Double Cross in Cairo (19 page)

Aberle, aged thirty-seven, also had been born in Palestine and from 1936 had run a garage in Haifa with Weber. He had returned to Germany upon the outbreak of war and had been assigned in the autumn of 1939 to an anti-tank depot company before being transferred to the Brandenburg Regiment in the spring of 1940. After a period on the Belgian coast preparing for the invasion of England, he was posted to Tripoli in October 1941.

More corroboration came from the diaries which Sandstede had maintained. Although some entries proved to be false, such as the claim that they had visited Suez and Port Said to recruit local informants, they had kept these incriminating documents to prove, when Rommel entered Cairo, what they had accomplished for the Reich. At the moment of their arrest Sandstede had thrown Eppler's diary into the Nile, but had failed to destroy his own.

Eppler's half-brother, Hassan Gafaar, was also arrested, and when questioned he explained that he had been born in Germany, where he had spent the first seventeen years of his life, and had been educated in Stuttgart. He then had been apprenticed to a firm of ironmongers for eighteen months in Backnang, where he had lived with his grandmother.

He said he had had not heard from his half-brother until a fortnight earlier, on Saturday 11 July, when he had received a handwritten letter
instructing him to meet Hans at the Americaine that same evening. He had gone to the rendezvous and later had visited his houseboat, and thereafter had seen him every day. He also admitted introducing Eppler to Hauer in the hope of replacing the transmitter's faulty quartz crystal.

Thus
SALAAM
, one of the great adventures of the Second World War, later to be recounted in films such as
The English Patient,
ended as a series of interrogation reports, studied by MI5 analysts in London eager to learn if the Abwehr was planning to establish a spy-ring in Cairo to rival
CHEESE
.

B
etween July 1941 and April 1945
CHEESE
transmitted a total of 432 messages from Cairo, and provided the enemy with a vast quantity of information, much of it misleading, which had been carefully processed by ‘A’ Force for the purpose of giving the enemy an entirely false impression of the Allied order-of-battle, the strategy adopted to prosecute the war in North Africa and protect Egypt from the Afrika Korps, and to convey a wholly bogus picture of British priorities. Such an undertaking required great force of character on the part of the principal coordinator, Dudley Clarke, who had to persuade much more senior officers of the value of deception and unorthodox warfare, and SIME which otherwise might have been expected to adopt a very insular, defensive role if it had not been for the imagination of a handful of officers who would later take up the intelligence business on a professional basis. Charles de Salis, Geoffrey Hinton, Douglas Roberts, Terence Robertson, Nicholas Elliott, James Robertson, Rex Hamer, Michael Crichton and Desmond Doran found their natural
milieu
in the postwar secret world, but it was the
CHEESE
case that enabled them to realise their vocation. No such double agent had ever been managed with such ambition, and
the proposition that an entirely notional spy could dupe a relatively sophisticated enemy over a period of four years remains a veritable milestone in intelligence history.

Until he found a job with OETA,
CHEESE
himself relied on personal observation, open sources (such as the Cairo newspapers) and his sub-agents, principally
MISANTHROPE
, for his information, but as the channel developed, probably beyond the wildest expectations of SIME and ISLD, he became something of a cottage industry. From the Allied perspective, the priority was to put over dangerously false material, mixed in with sufficient truth to make it palatable, to an enemy that might have other comparable sources. This was an extraordinarily hazardous undertaking, and demanded great concentration and an appreciation of the subtleties required. These talents are not always associated with the military mind, but the remarkable personalities associated with
CHEESE
proved themselves to be entirely up to the task, ready to engage the Abwehr at their own game at a time when such large-scale schemes were entirely unknown.
CHEESE
himself had the benefit of a committee which carefully rehearsed each scenario and enjoyed sufficient prestige to perpetuate the fraud over a long period with support from London, Istanbul, Athens and Damascus, not to mention the military authorities across the entire Middle East. The stakes could hardly have been higher, but how did the case officers and their senior management develop
CHEESE’S
sources and choose his sub-agents?

The sheer variety of contacts fabricated by SIME’s Special Section is testimony to their fertile imaginations and their skills at exploiting and manipulating their adversary. Every message, every casual observation, was carefully logged, recorded on a card index and scrutinised to ensure there were no internal contradictions in the traffic. The narrative may have been constructed from whole cloth, but it had undergone plenty of study by skilled analysts to ensure that it
retained an essential verisimilitude and would be likely to be accepted as at least plausible by their Axis counterparts. SIME never made the mistake of underestimating their opponents, and paid them the compliment of fabricating themes that
might
have been authentic.

What distinguishes ‘A’ Force from any other Allied organisation was the very comprehensive nature of its mission, and the amount of attention paid to detail. For example, to develop a completely false Allied order-of-battle, which was part of the general strategy of exaggerating the strength in the Middle East, Dudley Clarke not only invented non-existent military units, but embroidered reports of individual sightings by including details of unit emblems and shoulder-flashes. For a professional analyst, such observations added verisimilitude to the reports, and ‘A’ Force mastered the technique by keeping track of every item passed to the enemy so there were no internal errors that would have tipped off the Abwehr.

In his early reporting,
CHEESE
appeared to concentrate on his own observations, but gradually, as his confidence grew, his messages grew wider in scope. An analysis of his first eighty transmissions illustrates the diverse range of the topics his information covered:

Study of
CHEESE’S
second tranche of messages, transmitted mainly in 1942, reflects his self-dependence in the absence of funds to recruit and maintain a well-informed spy-ring. Thus he made transmissions on topics that were within his grasp, including

CHEESE
also relied on the newspaper for some of his material, and his reports drawn directly from what had just been published included Indian troops in Persia; General George Brett in Cairo; air-raid damage; General de Gaulle in Cairo; the death of General William Gott; General de Gaulle and General Georges Catroux in Tripoli; Charles de Gaulle left the Levant; photo of General Alexander reviewing Polish artillery with heavy tanks; de Gaulle arrives at Brazzaville; five spies shot at Aleppo; General George W. Casey arrives from Iran; Greeks at the front; Air Marshal Arthur Tedder’s appointment; troops in the 9th Army; desert disaster; the Greek Commander-in-Chief; General Sir Bernard Paget succeeds General Sir Henry Wilson; General Sir William Holmes appointed to the
9th Army; Air Marshal Keith Park replaces Sholto Douglas; General Lloyd killed in an air accident; The King of Yugoslavia in Cairo; German traitors in Turkey; 2 Polish Corps containing Carpathian and Cresows Divisions fighting in Italy; The King of Yugoslavia in London; General Paget visited Cyprus; Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean is head of a British Military Mission to Tito; General Wilson and Lord Macmillan in Cairo for a conference; The King of Greece in London; Greek Brigade to be reorganised so as to help in the liberation of Greece; Nineteen delegates of political parties in Greece and in exile meeting in the Near East; Air Marshal Park returned here from a tour of Syria and Palestine.

The wife of a Polish officer supplied the content of four messages; ‘her husband embarking at Port Said’; ‘Leave cancelled and rejoined his regiment in Cyrenaica; A Polish officer at Quassassih belongs to 2nd Armoured Brigade; Husband thinks Poles in Italy will soon launch an attack against the Albanian coast.’

A 27th Lancers officer ‘arrived from England. His ‘leave cancelled – to rejoin his regiment in Cyenaica’; His ‘regiment is part of 8th Armoured Division which has left Cyrenaica and returned to Egypt’. He was ‘leaving for Syria with his regiment. Thinks other units of his division soon embarking for Europe.’

Another source, a Hungarian interpreter, had been ‘chosen by Civil Affairs branch for his knowledge of Bulgarian’; Bulgarians frightened that they will undergo the same fate as Hungary’; Assisted at discussions in November and training branch on port of Varna’; ‘Going to 9th Army HQ at Aleppo’; ‘The English will soon be fighting side by side with Russians.’

CHEESE
also asserted, on his own account, that he had ‘seen no sign of 4 Division. Thinks must have left Egypt; South African troops at Heitan of the 7th Division; The railway line to Palestine blocked by a sandstorm; Divisions in Egypt: the 7th
South African and 6th South African Armoured, 10th English Armoured, also division with the sign of a white unicorn; Many Greeks around Alexandria – perhaps a whole division. Also New Zealand and Polish and Indian troops at Congos. 8th Armoured and 4th Airborne Divisions to Libya and Cyrenaica; Troops with sign of green tree and black cat in Cairo; Greek Government crisis, Teomoninos resigned. Rumour that Venezilos or Romenos will be president. No Australian troops here, only airmen. Still many New Zealanders; Green tree sign belongs to 46 Division. It is London Division, were formerly in Italy. A summary of
CHEESE’S
sub-sources and the information they supplied implies that one of SIME’s tactics was to overwhelm the recipients with such volume and detail that it would appear inconceivable that anyone could devote the necessary resources to the creation of a dangerous fiction. And yet, that is precisely what was accomplished.

Initially
CHEESE
started off with a relatively limited group of conscious and unconscious informants who relayed interesting gossip or reported their own observations, but gradually the network grew to encompass more than a dozen sources who occupied positions which gave them access to military secrets. Clarke’s methodology was to drip-feed the Abwehr with what might be termed pieces of a jigsaw, thereby allowing the enemy analysts to build their own picture, rather than hand the entire story to them, almost on a plate, an approach which would be more likely to cause them to question its authenticity, By allowing them to reach their own conclusions, apparently independently, using their own military doctrine, Clarke believed that the objective could be better accomplished.

Among the first was described as ‘ESR friend’ who reported military observations, such as gliders spotted near the Suez Canal, troops crossing the canal to Palestine despite the desert battle, possibly a new armoured division or the 20th Armoured Division; the bridge at
Firdan; Australian troops at Kabrit, troops crossing the Canal; Australians leaving Kabrit; American gliders in crates at Suez. Another source was a BOAC employee who claimed that General Martel passed through Cairo while on a visit to Benghazi; reported that Generals Richard Casey and Alexander, and Air Marshal Tedder were going to Baghdad; noted that a BOAC pilot had remarked that there would be an Anglo-American invasion of Italy in November 1942.