Like many people my interest in the German use of the Rebecca Code during the Abwehr Operation Kondor, began with reading Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 Booker Prize winning novel The English Patient. I was further inspired by the late Anthony Minghella’s 1996 Oscar winning film of the same name. Much is to be admired in both, at the heart of which is a love story between the desert explorer Count László Almásy and the English woman Katherine Clifton.
Most readers I trust will be familiar with the book and/or the film of The English Patient, so there is no need to relate it here, other than to say much of the background of the Western Desert and Cairo was the setting for real events. Also the character of Almásy depicted in book and film is a marked distortion of the real man, and his end was in real life very different. Many of the other characters in the real story are discounted, no doubt for good reason in that fictional account.
The English Patient was not the first attempt in fiction to tell this story. The first book to cover the Kondor mission was by war correspondent Leonard Mosley in his 1958 publication The Cat and the Mice. Mosley was in Cairo at the time the events took place and he interviewed the German spies John Eppler and Peter Monkaster (Heinrich Gerd Sandstette) in prison. He also kept in touch with Eppler after the war. However in view of the later accounts, one written by Eppler, and later firm evidence, it is certain that Eppler strung him along to a degree in order to embellish his own image as some sort of James Bond. The 1960 film Foxhole in Cairo was based on Mosley’s book, the film poster calling it ‘the greatest spy story of the desert war’. That is true, but the film has little else to recommend it. In the film James Robertson Justice plays the British intelligence officer, a naval commander, tasked with catching the spies, and Michael Caine is seen in one of his early roles as a German W/T operator.
Other writers also used the bones of the Kondor story in fiction, Ken Follett in The Key to Rebecca (1980) which was filmed in 1989, and Ken Deighton in City of Gold (1992). Both books relied heavily on personal accounts. Also Anwar Sadat’s Revolt on the Nile (1957), A.W. Sansom’s I Spied Spies (1965) and John Eppler’s Rommel Ruft Cairo (1960) published in English as Operation Condor Rommel’s Spy (1977). It is doubtful if they would have used Almásy’s Rommel Senegenal Libyaban (1943), translated into English by Gabriel Francis Horchler as With Rommel’s Army in Libya (2001). Or for that matter come across Almásy’s diary of Operation Salam, held by the Imperial War Museum in the Lloyd Own Papers.
The Secret MI6 files were closed in 2003 and released to the public in 2006. It was my aim, therefore, to bring the four eyewitness accounts by Almásy, Eppler, Mosley and Sansom together with the official files and tell the true story of the Rebecca Code and Operation Kondor.
Secondary sources that have been useful include Hans-Otto Behrendt, Rommel’s Intelligence in the Desert Campaign (1980). John Bierman’s The Secret Life of László Almásy (2004), Paul Carell’s The Foxes of the Desert (1958), Christer Jorgensen’s Hitler’s Espionage Machine (2004) and Saul Kelly’s The Lost Oasis (2002).
I am grateful to the staff at Bletchley Park, the Imperial War Museum, the Intelligence Corps Museum, the Public Records Office, Royal Geographical Society, AKG Images, Hunt Library, US National Archives, Hungarian Geographic Museum, Bookends of Fowey, and the Forest Park Hotel Cyprus.
I am also hugely indebted to the following people: Shaun Barrington my Editor at The History Press for his enthusiastic support for this project right from the start. Group Captain L.E. (Robbie) Robins AEDL, another enthusiastic supporter, for free use of his extensive library, his hospitality, and for reading an early draft making many excellent comments and suggestions. My late Aunt Olive Hard for her illustrations of Egypt during the war years. To Ann Willmore, book dealer at her shop Bookends of Fowey and an expert on the work of Daphne du Maurier, who supplied a wealth of information on the publishing history of the novel Rebecca.
Finally my wife Margaret as always gave her whole hearted support in the nuts and bolts of building a book, with proof reading, index building etc. Thanks to all.