photo Instituto Resistenza) P-52

7. AP war correspondent Joe Morton, captured and executed by Germans. (Photo AP) P-59

8. Ernest Hemingway, Passport photo 1923 as a reporter for the Toronto Daily Star P-60

9. Dieppe Raid. Aftermath of battle on Blue beach and Dieppe harbor. (Archives Canada) P-72

10. Halifax bomber,favored by SOE to drop agents behind enemy lines. (UK Archives) P-81

11. Partisans around a signal fire await a Halifax bomber’s approach to drop supplies. Wreck of 15th U.S. Army Air Force B-17 #42-97152, of turret gunner Maurice La Rouche. (Photo Instituto Resistenza) P-82

12. Author Don North looks into the past through the door of radio room at The Farm. (Photo Don North) P-95

13. The Farm as it was in 1944. SOE agents including Lees (in beret) Farrimond (behind Lees) September 1944. (Photo Instituto Resistenza) P-101

14. The Farm as it is today. Tin from drop containers still used to reinforce roofs. (Photo Don North) P-102

15. Memorial plaque tribute to Maj. Temple (Darewski), leader of SOE at The Farm. P-111

16. 1944 photo of Maj. Darewski with monarchist leader Maj. Mauri. (Photo Instituto Resistenza) P-111

17. Painting by Geoffrey Long of parachute drop at Dogliani. P-112

18. Three Garabaldini communist partisans who hijacked SOE supply drop. (Long) P-122

19. Capt. Lees forgives Garabaldini partisans for hijacking supply drop.(Long) P-131

20. Lees, Morton and Long drive to The Farm with escaped POW McClelland.(Long) P-137

21. Cpl. Bert Farrimond, wireless operator at SOE base The Farm.(Long) P-137

22. Partisans stealing boots and mortar shells from dead German soldier.(Long) P-155

23. Partisan monarchist leader Maj. Mauri. (Long) P-155

24. As German mortars fall on Pigna, English woman Vi Borfega runs to high ground with her baby, October 1944 (Long) P-164

25. B-17 Flying Fortress, similar to the one Sgt. Maurice La Rouche was turret gunner. (Photo U.S. Army) P-164

26. Italian Fiat G.55s Centaruo ready to scramble at the Venaria airport near Turin.

27. Operation Tombola.(from left) Hugh McGlade, escaped British POW, Peter Lizza, Italian-Canadian agent SOE, Angiolino Orlandi, partisan, Bert Farrimond, wireless operator, Capt. Michael Lees, SOE Liaison (Photo Instituto Resistenza) P-184

28. Major Roy Farran, British SAS, Co-commander Operation Tombola. (Photo SAS) P-204

29. Ball-turret gunner Sgt. Maurice La Rouche and Giancarlo Garello, who as ten year old boy saw the downing of La Rouche’s B-17, pictured at 1997 reunion of crew in Las Vegas. P-222

30. Author Don North with Giovanni Raineri and Giovanni Ugliengo, partisans who met Morton in 1944 pictured at Instituto Storico Della Resistenza, Cuneo. P-238

31. 15th U.S. Army Air Force orders March 29, 1944 for B-17 mission in which La Rouche took part. P-256

32. Morton asking leave for La Rouche to broadcast propaganda to partisans. P-257

33. Morton letter to La Rouche, 1959. P-258

34. Letter from British government confirming Morton’s mission with SOE. P-259

I went in behind enemy lines and emerged as a kind of agent. I went in as a reporter and came out a kind of soldier. I sometimes wish I had never gone in at all.

Paul Morton

From Missione Inside

He was a bit more complex than most of us, I’d guess. By times he could be able, elegant, difficult, personable, articulate, gay, ulcerous and improbable. And being all those things he got caught up in a bizarre episode of the war. At a crossroads in his life, the frailties of his past reached out and poisoned perhaps his best hour.

Douglas How, Editor, Readers Digest (Canada)

From The Cloud of Disbelief

I was dumb enough to believe that everybody else was motivated by a simple and straight forward desire to get on with the war. I learned about the perfidy of men and organizations the hard way.

Capt. Michael Lees, Number One Special Force

From Saboteur (unpublished memoir)

Barrie%20Dunsmore.jpg

Barrie Dunsmore was a foreign correspondent for ABC News from 1965-95.

Author of There and Back (Wind Ridge) he writes a column on foreign and national affairs for Vermont’s Rutland Herald.

Don North has spent much of his lifetime, reporting on the almost never-ending wars that have dominated the headlines of the past half century. From the Vietnam War in the 1960’s to the Afghanistan War still raging after more than a decade—and virtually all the conflicts in between—Don North was there. I am tempted to say that North is a war correspondent’s war correspondent. Not only did he cover these wars, but he was usually where the action was. No sitting around the bar of the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon where most of the scribes reporting on Vietnam hung out. No sipping dry martinis at the Hotel St. Georges in Beirut where many a war reporter gathered the news of the latest Middle East conflicts.

I’m not suggesting that he did not from time to time drop into such watering holes. But most of the time North was in the jungle—or the desert—risking his life to see for himself what was actually happening. But to call him a quintessential war correspondent would be a disservice. He was not merely an adrenaline junkie—although there has to be a little of that for all of those who go bouncing from war to war, North included. He was not solely seeking fame and fortune—although he might be grateful for a little of both. Rather, in most of his reporting North was always willing to go the extra mile, to brave the greater dangers, to suffer the worst hardships in the interests in getting the real story—not necessarily the one that drew the greatest headlines. North was constantly seeking the unique event that no one else had the courage and tenacity to go after, which would ultimately explain some greater truth about the conflict. In 1983 he spent two months in the jungles of El Salvador and came out with proof of a major massacre of civilians—by the government—that most of the American media ignored. I think it is fair to say that he was often engaged in a quixotic search, if you define Don Quixote as a romantic idealist, which is how I would describe my friend Don North.

In his new book, "Inappropriate Conduct—Mystery of a Disgraced War Correspondent" North has found the perfect vehicle to express his romantic idealism while reflecting on the cruelty of fate. Inappropriate Conduct is the true story of Paul Morton, a war correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star, based in Rome near the end of World War II. He is an appropriate protagonist for North. As we learn in the early pages, Morton was perfectly placed to cover the Liberation of Rome—the first Axis capital to fall after nearly six years of war. On any other day, this would have been a huge page one story. But Morton’s historic work was relegated to a couple of paragraphs on the back pages of his paper because Rome was liberated on June 6th, 1944—the same day of the Allied landings in Normandy. For a war correspondent, that is the kind of luck that can lead to a short career. But that kind of luck is something North understands. And in his hands, Morton’s story becomes not just a cautionary tale about how a brave man can be caught up in political forces far beyond his control, but a compelling one.

A few weeks after the Rome disappointment, Morton was approached by British Intelligence for what could be the story of a lifetime and certainly one of the most dangerous missions undertaken by any journalist during World War II. The basic plan was said to have the approval and encouragement of Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself. As it developed, Morton and a South African combat artist were to parachute behind Nazi lines in Northern Italy, to report on the guerrilla war being fought by Italian partisans against the German occupation. Morton did that and more—often actively joining the partisans in the fight as a matter of his own survival. When he surfaced, after two months, carrying his stories with him as he had not been able to file them while on the run from the Germans, the world had changed.

I don’t want to spoil things for the book’s readers so suffice to say that what had seemed like a great propaganda idea two months earlier, suddenly did not conform to a new British/Canadian view of the Italian partisans. And to say Morton was then treated shabbily by the military and his own employers would be a major understatement.

After hearing about Morton from a prominent Canadian journalist who had been in Italy during the war and known him quite well, North spent ten years researching the Morton story. And he has uncovered credible documentation from official British military archives which support Morton’s basic assertions. Twenty years after the war, Morton wrote his own eighty page report on his adventure which was published in Italy. In addition to combing archives in Ottawa, London and Rome, North also visited the region and found some very old Italian partisans who were certain they remembered Morton. In the book North uses Morton’s own account which he intersperses with his own detailed narrative. I am left in no doubt that between the two of them, we learn pretty much what actually happened.

Like many war stories, this one does not have a happy ending. But as is also true in stories about war, the enemy is not always the guy in your gun sights. War can bring out the best of humanity, but it can also bring out the worst. Cold, calculating duplicity on the part of your own side, is apparently not so rare as we might imagine.

Inappropriate Conduct is the story of what happened to Paul Morton—a small cog in a big wheel, during a very big war. North can sometimes be a romantic idealist. But perhaps the real value of this book is that it is actually an unromantic and unvarnished true story of what can happen in wartime to an evidently brave and decent man, who deserved much better than he received—not from the enemy—but from his own kind.

Barrie Dunsmore

Tim%20Knight.JPG

Tim Knight was a long time writer/producer for ABC TV News. He is the author of Story Telling and the Anima Factor and is currently media columnist for Huffington Post, Canada.

Don North is a damned fool.

Always has been.

Likely always will be.

He’s out of Vancouver, worked at CTV, Global and CBC here in Canada. And at ABC, CBS and NBC in New York. He’s a war correspondent, what’s known in the journalistic craft as a bang-bang man.

Today, Don hangs around Fairfax, Virginia, ostensibly finishing his book on Canadian journalist Paul Morton and being a good husband to the lovely Deanna.

But all the while he’s listening. For the muted drumbeat of the next and distant war. For the far off thunder of the guns. For the thunk-thunk-thunk of the copters and the noisy, gritty, urgent camaraderie of men in battle.

When he senses these sounds, he’ll paw the ground like an old warhorse, develop a sudden avid interest in newspaper, radio and TV news.

And after a couple of days he’ll casually mention to the lovely Deanna that he’s thinking he might take his camera, drop over there, just for a look. Maybe file a story or two back to the networks.

Don’t worry, he’ll tell her, I’m too old for that battle shit. So I’ll just hang around some safe hotel and work on backgrounders and forecasters. Nothing too strenuous. Nothing dangerous.

Don will be lying, of course.

Don, and war correspondents like Don, always want just one more battle. To go back where they belong. With all the other men and women who go to war, not to fight, but to report and reveal and enlighten and risk their lives and hang out in hotel bars and swap stories of past glories and disasters. And colleagues who died in the line of duty.

And smell napalm in the morning.

The lovely Deanna will know Don’s lying and smile sadly and remind him that he swore the previous war he covered would be his last.

But she’ll understand.

Because she knows Don—whatever else he’s doing, however old he gets—is always at heart a war correspondent. And all war correspondents, both by nature and choice, are damned fools who follow the bang-bang because they must, because they have no choice.

And Don North has covered more wars than most of us can name or remember.

Vietnam, Borneo, Cambodia, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Egypt, Israel, the Gulf, Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq.

So now he writes a book. Not about his own wars (although I’ve tried for years to get him to make a documentary out of all the war footage he keeps down in the basement—suggested title Bang-Bang Man).

No, Don’s book is about someone else’s war. About journalism betrayed, courage punished and all-round sheer, bloody-minded paranoia.

It’s called Inappropriate Conduct, Mystery of a Disgraced War Correspondent.

It’s the story of Canadian journalist Paul Morton in World War Two. North sets its theme in the very first words: War changes and often harms not only its combatants but also its eyewitnesses.

In 1944, Toronto Star correspondent Paul Morton parachuted behind enemy lines to report on Italian partisans fighting on the side of the Allies against both their own and German armies.

Morton’s first report, after two months with the partisans, was published in The Toronto Star on October 27, 1944. Then he filed eight more stories on his time behind enemy lines.

But favourable publicity for the partisans was the last thing Allied Command wanted at this stage in their war. They may have been brave guerilla fighters who helped the Allied cause, but many were also communists. And communists, to many of the Allies, were the new Nazis.

Harry Hindmarsh was The Star’s editor at the time. Presumably under pressure from the Allies, he spiked Morton’s eight remaining reports about the partisans. Adding deep insult to this injury, The Star held an investigation which found that Morton had not spent those two months with the partisans. He’d lied.

The word spread like a disease through the Toronto Press Club. Paul Morton of The Star had faked an assignment. His own editor said so. Morton’s journalistic career was finished. Years later he died, broken and bitter, in Toronto.

These many years later, North found papers in the Canadian military archives in Ottawa confirming, in great detail, Morton’s months with the partisans.

So he recently asked John Honderich, former publisher and editorial page editor of The Star, now chair of Torstar’s board of directors, to look into the Paul Morton affair:

"John, as a former Toronto Star publisher you may have some knowledge of this story or know where the bones are buried. I hope you might share my interest in righting a terrible injustice to one of our colleagues and at long last recognizing Paul Morton’s talent and courage in wartime reporting."

Honderich checked out Toronto Star files for any mention of Morton. He also inquired with the family of Harry Hindmarsh for letters or papers to explain the enigma of Paul Morton, but with no success."

All very complex and mysterious.

Now, everyone agrees Paul Morton was no saint. He sometimes drank too much. Covering wars certainly makes you thirsty. And he shot up the occasional military mess. Which war correspondent hasn’t dreamed of doing that?

But Paul Morton, according to North, was a fine and dedicated Canadian journalist who risked his life for a very important story—something only the bravest and most dedicated of our profession are ever called to do.

And when he got back from the assignment, he was betrayed by his own newspaper.

North tells Paul Morton’s story in gritty, believable, detail page after page. And tells it with passion and the sort of empathy that can only come from one courageous war correspondent reporting on another.

Don North deserves a best-seller.

If you want more, buy the damned book. It’s called Inappropriate Conduct.

P.S. Looks like another war is scheduled for the Middle East sometime soon.

Don North will likely sense the drumbeat before the rest of us. His eyes will narrow, nostrils flare. He’ll paw the ground like the old warhorse he is and pack his camera once again.

This is my last war, he’ll promise.

And the lovely Deanna will smile and shrug more in sorrow than denial and understand.

Again.

Tim Knight, Toronto

PREFACE

North     Telling the Truth about War

War changes and often harms not only its combatants but also its eyewitnesses. The war correspondents whose job it is to get as close as possible to war, report what they see, and survive to tell about it, have a unique job. Neither victims nor killers, they risk injury and death and often struggle against those who would censor their truth. It is a frustrating profession and one that can destroy its best and bravest.

This is a story of such a war correspondent who volunteered for one of the most dangerous assignments of the Second World War. Paul Morton was a reporter for the prominent Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Daily Star.¹ On a mission initiated by the British government, alleged to have Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s personal approval, Morton parachuted behind Nazi lines in Northern Italy to report on the guerrilla war being fought by Italian partisans against the German occupation. Morton not only reported on the partisans’ war, but in order to stay alive wound up fighting it as well, pursued by German Army units that dwarfed the Italian guerrilla bands. By the time Morton returned to Rome after two months, the British Army, which had urged him to take the assignment, refused to distribute his reports to the international press as they originally planned, apparently because of changes in war strategy.

The Toronto Daily Star spiked² his stories and his career was ruined. His editor fired him, declaring his stories were fraudulent and that he had never been behind the lines in Northern Italy. The Canadian Army cancelled his accreditation based on an incident in the bar of the officer’s mess before his mission, in which he fired a couple of rounds at the wall from a Colt .45.

Although the Toronto Daily Star published the first of Morton’s accounts from behind the lines, his other eight stories—approximately 8,000 words—were never published by the Toronto Daily Star or the Combined Allied Press as originally planned. No copies of the articles can now be located, and are lost to history. It remains a mystery why neither the Toronto Daily Star nor the British and Canadian armies did not publish Morton’s series and treated him in such a cavalier fashion. However, there are clues which will unfold in these chapters.

I have tried to discover the truth about Paul Morton for more than 10 years, ever since my friend Peter Stursberg, a war correspondent in Italy and a friend of Paul’s told me the story. In many ways I identify with Paul Morton, since I was born Canadian and am a lifelong journalist with a deep respect for soldiers, prone to drinking too much and often not very good at communicating with my bosses. Like Morton, I covered war close-up and to my regret on occasion, out of fear for my life, decided to go armed into a conflict zone. In 1983, I spent two months behind the lines with the leftist guerillas in El Salvador, escaping with my life and a story for Newsweek—only to have the U.S. Embassy there state that I was a liar for reporting a Salvadoran army massacre of civilians. I’ve spent most of the last 50 years not only thinking about, but experiencing the often rocky relationship of governments and armed forces with the press. So, yes, Paul Morton’s experience strongly resonates with me, and made me want to find out why he suffered such an ignominious fate.

Morton’s odyssey is an adventure with a cast of fascinating characters played out in the fall of 1944, when defeat of the German Army was still a year away. His story shows the best days of a man’s life destroyed by those he trusted, by historical forces beyond his control, and by the classic tragedy of his own failure to combat the enemy inside himself that left him helpless to battle the lies of colleagues.

Twenty years after his mission, Morton did get the opportunity to tell his story, although not to his own countrymen. Italian historians of the war located Morton in Toronto and urged him to write an account of his mission with the partisans. Morton did so, penning a compelling narrative with humor and a keen memory for detail. His memoir was translated and published in Italian in 1979 under the title Missione Inside: Fra I Parttigiani Del Nort Italia or Mission Inside: Behind Enemy Lines in North Italy. by L’Arciere Press. It is published here for the first time in English with the permission of Morton’s brother, John Morton of Toronto. Inappropriate Conduct is a duet with Morton’s memoir and my own reporting from interviews with those who knew him and by scouring archives of the Second World War in Italy, Britain and Canada.

At the British Archives in Kew, I located file HJS 9/1066/6, the British Army’s personnel file for Morton. It was sealed and exempt from the Freedom of Information Act until proof of death or the individual’s one hundredth birthday. I was able to send a letter written by Morton’s widow Marjorie that described his death in 1992 that satisfied the manager of records, and the file was opened. Often the unvarnished truth found in dusty, fading official letters and documents is at odds with later self-serving memoirs written as the memory is also fading. However, every fact I found in the archives agreed with Morton’s memoir.

I have emphasized the significance of Morton’s mission by adding relevant context. For example, Churchill’s own experiences as a cavalry officer and war correspondent help to explain his alleged enthusiasm for Morton’s mission.

To point out the danger of Morton’s mission, I have described the fate of another correspondent based in Italy at the same time, Joe Morton (no relation) who went into Slovakia with the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) but was captured by the Germans, taken to a concentration camp and executed.

Several other chapters document the complex political and military status of the Italian partisans through research into their history 60 years after Morton tried to report it. I relate the stories of two men Morton met and helped escape from Italy—Pte. William McClelland, an escaped British prisoner of war and Sgt. Maurice La Rouche, a gunner on an American B-17 shot down over Italy. Although Morton was not involved in Operation Tombolo, to attack a German Army headquarters, his British Army escort Capt. Michael Lees led the partisans in this remarkable operation that clearly exposed the lack of organization of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Italy.

The Toronto Daily Star, which employed Morton for 10 years, was expected to be a rich source of information on their reporter’s fate, dedicated as we presume they are to defending the truth and transparency in our society, as any respected newspaper should be. However, all letters or files from that period of the Toronto Daily Star have been reported lost or destroyed. It seems the attitude of the Toronto Daily Star to storing large archives of their own history is If you can’t sell it pitch it.

The title of my book Inappropriate Conduct, is, I think, appropriate. It is what the Canadian Army in Italy charged Paul Morton with and punished him by stripping his accreditation as a war correspondent. Morton was the only Canadian journalist in the Second World War to lose his credentials to cover the war.

It