Polish Pilot Sold Loyalty to Both Sides Before British Internment
By Constance Bell ·
Both Berlin and London were played by a volatile Polish pilot who aided Operation TORCH before refusing to cooperate and facing internment at Camp 020R.
Clarc Korab was a Polish pilot whose war began with a crash in 1939. According to a catalogue entry in the UK National Archives (KV 2/1439), the man who would be known by the codename CARELESS did not spend his time in captivity mourning his aircraft. Instead, he navigated a route through Spain, where he volunteered to spy for the Germans in England.
This movement through the Iberian Peninsula was a common trajectory for the displaced and the opportunistic during the early years of the conflict. Spain, under Franco, served as a permeable membrane for intelligence services, a place where men without a country could negotiate the price of their survival. For Korab, this meant an initial pact with the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, which sought to plant assets within the British Isles to monitor defenses and political stability.
July 1941
Korab arrived in the United Kingdom in July 1941, shipped from Portugal. He arrived as a German asset, an agent intended to feed information back to Berlin. However, the moment he touched British soil, he performed a pivot common to the desperate: he volunteered his services to the British.
This created a precarious situation for the Security Service. The record identifies Korab as part of the "Double Agent Operations" documented in the PF Series of personal files. In the intelligence world, a double agent is an asset who is nominally working for one service while actually serving another. But Korab represented a more volatile category—the man who offers himself to both sides simultaneously. When a spy volunteers rather than being carefully recruited and vetted, he brings with him an inherent instability. He is not driven by ideology or deep-seated loyalty, but by the immediate necessity of the moment.
"Complete personal unreliability"
The Security Service is rarely complimentary in its internal summaries, but the catalogue entry for KV 2/1439 is blunt. It records that Korab’s "complete personal unreliability" eventually led to his internment at Camp 020R.
In the high-stakes environment of wartime intelligence, reliability is the only currency that matters. A man who sells his loyalty to the Abwehr in Spain and then immediately offers it to MI5 in London is a man whose allegiances are a matter of convenience. To the handlers at the Security Service, Korab was not a trusted partner in a clandestine game, but a liability to be managed and contained.
There is a sharp contrast to be found in the broader archival record of the same series. Related files for Juan Pujol García, codename GARBO (KV 2/63, 64, 65, 67), describe a different kind of operation. The entries for GARBO detail copies of communications by letter and wireless telegraphy with the Germans, incorporating meticulously planned British deception material. Where GARBO was a pillar of a sophisticated strategic deception effort, Korab was a volatile element whose primary value lay in what he could be coerced into providing.
Operation TORCH
Despite his volatility, Korab was not entirely useless to the British effort. The catalogue entry notes that his "Abwehr questionnaires provided useful information" and that he "participated in deception for TORCH."
Operation TORCH, the Allied invasion of French North Africa in November 1942, relied on a complex web of misinformation to keep the Axis powers guessing about the landing sites. The Abwehr questionnaires mentioned in the record are particularly telling; they represent the Germans' own attempts to vet Korab, revealing what the Abwehr valued and how they structured their intelligence gathering. By controlling Korab, the British could not only feed the Germans false data but could also glimpse the internal requirements and priorities of the German intelligence apparatus.
Korab was a small cog in this machine, a man whose willingness to lie to the Germans was a mirror of his willingness to lie to the British. He was a tool of convenience, useful only so long as his actions aligned with the needs of the Security Service and his cooperation remained intact.
That cooperation had a shelf life. The file's title itself, "Selected papers from the 'CARELESS' case, alias Clarc KORAB: Polish. A pilot shot down by...", ends in an ellipsis, leaving the specifics of his initial 1939 capture unrecorded in the description. The catalogue entry concludes by stating that Korab "refused to co-operate after January 1943."
It remains an open question why a man who had spent years navigating the whims of two different intelligence services suddenly decided to stop cooperating in early 1943, and what the Security Service did with an "unreliable" asset who no longer wished to play the game.