OldRecon
07-13-2004, 11:01 AM
I could usually produce a cup of tea within 10 minutes in the desert," says Brigadier Rupert Harding Newman, 94, dashing from his drawing room to switch on the kettle. He strides back - tea made in five minutes flat - with a cup on a gleaming salver inscribed with the words "British Military Mission, Egypt, 1939".
He is the only surviving member of the Zerzura Club - a small, legendary group of desert explorers and soldiers formed in North Africa before World War II. Members included men who went on to lead the Special Air Service and set up the Long Range Desert Group, as well as a tall, reserved Hungarian whom they suspected was a Nazi spy.
Count Laszlo Almasy was the most compelling of all in that mysterious time and place; it is his story that inspired Michael Ondaatje's romantic novel, and the subsequent film, The English Patient, which in turn prompted a debate about the true Almasy.
Was he really a German secret agent? Did he betray his best friend in the explorers' club by seducing his new wife? Did he pretend he was English when shot down in flames and captured, his face and body grotesquely charred?
"Almasy?" says Harding Newman, stiffening in his armchair at the mention of the name. "Bloody man," he splutters. He has been prompted to share his memories by the publication of a book, by Dr Saul Kelly, on the desert war, thick with new information drawn from British, German and Italian military intelligence files, and dedicated to "young Rupert". It reveals the count to have been a far more treacherous and exotic figure than fictional accounts have allowed, or the brigadier ever knew.
"At the beginning, what we were doing in the desert had no connection with any military purpose. That came later. It was just fun!"
In 1932, he was a young Royal Tank Corps officer, posted to Egypt. The invitation to join the first British desert expedition as a mechanic and cook offered an escape from routine duties. So he joined the tiny group of army officers, led by Major Ralph Bagnold, as they drove several thousand kilometres into the unexplored sea of sand stretching across southern Egypt and Libya.
The tribes on the desert's fringes could only report that the interior held evil djinns, or spirits, and a tiny scattering of freshwater springs, among them one they could give no help locating - the Wadi Zerzura or "Oasis of the Birds".
There were no maps. No one had flown over the desert. No portable radios were capable of transmitting a signal for help across this vast emptiness. If a man fell sick? "We had aspirin and Dettol," says the brigadier.
Even motorised expeditions could not carry enough water for a complete crossing unless they found oases. Explorers, like Harding Newman, heard the dry crack of bones beneath their truck tyres: bleached skeletons of all the slaves and camels who, for centuries, had perished from thirst. Temperatures hit 76 Celsius.
For all that, Harding Newman found the desert a seductive place. "You could feel the silence on your skin. There were no smells and no flies, which was remarkable in that part of the world." But the Wadi Zerzura oasis eluded them.
Halfway back to civilisation, they stopped at an outpost used by the British-led Sudanese Defence Force. "We were invited to dinner in the officers' mess. Almasy was there in a corner waiting. I drank a gin and tonic and shook his hand."
Harding Newman and his colleagues were wary. "We knew Almasy's reputation. We were always a band of brothers, either brother officers or friends. He had no friends, and was also reckless by our standards. It was our absolute golden rule never to go out alone in case you broke down. Almasy drove hundreds of miles across the desert by himself. And he never carried a mirror." In the crystalline air, a mirror could be used to flash emergency signals to an aeroplane 80 kilometres away.
When Bagnold and his party finally reached a cafe in a decrepit oasis village, on a whim they founded the Zerzura Club. It had just one rule: members must have taken part in the hunt for the lost oasis. Almasy automatically qualified.
It became an annual tradition for members within reach of London to gather at the Royal Geographical Society, where they would swap tales of their discoveries, and later dine at the Cafe Royal.
At the time of the 1936 dinner, Almasy was still in Egypt, so Bagnold read a paper the count had written for the occasion. The Hungarian - it seemed - had discovered Wadi Zerzura in the very heart of the desert, and thus beaten some of the most determined officers in the British Army to the great prize. They congratulated him.
Within three years, those same gentlemen in dinner jackets had become covert soldiers, and their Cafe Royal gossip about desert routes was suddenly classified as critical military intelligence. Only 1600 kilometres of sand and rock separated Italian-held Libya from the Suez Canal, the jugular of the British Empire. Anyone who could find a way through the dunes, a route from oasis to oasis, could perhaps lead an army across the desert.
Harding Newman was in charge of coordinating behind-the-lines raids by the SAS and the Long Range Desert Group (which had been founded by Bagnold). And Almasy?
"I never heard a thing about him during the war," says the brigadier - hardly surprising, given the clandestine world the count had joined.
The new history of the desert war uncovers the full story. When the Hungarian arrived in North Africa in 1926 he was 31 and penniless, a bitter survivor of World War I in which he had served with the defeated Austro-Hungarian air force.
In North Africa, the count's only asset was a connection with some wealthy Egyptian princelings whom he had met on shooting parties in Hungary. They were keen to enjoy some hunting and adventure in the desert to the south of their country, and turned to the veteran pilot for help. Silent film of Almasy's first venture into the desert shows a giraffe-like man with a slight stoop and a very long nose. He is no screen idol. As he pitches camp wearing baggy shorts he looks about as dangerous as a boy scout who has lost his penknife.
But even then, Almasy was passing his hand-drawn maps to grateful officers of Mussolini's army in Libya. By 1940, he was fully involved with the Abwehr - German military intelligence - and proposed a plan directly to its chief in Berlin to provoke an uprising in British-occupied Egypt, led by a local pasha who was one of his pre-war contacts. The plan came to nothing when the pasha crashed his plane into a palm tree as he headed to Germany for his briefing.
By the summer of 1942, Rommel's Afrika Korps was pushing to within hours of Cairo, and the count seized his chance to impress with his boldest plan yet. He would motor with a small convoy 3370 kilometres across the great desert from Libya, entirely through enemy territory, using his own sketch maps. When he reached the Nile he would drop off two agents, then head back the same way. He achieved this stupendous feat of endurance, and Rommel personally promoted him to the rank of major.
Almasy survived the desert campaigns and continued to work for the Abwehr in Turkey, until he sensed he was again on the losing side of a world war. This time he fed his secrets to the British. Even so, when the war ended, he was sent by the Allies to Hungary and imprisoned in a Russian camp. He escaped with the help of friends in the Egyptian royal family, and was bundled into an aeroplane bound for Cairo.
In real life, the "English patient" was never shot down, burnt or captured in the desert.
What of the other escapades attributed to him? In the film, Almasy seduces his friend's young wife (Kristin Scott Thomas). "Such absolute rot. I couldn't watch it," snaps Harding Newman. Apparently, the count's ****** adventures were common gossip in Cairo, and they were not of a kind to threaten anyone's wife. He was homo******.
And his discovery of the Wadi Zerzura? "It was just a fantasy. There never was an Oasis of the Birds," says the brigadier, and quotes from a book written by Bagnold after the war: "I like to think of Zerzura as an idea for which we have no apt word in English, meaning something waiting to be discovered in some out-of-the-way place. As long as any part of the world remains uninhabited, Zerzura will be there."
Almasy died in 1951, of dysentery in a Salzburg sanatorium. He was 54. His tombstone in the local cemetery was inscribed in Arabic, "The Father of the Sands", a title coined before the war by an old camel-rustler. He was given a less grandiose epitaph by a British member of the Zerzura Club: "A Nazi but a sportsman."
"I suppose whatever one thought of him," says the brigadier, "he was the most extraordinary man."
---
In early 1942 Almásy, as a Royal Hungarian Air Force reserve officer, was attached to Rommel's staff at German request. Among his numerous tasks during this time, in May 1942 he delivered two German spies, John Eppler and Hans Stansteade to Egypt after a daring crossing of the Libyan Desert, known as Operation "Salaam".
While it's significance is debatable, certainly this remains one of Almásy's most reknown exploits. At the time the Libyan Desert was for all practical purposes the LRDG's back yard, and it was rather embarrassing for the Brits that Almásy could slip through and return unnoticed.
After the war, a number of biographers and historians, depending on their affiliation, interpreted the events as either Almásy's superior abilities and experience in dodging pursuing enemy patrols and minefields (apparently there were none), or alternately that the Brits were very much aware of his actions, just "higher interests" prevented his interception, and he was allowed to return unharmed.
It is clear, that Almásy's radio messages were intercepted and decoded at the time of the abortive attempt to cross the Great Sand Sea. According to Jane Howard, who worked as an intellicence analyst at the code breaking section of the British Intelligence at Bletchey Park: "I read an Enigma decode which said something about a man called Almasy and a Condor Commando. It appeared to be moving into the desert behind our lines, which I thought very undesirable, since a friend of mine had just been sent out to the desert to set up an ersatz army. This man Almasy might find it. I was longstopping German High Command decodes, and this one had slipped through the watch. I asked permission to search for more among the Abwehr decodes, and was told that if I wanted to give up my lunch hour or work overtime I could please myself.... Between Abwehr ciphers and Enigma I mapped Almasy's movements from Tripoli to Gialo, South of Gilf Kebir and moving towards Kharga, and sent out signals to Cairo, hoping that the LRDG would do something about them." (letter to R.A. Bagnold, 31st March 1978)
Whatever the message was from Bletchey Park, based on the Kufra Garrison and LRDG War Diaries, it seems not to have reached the combat units. (It has been suggested, that the interest of protecting the Brit's capability of breaking the Enigma code was higher than capturing Almásy) Shaw's references in his book, and the LRDG War Diary match in suggesting, that action was only taken after an alert was received from the Kharga checkpoints, by which time Almásy was comfortably back in Jalo.
The loss of the three SAAF Blenheims, and the subsequent comotion raises another, highly probable theory - Almásy was simply lucky to have unknowingly made his venture at the right time. Based on his diary (in which the observations on convoy movements match the Kufra Garrison War Diary, proving it's authenticity) Operation Salaam started out from Jalo just as the search for the missing aircraft was winding down. The search involved all mobilisable units in the Kufra region, so there were no patrols out except the regular Wadi Halfa convoys (which were manned by Sudanese drivers of the SDF, and were not combat patrols in any sense). The reasons for the loss of the aircraft and the deaths of the crew were probably occupying the minds in the subsequent weeks, with the Court of Inquiry convening in Kufra at the end of May. In the mean time, on the 27th May Rommel attacked the main allied defence line, which overshadowed any other news.
Almásy used this time to make his sortie, coming and returning unnoticed. By the time Lazarus, a senior officer of the LRDG stationed in Kufra in charge of surveying duties returned to Siwa (LRDG headquarters at the time) for a briefing, where he was probably alerted to an enemy patrol in the desert inferred from his hasty departure on a patrol a day later, Almásy was safely back. The LDRG I.2. patrol was given orders to capture any enemy traffic going north from Jalo, focusing on europeans, but it was too late.
---
UDAPEST, Hungary -- The character compassionately depicted in the film "The English Patient" as a desert explorer with enigmatic origins is based on a real-life Hungarian who served German military intelligence in World War II and then apparently spied for the Soviet Union.
For his daring on the side of the Germans, Count Laszlo Almasy, who died of dysentery in Austria in 1951 at the age of 55, was awarded an Iron Cross by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
Through an adventure-strewn life that traversed wildly different nations and cultures through two World Wars, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the takeover of his country by the Communists, the tall, slender, slightly stooped, multilingual count often seemed many things to many people.
A small group of Almasy aficionados -- including a former British intelligence officer living in London and a dreamy Hungarian cartographer at a Budapest university -- have spent years piecing together the count's involved past, his personal preferences and his physical exploits.
The real Almasy was a far cry from the character portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in the film based on Michael Ondaatje's novel, a dashing explorer who falls in love with another man's wife while working with the Royal Geographical Society in North Africa, and who helps the Nazis only as a way to be united with his love.
In real life he was an intrepid explorer, but he was also a homo****** who wrote passionate letters to a young German officer he tried to help avoid going to the Russian front. And he was a monarchist, obsessed with the idea of returning the Hapsburgs to the throne even when it was clear the empire was beyond redemption.
The research into the real Almasy shows a man who was willing to work for whoever suited him at the moment.
Jean Howard, who as a young officer at the British government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park, first heard Almasy's radio signals as the count crossed the desert for the Germans, said that in the 1930s Almasy offered his services to British intelligence. He was turned down because he was suspected of being pro-German, she said.
He then offered himself to the Italians, but they too turned him down.
A Hungarian Nazi sympathizer wrote that after World War II Almasy informed the Soviet-controlled government in Budapest that a Hungarian official was smuggling treasures of the famed Esterhazy family from Hungary into Egypt.
On the strength of Almasy's information, the official, Victor Chornoky, the son-in-law of Zoltan Tildy, then the Hungarian president, was called home from his post as ambassador to Cairo, sentenced to death and hanged, said the account by Ferenc Fiala, published in Munich in 1976.
But the count's major espionage work appears to have been for the Germans. He lauded them for their invincibility and cited Rommel for his humanity in a book he wrote in 1943, "With Rommel's Army in Libya."
The real count, known for his intimate knowledge of the North African desert, was specifically requested in 1940 from the Hungarian government, then sympathetic to though not officially allied with Germany, by the German military for work with Rommel, said Zsolt Torok, a cartographer at the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest.
For a while Almasy was in Berlin; then he was transferred to the desert headquarters, Torok said.
Awarded the rank of major in the German air force, the count made a number of audacious raids. Driving a captured British Ford car through British lines in the North African desert, he traveled nearly 2,000 desert miles, relying on water holes he knew from his expeditions in the 1930s, to take the infamous German spy, Hans Eppler, to an oasis near Cairo.
In a mission code named Operation Condor, Eppler was then able to set up a German intelligence headquarters on a houseboat on the Nile.
The count also made two daring though unsuccessful attempts to get the pro-German head of the Egyptian army, Masri Pasha, out of Egypt so that the pasha could help Rommel take Egypt.
In another example of what can be seen as the real count's treachery, Elizabeth Pathy Salett, the daughter of a Hungarian diplomat posted in Egypt in the 1930s, said that the count had planned a desert museum as a front for German espionage.
Mrs. Salett, who lives in Washington and whose father, Laszlo Pathy, was Hungarian consul general in Alexandria, Egypt, recently wrote an article for The Washington Post that outlined how Almasy sought revenge against her father.
After the count's museum plans were scotched in 1936 because the Egyptian king learned that the museum was planned as a cover, the count blamed her father, Mrs. Salett said.
Six years later, while in Rommel's service, the count sneaked into Cairo for 10 days, Mrs. Salett said. On his way out the British confiscated his briefcase and found a list of the people Rommel planned to arrest when he occupied Egypt. Among the names, she said, was her father's.
For Mrs. Salett, and other Hungarians who have seen "The English Patient," the movie portrait of Almasy is "amoral and ahistorical." She said that by ignoring the count's work for the Germans, Ondaatje, who won the Booker Prize for his novel, trivialized the "significance of the choices men like Almasy made."
Ondaatje said in a telephone interview from Oklahoma that the character was loosely based on the life of Almasy. But for the emotional, even poetic, view that he was striving for, Ondaatje said. the count's political and social world was an irrelevant aside.
He knew the count "may have been a spy or a double agent," he said, but he had chosen to dwell on him as an explorer, a man transfixed by the desert.
Ondaatje said he knew the count never had an affair with another man's wife.
About 80 of Almasy's passionate letters to a young German army officer are now in the possession of Kurt Mayer, an Austrian filmmaker who recently completed a documentary based on film of one of Almasy's expeditions, a seven-month trek by car in 1929 from Mombasa in Kenya through the swamps and desert of Sudan to Alexandria.
Compiled from film taken by Mayer's father, Rudi, the documentary shows Almasy, dressed in colonial-style khakis and tropical hat, shooting an elephant, offering cigarettes to Kenyan tribeswomen and driving one of the two cars that made the journey.
Laszlo Almasy was born at a castle in what is now Bernstein in eastern Austria but in 1895 was part of Hungary. Like the sons of many well-to-do Hungarian families at the time, he was sent to an English school. He showed an early aptitude for flying, and by the age of 20 he was a pilot in the Austro-Hungarian air force.
Always ready for an escapade and disappointed at the disappearance of the empire, the count drove Karl, the grand-nephew of Emperor Franz Josef, into Budapest in 1921 in an attempt to restore the monarchy. It seems that Karl gave Almasy the title of count, which, because it was not an authentic hereditary title, Almasy used only abroad, Torok said.
Whose side was Almasy really on?
Mrs. Howard said the question prompted her to start her decades-long quest to unmask his past. She has talked to his German spy master, trekked through the desert on some of his routes and interviewed fellow British agents.
"If he was on any side at all, I think he was entirely a Hungarian," she said. Others are not so sure.
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He is the only surviving member of the Zerzura Club - a small, legendary group of desert explorers and soldiers formed in North Africa before World War II. Members included men who went on to lead the Special Air Service and set up the Long Range Desert Group, as well as a tall, reserved Hungarian whom they suspected was a Nazi spy.
Count Laszlo Almasy was the most compelling of all in that mysterious time and place; it is his story that inspired Michael Ondaatje's romantic novel, and the subsequent film, The English Patient, which in turn prompted a debate about the true Almasy.
Was he really a German secret agent? Did he betray his best friend in the explorers' club by seducing his new wife? Did he pretend he was English when shot down in flames and captured, his face and body grotesquely charred?
"Almasy?" says Harding Newman, stiffening in his armchair at the mention of the name. "Bloody man," he splutters. He has been prompted to share his memories by the publication of a book, by Dr Saul Kelly, on the desert war, thick with new information drawn from British, German and Italian military intelligence files, and dedicated to "young Rupert". It reveals the count to have been a far more treacherous and exotic figure than fictional accounts have allowed, or the brigadier ever knew.
"At the beginning, what we were doing in the desert had no connection with any military purpose. That came later. It was just fun!"
In 1932, he was a young Royal Tank Corps officer, posted to Egypt. The invitation to join the first British desert expedition as a mechanic and cook offered an escape from routine duties. So he joined the tiny group of army officers, led by Major Ralph Bagnold, as they drove several thousand kilometres into the unexplored sea of sand stretching across southern Egypt and Libya.
The tribes on the desert's fringes could only report that the interior held evil djinns, or spirits, and a tiny scattering of freshwater springs, among them one they could give no help locating - the Wadi Zerzura or "Oasis of the Birds".
There were no maps. No one had flown over the desert. No portable radios were capable of transmitting a signal for help across this vast emptiness. If a man fell sick? "We had aspirin and Dettol," says the brigadier.
Even motorised expeditions could not carry enough water for a complete crossing unless they found oases. Explorers, like Harding Newman, heard the dry crack of bones beneath their truck tyres: bleached skeletons of all the slaves and camels who, for centuries, had perished from thirst. Temperatures hit 76 Celsius.
For all that, Harding Newman found the desert a seductive place. "You could feel the silence on your skin. There were no smells and no flies, which was remarkable in that part of the world." But the Wadi Zerzura oasis eluded them.
Halfway back to civilisation, they stopped at an outpost used by the British-led Sudanese Defence Force. "We were invited to dinner in the officers' mess. Almasy was there in a corner waiting. I drank a gin and tonic and shook his hand."
Harding Newman and his colleagues were wary. "We knew Almasy's reputation. We were always a band of brothers, either brother officers or friends. He had no friends, and was also reckless by our standards. It was our absolute golden rule never to go out alone in case you broke down. Almasy drove hundreds of miles across the desert by himself. And he never carried a mirror." In the crystalline air, a mirror could be used to flash emergency signals to an aeroplane 80 kilometres away.
When Bagnold and his party finally reached a cafe in a decrepit oasis village, on a whim they founded the Zerzura Club. It had just one rule: members must have taken part in the hunt for the lost oasis. Almasy automatically qualified.
It became an annual tradition for members within reach of London to gather at the Royal Geographical Society, where they would swap tales of their discoveries, and later dine at the Cafe Royal.
At the time of the 1936 dinner, Almasy was still in Egypt, so Bagnold read a paper the count had written for the occasion. The Hungarian - it seemed - had discovered Wadi Zerzura in the very heart of the desert, and thus beaten some of the most determined officers in the British Army to the great prize. They congratulated him.
Within three years, those same gentlemen in dinner jackets had become covert soldiers, and their Cafe Royal gossip about desert routes was suddenly classified as critical military intelligence. Only 1600 kilometres of sand and rock separated Italian-held Libya from the Suez Canal, the jugular of the British Empire. Anyone who could find a way through the dunes, a route from oasis to oasis, could perhaps lead an army across the desert.
Harding Newman was in charge of coordinating behind-the-lines raids by the SAS and the Long Range Desert Group (which had been founded by Bagnold). And Almasy?
"I never heard a thing about him during the war," says the brigadier - hardly surprising, given the clandestine world the count had joined.
The new history of the desert war uncovers the full story. When the Hungarian arrived in North Africa in 1926 he was 31 and penniless, a bitter survivor of World War I in which he had served with the defeated Austro-Hungarian air force.
In North Africa, the count's only asset was a connection with some wealthy Egyptian princelings whom he had met on shooting parties in Hungary. They were keen to enjoy some hunting and adventure in the desert to the south of their country, and turned to the veteran pilot for help. Silent film of Almasy's first venture into the desert shows a giraffe-like man with a slight stoop and a very long nose. He is no screen idol. As he pitches camp wearing baggy shorts he looks about as dangerous as a boy scout who has lost his penknife.
But even then, Almasy was passing his hand-drawn maps to grateful officers of Mussolini's army in Libya. By 1940, he was fully involved with the Abwehr - German military intelligence - and proposed a plan directly to its chief in Berlin to provoke an uprising in British-occupied Egypt, led by a local pasha who was one of his pre-war contacts. The plan came to nothing when the pasha crashed his plane into a palm tree as he headed to Germany for his briefing.
By the summer of 1942, Rommel's Afrika Korps was pushing to within hours of Cairo, and the count seized his chance to impress with his boldest plan yet. He would motor with a small convoy 3370 kilometres across the great desert from Libya, entirely through enemy territory, using his own sketch maps. When he reached the Nile he would drop off two agents, then head back the same way. He achieved this stupendous feat of endurance, and Rommel personally promoted him to the rank of major.
Almasy survived the desert campaigns and continued to work for the Abwehr in Turkey, until he sensed he was again on the losing side of a world war. This time he fed his secrets to the British. Even so, when the war ended, he was sent by the Allies to Hungary and imprisoned in a Russian camp. He escaped with the help of friends in the Egyptian royal family, and was bundled into an aeroplane bound for Cairo.
In real life, the "English patient" was never shot down, burnt or captured in the desert.
What of the other escapades attributed to him? In the film, Almasy seduces his friend's young wife (Kristin Scott Thomas). "Such absolute rot. I couldn't watch it," snaps Harding Newman. Apparently, the count's ****** adventures were common gossip in Cairo, and they were not of a kind to threaten anyone's wife. He was homo******.
And his discovery of the Wadi Zerzura? "It was just a fantasy. There never was an Oasis of the Birds," says the brigadier, and quotes from a book written by Bagnold after the war: "I like to think of Zerzura as an idea for which we have no apt word in English, meaning something waiting to be discovered in some out-of-the-way place. As long as any part of the world remains uninhabited, Zerzura will be there."
Almasy died in 1951, of dysentery in a Salzburg sanatorium. He was 54. His tombstone in the local cemetery was inscribed in Arabic, "The Father of the Sands", a title coined before the war by an old camel-rustler. He was given a less grandiose epitaph by a British member of the Zerzura Club: "A Nazi but a sportsman."
"I suppose whatever one thought of him," says the brigadier, "he was the most extraordinary man."
---
In early 1942 Almásy, as a Royal Hungarian Air Force reserve officer, was attached to Rommel's staff at German request. Among his numerous tasks during this time, in May 1942 he delivered two German spies, John Eppler and Hans Stansteade to Egypt after a daring crossing of the Libyan Desert, known as Operation "Salaam".
While it's significance is debatable, certainly this remains one of Almásy's most reknown exploits. At the time the Libyan Desert was for all practical purposes the LRDG's back yard, and it was rather embarrassing for the Brits that Almásy could slip through and return unnoticed.
After the war, a number of biographers and historians, depending on their affiliation, interpreted the events as either Almásy's superior abilities and experience in dodging pursuing enemy patrols and minefields (apparently there were none), or alternately that the Brits were very much aware of his actions, just "higher interests" prevented his interception, and he was allowed to return unharmed.
It is clear, that Almásy's radio messages were intercepted and decoded at the time of the abortive attempt to cross the Great Sand Sea. According to Jane Howard, who worked as an intellicence analyst at the code breaking section of the British Intelligence at Bletchey Park: "I read an Enigma decode which said something about a man called Almasy and a Condor Commando. It appeared to be moving into the desert behind our lines, which I thought very undesirable, since a friend of mine had just been sent out to the desert to set up an ersatz army. This man Almasy might find it. I was longstopping German High Command decodes, and this one had slipped through the watch. I asked permission to search for more among the Abwehr decodes, and was told that if I wanted to give up my lunch hour or work overtime I could please myself.... Between Abwehr ciphers and Enigma I mapped Almasy's movements from Tripoli to Gialo, South of Gilf Kebir and moving towards Kharga, and sent out signals to Cairo, hoping that the LRDG would do something about them." (letter to R.A. Bagnold, 31st March 1978)
Whatever the message was from Bletchey Park, based on the Kufra Garrison and LRDG War Diaries, it seems not to have reached the combat units. (It has been suggested, that the interest of protecting the Brit's capability of breaking the Enigma code was higher than capturing Almásy) Shaw's references in his book, and the LRDG War Diary match in suggesting, that action was only taken after an alert was received from the Kharga checkpoints, by which time Almásy was comfortably back in Jalo.
The loss of the three SAAF Blenheims, and the subsequent comotion raises another, highly probable theory - Almásy was simply lucky to have unknowingly made his venture at the right time. Based on his diary (in which the observations on convoy movements match the Kufra Garrison War Diary, proving it's authenticity) Operation Salaam started out from Jalo just as the search for the missing aircraft was winding down. The search involved all mobilisable units in the Kufra region, so there were no patrols out except the regular Wadi Halfa convoys (which were manned by Sudanese drivers of the SDF, and were not combat patrols in any sense). The reasons for the loss of the aircraft and the deaths of the crew were probably occupying the minds in the subsequent weeks, with the Court of Inquiry convening in Kufra at the end of May. In the mean time, on the 27th May Rommel attacked the main allied defence line, which overshadowed any other news.
Almásy used this time to make his sortie, coming and returning unnoticed. By the time Lazarus, a senior officer of the LRDG stationed in Kufra in charge of surveying duties returned to Siwa (LRDG headquarters at the time) for a briefing, where he was probably alerted to an enemy patrol in the desert inferred from his hasty departure on a patrol a day later, Almásy was safely back. The LDRG I.2. patrol was given orders to capture any enemy traffic going north from Jalo, focusing on europeans, but it was too late.
---
UDAPEST, Hungary -- The character compassionately depicted in the film "The English Patient" as a desert explorer with enigmatic origins is based on a real-life Hungarian who served German military intelligence in World War II and then apparently spied for the Soviet Union.
For his daring on the side of the Germans, Count Laszlo Almasy, who died of dysentery in Austria in 1951 at the age of 55, was awarded an Iron Cross by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
Through an adventure-strewn life that traversed wildly different nations and cultures through two World Wars, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the takeover of his country by the Communists, the tall, slender, slightly stooped, multilingual count often seemed many things to many people.
A small group of Almasy aficionados -- including a former British intelligence officer living in London and a dreamy Hungarian cartographer at a Budapest university -- have spent years piecing together the count's involved past, his personal preferences and his physical exploits.
The real Almasy was a far cry from the character portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in the film based on Michael Ondaatje's novel, a dashing explorer who falls in love with another man's wife while working with the Royal Geographical Society in North Africa, and who helps the Nazis only as a way to be united with his love.
In real life he was an intrepid explorer, but he was also a homo****** who wrote passionate letters to a young German officer he tried to help avoid going to the Russian front. And he was a monarchist, obsessed with the idea of returning the Hapsburgs to the throne even when it was clear the empire was beyond redemption.
The research into the real Almasy shows a man who was willing to work for whoever suited him at the moment.
Jean Howard, who as a young officer at the British government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park, first heard Almasy's radio signals as the count crossed the desert for the Germans, said that in the 1930s Almasy offered his services to British intelligence. He was turned down because he was suspected of being pro-German, she said.
He then offered himself to the Italians, but they too turned him down.
A Hungarian Nazi sympathizer wrote that after World War II Almasy informed the Soviet-controlled government in Budapest that a Hungarian official was smuggling treasures of the famed Esterhazy family from Hungary into Egypt.
On the strength of Almasy's information, the official, Victor Chornoky, the son-in-law of Zoltan Tildy, then the Hungarian president, was called home from his post as ambassador to Cairo, sentenced to death and hanged, said the account by Ferenc Fiala, published in Munich in 1976.
But the count's major espionage work appears to have been for the Germans. He lauded them for their invincibility and cited Rommel for his humanity in a book he wrote in 1943, "With Rommel's Army in Libya."
The real count, known for his intimate knowledge of the North African desert, was specifically requested in 1940 from the Hungarian government, then sympathetic to though not officially allied with Germany, by the German military for work with Rommel, said Zsolt Torok, a cartographer at the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest.
For a while Almasy was in Berlin; then he was transferred to the desert headquarters, Torok said.
Awarded the rank of major in the German air force, the count made a number of audacious raids. Driving a captured British Ford car through British lines in the North African desert, he traveled nearly 2,000 desert miles, relying on water holes he knew from his expeditions in the 1930s, to take the infamous German spy, Hans Eppler, to an oasis near Cairo.
In a mission code named Operation Condor, Eppler was then able to set up a German intelligence headquarters on a houseboat on the Nile.
The count also made two daring though unsuccessful attempts to get the pro-German head of the Egyptian army, Masri Pasha, out of Egypt so that the pasha could help Rommel take Egypt.
In another example of what can be seen as the real count's treachery, Elizabeth Pathy Salett, the daughter of a Hungarian diplomat posted in Egypt in the 1930s, said that the count had planned a desert museum as a front for German espionage.
Mrs. Salett, who lives in Washington and whose father, Laszlo Pathy, was Hungarian consul general in Alexandria, Egypt, recently wrote an article for The Washington Post that outlined how Almasy sought revenge against her father.
After the count's museum plans were scotched in 1936 because the Egyptian king learned that the museum was planned as a cover, the count blamed her father, Mrs. Salett said.
Six years later, while in Rommel's service, the count sneaked into Cairo for 10 days, Mrs. Salett said. On his way out the British confiscated his briefcase and found a list of the people Rommel planned to arrest when he occupied Egypt. Among the names, she said, was her father's.
For Mrs. Salett, and other Hungarians who have seen "The English Patient," the movie portrait of Almasy is "amoral and ahistorical." She said that by ignoring the count's work for the Germans, Ondaatje, who won the Booker Prize for his novel, trivialized the "significance of the choices men like Almasy made."
Ondaatje said in a telephone interview from Oklahoma that the character was loosely based on the life of Almasy. But for the emotional, even poetic, view that he was striving for, Ondaatje said. the count's political and social world was an irrelevant aside.
He knew the count "may have been a spy or a double agent," he said, but he had chosen to dwell on him as an explorer, a man transfixed by the desert.
Ondaatje said he knew the count never had an affair with another man's wife.
About 80 of Almasy's passionate letters to a young German army officer are now in the possession of Kurt Mayer, an Austrian filmmaker who recently completed a documentary based on film of one of Almasy's expeditions, a seven-month trek by car in 1929 from Mombasa in Kenya through the swamps and desert of Sudan to Alexandria.
Compiled from film taken by Mayer's father, Rudi, the documentary shows Almasy, dressed in colonial-style khakis and tropical hat, shooting an elephant, offering cigarettes to Kenyan tribeswomen and driving one of the two cars that made the journey.
Laszlo Almasy was born at a castle in what is now Bernstein in eastern Austria but in 1895 was part of Hungary. Like the sons of many well-to-do Hungarian families at the time, he was sent to an English school. He showed an early aptitude for flying, and by the age of 20 he was a pilot in the Austro-Hungarian air force.
Always ready for an escapade and disappointed at the disappearance of the empire, the count drove Karl, the grand-nephew of Emperor Franz Josef, into Budapest in 1921 in an attempt to restore the monarchy. It seems that Karl gave Almasy the title of count, which, because it was not an authentic hereditary title, Almasy used only abroad, Torok said.
Whose side was Almasy really on?
Mrs. Howard said the question prompted her to start her decades-long quest to unmask his past. She has talked to his German spy master, trekked through the desert on some of his routes and interviewed fellow British agents.
"If he was on any side at all, I think he was entirely a Hungarian," she said. Others are not so sure.
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