GENERAL AZIZ EL MASRI HAD been Chief of Staff of the Egyptian Army and once a tutor to King Farouk. He was an ardent nationalist and open critic of the British, as well as a close friend of the Egyptian Prime Minister, Ali Maker. Many of his army officers were suspected of having contacts with the enemy.
With the entry of Italy into the war, the British Ambassador in Cairo, Sir Miles Lampson, demanded the removal of El Masri from command. However, Ali Maker did no more than put him on indefinite leave, and then only after the capture of the Italian headquarters in Libya in which was found a complete set of the British plans for the defence of Egypt. These plans were tracked back directly to a set supplied to El Masri. ‘Sammy’ Sansom was surprised at this to say the least: ‘Why our plans should have been shown to General el Masri was, and still is, a mystery to me. He had never made any secret of his strong pro-Axis sympathies.’ Even worse, the General’s dismissal did not restrict him and he ‘joined the ranks, already numerous, of Egyptians of high standing who were always likely to cause us trouble and whom we could not touch until they did.’1 It was in Germany’s interest to get hold of El Masri and use his influence in the Egyptian Army to bolster support for the Axis cause and focus anti-British sentiments.
Events in other parts of the Arab world were also coming into play. At the outbreak of the Second World War the young King of Iraq was only four years old, and his uncle, the pro-British Amir Abdul Illah, was regent. Iraq broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, but in June 1940 they did not break off relations with Italy. Thus the Italian legation at Baghdad became a centre of Arab nationalists and anti-British agitation. In August 1940 the German ambassador in Ankara, Franz Von Papen, met with Osman Kemal Haddad, the private secretary of the Grand Mufti. The Iraqi Ambassador was also present, the brother of the pro-Axis prime minister, Rashid Ali el-Ghailani.
Haddad, who was far from reliable, told Von Papen about the situation in Iraq and the wish for German aid under the same terms as Italy in order to throw off the British yoke, and an assurance that they would support the independence of all mandated Arab countries. They also talked of a revolt in Palestine orchestrated from Syria, to help the fight against the British. Moving on to Berlin, Haddad presented himself at the Reich Foreign Office as some sort of ambassador for the Arab world. He advised them that a committee led by the Grand Mufti was coordinating action.
At about the same time Eppler was in Istanbul, staying at the Pera Palace Hotel, enjoying the favours of an ‘oriental beauty – a doe-eyed little darling’ he was tiring of and trying to ditch. An Abwehr contact told him to report to the embassy in Ankara, an ideal excuse to slip away, which doubtless he told his mistress was a business trip. He was off to find Hadji Mohammed Amin el Husseini, the Grand Mufti.
It was his first visit to the embassy, known locally as the ‘German Village’. There Eppler met ‘Aladin’ who had asked to see him; Eppler thought he was ‘one of the cleverest Abwehr agents, and his cover name Aladin fitted him perfectly.’ To avoid being overheard they went for a drive, and stopping the car in a remote spot Aladin told Eppler of Haddad’s visit and that he was on his way to Berlin. Eppler told him that the Grand Mufti ‘had a finger in far too many pies in far too many places’ and that Haddad was not to be trusted.2
Aladin told Eppler of his new mission to go to Iraq and find out what was going on, and whether a putsch was possible. Eppler had a transmitter and the code would be taken from Wensinck’s The Muslim Creed. They would start with page 4, skip a page a day, and use the second paragraph.
Eppler travelled slowly south by train across the Middle East using his Egyptian passport. He soon realised that the anti-British mood was beginning to cool. However, the word from Iraq was that the army remained pro-Axis and a group of officers known as the ‘Golden Square’ were conspiring to start a rebellion.
Arriving in Baghdad he found the city ‘dusty’ and smelly and it had lost ‘the glories of bygone days’. There he met with prominent Iraqis in the villa of Sheikh Djafar in the northern part of the city on the left bank of the Tigris, shaded by tall date palms.
A servant, stepping like a stork, carried his tray over the legs of the guests scattered around the room. It was all very Arab. The assembled company gave the impression of having just been awakened from a long nightmare of slavery. But I knew them, these cunning bastards, and I knew that they were well off.
He knew they expected him to be able, through the Germans, to supply the power to ‘blow’ the British out of Iraq. ‘Then the great independence jamboree could begin.’
Eppler observed that one man deliberately arrived five minutes late, seemingly for dramatic effect. It was the Grand Mufti, ‘the world champion of intrigue’. He took the place of honour, a throne-like chair, ‘vulgar and tasteless, with plenty of gold and tinsel’ with green upholstery. He greeted them all as if he was giving a private audience.
Eppler disliked him, and he did not consider himself a conspirator, more an observer, as he counted nine in the room excluding himself. Those gathered seemed sure that the British knew nothing of their aims. Eppler was not convinced on that score, and was even more alarmed that they felt they could overcome any obstacle with the help of Allah; after all they had the Grand Mufti to guide them.
There was much debate but the Mufti was pulling all the strings. He said that the Italians were with them and he expected the Germans to do likewise. His agent was in Berlin. He was in constant contact with revolutionary groups in Palestine, Syria and Egypt. But alas, the insurgents were very poor and needed support. Apparently at this point the Mufti looked directly at Eppler, smiling, but Eppler made no comment; ‘For me the afternoon was not worth even a two line report.’ When the meeting broke up Eppler met with Colonel Mahmoud Salman, an air force officer and member of the ‘Golden Square’. He felt rather like Eppler and was equally unenthusiastic about Husseini the Grand Mufti.
Eppler sent a downbeat report to his superiors the next day. He had seen much evidence of British troop movements (this was February 1941), moving through Iraq for ‘the North African Front’ and he decided to leave for Egypt via Damascus, as he had completed his mission.3
In early April 1941 the Regent of Iraq learnt of a plot to arrest him and fled Baghdad to Habbaniya from where he flew to Basra, taking refuge on HMS Cockchafer. The Iraqi Prime Minister, Rashid Ali el Ghalani – with the support of the ‘Golden Square’ made up of army and air force officers – seized power. The new British Ambassador Sir Kinahan Cornwallis only reached Baghdad the day before the coup. It had been hoped he might have been able to douse the flames of revolution by diplomatic means.4
The rebels besieged the air training base at Habbaniya, and surrounded the British Embassy in which 300 people were trapped. The Middle East Commander in Chief General Archibald Wavell already had the German invasion of Greece and Rommel’s dash across Cyrenaica to deal with, and had no troops to spare for Iraq.5 However, the Chiefs of Staff were in favour of armed intervention and General Sir Claude Auchinleck, Commander in Chief India, offered to send a brigade to Iraq, which within a month could be up to a division in strength, and which he was willing to command. But Churchill would not transfer the responsibility for Iraq from Wavell; the Prime Minister constantly bullied and harried his reserved Middle East commander whom he found baffling. Churchill considered Wavell no more than ‘a good chairman of a Tory Association’.6
Wavell favoured a diplomatic solution but he scraped together various units to make ‘Habforce’, which entered Iraq through Palestine in mid May. It consisted of one mechanised brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division, one field regiment and a lorry-borne infantry division. It had no armoured cars, tanks, anti-aircraft guns or anti-tank weapons, and in Wavell’s opinion it would be too weak and too late.7
Meanwhile the Abwehr Operation El Masri was coming together. It was decided that Almásy would pilot a Heinkel III German medium bomber specially adapted for a long range role, with RAF markings. He would fly low and slip under British radar and pick up the General at Red Jebel, an elevated plateau southwest of Cairo.
This was not the first scheme put forward to get El Masri out of Egypt, all of which largely descended into a comedy of errors. The first idea had been to send a U-boat into Lake Burullus, east of Alexandria, where one of the branches of the Nile flows into the Mediterranean. That was until someone pointed out the lake was far too shallow for any submarine. Next was a suggested rendezvous near Kataba on the fringe of the desert, until it was realised the British had a large supply dump there and many troops in the area.
On the night of 16/17 May Almásy took off from Derna in Libya, heading for Red Jebel, accompanied by another Heinkel III. The pick-up point was not far from the road to Cairo, and was supposed to have been marked by a giant white cross. According to Ritter, Almásy and his wing man were forced to fly far out into the desert to avoid British standing air patrols.
Everything went according to schedule. They saw the Red Jebel and they expected to find the landing cross of the Pasha.
But there was no landing cross. Their disappointment was great, their excitement grew. What could they do?8
They waited as long as possible, crossing and re-crossing the area in case El Masri was nearby or lost. But with fuel running low they were forced to return to base. Almásy did not seem in the least upset according to Ritter, the former feeling sure that the ‘Pasha’ would not have deliberately let them down. They would have to wait for the next morning’s broadcast from their contacts to learn what had happened.
In the event it was not ‘Martin’ – their radio contact in Cairo who had helped organise the flight of El Masri from Egypt – who called; rather they learnt from Radio Cairo that the General had been arrested. Later it was indicated that El Masri had taken off from Cairo that night with the cover story that he was bound for Baghdad to persuade pro-German Iraqi officers of the ‘Golden Square’ to abandon their anti-British revolution. Some accounts say the aircraft broke down and had to make a forced landing.9
Sansom tells a different story; some time after 2 May he was told by informants within the Egyptian Army that El Masri was defecting to the Germans. He raced off to the airfield by car, arriving just as the plane was taxiing to take off, accompanied by Colonel Hegazi, Chief of Egyptian Army Intelligence, as in theory Sansom had no power over Egyptian nationals. They chased the aircraft down the runway, Sansom exhorting his driver to go faster, even though they knew it was hopeless. ‘The aircraft was heading into the wind and almost at the point of take-off.’ They managed to get up alongside the plane for a brief few seconds before it left them behind. ‘We saw the tail of the aircraft lift. In seconds now the wheels would leave the ground and the machine would be airborne, but still we hurtled on.’ Yet the plane did not take off; perhaps the pilot panicked or tried to lift off too early. The tail dropped, the aircraft slewed around and hit the boundary fence, the starboard wing hitting a concrete post. The tail rose into the air burying the propeller into the earth and the aircraft, a twin-engine bomber, came to rest on its smashed starboard side.
They helped the occupants from the wreckage and Hegazi arrested El Masri and his companions. Back at his headquarters they interviewed the General, who refused to answer any questions in the presence of Sansom, the representative of a ‘foreign power’. ‘As this was not getting us anywhere I left,’ said Sansom.
I had nothing to complain about, anyway. Helped very largely by luck … we had spoiled the General’s escape attempt and this prevented the establishment of a ‘Free Egyptian Army’ on German-occupied territory. Hegazi told me afterwards that the contents of the general’s briefcase made it clear that was the design.
Colonel Hegazi informed Sansom of the other escape plans – including the U-boat at Lake Burullus – that El Masri had told him about, but it is likely he was far from telling the whole truth even then.10 The wily General had even suggested to a British Special Operations Executive Officer, Colonel Cudbert Thornhill, when they had lunched together on 12 May, that he be given official sanction to fly to Baghdad on a mission to stop the officers’ revolt there. Thornhill denied that he ever agreed to any plan but even lunching with El Masri was enough to get him sent back to London in disgrace, at the insistence of an angry Ambassador Lampson.11
After the war El Masri met Ritter in Cairo and spun him all sorts of yarns, even describing an escape to Syria. But all the dates were wrong for he had been languishing in prison. It is fairly certain that the plane crash Sansom witnessed was on the night of 16/17 May and El Masri was trying to rendezvous with Almásy. A Middle East Intelligence report of 22 May endorses Sansom’s account that El Masri tried to escape
… on the night of 16/17 May, possibly to Syria en route to Iraq, in an Egyptian Air Force plane. With two officers, Hussein Zulficer Sabri and Abdul Moreim Abd ur Ru’uf [Sansom calls him Abdel Ra’ouf]. But the aircraft made a forced landing only ten miles from Cairo.12
However it appears that at some point El Masri escaped or was released by Colonel Hegazi, for on 19 May the Egyptian government issued a notice revealing that Aziz el Masri and two air force officers had committed an offence against the nation’s safety and security. A reward of £1000 was to be paid to anyone who assisted in securing the arrest of one or all of the fugitives and that anyone harbouring them or helping them to escape would be severely punished. After a tip-off they were arrested in a suburb of Cairo on 6 June.13
There was much vocal support for El Masri amongst the local population; the General became an embarrassment to the Egyptian and British governments, but Lampson was reluctant to have the case dropped, a view shared by Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary. Legal machinations delayed his trial in order to keep him locked up and court proceedings were continually put off and finally quietly dropped.
Sansom found out that El Masri’s companion Abdel Ra’ouf was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, who joined the growing file on ‘Subversive Elements’ within the Egyptian Army.
Sometimes, in the evenings, I sat in my office with the dossiers spread in front of me, pored over the information and stared at the photographs as if by sheer concentration I could discover which of them were the leaders of the group.
My favourite suspect was a short, slight young signals officer with a sleepy look that came from heavy lidded eyes. His name was Anwar el Sadat.14
Eppler was in Egypt in the early months of 1941, following his trip to Iraq. Checking on his contacts in Alexandria and Cairo, he observed: ‘Our jobs were changing. Up until now the business of collecting information had been something of a game.’ The people he knew ‘were far from anticipating an Axis victory’.15
By early May he had moved on and was staying in the opulence of the Orient Palace Hotel in Damascus, opposite the Hejaz railway station. The station had been built in 1917, in readiness hopefully to ferry Muslim pilgrims to Medina in Saudi Arabia and then onward to Mecca. At breakfast he read in a newspaper that a rebellion had broken out in Iraq, which might mean a holy war against the British spreading across the Middle East. According to the editorial the British Consulate in Damascus had been attacked. Eppler rushed off to see for himself but discovered that the report was inaccurate.
He decided to take the Nairn bus to Baghdad, a journey of nearly 850 kilometres east across the flat and featureless Syrian desert. The Nairn service had been started by two New Zealanders, Gerry and Norman Nairn, who had served in the transport division of the same British Army that had thrown the Turks and their German allies out of Baghdad in 1917. Before the Nairn service the British had got to Baghdad by mail ship through the Suez Canal to land at Basra.
The Nairns proved the overland route in 1923, taking two Dodge cars from Beirut via Damascus to Baghdad. They won the postal contract, and a passenger service soon followed. Most of the journey was on hard natural surfaces where the vehicles could reach 50mph but even carrying iced drinks and vast quantities of food it was uncomfortable and tedious. Agatha Christie took the bus in 1928 and found the ride had a similar motion to a ship; she soon came down with travel sickness.
The 48-hour trip across the desert was fascinating and rather sinister. It gave one the curious feeling of being enclosed rather than surrounded by a void. One of the things I was to realise was that at noon it was impossible to tell whether you were going north, south, east, or west, and I learnt that it was at this time of the day when the big six-wheeled cars most often ran off the track.16
The Nairns were long gone by 1941 but the bus bearing their name still ran. ‘The interior stank as usual of garlic, onions and caraway seeds.’ Eppler found little evidence of the ‘Holy War’, other than columns of British troops on the move.
In Ramadi, 100 miles west of Baghdad, a British officer stopped the bus and ordered the driver to take a different route into the city. Eppler found Baghdad in great confusion when he arrived on 4 May, the Iraqi soldiers almost helpless against RAF air attacks. The Mufti was behind the scenes immersed in ‘political wheeling and dealing’. He found it ‘a complete mess, no telling what’s going on’.17
The Iraqi rebels attempted to besiege the RAF air training base at Habbaniya some 60 miles west of Baghdad. The units there were commanded by Air Vice Marshal H.G. Smart, a motley collection of obsolete and training aircraft, 78 in all. Many of these had been converted to a bomber role in expectation of hostilities, as the situation in Greece and Libya meant there were limited resources for reinforcement. However six Gladiators did arrive and 300 men of the King’s Own Royal Regiment were flown in.
The Iraqis were soon in possession of the plateau overlooking the Habbaniya base, but dug in rather than moving forward. Smart knew the British were on their own, and the cantonment was hard to defend and was crammed with refugees. The British Ambassador – who was besieged in the Embassy in Baghdad18 – informed Smart that he regarded the Iraqi threat to the base as an act of war.
At dawn on 2 May all available aircraft at Habbaniya attacked the Iraqi positions on the plateau, along with eight Wellingtons flying from Shaibah near Basra. Smart then expanded his attack to knock out the Iraqi Air Force. On the first day the Flying School made 193 sorties, and three days later the King’s Own raided the plateau. By 6 May the Iraqis started pulling back from their positions. By mid-May Habforce was moving west from Palestine, while General Sir Claude Auchinleck’s Indian troops came in from the southeast, quelling the rebellion.
A handful of Axis aircraft did arrive in Iraq, flying via Rhodes and Syria, fourteen ME 110 fighters, seven HE III bombers and twelve CR 42 Italian fighters. By 29 May the small force had lost 23 of their aircraft, and there were no more to spare with the Luftwaffe fully committed to the battle for Crete. On the next day came the news of the collapse of Rashid Ali’s interim rebel government; he complained bitterly about the lack of support from the Axis and blamed them for everything.19
For the British it was the one bright spot amidst a sea of troubles. The garrison at Habbaniya had shown great fortitude and ingenuity under Smart’s resolute leadership.
In Baghdad the British civilians owed much to the firmness and tact of the Ambassador in his extremely difficult position, and some of them had good reason to be grateful to the United States Minister who gave them refuge at the worst time.20
By the third week in May Eppler had seen enough and headed for the mountains of Kurdistan and the Persian frontier. It was an area he had got to know well on a 1937 mission to canvas the tribes there on anti-British feeling.
As for the two heroes of the putsch, they had long ago crossed the Persian frontier and made their way to the safety of the Japanese Legation in Teheran. Rashid Ali el-Ghailam was eventually smuggled out of Persia via Turkey and on to Berlin. But the Mufti had greater difficulty in escaping and barely managed to get himself to Italy and then Berlin by November 1941.21
See here for a list of abbreviations used in the below notes
1 Sansom, p.57
2 Eppler, p.147
3 Playfair, Major-General I.S.O., The Mediterranean & Middle East Volume 2 p.178
4 ibid, p.179
5 ibid, p.179
6 Cooper, p.69
7 Playfair (Volume 2), p.185
8 Ritter, N., Deckname Dr Rantzau p.406–407
9 Bierman, p.154
10 Sansom, p.72–74
11 Cooper, p.71
12 PRO WO 208/1560, 22/5/1941
13 Kelly, S., The Lost Oasis p.169
14 Sansom, p.76
15 Eppler, p.177
16 Christie, A., Agatha Christie: An Autobiography p.383
17 Eppler, p.179–180
18 Playfair (Volume 2), p 183–184
19 ibid, p.196
20 ibid, p.197
21 Eppler, p.183