by Nigel West
Fluent in English, Arabic, French and some Scandinavian languages, he was married to a Danish wife, Sonia Eppler-Wallin, and had lived with her at Godthaabsveg 90 in Copenhagen until September 1940 when he had been conscripted into a Wehrmacht motor transport depot, and was then then transferred to a signals unit. On another occasion he said that before the war he had run a cotton business in Alexandria, but at the last moment before hostilities were declared he had fled by car to Germany, via Transjordan, Iraq and Turkey.
Eppler ended up in the same OKW topographical section as Sandstede, where he had been employed as a cartographer, but in the summer of 1941 both men had been moved to the 15th Company of the Brandenburg Regiment.
According to his version of events, Eppler initially had stayed at a flat at Sharia Bourse el Guedida belonging to a Frenchwoman, Mrs Therese Guillement, who was married to an Egyptian, but the location had proved unsatisfactory, partly because her premises were ‘used for immoral purposes’ and drew sporadic police attention, but mainly because the block was screened by other buildings which interfered with radio reception. He had then visited his mother at her home, Sharia Masr al Khadina 10, in Cairo’s old town, and discovered that his step-father Saleh Gafaar, a retired Egyptian judge, had died seven months earlier, and that his half-brother Hassan Gafaar, was away.
Eppler described how he had befriended Hekmet Fahmy, a belly-dancer at the Continental Hotel, who had allowed him to stay at her houseboat which she shared with her lover, a British officer who had been posted with his unit to the desert, and had left behind a case containing personal papers, among which was a map of Tripoli showing the disposition of Italian troops prior to the British occupation in 1941. Eppler then asked Fahmy to find him a houseboat to rent, which she did, and he moved into Dahabia (houseboat) number 10. He also wrote a letter to Hassan Gafaar asking him to attend a rendezvous at the Bar Americaine in the Fouad el Awal. They met, and Hassan suggested they seek help from Hauer who, he claimed, had arranged an introduction to Hassan Ezzat at a bungalow in Heliopolis.
The SIME interrogators were particularly interested by Eppler’s assertion that he had been informed that there was another active German transmitter in Cairo, allegedly run by the Gestapo and concentrating on political intelligence. At one point this radio, supposedly deposited at Zagazig before the war, could be accessed by a contact, Aziz el Masri, who might be able to send an emergency message to Rommel’s headquarters for him.
Another espionage suspect was Prince Abbas Halim, an individual already known to be pro-Axis who had been the subject of correspondence between Alex Kellar of MI5’s E2(b) and his colleague Helenus Milmo. According to Eppler, he had been instructed to contact the prince through his former servant, now employed at the Royal Automobile Club in Cairo.
Eppler also described how he had been given the details of a Hungarian priest at the church of the St Therese Carmelite convent in Cairo who would respond to a special password ‘alma mater’, and was supposed to have a 100-watt transmitter hidden on the premises. This statement led to the interrogation of Father Demetriou, a Carmelite lay brother who had been in Egypt since his arrival from Palestine in October 1939. Significantly, Demetriou, who was described by Hauer as ‘thoroughly pro-German’ had been nominated by the Swedish legation, which had taken over responsibility for Hungarian affairs when that country’s legation had closed, as an interpreter and someone to liaise with Hungarian internees. Born in January 1912 in Maco, Pierre Demetriou had studied at the Keszthely convent in Hungary before moving to Mount Carmel in August 1934. Under intensive interrogation Demetriou admitted having known Viktor Hauer and a German woman whom he reluctantly identified as Fatima Amer, but denied that he had ever been entrusted with a transmitter by Laszlo Almasy or one of his representatives. He also denied ever having met Eppler, which was probably true as Eppler’s diary noted a visit to the St Therese chapel on 30 May, when he had been informed that ‘Father D’ was away that day. As he had not repeated the trip, there was nothing else to link Demetriou to German espionage, apart from Levi’s instruction that he would receive a radio through the Hungarian legation, and various references to a priest working as an Abwehr courier. It would not be until Erich Vermehren’s interrogation that more details of Demetriou would emerge.
Meanwhile Sandstede was also being cooperative. Born in Oldenberg in 1913, the son of a chemistry professor, he had emigrated to West Africa in 1930, then lived in South Africa, moving to Uganda, Kenya, Dar-es-Salaam and Tanganika, and in 1938 was working as the office manager for Texas Oil successively in Kampala, Nairobi, Mombasa and Dar-es-Salaam. He spoke English, French, Swahili and some Italian. He had been interned in Dar-es-Salaam at the outbreak of war, but had been repatriated in January 1940 with other civilian detainees in an exchange. Once back in Germany, he had been assigned to a topographical department where he had worked on maps of the parts of Africa he knew, correcting and translating them. He claimed that he had chosen the alias ‘Peter Muncaster’ as he had known someone of that name in East Africa, and the Abwehr had forged the passport accordingly.
Sandstede confirmed Eppler’s story that the pair had first met while attending an interpreters’ course at Meissen in the summer of 1941, and had been transferred to the 15th Company of the Brandenburg Regiment because of their knowledge of foreign languages. There they had both been recruited by Rittmeister von Hoesch for a mission in Africa, and had been taken in civilian clothes to the Grand Hotel in Vienna to meet Count Almasy. On this occasion Eppler had also met Otto Eisentrager, one of the Abwehr officers associated with CHEESE who had been an adviser to Emperor Haile Selasse in Abyssinia until the Italian invasion, when allegedly he had moved to Cairo.
When Hoesch was killed at Gazala on 8 October 1941 the operation was entrusted to a Captain Pretzl, a Muslim who had worked before the war at the Azhar University. Under his supervision, Eppler and Sandstede had attended a wireless operators’ course in Munich, and then undergone further training at the Abwehr radio station at Berlin-Stahnsdorf. However, Pretzl would be killed in a plane crash in November 1941 while on a flight to Vienna, and in his absence Almasy took over command.
Almasy, who would travel to Tripoli at the end of December 1941, assured both men that their mission, to collect military information in Egypt, was entirely safe, and that if they were caught the Germans would take immediate steps to exchange them for Major Patrick Clayton, a founder of the LRDG who had been captured on the last day of January 1941 during a raid by his ‘T’ Patrol, deep behind enemy lines at Kufra. Clayton, who was wounded in the engagement, was an explorer who had been on several prewar expeditions when he had worked for the Survey of Egypt. Evidently the Germans regarded his capture as a considerable coup, and served to provide them with a potentially valuable bargaining chip, should the need arise.
By February 1942 the Abwehr had assembled a large group to finalise the details of Operation KONDOR, and among them were Steffens, von der Marwitz, Waldemar Weber, Wöhrmann, Munz Korper, Stringmann, and Beilharz.
The mission began on 12 May when Almasy led two columns of six captured British Ford V8 trucks into the desert at El Dibo on the journey across Libya, leaving fuel and water dumps along the route for use on the return journey. Conveniently, Almasy maintained daily radio contact with his base in Tripoli, thus enabling the British Y Service to monitor the traffic. The last part of the expedition was completed with two trucks, and some seven kilometres from Assyut Eppler and Snadstede, having buried their German uniforms, replaced them with civilian clothes, and concealed one of their two transmitters under some stones. This set, identical to one recovered from the houseboat, would later be retrieved by SIME. Finally, on the afternoon of Sunday 24 May 1942, they caught a train to Cairo where they found rooms, for two nights, at the Pension Nadia, before finding accommodation at Therese Guillermet’s brothel.
Sandstede described how he had attempted to raise the Germans with his radio, using the callsign HGS (his initials) and hoping to hear HWB in re
ply from Weber. After two weeks of failure, they decided their equipment was faulty and took steps, which proved disastrous, to obtain a new set. Sandstede also confirmed that the book code he had been assigned was based on The Unwarranted Death.
Both Eppler and Sandstede agreed that Almasy had briefed them on a Hungarian priest, Father Pierre Demetriou, of the St Therese Convent in Shoubra, who was alleged to possess a wireless and be in radio contact with Budapest. When SIME followed this lead and questioned the priest, the allegation was denied and no further action was taken. In any event, Eppler failed to find Demetriou.
SIME was able to verify the statements made by Eppler and Sandstede by comparing their versions with TRIANGLE intercepts, which became available from January 1942, and CSDIC interrogation reports of interviews with two NCO drivers, Waldemar Weber and Walter Aberle, two Palestinian Germans who had been captured at Bir Hachim on 27 May and questioned before Almasy ever reached Egypt.
According to a report drawn up by Blanshard Stamp of MI5’s B1(b) section in January 1943, Weber had been born in 1912 and spent most of his life in Palestine. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1934 and undergone military training in Germany in 1936. Shortly before the outbreak of war he had returned to Germany and in October 1939 had been assigned to the 25th Infantry Signals Depot to undergo wireless training, but in the spring of 1940 had been transferred to the elite Brandenburg Regiment. He had completed a mission in civilian clothes to Bulgaria, returning to Germany in November 1940, and in July 1941 had been posted to Istanbul as a wireless operator. In September 1941 he was ordered back to Germany, in preparation for a mission to Syria, but only reached Athens when it was decided that his grasp of Arabic was not good enough. Instead, he had been transferred in January 1942 to the Abstelle in Paris to study the British order-of-battle, and then in February sent back to Berlin in anticipation of his posting to Tripoli and participation in SALAAM. He recalled having met Eppler and Sandstede for the first time in Berlin in September 1941, when the pair had attended a course on the composition of the British Army.
Aberle, aged thirty-seven, also had been born in Palestine and from 1936 had run a garage in Haifa with Weber. He had returned to Germany upon the outbreak of war and had been assigned in the autumn of 1939 to an anti-tank depot company before being transferred to the Brandenburg Regiment in the spring of 1940. After a period on the Belgian coast preparing for the invasion of England, he was posted to Tripoli in October 1941.
More corroboration came from the diaries which Sandstede had maintained. Although some entries proved to be false, such as the claim that they had visited Suez and Port Said to recruit local informants, they had kept these incriminating documents to prove, when Rommel entered Cairo, what they had accomplished for the Reich. At the moment of their arrest Sandstede had thrown Eppler’s diary into the Nile, but had failed to destroy his own.
Eppler’s half-brother, Hassan Gafaar, was also arrested, and when questioned he explained that he had been born in Germany, where he had spent the first seventeen years of his life, and had been educated in Stuttgart. He then had been apprenticed to a firm of ironmongers for eighteen months in Backnang, where he had lived with his grandmother.
He said he had had not heard from his half-brother until a fortnight earlier, on Saturday 11 July, when he had received a handwritten letter instructing him to meet Hans at the Americaine that same evening. He had gone to the rendezvous and later had visited his houseboat, and thereafter had seen him every day. He also admitted introducing Eppler to Hauer in the hope of replacing the transmitter’s faulty quartz crystal.
Thus SALAAM, one of the great adventures of the Second World War, later to be recounted in films such as The English Patient, ended as a series of interrogation reports, studied by MI5 analysts in London eager to learn if the Abwehr was planning to establish a spy-ring in Cairo to rival CHEESE.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE CHEESE NETWORK
Between July 1941 and April 1945 CHEESE transmitted a total of 432 messages from Cairo, and provided the enemy with a vast quantity of information, much of it misleading, which had been carefully processed by ‘A’ Force for the purpose of giving the enemy an entirely false impression of the Allied order-of-battle, the strategy adopted to prosecute the war in North Africa and protect Egypt from the Afrika Korps, and to convey a wholly bogus picture of British priorities. Such an undertaking required great force of character on the part of the principal coordinator, Dudley Clarke, who had to persuade much more senior officers of the value of deception and unorthodox warfare, and SIME which otherwise might have been expected to adopt a very insular, defensive role if it had not been for the imagination of a handful of officers who would later take up the intelligence business on a professional basis. Charles de Salis, Geoffrey Hinton, Douglas Roberts, Terence Robertson, Nicholas Elliott, James Robertson, Rex Hamer, Michael Crichton and Desmond Doran found their natural milieu in the postwar secret world, but it was the CHEESE case that enabled them to realise their vocation. No such double agent had ever been managed with such ambition, and the proposition that an entirely notional spy could dupe a relatively sophisticated enemy over a period of four years remains a veritable milestone in intelligence history.
Until he found a job with OETA, CHEESE himself relied on personal observation, open sources (such as the Cairo newspapers) and his sub-agents, principally MISANTHROPE, for his information, but as the channel developed, probably beyond the wildest expectations of SIME and ISLD, he became something of a cottage industry. From the Allied perspective, the priority was to put over dangerously false material, mixed in with sufficient truth to make it palatable, to an enemy that might have other comparable sources. This was an extraordinarily hazardous undertaking, and demanded great concentration and an appreciation of the subtleties required. These talents are not always associated with the military mind, but the remarkable personalities associated with CHEESE proved themselves to be entirely up to the task, ready to engage the Abwehr at their own game at a time when such large-scale schemes were entirely unknown. CHEESE himself had the benefit of a committee which carefully rehearsed each scenario and enjoyed sufficient prestige to perpetuate the fraud over a long period with support from London, Istanbul, Athens and Damascus, not to mention the military authorities across the entire Middle East. The stakes could hardly have been higher, but how did the case officers and their senior management develop CHEESE’S sources and choose his sub-agents?
The sheer variety of contacts fabricated by SIME’s Special Section is testimony to their fertile imaginations and their skills at exploiting and manipulating their adversary. Every message, every casual observation, was carefully logged, recorded on a card index and scrutinised to ensure there were no internal contradictions in the traffic. The narrative may have been constructed from whole cloth, but it had undergone plenty of study by skilled analysts to ensure that it retained an essential verisimilitude and would be likely to be accepted as at least plausible by their Axis counterparts. SIME never made the mistake of underestimating their opponents, and paid them the compliment of fabricating themes that might have been authentic.
What distinguishes ‘A’ Force from any other Allied organisation was the very comprehensive nature of its mission, and the amount of attention paid to detail. For example, to develop a completely false Allied order-of-battle, which was part of the general strategy of exaggerating the strength in the Middle East, Dudley Clarke not only invented non-existent military units, but embroidered reports of individual sightings by including details of unit emblems and shoulder-flashes. For a professional analyst, such observations added verisimilitude to the reports, and ‘A’ Force mastered the technique by keeping track of every item passed to the enemy so there were no internal errors that would have tipped off the Abwehr.
In his early reporting, CHEESE appeared to concentrate on his own observations, but gradually, as his confidence grew, his messages grew wider in scope. An analysis of his first eighty transmissions illust
rates the diverse range of the topics his information covered:
– South African troops in Cairo and the Western Desert; the Polish Brigade leaving for unknown destination; the 18th Division HQ; possible deception, Australian, New Zealand and Greek HQs.
– The 6th Australian Division in Palestine and Syria; No South African or New Zealand troops in Persia. Australian troops en route for Middle East; the 4th Armoured Brigade west of Alexandria. The 2nd Armoured Division in the Western Desert.
– 18th Division HQ; General Sir Alan Cunningham in Cairo; a bomb was dropped on Abbassya.
– The situation at GHQ.
– No Free French or British troops arrived from Syria; equipment from West Africa.
– General Sir Alan Cunningham is Commander-in-Chief; No New Zealand cavalry division in Egypt; An infantry division in the Western Desert. No American units in Cairo.
– Aircraft arriving in crates by sea.
– Ships damaged in Alexandria harbour.
– No cavalry in Egypt.
– The 2nd New Zealand Division, the 5th Infantry Division and new English division leaving for Caucasus in mid-November.
– British warships at Alexandria.
– The 70th Division formed. Voltage of Cairo and Alexandria.
– The 50th Division is in Palestine en route for Caucasus.
– An American aircraft factory is to be built here.
– An Australian brigade in Delta. The 43rd Australian Battalion in Cairo. The 11th Hussars officers are in Cairo and the rest of their regiment arriving.
– General Moore is in Cairo. No Australians are here but South African and New Zealand troops are.
– The New Zealand troops in Cairo are the 9th Brigade and the 6th Division.
– Egyptian cigarettes have been sent to the officers mess of the Royal Sussex regiment in Cyprus.
