WHEN ROMMEL BARELY ESCAPED THE clutches of New Zealanders of the LRDG, a bullet is said to have ripped one of the epaulettes off his uniform jacket as he sped off in his car with his driver. Aberle and Weber, along with others from the Abwehr signals unit, were not so lucky and were captured. The captives were briefly questioned at Eighth Army HQ before being hurried on to Cairo for a more thorough interrogation by intelligence officers. Thus the Rebecca Code had been compromised before Eppler and Sandstette had even arrived in the city.1
Aberle and Weber were taken to the interrogation centre at Maadi near Cairo. At first all they would say were their names and numbers and throughout the process they remained pretty tight lipped. However, one of the men brought in to look them over did not need them to speak. This mysterious man from the Defence Security Office was called ‘Robby’ by Leonard Mosley, who interviewed him,2 and ‘Bob’ by Sansom in his account. He was undoubtedly an MI6 operative.3 He worked for Cuthbert Bowly, head of MI6 in Cairo at the time, who had responsibility for the Balkans and the Middle East. He established good working relations with GHQ and other security services, but was overworked and his health suffered, resulting in a short spell in hospital toward the end of 1941. The Rebecca Code must surely have crossed his desk at this time.4
‘Robby’/’Bob’ looked over Aberle and Weber’s possessions and came across a copy of Rebecca. It was the only book they had with them; other reading matter consisted of Nazi magazines and newspapers and personal letters from home. An interview with them confirmed that their knowledge of English literature was about nil, and their English was poor, so why did they have an English language copy of the novel?
A forensic photographer from GHQ soon worked out from the yellow dust jacket that the book had been priced at 50 escudos (the Germans had tried to remove the price) and had therefore been bought in Portugal. The MI6 man’s report to GHQ stated that in his opinion a significant German agent had started operations in the area.
He is probably a German national with close knowledge of Egypt and the Egyptians. He is regarded by his bosses as an operator of such importance that they have provided him with his own personal code and a special listening-unit to take the information he collects. We have fortunately collected the listening-unit in the persons of Aberle and Weber.5
Reports passed through the Defence Security Office in Cairo, across the desk of Colonel G.J. Jenkins, and on to the War Office and MI5 in London.6
About the same time the radio monitoring section at GHQ reported a transmitter coming on air precisely at midnight, almost certainly somewhere in the city, using a code. It was always the same, a sending station’s identification which was not acknowledged. Sansom had received reports on this, which remained a puzzle until a man called ‘Bob’ showed him the copy of Rebecca he had taken from Aberle and Weber’s kit. Sansom admitted to having read the novel when it was first published and Bob’s information revealed the truth behind the transmissions.
Things began to click into place. The Germans were using Rebecca as a code manual. Their agent in Cairo was transmitting in code. He was not yet sending information because he was not getting acknowledgment; and knowing that he was probably being monitored, he was not going to help us to locate his transmitter by broadcasting uselessly. [With Aberle and Weber in captivity] the only place receiving the spy was our own monitoring unit in Cairo. But this state of affairs was not going to last long. The Germans were bound to answer from another station before long. Then our chaps would jam the pirate, the Germans would tell him he was being jammed, and he would do a bunk.7
The spies themselves were already beginning to wonder what was going on. Was there something wrong with their W/T set? Sandstette and Eppler had no other means to contact their controllers.
Eppler wrote to his stepbrother, Hassan Gaafar, who was back in Cairo and asked to meet him at the ‘American Bar’. There Eppler – disguised in dark glasses – picked up his brother and took him back to the houseboat, where Hassan met Sandy. Together they explained their predicament: their transmitter needed repairs, perhaps a new quartz. Hassan agreed to help them.8
Hassan contacted Viktor Hauer, a German working at the Swedish Legation, who looked after the interests of Germans in Egypt. Hassan took Hauer to the houseboat on 12 July, bringing with them an American W/T set which had been stored at the Legation. Hauer also brought a Mauser pistol with ammunition and some maps of Egypt.9
Apart from the problems of communication, the agents were also having difficulties making useful local contacts. Their main contact was supposed to have been Mohamed Mamza, whom Eppler had known before the war, but they soon learned that he had been taken into detention. However, the Hungarian priest Pere Demetriou, based at the Church of St Theresa Shoubra, had a spare Abwehr W/T set left over from the failed Operation El Masri (see Chapter 7). Almásy had advised Eppler to contact Brother Demetriou on his arrival; he was sure the priest ‘would give them all assistance’. Maybe they could even work with their own set from the church.10
In his account Eppler says he did contact Demetriou, travelling to the chapel of St Mark’s school on the Shariah Ibn el-Kourang in Hekmat’s borrowed Cadillac.
I was supposed to talk to a priest who would be celebrating early morning Mass. Should I be unlucky, I would have to keep coming to the church until I had found the right man.
He knew there was another W/T set somewhere in the city but,
I hated this kind of set-up; it could so easily turn out to be a trap. I disliked contacts that had been arranged by other people …11
Entering the church he found several parishioners taking mass; he had to wait uneasily in one of the pews until the service was over. Finally, after exchanging code words in a secluded corner, he met the priest; he was more elderly than he had expected, his skin like leather after years in the sun. He had a ‘lean face with a shock of white hair crowning it, the dark eyes’ had a ‘humorous twinkle’.
They retreated to the ‘semi-darkness’ of the vestry. Eppler asked him why no signals had been sent by him ‘for some time’. Demetriou explained that since the failure of Operation El Masri, the British had captured many of those involved. The risks were too great. Eppler felt he would get little help from the priest.
I knew that I would never return, not only because things were so dicey, but also because I could not approve of installing a transmitter under the altar of a church and, moreover operating it from there. That was asking for more brass neck than I had.
Obviously Demetriou had no such qualms on that score.12
The priest had had close contacts with the Hungarian Legation, which was no doubt where he came across Almásy; eventually it closed down its interests and switched to the Swedish Legation. There Demetriou met Hauer but it seems the latter did not quite trust the priest, and this may have rubbed off on Eppler.13
By this time Eppler was concerned that they were running out of money and had achieved little. He decided he must somehow get back to the Afrika Korps to find out what was happening. To this end he once again turned to Hauer who put him in touch with Fatma Amer, the Viennese wife of an Egyptian official who lived at Sharia Miquas 50 on Roda Island. Eppler observed that the Austrian woman ‘had been assimilated so well by her surroundings that she would have passed unobserved as an Egyptian.’14 However, Eppler was far from pleased with her or Hauer, complaining that they had no idea what they were doing and Hauer had ‘brought him a transmitting set which was as inefficient as his own.’15
Fatma Amer was described by DSO Colonel Jenkins as ‘a most dangerous woman, a brilliant actress, and a convincing liar’.16 She worked on the fringes of the Abwehr, helped Axis escapees and had contacts with the pro-Nazi Egyptian group the Liberty Party. On 21 July she introduced Eppler to Abdel Moneim Salama who took him to meet an Egyptian Air Force officer at a coffee house in Gizeh, near the Abbas Bridge. It was Lieutenant Hassan Ezzet (see Chapter 18).
Eppler was far from happy talking there but Ezzet assured him that he was amongst friends. Eppler relented, and in a lowered voice he explained Sandy’s and his predicament. What he needed was to be flown back to the Afrika Korps, and surely an Egyptian Air Force officer was in the position to do so. Ezzet said he was willing to meet Eppler again once he had checked the agents out; after all, he needed assurances that they were who they said they were if he was going to fly them back to Rommel, probably from near the pyramids of Giza. He suggested they meet on 23 July with Aziz el Masri Pasha; Eppler had little choice and agreed, well aware of the lack of success surrounding El Masri.
The centre of Cairo, 1939–1945.
Hassan Ezzet dropped Eppler back at Fatma Amer’s house. There to his surprise he met El Masri himself. The General sat in a chair too high for his diminutive frame, his feet not touching the ground, quite at ease smoking a cigarette in a jewelled holder. The two men talked long into the night about Eppler’s need to return to the Afrika Korps and about El Masri’s hopes for Egypt’s great Aryan future. Eppler thought he had an overblown opinion of himself.17
The next night Eppler and his stepbrother Hassan Gaafar went by taxi to meet Ezzet at the Kubeh Garden Station at 21:00. They met by the ice box, where Ezzet told them ‘We cannot talk here. I am being watched.’ He told them to wait at the petrol station 500 yards away near the Egyptian Army Hospital on Sharia Ismail Bey. At the station they paid off the taxi and waited at bus stop No 10 on the main Cairo-Heliopolis road for half an hour, when a brown car finally pulled up, driven by El Masri. With him was Ezzet and Captain Anwar el Sadat, a captain of signals in the Egyptian Army. Eppler sent his stepbrother home and got into the General’s car. They took the Heliopolis road and then drew up near the Villa Baron Empain to talk.18
Ezzet was still not happy, and wanted more proof that Eppler was whom he claimed to be. Eppler was frustrated and well aware of the risks involved, but said that all he could do was take them to his boat and introduce them to Sandstette. Ezzet tried to reassure him that the guarantee of his ‘bona fides’ was vital because he had no news from ‘his man’ Seoudi, who had flown over the German lines about two weeks before. Seoudi had been given letters of introduction from Masri Pasha and also code lists, as apparently he was supposed to establish a W/T link with him. He had also taken with him 1500 aerial photos of military installations and objectives in Egypt. Anwar el Sadat boasted that one of the targets they had photographed had already been bombed by the GAF (Luftwaffe). ‘From this conversation it was quite clear to Eppler that Mazri [Masri] Pasha gave orders to Hassan and Hassan to Seoudi.’19
Fatma Amer had already told Eppler that Seoudi had been the pilot of one of two planes ‘flown over to the Germans. One of them was shot down, the other arrived.’ It appears Seoudi did fly over the German lines with the photographs; he gave a signal of friendship, but as he was flying a British Gladiator he was shot down.20
El Masri drove them back to the petrol station, then Eppler, Hassan Ezzet and Anwar el Sadat took a taxi to the Kit Kat Cabaret where they picked up Sandstette and drove on to the houseboat. There Ezzet told Eppler and Sandstette that he was in contact with the Germans through an agent in the town of Zagazig, in the Nile Delta, and that he could contact the Abwehr for them. Sandy wrote a message to Angelo, their operator, Major Seubent, of 1 H West, Abwehr:
Please guarantee our existence. We are in mortal danger. Please use the wave-length No 1 at 09:00hrs Tripoli time. Max and Moritz [their code names].21
Ezzet told them that it would take about six days to get a reply.
Anwar el Sadat examined the W/T sets that Sandy had been planning to ditch in the Nile, but changed his mind when the Captain told him that they were in working order. El Sadat was shocked by the obviously riotous life Eppler and Sandy were enjoying. There were empty bottles lying everywhere and evidence of female company. He wrote that the houseboat was
… a place straight out of the Thousand and One Nights, where everything invited indolence, voluptuousness and pleasure of the senses. In this dissolute atmosphere the young Nazis had forgotten the delicate mission with which they had been entrusted.22
Eppler was equally unimpressed with El Masri and El Sadat, and felt that the meetings with them ‘proved a waste of time’. They needed El Sadat’s expert opinion on the radios, but the man went off in a huff making it clear that
He did not approve of the cover we had chosen, although it was none of his business. He took it for granted that an agent ought to live like a hermit.
But Eppler had other worries and did not care how things looked to the Egyptian.
I was fed up … I felt like a blind man having to grope without knowing where he is. I felt as browned off as a man on whom an enormous invisible fist descends every second, beating him into the ground. It was all very depressing.
But he cheered himself up with an ‘outsize Scotch, four fingers of it, without soda …’23
Eppler doubtless would have been more depressed if he had known his file as Hussein Gaafar had already crossed Major Sansom’s desk, along with those of El Masri, Anwar el Sadat, Hassan Ezzet and many others.
See here for a list of abbreviations used in the below notes
1 KV/2/1467 ref40
2 Mosley, p.85
3 Sansom, p.117
4 Jeffery, K. MI6 p.427
5 Mosley, p.89
6 KV/2/1467
7 Sansom, p.118
8 KV/2/1467 Appendix D
9 ibid, Appendix A p.2
10 ibid, 13A
11 Eppler, p.222
12 ibid, p.223
13 KV/2/1467 13A p.2
14 Eppler, p.230
15 KV/2/1467 (Letter to His Excellency)
16 FO 141/852 Jenkins to Tamlyn 2/8/1942
17 KV/2/1467 17A Appendix A p.2
18 ibid, p.2
19 ibid, p.3
20 ibid, p.3
21 KV 3/5 p.70
22 Sadat, A., Revolt on the Nile p.47
23 Eppler, p.232–233