Mission: Implausible, Pt. III -- The Something (S6E6)

Having scored a trove of sensitive intelligence, Eppler and company desperately try to radio their findings to the German military. Unfortunately, their efforts explode in their face, to spectacular effect.

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Above: Scene from the 1960 film, Foxhole in Cairo (directed by John Llewellyn Moxey). This B-Movie was based on Eppler and Sandy’s adventures during Operation Condor. The story of the two inefficient Nazi spies inspired several books and films in the following decades.

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SHOW NOTES

The arrival of Allied forces to Egypt transformed every facet of life in Cairo. British, Australian, New Zealand, and Indian troops were seen all over town: on every street corner, in every market, and atop every major tourist attraction. This photograph depicts Australian soldiers climbing the Pyramids of Giza.

The Garden of the Hotel Continental, ca. 1934-39. One of Cairo’s most exclusive hostelries, the Continental also boasted an elite restaurant and a rooftop cabaret, where Hekmet Fahmy once performed. Eppler and Sandy spent their evenings at absurdly expensive venues like the Continental and the Kit Kat Club, where they burned through the counterfeit bills given them by the Abwehr. Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Alfred William Sansom was born in Cairo in 1909. Like Eppler, he grew up far from his ancestral country, learning several languages in the process. During the war, Sansom worked for British Field Security, rooting out spies who had infiltrated Egypt. His lighthearted memoir “I Spied Spies”—which explains how he caught Eppler and Sandy—was an important source for this series.

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TRANSCRIPT

The snoring of the drugged man boomed throughout Hekmet’s houseboat. Eppler and Sandy stood over her bed, eyeing the unconscious—and very much naked—Major Smith. Hekmet urged them to hurry. The British officer could awake at any time. The two spies hurried over to Smith’s dispatch case and reviewed its contents. Inside were top-secret plans that laid out the Allies’ strategy for getting reinforcements to the Western Desert. Eppler marveled. In his hands he held the answers to all the questions that Rommel had sent him to Cairo to uncover. Eppler and Sandy hurriedly wrote down all the relevant information from the documents. When done, Eppler turned to Hekmet, with an indebted expression on his face and said: “They should give you the Iron Cross for this!” This was an allusion to a military medal awarded to those who had made exceptional contributions to the Nazi cause. He added, urgently: "I've got to get this onto the transmitter right away. For God's sake, don't let him know we've got it!"

Eppler and Sandy tucked the papers back into the dispatch case and hurried toward their own houseboat to radio the news to Rommel’s listening station. In this moment, the Nazi spies were probably fantasizing about their own Iron Crosses, now that Operation Condor appeared to be on the verge of a successful conclusion. If so, they were in for a Göring-sized disappointment. Today, we’ll hear about the series of unfortunate events that stymied Eppler’s plans, about the slapstick arrest that dashed his hopes, and about the long-term consequences of Operation Condor for Eppler’s accomplices, including famous belly dancer Hekmet Fahmy. This is The Art of Crime, and I’m your host Gavin Whitehead. Welcome to Part 3 of Mission Implausible: “Trouble on the Nile.”

On the Radio

Inside his secret radio closet, Sandy tapped out a coded message: “This is Condor. We have a long message for you.” Just outside the cabinet door, Eppler fidgeted anxiously. Since they arrived in Cairo, the listening station had not acknowledged any of their messages. Tonight, they hoped that the situation would change. They waited, and waited, and waited... Still, there was no answer. What the spies didn’t know was that the men manning the listening station had already been arrested and transferred to an interrogation center in the Cairo suburb of Maadi.

However, to Sandy and Eppler, the most likely explanation was that there might be something wrong with their transmitter. After all, the Nazis had given them bundles of counterfeit British notes, why not a bum radio, too? Eppler would have to use his connections to find the pair a new transmitter; the stakes were too high to wait even for an hour. So far, Eppler had kept his family out of his mission. They thought he had taken a job with a businessman and was traveling back and forth between Cairo and Alexandria. While Eppler's mother might have doubted this story, his doting stepfather was more than happy to take it at face value. This left Eppler’s younger half-brother, Hassan, who clearly knew that his sibling was a Nazi spy. So, Eppler went to Hassan for help.

The spy arranged to meet his brother in a downtown Cairo bar. Eppler arrived wearing dark glasses, a somewhat half-hearted disguise. He took Hassan back to the houseboat and showed him the transmitter. Hassan did not know much about radio technology, but he knew someone who might be able to help. He gave his brother a name: Viktor Hauer. Hauer was a German citizen who worked at the Swedish Legation; he was also a Nazi sympathizer. A few days later, on July 12th, 1942 Hassan escorted Hauer to the houseboat, where the German gave Eppler and Sandy a new wireless transmitter set; he also left them a Mauser pistol.

Armed with the fresh transmitter, they tried once again to establish contact with the listening station. One day came and went, then another. There was still no response. Sitting on a trove of war-winning intelligence, Eppler fretted constantly about the lack of communication with Rommel. Meanwhile, the heat of July suffocated Cairo. A blistering, arid wind blew in from the desert, causing Eppler to sweat profusely the moment he stepped outside, even at night. All they could do was wait.

On one of these scorching evenings, Eppler and Sandy left their cares behind for a while and headed toward the Kit Kat Club, where they shared a bottle of champagne with Hekmet. Even in this outdoor cabaret, located along the banks of the Nile, it was too hot. The trio of friends and conspirators chatted merrily, their spirits suddenly lightened after several careworn days. Their banter was put on pause at the sight of the drunken man lurching toward them. He stood about 5 feet, 5 inches tall. Sporting a pair of dark glasses, he stroked his vigorous black moustache as he struck up a conversation.

At first, the stranger struck everyone as a little bit off-putting. He swayed where he stood. He also seemed hesitant to talk to, or even look at, Hekmet. The man spoke first to Eppler, addressing him in grammatically correct, if extremely slurred, Arabic; Eppler answered in kind. A few pleasantries later, Eppler invited him to sit down and enjoy a round of drinks. To the trio’s surprise, their new acquaintance wasn’t a native Egyptian, but rather a Greek businessman who spent a lot of time in Cairo, which is why his Arabic was so good. Tonight, he explained, he was celebrating a business deal—something involving a shady-sounding currency exchange—that had netted him a huge profit. Within a couple of hours, the foursome were getting along like old friends.

Then, the conversation suddenly turned political:

“Isn't it wonderful to be free of the British and the war and all this nonsense for an hour or two. Tell me, do you think Rommel is going to take over Egypt?" the Greek man slurred.

The spies tensed up. While they were growing to trust this drunken businessman, they were in the Kit Kat, an establishment filled with Allied officers and officials from British Field Security. It would be reckless to confide their true feelings. Hekmet was the first to protest.

"You have no right to say such things," she scolded, "I have wonderful friends fighting in the Western Desert. I am sure they will win." The Greek turned to Eppler, “And what do you think, friend?” Eppler: “I believe in a British victory.” The topic of conversation then meandered toward happier subjects. When the evening ended, Eppler expressed the hope that he would see this fun-loving Greek again. And see him he would. Though nobody in this party of four knew it at the time, the fates of Eppler, Sandy, and Hekmet would soon hinge on the actions of this amiable little drunk.

Stasis

Sandy and Eppler decided that they needed to talk to a transmissions expert. Hekmet suggested future Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, at the time a military officer with expertise in signals intelligence. He was also a fascist, who had already collaborated in various ways with Nazi efforts to subvert the British in Egypt. In the last episode, we saw that Eppler and Sadat had spoken previously, in a short, inconclusive meeting. The two men had failed to hit it off.

Their second encounter proved no less frosty. Sadat arrived to the houseboat late one evening to inspect the transmitters that the spies had been trying to use. At the time, Eppler and Sandy had a full ship. Hekmet was there. Also on deck were beautiful Jewish-Egyptian dancer Edith and her female friend, who had become regular paid companions to the two spies. Sadat’s eyes darted around the deck, taking in its décor and the mixed company kept by Sandy and Eppler. In his 1957 memoir, Revolt on the Nile, Sadat would speak of what he witnessed that evening in unflattering terms:

“I glanced around the room in which I found myself, and I was quickly enlightened about the sort of life which these young Nazis were living. The place was furnished like something out of the Arabian Nights. In these soft and voluptuous surroundings, it was clear that Eppler and Sandy were rapidly forgetting the mission for which they had been sent to Egypt.”

Sadat also complained about finding the spies “dead drunk with two Jewesses”—a reference to Edith and her friend.

Though visibly disapproving of their lifestyle, the future president of Egypt nevertheless looked over their radio equipment, finding nothing amiss with it. Sadat later speculated that Eppler and Sandy were playing dumb and effectively torpedoing their own mission, in an effort to prolong their luxurious lifestyle in Cairo. For his part, Eppler would answer Sadat’s accusations in his own memoir: “Anwar had left our houseboat angrily. He did not approve of the cover we had chosen, although it was none of his business. He took it for granted that an agent ought to live like a hermit. Anyway, I had other worries and did not care how things looked to him.” Sadat came and went without any progress being made toward communicating the time-sensitive intelligence to Rommel.

By this time, Eppler began to despair. He started to worry that something serious had gone wrong with his mission and that nobody had informed him about it. In a shocking lapse, the Abwehr failed to provide its two spies with an emergency contact within Egypt. Eppler decided that it was time to leave Cairo for the Libyan or the Egyptian desert. There, he could deliver his urgent intelligence in person and discover whether or not Operation Condor had been compromised. To that end, he contacted Hungarian priest Father Demetrius, the Nazi asset whom he had met on his first full day in Cairo. He also touched base with Viktor Hauer, who kept his finger on the city’s subterranean Nazi pulse. Both men directed Eppler toward Fatma Amer, the Austrian-born wife of an Egyptian official. Amer, who had lived so long in Egypt that she passed for a native, had assisted with other covert German operations. Soon, Sadat and some other likeminded Egyptian military officers were brought on board. A vague plan started to take shape, one that included a helicopter rescue piloted by desert explorer and crack aviator László Almásy, of Operation Salam fame. If history were any guide, such a mission would have little chance of success; the Nazis had recently botched a similar plan, involving the exfiltration of an Egyptian military officer.

As Eppler mulled over this dangerous, far-fetched plan, he tried to relax when and how he could. He and Sandy partied harder than ever, from night into early morning. Then, on July 24th, their luck changed. Unbeknownst to them, the Abwehr had successfully set up a new listening station for Operation Condor, this time located in Athens. Its staff wired the spies to say that the operators would be ready to receive their transmission the following evening at midnight. After days of stasis and frustration, Eppler and Sandy were finally in a position to improve Rommel’s prospects in the Western Desert.

Things Fall Apart

The Abwehr’s long-deferred acknowledgement of the spies’ messages heartened Eppler, who rose the next day with his customary energy and optimism restored. Though he could not have known it, unseen forces had begun to align against him. Counter-espionage expert Major Alfred William Sansom had been trailing several people who had recently had direct contact with Eppler, including Anwar Sadat and Viktor Hauer. Indeed, on the evening of July 21st, British Field Security secretly kidnapped Hauer as he left the cinema, taking him to the interrogation center in Maadi for questioning. Sansom, in coordination with Egyptian police, conducted a mass arrest of leading figures from Cairo’s underworld, including illegal moneychangers, sex workers, and even legitimate employees of establishments like the Kit Kat. Among those detained was Edith, the Egyptian dancer who also worked as Eppler’s friend-for-hire.

Oblivious to these developments, Eppler was enjoying the company of Sami, the sharp-dressed moneychanger who had helped him unload his counterfeit bills. The two men had gone to high school together, and Eppler’s affection for Sami had grown over the previous weeks, when he showed himself a loyal friend. The two men ducked into one of Cairo's most prestigious tailors, where Sami was to be fitted for a suit. Conversation turned to the men's personal lives. Sami asked Eppler how long he had known Edith. “About two months,” he answered. Sami replied, “Tell me, Hussein, are are you in love with her? She says you are.” Eppler laughed. He had had a great time with Edith, sure. But he was not in love. Sami cleared his throat and embarked on more delicate subject matter. He asked Eppler why, then, was Edith telling her boss that he was in love with her? Eppler was confused. Her boss? Sami, a member of Cairo's Jewish community, had heard that Edith was an undercover agent for a Zionist organization operating out of Egypt. Eppler wasn't that surprised. But something did puzzle him. How did Edith afford her fabulous wardrobe, which clearly cost more than she could possibly make as a spy for this small Jewish group? And why would the organization be interested in Eppler? Sami cleared his throat and shifted his weight uncomfortably. He then proceeded to tell Eppler that Edith was actually a double agent, and her real boss was British Field Security. They were the ones surely underwriting Edith's lavish lifestyle.

Eppler gasped. This woman had spent dozens of nights in his houseboat. He had given her free reign to wander around as she liked. Then, he remembered an incident that struck him as odd at the time. One evening, when he went down the stairs to fetch something, he came up sooner than expected, only to find Edith sneaking around Sandy’s secret radio cabinet. This seemed strange to him. Edith unconvincingly claimed that she was looking for some alcohol, but she clearly knew that the alcohol was stashed on the other side of the bar. Eppler, laid back by nature, let the issue slide and never once thought about it again. Until now. While he was fairly certain that she didn't know much about his activities, he nevertheless seethed at having been duped by a fellow spy. He vowed to avenge himself. As luck would have it, this was a vow that Eppler would never have the chance to keep.

Later that night, Eppler lay in his bed, alone, stewing over the evening’s revelations. All was still on the houseboat. Sandy was asleep in his room, and Eppler—eyes closed—was listening to the waters of the Nile wash gently against the side of the ship. About 20 meters off, he heard the liquid sound of fish jumping out of the river and softly splashing back under its surface. Suddenly, Eppler shot up out of his bed. A lifetime of living in Cairo had taught him that fish did not splash around at this time of year. What he had heard was the sound of oars wrapped in cloth, delicately plunged down into the Nile, propelling a furtive rowboat steadily forward. In that moment, he comprehended all: The British were coming.

The Raid

Mostly naked, Eppler reached for the Mauser pistol that Hauer had left for him. He darted toward the trap doors that led to the upper deck and bolted them fast. Running back in the opposite direction, he barged into Sandy’s room and roused him from his slumber. Upon learning that the boat was about to be raided, Sandy leapt from bed and made his way to the bung hole, which he opened in an effort to sink the ship. Eppler, meanwhile, quickly removed all the fuses, in order to keep the invaders in the dark. Then, from the upper deck, they heard a crash and the sound of shattering glass. The British had boarded the ship, knocking over some of the bottles at the bar in the process. Sandy hurried to his secret radio cabinet and gathered up his notes as well as the copy of Rebecca. He also began destroying the radio equipment.

Eppler came to him with a pair of black socks rolled up in his hand. He laid out his plan to Sandy. They would have to go up to the top deck in order to escape. In Eppler's mind, the best course of action was to throw his pair of socks in the general direction of the British, pretending that it was a grenade. While the soldiers and police were ducking for cover, Sandy and Eppler could jump off the deck of the boat and swim to Hekmet’s ship. With this settled, the spies had just one last piece of business to resolve before making a run for it. Without talking to each other, one of them took out a coin and flipped it. Sandy lost the coin toss. Eppler looked at him with a mixture of pity and relief. It was now time to effect their daring escape.

They burst up through the trap door and clamored onto the deck. Suddenly, about a dozen men were training their guns on them. Eppler sprang into action. Announcing that he had a grenade, he tossed the pair of black socks across the deck. At the same time, Sandy chucked his notebooks and the copy of Rebecca into the Nile. The armed men all ducked for cover. As Sandy and Eppler headed toward the edge of the deck to jump, they were intercepted by a Cockney soldier with a rifle. He pointed the barrel of the gun right at them. There was nowhere to go.

The Greek

Out of the shadows emerged a man with a black mustache. He urged Eppler to put down his Mauser pistol if he knew what was good for him. As he approached the pair of spies, his facial features suddenly came into view. To their astonishment, Sandy and Eppler recognized him; it was the fun-loving Greek guy that they had met the other night at the Kit Kat Club. He introduced himself to the two Nazis as Major Alfred Sansom of British Field Security. Eppler could have kicked himself. Here was yet another enemy whom he had gladly welcomed into his life. The spies gave themselves up and were conveyed across town to the interrogation center.

Meanwhile British Field Security, with the help of the Egyptian police, fanned out across Cairo to round up every suspected member of the Nazi spy network. They arrested Father Demetrius, Fatma Amer, Anwar Sadat, and even Eppler’s brother Hassan Gaffer. Nor did they stop there. More than 20 clearly innocent people were also brought in for questioning, including the owner and several employees of the Kit Kat Club.

The arrest of Hekmet Fahmy, meanwhile, was a VIP affair, with Sansom going personally to her houseboat to detain her. When Hekmet realized that the man arresting her was the drunk from the Kit Kat, she nearly screamed in rage. For his part, Sansom was surprised that she hadn't seen through his disguise on the night that he hung out with them at the cabaret, since she had previously seen him around the establishment in his British uniform. That’s why he initially hesitated to make eye contact with her. But, his dark glasses and his inebriated act were enough to conceal his identity from the dancer. Now, she lounged uneasily on a sofa on the upper deck of her houseboat, staring coldly at Sansom and his underlings.

"Look, Hekmet," said Sansom, "whatever happens now, things are not going to be very nice for you. We will have to turn you over to the Egyptian police. We have known for some time that you have been working with a number of Egyptian dissidents. Now you are linked with two dangerous spies. We want to make the best of it for you, but in order to do so we must have every help from you."

Hekmet said: "I didn't know anything. I didn't know they, were German spies. I just wanted to be nice because I know Hussein Gaffer's mother."

"Who is a German," interposed Sansom. "You knew she had a German son named John Eppler."

"I didn't know he was a spy," insisted Hekmet.

The belly dancer didn’t back down from this denial, even as Sansom’s men discovered the uniform and accompanying medals of Major Smith, who had left them with her after she had drugged him and copied his top-secret documents. Indeed, during the lengthy detention that was to follow, Hekmet never admitted knowing about Eppler’s true motives for being in Cairo, nor did she testify against him, even when it would have benefitted her.

fter Eppler and Sandy were taken in, British interrogators set to work. According to Eppler, they menaced him with the threat of the firing squad, which was actually the fate of all convicted spies at the time. In order to loosen his lips, his captors adopted the good cop / bad cop approach. While most of his British interrogators were kind and polite, even sharing their cigarettes with him, one of them bullied and punched Eppler, breaking his nose. The longer that Eppler spent in captivity, the greater his understanding of how he got caught. Viktor Hauer, having been kidnapped from the cinema, squealed on everyone. Edith, meanwhile, had accidentally been arrested by a different branch of British security, who didn’t know that she reported to Sansom. In order to spring her from detention, her Jewish spymaster allowed her to offer up the names of the two Nazi spies. Some sources, who refer to Edith as “Natalie” or “Yvette,” allege that she also told them about the copy of Rebecca aboard the houseboat, which she had inspected during one of her overnight stays there. She claimed to be certain that it was the basis of the code that the spies were using to communicate with Rommel.

As for Sandy, shortly after arriving at the detention center, Eppler’s partner cut his own throat. This action had been decided by the coin toss that the two engaged in right before their arrest. Early on in their mission, Eppler and Sandy decided that, should they get caught, one of them would sacrifice themselves so that the British couldn’t play them off each other during their interrogations. They also agreed to settle the matter by coin toss. Sandy lost this game of chance. Sansom and his colleagues desperately wanted both spies alive—at least until it was time to put them in front of the firing squad. So, they rushed Sandy to the hospital, where his life was saved.

Back at the houseboat, divers recovered the copy of Rebecca and the notebooks that accompanied it to the bottom of the Nile. Some sources claim that Sansom raced against the clock to figure out which page of the novel the two spies were supposed to use that evening to communicate with the new listening station in Athens. In a down-to-the-wire finish, he managed to figure it out—and subsequently send Rommel misleading information about where the British intended to make their last stand. This false intelligence contributed to the Axis defeat at the Second Battle of El Alamein, which marked a turning point in the Western Desert campaign, in which the Allies would ultimately prevail. I haven’t been able to confirm the truth of this gripping story, which does seem just a little too good to be true.

Consequences

What we do know for certain is that Eppler and Sandy ultimately cooperated with their British captors. Owing to the political influence of Eppler’s stepfather, Saleh Gaffer, the British did not execute the two spies, treating them instead as a special class of POW. Saleh died shortly after his beloved son’s arrest, having been assured that the life of his adopted child would be spared. Eppler and Sandy spent the rest of the war as low-security prisoners in the detention center at Maadi. They would take regular, chaperoned trips into Cairo, where they temporarily returned to their partying ways. Though occasionally allowed to go off on their own, neither one ever tried to escape.

Most of Eppler’s network was released immediately following their initial interrogations, including Hassan Gaffer. Two notable exceptions to this rule were Anwar Sadat, who was held captive until the end of the war, and Hekmet Fahmy, who was imprisoned for a year. When released, her reputation was in ruins. Nobody would hire her to dance. In a last-ditch effort to relaunch her career, she sold her houseboat and her vacation villa in order to finance a comeback movie. The film flopped at the box office, and Hekmet retired from showbusiness, living out the rest of her life in relative obscurity.

Eppler and Sandy were held captive in Egypt until 1946, when they were then transferred to Germany to stand trial as war criminals. Due to British diplomatic efforts, and probably a lack of evidence, they were ultimately released. Johannes Eppler lived the rest of his life as a civilian in Europe, where he died in 1999. His memoir was one of several books that told the story of Operation Condor, all of which seem to mix historical fact with the tropes of spy fiction. Most of these volumes, including Eppler’s, enjoyed afterlives as the basis of films that leaned into some of the more fictionalized elements of the story. Examples include the 1959 German movie Rommel Calls Cairo and the British film Foxhole in Cairo, from 1960.

For all its eccentricity and flair, Operation Condor apparently accomplished nothing. Several writers who have studied the ill-fated mission have suggested that this is due to some combination of Eppler’s inexperience and his indifference to Nazi politics. To me, this is actually the most troubling dimension of an otherwise slapstick spy story. Though initially brought into the Nazi fold with the promise of adventure and self-actualization, Eppler never bought into the racial beliefs that were responsible for the most horrific developments of the Second World War. Eyewitness sources to the events surrounding Operation Condor agree that Eppler respected Jews and non-Arab Africans; some state that he openly mocked the idea of Arianism, recognizing that he himself was deemed racially inferior from a Nazi perspective.

Yet despite all this, Eppler’s actions suggest that he was capable of ignoring the core features of Nazi ideology—or, of separating what he was doing in Cairo from what was happening in the death camps of Europe. It’s not necessarily easy to explain, or even understand, this kind of psychology. Hekmet Fahmy, who also apparently shunned anti-Semitism, was probably able to think her way into helping the Nazis as a nasty means to a needful end: Egypt’s independence from Great Britain. But it doesn’t seem that Eppler was excessively preoccupied by the question of Egyptian nationalism, even if he was sympathetic to it. Even Alfred Sansom, who spent so much time grappling with Eppler’s psychology, couldn’t quite bring himself to view him as a “real” Nazi. Sansom summed up his complex feelings in this way:

You couldn't help liking him, you know. Even though he was a German and a spy, he had something about him. He knew how to enjoy himself. He liked people. And he was never afraid…I'm glad we didn't shoot him!"