On the other front, against naval Enigma, German defenses were defeating the codebreakers, and the defeat meant that British ships and supplies were sinking and many men dying in the cold North Atlantic waters. The German navy imposed much stricter security rules than the air force did. A naval Enigma operator had to choose his wheel setting for messages from a list, and then used a code and a cipher to hide it before sending it. In Hut 8 at Bletchley Park, Alan Turing and Peter Twinn were stymied. Only by capturing the code and cipher instructions from a German vessel, they believed, could they learn the method.10
Ian Fleming, the young assistant to the director of naval intelligence, came up with a plan: repair a downed German bomber, man it with “a tough crew of five” wearing bloodied German uniforms, fly it over the English Channel, radio an SOS message, and crash the plane into the sea. When a German rescue boat picked up the disguised men, they’d “shoot [the] German crew, dump [them] overboard, [and] bring [the] rescue boat back to English port.” Fleming expected to be one of the five. The scheme was approved, labeled Operation Ruthless, and then called off.11 Ian Fleming was imaginative, but Ruthless was a plan fit only for a spy novel.
Frank Birch, the navy intelligence officer at Bletchley Park, sent a memo to the Admiralty in October. “Turing and Twinn came to me like undertakers cheated of a nice corpse two days ago, all in a stew about the cancellation of Operation Ruthless,” he wrote. “The burden of their song was the importance of a pinch.”12 As a senior Bletchley Park figure wrote on another occasion, “As far as we are concerned, pinching is the best form of cryptography.”13
Once before, Marian Rejewski had found the equations to unlock Enigma. The entire operation against the German machine began with that flash of insight. This isn’t proof he could have done the same again to solve the naval Enigma problem, but the possibility was never tested. It’s unlikely that anyone in England would have asked him. The best minds of Bletchley Park assumed that the Poles had pinched an Enigma machine with its wheels, rather than working out the wiring mathematically.
After the fall of France, in any case, Rejewski was beyond reach. Dilly Knox’s health grew worse, as did Alastair Denniston’s. Bletchley Park filled with new recruits who did not know how Enigma was first broken or by whom.
The magicians from Warsaw faded from the collective memory of Britain’s codebreakers. Bletchley Park’s history was a secret known to few. The Poles’ contribution was an even deeper secret.
“FOUR SIM AGENTS were surprised this evening inside the Yugoslav legation,” Ciano told his diary on August 3.14 “We must encourage the rumor that they were simply ordinary burglars.”
For Manfredi Talamo, this was a rare and dangerous fiasco. His Removal Section and the whole Servizio Informazioni Militari, the SIM, could have inscribed “Pinching is the best form of cryptography” on their coat of arms. But if the identity of the intruders in the Yugoslav embassy became known among foreign diplomats, Talamo’s game could be over.
Ciano’s rumor spreading apparently succeeded, though. Security at embassies remained abysmal. Talamo’s copied keys still worked. Many of the diplomats lived at the Hotel Ambasciatori, an ornate neo-Renaissance building on Via Vittorio Veneto, in quarters conveniently provided by the Italian government. The palace was around the corner from the US embassy and close to other legations in the posh Ludovisi district, which meant that diplomats could walk home from work and Talamo’s men could easily keep track of when they were away from their offices.15
The British embassy to Italy had closed down, but plenty of others were left. Actually, another British legation remained open very nearby, in the world’s tiniest independent state, the Vatican. A country of a little over a hundred acres didn’t have much room for foreign diplomatic offices, so in normal times they were located elsewhere in Rome. After Mussolini declared war, British representative Francis D’Arcy Osborne moved to an apartment in Casa Santa Marta, a Vatican guesthouse in the shadow of St. Peter’s Basilica. The French, Belgian, Polish, and other Allied diplomats joined him as guests, or as honored prisoners, at the Santa Marta. To communicate with London, they sent messages in the Vatican diplomatic bag to Bern. From neutral Switzerland, their reports could be radioed to London.
Talamo wasted no time. In June 1940, he assigned one of his men, Angelo Greffi, to Osborne’s relocated legation. By August or September, Greffi had picked out two Italians working for the British, and they were called in for interviews with the man with a pudgy face and a southern Italian accent who, if he gave a name at all, did not give “Talamo.”
The P Squad chief had his own contacts inside the Vatican. One was Giovanni Fazio, the pro-Fascist head of the “special section” of the Vatican police. Fazio’s men followed each of the foreign diplomats and kept hour-to-hour reports on their movements. Fazio gave that information to Talamo. The reports on D’Arcy Osborne apparently showed that he habitually left his residence for several hours every Sunday morning. That was the time chosen for the P Squad’s periodic break-ins. The Vatican police did not interfere. Talamo’s men knew what to look for: they removed, photographed, and returned codebooks, cipher tables, and coded messages on which the plain English text had been handwritten by whoever decoded them. It was all that Italy’s own codebreakers could wish for.16
BUDAPEST WAS STILL a neutral capital, which made it one of the back alleys accessible from both sides of a divided world. Major Nikolaus Ritter of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, came there nearly once a month under the name Dr. Jansen; he used it as a meeting place with the agents he was running in the Balkans and the Middle East under the guise of representatives of Oriental Export and Import, purportedly a Hungarian furniture firm. Besides that, there was no war economy in Budapest, so he shopped there for clothes for his wife and got a bespoke suit for himself.
In Budapest, he’d been introduced to Captain Laszlo Almasy. Ritter’s understanding was that Almasy served in the Hungarian Intelligence Service. Ritter appears to be the only source for this. Other accounts say Almasy was teaching at Hungary’s air force academy. It’s possible that Almasy was doing both. It’s also possible that Almasy strayed from the truth to impress the German. Certainly Ritter took a liking to him and to the Almasy family mansion, and dropped by regularly on his trips to Budapest.
Though he’d returned to his home country, Almasy felt he was in exile. “If you ever need to know anything about Africa that I can help you with, let me know. I know the land and people like my vest pocket,” he liked to tell Ritter. He backed that up with stories and name dropping. One time, in September 1940, he talked about Aziz el-Masri, who had been chief of staff of the Egyptian army until the British pushed him out. Almasy said the old Anglophobic general was a friend of his, and that “the general and his nationalist Egyptian friends were fervently hoping for a German victory” that would free them from the British.
Ritter blurted out what he considered an absolutely improbable idea. “Could this man, this general, perhaps be influenced to work with us against the British?”
Almasy didn’t think it all improbable. He said this was just what he was leading up to.
Together they cooked up a proposal: they would smuggle Masri out of Cairo to Germany and use him “to persuade Egyptian revolutionaries to switch to the German side.”
Almasy would be the smuggler.
At first Abwehr commander Wilhelm Canaris labeled this idea “crazy.” A month later he reversed himself. In the meantime, Hitler was leaning on Budapest to align militarily with the Axis. On November 20, Hungary formally joined the Tripartite Pact. Soon after, Almasy got orders seconding him to the Abwehr, where he would retain the rank of captain but wear a German uniform. Or so Almasy would later describe the change of country that he served: as something imposed on him.
But the orders came from the commander of the Hungarian air force, who may have been a personal friend, and the move furthered his scheme with Ritter. The plan fit his passion for living dangerously, an
d it would take him home to the desert.17
3
SANDSTORM
Autumn 1940–Winter 1941. Cairo–Haifa–Benghazi.
MARSHAL RODOLFO GRAZIANI, known as “the Butcher,” ordered his troops forward toward Egypt in two prongs. The main force would attack along the coast. A smaller, more mobile group under General Pietro Maletti would leave its base in Libya and head south into the desert, cross into Egypt, then swoop around the British front line and attack from behind. Maletti had spent years in Libya. He’d fought under Graziani in the riconquista and the slaughter of the Senussi at Kufra. He knew the desert.
After giving the command to advance, Graziani told his diary, “Thus is accomplished what may well be recorded as a crime of historic proportions, against the commission of which I have fought with all my strength.” In the mind of the Butcher, let us assume, the crime was not against Britain or Egypt. It was against the unready Italian army he led. But he absolved himself; he was only following orders. “For whatever evil may occur, I, before God and my soldiers, am not responsible.”
Maletti, overconfident or careless, left his Arab guides behind and got lost in soft sands while still in Libya. By the time the Italian air force found him, he’d used up too much fuel, time, and water for his flanking action. He returned to the coastal road to join the rest of the army.1
On the Libyan side of the border, the land rose from the shoreline to a plateau. The coastal plateau ended just inside Egypt, where a cliff dropped six hundred feet to Sollum, a dot on the map with a customs post, thirty houses, and too few British defenders. The Italians had to descend from the high ground via a rocky path called Halfaya Pass. British soldiers called it Hellfire Pass. The rocks mostly hid the Italian trucks as they came downhill. Still, British gunners noticed that the Italians “caught the sun on their windshields at one exposed corner,” war correspondent Alan Moorehead wrote. “A few seconds later each vehicle exposed itself again very briefly on another bend.” The gun crews “had merely to note each reflected flash from the windshields and then aim at the lower corner.” Shattered vehicles clogged the path, but the river of “water-trucks, guns, donkey teams, tanks, armored cars” kept flowing down the escarpment.
The outnumbered British abandoned Sollum, dropped back sixty miles to the deserted Beduin village of Sidi Barani, and abandoned it too. General Wavell’s sunburned soldiers had dug their trenches in the sand at Mersa Matruh, eighty miles further on. The former resort village had a port and a paved road all the way to Alexandria to supply it. That’s where Wavell hoped to stop the Italians before the river of men and machines could reach Alexandria.2
Instead, Graziani ordered a halt at Sidi Barani on September 16. He’d taken a strip of Egyptian coast; he’d taken casualties; he didn’t intend to take more chances. The British could not see the chaos in the Italian multitude that had pursued them into Egypt: whole units that panicked, junior officers who “deserted their troops under fire,” the general who “drove artillery lieutenants out of hiding and back to their guns with blows.” Graziani told Rome that he was making logistic preparations for the next advance. He didn’t say how long that would take. On the coast and in an arc into the desert, his soldiers began building fortified camps.3
At the end of September, the minutes of the British war cabinet included a laconic report from the chief of the Imperial General Staff, John Dill, that “there was nothing to indicate… that the Italian offensive would be resumed at an early date.”4 Seen from London or Cairo, it hardly made sense. Graziani, or perhaps God, had granted Britain time to send more men and tanks to Egypt.
Mussolini, at first, was “radiant” about the invasion, which gave Italy “the glory she has sought in vain for three centuries.” His son-in-law recorded the Duce’s words in his diary. Ecstasy evaporated into anxiety and then anger when Mussolini realized that Graziani saw the next stage as months, not days, away.
The Duce was even angrier when German troops began occupying Romania. Germany had too little petroleum to fuel a war. It depended on Romania’s oil fields and produced an invitation from the country’s new far-right government to protect them. Mussolini thought Germany understood that the Balkans were supposed to belong to his empire. Hitler was always surprising him, always snatching without inviting Italy to share. “This time I am going to pay him back in his own coin,” he told Ciano. “He will find out from the papers that I have occupied Greece.” He expected to seize the country easily, as he had seized Albania, as the Germans had grabbed Austria and Czechoslovakia.5
MAJOR BONNER FELLERS barely had time to unpack his suitcase in Madrid when he got orders “to proceed by first available transportation to Cairo.” The Military Intelligence Division of the US Army had decided that it needed an attaché in Cairo more than it needed an assistant to the military attaché in Spain. The Franco regime in Spain might join the war on the Axis side, but in Egypt a war was now actually going on.
The decision to move Fellers was sudden, almost impulsive. It came within two weeks of Graziani’s clumsy invasion.6 Military Intelligence in Washington clearly hadn’t been planning to post an attaché in Egypt. Fellers hadn’t received codebooks, regulations on how to run an attaché office, or budget instructions.7
He left Madrid on October 18. Crossing Europe, he was in Berlin a few nights later. He heard sirens, which gave so little warning of approaching British bombers that he hadn’t pulled his clothes on before he heard antiaircraft guns firing. He took note that the searchlights meant to help the gun crews were useless. The lights never found a plane, though Fellers was told that sixty British bombers had attacked the city. He did not report who told him this; he often left sources unnamed. From Berlin he traveled to Budapest, perhaps crossing paths on the street with Abwehr officer Nikolaus Ritter, in town to meet his agents. At the end of October, Fellers reported to the US legation in Cairo.8
By his fourth day in Cairo, he met with Britain’s secretary of state for war, Anthony Eden. Churchill had sent Eden off to Egypt by flying boat because Wavell had not attacked the Italians yet despite all the tanks he had been sent; because Churchill found it “illogical” that Egypt hadn’t declared war, and he wanted to remind King Farouk that “he was under the necessity of obeying our instructions”; because a Turkish military delegation would be in Cairo; and because of a telegram from Spain. The telegram contained a thirdhand report: the British ambassador in Madrid said that the Spanish foreign minister said that Hitler and Mussolini had agreed that the Germans would plunge their army through “Constantinople and Syria” to conquer Egypt. Churchill wanted Eden to persuade the Turks that they should side with Britain, not acquiesce to the Axis.
The warning from the ambassador in Madrid is recorded not in the war cabinet minutes but in the even more secret annex, in which Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, warns that the thrust through Turkey could actually be aimed at the Persian Gulf, the territory of oil. The airfields and antiaircraft defenses that Germany was building in Romania might be part of the plan, he said.9 In this war, neutrality lasted only till a country was overrun, or until it stabbed another in the back. Every map hid invisible invasion routes.
The earth hid sinews tying every front to every other far-away front. When German tanks wounded the soil in Romania, the ground shuddered in Egypt.
Eden was about to fly home when Italy invaded Greece from Albania. He delayed leaving. Between his urgent talks with the British commanders, Eden carved out time for the freshly arrived American major, Bonner Fellers. The meeting, it seems, testifies to how eagerly Fellers got to work, and how easily he made himself at home in people’s confidence. In the spring he’d been teaching English to cadets. Now he could radio home that Anthony Eden had pledged that “I would be permitted to see all British units and installations.”10
The cabinet-level promise testifies to another thing: how important it was to Britain’s leaders to make the Americans feel like they were already allies in a war they hadn’t entered. Secrets, will
y-nilly, bind giver and taker. In September, Fellers had belonged to the inner circle of American isolationists. In November, he was bound by shared secrets with Anthony Eden.
Fellers received an office on the second floor of the American consulate building in Garden City, the quiet enclave of aristocrats and ambassadors on the eastern bank of the Nile, in a separate universe from the din of the rest of Cairo. The building was the mansion of a recently deceased millionaire. The staircase Fellers took to his office each day was wide enough for a king’s entourage. In late November he wrote his Report No. 1. Hassan Sabry, Egypt’s prime minister, had stood a few days before in parliament to give the first speech of the winter session. He spoke softly, turned for a moment toward the king, staggered, and collapsed. He was carried out dead. The next day Farouk appointed a successor—who stuck to the policy of “nonparticipation” in the war.
The British, Fellers wrote, tried pressing the king to get off the sidelines, then “gave it up as a bad job.” One of Fellers’s sources was Jumbo Wilson, commander of the British Troops in Egypt. The British military, Fellers wrote, had “reported officially that at least eighty percent of the Egyptian officers were dead against war.” A unit of less than a thousand men of the Egyptian army’s Frontier Force held Siwa Oasis near the Libyan border. “Word came to the British Army that the Egyptian officers… would refuse to fight if attacked by the Italians… the oasis lies on a route by which the Italians might invade” through the desert, Fellers said.
Fellers also got an Egyptian cabinet minister, Abdul Rahman Azzam, to talk to him about the crisis. Azzam had fought in Libya with the Senussi against the Italians twenty years earlier. He “hated Italy possibly more than any other Egyptian,” Fellers wrote, but “still violently opposed participation in the war.” As described by Fellers, Azzam looked at the war as one between Britain and Italy, in which the fact that the gunfire and dying were taking place on Egyptian soil was a distant abstraction. Egyptians, Azzam told Fellers, “honestly desired to help Great Britain” as long as doing so didn’t pull them into the conflict. Azzam had proposed to Wilson that the Egyptian army pull its units out of the desert “to police rear areas,” freeing British troops for the front. As part of the arrangement, Wilson wanted the Egyptian army to turn over tanks, trucks, and artillery to the British. Azzam agreed to give cover by presenting this to Farouk as his idea.11
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