Spy and Counterspy E-Book

Ian Dear

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 492

Beschreibung

The shadowy world of supposedly legalized spying has an enduring fascination for us all. Spy and Counterspy reveals for the first time the web of spies that spanned the globe during and after the Second World War, working for organisations like MI5 & MI6, the CIA & OSS, Soviet Smersh & NKVD, Japanese Tokko and the German Gestapo. These men and women lived extraordinary lives, always on the edge of exposure and the risk of death. Many of them were so in love with the Great Game of espionage that they betrayed their countries and acted as double and sometimes even triple agents in a complex deception that threatened the very grasp of power in government. Their war in the shadows remained unrecognized until today.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1.    Pit and Pan and the English Patient

2.    Stalin’s Master Spy

3.    The Cambridge Five and Their Soviet Handlers

4.    The Singing Valet

5.    The Spy who Made Porridge

6.    The Spies of the Double-Cross System

7.    Decoding America’s Soviet Spy Rings

Bibliography

Plate Section

Copyright

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following for permission to use extracts from the titles listed below. Other copyright holders have been credited in the chapter notes:

Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (London, 2001). Copyright © Miranda Carter, 2001. Published by Macmillan, 2001

Ewen Montagu, Beyond Top Secret Ultra (London, 1977). Extracts reprinted by permission of the Random House Group Ltd, and by the Penguin Group (USA) Inc

Kathryn S. Olmsted, Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002). Copyright © the University of North Carolina Press, 2002, www.uncpress.unc.edu

Russell Miller, Codename Tricycle: The True Story of the Second World War’s Most Extraordinary Double Agent (London 2005). Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of Russell Miller

Yuri Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends (New York, 1994). Copyright © Editions Robert Laffont S.A. Paris, 1994. Extracts reproduced by permission of the publisher, Headline Publishing Group Ltd and by Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York

Quotes from articles in Journal of Intelligence and National Security and International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence. Reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals)

While every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of all the titles from which I have used extracts, I have not always been successful. These copyright holders are invited to contact the publishers, as are those copyright holders of the photographs I have been unable to trace.

List of Abbreviations

A-A

Anti-Aircraft

ASIO

Australian Security Intelligence Organisation

BBC

British Broadcasting Corporation

CIA

Central Intelligence Agency

COI

Office of Coordination of Information

CPGB

Communist Party of Great Britain

CPUSA

Communist Party of the United States of America

DAK

Deutsches Afrika Korps

DNB

Deutsches Nachtrichten Büro

FBI

Federal Bureau of Investigation

FO

Foreign Office

FUSAG

First United States Army Group

GC&CS

Government Code and Cipher School

GCHQ

Government Communications Headquarters

GRU

Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoyed Upravleniye: Soviet Military Intelligence

IRA

Irish Republican Army

IRD

Information Research Department

ISOS

Intelligence Services Oliver Strachey

JCS

Joint Chiefs of Staff

KGB

Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti: Soviet Security and Intelligence Service (1954–91)

LRDG

Long Range Desert Group

MBE

Member of the British Empire

MGB

Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti: Soviet Ministry of State Security (1946–54)

MI5

British Security Service

MI6

British Secret Intelligence Service

MP

Member of Parliament

NKGB

Narodnyi Kommissariat Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti: Soviet Security and Intelligence Service (1941–46, part of NKVD 1941–43)

NKVD

Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del: People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (1922–23, 1934–43)

OBE

Order of the British Empire

OGPU

Obyedinennoye Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye: Soviet Security and Intelligence Service (1923–34)

OKW

Oberkommando der Wehrmacht

OSS

Office of Strategic Services

POW

prisoners of war

RNVR

Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve

RSHA

Reichssicherheitshauptamt: Reich Security Main Office, the Nazi Party’s umbrella organisation for all its security services

SD

Sicherheitsdienst: Nazi Intelligence Service

SIME

Security Intelligence Middle East

SOE

Special Operations Executive

SSA

Signals Security Agency

USSR

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Introduction

This is the final part of a trilogy on clandestine warfare. Like the first two – Sabotage and Subversion and Escape and Evasion – this book covers events during the Second World War, but it also includes the decades on either side of it. Espionage is often a very long-term business, and it would be no use confining the work of The Cambridge Five, for instance, to the war years when they did as much, if not more, damage to the interests of their country in peacetime. However, the main focus is on the years 1939–45, and the examples I have chosen are but a small cross-section of the espionage both sides employed – even when the countries concerned were supposed to be Allies.

It is commonly acknowledged that more lies have been told about spies and spying than any other subject. A possible exception is sex, and it is not a coincidence that the two subjects are linked by that doubtful distinction. Perhaps someone some day will write on the love life of spies and how it motivated their behaviour. However, the examples of espionage I have chosen are not for any prurient motive, but because more information has become available about each of them. The sources include a short-lived partial access to the KGB archives during the early 1990s; the posting by the United States’ National Security Agency of the VENONA signals and related material on the internet during the mid-1990s; and the release into The National Archives at Kew of MI5 and associated files which is still ongoing. The publication of the official histories of MI5 and MI6, in 2009 and 2010 respectively, and the release of certain private diaries and memoirs during the last decade, have also helped me, I hope, edge slightly closer to the truth.

So the fog surrounding espionage during the Second World War is becoming a little less dense. For example, it is now acknowledged that some early post-war tales of espionage were not much more than cover stories for ULTRA intelligence. This is not to belittle the courage of the agent concerned, but shows the extent to which the authorities went to keep ULTRA a secret until it was eventually became public knowledge in the 1970s.

Will the fog ever clear completely? Not a hope. Spying by its very nature is all smoke and mirrors, which is why it remains a subject of such fascination to so many.

Ian Dear

Cottenham, Cambridge, January 2013

1

Pit and Pan and theEnglish Patient

In May 1942 German Military Intelligence (Abwehr) mounted SALAM, the codename for an operation to infiltrate two of its spies across the desert from Axis-held Libya into Egypt. Once this was accomplished, the spies were to implement operation CONDOR, which was to discover British plans to prevent German and Italian forces from capturing the Suez Canal, Britain’s lifeline to its Far East Empire. They were also ordered to encourage an incipient Egyptian Army plot to revolt against the British.

Erwin Rommel, the charismatic German general commanding the Axis armies in Libya, already had an excellent, if unwitting, intelligence source in the American military attaché in Cairo, Colonel Fellers. The role of Fellers was to report to Washington on what the British were up to militarily and diplomatically. This he did meticulously, not knowing that the diplomatic cipher (the Black Code) he used to relay his reports was being read by the Italians who had acquired photographs of the code’s enciphering tables from the US embassy in Rome.

This Black Code intelligence was invaluable to Rommel for two reasons: it was very detailed and it was extremely reliable, as it was hardly likely that the British would give false information to the United States, which was soon to become their ally. So pleased was Rommel with this intelligence that he called it die gute Quelle (the good source), and it was also known to the Germans as ‘the little fellows’ or ‘the little fellers’, a play on the US attaché’s name. Nevertheless, it was decided that a back-up source was needed should the American one dry up (which it did at the end of June 1942).

Putting agents on the ground would also enable the Germans to encourage the anti-British faction in the Egyptian armed forces – it included two future Egyptian presidents, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar el-Sadat – which was plotting to oust the British from Egypt. In this they faced a formidable task, for though the country had officially become an independent constitutional monarchy under the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936, the treaty gave the British certain rights in wartime. These they invoked when hostilities began that made Egypt virtually an occupied – though still independent – country.

In February 1941 Rommel and the two divisions of the famous Deutsches Afrika Korps (DAK) were sent to boost the flagging Italian Army, whose efforts to conquer Egypt from their Libyan colony had proved fruitless. In what became known as the Western Desert Campaign, the two sides fought across the vast expanses of sand and scrub known as the Libyan Desert, though its eastern part was in Egypt. The size of the entire Indian sub-continent, it covers an area of over 1.5 million square miles (3.9 million square kilometres) and dwarfs any of the world’s other deserts. Like a rutted cart track it has a series of parallel escarpments running east to west down its entire length, some of them as high as 1,000ft (305m). In places the wind, over millennia, has hollowed out the base of these ridges so that the underground water table is close enough to the surface to create oases. Before the advent of the motorcar and the aeroplane these oases were completely isolated, and the vast distances and the rugged terrain made exploration all but impossible. The only mode of travel was by camel. This has a maximum range of about 270 miles (430km) as it needs water after 15 days. So much of the desert remained unmapped, and early motorised explorers faced a formidable and dangerous task.

Because of the distances involved, explorers and armies alike were faced with the problem of supply, particularly fuel. The climate, too, made movement difficult as temperatures in the desert summer could reach 150°F (65°C) while at night they dropped to below freezing, and the winds could whip up fierce, blinding sandstorms at a moment’s notice. It was an impossibly difficult climate to fight in where, above all, speed was of the essence. As Rommel commented, it was the one thing that mattered, and ‘territory was less important than to keep moving until a tactically favourable position for battle was found, and then to fight’.1

Though the British and those allied to them – principally de Gaulle’s Free French forces and those from the British Commonwealth – were sometimes slow in responding to Rommel’s rapier-like thrusts, they did possess a small, highly mobile, strike force that punched well above its weight. Called the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), this was formed in June 1940 by a self-taught geographer, Captain Ralph Bagnold, a Cambridge University-educated regular officer in the Royal Engineers. Its main function was to gather intelligence by keeping a road watch behind Rommel’s lines, but it also mounted lightning attacks on enemy fuel dumps, airfields and garrisons, and made a general nuisance of itself.

Between the wars Bagnold had been one of the pioneers of motorised desert exploration using stripped down Model A Fords. An ingenious, mechanically gifted man, he had perfected a method of preventing his car’s radiator from boiling dry by using a rubber tube to connect the radiator overflow to a tank half full of water, which was fixed to the car’s running board. The steam from the overflow would then condense into water before being sucked back into the radiator.2 He also learnt how to surmount the 300ft (91m) sand dunes by driving at them full tilt; how to avoid being bogged down in the soft sand by drastically reducing the pressures of his vehicles’ tyres; and how, if he did get stuck, to free himself by using steel channels and rope ladders under the front wheels. To navigate across the desert day and night he taught himself to use a theodolite to measure the height of the stars and, knowing how a magnetic compass was affected by the steel in his vehicle, he perfected a sun compass with which to calculate his bearings.

Above all, Bagnold’s desert experience taught him never to attempt to venture anywhere with only one vehicle, and if one did break down those in it should never attempt to leave it, however powerful the urge to do so. He later wrote:

An extraordinary powerful impulse urges one to move, anywhere, in any direction, rather than stay still and think it out. This psychological effect of the true desert has been the cause of nearly every desert disaster of recent years. Always the lost one leaves his broken-down aeroplane or car and begins an unreasoning trudge, somewhere – it does not matter where. The vehicle is found by planes or trackers, but the solitary, half-demented walker is too small to spot.3

All this experience Bagnold had accumulated during expeditions with a few companions in the 1920s and 1930s in order to discover and map the most inaccessible parts of the desert. His feats included exploring a vast area of desert between Cairo and Ain Dalla, said to contain the mythical city of Zerzura; and making, in 1932, the first recorded east–west crossing of the Libyan Desert. He always asserted these epic journeys had been made for the fun of it, and there is no reason to disbelieve him, though some suspected him of doing it for military purposes. Certainly when the war came to North Africa he was able to put this knowledge to good effect by forming the LRDG, whose Chevrolet trucks and command cars were manned mainly by New Zealanders. According to Bagnold, they adapted to desert warfare like ducks to water.

* * * * *

Bagnold and his companions were not alone in their early enthusiasm for motorised desert travel. At the same time as they were making their first ventures into the Sahara, a certain putative Hungarian count, Laszlo Almasy, was mounting his own expeditions. The main character in Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient – later made into a highly successful film – was based on Almasy, who came from what has been described as a dysfunctional and disgruntled family,4 which lacked a noble title despite its ancient Hungarian lineage.

Almasy was born in 1895 at Castle Borostyanko in western Hungary – renamed Burg Bernstein when the region became part of eastern Austria after the First World War – which belonged to his grandfather, Eduard Almasy. Attached to this forbidding ancient fortress was a large and prestigious estate. Both had been bought by Eduard to increase the family’s social standing and the possibility of being ennobled. Eduard had a son, Gyorgy, whose Italian-born wife produced two sons, Janos and Laszlo, and a daughter, Gyorgina. Gyorgy was an ethnographer and explorer, though he preferred to investigate the fleshpots of central Europe. This inevitably brought marital strife and discord and, perhaps, accounted for Almasy’s inability in later life to establish long-term relationships. Not surprisingly, the marriage ended in divorce.

Though a gifted linguist – he spoke Hungarian, German, French, Italian, English, and later Arabic – Laszlo Almasy was not interested in academic subjects, at which he proved to be quite hopeless. Instead, from a young age, he became enthralled by two of the new mechanical wonders of the era: the aeroplane and the automobile; at just 14 he built himself a rudimentary glider. Then, in a final attempt to give him a proper education, Almasy’s grandfather sent him to an educational establishment in Eastbourne on the English south coast. This also failed, but it did give the budding aviator a chance to join the local flying club, and after only a few hours of instruction Almasy, then aged 17, qualified for a pilot licence. At around this time he also learnt to drive, for his licence records that the following year he was fined for dangerous driving. However, before he could break his neck either on the road or in the air, the First World War broke out and Almasy hastened home to join the army. He then transferred to the recently formed Austro-Hungarian Air Force. In March 1918 he was shot down and wounded, and he spent the rest of the war as a flying instructor.

In 1919 the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up and the Hapsburg Emperor Karl IV took refuge in Switzerland. However, there were some, including Almasy, who wanted him back on the throne, even if it was only the Hungarian one, and in 1921 Almasy aided the emperor’s two abortive attempts to regain it. As a reward for his support, Karl IV made Almasy a count before retreating to exile in Madeira where he died the following year. However, Almasy could not use the title in Hungary (though he did elsewhere) as it was never ratified by the Hungarian parliament.

In these early post-war years Almasy was employed as secretary and huntsman to a Hungarian bishop, and this brought him many new contacts amongst the rich and powerful, including Egyptian royalty and aristocracy who came to enjoy the hunting on offer. He also pursued his early enthusiasm for the motor car by taking a mechanics course and participating in motor rallies, driving for the Graz-based Steyr Automobile Works. He became something of a star on the rally circuit and this led Steyr to offer him a job in Cairo as their representative for the Middle East and Africa. In the winter of 1926 he began his new career by driving a Steyr touring car from Cairo to Aswan, a distance of some 600 miles (950km) beside the River Nile on what was no more than a desert track. From there he and his companion drove across the Nubian Desert to Khartoum, and then followed the Blue Nile and its tributary the Dinder before returning to Cairo.

This pioneering trek, and the tests Almasy subsequently carried out on other Steyr models, established his reputation as an intrepid motorised explorer. It honed his skills as a mechanic and taught him the techniques of driving in the desert. His method of negotiating a sand dune was a star turn for those he took on desert tours, and he would earn himself extra money by showing them how it was done. Like Bagnold, he drove at top speed up the gradually sloping windward side of the dune. Then, when he reached the top, he would turn sharply so that the car slid sideways down the dune’s steep leeward side. So popular did this trick become that the practice was banned on safety grounds, though in fact it was not as dangerous as it sounded.

Taking the rich on desert tours and on hunting safaris soon became a way of life for Almasy, and supplemented his earnings from Steyr as well as giving its products good publicity. An early supporter of his desert forays was Prince Kemal el Din, a fabulously wealthy member of the Egyptian royal family. Kemal, a keen explorer himself, had, in 1926, mapped part of a rocky desert plateau known as Gilf Kebir (The Great Wall), before ill health had overcome him. He gave Almasy a three-year contract to finish the job and, hopefully, to discover the lost city of Zerzura, or the Oasis of the Small Birds as it was called.

Finding Zerzura quickly became an obsession with Almasy – as it had with Bagnold and other desert explorers – as did discovering another of the desert’s most enduring legends: the remains of the army of Cambyses, the fifth-century BC Persian conqueror of Egypt, which had allegedly vanished in one of the desert’s fearful sandstorms. Such romantic and whimsical destinations caught the fancy of those wealthy enough to indulge their fantasies, and Zerzura in particular became such a magnet to interwar explorers that they formed the ‘Zerzura Club’. This had no premises and no rules, beyond the obligation to attend the annual dinner at the Café Royal in London’s Regent Street. Both Bagnold and Almasy attended these functions, where Almasy would have met a number of Englishmen who were soon to become his enemies. Doubtless, they exchanged experiences and learnt about each other’s desert techniques.

Desert exploration proved to be the ideal life for the young adventurous Hungarian aristocrat. Though he never had any money, he knew everyone and indulged in the good life in Cairo, a city that was more European than it is today. He enjoyed living dangerously and his adventures read like cuttings from Boy’s Own Paper. However, all this threatened to come to an end when, in 1932, Kemal and another of Almasy’s richest backers both died; and, because of the Great Depression, he lost his job with Steyr.

However, in 1933, while exploring part of the Gilf Kebir that Kemal had already mapped, Almasy found some Stone Age cave paintings. Others had come across similar paintings of animals that had inhabited the area before it had gradually turned to sand, but Almasy was the first to discover paintings of the men who must also have lived there, by the side of a long-vanished lake. Those eager to see them paid him well to take them to the caves, but Zerzura remained elusive, and he did not have any luck finding the remains of the vanished army of Cambyses either. Though he continued his desert travels whenever the opportunity arose, he now turned to his other love, flying. He helped found Egypt’s Royal Aero Club, became a flight instructor at Cairo airport, and ran the agency for a Hungarian firm that designed and built gliders.

By now there was talk of another war. Not surprisingly, Almasy’s desert adventures had attracted the attention of British intelligence in Cairo. One of its tasks was to monitor disputed desert areas, and it had become concerned by the Italian occupation of the larger Libyan oases close to the Egyptian border. Some suspected Almasy was working for the Italians; others thought that he might be in the pay of the Germans; while the Italians were pretty sure he was being funded by the English, as a report by the Italian minister in Cairo indicated. ‘It can be taken for granted that he is an agent of the complex English political-military organization in Egypt,’ the minister wrote when it became known Almasy had found a way through the Gilf Kebir, which he called the Aqaba Pass. ‘This is not tourist information, but indication of military aims. It shows that the English want … to go from Egypt into Italian territory with heavy convoys.5

The British Foreign Office, which thought Almasy both eccentric and unpleasant, had its own suspicions about him; for though he had undertaken several desert explorations with Englishmen, it was aware that more recently his travelling companions had come from potentially hostile countries such as Italy, Hungary and Germany. The fact that his elder brother, Janos, now the owner of Burg Bernstein, had taken up with Unity Mitford, a devout admirer of Hitler, must also have caused some suspicions as to where the family’s political sympathies lay.

However, the Englishmen who had explored with him found him pleasant enough. Bagnold described him as an amusing, likeable man, though a secretive loner who would vanish from Cairo and reappear months later without revealing where he had been. Mysterious, too, was his sex life. In Cairo he was known as something of a ladies’ man in search of a rich wife, but there were also rumours of homosexual encounters with small boys in the backstreets of the Egyptian capital – rather the opposite of the heterosexual English Patient the film portrayed. One thing was for sure: some English women he met disliked him on sight; one even refused to shake his hand. What wasn’t known at the time, and only came to light in 1995 when a bundle of letters was found at Burg Bernstein, was that from the late 1930s Almasy had been carrying on an intermittent love affair with a young German actor called Hans Entholt. So smitten was Almasy with this young man that he made sure he accompanied him on Operation SALAM.

With war now fast approaching Almasy returned to Hungary and in 1939 joined the Royal Hungarian Air Force as a reserve officer and became a flight instructor. The same year his book, The Unknown Sahara, which had been published in Hungary in 1934, came out in a German edition. This brought him to the attention of the Abwehr’s North African desk, which was recruiting specialists to ferment risings against British rule in the Middle East. An Abwehr officer from the Balkan desk, Major Nikolaus Ritter, visited Almasy in Budapest and was suitably impressed. ‘A tall, distinguished-looking man,’ he reported back, ‘with finely chiselled features … a cavalier of the old school.’6

During one of their talks the name of an Arab nationalist, General Aziz Masri, cropped up. The British had recently levered the general out of his position as the Egyptian Army’s chief of staff, and Ritter suggested that Almasy, who was friendly with the general, might persuade him to defect to Germany. This, Ritter thought, could inspire the Egyptian Army’s officer corps, who were particularly anti-British and were devoted to Masri, to rebel against what was virtually a British occupation of their country. Almasy agreed to help, though Ritter suspected he did so because all he wanted to do was return to Egypt. Rather perceptive of him as it turned out.

With the entry of Rommel into the desert war in February 1941, the plan to suborn Masri, and another to infiltrate agents into Cairo, was given official Abwehr approval. Ritter was ordered to form a Sonderkommando, or special group, and Almasy, now seconded to the Luftwaffe as a captain, became its second-in-command. Before Almasy left to join it he had lunch with a Hungarian ornithologist and his son. The latter later recalled that when Almasy was asked how he thought working for the Germans could be reconciled with his friendship with the British, Almasy replied that he would not be doing anything that clashed with what he called his military honour.

Then he stared into space for a long time and slowly added: ‘The only thing that really interests me there is to dig out Cambyses! Rommel will supply the petrol …’ I can still vividly recall the almost crazy, obsessed look on his face … I have always felt he would make a pact with the devil himself to further his voyages of discovery: everything else was of secondary importance.7

When Ritter’s Commando arrived in Tripoli at the end of March 1941, Rommel’s first big offensive was already under way and by the time he ran short of fuel the new front had shifted almost to the Egyptian border. The Commando moved up behind the advancing DAK before setting up its headquarters at Derna on the Mediterranean coast, where Almasy began to organise ‘Plan el Masri’. Contact was made with the dissident Egyptian general via a clandestine wireless link, a portable transmitter/receiver that had been smuggled into the still-neutral Hungarian Legation in Cairo, and arrangements were made for him to be picked up inside western Egypt by Almasy flying a German Heinkel light bomber. To avoid being detected by British radar, Almasy was to fly low over the desert to his destination, before touching down near a landmark called the Red Jebel, on a hard strip of sand that would be indicated by a cross. The plan, which seemed foolproof, would never have succeeded as Bletchley Park’s Code and Cipher School, which had broken the Abwehr’s hand cipher, was monitoring it closely. Anyway, Masri never turned up. He was later betrayed and arrested, though the whole episode was so embarrassing to the British that he was never prosecuted.

The attempt to fulfil the Commando’s second task, flying two Abwehr agents into Egypt, was also aborted when the aircraft (which was not piloted by Almasy) ditched in the sea. One of the agents was killed, and Ritter was so badly injured he had to relinquish command of the Commando to Almasy, who now decided that he would execute SALAM by delivering the agents overland. This not only gave cryptographers at Bletchley Park the impression that the Germans had formed a similar unit to Bagnold’s LRDG, but alerted one of its intelligence analysts, Jean Alington (later Mrs Howard), to a signal from the German High Command (OKW) about Almasy’s intended route. At the time she was acting as a ‘long stop’, as she described it, for any OKW decodes that had been overlooked, and she immediately realised its importance; for he planned to pass close to a British signals unit, which was transmitting false signals to deceive the Germans that a powerful British army formation was positioned there. She therefore requested she be allowed to search for similar Abwehr and ULTRA intelligence signals about Almasy. This was grudgingly granted, though she was told to do it in her own time, and it enabled her to piece together Almasy’s intended journey.

‘I thought,’ she recalled during a television interview in 1995, ‘this man must be caught. It would be terrible if we didn’t send someone to catch him before he discovered the truth about our phantom army.’8 She alerted Cairo to Almasy’s route, which was later confirmed by intelligence reports of two mysterious vehicles passing through a British-held oasis, and in due course Operation CLAPTRAP was launched to try and capture him.9

* * * * *

As commander of his own special unit, Almasy had the right to choose his own men for the operation. Excluding the two spies, SALAM comprised a seven-man team who were to maintain wireless contact with two of Rommel’s signals desert outposts. Six were members of the elite special forces, the Brandenburg Regiment, two of whom were radio operators. The seventh, the unit’s medical orderly, was none other than Almasy’s officer cadet lover, Hans Entholt, whom Almasy had managed to have transferred from the Eastern Front.

Operation SALAM was launched on 12 May 1942 from the Italian-occupied Gialo Oasis, later described by one of the spies as where ‘the springs are brackish and the inhabitants surly. A thousand palm trees and filthy mud huts stand in a hollow in the middle of the desert. The wind howls ceaselessly.’10 So he couldn’t haven’t been pleased when, just days after starting out, Almasy was forced to return to Gialo as sand dunes, not marked on any of his Italian maps and impassable to his heavily laden vehicles, barred his progress. Also, his lover and one of the wireless operators were ill with desert colic and were worsening by the hour, obliging Almasy to send them back to Tripoli for treatment (Entholt was later killed in action). He then made an aerial survey of alternative routes, and eventually opted for a longer, but less arduous one. This caused a supply problem as the longer route risked having insufficient fuel and water for the return journey. He solved this, or so he hoped, by reducing his convoy to two 30cwt Bedfords and two Ford V8 station-wagons, and retaining only three of the Brandenburgers.

‘During the night everything re-calculated and the trip reorganised,’ Almasy wrote in his diary.11 ‘We must go via Kufra! A detour of 500km [310 miles] both on the outwards and return journeys, i.e. increased load for 1000km [620 miles]. Instead of the 2000km [1,240 miles] originally reckoned, it is now about 4200km! [2,600 miles].’ This hugely increased the risks.

Driving through the outskirts of the elliptically shaped Kufra Oasis – really a series of smaller oases roughly 30 miles (48km) long and 12 miles (19km) wide – was a dangerous undertaking as it was now in Allied hands after being captured from the Italians the previous year. The two spies, whom Almasy nicknamed Pit and Pan, ‘are not overjoyed at driving through Kufra,’ Almasy recorded. ‘They fear an encounter with the enemy. According to aerial reconnaissance the British post is supposed to be near Bir du Zerreigh … I shall attempt to turn southwards before then.’

From his comments it is obvious Almasy did not think highly of the two spies. ‘Pit and Pan, who are riding in the radio car,’ he noted towards the end of the outward journey, ‘are the most untidy fellows I’ve ever had under me. The inside of the radio car looks frightful … personal effects, weapons and food all mixed up together.’ As will be seen, he wasn’t particularly impressed with the Brandenburgers either.

However, as all Almasy’s vehicles had been captured from the British, there was a good chance they would avoid detection at Kufra. To conform to the rules of war, they bore the markings of the Afrika Korps’ 21st Panzer Division, but Almasy partially obscured them with sand. Once through Kufra, Almasy planned to turn eastwards towards the Gilf Kebir, and then north-eastwards to Kharga and its oasis, before reaching his final objective, Assiut in the Nile valley. There the two spies would be dropped and would board a train to Cairo.

The reduced convoy passed near a British outpost on the northern outskirts of the Kufra Oasis at about 1230 on 15 May without being detected. ‘I drove through it purposely at noon-time,’ Almasy wrote; ‘that’s when Tommy is asleep.’ They found an old track that was easy to follow and at 1900 stopped for the night having covered just over 130 miles (210km). Almasy found a good hiding place for the cans of petrol and water that he would need for the return journey, and the next day continued to follow the track across difficult rocky terrain. After 37 miles (60km) he attempted to change course but found the ‘moon-landscape’ impossible to traverse and returned to the track. This soon became invisible amongst some dunes, but he recognised others from his earlier adventures and in the afternoon reached an open serir, or sandy plain, where to his surprise, and probably consternation, he found the fresh tracks of Allied motorised columns. He then turned south, made for a big double gara (Russian for hill), and eventually laagered between them at 1830, having covered 156 miles (250km). They hid more petrol, water, and rations for their return journey, and the wireless operator tried to contact one of the two listening posts Rommel had allotted to the operation, but without success.

On 17 May Almasy set out early to try and find the route to Gilf Kebir. ‘To the east a large group of high black garas, not shown on the Italian map. No mapping was done here outside the Depression and the Gebel Kufra.’ Then he queried testily: ‘What were they doing from 1931–1939, then?’ He also showed his frustration with his companions:

Through the absence of Entholt I have to see that Woehrmann [the wireless operator] keeps the log-book up to date. He has no initiative and I have to keep on asking and ordering everything. The men still cannot understand, anyway, that, despite experiences in the sea of sand, a long-range expedition through this realm of Death is nothing else than a flight from the desert itself. The terrain is horrible. Dissected plateaus, soft shifting sand … for ever having to change course and check bearings for finding new ways through. Since Woehrmann is not capable of reckoning bearings and distances for me I am continually forced to stop and to check the courses on the useless Italian map. According to distances in kilometres we should already be on the open serir with which I am familiar but dunes suddenly appear before us. On the previous occasion I did not sight them N. of my route. Impassable with the overloaded vehicles so turn about and go N., to cut across the big enemy L. of C. [lines of communication] again. A tour of 100km [62 miles]. Frightful!

Later that day plumes of dust were seen ahead which indicated an enemy convoy of some sort, and Almasy was forced to hide his vehicles behind a dune. Through his glasses he could make out five vehicles in front of them – but also, along the eastern horizon, the great Gilf Kebir escarpment he had been seeking, and he moved off, making sure the enemy remained well in front of him. At last, he noted in his diary, he was on familiar territory. The frontier into Egypt was crossed and the spur of the Gilf Kebir escarpment rounded. Evidence of the enemy – hundreds of tracks and four abandoned vehicles – was everywhere, but not a sign of the trucks they had glimpsed in front of them earlier in the day.

The convoy hugged the wall of rock until a suitable hiding place was found and Almasy laagered up for the night. ‘Day’s performance: 240km [150 miles]. 100 of them for nothing.’ Another cache of petrol, water, and rations was hidden for the return journey, as was one of the trucks. Its markings were painted over, and everything removed that would identify its occupants, before it was driven deep into a rock-cleft. A note in French was then struck on the inside of the windscreen to make the ‘Tommies’, Almasy noted in his diary, ‘think the vehicle belongs to their Degaullist allies’. It said that the truck had not been abandoned and that it would be returning to Kufra, and that no part was to be removed. ‘If they catch us they can rack their brains as to where we have come from.’

Before leaving the area the next morning, 18 May, Almasy drove to the prehistoric rock paintings he had discovered in 1933, then continued eastwards to find the cave where, the same year, he had left eight soldered cans of water. This stash had saved the lives of Bagnold and his companion in 1935 after breaking the axle of their only car. Some of the cans were rusted and empty but four were full. ‘I open one cautiously in order not to shake up the water. We pour it into a cooking pot, it is clear and odourless.’ They each took a sip of the 1933 vintage and pronounced it ‘excellent’.

They now turned their attention to a group of neatly parked vehicles they had already spotted some 2½ miles (4km) to the south. Positioning a look-out on higher ground, Almasy went to investigate and found six 5-tonners belonging to the Sudan Defence Force. They had not been abandoned because on the windscreen of the front one was the message: ‘refuelled for return journey’. In no time at all Almasy had siphoned all the petrol from their tanks. ‘500 litres of petrol! That changes all my plans. I can carry out the journey to the objective with both cars and probably even take one Commercial with me back home.’

Sand was poured into the oil filters of the parked vehicles and the looted petrol driven some 12 miles (19km) to the north-east where it was ‘distributed artistically amongst the black rocks so that none could be seen even from vehicles which might follow our tracks … Today’s performance is small, only 120km [75 miles], and about 30 of them back and forth but it was worth it: our return journey is assured.’ Just as encouraging was the fact that contact was made with one of Rommel’s listening posts, and it was given a progress report. But the other, codenamed Schildkroete (tortoise), the mobile unit that would arrange to drop them more supplies if necessary, still couldn’t be raised.

The next day was a disaster. Almasy could not find the entrance to the Aqaba Pass through the Gilf Kebir he had found before the war, and a spring in his car had to be replaced. As a result only about 50 miles (80km) was covered, but on 20 May he found the entrance, a dry riverbed called the El Aqaba Wadi that sliced northwards through the Gilf plateau. His old tracks were still visible and the going on the old riverbed was reasonable. A tail dune12 which blocked the way had to be carefully negotiated, though Almasy remarked:

Pit drives as usual, like a wild man and instead of following my track drives the “President” [one of the two station-wagons] head over heels down the steep part of the tail-dune. A miracle that the vehicle does not turn over at the bottom. Result: broken track of the shock absorber.

The distance covered that day was 180 miles (290km), 37 of which were spent in a fruitless search to find a shorter route. Almasy’s frustration was evident. ‘Store [made] of three cans of petrol and two cans of water. The radio won’t work, allegedly the transformer is damaged!’

The next day proved the ‘hardest day so far as regards terrain’:

Low plateaus, and over and over again small hills with the tail dunes which are such a nuisance, broad plains with shale stretches and only now and again a piece of open serir. The vehicles suffer terribly on this kind of ground, the drivers behind me as well probably. I have to keep on stopping and marking the course on the map. This time I can’t draw in the stretch we have done, but only put in tiny points on the map sheet with a sharp pointed pencil: if we get caught no surveyor in the world will be able to follow our route … my eyes ache terribly from eternal compass-driving.

At noon the remaining truck was hidden with some more petrol and water, and its load redistributed between the station-wagons. Camp was made early, ‘otherwise the men will go slack on me … Day’s mileage 230km [140 miles].’

The failure to make contact with Schildkroete worried Almasy greatly as the difficult terrain and the extra kilometres travelled were consuming their fuel at an alarming rate. ‘I have scarcely enough petrol to get back,’ he complained in his diary. ‘Everything was discussed and planned in detail. I was only to radio and they drop fuel, water and food for me in any grid square I liked.’ But the radio still refused to function. ‘The men mess around with it for an hour,’ Almasy wrote in exasperation, ‘then came in, with the thing still out of action, to our one-pot supper. Three radio-operators [he was including Pit and Pan, who had their own wirelesses] and a mechanic are not in a position to find out what is wrong! In this undertaking I always have to do absolutely everything myself.’

The following day, 22 May, they pressed ahead to reach the Kharga road before night fell, but it was dark before they found it, and they were forced to camp for the night in the open desert, having covered 250km [155 miles]. Pit used his transmitter, which worked perfectly, but to Almasy’s dismay they still could not raise Schildkroete. In his diary he railed against the mobile signals unit, but curiously does not mention the other, codenamed Otter, as an alternative method of communication. To save fuel Almasy decided that if,

I drive through the Kharga Oasis tomorrow by road instead of over the dunes, so as to remain unobserved, I shall just be able to make it. If the worst comes to the worst I shall have to get petrol by cunning or force. My mind is made up: in order to save petrol I shall remain on the road.

In short, at all costs, Almasy was determined to reach his objective, whatever the risks. Before leaving at dawn the next morning, 23 May, he distributed Privistin – one of the amphetamine class of drugs used by the German military during the war – to stimulate the morale and minds of his tired men.

We drive in the first grey of morning towards the north and soon reach the Dachla–Kharga road about 15km [9 miles] before Kharga. Then no halts on the good road to the oasis. I know everything here, the scattered Barchana [crescent dunes] of the Abu Moharig dune through which the road snakes in a masterly fashion, the iron tracks of the abandoned railway lines, which were once to have led to Dachla, on the left hand Gebel Ter and on the eastern horizon in the soft red of breaking day the mighty wall of the Egyptian limestone plateau.

Just outside Kharga he stopped and gave his final orders, drumming into the men in the rear car that they were ‘not to get left behind under any circumstances, to halt when I halt and to start off when I start off. The sub-machine guns are held at the ready, but arms should not be resorted to unless I myself have started it.’

As they drove into the town square they saw two Egyptian Chaffire (night-watchmen) standing in the road. Almasy stopped, and one of them greeted him respectfully in Arabic, regretting that he didn’t speak English. Almasy replied in Arabic, and the man told him that anyone passing through had to report to the local commanding officer at the Markaz, or seat of local government. Almasy, showing just how quick-witted he was, even after several exhausting days in the desert – perhaps he had taken some Privistin, too – immediately replied that of course his Bimbashi (major) would report, but that he was only driving the major’s luggage to the station and had to get to there without delay.

‘Where is the Bimbashi?’

‘In the fourth car.’

The Chaffire, puzzled, looked down the road behind the two vehicles.

‘How many cars are there behind me?’ Almasy asked quickly.

‘Only a second one.’

‘Good,’ Almasy replied, and pointed to the other night-watchmen. ‘You stay here, and wait for the other two cars. The Bimbashi [major] is travelling in the fourth car. You will show him to the Markaz.’ Then, only interested in getting the two night-watchmen parted quickly before they had time to think about what was happening, he ordered the other to get on the running board, and show him the way to the turning which led to the station.

The night-watchman saluted: ‘Hadr Effendi.’

When they came to the turning the Chaffire stepped off the running board, Almasy thanked him and both vehicles drove on and out of Kharga. The road was now excellent, which to Almasy’s great joy had a positive effect on their petrol consumption. About 29km [18 miles] from their destination one of the vehicles with two of the Brandenburgers was parked out of sight to await the return of the others. If Almasy did not come back after three hours their orders were to return on their own. ‘At 2 p.m. we reach the edge of the plateau. Scarcely 4km [2.5 miles] below us lies the huge green valley with the silver glittering river, the large white city, the countless esbahs [farms] and country houses.’ Pit and Pan were deposited on to the road with their suitcases, and after changing into civilian clothes, began their walk over the crest and down the road to the railway station on of the edge of Assiut. If anyone asked, they were to pose as travellers whose car had broken down in the desert. ‘Not many words are said,’ Almasy recorded, ‘a few handshakes, one last photograph, a short farewell’, and then he turned round and motored back the way he had come.

Despite some close calls with British patrols, and a great deal of anxiety at missing the dumps left on the outward journey, Almasy and his men arrived safely back at Gialo on 29 May. The prearranged three white flares were fired and the Italian tricolour was hoisted on the car’s aerial mast. It had been an epic journey, a truly remarkable accomplishment.

Operation CLAPTRAP to capture the Commando was launched two days later, but ended, as one writer remarked, ‘with nobody caught in the trap and little to clap about’.13

* * * * *

So who exactly were Pit and Pan, who were left plodding along a desert road with their suitcases containing two transmitters and, according to some commentators, £50,000 (it was in fact £3,000 in sterling notes and £600 in Egyptian pound notes)? Well, Pit, the madcap driver and wireless operator, was Heinrich ‘Sandy’ Sanstede (sometimes Sandstede), a German national born in Oldenberg in 1913, the son of a chemistry professor. Educated in Germany, he continued to live there until he emigrated to West Africa in 1930, realising by then that he was a natural adventurer who was quite unable to fit in with the aspirations of his middle-class professional family background. He subsequently travelled widely and worked in South West and South Africa, and by 1938 was office manager for the Texas Oil Company, first in Dar-es-Salaam and then in Kampala, Nairobi and Mombassa.

When war broke out Sanstede was interned in Dar-es-Salaam, but in January 1940 he was repatriated to Germany as part of an exchange. He then worked in the topographical department of the German High Command in Berlin, correcting and translating maps of those parts of Africa with which he was familiar. He spoke perfect English (with a slight American accent) and before joining the operation had been issued with a false British passport by the Abwehr in Berlin under the name of a businessman, Peter Muncaster.14

But the main protagonist was Pan, alias Johannes, or John, Eppler. According to one British report he was born illegitimately to a German woman in Alexandria in April 1914 who later married an Egyptian named Gaafar. He was brought up in Germany between 1915 and 1931, when he returned to Egypt, and attended the French Lycée in Cairo. He went back to Germany in 1937, married a Danish woman, and ran a fur-farm for his father-in-law until September 1940 when he was conscripted into the army. Another report confirms his year of birth and that his mother was German, and adds that his father was probably British, a Lt Webb. It also confirms that in 1915 the mother took Eppler back to her home town, Backnang, and that around this time she married Salah Gaafar.15

Eppler’s version of events is somewhat different. He says in his memoirs that his German mother had run a hotel in Alexandria inherited from an uncle, and that his father was an investment adviser for European mining and oil companies. When he died suddenly, Eppler’s mother married Salah Gaafar, who kept a suite in her hotel. Gaafar was a prosperous pro-British Egyptian magistrate of Arab origin. He adopted Eppler, and treated him as the eldest son – even though the marriage produced a second boy, Hassein Gaafar, who later became embroiled in Eppler’s espionage.

At a young age Eppler says he was converted from Roman Catholicism to Islam and was introduced to the traditional Moslem customs that ruled his extended family. He also spent time with the family’s Bedouin tribe based at the Ajun-Musa Oasis in the Sinai Desert, and wrote evocatively about his first contact with them:

In the shade of a plane tree, sat two Bedouins, awaiting my arrival. They were swathed from head to foot in cloth, except for a small slit to look through. Europeans are no use at waiting. They are always in a hurry. These two men of the desert, however, were sitting motionless in the shade, like the camels lying on the ground next to them, chewing their cuds and gazing into the void.16

How truthful Eppler is about his early life is anyone’s guess, but his book is full of such nice touches. His description of his stepfather’s house in Cairo is equally evocative. It was there, he wrote, that the breath of adventure ‘first brushed my cheek, and I knew that as long as I lived it would never let me go’. Day and night a huge Nubian, his ebony skin glistening in the blistering sun, guarded the gate of the large, walled building situated on the eastern bank of the Nile. On its top floor Eppler had a self-contained apartment where no woman was ever allowed to enter, while outside it lay a dark-skinned Sudanese Bisharin17 ready to defend his master with his life.

He described how, beyond the gate, lay a dark passage that led into a wide sunlit courtyard ablaze with roses and surrounded by a shady arcade. At its southern end were two doors, one leading to the harem, guarded by a fat eunuch, the other leading to the men’s quarters known as the salamlik. Long cushioned divans lined the courtyards walls on which the men of the family reclined, discussing the ways of the world, drinking coffee, or drawing on their hubble-bubbles, while a black Berber carrying a copper brazier walked slowly round the four sides, gently chanting an Arab song and leaving a trail of sandalwood-scented smoke. At precisely the same time each morning, small boys carrying cups and copper jugs hurried to and fro across the courtyard from the huge kitchen to serve coffee to the women in the harem, while every morning and night an ancient, sightless Ulema,18 supported by a knotted stick, appeared in the eastern colonnade and sat on a stool halfway along it. Then, in a sing-song voice, he recited a chapter from the Koran before leaving through a little door made in the big gate and disappearing into the palm grove beyond.

Eppler says that at 16 he undertook a pilgrimage to Mecca, the wish of every devout Moslem. By then it held no religious meaning for him as he already knew the ways of his desert family were not for him, nor was their religion. But the pilgrimage released within him his sense of adventure and two years later, bored with the playboy life that seemed to be all Cairo and Alexandria had to offer, he went gold prospecting in the Lupa goldfields in what is now south-western Tanzania. But he failed to make his fortune and his memoirs then fast-forward to Beirut in May 1937 where, at the Hotel Saint George, he waited for an unknown German who had come all the way from Istanbul to meet him. The meeting had been arranged by the German embassy in Cairo, which had been ordered by the Abwehr to provide a list of all those with German blood living in Egypt. Eppler was high on the list for he was a member of an important Arab family – though hardly anyone was aware his mother was German – and he was already known in Cairo for seeking out adventure. It therefore wasn’t surprising that it didn’t take him long to decide that what the Germans proposed – to join the Abwehr – might provide just the kind of excitement he was seeking, as well as giving him the excuse he needed to avoid the dull career trajectory his family had planned for him.

His terms of employment were successfully negotiated and in August 1937 he arrived in Berlin to start his induction into military intelligence, which included basic army training, courses in parachuting and operating a portable wireless, and coding and decoding signals. By October he was back in the Middle East and in his memoirs he describes his involvement as an Abwehr agent in such diverse anti-British activities as preparing the way for a German–Russian attack on India; finding a method of infiltrating a commando unit into Turkey, where it could lie low until it was needed to aid the Wehrmacht secure the Romanian oilfields of Baku; helping the leader of the failed 1941 Iraqi revolt against the British to reach Germany; and working with members of the Egyptian military (the PYRAMID organisation19) who were planning a revolt against the British. On his various visits to Berlin he says he met the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, and even had a chat with Hitler. Like Sanstede, he was employed in the German High Command’s cartographic department in Berlin, and he also worked for the Military Geographical Department, where he assisted in bringing out a new book on Egypt. He seems to have crammed a lot into a short time.

After his capture Eppler betrayed the PYRAMID organisation, but in the reports of his interrogation there is no mention of his Abwehr activities. This is not surprising, as revealing this while apparently under imminent threat of execution would only have further incriminated him in the eyes of his captors. More surprising is that during his interrogation Eppler claimed to have travelled extensively in the Egyptian and Sudanese deserts during the 1930s. With one exception his memoirs give no details of his desert adventures between the wars, so he may well have invented them for his interrogators as unverifiable cover for his activities as an Abwehr agent. However, he does mention one desert journey with Almasy:

The assurance of this man Almasy was truly enviable. He had not changed since that day in 1935 we had broken down with engine trouble near the great Mohariq Barkan Dune. We had been searching for a lost oasis and were resigned to awaiting the end, but he quite calmly repeated: ‘The last moment has not yet come. Someone will turn up and get us out of this.’ And right enough, someone did just about at curtain time. It was Robert Clayton, who took us back to the Nile Valley.20

* * * * *

The luck of the two spies held – at first. The original plan had been for Sanstede to stay in Assiut, to relay any information Eppler transmitted to him from Cairo. However, at some point both of them decided to go to Cairo, and they buried one of the transmitters with their desert clothing before walking into Assiut. After rounding a bend, they came upon a British army camp that straddled the road. After showing their identities, they explained how they had come to be there. They were hospitably received in the officers’ mess, given lunch, and then driven to the station, having been told in no uncertain terms how insane they had been to drive into the desert with only one vehicle.

Before boarding the late afternoon Luxor–Cairo express, Eppler solved the possibility of their suitcases being inspected by field security when they reached the capital by hiring a young Nubian who was propping up a nearby wall. Nubians were known to be totally honest and reliable, and that no one would bother to stop a native with a couple of old suitcases, so the boy was given the suitcases, and a meeting place in Cairo was agreed.

The facts about what happened after they reached Cairo on the evening of 24 May differ widely. Eppler’s memoirs say that when he and Sandy, as he called Sanstede, arrived there they immediately went to the villa Eppler had rented when previously visiting the city. However, contemporary official reports based on their interrogations say they rented rooms, first in the Pension Nadia in the Rue Taufik, where they stayed two nights, then at an apartment in the Sharia Borsa el Gedida owned by a Mme Therese Guillermet (the name varies), which turned out to be a brothel. Some reports say she remained with them in the flat; others say she moved out soon after their arrival and was given a hefty premium for doing so.

Wherever it was they stayed, one can accept that they were soon absorbed into the atmosphere of the great city which was Eppler’s home; and with money in their pockets they set out to enjoy themselves, and to make contacts with those who were well disposed towards them and were prepared to help them achieve their clandestine objectives. ‘It was the pleasantest time of day to be in Cairo,’ Eppler wrote of that first evening.

The population sat chattering outside the cafes and restaurants, drinking zibib or beer and eating vast quantities of meze, smoking their nargilehs,21 sipping coffee, and laughing. The city was brightly lit. Groups of people were loitering on the banks of the river, and those aboard the graceful feluccas on the water were enjoying the river breeze. At Guezira22 we could at last spend a night in civilized surroundings after our murderous journey through the desert.