by Nigel West
V. If as a result of the previous questions it is discovered that the courier is a ‘principal’ recruited in enemy territory for his task he will be asked how he was to report to his employers that his task had been completed, or by wireless it must be ascertained exactly where the wireless apparatus is and who besides the courier is aware, in Egypt, of its existence.
Frustratingly, with all these arrangements having been made, the Abwehr failed to send the promised courier. The dilemma for SIME was how to interpret the enemy’s apparent reluctance to place their own personnel in jeopardy by undertaking the hazardous mission to Cairo. Was the adversary suspicious of CHEESE? Was the entire network compromised to the point that the Abwehr was now playing with SIME? If so, the implications for strategic deception were immense as the channel had developed into the Allies’ main method of deceiving Berlin.
CHAPTER THREE
ROMMEL’S INTELLIGENCE
Rommel’s arrival in Cyrenaica in February 1941 went unnoticed by the British because, at that stage in the war, CBME had access to some Luftwaffe Enigma traffic, but no Middle East Wehrmacht keys had been solved yet, and would remain opaque for another seven months. Nevertheless, the individual circuits dedicated to Afrika Korps administrative communications were identified as early as March 1941 and designated BULLFINCH, a channel accompanied by CHAFFINCH, for operational traffic, and PHOENIX, which was used exclusively by the Panzerarmee Afrika. These signals provided the very first indication of the deployment of German forces to Tripolitania, and they terminated at 0800 on 12 May 1943 after a series of poignant farewell signals, marking the surrender, and referred to within the network as KLARTEXT.
Initially designated ‘AF5’ and then LINNET in March and April 1941, CHAFFINCH included circuits connecting Rome and Berlin to Libya and Sicily. Whereas the latter were high-power static stations, the other sites tended to be low powered and mobile. Later in August 1941, a further network, linking Rome to Benghazi and Tripoli, were detected and monitored.
US military attachés based at embassies and legations in foreign countries were equipped with a cipher system known as the Black Code, a copy of which fell into the hands of the Italian Servizio Informazioni Militare (SIM) in August when the office of the military attaché in Rome, Colonel Norman Fiske, was burgled. The incident only became known when the diaries of Mussolini’s foreign minister, Count Ciano, were published, causing acute embarrassment and prompting an investigation. The evidence suggested that SIM had revealed its coup to German codebreakers at the Chiffrierabteilung, who had ensured that all subsequent messages encrypted with the Black Code were intercepted and read.
It was in these circumstances that traffic for the period from October 1940 to August 1942 transmitted by Colonel Bonner F. Fellers, the US military attaché in Cairo, was read instantly by the Afrika Korps. Although not yet in the war, the Americans had been granted privileged access to British planning, and Fellers was a regular attendee at the staff conferences addressed by General Claude Auchinleck. His reports of these meetings formed the basis of a daily dispatch to Washington which Rommel found invaluable and came to rely on:
2 June, 1642HRS. Hachiem is still held by the Free French who claim to have destroyed two workshops of the 21st and 15th Armd. Divs. Axis lines of communications are believed by the British to be to be very unstable and General Ritchie is planning to push pursuits. Picture may be changed however by using units of the 1st Armd. Brigade as replacements.
Dispositions of 1 June
Axis Forces: Well covered by artillery and anti-tank guns in the general areas 36–40 and 36–39. Future moves are not apparent. 300 German tanks have been lost according to the British.
British Forces: It is believed that the Southern brigade of the 50th Div. has been completely destroyed. 1st and 7th Armd. Divs. In square 37–42 is the 4th Armd. Brigade with one regiment of the 1st Armd. Brigade. Balance of the 2nd and 22nd Brigades totaling approx. one brigade are in square 37/40. In square 38/40 is the 200th Guards Motor Brigade Exact position of the 7th Motor Brigade is not known but they moved south and west of Bir Hachiem and its car regiment of KGGs was in square U6-5 yesterday. [AQ6] June 4, 0749 HRS. On the night of June 2–3 Germans evacuated Eleut Ettamar, which position was then occupied by British Infantry Battalion, supported by remnant of 4 Armd. Brigade from the east. The position has again been attacked from the north by the German 7th Armd. tanks with unknown results. The main German position in minefields is unchanged.
At Bir Hachiem Free French withstood Italian attack of 2 June. RAF assisted with adequate air support. The 7th Motor Brigade is in a position west and slightly north of Free French. Right flank is being covered by 29th Indian Brigade of the 5th Indian Division. Axis lines of communication are being raided from south by 4th Armd. and from the north by 50th Div. and 3 South African Brigade. The 11th Indian Brigade from the 4th Indian Div. is now at Tobruk and the 10 Indian Div. is moving up in the rear of South African Div.
The detail supplied unwittingly by Fellers gave Rommel a massive advantage and he was quick to grasp the opportunity. Indeed, he became so dependent on what was termed ‘the good source’ that he would delay his own decisions until he had received the daily Cairo decrypts from his liaison officer, Leutnant Wischmann, and expressed his frustration if Fellers’s transmission was unpunctual.
The ‘good source’ was terminated when, at the end of June 1942, a Luftwaffe signal encrypted on a vulnerable Enigma link was itself read and found to contain a reference to a recent British success in locating a particular Luftwaffe headquarters. This suggested a major security leak within the British command, but the ensuing investigation failed to make any progress. However, on 9 July 1942, Australian 9th Division tanks overran an Afrika Korps intercept site on the Tel-el-Eisa plateau manned by Wireless Reconnaissance Unit 621, some 600 metres from the front. All the sixty-nine PoWs, including the commanding officer, Harald Seebohm, and his adjutant, Leutnant Herz, underwent CSDIC’s attention while analysts studied the captured cipher records which proved that the enemy had gained access to the Black Code. Consequently, Fellers was decorated and replaced by a suitably indoctrinated officer, Colonel Sivley. To prevent a repetition, Sivley’s assistant, Captain John Brinton, was instructed to change the new attaché systems and procedures periodically.
This episode would severely handicap Rommel, although the activities of his Y Service would remain a mystery until April 1943 when SCORPION, the codename for the organisation’s Enigma key in the Mediterranean theatre, was finally broken by Allied cryptographers. British understanding of the enemy’s Y Service would be greatly assisted by Herz who agreed to cooperate with his debriefers in Heliopolis, thereby allowing MI8’s Major Tozer to compile a handbook, The German Wireless Intercept Organisation. Herz’s senior officer, Major Seebohm, later died in an Alexandria hospital of his wounds. However, with Rommel ‘denied a vital source of intelligence’ Sir Michael Howard observed ‘from now on CHEESE had the field very much to himself’.
CBME made a critical contribution to the Allied victory in October 1942 at El Alamein, where an Oxford don, Brigadier Edgar (‘Bill’) Williams, acted as General Bernard Montgomery’s chief intelligence adviser and kept him supplied with ULTRA summaries that provided a comprehensive view of General Erwin Rommel’s order-of-battle, future plans, troop strengths, reserves, ammunition stockpiles, and fuel bunkers, together with daily updates of the Afrika Korps’ tank inventory, vehicles under repair, and a tally of recent losses. He even received copies of his adversary’s private medical reports (describing Rommel’s low blood pressure), which were transmitted to Berlin by Rommel’s personal physician, Professor Hans Hörster, then director of the Municipal Rudolf Virchow Hospital in Berlin-Wedding.
Rommel’s attack at what he believed to be a weakness in the Allied lines at El Alamein proved to be one of the great turning points of the entire war. The DAK planned to overwhelm the supposedly thin British defences and sweep triumphantly into Cairo, but ULTRA had given Mo
ntgomery a very precise view of the enemy’s intentions and, by now confident in its accuracy, he had taken the appropriate counter measures. This was a classic, textbook example of how to exploit reliable intelligence, and the scale of the defeat was immense. Its impact was all the greater because Rommel had gambled on capturing enough fuel to sustain his momentum but, in the event, the DAK encountered well-prepared positions and coordinated aerial bombing. Without any petrol reserves, the scheme designed to deliver a swift victory and closure of the canal was transformed into a wholesale rout of historic proportions.
In February 1944 Guy Liddell recoded a slightly different perspective on the battle, attributing an ‘A’ Force deception scheme codenamed FLESHPOTS as having contributed to the Allied success, claiming that Rommel had been influenced by the timely discovery of a misleading map, apparently abandoned in a burned-out armoured vehicle. On 18 February 1944 he dined in London with Montgomery’s chief intelligence officer, Brigadier Bill Williams, who told him that
Monty’s first success at El Alamein was the turning point. The Germans did exactly what he had calculated that they would do. He had encouraged them to make their advance over the soft sand north of the Quatra depression by planting false maps on them. These maps were left in a burned-out tank, and, according to General von Thoma, Erwin Rommel based his action upon them. Had the Germans, instead of turning north, gone straight on, there is no doubt that the 8th Army would have been in very grave difficulties.
The 8th Army’s surprise counter-attack in October, supported by new equipment, proved to be the start of the Akrika Korps’ disastrous withdrawal over 800 miles of poor terrain with no concealment from the Royal Air Force. Convinced he was facing a strong adversary, Rommel led what was left of the DAK men and tanks to an epic defeat.
This kind of comprehensive intelligence picture, a rare phenomenon, enabled Montgomery to exploit his opponent’s weaknesses and mount credible deception campaigns, but the loss of Crete in May 1941 had demonstrated that, however impressive a commander’s knowledge of the enemy’s intentions, there was no substitute for the determined force of arms. Despite the defenders’ overwhelming numerical superiority, with 27,500 British and Empire troops, supported by 14,000 Greeks, General Bernard Freyberg was forced to surrender to an airborne force of less than 16,000. Although 15,000 Allied soldiers were evacuated to Alexandria, some 1,742 were killed, 1,737 wounded, and 11,835 taken prisoner in a humiliating defeat. Yet before and during the German offensive, Freyberg had received ULTRA decrypts that had detailed the enemy’s strategy and identified the precise date of the attack. He also had the benefit of the Australian 4 Special Wireless Section, an eighty-strong component of 101 Special Wireless Company, that provided Freyberg with high-quality tactical intercepts throughout the fighting until the unit was evacuated from Sphakia to Alexandria.
As SIME came to appreciate at an early stage, the Axis espionage network in Cairo essentially boiled down to CHEESE as the sweep of enemy aliens in June 1940 had effectively neutralised whatever preparations had been made by SIM. It would not be until May 1942 that the Abwehr attempted to infiltrate a new spy, Johannes Eppler, codenamed KONDOR, into Cairo, taking an epic overland route across the desert from Libya.
Alias Husein Gafaar, Eppler had been born in Egypt and his plan, codenamed SALAAM, called for the noted Hungarian explorer, Count Laszlo Almasy, to drive Eppler on a hazardous 1,700-mile journey from Tripoli to Assyut and deliver him deep behind the Allied lines so he could make his own way to Cairo by train, accompanied by his twenty-five year-old wireless operator, Heinrich Sandstede, who held a forged British passport identifying him as ‘Peter Muncaster’. Both men reached Cairo on 11 May 1942 but quickly discovered that although the E£600 they carried were fine, the Sterling notes worth £3,000 they had been given were banned in Egypt and difficult to exchange for usable currency. However, having changed some money, and spent most at nightclubs and bars such as the Kit-Kat and Rivoli, they were soon very short of funds and, suspecting their transmitter was faulty because they had failed to make radio contact with the Abwehr, they sought help from family, friends and contacts. Almost inevitably, this led them to betrayal.
On 11 June the DSO in Cairo, George Jenkins, was informed by Dr Radinger, one of his sources, who was a German Jewish abortionist, that Viktor Hauer of the Swedish consulate had been in touch because he had received a telephone call from someone seeking his help. Hauer had responsibility for looking after the interests of German internees in Egypt and subsequently he had agreed to meet two Germans who had asked for passports and a Hallicrafter wireless transmitter that had been stored in the consulate’s basement, apparently since 1937. As Hauer had known since 1939 that the abortionist was an agent of the British, he asked him to act as an intermediary, and the result was that the DSO arranged for Hauer, whose precise diplomatic status was uncertain, to be abducted with his consent. This took place on the evening of 27 June, and as Hauer left the Metro cinema he was blindfolded and driven to the SIME villa at Maadi. Under interrogation, Hauer described his background. He was an Austrian diplomat who had served in Paris, and had married a woman from Alsace in Cairo in 1936. They had a five-year-old daughter who had returned with her mother to Europe.
Hauer confirmed that he had been visited at the consulate by Hassan Gafaar, and had agreed to see him again the same evening at Badia’s Cabaret near English Bridge, where he had been introduced to Eppler. Together the trio took a taxi to Eppler’s houseboat where he met Sandstede who had threatened him, and mentioned another transmitter buried five hundred kilometres away at Assyut. He had also said that in their messages they were known as MAX and MORITZ.
Having made this statement, Hauer’s name was changed to Franz Miller and, at his request as he feared for his life, he was transferred to a PoW camp in Palestine where he remained for the rest of the war. SIME later concluded that Hauer had not told the whole truth, and had omitted to mention that he had also supplied Eppler with six maps of Egypt and a Mauser pistol, all of which were subsequently recovered. He had also acted as an intermediary for a group of Egyptian officers who had planned to block a British evacuation in the event that Rommel reached Cairo. They hoped to sabotage the bridges and maximise British casualties, but had no way of communicating with the Germans.
Eppler and Sandstede were arrested on the evening of 25 July 1942 at their rented houseboat at El Agouza, and interrogated separately by Harold Shergold and Giles Isham. Shergold, who spoke fluent German, having studied in Munich before the war, had joined the Intelligence Corps upon the outbreak of hostilities, when he had been teaching at Cheltenham Grammar School.
The houseboat’s interior was searched thoroughly, but no transmitter was found, and Eppler later claimed he had thrown it into the Nile four days earlier. From SIME’s viewpoint, it was absolutely essential to ascertain whether this pair of enemy agents were on a short-term, tactical mission to collect military information directly relevant to the Afrika Korps’ objectives in Egypt, or if Eppler had some other role, perhaps to check on CHEESE, supply him with money or complete some other mission.
From the outset, both men proved extremely compliant and not only implicated a large number of Egyptian co-conspirators but then appeared as prosecution witnesses at their trials. In return, both men were treated throughout as prisoners of war rather than enemy spies destined for the gallows. As a result of their testimony two Egyptian army officers, Flight-Lieutenant Hassan Ezzat and Captain Anwar el Sadati were court-martialled by a military tribunal headed by the Egyptian army’s DMI, Kaimakam Moussa bey Loufta, and interned for the rest of the war, as was a pro-Nazi civilian, Aziz el Masri Pasha, the former chief of staff of the Egyptian army.
A pilot, Ezzat had been asked to fly Eppler back to the German lines, should the need arise. Anwar el Sadati was in the Egyptian Signals Corps and his function was to repair Eppler’s radio and to transmit an emergency message if required. The signals officer, Sadati, was suspected of being a Nazi sympathiser, ba
sed on the a copy of Mein Kampf annotated in red ink, found at his home, and his admitted association with Eppler and Sandstede whom he had met at their houseboat.
Also implicated was an employee of the Ministry of Social Affairs, Frau Doktor Fatma Amer, the German wife of a local doctor, Ali Amer, who had previously assisted escapees who had absconded from their internment camps. The most recent fugitive, Kurt Siegel, who had benefited from her help, was also detained. Eppler would later claim that Madame Amer would be his link to a pro-Nazi ‘Egyptian Liberty Movement’ and had introduced him to one of its leaders, el Masri Pasha.
Eppler willingly explained his own background. He said he was twenty-five years old, having been born in 1914 in Alexandria, the illegitimate son of Johanna Gafaar, and his father had been a British officer. He had been brought up in Germany between 1915 and 1931, and then had returned to Egypt where he had attended the Lycée Francais. He had travelled back to Germany in August 1937 and joined the Luftwaffe, holding the rank, and paybook, of a lieutenant.
Eppler would later say that while in Berlin in 1937 he had visited the Abwehr’s headquarters in the Tirpitzufer, where he had been greeted by Admiral Canaris, and had been trained as a saboteur until October when he had been sent to Athens for a briefing on his first mission, in Istanbul. Following that he had operated in the Balkans, liaising with Colonel Morozow of the Siguranza in Bucharest, to investigate reports, leaked from the British embassy, of British plans to sabotage the Ploesti oilfields. His next assignment was to be Cairo, and Eppler described his journey through Palestine, staying in Jerusalem, before returning to Alexandria. By May 1941 he was in Baghdad but he gave several very different versions of his movements prior to his arrival in Tripoli in 1942 in preparation for SALAAM.
