“An English tank that took a direct hit is lying close to the highway,” Laszlo Almasy wrote. “The German armor-piercing cannon shot clean through its 14 centimeter armor. The inside of the tank is repulsive, full of shreds of clothing and puddles of blood.” He’d been ordered to drive a staff officer from Tripoli all the way to Rommel’s headquarters and found himself chasing the general across Cyrenaica. “The officers tell us that Rommel has practically not rested since the big battle began four days ago… He expects a lot from his soldiers but the most from himself,” Almasy wrote. For the general’s men, he’d become half a god. An antitank gunner told Almasy that Rommel “neither eats nor drinks and never sleeps.”
Almasy caught up with Rommel in Benghazi. The town had just been conquered, again. Almasy drove past the ruins of the Grand Hotel d’Italia and recalled his last stay there. At night British bombers had come, and Almasy had run to a bomb shelter. In the morning his room was intact, except that the stairs to it were gone and a wall had been sheared off. An Italian soldier had found a ladder and brought him his pajamas and slippers.
Outside town, Almasy noticed an intact, captured British truck. It was just what he needed.35
FOR LAMPSON, THE reversal in the desert came at a most inconvenient time. Egypt’s wheat shortage was getting worse, warned Colonel Raymond Maunsell, head of Security Intelligence Middle East. At the Suez port, “native laborers went on strike, complaining of the impossibility of buying flour,” said an SIME intelligence roundup, adding that the poor blamed the British forces for buying up supplies. Hunger made people susceptible to enemy propaganda, Maunsell warned.36 So did military failures. When Lampson told Prime Minister Hussein Sirry about the fall of Benghazi, Sirry “observed that the moral effect on the Egyptian public was certainly going to be bad.”37
On top of this, there was Farouk.38
In early January, Egypt’s foreign minister, Salib Sami, phoned Lampson to say that the cabinet was about to break diplomatic ties with Vichy. London had demanded this for months. The French government under Marshal Petain was an Axis satellite. Farouk was away, enjoying himself on the Red Sea coast, and had asked not to be “troubled with telegrams or state affairs.”
Lampson was pleased. He’d been under pressure to somehow get the Wafd back in power. The Wafd stood for Egyptian nationalism. It was the only party with wide public support, and its leader, Mustafa el-Nahas, was reliably antifascist, which in the view of Lampson’s critics made it worth putting up with Nahas having a mind of his own. Maunsell had been saying this in ornate offices behind Lampson’s back. For Lampson, the break with Vichy was proof of his wisdom in exerting British influence quietly through Sirry’s minority government. “Sirry and his crowd are giving us, almost without exception, everything we want in… prosecution of the war,” he wrote.
Two weeks later, Farouk got back to Cairo, erupted in curses at the foreign minister, and demanded that he resign.
Lampson phoned Ahmed Hassanein, the former explorer whose official position was now head of the royal cabinet and whose unofficial position for years had been indulgent father figure to the king. They had to meet, Lampson said, that evening, it couldn’t wait. Hassanein came to the grand compound of the British Residency facing the Nile at 10 p.m. The constitution, Hassanein told Lampson, required the king’s consent to break relations. When Farouk had returned to Cairo, a memo had been waiting for him from deposed prime minister Ali Maher and his henchmen, saying that the “royal prerogative had been ignored.” This was “His Majesty’s softest spot,” Hassanein said. Maher’s goal was to replace Sirry with someone less compliant with British demands.
“I did not mince my words,” Lampson dictated at midnight to the secretary who kept his diary. The Egyptian cabinet had met a legitimate war-related request from its British ally. For Farouk to pick a fight over this was “reckless irresponsibility on the part of a young and headstrong sovereign” influenced by “evil counsellors.” Sirry had to stay, and Farouk had to finally sweep his Italian advisers and Maher’s cronies out of the palace.
Three different fights were tangled together. One was over who ruled Egypt. One was over Farouk’s loyalties in the war, and Lampson’s suspicion that the king leaned toward the side that had invaded his country, not the side that was defending it. And one was over prestige, which was also Lampson’s soft spot.
In Cairo you could read, even in the censored press, that everywhere the British Empire was cracking. The top headline on January 25 in Al Aharam said the war was getting closer to Singapore, as the Japanese pushed south on the Malayan Peninsula.39 The next morning, Lampson talked to Prime Minister Sirry. Since he’d taken office, Sirry said, he’d labored to save Farouk from “the charge of treachery.” He’d closed the “palace channels of communication with the enemy… until only the Vichy Legation remained.” Sirry said he would resign if the king dismissed his foreign minister. Lampson told him to hold on.
All this comes from Lampson’s account. It’s harder to know what Farouk was thinking during those days just before his twenty-second birthday, though his messages to German emissaries in Turkey and Tehran offer clues. He said that despite being in a “position of utmost difficulty,” his heart lay with the Führer. Whether he feared the arrival of a German army or eagerly looked forward to it, Farouk may have guessed that letting his prime minister expel the Vichy representative signaled that he was useless to Hitler as a potential partner. Farouk’s father had given him a car when he was eleven but never taught him the game of diplomacy. It was not like the poker games at the Royal Automobile Club, where the king reputedly kept everyone in the room till dawn so he could try to win back what he had lost.40 He did not want to lose his kingdom, and could not expect new hands to be dealt.
February 1 was a Sunday. Lampson had left Cairo to go hunting; he looked forward to shooting ducks by moonlight. A messenger reached him before sunset with word that he had to return immediately. The crisis had leaked out into the streets. That night he went to Sirry’s house. The prime minister came downstairs from a dinner party to talk. There’d been disturbances at Al-Azhar, the great seminary of Islamic studies, fomented by the rector “in concert with Ali Maher and other evil elements,” Sirry said. Then demonstrations began at the university. Years before, student protests had been the first sign of larger anti-British upheavals. Sirry said he had asked Hassanein for the king’s support in quashing the protests. The courtier had brought Farouk’s reply: do as you please, but it’s not my business.
Sirry understood: the king was done with him. I’m resigning, he told the ambassador. Lampson asked who should succeed him.
“Send for the Wafd,” Sirry said.
Really, Lampson decided, “it was more evident than ever” that a government that wanted to uphold Egypt’s side of the alliance with Britain would have to “fight the Palace.” Only a government supported by the majority of Egyptians could do that. This meant the Wafd. He wrote this as if he had never thought differently.
LAMPSON WROTE CABLES to London, lining up Foreign Office support. He went to Abdin Palace and told Farouk who the next prime minister had to be. He did not meet overtly with Nahas, but with an intermediary. The Wafd leader had been waiting since the rigged election four years earlier had denied him power. He was ready to rule, on his terms: there’d be no coalition with other parties, and there would be new elections.
On the morning of February 4, Lampson met with Auchinleck, Cunningham, Tedder, and Oliver Lyttelton, the British cabinet minister resident in Cairo. They agreed on the message that Lampson would give Hassanein: “Unless I hear by 6 p.m. today that Nahas has been asked to form a government, His Majesty King Farouk must accept the consequences.” Hassanein came to the embassy, listened, and went.
By chance, the man who’d written the abdication letter for King Edward VIII of Britain in 1938 was now serving Lyttelton as head of the British propaganda department in Cairo.41 He prepared a letter for Farouk to sign. Since Farouk had only daughters,
the next in line for the throne was his much older first cousin, Prince Muhammad Ali. Conveniently, the prince was the rare Anglophile in the royal clan. That left the question of how to dispose of a slightly used king, still young. Admiral Cunningham suggested to Lampson putting Farouk on a ship, without saying where it would go. Ceylon was a possible destination. In London, the Foreign Office tried checking to see if Canada would take him. Bonner Fellers heard from a “reliable source” that a plane was waiting to take Farouk to South Africa.42
Just before lunch, Lampson recorded in his diary, he received a report that students were demonstrating at the university. They were shouting, “Long live Rommel,” “Long live Farouk,” and “Down with the English.” There were no chants about Hitler or Mussolini. It was easier to think of Rommel as liberator.
Farouk called the leaders of Egypt’s political parties to Abdin Palace. At 6 p.m. Hassanein traveled the mile and a third from the palace to the British embassy, bearing a message. It listed the politicians, including Nahas, and said they all agreed “the British ultimatum is a great infringement… of the independence of the country,” and that Farouk therefore rejected it. Lampson answered, “I shall be arriving at the palace at 9 p.m.”
Nahas’s man showed up while Lampson was sitting with General Robert Stone, commander of the British garrison responsible for internal order. Ignore Nahas’s name on that list, Nahas’s man said. Lampson could count on the Wafd leader.
The usual wartime blackout was in effect; Cairo’s nighttime streets were dark. Tanks appeared around Abdin Palace at 7:30, Fellers told Washington. “A tank drove through the closed iron gate and infantry followed into the court,” Fellers wrote.43
Lampson came with General Stone and with what the ambassador proudly described as “an impressive array of specially picked stalwart military officers armed to the teeth.” Hassanein and the king were in the royal reception room. “In rising indignation,” Lampson wrote afterward, he read out a prepared statement. He had held himself in diplomatic restraint for years; it evaporated. The king’s advisers were assisting the enemy, Lampson declared. The king had refused to entrust government to the party with “the commanding general support of the country.” Thus, “Your Majesty is no longer fit to occupy the throne.” Lampson handed him the letter of abdication.
Hassanein spoke to Farouk in Arabic. Lampson did not understand the language. Farouk “looked up and asked almost pathetically” for another chance. He would call for Nahas, he said. Lampson agreed, though he had his heart set on abdication. He left through “passages filled with British officers and court chamberlains, the latter a crowd of scared hens.”
Back at the embassy, he had the “comic relief” of a phone message from Hassanein asking that he remove the troops because they weren’t letting Nahas in. From the palace, the new prime minister came to the embassy. Lampson told him that “my desire, as ever, was to remain as much as possible behind the scenes.” Diana Cooper, the aristocrat and actress, was staying with her politician husband at Lampson’s residence. After 11, she found the embassy hall crowded. Lampson “came out of his den, dressed in a pearl-grey frac, arm in arm with Nahas Pasha, both grinning themselves in two.”44
Lampson wrote a long cable that night. Its tone suggests that the ambassador’s blood was still pounding pleasurably in his ears. “So much for the events of the evening, which I confess I could not have more enjoyed,” he concluded.
Several days after, Second Lieutenant Khaled Mohi El Din of the Egyptian Cavalry Corps heard from a colleague about a meeting at the Officers Club in Cairo. When he got there, he found “about three or four hundred” men, top brass and junior officers like himself, some “crying in bitterness, rage and humiliation, others shouting.” Whatever they thought of Farouk personally, the king represented the nation. Someone proposed a protest march to the palace. Someone more senior said that military discipline barred political demonstrations. In the midst of the meeting, a phone call came from the palace with word that Farouk “appreciated the expression of loyalty” but asked them to return peacefully to their duties. Everyone left. The king embodied the nation less than he had, and so did the Wafd.45
February 4, 1942, was the day when “Mustafa el-Nahas Pasha lost our respect,” Anwar al-Sadat wrote much later. In his version of what followed, “officers assembled in Cairo and marched out to Abidin [sic] Palace to salute the king, and he came out to return their salute.” The description is in third person. Sadat does not claim to have been present as a young signals officer. It’s not clear whether someone else misinformed him or he invented the heroic march to the palace and the salute. Either way, it was a more honorable past, at least in Sadat’s eyes, than the real one.46
WORD OF THE coup d’état was sure to seep out, Fellers radioed. “British prestige among Egyptians, at a time when the military situation is critical, is lower than at any time since my arrival sixteen months ago.”47 Lampson had made sure Egypt had a government opposed to Rome and Berlin. In the battle for esteem, however, he too had lost.
Only Rommel had gained prestige. He was part of everyone’s calculations: he had inspired demonstrations, inflamed Farouk’s hope or fear, and helped convince Lampson that confrontation was essential. In Rome, Ciano wrote, Mussolini summed up a meeting of his ministers with his “usual attack” on Italian generals and then praised Rommel, “who is always in his tank leading the attacking columns.” The soldiers of the Bersaglieri, elite Italian infantry units, “are enthusiastic about him… carrying him in triumph on their shoulders, shouting that with him they are sure they can reach Alexandria.”48
Yet Rommel’s advance stopped just as the coup was taking place in Cairo. His tanks were out of fuel and shells; he’d again outrun his supplies. The British built their new defenses on a line running into the desert from a village called Gazala on the Libyan coast.49 The Eighth Army was 125 miles west of where it had started in November. Tobruk was no longer besieged. In a dispassionate accounting, this made the last two and a half months of fighting a British victory, albeit costly. Yet memory is often shaped by the end of a story. Because Rommel regained much of the ground he initially lost, the battle was easily remembered as his victory and Auchinleck’s loss.
Lampson was right, though, that Britain paid dearly for taking warplanes and troops from the African front to the Far East. That decision had made Rommel’s counterattack possible. Yet Singapore fell to Japan on February 15, and seventy thousand British, Indian, and Australian soldiers, including newly arrived reinforcements, went into captivity.50 In the clarity of retrospect, the message telling Japanese diplomats in London to destroy their Purple machine heralded the surrender of Singapore, Auchinleck’s failure to take Tripoli, and tanks surrounding Abdin Palace in Cairo.
“COUNT ALMASY IS a splendid fellow, quiet and considerate, and knows all about the desert,” Heinrich Sandstede wrote. He and his friend Johann Eppler were overjoyed when they were assigned to the Hungarian explorer’s tiny unit. Almasy’s German uniform showed the insignia of a hauptmann, a captain. But he didn’t make them shout “Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann.” Just “yes” was enough. Even better, Almasy said they wouldn’t need to jump out of an airplane; he would drive them into Egypt. Sandstede had the idea this would be less dangerous. He had not traveled before with Laszlo Almasy.51
In February, they took a train to Napoli, then flew across the Mediterranean to Tripoli. With them, they brought their suitcase-sized wireless sets. Other supplies caught up with them there—packages listed as “tobacco” in Abwehr radio messages, which really meant British banknotes for Eppler and Sandstede to use in Egypt, and copies of an English novel. Abwehr agents used a cipher in which the letters of the original text were rearranged in a complex pattern. The pattern shifted daily, based on words on prearranged pages of a published novel, in a language fitting the agents’ false identities. In Egypt, Eppler would revert to being Hussein Gaafar, an Egyptian, but Sandstede would carry British papers in the name “Peter Muncaster.” In Ab
wehr messages, their codenames were Max and Moritz, the boy pranksters from a classic German children’s book. Almasy was “Salam,” a near-anagram of his name and the Arabic word for “peace.”
Two radiograms to Salam told him to dock Max and Moritz’s pay for bills they’d left unpaid on their Berlin apartment. The messages were translated two weeks later in Hut 3. GCHQ had cracked the ciphers used by Abwehr agents in the summer of 1940. In December 1941, Dilly Knox’s section in the cottage at Bletchley Park had figured out how to read messages sent between main Abwehr stations with the agency’s special model of the Enigma machine. Knox, dying of cancer, gave credit to Mavis Lever and another woman in his group, Margaret Rock, for solving the puzzle. The value of Abwehr traffic was that it led to spies.52 Messages to Tripoli about delinquent utility bills got low priority for translation.
Almasy delivered two of his men to Rommel’s frontline headquarters, where they would be responsible for relaying wireless messages. Then he returned to Tripoli and set out to Cyrenaica with the rest of his small crew. He’d succeeded in getting three captured British trucks and three Ford command cars. Just past Agheila, they turned off the paved coastal highway onto a track south into the desert. Through a sandstorm they drove 150 miles to an oasis called Jalo, home to less than three thousand people, as well as fifty thousand date palms and an Italian garrison.
Almasy planned to drive six hundred miles almost due east from Jalo to Assiut, the largest town in Upper Egypt. He hadn’t explored this area before. He was counting on Italian maps that showed flat, gravelly desert, near-perfect driving terrain, for most of the journey.
The maps, it turned out, were wrong. They were based on imagination or laziness. Eighty miles east of Jalo was a sand sea: wave after wave of soft dunes.
War of Shadows Page 24
