SANSOM FINALLY CAUGHT UP WITH Eppler at the Kit Kat Cabaret, a well known haunt of spies. British officers were warned to be tight lipped around the Hungarian dancing girls, and it was even made out of bounds at one time. Sansom saw a grinning Egyptian light a cigarette with a five pound note, and, becoming suspicious, made his move. He ordered a bottle of champagne and joined the group around Eppler uninvited, feigning drunkenness.1
‘Your birthday, perhaps?’ asked Eppler, obviously suspicious of this uninvited intruder and his invitation to help him drink the champagne, notwithstanding the eagerness of the two dancing girls.
‘Just a good business deal,’ replied Sansom. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he continued, slurring his words, ‘it was a currency transaction – but don’t tell anyone.’2
Eppler himself does not mention this meeting, perhaps unwilling to admit that he was so easily taken in by Sansom. According to Sansom, he was then introduced to Hekmat Fahmy.
There was nothing I wanted less. Hekmat Fahmy must have seen me in the Kit Kat many times in uniform as well as in civilian clothes. My dark glasses seemed a shaky disguise.
Eppler introduced himself as Hussein Gaafar and Sandstette as Sandy, who had a strong American accent. At this point Sansom had no idea Eppler was anything but a wealthy Egyptian and a close friend of the famous belly dancer; he was simply following the Sterling which Eppler had burned with such bravado. Fortunately for him, the group invited him back to Hekmat’s houseboat for further drinks. All were quite intoxicated, apart from Sansom; the barman at the Kit Kat, Mac, knew to water his drinks.
Two taxis took them down to the Nile, Hekmat and Sansom in the first; he felt he had to make a pass at her under the circumstances, so there followed a clumsy grope, which to his surprise she seemed to enjoy. Or had she been primed by Eppler to try and cultivate this currency dealer?
Once on the boat the talk soon turned to currency exchanges. Sansom had a bite but he stonewalled, advising official channels as the best option; he didn’t want to appear too eager. Eppler confided that his friend would rather not take that route, and had about £10,000 to change. They arranged to meet at the Kit Kat the next night.
Sandy went to the agents’ own houseboat, apparently to get another bottle of scotch, although Sansom noted that there were several bottles on Hekmat’s boat; perhaps Sandy favoured a particular brand. This was how Sansom learned that the two men lived on a nearby boat. Shortly after this Anwar el Sadat appeared, apparently looking for Sandy, and Eppler took him over to the other boat. Sansom began to think he had struck gold.
All the pieces of the jigsaw began to click into place. It was nearly midnight, and Sandy had invented the excuse about getting more whisky in order to make his nightly broadcast …3
Sansom knew who Anwar el Sadat was and that it was more than likely he had come to see the transmitter in action.
Alone with Hekmat, Sansom felt a certain attraction to the dancer, but knew that he had to get off the boat quickly. She no doubt expected another advance. ‘Certainly she earned her living by dancing sexily, but that did not mean she was promiscuous, let alone a whore.’ More important was that if he made an advance ‘I would have to take off my dark glasses, and then she might have recognised me.’ His only course of action was to appear severely worse for wear. In the tiny bathroom he made elaborate retching sounds, and emerged wiping sweat off his face, begging for a glass of water. It was 00:15 and still the three men had not returned.
At last they came back. El Sadat ‘looked and sounded angry’. Sansom, pleading sickness, left a few minutes later. Finding the nearest telephone he contacted the radio monitoring unit to ask what they had picked up. ‘Same as usual,’ he was told, which sent him ‘dizzily to bed’.4
Sansom met with various intelligence officers the next day. The MI6 man ‘Bob’ did most of the talking. Before them was a clear choice: they could either raid the houseboats right away, or give the spies more time to reveal their network more fully. Picking them up quickly would give them more time to look at the German codes, and they might find vital information on the boats. They might even be able to broadcast misleading information to the Germans. However, if they left it a few days they might be able to round up more of the nest.
Sansom wanted to hold off but Bob was not so sure. If they waited then there was the chance that the agents’ nightly transmission would be replied to by the Abwehr. The Abwehr would tell the agents to abort, as they knew that Kondor’s contacts (Weber and Aberle) had been captured in May, and that the operation was compromised. Sansom suggested having ‘a squad standing by every night at twelve, ready to storm the houseboat at a moment’s notice, so that even then we might catch them before they have time to destroy the papers.’
To be doubly sure they could arrange to ‘jam’ the signal if the Abwehr answered the agents’ transmission in order to warn them, although the Abwehr controllers would then write the transmitter and the agents off. There were plainly risks whatever they did, but they decided to consider matters on a day-to-day basis.5 In the meantime Field Security began arresting some of the contacts the two spies had made, including members of the Swedish Legation. After his arrest Viktor Hauer – the German who had worked at the Swedish Legation – described the houseboat during his interrogation on 24 July:
The furniture is chintz covered and the woodwork is painted pale green. There are hangings on the canvas walls with decorative Egyptian figure friezes. Between the two flights of steps which lead to the upper deck is a long wooden chest painted pale green. On top of this stands a radio set, in the middle sunk in, is a gramophone turntable, at each end a cupboard. Under the turntable is a sheet of felt which Hauer lifted and found was hiding a Yale lock. It is his belief that the transmitter is hidden there.6
Anwar El Sadat and members of the Egyptian forces were left at liberty for fear of alerting Eppler.
Sansom kept his appointment with Eppler that night at the Kit Kat Cabaret, where he changed £100 into Egyptian currency at a reasonable rate, and promised to change more. However, he failed to get an invite to the houseboat as he had wanted, and was told to contact the agents through Hekmat. Sansom had one of his men watching the boat disguised as a beggar, and more men were detailed to tail the two spies as they moved about the city.
It was deemed imprudent to search the houseboat while the two spies were absent, as they would certainly be alerted to the fact by someone. Every night Sansom’s men stood ready to raid the boat at midnight, but still of course the spies received no acknowledgement to their messages.
About this time a French cabaret dancer Sansom refers to as Natalie was arrested because she had been seen to spend the night on the spies’ houseboat. Mosley calls her Yvette and places her on the houseboat on 27 July; by then she may have been working for Field Security.7 However this date cannot be correct as Eppler was arrested on 25 July.8 Dates notwithstanding, Mosley goes on to say that Maurice Hohlman, working for the Jewish Agency in the city, got hold of ‘Robby’/‘Bob’, and they both went to Sansom pleading with him to speak with Yvette as she had uncovered the spies he was looking for, Hohlman even admitting he worked for the Jewish underground and that Yvette worked for him.9
According to Sansom, Natalie/Yvette asked to speak to him and one of his NCOs advised him that he should. He found out that she was not French but a Jew from Palestine and she admitted working for a ‘Jewish underground organisation’. She and another girl had spent the night with the spies in order to gain information, which they duly did. She had discovered the agents’ transmitter hidden in the radiogram, ‘big enough for Sandy to get inside when he was transmitting.’ She revealed that Sandy had got no reply to the transmission, a fact she had heard him tell Eppler. She also told Sansom that Sandy kept his papers in a book which he kept under his pillow while he slept. That book was Rebecca.
Sansom asked her to draw a rough sketch of the houseboat, showing where the two men slept and the location of the radiogram. She apparently volunteered to go back and try and obtain the papers she had seen.10
Eppler himself identified the woman as Edith (as opposed to Natalie or Yvette), and was quite taken with her.
Her eyes were doe-shaped and slanted, her mouth blood-red without a touch of make-up. Her eyebrows were perfectly symmetrical arches. She had wonderful teeth, like those girls with frozen smiles in toothpaste advertisements.
Her hands were delicate and expressive, her hips shapely and her breasts firm and pointed. Her long legs could drive a man wild; her skin was soft to the touch and firm all over her body.11
Sami the money changer asked Eppler if he really knew Edith; he said he had met her two months before. Sami claimed that Edith had been heard to say that Eppler was her lover and that her real employers were unlikely to work in his best interests. He told him Edith was working for the terrorist Jewish ‘Stern Gang’.
Eppler found this hard to believe and doubted that the Jews could ‘afford to dress her in the style she is accustomed to. Have you ever seen her in the same outfit twice? A wardrobe like hers costs a lot of money, Sami.’
The money changer laughed at that, and told him the money came from the British.
For Eppler it then all fell into place: the interest she had shown in the houseboat. She must be working as an informer for Field Security. Eppler threatened he would have ‘to settle the score with that girl …’12
Eppler never got the chance. Field Security moved in on them, perhaps prompted by Yvette’s information that when she had left them only hours before the two agents had been ‘snoring their heads off’ and were ‘dead drunk’.13
According to Sansom, the raid was fixed for 02:00; he had some river police seconded to him to effectively surround the craft. The houseboat was cloaked in darkness as they approached. Something woke Eppler, some sixth sense.
The room was pitch dark and the night quite still. Every now and then the quiet was broken by the croaking of bullfrogs. The chirping of the cicadas in the sycamore trees along the banks of the Nile came in sharp little bursts.
There was something wrong. He shot out of bed. ‘They were here! There was a barely perceptible splashing on the water, like fish jumping. But it was not the time of the year when they jumped.’ It was the muffled oars of the river police.14
Field Security and the police broke down the door; in the darkness something was thrown. Someone called out that it was a grenade and the policemen scrambled for cover. When torches lit up the boat they found the grenade to be a rolled up pair of socks. Eppler stood there naked with a Luger, but seeing the odds against him dropped it.
In Eppler’s account of events he mentions the trick they tried with the socks, and states that before the police broke down the door they had removed the bung from the boat’s flat bottom in an attempt to scuttle it.
Sandy was caught on deck, but was thought to have thrown something into the Nile. A search of the houseboat failed to find the copy of Rebecca or the notes described by Natalie/Yvette/Edith.
We began tearing the place to pieces, without finding either the book or any coded messages. The transmitter was there, all right, hidden in the capacious radiogram just as Natalie had said. But that was all.15
In fact, the river police were in luck; both the book and the papers had landed in their launch rather than the river. When this was realised Eppler made a grab for the book, but Sansom punched him, making him stagger and fall to the floor. As the two men were taken away, Sansom advised: ‘Take my tip and talk, if you want to live.’16
Once outside Eppler observed: ‘It was still dark and the air pleasantly cool. In the east there was a thin pink line just above the Mogattam Hills. Soon it would be light; another cloudless blue sky would break over Cairo.’17
Sansom meanwhile boarded Hekmat Fahmy’s boat where she had been arrested. She was furious when she realised who he was. He collected her love letters from admirers in the British forces, some of which contained details of actions and breaches of security. No wonder Eppler had been so interested in her. ‘The raid over, I went to bed and slept long and soundly for the first time in weeks.’18
Eppler and Sandstette’s mission had utterly failed.
See here for a list of abbreviations used in the below notes
1 Cooper, p.123
2 Sansom, p.119
3 ibid, p.120
4 ibid, p.123
5 ibid, p.124–126
6 KV/2/1467 Interrogation of Viktor Hauer 24/7/1942
7 Mosley, p.114
8 KV/2/1467
9 Mosley, p.126
10 Sansom, p.129
11 Eppler, p.235
12 ibid, p.237
13 Mosley, p.128
14 Eppler, p.238
15 Sansom, p.131
16 ibid, p.131
17 Eppler, p.240
18 Sansom, p.132