"Unt now ve danz!"
Posted on 05/20/2004 8:10:58 PM PDT by ijcr
The true story of Count Laszlo Almasy, the Hungarian explorer and hero of the film The English Patient, is told in MI5 files released to the National Archives today.
In the film, Almasy, played by Ralph Fiennes, is a disfigured patient in an Italian hospital who had been the handsome young lover of an Englishwoman (Kristin Scott Thomas) in pre-war Cairo.
The truth is more prosaic. Although Almasy was a Hungarian explorer and airman who mapped the Libyan and Egyptian deserts and was prominent in pre-war Cairo society, he was no hero.
He was a bungling Nazi intelligence officer who, according to his MI5 file, was "very ugly and shabbily dressed, with a fat and pendulous nose, drooping shoulders and a nervous tic".
The image of the romantic hero portrayed in the film will be further damaged next week when a new book, The Secret Life of Laszlo Almasy, reveals that he was also homosexual.
But Almasy's interest in exploration is not in doubt. The files chart an epic, but ultimately flawed, journey he made across the Libyan desert to infiltrate two German agents into Cairo.
Sadly for Almasy they were a pair of no-hopers who within weeks blew the £3,600 he gave them on cheap champagne for exotic dancers and prostitutes in a succession of nightclubs and brothels.
Almasy was one of a number of minor pre-war explorers recruited by German intelligence to roll back British influence across Africa. He first came to the attention of MI5 when it emerged, in messages deciphered by Britain's wartime codebreakers at Bletchley Park, that he had made a dramatic flight to the Great Pyramid at Giza to extract two Hungarian agents.
He was operating under the codename Salam, an anagram of the first five letters of his surname, and initially tried to replace the Hungarians with two Egyptians, one of whom was later picked up in Dar es Salaam by MI6. Mohsen Fadl, who was recruited by Almasy in Paris where he was head of the Egyptian tourist office, was supposed to be the money man in the "Pyramid Organisation", the title given to the German spy network.
Fadl's main contact in Cairo was to be Prince Gamil Shehab Ed-Din Hussein, who according to the files was "a man of loose morals and not in fact entitled to call himself a prince at all". They produced no useful intelligence. So a new plan, Operation Condor, was devised under which two German nationals would be smuggled in to Cairo.
Heinrich Sandstede, 29, codenamed Max, had spent nine years in Africa before the war working for the Texas Oil Company and spoke fluent English.
Hans Eppler, 28, codenamed Moritz, was the illegitimate son of a German woman who later married an Egyptian judge. He was a cotton trader in Cairo before the war, spoke fluent Arabic and was using his real Egyptian name, Hussein Gaafar. They were to be taken by Almasy across the desert from Libya to the Egyptian city of Asyut, on the Nile, 200 miles south of Cairo, from where they were to make their own way to the Egyptian capital.
But even before the journey began, the preparations had been picked up by Bletchley Park. By the end of December 1941, the codebreakers knew Almasy was in Tripoli organising an espionage operation. During February, March and April of 1942, they monitored the build-up of people for the expedition, including a number of Ford V8 lorries - "the only cars suitable for desert work".
The team of eight men in six Ford lorries left the Jalu oasis 250 miles south of Benghazi on May 12, 1942, their every move tracked by Bletchley Park. They followed the desert tracks to the Khufra oasis for 40 miles before turning east towards Asyut. But they swiftly became stuck in the sand and had to turn back, abandoning one lorry.
Once they got back on the Khufra track, one lorry returned to Jalu. The remaining four continued south until 15 miles before Khufra when they again turned east, trying to find the Gilf Kebir plateau.
A third lorry had to be left in a wadi before they found the tracks of an expedition which Almasy had conducted in 1932. But very soon they were again bogged down in the sand and a fourth lorry had to be dumped. The two remaining lorries continued and Max and Moritz were dropped seven miles from Asyut. They made their way to the city by foot, taking the train to Cairo where they found most of the pensions full.
They spent their first two nights staying in a brothel before moving to a flat in another building which also turned out to be a brothel and the subject of frequent police searches. They eventually met Hekmet Fahmy, a belly dancer at the Continental Hotel, described in the MI5 file as "an exponent of the danse de ventre", who found them a dahabia, or houseboat, on the Nile.
But they failed to make contact with their German base station, largely because it had been captured by the British, and spent most of their time enjoying Cairo's nightlife.
"They were too intoxicated with the possession of so much money and too intent upon enjoying the fleshpots of Egypt in the form of women and wine," the MI5 file says.
"Their average outlay nightly for these things was round about £20 and it was their extravagance that got them into difficulties."
Desperate for more money, they sought out a young signals officer in the Egyptian army, the then Capt Anwar Sadat, later Egyptian president, and persuaded him to help them get in touch with the headquarters of the German commander, Edwin Rommel.
They then went around asking anyone with any kind of link to Germany to help them to fly to Rommel to obtain more funds and all, including the young Sadat, were promptly picked up and jailed by the British.
Almasy: "That'th Mithter, to you!"
"Unt now ve danz!"
Yeah, besides Titanic, the English Patient was the worst effen movie of all time.
Hated that movie anyway.
Just a note: Max und Moritz (names assigned to the two Germans) was a popular and very funny early comic strip.
I have a special dislike of romantic adultery movies. I don't know that this is any worse than the Hollywood version.
Ich bin ein boy sinner.
Ralph Fiennes looked better.
Handsome men and beautiful women rarely do well at intelligence fieldwork. Too easily recognized. Mata Hari ended up shot...
Well, he certainly had a long neck!
Are there any pics of the danseuse de ventre at work?
What kind of doughnut is that?
Alas... another career choice that I am denied! ;-)
I NEVER liked that movie! (But the cinematography was breathtaking)
I knew it...
That damn movie was too stupid to be made up!!
It was so, so, so bad. It was a terrible movie.
Christmas goose material.
That would have been The Piano.
But it was a great movie.
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