Clarc Korab Betrayed Two Regimes Before British Internment

By Vera Kessler · August 9, 2026

After helping the British with Operation TORCH, the Polish pilot was branded with complete personal unreliability and locked in a specialized camp where he eventually fell silent.

The catalogue entry for file KV 2/1438 in the UK National Archives introduces a man known by the alias Clarc Korab. According to the record, Korab was a Polish pilot shot down by the Germans in 1939. He did not spend the subsequent years in a prisoner-of-war camp. Instead, he navigated a precarious path through Spain, where he volunteered to spy for the Germans in England.

By July 1941, the file's catalogue entry records that Korab was shipped from Portugal to the United Kingdom. But upon his arrival, the Polish pilot made another offer. He volunteered his services to the British. In the world of wartime intelligence, a man who offers himself to both sides is either a master of the game or a liability waiting to happen. For Korab, the latter proved true.

Spain, Portugal, and the July 1941 Arrival

Korab’s trajectory suggests a man attempting to survive the collapse of Europe by selling the only currency he had: access. The journey from a crashed plane in 1939 to a secret shipment from Portugal in 1941 implies a period of vetting and maneuvering through the neutral zones of the era. The Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, saw a Polish pilot as a useful tool for infiltration. The British, upon his arrival, likely saw a potential source of German intelligence.

This kind of duality is the bedrock of the double-cross system, where the state manages agents who are, by definition, betrayers. The record does not detail the specific conversations Korab had with his handlers in Lisbon or London, but it notes the outcome. The state's patience for a double agent is typically measured by their utility. When that utility vanishes, the agent ceases to be a partner and becomes a problem.

"Complete Personal Unreliability"

In the sterile language of the Security Service, Korab’s failure is summarized in a single, devastating phrase: "complete personal unreliability." This is the kind of phrasing that appears in government files when a human being no longer fits the required mold. It is a judgment that strips away the nuance of a pilot’s desperation or the psychological toll of playing two totalitarian regimes against one another.

This unreliability led to Korab's internment at Camp 020R. For those unfamiliar with the geography of the British double-cross system, Camp 020R was not a standard prisoner-of-war facility; it was a specialized site for the holding and interrogation of agents. Once Korab was moved there, he transitioned from an asset to a captive. The catalogue entry notes that after January 1943, he refused to co-operate entirely.

It is worth noting that other archives hold further papers on this subject. The UK National Archives lists selected papers from the 'CARELESS' case—Korab's codename—under references KV 2/1439 and KV 2/1444. These files remain outside this specific summary, leaving a gap in the record regarding what exactly constituted his "unreliability" and how the British handled his eventual silence.

Operation TORCH and the Intelligence Weapon

Despite his eventual descent into unreliability, the state still managed to extract value from Korab. The catalogue entry records that his Abwehr questionnaires provided "useful information" and that he participated in deception for Operation TORCH, the Allied invasion of French North Africa in November 1942.

Korab was a small piece of a much larger mechanism. Related files in the KV series illustrate the scale of this effort. File KV 3/116 describes the Abwehr's use of deception as an "intelligence weapon," based on interrogation reports and captured documents. Another record, KV 3/119, points to Walter Schellenberg, head of the SD, who created a department specifically to coordinate intelligence-based deception.

While Korab was being managed or interned, the British were refining their own methods. Files KV 4/430 and KV 4/429 detail policies for deception that went beyond the use of "turned" double agents, focusing instead on the spreading of false information through alternative channels. The success of these strategies is highlighted in file KV 4/247, which collects evidence of the efficacy of British Deception Plans in 1945, specifically regarding the Normandy Landings under Plan FORTITUDE.

Against the backdrop of these sweeping strategic victories, the case of Clarc Korab appears as a footnote of human failure. The government celebrates the "success" of the plans while the individual agents, once their usefulness is exhausted, are filed away under labels of unreliability.

We are left with a man who survived a plane crash in 1939 and the espionage networks of Spain and Portugal, only to end up in a specialized camp, refusing to speak to the people who had used his questionnaires to help win a campaign in North Africa. The record stops at his refusal to co-operate in January 1943. What happened to Clarc Korab after he stopped being useful to the Security Service remains an open question.