Double Cross in Cairo (17 page)

In October 1943 there was a further threat to
CHEESE
when an SIS agent in Athens, codenamed
GROWNUP
, reported that ‘In Heliopolis, Cairo, there is a German transmitter worked by an Italian
ROBERTO
’.
After some discussion, it was agreed that SIS would declare the news ‘very interesting’

Fortunately,
GROWNUP
was not able to pursue the matter any further, and the subject was quietly dropped,

The single recurring problem was, of course, the transfer of funds to
CHEESE
which posed some challenges for SIME as well as for the Abwehr. Clearly the Axis showed little initiative in sending money to him, but in Cairo the debate was more about how to handle the expected courier. In October 1942, when it really looked as if an unknown individual was about to turn up in Cairo and hand over a packet of money to
MISANTHROPE
, there was a lengthy discussion about what she should say to the courier if she was questioned, and about the fate of the mystery intermediary. On 11 October James Robertson decided on a plan that would accomplish most, if not all of its goals while still maintaining the pretence that
CHEESE
was at liberty and working entirely independently.

SIME, of course, was handicapped by the lack of a ‘flesh and blood’ Nicossof to appear for the courier, and there were other loose ends, such as the language to be spoken at the rendezvous, and even a physical description of
MISANTHROPE
and Nicossof. When Maunsell read Robertson’s proposal he speculated about what might happen
if
two
couriers turned up, Nevertheless, he gave his approval, and the DSO then began to assemble a suitable reception for the courier and his confederates at SIME’s villa where two SIME officers, Majors Kennedy and Dunstan, gathered a team of Field Security NCOs to act as guards. The plan dictated that

Frustratingly, with all these arrangements having been made, the Abwehr failed to send the promised courier. The dilemma for SIME was how to interpret the enemy’s apparent reluctance to place their own personnel in jeopardy by undertaking the hazardous mission to Cairo. Was the adversary suspicious of
CHEESE
? Was the entire network compromised to the point that the Abwehr was now playing with SIME? If so, the implications for strategic deception were immense as the channel had developed into the Allies’ main method of deceiving Berlin.

R
ommel's arrival in Cyrenaica in February 1941 went unnoticed by the British because, at that stage in the war, CBME had access to some Luftwaffe Enigma traffic, but no Middle East Wehrmacht keys had been solved yet, and would remain opaque for another seven months. Nevertheless, the individual circuits dedicated to Afrika Korps administrative communications were identified as early as March 1941 and designated
BULLFINCH
, a channel accompanied by
CHAFFINCH
, for operational traffic, and
PHOENIX
, which was used exclusively by the Panzerarmee Afrika. These signals provided the very first indication of the deployment of German forces to Tripolitania, and they terminated at 0800 on 12 May 1943 after a series of poignant farewell signals, marking the surrender, and referred to within the network as
KLARTEXT
.

Initially designated ‘AF5' and then
LINNET
in March and April 1941,
CHAFFINCH
included circuits connecting Rome and Berlin to Libya and Sicily. Whereas the latter were high-power static stations, the other sites tended to be low powered and mobile. Later in August 1941, a further network, linking Rome to Benghazi and Tripoli, were detected and monitored.

US military attachés based at embassies and legations in foreign countries were equipped with a cipher system known as the Black Code, a copy of which fell into the hands of the Italian Servizio Informazioni Militare (SIM) in August when the office of the military attaché in Rome, Colonel Norman Fiske, was burgled. The incident only became known when the diaries of Mussolini's foreign minister, Count Ciano, were published, causing acute embarrassment and prompting an investigation. The evidence suggested that SIM had revealed its coup to German codebreakers at the Chiffrierabteilung, who had ensured that all subsequent messages encrypted with the Black Code were intercepted and read.

It was in these circumstances that traffic for the period from October 1940 to August 1942 transmitted by Colonel Bonner F. Fellers, the US military attaché in Cairo, was read instantly by the Afrika Korps. Although not yet in the war, the Americans had been granted privileged access to British planning, and Fellers was a regular attendee at the staff conferences addressed by General Claude Auchinleck. His reports of these meetings formed the basis of a daily dispatch to Washington which Rommel found invaluable and came to rely on:

The detail supplied unwittingly by Fellers gave Rommel a massive advantage and he was quick to grasp the opportunity. Indeed, he became so dependent on what was termed ‘the good source' that he would delay his own decisions until he had received the daily Cairo decrypts from his liaison officer, Leutnant Wischmann, and expressed his frustration if Fellers's transmission was unpunctual.

The ‘good source' was terminated when, at the end of June 1942, a Luftwaffe signal encrypted on a vulnerable Enigma link was itself read and found to contain a reference to a recent British success in locating a particular Luftwaffe headquarters. This suggested a major
security leak within the British command, but the ensuing investigation failed to make any progress. However, on 9 July 1942, Australian 9th Division tanks overran an Afrika Korps intercept site on the Tel-el-Eisa plateau manned by Wireless Reconnaissance Unit 621, some 600 metres from the front. All the sixty-nine PoWs, including the commanding officer, Harald Seebohm, and his adjutant, Leutnant Herz, underwent CSDIC's attention while analysts studied the captured cipher records which proved that the enemy had gained access to the Black Code. Consequently, Fellers was decorated and replaced by a suitably indoctrinated officer, Colonel Sivley. To prevent a repetition, Sivley's assistant, Captain John Brinton, was instructed to change the new attaché systems and procedures periodically.

This episode would severely handicap Rommel, although the activities of his Y Service would remain a mystery until April 1943 when
SCORPION
, the codename for the organisation's Enigma key in the Mediterranean theatre, was finally broken by Allied cryptographers. British understanding of the enemy's Y Service would be greatly assisted by Herz who agreed to cooperate with his debriefers in Heliopolis, thereby allowing MI8's Major Tozer to compile a handbook,
The German Wireless Intercept Organisation.
Herz's senior officer, Major Seebohm, later died in an Alexandria hospital of his wounds. However, with Rommel ‘denied a vital source of intelligence' Sir Michael Howard observed ‘from now on
CHEESE
had the field very much to himself'.

CBME made a critical contribution to the Allied victory in October 1942 at El Alamein, where an Oxford don, Brigadier Edgar (‘Bill') Williams, acted as General Bernard Montgomery's chief intelligence adviser and kept him supplied with
ULTRA
summaries that provided a comprehensive view of General Erwin Rommel's order-of-battle, future plans, troop strengths, reserves, ammunition stockpiles, and fuel bunkers, together with daily updates of
the Afrika Korps' tank inventory, vehicles under repair, and a tally of recent losses. He even received copies of his adversary's private medical reports (describing Rommel's low blood pressure), which were transmitted to Berlin by Rommel's personal physician, Professor Hans Hörster, then director of the Municipal Rudolf Virchow Hospital in Berlin-Wedding.

Rommel's attack at what he believed to be a weakness in the Allied lines at El Alamein proved to be one of the great turning points of the entire war. The DAK planned to overwhelm the supposedly thin British defences and sweep triumphantly into Cairo, but
ULTRA
had given Montgomery a very precise view of the enemy's intentions and, by now confident in its accuracy, he had taken the appropriate counter measures. This was a classic, textbook example of how to exploit reliable intelligence, and the scale of the defeat was immense. Its impact was all the greater because Rommel had gambled on capturing enough fuel to sustain his momentum but, in the event, the DAK encountered well-prepared positions and coordinated aerial bombing. Without any petrol reserves, the scheme designed to deliver a swift victory and closure of the canal was transformed into a wholesale rout of historic proportions.

In February 1944 Guy Liddell recoded a slightly different perspective on the battle, attributing an ‘A' Force deception scheme codenamed
FLESHPOTS
as having contributed to the Allied success, claiming that Rommel had been influenced by the timely discovery of a misleading map, apparently abandoned in a burned-out armoured vehicle. On 18 February 1944 he dined in London with Montgomery's chief intelligence officer, Brigadier Bill Williams, who told him that

The 8th Army's surprise counter-attack in October, supported by new equipment, proved to be the start of the Akrika Korps' disastrous withdrawal over 800 miles of poor terrain with no concealment from the Royal Air Force. Convinced he was facing a strong adversary, Rommel led what was left of the DAK men and tanks to an epic defeat.

This kind of comprehensive intelligence picture, a rare phenomenon, enabled Montgomery to exploit his opponent's weaknesses and mount credible deception campaigns, but the loss of Crete in May 1941 had demonstrated that, however impressive a commander's knowledge of the enemy's intentions, there was no substitute for the determined force of arms. Despite the defenders' overwhelming numerical superiority, with 27,500 British and Empire troops, supported by 14,000 Greeks, General Bernard Freyberg was forced to surrender to an airborne force of less than 16,000. Although 15,000 Allied soldiers were evacuated to Alexandria, some 1,742 were killed, 1,737 wounded, and 11,835 taken prisoner in a humiliating defeat. Yet before and during the German offensive, Freyberg had received
ULTRA
decrypts that had detailed the enemy's strategy and identified the precise date of the attack. He also had the benefit of the Australian 4 Special Wireless Section, an eighty-strong component of 101 Special Wireless Company, that provided Freyberg with high-quality tactical intercepts throughout the fighting until the unit was evacuated from Sphakia to Alexandria.

As SIME came to appreciate at an early stage, the Axis espionage network in Cairo essentially boiled down to
CHEESE
as the sweep of
enemy aliens in June 1940 had effectively neutralised whatever preparations had been made by SIM. It would not be until May 1942 that the Abwehr attempted to infiltrate a new spy, Johannes Eppler, codenamed
KONDOR
, into Cairo, taking an epic overland route across the desert from Libya.

Alias Husein Gafaar, Eppler had been born in Egypt and his plan, codenamed
SALAAM
, called for the noted Hungarian explorer, Count Laszlo Almasy, to drive Eppler on a hazardous 1,700-mile journey from Tripoli to Assyut and deliver him deep behind the Allied lines so he could make his own way to Cairo by train, accompanied by his twenty-five year-old wireless operator, Heinrich Sandstede, who held a forged British passport identifying him as ‘Peter Muncaster'. Both men reached Cairo on 11 May 1942 but quickly discovered that although the E£600 they carried were fine, the Sterling notes worth £3,000 they had been given were banned in Egypt and difficult to exchange for usable currency. However, having changed some money, and spent most at nightclubs and bars such as the Kit-Kat and Rivoli, they were soon very short of funds and, suspecting their transmitter was faulty because they had failed to make radio contact with the Abwehr, they sought help from family, friends and contacts. Almost inevitably, this led them to betrayal.

On 11 June the DSO in Cairo, George Jenkins, was informed by Dr Radinger, one of his sources, who was a German Jewish abortionist, that Viktor Hauer of the Swedish consulate had been in touch because he had received a telephone call from someone seeking his help. Hauer had responsibility for looking after the interests of German internees in Egypt and subsequently he had agreed to meet two Germans who had asked for passports and a Hallicrafter wireless transmitter that had been stored in the consulate's basement, apparently since 1937. As Hauer had known since 1939 that the abortionist was an agent of the British, he asked him to act as an intermediary, and the result was
that the DSO arranged for Hauer, whose precise diplomatic status was uncertain, to be abducted with his consent. This took place on the evening of 27 June, and as Hauer left the Metro cinema he was blindfolded and driven to the SIME villa at Maadi. Under interrogation, Hauer described his background. He was an Austrian diplomat who had served in Paris, and had married a woman from Alsace in Cairo in 1936. They had a five-year-old daughter who had returned with her mother to Europe.

Hauer confirmed that he had been visited at the consulate by Hassan Gafaar, and had agreed to see him again the same evening at Badia's Cabaret near English Bridge, where he had been introduced to Eppler. Together the trio took a taxi to Eppler's houseboat where he met Sandstede who had threatened him, and mentioned another transmitter buried five hundred kilometres away at Assyut. He had also said that in their messages they were known as
MAX
and
MORITZ
.

Having made this statement, Hauer's name was changed to Franz Miller and, at his request as he feared for his life, he was transferred to a PoW camp in Palestine where he remained for the rest of the war. SIME later concluded that Hauer had not told the whole truth, and had omitted to mention that he had also supplied Eppler with six maps of Egypt and a Mauser pistol, all of which were subsequently recovered. He had also acted as an intermediary for a group of Egyptian officers who had planned to block a British evacuation in the event that Rommel reached Cairo. They hoped to sabotage the bridges and maximise British casualties, but had no way of communicating with the Germans.