A more accurate assessment of Farouk’s mood came from a longtime friend of his late father, who told Lampson that he’d met the king and found him “extremely frightened.” Farouk wanted to hold onto his throne and could not make up his mind whether that meant leaving with the British if they left Cairo, or staying under Axis occupation. His way of coping was to dine at Shepheard’s Hotel with one of his Italian cronies and throw parties from eleven at night to four in the morning at his country estate.39
“WE CAN’T GIVE the invader a pretext to annihilate us,” Werner Senator insisted. Senator was speaking at an emergency meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, the top Zionist body in Palestine. A Hebrew University administrator and a man of moderate politics, he was arguing against engaging in partisan warfare if the Axis conquered the country. Moshe Haim Shapiro, a religious Zionist leader, backed him up. “If someone told us that an invasion of the Land of Israel means annihilation of the Jewish community,” he said, then it would make sense to say, “Let me die with the Philistines”—that is, emulate the biblical Samson, who chose death in order to kill his enemies. But, Shapiro said, “if there is another possibility, of living in a ghetto in the Land of Israel, then there’s hope, albeit meager… that some will survive.” Like the anonymous editor at the New York Times, it seems, Shapiro did not believe the news item that the Nazis were exterminating Jews.
Another member of the executive, Yitzhak Gruenbaum, answered with fierce despair. “If the Germans in Poland had met violent resistance from Jews, our situation there wouldn’t be worse, because it couldn’t possibly be worse than it is now,” he said. “There’s no hope of saving any of what we’ve created from the German invader, if he conquers this land… At least we can make sure to leave a legend of Masada after us.”40
High Commissioner MacMichael had a guest for a night in Jerusalem, Hermione Ranfurly wrote in her diary. General Henry Maitland Wilson, commander of the Ninth Army in Syria and Palestine, was returning from the Sinai to Beirut. He’d received orders to prepare defenses facing south, in case Rommel pushed past the Suez Canal. Until now, he had steadfastly maintained that the danger of a Nazi invasion came from the north.41 (At the beginning of the war, as head of the British forces in Egypt, Wilson had already demonstrated his blinkered vision by berating the division commander who left Mersa Matruh to reconnoiter the desert with Ralph Bagnold.)
The Palmah deployed two companies to kibbutzim in southern Palestine to face the invasion. They had no guns. The weapons with which they’d trained at Mishmar Ha’emek belonged to the British. After a week and a half, rifles arrived from the Haganah militia’s illegal stores. The deployment was a tragic gesture. Two companies of briefly trained irregulars were not going to stop the Panzer Army. They were there to die and leave a legend.42
EXCEPT FOR THE eager Australians, Auchinleck’s army consisted of battered divisions that had retreated from Libya. The New Zealanders were exceptions only in that they’d been battered at Mersa Matruh inside Egypt. One of Auchinleck’s successes was getting artillery units to focus their fire to block enemy attacks and support his own infantry. (Each of his successes underlined his error in waiting so long to relieve Ritchie and take over in the field himself.) And yet, having lost vast ammunition dumps everywhere from Bir Hakeim back to Mersa Matruh, Auchinleck was using up his artillery shells before new supplies could arrive by sea.43
Auchinleck knew that his enemy was in worse shape. A precise stream of deciphered Italian naval messages on Mediterranean convoys allowed the RAF to target tankers bringing fuel to Africa. Deciphered Enigma messages revealed that Rommel needed reinforcements to be brought quickly, by air. But aircraft fuel was so scarce in Axis-held Africa—so said a Luftwaffe supply message decoded in Hut 6—that transport planes bringing troops had to land at Tobruk, a short enough hop from Crete that they could return without refueling. The Luftwaffe was short on escort planes to protect the troop planes, said another deciphered message. From Tobruk, trucks had to bring the soldiers hundreds of miles to El Alamein. Trucks were in short supply, so men got stuck in Libya. Airplane fuel wasn’t the only kind desperately needed. Tanks and trucks also had to run on something. The Panzer Army’s “most urgent need is fuel and ammunition,” said yet another decoded message.44
Auchinleck knew as well that Rommel intended to send what remained of three of his divisions on July 7 to overrun the New Zealanders’ position at Bab el Qattara, the Gate of Qattara, on the southern end of the front. The New Zealand division quietly pulled out. Rommel spent three days—and badly needed fuel and ammunition—capturing the empty fortifications at Bab el Qattara.
Rommel had left weaker Italian forces to hold the line near the sea. Auchinleck knew this too. In the predawn darkness of July 10, the Australians attacked on the coast. Rommel was twenty miles away in the desert. He found out about the Australian attack from the roar of artillery that carried across the sands and yanked him from his sleep.
With first light, a brigade of Australians pushing forward on a rise of white sand spotted a clump of trucks and antennae. As the Australians closed in, they came under machine-gun fire. When they got close enough, they realized the enemy gunners were German, not Italian. After an hour and a half of fighting, the Australians had seventy-three prisoners, including the wounded commander, Captain Alfred Seebohm.
No advanced intelligence had revealed that the forward sections of Strategical Intercept Company 621 would be in that spot or that Seebohm himself would be visiting that day. The capture of the unit was a gift of fortune.
The men themselves, “well trained, intelligent… of strong Nazi conviction and full of German propaganda cliches,” revealed very little under interrogation, except that Seebohm was the “pivot on which the whole company turned.” The deputy commander, not yet digesting that he would not soon see his superiors, feared that he and Seebohm would be court-martialed for deploying the intercept team where it had only Italian infantry to protect it. Seebohm himself died before he could be questioned.
The stacks of documents in the trucks, on the other hand, revealed that Company 621 knew the British code for map locations and the radio call signs for Eighth Army units. It possessed a wealth of captured British codebooks. Often it did not need to decode anything because British officers communicated freely in plain language. On the other hand, the Urdu spoken by Indian officers and the Afrikaans of the South Africans might as well have been unbreakable ciphers. None of Seebohm’s men knew those languages.
Seebohm’s personal papers included his unit’s monthly reports. In one, the anonymous author examined intercepted messages for evidence of British intelligence successes. Without knowing her name, he had tried to emulate Margaret Storey. Seebohm’s man concluded confidently that the British had not broken Enigma.
A German intelligence document written later in the war said that the capture of Company 621 was “for us the equivalent of a lost battle.” It took months to replace Seebohm and the men he’d trained. In the meantime, according to the Italian intelligence chief in North Africa, battlefield intelligence was “very poor.”45
THROUGHOUT MAY AND June, Rommel could see the Eighth Army’s plans, positions, and perceptions, its strengths and weaknesses. He had two good eyes. Just as he burst into Egypt, Rommel lost one eye, the stronger one. The last thing he’d seen with that eye was a vision of conquering the Nile and then the entire Middle East.
In those same weeks, with each new success at reading Enigma keys, the cataracts were removed from the eyes of the British.
Before the battle began at El Alamein, another battle had nearly been decided. The struggle began with Rejewski, Turing, and Welchman; it continued with Herivel and his brainstorm about the psyche of the tired Enigma clerk, with Reg Parker and his patient expectation of repeated keys, with Storey and Dudley-Smith’s sifting of clues. They had defeated whoever it was, as yet unknown, who had given Rommel his secrets.
This victory was not enough, by itself, to save Cairo and Suez
, Jerusalem and Damascus from the fate of Warsaw and Paris. Men from Punjab, from New Zealand sheep farms and Welsh mines still had to fight in the desert. They could not know that there were phantoms on the field with them, that a struggle of minds came before the struggle with steel.
With the capture of Strategical Intercept Company 621, Rommel lost his other eye. His knowledge of the enemy was now even weaker than his supply lines.
If the myths of secret agents were true, if Rommel had only had a spy in Cairo, if the Abwehr had planted someone there years before who’d recruited a clerk or a cleaner at General Headquarters or even at the American office on El Nabatat Street to steal documents, then he might still have seen into the mind of his enemy.
Instead, Rommel had Eppler and Sandstede. They were busy gathering information about the cabarets of Cairo.
VICTOR HAUER, BORN in Vienna, was thirty-seven. Before the war he had worked at the Austrian embassy, then at the German embassy in Cairo. When other German men in Egypt were interned, he managed to stay free by getting a job at the Swedish embassy, handling the interests of German internees and their families.46
One day in July 1942, a young Egyptian friend named Hassan Gaafar showed up at Hauer’s office and asked if he’d be willing to help two German spies. They spoke in German; it was Hassan’s mother’s language.
A couple weeks before, Hassan had received a brief note telling him, “Meet me at the Americaine Bar.” He’d recognized the handwriting of his older half brother, Hussein Gaafar, alias Johann Eppler. From then on, he’d say afterward, he was so excited at his brother’s return, he didn’t think about the meaning of what he was doing.
Hauer agreed to help the spies. Late that night, as Hassan instructed him, he came to Madame Bardia’s casino. The next stop was Eppler and Sandy’s houseboat. The spies provided whiskey and told Hauer that they had “been directing Rommel’s advance” with information they’d gained from inebriated British officers and from agents they’d placed in Suez and Port Said. But their transmitter had stopped working, they said, and Rommel might think they’d been caught. Eppler was good at telling stories. This one sounded better than saying that the transmitter had never seemed to work, or that they had managed to run through most of £3,600 in a month and a half and wanted more money. Hauer had a solution: in a complicated rendezvous, he delivered an American wireless transmitter that German diplomats had stored in the basement of the Swedish embassy.
At their next meeting, Eppler told Hauer that they couldn’t get the American transmitter to work. The last orders he’d received before his own radio failed, Eppler said, were to report to Rommel’s headquarters, and then to the Führer. (Eppler told Hauer more stories: that his money had been delivered by parachute, that ten German would-be spies had been shot one night while trying to parachute into Egypt, that the German navy now had submarines powered by bottles of a lightweight atomic fuel.)
Hauer again had a solution. He’d just met a Viennese doctor married to an Egyptian. Now called Fatma Ammar, she wanted to help Germany, and knew Egyptian officers with the same goal. Hauer took Eppler to her house. From there, a “tall, dark, young Egyptian” took him to meet an Egyptian pilot in a nearby coffee shop. When Eppler returned to her house, another guest was there: Aziz el-Masri. They talked deep into the night. The deposed Egyptian chief of staff, who as a young man had taken a surname that meant “the Egyptian,” explained that he “was an Aryan, a Circassian, and talked about the great future of the Aryan races” and his plans for “his country, Egypt, after the final German victory.”
On the night of July 23, at 9:30, a dark brown car pulled up at a bus stop on the road to Heliopolis. Eppler, who’d been told to wait there, got in. Masri was driving. With him was the pilot, whose name was Hassan Ezzet, and a signals officer introduced as Anwar. They wanted proof that Eppler was really a German agent. Ezzet explained that “his man,” a pilot named Seoudi, had taken a plane and flown to German lines earlier in the month, but they hadn’t heard from him. Seoudi had carried a letter of introduction from Masri and aerial photos of targets for the Luftwaffe, Ezzet said.
To try to prove his bona fides, Eppler took Ezzet and Anwar back to the houseboat at midnight to meet Sandy. Anwar took a look at the American wireless set they’d received from Hauer, and talked them out of tossing it in the Nile as a piece of junk. In the morning, he came again, and took the wireless to see if he could get it working. He left a phone number and his first name. He did not write his full name: Anwar al-Sadat.
At 5 a.m. the next day Egyptian police arrived at the houseboat. With them were soldiers from Field Security, a relatively visible intelligence unit responsible for preventing subversion and sabotage in occupied areas. Eppler and Sandstede’s inept espionage career was over.
The other suspects, including Ezzet, Masri, and Sadat, were rounded up afterward. Masri was last. In Sadat’s possession police found a diary that indicated he’d been sending information to the enemy. When Ambassador Lampson received a report of this, he wrote at the bottom, “I hope that man will be shot… Please let me know what is done with him.”47
There are three accounts of how Eppler and Sandstede were captured. The first, published in several variations, says that they paid for everything from groceries to girls with British banknotes, the larger ones counterfeit. Major Alfred Sansom, the head of Field Security in Cairo, the typecast shrewd and debonair spy hunter, followed the trail of their cash. When a German “mobile field radio monitoring unit” was captured in the desert, a British intelligence agent noticed that two soldiers who spoke no English had a copy of Rebecca in English. The final clue came from a French cabaret dancer named Natalie, or perhaps Yvette, actually a Jew from Palestine working underground for the Jewish Agency, who slept with Eppler “to serve my cause” and found a copy of Rebecca on the houseboat—or perhaps Eppler was given away by his Jewish girlfriend Edith, who was working for both the tiny Jewish extremist group that the British called the Stern Gang and for Sansom’s Field Security. This story contains several facts, some misunderstandings and anachronisms, and quite a bit of what can most kindly be considered mistaken memory. It became part of the Operation Condor myth.48
The second account is in Lampson’s files, and comes from Colonel G. J. Jenkins, the district security officer, which is to say the MI5 chief, in Cairo. Informing the British embassy of the arrests, Jenkins said he had been working on the case “for months.” To Lampson, he could not explain that the first clues came from intercepted Abwehr messages about Laszlo Almasy operating near Gilf Kebir. The breakthrough, Jenkins told the embassy soon afterward, came with the arrest of an escaped German internee, who gave a statement about Hauer knowing of something suspicious at a particular houseboat. Arrests followed. Hauer had “unfortunately” vanished, Jenkins told Lampson.49
The third account is in Jenkins’s letter to MI5 director David Petrie and in a pair of interrogation reports Jenkins sent to London. When Hassan Gaafar asked for help, Hauer had decided to “safeguard himself” whichever way the war went, and began “playing the double agent.” He went to talk to a German Jewish gynecologist, Dr. Radinger, whom he knew to be an agent for British intelligence. Radinger told him to meet the spies but to keep reporting back.
Jenkins concluded that Hauer knew more than he was telling the doctor. But MI5 did not have authority to arrest people, and Jenkins was not ready to involve Egyptian authorities. As he calmly informed Petrie, “I therefore decided to kidnap Hauer.”
“Picked up on coming out of the Metro Cinema at 11:45 p.m.” on July 21, Hauer was soon in a cell at SIME’s interrogation center for POWs. He “was made to understand that his reprieve from shooting” depended on telling what he knew, after which his surname would become Muller and his identity that of a German prisoner of war. He talked and was sent to a POW camp in Palestine.
“Both my own police and the Egyptians are still hunting for Hauer, whose disappearance was reported by the Swedish legation,” Jenkins concluded.5
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Sadat and Ezzet were not shot. Rather than being court-martialed, they were dismissed from the Egyptian military and interned for the rest of the war, as was Masri. Abbas Halim, the Egyptian prince whose name had been given to Eppler as a contact, was placed under house arrest away from Cairo, as were two other prominent pro-Axis royals.51 By breaking up Operation Condor, MI5’s Jenkins had not denied Rommel any intelligence, since the spies were providing none.
But the end of Condor completed the British victory in the covert political battle in Egypt: it removed the mentor and two leaders of the pro-Axis junior officers, crippling subversion in the army, and it sidelined more pro-Axis aristocrats, increasing Farouk’s isolation.
To avoid turning Eppler and Sandy over to Egyptian authorities, they were treated as prisoners of war. To get more information out of them, they were moved from a cell to a tent at the interrogation center. They did not believe that a tent could be bugged. They were mistaken; a microphone had been inserted in the tent pole. The transcript of their conversations includes Eppler saying to Sandstede that he hoped their girlfriends Edith and Sandra would be quickly released.
“Those poor girls did not know anything about us and they never did anything wrong,” Eppler said. The two women were in fact released. Had Eppler been a more successful spy, his Jewish girlfriend’s fate might have been different.52
WALTHER RAUFF’S EINSATSKOMMANDO Egypt received its official orders for “executive measures against the civilian population” on July 13. Now an SS obersturmbannführer, a lieutenant colonel, Rauff commanded twenty-three men. At least four of the six other officers had joined the Nazi Party before it came to power, a badge of ideological fervor. Hans-Joachim Weise, Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s former liaison officer, and Wilhelm Beisner were SS experts on the Middle East.
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