Husseini and Gailani found an ally of sorts in the Japanese government. “The Japanese have proposed a tripartite declaration on the independence of India and Arabia,” Ciano wrote in his diary in mid-April. “Initial reactions in Berlin are unfavorable.”12 Japan’s strategy for overrunning the southern rim of Asia even while fighting America depended in part on stirring local national movements to rebel. Promising to drive out European colonial empires, Japan would build its own.13
So Husseini and Gailani saw the Hitler-Mussolini meeting in April 1942 as an opening to press their demand. “We request the Italian government to render all possible assistance to the Arab countries which are at present under the tyranny of Britain” and “to recognize the sovereign rights and independence of these countries,” Husseini and Gailani’s letter to Ciano said. The German foreign minister, Ribbentrop, got a parallel letter addressed to his government. The Japanese ambassador in Rome radioed the text to Tokyo—which meant that Menzies was able to hand Churchill a decoded and translated copy.
Ciano wrote back to the exiled Palestinian and Iraqi in early May that “the freedom and independence of the above-mentioned Arab nations are aims of the Italian government.” Yet he also said that the letter had to remain secret. This was not what the two exiled Arabs had sought.
Japan’s ambassador in Rome explained to his foreign ministry in Tokyo—and, unknowingly, to Churchill: The Duce and the Führer had discussed the subject at Salzburg. They’d agreed that it was the wrong time for a public declaration because “it would run the risk of not arousing any particular reactions” in the Arab world. Put differently, they did not have confidence in Husseini’s claim that the Arab world was soaked in inflammable pro-Axis emotion; they did not believe that their promise of independence would ignite rebellions. The Arabs would remain passive, which would be a victory for British propaganda. Perhaps later, when the Axis armies were near enough to the Arab heartland to support uprisings, it would be time to say something.14
Amid the disagreements about Axis strategy in the Middle East, the SS put its confidence in Rommel: that he would soon reach Cairo and Alexandria, and then Palestine. In May, Obersturmführer Hans-Joachim Weise got new orders: He was to set up an Einsatzkommando—an SS special operations command for mass murder—for Rommel’s army.15
IN THE THIRD week of May, Gordon Welchman’s team was still straining to crack Chaffinch II, the Enigma key used between Rommel’s headquarters and the German high command. For nearly a third of the hours that the bombe wheels spun that week, they were testing possible cribs for that one key. The successes added up to the Chaffinch II settings for one day of that week and for four days in earlier weeks.16 A message intercepted on May 12 was decoded only on May 17. It came from the high command for Rommel’s intelligence officer and described the proportion of tracer shells that the British used in their antitank and antiaircraft guns. The information, it said, came from “a good source.”17
On May 19, Welchman’s team belatedly found the Chaffinch II settings for April 30. Among the nearly three-week-old messages that could now be deciphered was another one from the high command for Rommel’s intelligence officer. It opened with the words “Good source reports.” Then came a string of dates, each with its own packet of intelligence.
On February 19, the good source had said that among the British forces in the Middle East, there was a “need of tools” for American tanks, and such a “critical” shortage of spare parts that four US-made tanks had been taken apart to provide parts for others. American tanks carried eighty-one rounds of 75-mm ammunition and eighty-four rounds of 37-mm ammo, the source had reported in March. To make room for more shells, the machine gun that the tanks normally carried had been removed.
On March 28, the source gave the “assumed” positions of four Axis divisions in Libya. It did not say who was assuming this; the implication was that these were high-level British assessments.
“There are not enough British troops in North Africa to guarantee its safety,” the source had reported on March 29—information that would presumably have pleased Rommel were it not for an update from April 24: “If the German troops are not reinforced, the British are strong enough to prevent the capture of the Nile Delta.”18 These points, too, looked like assessments from somewhere within General Headquarters in Cairo.
The intercepted message containing all these reports was a grab bag: nuts-and-bolts information from tank workshops together with strategic assessments. The obvious question was the identity of the source. A subtler riddle was why all this had come at the same time. An even deeper mystery was what else might have come from this source but not been intercepted by British wireless operators or decoded at Bletchley Park.
Menzies avoided such queries from Churchill; the message did not go into his packet for the prime minister.
It did go into the Bluebird file in Hut 4. It gave Margaret Storey and Russell Dudley-Smith more clues and more questions. Most of all, it shouted the need to find answers, quickly.19
IN EGYPT, COLONEL Bill Liardet’s regiment had fifty American tanks when he took command on May 15. Twenty were the older model that the British had named Stuarts, after a Confederate general of the Civil War; thirty were the newer Grant tanks, designed in a rush when the United States belatedly started preparing for war, manufactured in equal haste, and freshly delivered.
The regiment “was in a pretty untrained state, rather dirty and undisciplined,” Liardet would later write to his wife. The men had no experience with US tanks. Liardet “set about the most intensive training” and tightening of discipline. But he had to “teach them an entirely new technique, of which I was none too certain myself,” and had only till June 1, when they were supposed to move from their base near the Nile to the front in the Western Desert.20
Lance Corporal Ron Hurlock wrote to his father from the Western Desert on May 25. He was a signalman, which meant that when the time came he’d go forward in a wireless van with three other men. “I chose this, as I thought Jerry would hardly waste an expensive bomb on [a van], whereas a tank is a good prize” for the enemy. He told his father he’d finally received a letter from his wife, sent over two months before. “It’s short, and not terribly loving, and if there is anything to drive a man scatty out here, it’s that,” he wrote. “Jerry, the sand, the sun, diseases, insects, cannot scare me half as much as she.”21
E. H. Wilmott’s truck was dug into the sand near Bir Hakeim at the southern end of the British line in Libya. Bir Hakeim itself was held by General Pierre Koenig’s Free French brigade of about four thousand men, including recruits from France’s sub-Saharan African colonies and soldiers of the Foreign Legion.
Wilmott was in the Twenty-Second Armored Brigade. On May 26, he was due to get a week’s leave, but his place on the truck out was taken by another man who was being sent for a training course with the Grant tank. “I wasn’t worried,” he wrote in his diary. No one said anything to make him expect leaves would be canceled; he assumed he’d get his soon.22
ON MAY 21, at Bletchley Park, a message came into Hut 6 in an Enigma key nicknamed Primrose, only recently broken. Luftwaffe supply units used it. If any trucks belonging to four supply groups were still in Tripoli, it said, they must “be loaded and sent off immediately, even during the night.” They had to reach Derna, on the far side of Libya, near the front. “Latest permissible time of arrival [is] evening of 25th May,” the message said. Hut 3 sent the information to Cairo on the night of May 22.23
Another German message, deciphered on May 24, said that one thousand armor-piercing shells, 75-mm caliber, would be “delivered to Derna in five or six aircraft as from 26th May.” In the Watch Room at Hut 3, an air or army adviser added a comment: this was “strong evidence” that German tanks were being outfitted with a new gun. The adviser did not note the urgency involved in sending ammunition by air; this was obvious.24
A message in Chaffinch II came in on May 22 but took four days to decipher. The Italian Supr
eme Command, it said, argued that three infantry battalions newly arrived in Africa needed several weeks’ training before they went into battle. Rommel answered “that for the known projected operation, not one single man can be dispensed with, let alone three battalions.” Hut 3 sent the information to Cairo on May 26.25
Hundreds of items of intelligence now flowed weekly from Bletchley Park to the British commanders in chief in Egypt. Most dealt with Italian naval convoys or the daily reports of the German air force. The few that came from the German army did not tell when the “known projected operation” would begin, or where, or what the plan was. They would shine brilliantly with meaning—when seen in hindsight.
“GROPPI’S ICE CREAM is only ONE in Egypt made by the American process. It is pasteurised,” said a full-page ad for Cairo’s most famous cafe in the new guidebook, which was just the right size for a soldier’s uniform pocket. The Fleurent restaurant advertised its American bar; La Taverne Française claimed that it was Cairo’s most “famous American bar and grill room.” The Metro advertised that it was “Cairo’s only air conditioned cinema.” The Marconi Radiotelegraph Company provided a map of downtown so you could find its building.
The guidebook included pages of useful phrases in Egyptian Arabic so that the swarms of soldiers on leave and the countless staff officers stationed in the city could learn to say “Do you understand?” and “Go away,” and “You, boy, go and get me a cab,” and “Barman, beer.” A section titled “The Casino,” which meant any nightclub, included the Arabic for “blonde” and “brunette” and for “Waiter, are these girls Egyptian?” and “What’s your name?” and “What a beautiful name!”26
On the evening of May 23, two men arrived in the city on the train from Assiut in Upper Egypt.27 Both had light hair and pale eyes. The short one with the slight build wore a moustache. That was Johann Eppler. The tall one, Heinrich Sandstede, known as Sandy, was clean-shaven. Only that morning they’d awoken in the desert. At mid-day they had said farewell to Almasy. They had a suitcase with a wireless set in it and the clothes they wore, as well as six hundred Egyptian pounds and three thousand British pounds. Combined, this was the equivalent of what Hermione Ranfurly would have received as twelve years’ salary at the SOE’s generous rates or thirty years’ salary for newly commissioned cipher officer June Watkins. Despite his Egyptian connections, though, Eppler was apparently unaware that British banknotes were not legal tender in Egypt and would have to be exchanged on the black market.
They needed to find a room. Either because the hotels were packed or because it suited their tastes, they ended up at the Pension Nadia, a brothel. They stayed there three nights while hunting for lodging.
(Far away to the southwest, Laszlo Almasy and the three men still with him drove their captured Fords back through the pass across Gilf Kebir. On the far side, they met a convoy of the Sudan Defense Force, the colony’s small military, on its way to Kufra with ammunition and other supplies for the garrison there. Unable to evade the Sudanese, Almasy drove right past them, saluting as he went, as if leading an unexpected British patrol. The Sudanese saluted in return, and Almasy disappeared into the desert and headed back for Jalo oasis.28)
A real estate agent helped Eppler and Sandy find rooms with a Frenchwoman named Madame Therese, for which they paid seventy-five pounds as three months’ rent. Sandstede listed another fifty pounds in his diary as a signing fee, but that was just to cover up their other spending. The flat didn’t work out: it turned out that Therese was a prostitute; both clients and police kept turning up. Among the visitors was a man named Albert Wahda, unreliably reported to be Therese’s pimp, who recognized Eppler as Hussein Gaafar, his classmate from the lycée, the French-language high school, in Cairo.29
Sandy bought a radio set and a roof antenna. The radio was needed as a cover story for his need for the antenna, which he hooked up to his wireless transmitter. He began regularly sending out his call letters, “HGS,” and waiting to hear back “WBW” from Waldemar Weber, the Abwehr wireless man whom Almasy had left at Rommel’s headquarters in the desert.
No one answered. Sandy concluded that the high buildings around their flat were blocking reception. They’d have to find another place to live.
“WE HAVE INFORMATION that [an] enemy intelligence unit may shortly be established in area [of] Gilf Kebir,” said the “most secret” cable from General Headquarters Middle East in Cairo to the British general in command of the Sudan Defense Force.
The information came from the Abwehr message that had caught translator Jean Alington’s eye at Bletchley Park. She’d read it two days after it was sent from Tripoli, which was two days after Almasy reported his position at the desert plateau on his way into Egypt. After Alington translated the four-day-old intelligence, it took another three days for the information to get to Cairo, possibly because the MI6 officer in charge of distributing decoded Abwehr material did not like to share it with anyone outside his own agency.
The “most secret” cable to Khartoum was sent on May 25. It said that the Sudanese forces should organize a search and try to capture the enemy unit. By then, Eppler and Sandy were staying at the Pension Nadia; Almasy was crossing back through Gilf Kebir on his way to Jalo. Several days later, an RAF pilot left Cairo for Khartoum in a small reconnaissance plane. His assignment was to help comb the desert for an Axis intelligence group.30
THE AXIS COLUMNS rolled forward just where Auchinleck had expected: on the coastal road toward Tobruk, and further south at the center of the British line stretching into the desert. It was the afternoon of May 26.
Those were feints.
The British had laid down one million landmines along their front; they had dug into the rocks. But it was impossible to build fortifications all the way across the desert when, as Ralph Bagnold had written, it was an emptiness as large as India.31 Their line ended, and beyond that was open country.
The moon was two-thirds full that night. To the south, past Bir Hakeim, beyond the far end of the British line, Rommel rode forward at the front of his tanks and the columns of trucks carrying men and supplies. Rather than batter his way through the British wall, he’d again chosen to go around. The tactic was a gamble; it created a long, vulnerable supply route. But in the morning, the weight of his army was plunging northward behind the British line.32
“The British were completely surprised,” Lieutenant Colonel James Fry reported from the desert. Bonner Fellers’s assistant attaché said British officers told him they had less than half an hour’s warning before their units came under fire. “As a result the Third Indian Brigade was practically destroyed, the Seventh Armored Division… was completely overrun, and the Fourth Armored Brigade lost 50% of its tanks.”33
Rommel also slammed into surprises. He had never faced Grants before. Even for a tank, the machine was ugly—lopsided, too tall, too visible. The US Army had wanted a 75-mm gun able to shoot armor-piercing shells at long range, but American factories weren’t ready to build a turret for a gun that big, so the gun was stuck on a platform on the right front of the hull, and the whole tank had to turn toward the target. On top, off center, was a rotating turret with a smaller gun. Seen from the front, the Grant resembled a cubist sculpture in steel of a rhinoceros, with its menacing big horn and the smaller horn above it. But it was fast and deadly.
“Our plan to overrun the British forces behind the Gazala line had not succeeded,” Rommel wrote of the battle’s first day. “The principal cause was our underestimate of the strength of the British armored divisions. The advent of the new American tank had torn great holes in our ranks.” What prevented a rout, Rommel would write, was that General Ritchie, commander of the Eighth Army, sent his tank units into battle in small numbers, never in a united action. That prevented them from overwhelming Rommel’s reduced forces.
Meanwhile, the Free French ranged out from Bir Hakeim, attacking his truck convoys. Rommel’s main forces, including his surviving tanks, were on the east of the British min
efields. His stores of fuel and ammunition were on the west side. In the first day’s confusion, Rommel got separated from most of his own staff. By the second day of fighting, his immediate goal was to open a supply route.34
On the fourth day, the Axis forces had opened two gaps in the minefields. So Ritchie wrote in his daily situation report, sent in cipher to Auchinleck. “Seems definite,” the Eighth Army commander added, “that enemy intends withdrawing west through these gaps.”
He was mistaken. Rommel intended to widen the gaps, bring fuel and ammunition through them, and keep fighting.35
In the midst of this chaos, British troops captured two Germans in a van with an antenna north of Bir Hakeim on May 27. One of the men was Waldemar Weber, the wireless operator assigned to relay Eppler and Sandy’s messages as part of Operation Condor. The other man was his driver. The two had apparently gotten separated from Rommel’s staff.
Before he was taken prisoner, Weber managed to discard his notebook, two letters, and the plan for a communications network listing six wireless addresses. They included his own, as well as “Salam” for Almasy and “Condor” for Eppler and Sandstede. The letters, from the German consul in Tripoli, were to be sent by radio to Almasy. A Long Range Desert Group patrol found Weber’s papers a couple days later.
The LRDG patrol returned to its base at Kufra oasis a week later with the papers of the enemy communications net. Weber and his driver, though identified as Abwehr men, were held for three weeks before they were interrogated.36 The puzzle pieces were too scattered to create a picture of what Almasy was up to. In Sudan, the search for him continued.
The arrangements for Operation Condor had assigned Weber alone to answering Sandy and Eppler.37 By the time they rented their flat, there was no one in the desert to respond to Condor’s call letters from Cairo.
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