Double Cross in Cairo (18 page)

Eppler and Sandstede were arrested on the evening of 25 July 1942 at their rented houseboat at El Agouza, and interrogated separately by Harold Shergold and Giles Isham. Shergold, who spoke fluent German, having studied in Munich before the war, had joined the
Intelligence Corps upon the outbreak of hostilities, when he had been teaching at Cheltenham Grammar School.

The houseboat's interior was searched thoroughly, but no transmitter was found, and Eppler later claimed he had thrown it into the Nile four days earlier. From SIME's viewpoint, it was absolutely essential to ascertain whether this pair of enemy agents were on a short-term, tactical mission to collect military information directly relevant to the Afrika Korps' objectives in Egypt, or if Eppler had some other role, perhaps to check on
CHEESE
, supply him with money or complete some other mission.

From the outset, both men proved extremely compliant and not only implicated a large number of Egyptian co-conspirators but then appeared as prosecution witnesses at their trials. In return, both men were treated throughout as prisoners of war rather than enemy spies destined for the gallows. As a result of their testimony two Egyptian army officers, Flight-Lieutenant Hassan Ezzat and Captain Anwar el Sadati were court-martialled by a military tribunal headed by the Egyptian army's DMI, Kaimakam Moussa bey Loufta, and interned for the rest of the war, as was a pro-Nazi civilian, Aziz el Masri Pasha, the former chief of staff of the Egyptian army.

A pilot, Ezzat had been asked to fly Eppler back to the German lines, should the need arise. Anwar el Sadati was in the Egyptian Signals Corps and his function was to repair Eppler's radio and to transmit an emergency message if required. The signals officer, Sadati, was suspected of being a Nazi sympathiser, based on the a copy of
Mein Kampf
annotated in red ink, found at his home, and his admitted association with Eppler and Sandstede whom he had met at their houseboat.

Also implicated was an employee of the Ministry of Social Affairs, Frau Doktor Fatma Amer, the German wife of a local doctor, Ali
Amer, who had previously assisted escapees who had absconded from their internment camps. The most recent fugitive, Kurt Siegel, who had benefited from her help, was also detained. Eppler would later claim that Madame Amer would be his link to a pro-Nazi ‘Egyptian Liberty Movement' and had introduced him to one of its leaders, el Masri Pasha.

Eppler willingly explained his own background. He said he was twenty-five years old, having been born in 1914 in Alexandria, the illegitimate son of Johanna Gafaar, and his father had been a British officer. He had been brought up in Germany between 1915 and 1931, and then had returned to Egypt where he had attended the Lycée Francais. He had travelled back to Germany in August 1937 and joined the Luftwaffe, holding the rank, and paybook, of a lieutenant.

Eppler would later say that while in Berlin in 1937 he had visited the Abwehr's headquarters in the Tirpitzufer, where he had been greeted by Admiral Canaris, and had been trained as a saboteur until October when he had been sent to Athens for a briefing on his first mission, in Istanbul. Following that he had operated in the Balkans, liaising with Colonel Morozow of the Siguranza in Bucharest, to investigate reports, leaked from the British embassy, of British plans to sabotage the Ploesti oilfields. His next assignment was to be Cairo, and Eppler described his journey through Palestine, staying in Jerusalem, before returning to Alexandria. By May 1941 he was in Baghdad but he gave several very different versions of his movements prior to his arrival in Tripoli in 1942 in preparation for
SALAAM.

Fluent in English, Arabic, French and some Scandinavian languages, he was married to a Danish wife, Sonia Eppler-Wallin, and had lived with her at Godthaabsveg 90 in Copenhagen until September 1940 when he had been conscripted into a Wehrmacht motor transport depot, and was then then transferred to a signals unit. On another occasion he said that before the war he had run a cotton business in
Alexandria, but at the last moment before hostilities were declared he had fled by car to Germany, via Transjordan, Iraq and Turkey.

Eppler ended up in the same OKW topographical section as Sandstede, where he had been employed as a cartographer, but in the summer of 1941 both men had been moved to the 15th Company of the Brandenburg Regiment.

According to his version of events, Eppler initially had stayed at a flat at Sharia Bourse el Guedida belonging to a Frenchwoman, Mrs Therese Guillement, who was married to an Egyptian, but the location had proved unsatisfactory, partly because her premises were ‘used for immoral purposes' and drew sporadic police attention, but mainly because the block was screened by other buildings which interfered with radio reception. He had then visited his mother at her home, Sharia Masr al Khadina 10, in Cairo's old town, and discovered that his step-father Saleh Gafaar, a retired Egyptian judge, had died seven months earlier, and that his half-brother Hassan Gafaar, was away.

Eppler described how he had befriended Hekmet Fahmy, a belly-dancer at the Continental Hotel, who had allowed him to stay at her houseboat which she shared with her lover, a British officer who had been posted with his unit to the desert, and had left behind a case containing personal papers, among which was a map of Tripoli showing the disposition of Italian troops prior to the British occupation in 1941. Eppler then asked Fahmy to find him a houseboat to rent, which she did, and he moved into Dahabia (houseboat) number 10. He also wrote a letter to Hassan Gafaar asking him to attend a rendezvous at the Bar Americaine in the Fouad el Awal. They met, and Hassan suggested they seek help from Hauer who, he claimed, had arranged an introduction to Hassan Ezzat at a bungalow in Heliopolis.

The SIME interrogators were particularly interested by Eppler's assertion that he had been informed that there was another active German transmitter in Cairo, allegedly run by the Gestapo and
concentrating on political intelligence. At one point this radio, supposedly deposited at Zagazig before the war, could be accessed by a contact, Aziz el Masri, who might be able to send an emergency message to Rommel's headquarters for him.

Another espionage suspect was Prince Abbas Halim, an individual already known to be pro-Axis who had been the subject of correspondence between Alex Kellar of MI5's E2(b) and his colleague Helenus Milmo. According to Eppler, he had been instructed to contact the prince through his former servant, now employed at the Royal Automobile Club in Cairo.

Eppler also described how he had been given the details of a Hungarian priest at the church of the St Therese Carmelite convent in Cairo who would respond to a special password ‘alma mater', and was supposed to have a 100-watt transmitter hidden on the premises. This statement led to the interrogation of Father Demetriou, a Carmelite lay brother who had been in Egypt since his arrival from Palestine in October 1939. Significantly, Demetriou, who was described by Hauer as ‘thoroughly pro-German' had been nominated by the Swedish legation, which had taken over responsibility for Hungarian affairs when that country's legation had closed, as an interpreter and someone to liaise with Hungarian internees. Born in January 1912 in Maco, Pierre Demetriou had studied at the Keszthely convent in Hungary before moving to Mount Carmel in August 1934. Under intensive interrogation Demetriou admitted having known Viktor Hauer and a German woman whom he reluctantly identified as Fatima Amer, but denied that he had ever been entrusted with a transmitter by Laszlo Almasy or one of his representatives. He also denied ever having met Eppler, which was probably true as Eppler's diary noted a visit to the St Therese chapel on 30 May, when he had been informed that ‘Father D' was away that day. As he had not repeated the trip, there was nothing else to link Demetriou to German espionage, apart from
Levi's instruction that he would receive a radio through the Hungarian legation, and various references to a priest working as an Abwehr courier. It would not be until Erich Vermehren's interrogation that more details of Demetriou would emerge.

Meanwhile Sandstede was also being cooperative. Born in Oldenberg in 1913, the son of a chemistry professor, he had emigrated to West Africa in 1930, then lived in South Africa, moving to Uganda, Kenya, Dar-es-Salaam and Tanganika, and in 1938 was working as the office manager for Texas Oil successively in Kampala, Nairobi, Mombasa and Dar-es-Salaam. He spoke English, French, Swahili and some Italian. He had been interned in Dar-es-Salaam at the outbreak of war, but had been repatriated in January 1940 with other civilian detainees in an exchange. Once back in Germany, he had been assigned to a topographical department where he had worked on maps of the parts of Africa he knew, correcting and translating them. He claimed that he had chosen the alias ‘Peter Muncaster' as he had known someone of that name in East Africa, and the Abwehr had forged the passport accordingly.

Sandstede confirmed Eppler's story that the pair had first met while attending an interpreters' course at Meissen in the summer of 1941, and had been transferred to the 15th Company of the Brandenburg Regiment because of their knowledge of foreign languages. There they had both been recruited by Rittmeister von Hoesch for a mission in Africa, and had been taken in civilian clothes to the Grand Hotel in Vienna to meet Count Almasy. On this occasion Eppler had also met Otto Eisentrager, one of the Abwehr officers associated with
CHEESE
who had been an adviser to Emperor Haile Selasse in Abyssinia until the Italian invasion, when allegedly he had moved to Cairo.

When Hoesch was killed at Gazala on 8 October 1941 the operation was entrusted to a Captain Pretzl, a Muslim who had worked before the war at the Azhar University. Under his supervision, Eppler
and Sandstede had attended a wireless operators' course in Munich, and then undergone further training at the Abwehr radio station at Berlin-Stahnsdorf. However, Pretzl would be killed in a plane crash in November 1941 while on a flight to Vienna, and in his absence Almasy took over command.

Almasy, who would travel to Tripoli at the end of December 1941, assured both men that their mission, to collect military information in Egypt, was entirely safe, and that if they were caught the Germans would take immediate steps to exchange them for Major Patrick Clayton, a founder of the LRDG who had been captured on the last day of January 1941 during a raid by his ‘T' Patrol, deep behind enemy lines at Kufra. Clayton, who was wounded in the engagement, was an explorer who had been on several prewar expeditions when he had worked for the Survey of Egypt. Evidently the Germans regarded his capture as a considerable coup, and served to provide them with a potentially valuable bargaining chip, should the need arise.

By February 1942 the Abwehr had assembled a large group to finalise the details of Operation
KONDOR
, and among them were Steffens, von der Marwitz, Waldemar Weber, Wöhrmann, Munz Korper, Stringmann, and Beilharz.

The mission began on 12 May when Almasy led two columns of six captured British Ford V8 trucks into the desert at El Dibo on the journey across Libya, leaving fuel and water dumps along the route for use on the return journey. Conveniently, Almasy maintained daily radio contact with his base in Tripoli, thus enabling the British Y Service to monitor the traffic. The last part of the expedition was completed with two trucks, and some seven kilometres from Assyut Eppler and Snadstede, having buried their German uniforms, replaced them with civilian clothes, and concealed one of their two transmitters under some stones. This set, identical to one recovered from the houseboat, would later be retrieved by SIME. Finally, on the afternoon of
Sunday 24 May 1942, they caught a train to Cairo where they found rooms, for two nights, at the Pension Nadia, before finding accommodation at Therese Guillermet's brothel.

Sandstede described how he had attempted to raise the Germans with his radio, using the callsign HGS (his initials) and hoping to hear HWB in reply from Weber. After two weeks of failure, they decided their equipment was faulty and took steps, which proved disastrous, to obtain a new set. Sandstede also confirmed that the book code he had been assigned was based on
The Unwarranted Death.

Both Eppler and Sandstede agreed that Almasy had briefed them on a Hungarian priest, Father Pierre Demetriou, of the St Therese Convent in Shoubra, who was alleged to possess a wireless and be in radio contact with Budapest. When SIME followed this lead and questioned the priest, the allegation was denied and no further action was taken. In any event, Eppler failed to find Demetriou.

SIME was able to verify the statements made by Eppler and Sandstede by comparing their versions with
TRIANGLE
intercepts, which became available from January 1942, and CSDIC interrogation reports of interviews with two NCO drivers, Waldemar Weber and Walter Aberle, two Palestinian Germans who had been captured at Bir Hachim on 27 May and questioned before Almasy ever reached Egypt.

According to a report drawn up by Blanshard Stamp of MI5's B1(b) section in January 1943, Weber had been born in 1912 and spent most of his life in Palestine. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1934 and undergone military training in Germany in 1936. Shortly before the outbreak of war he had returned to Germany and in October 1939 had been assigned to the 25th Infantry Signals Depot to undergo wireless training, but in the spring of 1940 had been transferred to the elite Brandenburg Regiment. He had completed a mission in civilian clothes to Bulgaria, returning to Germany in November 1940, and in July 1941 had been posted to Istanbul as a wireless operator.
In September 1941 he was ordered back to Germany, in preparation for a mission to Syria, but only reached Athens when it was decided that his grasp of Arabic was not good enough. Instead, he had been transferred in January 1942 to the Abstelle in Paris to study the British order-of-battle, and then in February sent back to Berlin in anticipation of his posting to Tripoli and participation in
SALAAM
. He recalled having met Eppler and Sandstede for the first time in Berlin in September 1941, when the pair had attended a course on the composition of the British Army.