Operation Salaam - On The Nile

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 gramophone 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 gramophone unit (record player) could still be operated while the radio operator was seated inside the cabinet veiled behind a wooden panel unseen and undetectable from the outside and send Morse radio messages while the device played music. 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.