Almasy tried anyway. They got stuck, dug themselves out, got stuck again. It did not help that the men had no desert experience, or that they were out of shape. It did not help that Almasy had ignored Bagnold’s method of stripping every unneeded piece of metal from the trucks to lighten them. Handing out amphetamines did not help. They drank too much water, except for Sandstede, who had brought schnapps. They got diarrhea. Almasy said that turning back “would question the whole enterprise and embarrass me immensely”—so Sandstede would remember. They tried radioing for a plane to drop supplies but the big Italian transmitters at the oasis blocked reception.
They turned back to Jalo and started again. They left behind everything possible. The only extra set of clothes were the civvies that Eppler and Sandstede would wear if they ever got to Egypt. They searched for a path in the dunes. The gearbox on Almasy’s station wagon cracked. They had to abandon the car in the dunes.
Almasy had shown that he either did not fear death or did not believe it would happen to him. He did fear shame. He stayed up through the night calculating a new route, and announced it in the morning. They would go south, almost to Kufra oasis, and gamble on slipping past the British garrison there. He sent one truck back to Jalo with the two men who were in the worst shape. That left six men, and two trucks and two cars, and no fuel to spare because he was adding at least three hundred miles in each direction. The trucks would be left at points along the way, so their fuel could be used for the way back.
Their luck got better. They found a track that the Italian trucks had used to supply Kufra before the war. They got around the oasis without the British spotting them, and found another track, now used by the Sudanese convoys that came to Kufra from Wadi Halfa. It led to the edge of Gilf Kebir. Almasy wrote in his diary, “In May 1932 I discovered this mighty plateau,” though he knew that Prince Kemal el Din, Farouk’s cousin, had been there before him.
He showed the men the prehistoric drawings at the Cave of the Swimmers, as if he were just an explorer guiding aristocratic adventurer-tourists. He found a cache of water he’d left in 1933, four full tins, still good. They managed to get through by wireless to their men at Rommel’s headquarters and report their position.
After two days of searching, Almasy found the pass through the plateau that he and the English pilot Hugh Penderel had spotted nearly a decade earlier, and that he’d drawn on a map for an Italian intelligence officer all those years before. It was “the secret gateway for breaking into Egypt,” Almasy wrote in his diary. For part of the way, he was able to follow tire tracks he’d left himself. His greatest problem was the men, especially Eppler and Sandstede. Sandstede “drives as usual like a wild man,” he wrote.
On the far side of the plateau, short of fuel, Almasy decided to drive right through the oasis village of Kharga. When two Egyptian sentries stopped him and told him in Arabic to check in at the government house, he said his commander was behind him and would do that. The sentries did not notice their German uniforms. From there Almasy followed an old Roman road and then Darb el Arbain, the slave caravan route.
At two in the afternoon, the two remaining cars stopped on a plateau above Assiut and the Nile. Eppler and Sandstede got out. “A few handshakes, a short farewell” and Almasy and the other driver turned back. The journey, so far, had taken nine days since Almasy had changed the route. The escapade may have been the counterfeit count’s greatest feat, and he could tell almost no one about it.
Eppler and Sandstede continued on foot, lugging their two wireless sets in suitcases. They decided to bury one of them, along with their uniforms. They split their cash, put on their civvies, and descended into the town to catch a train for Cairo. Up to now, they had been supporting actors in Operation Salam, the journey. Now they constituted Operation Condor.
At Hut 3, Jean Alington got an Abwehr message to translate. Alington was twenty-four years old. Her path to Bletchley Park had begun with studying opera in Germany and Austria before the war.53 The message had been sent from Tripoli to Berlin. It was short, and a couple of days old. It said, “Salam reports arrival at Gilf Kebir.” Alington had read Ralph Bagnold’s book Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World. She knew where Gilf Kebir was. The message meant that the Abwehr had someone operating out there, in the dead sands.54
Act III
A PARTICULARLY RELIABLE SOURCE
1
THE WOMAN OF DAUNTING INTELLIGENCE
April–May 1942. Bletchley Park–Cairo–Rome–Mishmar Ha’emek.
A BRITISH INTERCEPT operator heard the dots and dashes and took down the stream of letters before the sun rose on April 24, 1942.1 By late that afternoon, the whirling wheels of one of the twenty or so bombes now operating at Bletchley Park and at a couple of outstations, operated by the land-bound sailors of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, had produced a break for the Red key of Enigma. Hut 6 transformed the predawn message from Field Marshal Albert Kesselring of the Luftwaffe into a string of five-letter groups that, once properly divided into words, would be German.
A square wooden duct, just wide enough for a wooden tray to pass through, connected Huts 6 and 3. Someone put freshly decoded messages on the tray and shouted into the duct. If there was no response, she banged the inside of the duct with a broom handle left next to it for this purpose. On the Hut 3 end, someone else pulled a string attached to the tray and reeled in the fresh material.
The Watch Room of Hut 3 was laid out like the newsroom of a small newspaper, in this case one with an extremely small, elite readership. In the middle was a horseshoe-shaped table, like a newspaper’s copy desk. The Number One of the watch, sitting inside the horseshoe, read the decoded Kesselring message, decided it was urgent, and handed it to one of the translators facing him on the outside of the horseshoe for immediate attention. A few minutes later, Number One was reviewing the translation.
“Reports from a particularly reliable source,” it said, revealed that “the British high command intends” to use “heavy American bombers from the Egyptian area” to attack German aerodromes in Sicily, and to send commandos to Sicily to sabotage German warplanes on the ground.
Most importantly, Kesselring’s message quoted the particularly reliable source as confirming that the British were planning an offensive in Libya in order to push the Axis forces westward, back beyond Benghazi. Once the Royal Air Force could operate from the Cyrenaica coast, it would be able to provide air cover for convoys to the besieged island of Malta.
A sentence pregnant with uncertain meaning followed, referring to the planned British offensive: “As the last named operation is not possible before June, it will come too late.”
Number One approved the text. Since this was mainly air war material, he handed it on to the air advisers—two RAF officers who sat at another table, along with the army and naval advisers. The RAF man added commentary and wrote up a paraphrase to send to MI6; to army, air force, and naval intelligence in London; and to the commanders in chief in Cairo. He passed his work through a window to the next room, where the duty officer sat.
The buck stopped with the duty officer. He had to make sure that the paraphrase told enough, and was accurate, and did not give away anything unnecessary, especially about where this information came from. Among the elect who knew about breaking Enigma, the constant fear was that the secret would spread to one person too many and get back to the Germans.
“The Enigma code as now used by the German Air Force and German Army is, as far as known at present, theoretically unbreakable,” but German carelessness made all the difference, Gordon Welchman had written to Commander Edward Travis. “Our methods… are based on taking advantage of the enemy’s mistakes.” It was only “a little short of miraculous,” Welchman wrote, that the Germans kept using stock phrases—the cribs that Hut 6 used to set up the bombes and break the keys.
There were crazier German mistakes: Whoever created the key settings was getting tired of writing endless lists of which wheels to use each day, how t
o set the rings, how to set up the plugboards. The anonymous code-meister had begun to recycle: He would take the wheel orders from January’s list for one key, the ring settings for another key, and combine them to use for a third key for February.
A Hut 6 staffer named Reg Parker had, on his own, started keeping a record of all the settings of all the keys ever broken. At the beginning of each month, he would look for repetitions of settings seen earlier in other keys. They started appearing. A few days of recycled ring settings or wheel orders meant that they were almost sure to keep repeating. In a moment, a large piece of the solution for the key for the whole month was ready. If the Germans ever found out that Enigma was being read, all they had to do to foil the British was to start being more careful.
Edward Travis was now in charge at Bletchley Park. Alastair Denniston, who’d created GCHQ, and would have much preferred to read other gentlemen’s mail than demand bigger budgets, was sent back to London together with the department that broke diplomatic codes, for which there was no longer room at Bletchley Park. Denniston was like a master weaver after the invention of steam looms, out of place in the industrial age.2
Travis was “of the bulldog breed,” Welchman would say. He had a thick neck, a wide nose, and round black-rimmed spectacles that emphasized his eyes.3 He could be friendly; he could also write “BALLS” in the brown ink that was his trademark across a proposal he disliked.4 He sent out a memo on security to everyone at Bletchley Park. “Do not talk at meals,” it said; the waiters and waitresses had ears. Do not talk on the train home, or by your parents’ fireside. If a friend or old aunt asks what you are doing in the war, answer, “Working for the Foreign Office,” or the navy, or whatever. If asked, “But what do you do?” do not say it is secret. Answer, “Oh—work.”5 A woman who’d been studying German at Cardiff University when a strange man approached her in the library and asked her if she’d like a job he couldn’t explain with the Foreign Office and who now decoded messages in Hut 6 was billeted with a nearby family. The master of the house pestered her with questions and told her that she talked in her sleep. She stopped sleeping, fainted at work, and woke up in the sick bay with influenza. It was a Bletchley Park form of war wound.6 Nervous breakdowns were another form. When a doctor started using hypnosis to help one officer who collapsed under the strain, MI5 was told to interrogate the physician to find out what the patient might have revealed.7
To Kesselring’s message citing his particularly reliable source, either the duty officer or the air adviser added a note: The sentence saying that the British operation in Africa “will come too late” could mean that the Germans intended to act in Africa before June 1. Or it could mean that it would “be ‘too late’ to have any influence on supplying Malta because of German intentions against Malta.”
Implicitly, though, the entire message was about Malta. The island, smaller than the New York City borough of Brooklyn, was a hunk of rock between Tunisia and Sicily. Even more than Crete, it rendered the distinction between Europe and the Middle East meaningless. The quarter million people who lived there spoke a North African dialect of Arabic written in Latin characters, practiced Catholicism, and, in April 1942, lived under the most intensive bombing on earth.
Every ship from Italy to Tripoli had to pass near Malta. It was the choke point on Erwin Rommel’s supply line. From the island, British warships and planes had attacked the Italian convoys. For both the Axis and the British, Malta was the key to North Africa and the Middle East. Kesselring, commander of all German forces in the Mediterranean, had six hundred warplanes based in Sicily, half an hour’s flight from Malta, and more planes in Libya, and they were coming day and night to bomb. The Luftwaffe was flying as many sorties over the tiny island daily as it had over all Britain in the summer of 1940.8
Malta’s fishermen could not go to sea; they would be machine-gunned from the air. Since the war began, there’d been no pasta from Italy. Potatoes could be had only on the black market. Farmers lacked feed for their pigs. The last British convoy had set out in March from Alexandria with twenty-six thousand tons of food, fuel, and ammunition. Only a fifth of that made it off the two ships that got through to the deep cleft in the rock island that was Malta’s Grand Harbor. Churchill wrote a letter to Roosevelt, who sent an American aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean. From its deck, British Spitfires flew to Malta to reinforce the RAF. The fighters could not bring food. The Maltese cut tunnels into the rock for shelter and grew hungrier.9
Stewart Menzies delivered the Kesselring message to Churchill late that night. Churchill drew a red line next to the paragraph that said a June offensive would “come too late.” This fit his concerns. He was again pushing Auchinleck to attack. The general in Cairo was insisting that he “would not have reasonable numerical superiority until June 1.”10
Earlier in April, Churchill had received a decoded German message that said the RAF headquarters in Cairo was informing “all subordinate units that the HQ of the German air force is… six miles east of Benghazi.” This alarmed him. In red, he scribbled an order to Menzies: “Please report on this. How did they know that we had told the army in Egypt where it was?” The order set off an investigation of RAF code and radio security in Egypt.11
This time, the problem slipped past Churchill’s tired eyes. The prime minister did not ask Menzies to find out what particularly reliable source had handed Field Marshal Kesselring an intelligence jewel: what “the British high command intends,” and how much time Kesselring had before Auchinleck’s planned attack.
THE BRITISH FOURTH Armored Brigade “has most excellent morale,” wrote infantry Lieutenant Colonel James Fry of the US Army when he returned to Cairo from the Western Desert. “Both officers and men are extremely enthusiastic about the new army equipment,” which included American tanks. That was where his good news ended.
Fry’s report showed that Auchinleck had more to worry about than achieving numerical superiority. The Eighth Army had been compelled to issue an order that in training, US tanks should not be driven more than one hundred miles a month. It was hard to keep them in running order, especially because the air cleaners were “in a most inaccessible place” and kept clogging. The tank engines weren’t designed for the otherworldly conditions of deserts.
Besides that, the men needed training, but Fry said, “I never found an officer actively conducting any instruction… I did see officers enjoying their tea during the hours you would normally expect training.” A couple of times, he found officers in bed at 8 a.m., being served tea by their orderlies. “This is fairly hard to understand from an American viewpoint,” Fry wrote.12
Colonel Fellers, his superior, forwarded Fry’s report to the Military Intelligence Division in Washington. A year and a half before, Bonner Fellers had come to Cairo alone. Now he was in command of two dozen American officers and civilians at the military attaché’s office in Garden City. He had an assistant attaché for air war, and one for armored forces, and several more, along with battlefield observers. He had his chief code clerk, Marie Broach, and her two assistants, whom he shared with General Russell Maxwell, whose office was in the same mansion on El Nabatat Street.13 Maxwell headed the US military supply mission in North Africa, in charge of bringing the tanks and trucks that kept coming by ship around the Cape and the warplanes that flew from America, to Brazil, to Takoradi in West Africa, to Egypt.14 The American technicians who came with the machines were his responsibility.
Five months after the United States declared war, Fellers and Maxwell were the American commanders closest to fighting on the ground against Germany and Italy. Washington and London were still debating where and when US troops would first land—France, or North Africa, or perhaps Norway. Fellers’s office grew because the War Department was ravenous for information about how well its weapons worked, how its forces should prepare, and how its ally was performing.
In a meeting with Auchinleck, Fellers said the War Department wanted information on Malta. The tall red-head
ed general with the pale eyes said that his own weekly situation report went to Field Marshal John Dill, former chief of the Imperial General Staff and now Britain’s military representative in Washington. Dill was surely sharing his reports with the War Department, Auchinleck said. He added that “he was concerned lest General Dill and [Fellers] might present divergent views on the situation in the Middle East.” Even worse for Auchinleck, the War Department often got Fellers’s criticism a day earlier than Auchinleck’s upbeat assessments, which at times were channeled through London.
“Our government desires its own intelligence agency,” just as Britain would, Fellers answered Auchinleck.15
Auchinleck knew this was reasonable. But he also knew that Britain had been fighting alone, and its army was now being criticized by American officers who had yet to make decisions while under German fire. If Lieutenant Colonel Fry’s comments about the Eighth Army’s flaws got back to him, Auchinleck might well have whispered Countess Ranfurly’s words: “That from an American.”
Yet Auchinleck would have liked some of Fellers’s telegrams—had he seen them—much more than the attaché’s commanders did. In April Fellers radioed a long proposal for sending a major force of American heavy bombers to the Middle East. In Fellers’s plan, they would strike the Romanian oil fields on which Germany depended for fuel and would bomb Axis airbases around the Mediterranean. To protect that force and prevent a German invasion of the Mideast via Turkey, he urged sending four ground divisions, some sixty thousand American soldiers. He did not get a response. He repeated the recommendation. He warned that Japan could reach Persia via the Indian Ocean and cut the Allied supply route to Russia through that country. He proposed an American invasion of the Balkans, thereby hitting the German armies in Russia from behind and preventing collapse of the Soviet Union.16
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