Kondor mission

Kondor mission, German Abwehr espionage operation in Egypt undertaken in May 1942 by two German nationals, Johannes Eppler and his wireless operator Hans Gerd Sandstetter. In an operation codenamed SALAAM the Hungarian desert explorer Captain Ladislaus de Almaszy drove them from the Gialo oasis to Assiut in Egypt where they caught a train to Cairo, Eppler's birthplace.

The desert journey was a remarkable achievement but what followed is the kind of story which gives spies a bad name. Much has been written about Eppler's mission but the official files are less dramatic. They show that though the Germans' desert journey was detected by ULTRA intelligence, its purpose was not known until two wireless operators, detailed to receive Sand stetter's messages, were captured during the Gazala battle of June 1942. Documents with the operators indicated the mission's presence in Egypt, but there is no mention in the official files of the key to Standstetter's code—Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca—which figures in nearly every written account of the mission.

The agents were sheltered by a belly-dancer, Hekmat Fahmy, on her houseboat where her English officer lover—away in the desert—had left a map of the Tobruk defences. But the map was out of date and anyway Sandstetter was unable to make contact on his transmitter after Fahmy installed them on a nearby houseboat. This failure, compounded by the Abwehr's mistake in giving them English currency, soon turned the mission into a farce, and their efforts to change the money, as well as their ‘riotous living’, eventually attracted attention. A watch was put on their houseboat and on the chauffeur-driven car they used to meet their contacts, two of whom were a future Egyptian president, Anwar el-Sadat (1918–81), and a German called Viktor Hauer, who worked in the Swedish legation. But the houseboat was only raided, on 25 July, when a contact of Hauer's apparently revealed to the British that the two men on the houseboat were Germans, and it was only when they were interrogated that their connection with Almaszy's journey was established.

The two agents were treated as prisoners-of-war, the chauffeur and Fahmy were let off with a caution, and the other participants were interned or deported, except for Hauer who disappeared.

Bibliography

Eppler, J. , Operation Condor (London, 1977).