Operation Salaam

Operation Salaam was a 1942 World War II military operation under the command of the Hungarian aristocrat and desert explorer László Almásy. The mission was conceived in order to assist Panzer Army Africa (to which Almásy was attached) by transferring two Abwehr agents deep into British-held Egypt.

Background

In 1942, after numerous battles back and forth in the North African desert, German and Italian forces had pushed Commonwealth forces into a retreat that ended at El Alamein. This position was an excellent site for defence of the Nile Delta, and preparations had been ordered by General Auchinleck months previously. The area is bordered on the north by the Mediterranean and a huge salt pan - the impassable Qattara Depression - to the south. It is debatable whether Hitler had serious designs on the conquest of Egypt for he viewed the Mediterranean theatre as a sideshow and at the time of Operation Salaam he was very much concentrated on the rapidly developing invasion of the Soviet Union. The Afrika Korps which had been sent to support the Italians in North Africa, had demoralised the Allied forces with the fall of Tobruk and the Battle of Gazala. The United States was months away from participation in the "Desert war" and the Axis commander Erwin Rommel had plans for capturing Egypt which would have thus put the Allies in a very precarious situation with the Suez Canal under enemy control. Although the Germans had intelligence coups such as the Black code/Bonner Fellers intercepts, they had few agents in Egypt itself. Operation Salaam would give them eyes and ears in Cairo where the British authorities and community were in crisis over the Afrika Korps' advance, with a city-wide curfew in the months before June and many Europeans fleeing to Palestine. Two spies would be delivered via a route taken far south of the Qattara Depression where enormous expanses of desert would lessen the risks of being captured.

László Almásy was an experienced desert specialist, motorist, aviator and linguist. He had already explored the Libyan and Egyptian deserts in the 1920s and 30s with other Europeans such as Ralph Bagnold (founder of the Long Range Desert Group) and Patrick Clayton who were now working for the British Middle East Command. When Hungary had entered the war on the side of the Axis Almásy was recruited by German military intelligence and given the rank of Hauptmann (captain) in the Luftwaffe. From then on he advised Rommel's Afrika Korps and Panzer Army Afrika on desert warfare, while also leading military operations such as Salaam.

The route

Map of North Africa with locations of Jalo, Kufra, Kharga and Assiut. The dark brown areas are the ergs or sand seas.

Almásy, accompanied by Brandenburger commandos, the agent Johannes Eppler and his radio operator Hans-Gerd Sandstede^[1] were driven 4,200 kilometres in a four-vehicle convoy using captured American vehicles (with German military signs and wearing German uniform) - the Sonderkommando Almasy. The entire round trip took two weeks: seven days there and back.

They started off from the Axis base at Jalo oasis in Libya travelling south through the desert to Kufra oasis and then across the Great Sand Sea to the foot of the Gilf Kebir plateau. There Almásy showed his team members the rock paintings he had discovered at the legendary oasis Jebel Uweinat in May 1932.

After this they bluffed their way through Kharga Oasis and then dropped Eppler and Sandstede off near the railway station at Asyut. Operation Salaam now became 'Operation Condor' with the two spies on their way to Cairo and Almásy and his convoy returning into Axis-held Libya. There he was awarded the Iron Cross (first class) and promoted Luftwaffe major by Afrika Korps commander Erwin Rommel. The outward journey was tracked by British intelligence via their Bletchley Park interception headquarters though little was known about the exact intentions of the group or their final destination. During their expedition Sonderkommando Almasy had passed many Allied vehicles and were waved through the few checkpoints and bases that were on the route.

On the Nile

Eppler went under the name of Hussein Gaffar. He had grown up in Alexandria and Cairo after his mother had remarried to a wealthy Egyptian and Eppler had thus acquired this name. Sandstede posed as an American 'Peter Monkaster', since he had worked in the U.S petroleum industry before the war and could pass as a Scandinavian American. After a rail journey to Cairo the two spies rented a houseboat on the river Nile. Sandstede had installed their radio set in a grammophone cabinet in the living room on the boat. This device of furniture was built by Sandstede himself as a masterpiece of carpenter craftsmanship; the radio unit and the grammophone unit (record player) could still be operated while the radio operator was seated inside the cabinet vailed behind a wooden panel unseen and undetectable from the outside and send morse radio massages while the device played music.^[2] They then proceeded to garner information on British troop and vehicle movements with help from a nationalist-inclined belly dancer Hekmat Fahmy (Eppler's friend from his younger days), as well as other dancers and escorts in the bars and nightclubs of Cairo - a very lively city during the war and the destination of thousands of Allied service personnel 'on leave' (R&R). Eppler often posed as a lieutenant in the Rifle Brigade of the British Army and used expertly forged British and Egyptian banknotes. Using a prearranged system of codes based on Daphne du Maurier's book Rebecca they managed to make temporary radio contact with a German forward radio interception post near Alamein (the nearest to Cairo Axis forces had reached before the Battle of El Alamein). Communication problems forced them to request assistance from the Cairo-based Free Officers Movement, who were at the time nominally pro-Axis in the belief that they would 'liberate' Egypt from the British. A young Anwar El Sadat (who much later would become Egyptian President) was sent to help with Eppler and Sandstede's radio equipment but communication was impossible as the German receiving station had been overrun by Australian troops on the 7th of July.

Sadat was extremely critical of Eppler and Sandstede in his book Revolt on the Nile. Sadat's view was that the two Germans deliberately sabotaged their own radio, because they wanted to enjoy themselves and live with two Jewish prostitutes.^[3]

Discovery

The spies' extravagant lifestyle as well as the various leads picked up by Allied intelligence, led to their hideout being discovered and the houseboat was boarded by British Field Security. Sandstede had started to flood the vessel but they were quickly taken into custody. Both Eppler and Sandstede confessed but were spared execution (the usual fate of spies out of enemy uniform during World War II) as was Anwar Sadat. Hekmat Fahmy was caught and received a two-year prison sentence [1].

Other long-range operations in the region

Although compromised, Operation Salaam is notable as one of the few Axis operations that mirrored the important Long Range Desert Group activities in the Libyan desert during the North African campaign. The Italian Auto-Saharan Company (La Compania Auto-Avio-Sahariana "Cufra" - a desert patrol column with air support), was a long-lived unit that harassed SAS and LRDG operations up until Allied victory in Libya and Tunisia.

In popular culture

• A fictional portrayal of László Almásy and Operation Salaam is present in the Michael Ondaatje novel "The English Patient" and the film based upon it.
• The novel The Key to Rebecca by Ken Follett is loosely based on Operation Salaam.
• The German film Rommel ruft Kairo (Rommel calling Cairo), directed by Wolfgang Schleif in 1959, is based on the book written by John Eppler, although it takes many liberties and does not pretend to be an exact account of the operation.
• The 1960 film Foxhole in Cairo with Peter van Eyck as Almaszy with Lee Montague and Michael Caine as the implanted spies is also based on Operation Salaam.

See also

• Military history of Egypt during World War II
• Afrika Korps (Deutsches Afrikakorps)
• Abwehr (German intelligence organization)
• Sudan Defence Force
• Western Desert Campaign
• North African Campaign
• Middle East Theatre of World War II
• Desert warfare

References

1. ^ Stehmeyer, Anja: Rommels Spion - Saddams Geisel. In: Hamburger Abendblatt (17. Oktober 1990). Accessed on 4 April 2010.
2. ^ Eppler, John W. (1959). Rommel ruft Kairo. Gütersloh: C.Bertelsmann Verlag. pp. 156. 
3. ^ Sadat, Anwar Revolt on the Nile. The emphasis on the prostitutes being Jewish is in Sadat's book.

• John Bierman and Colin Smith, Alamein - The War Without Hate, Viking 2002.
• W.B. Kennedy Shaw, Long Range Desert Group, Greenhill Books 2000 - This book was first published in 1948 soon after the war and names the Abwehr agents as 'Reichert and Vollhardt'. This is either a different operation entirely or misinformation due to the book being published so close to the end of the war with much intelligence information still hard to come by.

Further reading

• John W. Eppler, Rommel ruft Kairo, C.Bertelsmann, Gütersloh (Germany), 1959, German Edition (Book# 1873 59.-68. tsnd)
• John Eppler, Rommel's Spy, Macdonald & Jane, London, 1977
• John W Eppler, Operation Condor: Rommel's Spy, Futura Publications; New Ed edition 1978
• Anwar Al-Sadat, Revolt on the Nile, Wingate 1957
• John Bierman, The Secret Life of Laszlo Almasy: The Real English Patient, Penguin Books 2005
• Artemis Cooper, Cairo in the War, 1939-45, Hamish Hamilton Ltd 1989
• Saul Kelly, "The Lost Oasis, The desert War and the Hunt for Zerzura, the True Story Behind the English Patient", Westview 2002

External links

• Hekmat Fahmy - the Egyptian belly dancer-spy
• Libyan desert reading list including WWII books