A LEGEND WOULD grow up around Operation Condor and about Johann Eppler as an adventurer, ladies’ man, and “spy of exceptional daring and competence.” In that legend, neither Weber nor his driver spoke a word of English, but they were carrying an English-language copy of the best-selling novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier when they were captured. The discovery of this incongruity would be essential to the legend.38
In reality, Weber and his driver had both been born into the sizeable German community of Palestine and had grown up under British rule. Weber spoke some English; the driver was fluent in the language. For the latter to have had a book in English would have been unremarkable.
There’s a seed of fact in the legend: Weber should indeed have had a novel in English, meant to serve him, Sandstede, and Eppler as the shared key to their Abwehr cipher. But no mention of it appears in the British document describing Weber’s capture or in the reports on the papers found in the desert.39 Either Weber managed to dispose of it separately, or it did not attract his captors’ attention. The book that sparked the hunt for Condor was not Rebecca. But the people who wove the Condor legend knew nothing about Enigma, or Bletchley Park, or Jean Alington having read Bagnold’s Libyan Sands.
HANS-JOACHIM WEISE HAD served only briefly as head of the nascent Einsatzkommando for the Middle East when he got word that a higher-ranking SS officer was to command the unit: Walther Rauff. Weise would serve under him, recruiting Arab collaborators.
Rauff had been working in Prague. His patron, Reich Security Main Office chief Reinhard Heydrich, had been given the additional post of Nazi viceroy of the Protectorate of Moravia and Bohemia. Rauff went with him to institute a reign of terror in the protectorate, the remainder of Czechoslovakia. On May 27, two SOE-trained Czechs hurled a bomb into Heydrich’s car in Prague and mortally wounded him.
Rauff was unexpectedly available. The engineer of the gas wagons would take charge of murdering Jews in the lands that Rommel would conquer.40
“THE RAF IN Egypt is making no use of the technical courses established by the Americans” on how to repair US airplanes, the message said. Because the RAF crews lacked training, they were unable to locate or fix problems in instruments from the Sperry Corporation, or in the engines, or anywhere else in the Kittyhawk fighters that the United States had sent to Egypt. “The result is a dreadful waste of equipment materials.” There were requisitions on an “abnormal scale” for spare parts. Until they arrived, “the Kittyhawk is grounded.”
All of this and more, the message said, had come from a report on April 16 by “a particularly reliable source.”
The message was sent in the Red key of Enigma. The intelligence officer at Luftwaffe headquarters in Libya, to which it was addressed on May 29, was undoubtedly pleased by the news.
Intercepted in England, decoded in Hut 6, translated the next afternoon in Hut 3, hand-delivered by Stewart Menzies, it made Winston Churchill much less happy. “What action?” he wrote in red at the bottom and handed it back to the MI6 chief.41
As Menzies understood it, the prime minister’s question was whether the report was true and what was being done about it. How the Germans knew was a secondary issue.
For Russell Dudley-Smith and Margaret Storey, German intelligence was the main issue. The message fit the Bluebird pattern.42 The report was lengthy and specific, including the name of the manufacturer of the aircraft instruments. It was precisely dated. The Germans, it seemed, again regarded their source not just as “good,” but as “particularly reliable.” Or perhaps they were talking about more than one source. Yet they’d waited six weeks to forward the information. Why?
3
SPIES, EVERYWHERE
June 1–9, 1942. Bletchley Park–Cairo–Bir Hakeim–Rome.
FIELD MARSHAL ALBERT Kesselring sent word on the last day of May: the rail line that the British were building would reach to within fifteen miles of Tobruk by June 1. “The British supply position in North Africa” on the eve of the renewed battle “was considerably better than in November,” when the previous British offensive had begun.
This intelligence was two weeks old, according to Kesselring’s message, having come from a “particularly reliable source” on May 17. Still, it had immediate value, especially the final words: “German air attacks on locomotives caused considerable damage.” A railroad was the most efficient means to move massive supplies. The message confirmed that air attacks against it were effective. The day after Kesselring sent this, Auchinleck had the text in English, as did Churchill.1
Evidence soon followed that the Germans were starting to get much fresher information. “A good source” reported that at noon on May 30, General Koenig’s Free French held an area that extended at least twelve miles north of Bir Hakeim. The location was given in coordinates taken from a British military map. The British had 360 tanks left, the source said. An addendum from the German high command noted, “The British seem to believe firmly in the withdrawal of the Axis forces.”
The message was sent in the German army’s Chaffinch II key of Enigma on June 1. By June 2, the key was broken, the intelligence passed on.2 The translator and army adviser in the Watch Room at Hut 3 did not have a basis to judge just how good the source actually was. They received no information from the front but what came through Enigma. This prevented any unconscious bending of what they read from the German messages to fit what they knew from British sources.3 Dudley-Smith and Storey probably worked under the same constraint.
In Cairo, Claude Auchinleck or his intelligence chief may have noted that the map location for the Free French precisely matched General Neil Ritchie’s situation report on the afternoon of May 30, the same one in which he assessed that the enemy intended to withdraw westward.4
More likely, both were under too much pressure to line up a snippet of information from Ritchie with another from Hut 3, especially as they were getting ever more material from the latter source. Bletchley Park was reaching a pace of deciphering over eleven hundred Enigma messages daily.5 A large portion were from North Africa and the Mediterranean. Hut 6 was beginning to break a key it called Phoenix, used between Rommel and the divisions and corps under his command. A German officer who methodically sent a message every two hours saying, “No change,” followed by his code name, provided a crib for Phoenix that worked again and again.6
Reg Parker, the Hut 6 staffer who watched out for recycled keys, made an astounding find: the German maker of the keys was entirely reusing each month’s settings for the minor air force key called Primrose. The next month they became the settings for the key called Scorpion. The only change that the anonymous key meister made was to shuffle the days, so that the Primrose setting for May 10 might be the Scorpion setting for June 1, or June 22, or some other day. When the first Scorpion message of the day came into Hut 6, it took just a few minutes to figure out which day’s Primrose settings from the previous month would unlock it.
Scorpion was used by the German air force officers who served as liaisons to army units. One way in which the German military was years ahead of the British was in the tight coordination between the German army and air force. The liaison officers sent the air force constant updates on the condition and plans of army units. The remarkable reuse of old Primrose keys for Scorpion meant that their updates could be read as soon as they arrived in Bletchley Park.
Scorpion “gives hour by hour current information about Axis front lines… and intentions of ground forces,” along with air force plans, an early June memo said. The real problem with Scorpion, and even more so with Phoenix and Chaffinch, was that the transmitters sending them were meant for short distances. Intercept operators in Alexandria managed to hear Scorpion. To eavesdrop on Phoenix, operators had to be deployed at Eighth Army battle headquarters in Cyrenaica, or near Mersa Matruh in Egypt. They took down what they heard on paper. Light planes carried the paper to Heliopolis east of Cairo, where the messages were typed into Britain’s own cipher machine, TypeX, to be radioed to
Bletchley Park. Messages that could be cracked in an hour were taking two days to reach Bletchley Park. If they could be moved faster, Auchinleck and Ritchie would practically be sitting in Rommel’s tent.7
The Germans could easily have noticed their own security mistakes if they’d had less faith in the statistical impossibility of cracking Enigma, Gordon Welchman would write.
He concluded, “We were lucky.”8
THE GERMANS ALSO had luck with their enemy’s codes. Margaret Storey began to list as much of it as she could find in the deciphered messages, week by week. The title at the top of her first effort, at the start of June, indicated that she’d been assigned only to look for signs of success by the Germany navy’s signal intelligence agency, the B-Dienst. After all, she worked in Hut 4, the Naval Section.
But the limitation made no sense. So Storey listed every hint of enemy intelligence she could find. She noted the work of a German station that tracked how much wireless traffic there was between British ships. She noted a report from Lieutenant Seebohm’s battlefield listening station in Cyrenaica that mapped out the relations between British units based on their chatter. She pointed to the intelligence apparently coming from a German undercover agent in Gibraltar who had seen an aircraft carrier that he surmised was taking fighter planes to Malta.
Storey’s reports say nothing about how she gathered her material or evaluated the sources of the information. Her knowledge of languages and occasional corrections of translations suggest that she combed through large numbers of deciphered messages, at least some of them in the original languages.
(She left no letters or diaries telling how she felt. If she left any hidden message of her state of mind in her reports, the code has yet to be broken. If we can judge at all from the memories of others who worked at Bletchley Park’s most analytical tasks, the jobs that demanded reason and intuition, she felt driven, exhausted, excited, aware that much depended on her and not nearly aware just how much, and—as Gordon Welchman described his feelings—was having the greatest fun that life would ever offer.)
In the category “German agents,” Storey listed the message about the British railway to Tobruk and the bombing of locomotives. The message about the Free French position and the British view that Rommel was trying to withdraw she likewise attributed to an agent.
This was a reading of clues, not a certainty. But the clues did in fact point toward an agent. The information came from someone who could compare the British supply situations in November and May, and who knew how many tanks the Eighth Army still had after four days of battle. It came from someone who was privy to commanders’ private assessments of the enemy, the kind they gave in conversations in closed offices and did not necessarily feel certain enough to send to London. The information had the fingerprints of someone highly placed or very well connected in British headquarters in Cairo.9
ALBERT WAHDA DIDN’T know that his old school friend Hussein Gaafar had been in Germany. Hussein said he’d returned to Cairo after living for five years on a farm near Assiut. Nor did Albert know that Hussein was also Johann Eppler, Abwehr agent. He did know that Hussein and his British friend Peter, or Sandy, enjoyed spending freely on themselves and others at Cairo’s nightspots.10
Albert took Hussein and Sandy to the rooftop garden at the Continental Hotel. The accountant there agreed to change some of their British cash for them on the black market. He gave them forty-seven piasters for a British pound; the official exchange rate was ninety-seven piasters. They asked the headwaiter to introduce them to a girl. After the evening’s show, he brought the belly dancer, Hekmet. She lived in one of the tony houseboats moored along the Nile, and invited them to stay there for a night. Later they would insist that none of them had slept with her. She had a lover, a British officer, who was away from town. He’d left a suitcase on the houseboat. Inside, it would later emerge, was a map of the defenses of Tobruk.
Eppler would later be overheard telling Sandy he’d never thought to open the suitcase, as “that was a bit dangerous.” Sandy’s later claim to have seen the map was almost certainly fiction. In any case, the map would have been of little use to Rommel. It showed the Italian defenses from before the first British conquest of the town early the year before.
They liked the houseboat, though, and found one to rent for themselves with two decks, well appointed with chintz furniture, woodwork painted pale green, and Egyptian wall hangings. It was moored near the Kit-Kat Club, another nightspot they liked, and facing Gezira Island, where the city’s best sporting club was. They were spending twenty Egyptian pounds a night. As they would explain the expenses, they were lubricating British officers with liquor so that they would say more than they should.
Eppler and Sandy also had names provided by Almasy of well-connected contacts. At the top of the list was Prince Abbas Halim, a cousin and rival of Farouk. Abbas Halim shared Almasy’s injured aristocratic pride and his love of airplanes. In the previous war he’d first fought for Germany, then become a pilot for the Ottoman air force. Pro-Axis but in conflict with the king, he was an unlikely candidate for access to any military secrets. Eppler and Sandy were, however, risk-averse spies. They picked up in Cairo conversations that the prince was “too suspect” to risk contacting. This was true; the prince’s name had only recently appeared in the “most secret” weekly security report put out by Security Intelligence Middle East.11
Sandy hid his wireless set underneath a gramophone turntable in a cabinet on the houseboat. He sent out his call letters and got no answer, though reception was no longer blocked by buildings. The transmitter still did not work, he concluded. They continued to spend their evenings and money at the Continental and the Kit-Kat Club.
IN GARDEN CITY, on the other side of the river and a mile or two from where the houseboat was moored, Auchinleck’s intelligence chief composed a “most secret” update on the search for the enemy intelligence unit operating around Gilf Kebir. He read the evidence through the lens that was familiar to him: his own army’s Long Range Desert Group. “Hauptman Graf Laszlo von Almasy,” he wrote, “was in charge of a German unit equivalent to the LRDG.” (The German Graf was equivalent to the aristocratic title “count”; Almasy would have been pleased by this recognition.) The papers captured near Bir Hakeim, with the list of six codenames for wireless stations, suggested that Almasy’s commando unit had “six sections or columns.” Entries in a notebook found with the list suggested that “English money was used for certain of the Commando’s transactions.” The unit might be connected to two prisoners of war, also captured near Bir Hakeim, who belonged to an Abwehr sabotage force.
“The possibility of sabotage activities in Upper Egypt cannot be overlooked and the passing of agents into Egypt along this route appears to be a definite possibility,” he wrote. Far to the south, between Gilf Kebir and Wadi Halfa on the Nile, the search for Almasy’s commandos continued.12
“IN THE NAZI attitude toward them as a race the Egyptians find neither hope nor tolerance. Those who have read Mein Kampf realize the German theory of racial superiority advocates glorification of some races, subordination of others… Fascists dream of Roman Empire revival, Mediterranean domination, African colonies,” Bonner Fellers wrote. Nonetheless, he said, deep anti-Axis feeling “fails to turn Egypt to Great Britain.” In time of war, the Anglo-Egyptian treaty “has failed to serve the best interests of Egyptians, has contributed neither to their dignity or national aspirations. The treaty guarantee of independence has been deliberately, consistently violated.”
The obvious example was Farouk being forced “to appoint a prime minister of British selection.” Besides that, citizens had been imprisoned without charges “for the security of the state.” When Prime Minister Mustafa el-Nahas had held elections in March, “certain opposition candidates were told to withdraw… opposition voters were thrown into jail.”
The British maintained “their 19th century tradition” of colonial rule by force, Fellers said. Only a few patriotic Egyptian
s showed leadership, preventing a rebellion by relying on Islam’s rationalist tradition and its prohibition of treason. When the war ended, Egypt would demand that Britain leave and give up control of the Suez Canal Zone. “Should these demands be rejected fighting will begin,” he concluded.13
The report sounded credible, certainly as a description of an educated political class that could read Mein Kampf. It suggested that Fellers—the cosmopolitan isolationist, the conservative anticolonialist—was developing an affection for Egypt like the feeling he’d once nurtured for Japan. The report also sounded omniscient, without attribution to informants. The SIME security records give clues. “It is reported that [Abdul Rahman] Azzam and others are planning to form a new party, Al Hizb al Islami,” to unite Muslim associations in support of the palace, SIME’s intelligence roundup said in mid-April. The next roundup said that “the king proposes to win the favor of the U.S. authorities in the Middle East, presumably driving a wedge between them and ourselves.”14
Azzam, a prominent political figure, was one of Fellers’s first contacts in Egypt. The two would remain friends for years. In Fellers’s description, Azzam despised the Italians. He was the logical person to decry Britain’s colonial obtuseness—and to tell Fellers that the account would come due once Britain had won the war. Fellers was a receptive audience for an argument both anti-Axis and harshly critical of Britain.15
INSTEAD OF AIR, there was sand and dust. At noon, “visibility was fifty yards,” Alan Moorehead scratched in his reporter’s notebook when he reached the fighting in Cyrenaica. “At 1400 hours it was twenty yards; at 1600 for a good part of the time it was nil.” Men fired machine guns uselessly into air that changed colors with the thickness of the sand, from pink to orange to gray. He reached a brigadier’s dugout at the British strongpoint called Knightsbridge. Officers swept sand off maps with their hands and gave orders through field telephones to artillery gunners who fired with no idea of what was out there or if they had hit anything.16
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