War of Shadows

by Gershom Gorenberg

  An American intelligence officer visiting Bletchley Park a year after these events had a different explanation: a radiogram to Cairo gave the order to change the code as of June 17. “But for some incomprehensible reason,” RCA, the commercial radio firm, “failed to send the message.”14

  There was no scheming traitor in Washington or Cairo. The treachery was carelessness.

  In the week that slip of paper with the text for Cairo allegedly sat in the RCA office, Tobruk fell and thirty-five thousand men were taken prisoner.15 In that week, Rommel learned from a source hitherto absolutely reliable that this was the moment to conquer the Nile Delta, and he seized the moment. And then the source went silent—this time, never to resume.

  A DOZEN PLANES landed at Derna. The last one crashed coming in. A single passenger was killed—Mussolini’s barber, who had been brought to shave him each morning.

  Waiting to enter Egypt as its new Roman emperor, the dictator stayed in the Green Mountains, at the town of Beda Littoria. His presence was a secret, so all the Italian war correspondents knew. Sandbags surrounded his villa, and soldiers set up a checkpoint on the main road outside. One day they stopped two trucks carrying British prisoners. Mussolini, with a tommy gun hanging from his shoulder, came out to look and to talk to the guards. “You must hate the enemy,” he told them. “Be on the lookout and shoot at the first sign of revolt.”16

  Hatred came in different degrees. The Italian army segregated POWs. Indian and South African black soldiers were kept in worse camps and got less food than white prisoners.17 Even greater hatred was reserved for Italy’s Libyan Jewish subjects. By the end of June, the regime had trucked most of Cyrenaica’s Jews to the camp at Giado. Men in the camp were subject to forced labor that included carrying rocks or bags of gravel back and forth. The prisoners understood that the only purpose of the Sisyphean task was to degrade them. When some of the inmates worked up the courage to complain about the lack of food, the camp authorities told them, “The purpose of bringing you here is not to feed you but to starve you to death.”18

  From a Nazi perspective, the Italians were dilettantes.

  On June 30, an item appeared in the New York Times under the headline “1,000,000 Jews Slain by Nazis, Report Says.” It described this as something that World Jewish Congress spokesmen had “charged” at a London press conference. They cited the underground information smuggled out to Poland’s government-in-exile, which said that seven hundred thousand Jews had been murdered in that country. To that they added the slaughter of Jews in Romania, Nazi-occupied Russia, and elsewhere in Europe. The Times story did not include such details as the murder of thirty-five thousand Jews in Lodz in gas vans. The article was six paragraphs long, on page seven of the paper. One had to be cautious in reporting such things; they might be propaganda or rumor.19

  The next day, Walter Schellenberg, head of the SS foreign intelligence service, met SS chief Heinrich Himmler to lay out his completed proposal for Egypt. The same afternoon, Himmler met with Hitler and got approval to attach Walther Rauff’s Einsatzkommando to Rommel’s army. The engineer of the gas vans could get to work as soon as Rommel conquered Egypt.20

  TO THE NORTH of the railway stop at El Alamein, a couple hundred yards away, was blue sea. If you looked to the east, west, or south, you saw a flat land of yellow-brown sand and scattered dots of scrub in a shade closer to gray than green. Sometimes the wind caught sand and threw it upward in careless beige brushstrokes. The battle map showed the ground rising to hilltops a hundred feet higher than the sea. The slopes were gentle; an old man carrying a load wouldn’t have been tired by them. Inland were two ridges running east to west, wrinkles in the land. The southern one was Ruweisat Ridge.

  Axis commanders expected to pass through quickly. “When the Nile Delta is reached,” the Panzer Army’s chief medical officer told his subordinates on June 30, they needed to take precautions against smallpox and plague, and to prevent soldiers from drinking unboiled water or buying ice cream from street vendors. Kesselring wrote that there was “evidence of sympathy for Rommel” in Egypt, which “would come over to the German side” if propaganda was skillfully handled. Rommel’s orders at noon on July 1 assigned units to “mop up” the British strongpoint on the coast at El Alamein, to open the road to Alexandria, and to “pursue [the] British to the east.”21

  Hut 6 relayed a translation of those orders to the Eighth Army’s field headquarters. When Auchinleck read them later in the day, the tired general had reason to smile for a moment.

  In Rommel’s plan, two Panzer Army tank divisions were supposed to speed between British positions and cross Ruweisat Ridge, then encircle the British from behind. When they started up the ridge, artillery shells rained down on them. The shells were fired by an Indian brigade that had just arrived from Persia. The Indians were inexperienced, short of ammunition—and a complete surprise to the Germans, who spent the day dislodging them. At dusk, white-turbaned Sikh soldiers retreated. But the German divisions were stuck on the ridge, their advance blocked.

  A German infantry division was supposed to pass north of the ridge, closer to El Alamein, and turn toward the coast. The plan did not account for a South African division, whose presence and very existence was unknown to Rommel. The South Africans opened up with “machine guns, anti-tank guns, mortars and artillery.” Some of the German infantrymen turned and ran.22

  Rommel had stuck his fists into a thornbush and they were caught.

  A Luftwaffe liaison officer with the army begged the German air force overnight for fighter protection of a division hammered by RAF bombers. Another liaison officer conveyed an urgent early-morning request from Rommel to bomb the El Alamein strongpoint “as progress there is difficult.” A Luftwaffe commander replied that sandstorms made this impossible. “Enemy resisted obstinately with artillery and tanks,” a liaison officer reported in the Scorpion key at the end of the second day. “No movements of retreat observed,” another German air force man radioed.

  Auchinleck received these unintended words of encouragement within hours. The messages from German supply networks could take a bit longer. They told of truck shortages, of the Italian high command demanding the return of one hundred trucks lent to the Luftwaffe, of a German armored division that had “water for two days, food for one day.” From his own army, he knew that artillery units were at last coordinating their fire, concentrating on one point instead of fighting separately.23

  On the third night, Rommel admitted to the German high command that “the strength of the enemy, our own decreasing fighting strength and the most precarious supply situation, compel us to discontinue our major attack for the time being.” Rommel’s gamble had presumed that the Eighth Army would indeed crumble, that taking Alexandria would give him a new port, that the quick conquest of the Levant would eliminate the threat from RAF bases there and make shipping to Alexandria safe. Instead, a planned convoy to bring Italian reinforcements via Alexandria was shelved.

  The battle wasn’t over. Auchinleck needed fresh forces to hold on and push back. Rommel needed more fuel than he had to retreat to Libya. His only direction toward sufficient supplies was forward.24

  ANYWHERE BEYOND THE desert, the details of the battle were lost. Rommel was delayed, as a train might be. He would still arrive. “At the High Command in Rome they are optimistic, and convinced that the lull is altogether temporary,” Ciano told his diary.25

  “Arabs, receive the good news and spread it throughout Arabian lands,” Germany’s Arabic-language station broadcast on the morning of July 3. “In this solemn moment, when Axis forces are advancing victoriously into Egypt, the governments of the Reich and Italy declare Egypt independent… These Axis war activities in the Near East are carried out for the sole purpose of freeing the Arabs from the British rule. The Axis policy towards Egypt is one and only one, namely: Egypt for the Egyptians.”26 Two months earlier, Rashid Ali al-Gailani and Hajj Amin el-Husseini, the exiled pretenders to Iraqi and Palestinian Arab leadershi
p, had begged for such a declaration. Hitler and Mussolini had decided against it, for fear that it would not inspire Arab insurrections against British rule, and Axis claims to wide Arab support would look empty. Now they decided the odds were in their favor. Rommel’s victories would inspire a rebellion in Egypt, in turn speeding his conquest of the Nile.

  The Japanese ambassador in Berlin met with Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. Germany’s just-launched offensive in the Soviet Union included a thrust southeast. Once Stalingrad fell, the way would be open to cross the Caucasus into Persia. With Russia defeated, “while Rommel on the other side is pressing forward through Egypt into the Near East, then the war will have been won,” Ribbentrop said. “In the last four weeks we have come closer to this goal than the German leadership, even in its greatest optimism, could ever have hoped to achieve.”27

  In Alexandria, you could “hear the endless firing of guns all day and night,” a Greek woman wrote to a friend in England, in a letter stopped by the censor. Her Italian neighbor “was singing at the top of her lungs and whenever I heard her I felt I could murder her.”28 The Turkish ambassador in Cairo cabled Ankara. “The number of Egyptian Jews who desire… visas for Turkey is increasing every day,” he said, and asked how he should respond.29

  On the road from the coast of Palestine to the pass at Megiddo, a team of Palmah fighters scouted where to place explosives to block the expected Axis advance from the south. A long line of trucks came from the opposite direction. They carried the men of the Ninth Australian Division from Syria. A truck stopped. To the Jewish fighters, the men who climbed out “to drink beer and piss” looked like happy giants.

  “Why do you look so sad?” an Australian asked the Jews, as one of the latter would recall many years later.

  “Rommel is coming,” a Jew answered.

  “Wait for the news,” an Australian said. They climbed back into their truck and headed toward El Alamein.30

  TWO THOUSAND MILES from the sandstorms of El Alamein, in a sunless room with a nicotine-stained ceiling, Margaret Storey wrote up her listing of enemy intelligence for the first days of July.

  For her very select group of readers, the report had welcome news, conveyed by silence. The Good Source in Cairo had vanished. He had appeared two months earlier. His reports, each containing a splinter of a hint of who he was, had piled up on her desk, next to the ashtray full of her cigarette butts, until Good Source became a name. At first, she’d listed him as an Axis agent. As the fragments of clues began fitting together, the source had shifted shape: not one man but several, in Cairo and Washington; not traitors, but using a compromised code. Now, despite the lethargy and disbelief in Washington, the source had been eliminated.31

  Still, Storey and Russell Dudley-Smith could not close the Bluebird file. They had no idea of how the Germans had acquired the Americans’ code.

  THE FIRST MEMO about sharing information with the United States had passed between British staff officers at General Headquarters Middle East in January 1942. “We ought to tighten things up now that the Americans are in the war,” it said. Rules were needed about what secrets could be shared. Orders from London said that “future operations should be divulged… to Americans only when their cooperation is required.” Complicating matters, General Maxwell was the highest-ranking US officer in Cairo, but he was a logistics man, not a combat officer. Fellers seemed to represent George Marshall, the US Army chief of staff, the American who mattered. The memo sat on desks for months before anyone took action.

  Bonner Fellers, meanwhile, sent unhappy cables to Washington, saying he had to depend on friendships to get information because the War Department hadn’t named him liaison to the British command. Indirectly, this was testimony to how many friendships he had developed.

  When, at last, he officially got the title of liaison officer, a British lieutenant colonel wrote up orders on what Fellers could be told. The American was not to get secrets such as the dates of planned operations, or the location of forces to be used. A short list of officers could give him information. Auchinleck personally had to approve telling him how many tanks, in what condition, British forces had. Air Marshal Tedder had to sign off on telling him how many planes the RAF could get in the air. The final version went out to General Ritchie at his Eighth Army battle headquarters in the desert and to other top officers in mid-May.32

  And then, it appears, everyone went right on talking to the congenial American. Someone, for instance, told him that commandos were about to attack Axis airbases in Libya and the Aegean. In his radiograms, Fellers assiduously went on demonstrating that he knew just what was happening on the battlefield, and even what would happen.

  Now, at the beginning of July, Fellers added another title to his list of jobs. Maxwell’s supply mission had just been upgraded to the US Army Forces in the Middle East. Fellers became the acting chief of staff. And then, very quickly, Maxwell decided that Fellers should go home. “Due to unfortunate disclosures, Colonel Fellers finds it most difficult, if not impossible, to gain access” to useful information from the British, Maxwell reported to the War Department.33

  Orders followed for Fellers to fly to Washington “for temporary duty,” after which he’d return to Cairo. Whether he knew it or not when he boarded a military plane southward for the first leg of his long journey, the temporary duty would be permanent.34

  Before leaving, he had an uncomfortable meeting with his direct commander. Colonel Louis Compton, head of the British Empire Section in US military intelligence, had been sent to the Middle East to report on the political mood in the shadow of Rommel’s advance. At British military offices, he met a mix of suspicion, hostility, and silence. “With difficulty,” he got permission to visit Auchinleck’s battle headquarters. He asked to go to the front and got turned down.35

  Compton gave Fellers disturbing news. “Some time during the spring someone, either the British or the German, or both, cracked our secret code, and the British were getting all my complementary messages which were coming to Washington,” Fellers wrote to his former chief code clerk, Marie Broach, who’d just returned to America.

  Compton was investigating the leak, and Fellers wanted Broach to send a statement about how strict security had been—for instance, that “the cipher table [and] the code books were kept in separate safes” and that when one clerk married an RAF sergeant, she was switched to different work. “Beyond a doubt, the code was either lifted in Maxwell’s office or cracked by intercept radio,” Fellers wrote.36

  He was right about this much: he’d become persona non grata in Cairo because of the content of his cables—not because of the leak itself. The Germans had read Maxwell’s radiograms, but he did not have to go home. They’d read Marshall’s cables to both men. Fellers’s messages, though, revealed not just his “complementary” views but also his unsettling success at learning British plans, which he’d sent to Washington even before operations were carried out.

  Fellers’s assignment as attaché in Cairo was constructed out of contradictions: he was an overt spy, gathering intelligence for an ally. He’d been very successful at it. He’d had no idea that he’d been turned into an Axis spy as well, and no idea how it happened.

  Fellers was mistaken about the British cracking his code. They’d accidentally spied on his spying by cracking Enigma. His insinuation about his rival and friend Maxwell was also wrong: Maxwell had not left the codebooks unprotected, allowing someone to steal them. As for Compton, nothing he could learn in Cairo explained the gaping breach in US cipher security.

  “EGYPTIAN POPULATION HAS remained surprisingly steady. Curious feature has been almost complete absence of Egyptian fifth column.” So Colonel Maunsell of SIME and another intelligence officer responsible for Arab affairs, Iltyd Clayton, reported to their superiors in London. Prime Minister Nahas helped maintain that calm by arresting “over 300 undesirables… since the German advance” and shutting the Royal Automobile Club, a “centre of well-to-do enemy sympathisers,” acco
rding to SIME. Ali Maher, the pro-Axis former prime minister, had been under house arrest since March.

  “Many Egyptian elements previously hostile have offered cooperation and support,” Maunsell and Clayton added. “Azzam for example has spoken out most openly for us and against Axis.”37 Fellers was likely less surprised at Abdul Rahman Azzam’s behavior. He knew that his Egyptian friend hated the Axis even more than he wanted to be rid of the British.

  Mussolini and Hitler had lost their bet: Rommel reaching El Alamein did not set off an insurrection in Egypt. The day after Clayton and Maunsell sent their cable, though, an Egyptian air force officer took off for a training flight and did not return. The next day, another pilot vanished with his plane. Evidence accumulated that both had headed east, toward Axis-held territory. At least one was trying to deliver the offer of Egyptian junior officers to support the Axis. The Axis promise of independence had not even reassured the rebellious young officers; they believed they needed to provide a quid pro quo to avoid Italian rule.

  In Anwar al-Sadat’s telling, the Germans shot down one of the British-made planes and killed the pilot. Germany’s Arabic-language radio, on the other hand, claimed that three (not two) Egyptian pilots had successfully defected to the Axis. Erwin Ettel, the SS colonel and former German ambassador to Iran, told Ribbentrop that King Farouk had claimed credit for sending the airmen “with plans and maps for Rommel” as proof of the king’s “readiness to work with the Axis.”38

  Ettel’s report would eventually fall into British hands, to Farouk’s embarrassment. It was almost certainly false. The junior officers had a prominent mentor, but it was not the king. They’d lost faith in him in February, when he surrendered to Lampson.